Ranking every expansion team in MLB history to show how freaky the Golden Knights are

The Las Vegas Golden Knights have advanced rather far in the Stanley Cup Tournament of Champions! Or so they tell me. Even as I’m only tangentially aware of their existence, it’s hard not to be impressed. They’re an expansion team, for Jaromir’s sake. A freaking expansion team. Those things aren’t supposed to be good.

Well, the Vegas Knights aren’t just good; they’re the greatest expansion team in the history of North American professional sports. They’re in the Stanley Cup Final. For perspective, the Buffalo Sabres, St. Louis Blues, and Vancouver Canucks have never won the Cup, and this ragtag bunch of slot jockeys might do it in their first season.

Expansion teams are supposed to be painful. The new fans are just supposed to be happy to be there, buying merchandise and foodstuffs, waiting for the first good team. The Mariners had to wait more than a decade to win more games than they lost, for example.

To highlight just how absurd the Vegas Golden Knights are, we should take a look at the best and worst expansion teams in Major League Baseball history. The best teams ... still aren’t very good. Which is supposed to be the point.

The full list:

The ‘62 Mets were the Vegas Golden Knights of being awful. Though, to be fair, I included the Pythagorean record to remind you that they were only a 110-loss team according to runs scored and allowed. So they had that going for them. Which was nice.

It was a bad baseball team, friends. There were 17 different pitchers who made an appearance, and only one of them had an adjusted ERA that was better than the average pitcher (Galen Cisco, who threw 19 innings). Only one hitter in the Opening Day starting lineup was better than the league average (the original Frank Thomas). There was a fine book written by Jimmy Breslin about the season, and it was titled Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

The Mets would lose 100 games every year until 1966 ... when they lost 95. Then they lost 101 games the year after that. So if you’re ever wondering what the big deal was about the Miracle Mets of ‘69, that’s a great place to start.

Best baseball name on roster: Tough call between Vinegar Bend Mizell and Choo-Choo Coleman, but I’m going with Coleman. Choo choooooooooo!

Choo-Choo Coleman was a catcher who stole seven bases out of 16 attempts.

If you’re going by Pythagorean record, the Padres were the worst expansion team ever. They hit .225/.285/.329 as a team, which seems really hard to do. And that’s with Nate Colbert — still the franchise leader in career home runs — having a fine season.

The Padres’ entire team-building strategy, as far as I can tell, was to sign Johnny Podres as a free agent. Podres hadn’t pitched for a year, and he was 36 years old, but someone in the front office would say, “Ain’t that something! Podres on the Padres!” and chuckle a deep, sustained chuckle.

Something that might surprise you about the 1969 Padres is that they didn’t have a starting pitcher throw a no-hitter that year.

Best baseball name on roster: Billy McCool. Hell yes.

Baseball ... in Canada?Well, it was just so crazy that it might work. And it would have continued to work if it weren’t for those meddling plutocrats.

This team, though, was bad. Like expansion teams should be. They couldn’t pitch or hit, and their starting shortstop was a guy named Bobby Wine, who hit .200/.256/.251 and somehow hit .200 on the nose again two years later, and of the seven pitchers with more than 100 innings, all of them walked at least four batters for every nine innings pitched.

The good news is they were the best possible possible destination for international hero Rusty Staub, who spent his 20s putting up a 134 OPS+. And Maury Wills was there, which must have been fun!

Best baseball name on roster: Mudcat Grant. Great player, great name.

Baseball ... in Canada? Well, hey, wait a sec. This attempt made it, but the ‘77 Blue Jays were bad. They employed a young Rick Cerone, Alan Ashby, and Ernie Whitt, making this the Most ‘80s Catcher Team of all time, but they couldn’t do much offensively or on the mound. Roy Howell, Jerry Garvin, and Otto Velez looked like future stars, but they couldn’t stay healthy.

Best baseball name on roster: Steve Staggs. This is the 1962 Mets of best baseball names, but it will have to do.

Mickey Vernon was the manager, and he was one of the stars from the previous iteration of the Senators. That one became the Twins. This one became the Rangers. You can see why the didn’t go back to the well for the third attempt.

The ‘61 Senators could actually pitch a little bit. They had Joe McClain, Bennie Daniels, and Dick Donovan, all of whom ate up innings and pitched better than the average pitcher, but they didn’t have depth behind them, and they couldn’t really hit, so 100 losses, here we come.

