by Brian Boone
The 2024 baseball season is over, the Chicago White Sox made history… but the team probably isn’t particularly proud of that. The White Sox joined a very exclusive club: the worst professional sports teams of all time.
The Worst NFL Team
When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers joined the NFL in 1976, its roster was populated with players selected from an “expansion draft” — guys that their previous teams found expendable, like inconsequential rookies and veterans on their last legs. At any given time during the season, half the squad was injured. The Bucs went scoreless in its first two games, and five overall, and didn’t even score a touchdown until its fourth game. At season’s end, the Buccaneers had amassed a pristine 0-14 record. The team almost repeated the accomplishment, winning only the last two games of the ’77 campaign, finishing 2-12.
The Worst NBA Team
The 2011-2012 NBA season began months late, the delay owing to a disagreement between team owners and players. Down from 82 games, a 66-game season was mercifully short for the Charlotte Bobcats. The team was eliminated from playoff contention halfway through the season, and then ended the year with a 23-game losing streak to finish with a 7-59 record, and an all-time-NBA-worst winning percentage of .106.
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The Worst WNBA Team
After finishing the 2010 season with the fifth-worst WNBA record ever — 6-28 — the Tulsa Shock tried to turn things around by signing star Sheryl Swoopes and drafting center Liz Cambage. Neither was particularly stellar, and the Shock started the year with a 1-14 record. Following a 20-game losing streak — the longest in WNBA history — the Shock finished with a historically woeful 3-31 record.
The Worst MLB Teams
Major League Baseball defines its “modern era” as beginning in 1901, when the American League joined the National League as the two constituent conferences. In 2024, the Chicago White Sox finished with a 41 and 121 record, the worst performance of a team in more than a century. The White Sox finished 51.5 games out of first place. But it’s at least not technically the worst baseball team ever. That dubious honor goes to the Cleveland Spiders. A predecessor of the contemporary Cleveland Guardians, the 1899 Spiders went 20 and 134, 84 games out of first place.