Every MLB Team That Lost 120 Games in a Season
Three MLB teams have ever lost 120 games in a season: the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (134), the 2024 Chicago White Sox (121) and the 1962 New York Mets (120). That is the complete list.
It is a shorter list than most fans expect. Nineteen teams have lost 110 or more games, and 100-loss seasons now happen several times a decade — but the last ten losses between 110 and 120 have only been survived three times in a century and a half.
From the scorebook — 1899 Cleveland Spiders, 20-134. 2024 Chicago White Sox, 41-121. 1962 New York Mets, 40-120. Nobody else.
The complete 120-loss club
| Team | Record | Losses | Win % | Games | Era |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1899 Cleveland Spiders | 20-134 | 134 | .130 | 154 | Pre-1900 NL |
| 2024 Chicago White Sox | 41-121 | 121 | .253 | 162 | Modern |
| 1962 New York Mets | 40-120 | 120 | .250 | 160 | Modern, expansion |
Three teams, three completely different explanations.
1899 Cleveland Spiders — dismantled on purpose
The Spiders’ owners, the Robison brothers, also bought the St. Louis Browns before the 1899 season and moved Cleveland’s best players there, including Cy Young, Jesse Burkett and Bobby Wallace. What was left went 20-134 with a −723 run differential and averaged 145 fans a game at home. The franchise was dissolved that winter when the National League contracted from twelve teams to eight.
The 134 losses are the record and always will be an outlier, because the structural conditions that produced them — one owner controlling two clubs in the same league — were made illegal.
1962 New York Mets — an expansion roster from scratch
The Mets were in their first season. Casey Stengel’s roster was built from an expansion draft of other teams’ surplus, and it finished last in the National League in team batting average, team ERA and team fielding percentage simultaneously.
They went 22-58 at home and 18-62 on the road, with two long skids of 11 and 13 games. Their longest winning streak all year was three. The 120 losses stood as the modern record for 62 years.
2024 Chicago White Sox — the one with no excuse
The White Sox were not an expansion team and nobody stripped them. They were a 62-year-old franchise coming off a division title in 2021, and they lost 121 games with a −306 run differential, worst in baseball that season.
Their July-August collapse produced a 21-game losing streak, tying the American League record set by the 1988 Orioles. They passed the Mets’ record with a 121st loss on 27 September 2024.
Why the list stops at three
The gap between 110 losses and 120 losses is ten games, and ten games is a lot to give away when you already have.
A 110-loss team wins about 52 games, roughly 32% of its schedule. A 120-loss team wins about 41, roughly 25%. That is a difference of eleven wins — the difference between a bad team and a team that essentially cannot compete on any given night. Most rosters that bad get intervened on: players are traded up, prospects are called up, managers are replaced, and the team stumbles into enough wins to land somewhere in the 105-to-115 range.
The near misses show how thick that band is:
| Team | Record | Losses |
|---|---|---|
| 2003 Detroit Tigers | 43-119 | 119 |
| 2025 Colorado Rockies | 43-119 | 119 |
| 1916 Philadelphia Athletics | 36-117 | 117 |
| 2018 Baltimore Orioles | 47-115 | 115 |
| 1935 Boston Braves | 38-115 | 115 |
| 2019 Detroit Tigers | 47-114 | 114 |
| 1904 Washington Senators | 38-113 | 113 |
| 2023 Oakland Athletics | 50-112 | 112 |
| 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates | 42-112 | 112 |
The 2003 Tigers were 38-118 with six games left and famously won five of them to avoid the record. That is the pattern: the closer a team gets, the harder every remaining game is played, by both sides.
The era problem nobody mentions
The 1899 Spiders played 154 games. The 1962 Mets played 160. The 2024 White Sox played 162. Those are three different schedules, and comparing raw loss totals across them is not a like-for-like comparison.
By winning percentage the order changes. The Spiders (.130) remain far and away the worst, but the 2024 White Sox (.253) were fractionally better than the 1962 Mets (.250) despite losing one more game — because they also played two more. Both trail the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics (.235), who never reached 120 losses because the season was nine games shorter.
If you want a single number that travels across eras, use winning percentage. If you want the headline, use losses. Just do not mix them. The full breakdown is in the worst record in MLB history.
What 120 losses says about 0-162
Losing 120 of 162 is a .253 winning percentage. Losing all 162 requires .000 — and the worst full season ever managed, by a team its own owners had gutted, was .130.
That is roughly the same distance from zero as the best season ever is from perfect. The 2001 Seattle Mariners won 116 of 162, a .716 mark, and still lost 46 games. Baseball’s extremes both stop well short of the edges, which is the entire premise behind why 162-0 is effectively impossible — and why the inverse, an 0-162 season, has never come close either.
Frequently asked questions
Could a team lose 120 games in a shortened season?+
No. The shortest full-length modern schedule was 154 games and the current one is 162, but strike and pandemic years have run as short as 60 games. A 120-loss season requires a complete schedule, which is one reason 1994, 1995 and 2020 produce no entries on any futility list.
How many games back does a 120-loss team usually finish?+
It varies more than you would think. The 1962 Mets finished 60.5 games behind the pennant-winning Giants. The 2024 White Sox finished 51.5 games behind the AL Central-winning Guardians, who went 92-69. The Spiders finished 84 games out, in a league where the schedule was 154 games.
Do 120-loss teams share a common cause?+
The three cases have almost nothing in common. The Spiders were stripped by their own owners, the Mets were a brand-new expansion roster of castoffs, and the White Sox were an established franchise whose rebuild collapsed. There is no single failure mode that produces this.
Has a 120-loss team ever recovered quickly?+
The 1962 Mets won the World Series seven years later in 1969, the fastest turnaround of the three. The Spiders never got the chance, since the franchise was dissolved after the season.