Best baseball name on roster: Coot Veal. My stars, that is a 70-grade baseball name.

Really, they should be below the ‘62 Mets because they had Bobby Abreu and traded him for Kevin Stocker. By a pure WAR-for-WAR basis, that has to be one of the worst trades of all time. While Stocker was certainly a fine defender, Bobby Abreu was Bobby Abreu.

I remember reading a 100-post thread on rec.sports.baseball with people arguing about if the Rays or Diamondbacks had the better team after the expansion draft. Turns out they both sucked, except one of the teams would make the postseason the next year.

That’s selling the ‘98 Rays short, though, because they could pitch. Tony Saunders was the top pick they were expecting, and Wilson Alvarez was an established pitcher on a big deal. Rolando Arrojo was a deserving all-star, and he looked like the future of the franchise. They could have made noise with a decent lineup.

They didn’t have a decent lineup. While Wade Boggs was so prodigious, so amazing, that his number was retired and he’s still a Devil Rays legend,

Best baseball name on roster: Bubba Trammell is a strong contender, but youngsters need to appreciate Quinton McCracken. That is a Bases Loaded 3 name, and you would fight your friends for the chance to choose his team.

They’re not the first expansion team to have a Hall of Famer (Richie Ashburn was on the ‘62 Mets), but they certainly had some characters. Trevor Hoffman and Gary Sheffield were obvious highlights, but Benito Santiago, Walt Weiss, and Dave Magadan were also there to round out the Topps Future Star brigade. Robb Nen was in the background, and the staff ace was 45-year-old knuckleballer, Charlie Hough. What a fascinating team!

They weren’t very good, of course. Mostly, I’m mad that they ended up with Bryan Harvey, who was dominant as a closer, and didn’t trade him for sweet, sweet prospects at the deadline.

Best baseball name on roster: Not a great bunch, but Orestes Destrade is a name that I’ll find myself muttering under my breath for no reason at all. Orestes Destrade.

Either the worst Seattle expansion team of all time or the second-best. It depends if you’re a glass-half-full person or not. The Mariners had just three starters who made more than 15 starts for them all season, which meant that 17 different starters got at least one start. You’ll never believe it, but this accidental strategy didn’t work out. Their ace reliever, Enrique Romo, made three starts.

Romo? Starting?

Looks like the Mariners were ahead of their time.

Best baseball name on roster: While it’s hard to vote against Dick Pole or Puchy Delgado, I’ll cast a conflicted vote for Skip Jutze. Like, there’s no way Skip Jutze was going to be an engineer. He was on a major league bench from the time he was six.

The Pilots were immortalized in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, which is one of the most essential baseball books ever. They weren’t without talent, with Tommys Davis and Harper stopping over in the middle of solid, productive careers. But, mostly, they were without talent. Nobody really cared about them — they drew under 700,000 fans — which allowed an enterprising used car dealer from Milwaukee to steal them away after just one season.

They played their home games at Sick’s Stadium, which is the reddest of red flags, by the way.

The Pilots had 49 different batters with a plate appearance, which is the third-most in American League history. Did you see the part where they were the sixth-best expansion team in Major League history? I’m trying to make a point, here.

Best baseball name on roster: They had three Dicks, but I’m going with Skip Lockwood, which is a George Lucas name, and I appreciate the hell out of it.

This was the previous gold standard for expansion teams. They won 100 games and made the postseason the following season. They won the World Series four seasons after they debuted. They were as good as expansion teams could possibly hope to be.

[looks at Golden Knights]

Show-offs.

Still, it’s easy to appreciate the construction of the initial Diamondbacks team, even if it didn’t bear fruit right away. Jay Bell and Matt Williams were solid bets to perform. Devon White was an under-appreciated defensive stalwart. The young players, Travis Lee, David Dellucci, Karim Garcia, and Brent Brede, had scouting or statistical pedigrees. The rotation was steady and mostly reliable, eating innings and giving the team a chance to win.

Randy Johnson was the missing ingredient, apparently, but the ability of the ‘98 Diamondbacks to build a watchable team was underrated at the time, and it’s probably underrated now.

Best baseball name on roster: Rough roster! Not a lot of candidates, but it’s hard to deny the mellifluously constructed beauty of Amaury Telemaco. It has the right mix of syllables and vowels, as well as a perfectly timed hard consonant.

