The Colorado Rockies spent much of the season on track to break the Chicago White Sox's all-time worst win-loss record from a season ago.
But they got past that barrier, which led to one sigh of relief.
There's a problem, though. The Rockies are going to set a more miserable record.
Colorado is set to have the worst run differential in the history of baseball's modern era (dating to 1900), and it's not close.
They entered the final week of the season with a negative-404 run differential, having allowed 988 runs and scored 584.
Three of the worst teams ever weren't even within 50 runs of this. The 1932 Red Sox were negative-345. The 2023 Athletics were negative-339. The 2003 Tigers were negative-337.
"That is not just hard to do. It has been, to this point, impossible," writes ESPN's Jeff Passan. "Getting outscored by more than 2½ runs per game is the domain of teams in the 1800s. (The 1899 Cleveland Spiders yielded an astounding 723 runs more than they scored in 154 games.) And yet, here are the Rockes, whose ignominy won't launch them past the White Sox for the most losses in a modern season but will place them atop record books with a minuscule likelihood of being supplanted."
Maybe the Rockies can outscore their opponents in the final six games by 60 runs to avoid setting this record. Yeah, right.
Some records are the kind that no one wants. This one qualifies. And the Rockies may have made it unreachable for anyone else.
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