baseball stoopid stats (2016 edition) #2: wins, losses and games over 500.

As promised, here is another edition of stoopid stats for Major League Baseball. It has been noted to me that I really should provide access to the underlying spreadsheet. I don't deny that. And I offer my apologies to anyone who wants to look at it and can't. At some point I'll be up to doing such things.


Sometime around 30 years ago I started thinking about how cool it would be to see a massive graph

Cumulative won-loss totals for every major league franchise

showing every major league team's cumulative games above .500 (i.e., wins minus losses), as that stat progressed from year to year. It was impractical to undertake such a project without using a spreadsheet, so I didn't really pursue it until Lotus 123 (or am I dating myself) became one of my everyday tools. Now I have a spreadsheet tracking this, which I update every year.

The graph (as it exists as of 2016) is above. Another acknowledgement: It would be great to have a legend. But it wouldn't be that great. There have been 113 franchises (including defunct ones), so a full legend would be largely useless. But, for what it's worth, that red line at the top is the Yankees, who have (by far) the best record.

Of course, that doesn't mean that the Yankees have the most wins. They are actually eighth by that measure. Of course, fifteen franchises are older than they are. The eight non-expansion NL teams all date to the second half of the 1800s. The other seven non-expansion AL teams date back to 1901. The Yankees date back to 1903 -- the year they entered the league, replacing the AL Baltimore Orioles. Ranking the teams by win totals give us the table at right. For these purposes I am only including the current 30 teams. If you really want to see this table, including all 83 defunct franchises, let me know. But among defunct franchises, the one with the most wins was also the Baltimore Orioles who played in the AA from 1882-1891 and the NL from 1892-1899, compiling a record of 1,133 and 1,049. And they had fewer wins than the Rays who are behind the rest of the Major League pack.

Of interest (at least to me), the Yankees entered the 2016 season with exactly 10,000 wins. I actually hadn't noticed until after this year. That's because, until now I've been treating the 1901-1902 Orioles and the current Yankees as the same franchise. That was my understanding, based on the sources available when I started this project a couple decades ago. But in recent years the baseball historians reexamined the history and concluded that the replacement of the Orioles with the Highlanders (who would eventually come to be called the Yankees) really involved the dissolution of one franchise and creation of a new one. I don't know the exact criteria they used, or exactly how they arrived at that conclusion. I imagine it's as much art as science. But I'm going to accept their judgement. Problem is, that involves modifying my files.

Also, in 2016 the Dogers passed the Braves to become the third winningest franchise.