The easiest way to explain the Colt .45s is that they scored fewer runs than the Mets that year. Some of that was due to the cavernous Astrodome — they had the better OPS+, 83 to 82 — but it’s still impressive that they failed to score 600 runs in a full 162-game season.

The pitching was just a tick under league-average, though, and while the staff was filled with veterans instead of youngsters who hinted at a bright future, it was still a minor feat to cobble together a respectable staff through the expansion draft and whatever driftwood was floating around. Remember that a lot of these teams were created before the advent of free agency, so they really had to be creative.

Best baseball name on roster: There have been two Joe Smiths in baseball history, which always stuns me. There have been two Steve Ontiveroses, two Ryan Brauns, two Jeff D’Amicos, and two Joe Smiths. In baseball, those names are all equally unique.

But there’s only one Pidge Browne.

This team had a Pidge Browne.

Before you say anything else about he ‘93 Rockies, please note that they drew 4.5 million fans, which is still the Major League Baseball record. That’s partially on account of them playing in a football stadium, but it’s still remarkable. They nearly drew more seven times more than the ‘69 Pilots, and the reward for those fans was extremely bad baseball.

Don’t be so short-sighted, though. This ‘93 team featured several players who would define the franchise. Dante Bichette was there, as was Vinny Castilla, Eric Young, and Andres Galarraga. The Rockies are still giving out bobbleheads of these players today, which means this team might have an argument for the top overall slot. They also made the postseason in 1995, which was a pretty remarkable accomplishment at the time.

Best baseball name on roster: Jayhawk Owens probably would have been my favorite player if I were eight and living in the Denver area. That’s the official opinion of person with 188 Joel Youngblood cards, at least.

There were five starters on this team that made 20 starts or more. All of them had ERAs under 4.00. I know that’s less impressive when you consider the context (the league ERA was 3.62), but it’s still impressive. This wasn’t an expansion team that made fans grimace every turn in the rotation, as Dick Drago and Wally Bunker gave the team a one-two punch in the rotation that was young enough to dream on.

The lineup was rougher, but it still had a fiery Lou Piniella and a 20-year-old Buck Martinez to burnish its future-manager credentials, and they learned from Hall of Famer Joe Gordon.

Still, not the greatest team. They still lost 93 games, you know. And they’re the second-best team in this ranking.

Are you appreciating the Golden Knights yet?

Best baseball name on roster: Dick Drago, of course. As someone who was eight when Rocky IV came out, this name is right in my wheelhouse on multiple levels.

According to runs scored and allowed, this is the best expansion team in baseball team history. They lost 91 games.

But the nerd stats suggest they should have lost just 84!

But they still lost 91 games. They were a bad team.

They were the best expansion team in baseball history.

The best player on the ‘61 Angels was Leon Wagner, who was acquired in a trade from Toronto in the offseason. I don’t really know how that worked, considering the Toronto team was in the International League at that point, but he became one of the better hitters in those early Angels years.

There weren’t a ton of super-bright spots, though. Steve Bilko had a career year in part-time duty. There were a pair of above-average starters who went over 200 innings. The pitching wasn’t bad, all things considered, and they were the springboard for Dean Chance, who went on to win the Cy Young in 1964, with a 1.65 ERA in 35 starts. They also had a stable of would-be managers, with Chuck Tanner, Jim Fregosi, and Buck Rodgers.

They just weren’t very good. Except for the fact that they were the best expansion team in baseball history. What with the 91 losses and all. Which is great if you consider the context.

Best baseball name on roster: I used to stare at my Buck Rodgers manager card as a kid, wondering how that could actually be his name. But as an adult, I’m more impressed with a bench that had both Fritz Brickell and Faye Throneberry on it.

All of this suggests that it’s hard to over-appreciate the Vegas Golden Knights. It is really, really, really hard for a team to pick up the scraps of the scraps and build a team that can win as many games as it loses. To contend for a championship is something else.

The 1999 Diamondbacks are still impressive in retrospect, but nothing will top what the Golden Knights are doing. I was hoping for a historical surprise when I looked back at the previous entries, but there’s nothing close.

Nothing until the 2022 Montreal Voyageurs.

(Clayton Kershaw will start Opening Day. Please email me for the spec script.)