Rockies join miserable fraternity: A history of the teams that lost 100 games four (or more) years in a row

The Colorado Rockies are now on the list of teams with the most consecutive 100-loss seasons

Sep 23, 2026, 6:00 AM

DENVER, CO - SEPTEMBER 6: Cole Carrigg #16 of the Colorado Rockies walks back to retrieve his hat a...

Photo by Justin Edmonds/Getty Images

DENVER — The good news: It’ll be hard for the Colorado Rockies to become the worst team on the ensuing list.

The bad news: It’s only because a likely work stoppage is expected to take away professional baseball from us fans for much of next summer.

The list? The franchise with the most consecutive 100-loss seasons, which the Rockies are now tied for second-worst all-time at four straight years. Only five teams in baseball history have ever lost 100 games four or more years running — and the Rockies are the only one without an excuse baked into the circumstances of their time.

Most consecutive 100-loss seasons in MLB history

5 — Philadelphia Phillies (NL) 1938-42
4 — Boston Braves (NL) 1909-12
4 — New York Mets (NL) 1962-65
4 — Washington Senators (AL) 1961-64
4 — Colorado Rockies (NL) 2023-26

The Rockies clinched their place Tuesday night at Coors Field, a 7-2 loss to Arizona in which Nolan Arenado — the franchise’s likely next Hall of Famer, traded away in 2021 and started this spiral — delivered three hits including a home run to push his former team over the cliff. Loss No. 100 happened while Kyle Freeland, the club’s all-time leader in starts and innings, made what could be his final Coors Field start and left the mound in tears.

It’s all so poetic — baseball is grand like that.

The Philadelphia Phillies, 1938-42: Baseball’s bankrupt orphans

The only team to hold the record of five straight is the saddest story in baseball history.

Gerald Nugent was a leather goods salesman who married into the Phillies through longtime club secretary Mae Mallen, climbed the organizational ladder and found himself as controlling owner by 1932 of a franchise that had finished with a winning record exactly once since 1918.

Nugent could spot a ballplayer. He just couldn’t afford to keep one. Chuck Klein won the Triple Crown in 1933, but financial desperation forced Nugent to trade or sell every player worth anything to keep the lights on. First Klein went. Then Dick Bartell. Then Pinky Whitney. Then Bucky Walters, who would win the MVP with Cincinnati.

By 1938, the cupboard was bare. Philadelphia went 45-105 that year, then 45-106, 50-103, 43-111 and 42-109 — a combined 225-534. Second baseman Danny Murtaugh said that “if the Phillies ever won two games in a row, it might be grounds for a Congressional investigation.”

By 1942, Nugent owed Connie Mack two years of back rent at Shibe Park and needed a league advance just to go to spring training. National League President Ford Frick forced him out, and the league took over the penniless franchise. Nugent left baseball more than $300,000 in debt.

Those Phillies were the second-most important team in their own city, bankrupt, talent-stripped and functionally abandoned — less a major-league franchise than a shell company that happened to play baseball.

The Boston Braves, 1909-12: The pre-Miracle dark ages

The Braves managed one winning season from 1900 to 1913 and lost 100 or more games six times, churning through multiple owners and even nicknames — the Doves, the Rustlers, and finally the Braves in 1912 — while the crosstown Red Sox won pennants and World Series titles.

What followed, though, is the most improbable story in baseball history. After George Stallings was hired in 1913, the Braves started 1914 at 4-18 and sat in dead last at 26-40 on the Fourth of July, 15 games behind the Giants. Then they went 68-19 the rest of the way, won the pennant by 10½ games and swept Mack’s heavily favored Athletics in the World Series.

The Miracle Braves remain baseball’s original and best worst-to-first champions — proof that the darkness can precede something extraordinary. The Rockies, one imagines, would settle for even a fraction of that trajectory.

The New York Mets, 1962-65: The lovable losers

Expansion franchises are supposed to lose. The early Mets were somehow worse than their zero expectations.

Created to fill the void left by the Dodgers’ and Giants’ departures to California, the Mets hired 71-year-old Casey Stengel — seven World Series titles with the Yankees — to manage a roster of castoffs. What followed was a 40-120 season, the most losses by any team in the 20th century, then 51-111, 53-109 and 50-112.

Four consecutive 100-loss seasons under one of the game’s most legendary figures. But the Mets were building through the draft. Tom Seaver arrived in 1967, and by 1969 — just four years after the last 100-loss season — those same Mets won the World Series.

The losses were just part of the expansion formula.

The Washington Senators, 1961-64: Born to lose, destined to leave

The most forgotten team on this list, in fact you may have never heard of this team.

When Calvin Griffith moved the original Senators to Minnesota, MLB instituted a replacement franchise stocked via an expansion draft with whatever players established clubs were willing to part with.

Washington went 61-100, 60-101, 56-106 and 62-100 in its first four seasons — finishing as many as 47½ games behind the Yankees. Unlike the Mets, the Senators never captured the public imagination. They had just one winning season in 11 years of existence before relocating to Arlington, Texas, to become the Rangers.

The Colorado Rockies, 2023-26: No excuse

The Phillies were broke. The Braves were rudderless. The Mets and Senators were newborns. The Rockies are a 30-plus-year-old franchise in a one-team market with new ownership money and a fan base that showed up by the tens of thousands at Coors Field for a generation.

They never lost 100 games even as baby expansion team and managed to build good clubs from dark years. Until this decade.

They’ve lost 100 games four times — 59-103, 61-101, 43-119 and now 57-100 and counting — and they chose the path that led here, from the Arenado trade to the inability to develop pitching to whatever it is about 20th and Blake that keeps repeating the same mistakes.

The silver lining: The farm system is finally producing, and the 2025-to-2026 improvement represents real progress.

The twist: MLB’s current CBA expires on Dec. 1, and virtually everyone around the game expects an owner-imposed lockout. With the owners pushing a first-ever salary cap the union has firmly rejected, there is a real possibility the 2027 season is shortened or delayed significantly. Which means the Rockies may be stuck at four straight, one shy of the Phillies’ record — not because they got better, but because labor strife intervened.

That’s a strange kind of mercy. History works in strange ways. For the Braves and Mets, the darkness preceded miracles. For the Phillies and Senators, more darkness before an eventual dawn.

For the Rockies, the next chapter depends on whether the lights are even on.