In 2008, a battered and literally broken Chris Young took the mound for the San Diego Padres on the season’s second-to-last day with one goal in mind.
He was determined to eliminate the chance the Padres would lose 100 games for the year.
Did it, too. Went six innings against Pittsburgh. Allowed a run. Walked off the field a 3-2 winner. The Padres entered the last day of the season at 98 losses. Young, who had missed more than two months of the season after suffering a fractured nose on a line drive, left the mound 7-6 for the year.
“I was 100 percent motivated by it,” Young, now the Rangers’ first-year general manager said on the final road trip of the year. “It was personal motivation for me in a season that stunk. But whether we’d lost 100 or 99, it didn’t make the season any less worse.
“It was,” he added, “just a round number.”
That the Rangers have reached the round number with a 7-2 loss to the Los Angeles Angels on Sept. 29 for the first time in 48 years doesn’t mean any more or less to Young now, either.
From the moment they embraced a full-scale rebuild, the Rangers knew 100 losses was possible. Perhaps nobody discussed it out loud — who would? — but with a young team full of unproven players, things could get out of hand. The number of losses, Young said, doesn’t impact how he views this team.
“My experience and motivation has nothing to do with this team,” he said. “I’m fully confident that every day our guys have taken the field to win. It hasn’t gone our way, but I’m proud of the way they have approached it. That will serve them well moving forward. I expect us to have a great turnaround. I’m totally confident in where we are headed.”
To fans of a certain age, 100 losses remains a scarlet number. Whether the point of reference is the expansion 1962 New York Mets and their MLB record 120 losses or the 2003 Detroit Tigers, who won five of their last six to avoid tying or breaking the Mets’ record, 100 losses used to stand out as the ultimate baseball humiliation.
Now, it is merely the cost of doing business in a new age. It is a starting point. For many teams, the thought is: If you can’t be good at being good right now, the quickest way to get there is to be very good at being very bad.
And there is something to that. Three years after Detroit lost 119, the Tigers were in the World Series. Four years after the Chicago Cubs lost 100 in their first season under Theo Epstein, they ended a 100-year curse and won the World Series. Likewise, only four years after three consecutive 100-loss seasons, Houston won the World Series in 2017.
Even more recently: The Chicago White Sox hit the 100-loss mark in 2018. They have already clinched the AL Central in 2021.
“I conveyed to them to take it all in, the downs and the ups,” said pitcher Jordan Lyles, who was part of the three consecutive Astros’ 100-loss teams. “Right now there are a lot more downs with more losses than wins. When things get turned around, they’ll definitely appreciate where they came from. For me when I first got into a playoff run, years later, it made it that much more special. I cherished it more than guys who were on winning teams right away. Hopefully, each one of these guys are able to experience that in the near future. They have bright futures.”
That is the promise of the future, the Rangers believe. It does not make the present any easier.
“This is not what we envisioned,” manager Chris Woodward said. “It’s OK to acknowledge that. Sometimes it is OK to say it out loud: We sucked this year.”
Ever since the Astros introduced the world to the idea of tanking, other clubs have rushed to join them in an effort to rebuild faster. In the 60 years of baseball’s Expansion Era, there have been 81 100-loss teams. Seven of those were expansion teams, who paid handsome expansion fees for the right to take a beating. So throw them out. Of the other 76 (Including the Rangers), 12 have taken place in the last five years. There are likely to be four teams this year with 100 or more losses. A lot of bad baseball.
That is not to say the Rangers intended to be among them.
The idea was to set the foundation for a “championship culture” and to get answers about a number of young players who had shown some glimpses of promise at different periods, but nothing to give the Rangers a definitive idea they could be part of the roster the next time the club was ready to contend. If there has been one element of the season that has been particularly disappointing it is that nobody has provided a definitive answer in the affirmative on that topic.
“Nobody here has assured themselves of a job next year,” acknowledged first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, whom the Rangers traded for in the offseason. “Guys get to first base and ask me how I like Texas. I tell them I love it. The stadium is great. The place is awesome. It’s real. I just tell them I want to be here when it goes good.
“Right now, we can’t worry about 100 losses,” Lowe added. “We have to worry about winning today. We can’t win 100 in one day and we can’t lose 100 in one day. All we can do is focus on winning that day.”
Said Nick Solak: “It’s been tough. Losing is really hard. It’s the worst thing in the game. Nobody wants to lose. But you have to take it as an experience to learn from, to grow and get better. It’s weird to say that it’s beneficial, but it is.”
Painful as it may be, that is the enduring lesson.
It may not make this season any easier to take. But they will learn from it.
“What a waste if we don’t,” Woodward said.
