Why are there so many more terrible than great MLB teams?

This season features a particularly stark example of this trend, since the team with the best record (Milwaukee) has 86 wins, and the team with the worst (Colorado) has 101 losses. But this disjunction is long-standing. In the 65 seasons since MLB went to an 162-game schedule, only three teams have won as many as 110 games in a season (1998 Yankees, 2001 Mariners, and 2022 Dodgers), and the Mariners are the only one of those to get to 115 wins — 116 to be exact, as I’m sure some of my co-bloggers remember vividly.

Meanwhile, 15 teams have lost at least 110 games — I’m including this year’s Rockies in that group, since that’s basically assured at this point — and four have lost at least 115, with the Rockies having a better than 50/50 shot at this point to make it five. It’s also notable that almost all the worst of the worst have been inflicted on their fans in the last few years: of the teams that have lost at least 114 games, four of six have done so since 2018, with Colorado likely to make it five of seven (The infamous Original Mets and the 2003 Tigers are the outliers. BTW the 2003 Tigers won five of their last six to avoid the infamy of joining the Amazings at 120 losses.). And of course the White Sox set the all-time record for ineptitude just last season — a record that Colorado was threatening for much of this year.

I googled around a bit and didn’t find much discussion of why this should be. One intuitively obvious explanation would be that since a team that wins say 105 games is essentially 100% certain of having the best record in the majors, wins beyond that are inefficient as it were. On the other hand, the more games a terrible team loses, the further away it is from achieving at least minimal competitiveness, so I don’t see why this logic shouldn’t work in the other direction as well.

I’m sure some of you have thoughts, and in any case it’s nice to talk about the kinds of things this blog talked about a lot more often in the Before Time.