by David Fleitz

Comments? Send e-mail to
dlfleitz@wcnet.org

The play by play information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at 20 Sunset Rd., Newark, DE 19711.

The worst team of all time, the 1899 Cleveland Spiders of the National League, suffered 23 blowout losses while compiling a 20-134 record, by far the worst in history.  They lost 4 of their last 7 games by 10 runs or more, and lost a doubleheader on the last day of the season by scores of 16-0 and 19-3.

I wrote a piece earlier this week about blowouts, games in which one team beats the other by 10 runs or more. 

Since I located retrosheet.org on the Internet and found that I could download all the scores of all games from 1900 to 2000, I discovered that I could put all of that data into an Excel spreadsheet and then sift through it to find information.  I didn't put all the data in yet, but I made a database of all game scores from 1995 to 2000.

Anyway, I got to thinking, which team was blown out the most (and least) often in that six-year period, and which team won the most (and least) number of blowouts?

I figured that the Tigers would probably be the team that got bombed the most, and I was right.  Here's the list of the teams that suffered the most blowout losses from 1995 to 2000:

Detroit          35
Texas            28
Oakland          26
Kansas City      25
Minnesota        24

The American League has far more blowouts than the National.  There were 559 blowout games in the majors from 1995 to 2000.  306 of those games happened in the AL, 224 in the NL, and 29 in interleague play. All of the top 7 teams on the most-blown-out list are AL teams.

Fewest blowout losses, 1995-2000:

Atlanta            9
Tampa Bay         10
Arizona           11
Los Angeles       13
5 teams tied with 14

Tampa Bay and Arizona did not enter the major leagues until 1998.

Most blowout wins, 1995-2000:

Seattle           34
Cleveland         32
Yankees           31
Anaheim           27
3 teams tied with 26

Fewest blowout wins, 1995-2000:

Tampa Bay          7
Los Angeles        9
Arizona            9
Florida           10
Mets              11

The best teams have excellent records in blowout games; Atlanta is 26-9 in blowouts, the Yankees are 31-19, Seattle is 34-20, and Cleveland is 32-14. One the other extreme, Detroit is 17-35, Montreal 13-19, Kansas City 13-25, and Minnesota 15-24. It appears that a team's record in blowout games is an accurate indicator of how good the team really is.