baseball stoopidstats: wins through 2025

One of my annual rituals is checking how cumulative win totals have shifted the historical rankings. Most years, the changes are modest, which is exactly what you’d expect when you’re layering a single season onto more than a century of baseball history. Still, even small movements can be revealing, especially when they involve long-defunct teams, obsolete nicknames, or modern branding oddities.

At the franchise level, all of the changes involved active teams. That’s not surprising: each of the thirty current franchises has more cumulative wins than any one of the 150 defunct franchises, so none of the defunct fran chises could have moved. The Astros moved from 18th to 17th, passing the Angels. The Mets moved from 20th to 19th, passing the Rangers, though that “passing” comes with an asterisk: the Mets and Rangers are now tied in total wins, and I give the Mets the edge because they have fewer losses. The Marlins moved from 28th to 27th, passing the Rockies.

There was only one change in the location rankings, though it technically involved two locations switching places. “N/A,” my category for teams whose names did not include a geographic location, moved from 41st to 40th, passing Providence. This year’s Athletics season counts toward “N/A,” since the team played without a location in its name. The last time Providence appeared as a team location was 1885, so this was a case of a 21st-century naming decision nudging past a city that hasn’t had a major-league team since the 19th century.

The lone change in state rankings mirrors that shift almost exactly. “N/A” moved from 27th to 26th, passing Rhode Island. That’s no coincidence: Providence is the only location ever associated with a Rhode Island team, so once Providence slipped, Rhode Island followed.

The most activity this year came in the nickname rankings. “Mariners” moved from 28th to 27th, passing “N/A,” my category for teams that played without a nickname. The last time a team lacked a nickname was 1911, which once felt safely locked in baseball’s distant past. A few years ago, I would have said the same about teams playing without a location in their name, so clearly I should be careful with declarations like that.

In just its fourth year of use, “Guardians” jumped from 66th to 60th, passing six nicknames that are no longer in use: Hoosiers (last used in 1914), Metropolitans (1887), Cubans (1948), Orphans (1901), Club (1932), and ABCs (1938). It’s a good reminder of how quickly an active franchise can accumulate enough wins to move past names that survive only as historical curiosities. Elsewhere in the nickname rankings, “Astros” moved from 19th to 18th, passing “Mets,” while “Marlins” moved from 31st to 30th, passing “Rockies.”

Finally, a few milestones are worth noting. The Cincinnati Reds passed 11,000 franchise victories. The Boston Red Sox passed 10,000. And Pennsylvania passed 28,000 total victories for teams with locations in the state, including Altoona (6 victories), Harrisburg (151), Hilldale (282), Homestead (636), Pittsburgh (11,367) and Philadelphia (15,634).

As usual, the rankings didn’t lurch; they crept. But in those small shifts you can still see the slow accumulation of modern seasons, the fading weight of long-defunct teams, and the occasional reminder that baseball history has a way of colliding with the present in unexpected ways.