To err is human. To really screw up requires team effort. Everyone cheers the clubs that win pennants, but what about the doormats who made their triumphs possible? It’s time to give baseball’s lousiest teams their due. Here they are: The 1904 Washington Senators, whose only good player, a thirty-five-year-old star hitter, took a dive (fatally, into Niagara Falls); the 1935 Boston Braves, who set the National League standard for losing percentage despite featuring three Hall of Famers—including Yankee exile Babe Ruth; the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates, Joe Garagiola’s cellar-dwelling team that was so bad, he quipped, “they wouldn’t put our pictures on bubble gum cards”; and the 1962 New York Mets, maybe not the worst team ever but definitely the funniest in modern baseball history. You’ll get the stats, the scores, the scandals, and the secrets in this no-holds-barred account. When the survivors of these diamond trainwrecks include such legends as Marv Throneberry, Ralph Kiner, Cal Ripken Jr., Roger Craig, and Joe Garagiola, you can be sure that the book (unlike its subjects) is a winner.

Introduction by: George Robinson, Charles Salzberg