The 1899-1890 LOUISVILLE COLONELS, Baseball's first "Worst to First" franchise.
The Louisville Colonels were an early baseball franchise playing in the American Association until that league folded; they then joined the National League until they were sold to the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates and their best players transferred to the Pirates' roster.
An article in the most recent SABR publication, Road Trips (2004, University of Nebraska Press) edited by SABR's publications wizard Jim Charlton, has an article by Bob Bailey about the 1889-1900 Colonels, the first team in professional baseball history to go from last place to first in consecutive seasons. That team's manager had had one successful season before and never followed his pennant with another good season. The 1st place team's talent was actually less than it had been in the previous year. And yet they won. Pure Lucretian Dance of Random Chance.
The 1889 Louisville club featured an all-time great hitter, Pete "The Wooden Indian" Browning (he wasn't Native American, he was a fielder totally devoid of range or instincts) and an all-star caliber outfielder, Chicken Wolf. It had Guy Hecker, one of the better hurlers of the era, and short-career abuse victim Toad Ramsey, who was breaking down after seasons of pitching 588, 561 and 342 innings (and he was a strikeout pitcher, the AJ Burnett of his time).
The '89 team just sucked lukewarm prune juice through a plastic straw, putting up a pythagorean win-loss mark of 37-101 and underperforming even that toxic waste pool by going 27-111 on the field. This wasn't just a last place team, it was a bad joke told by a bad comedian. Browning had his worst full season ever, Hecker and Ramsey, too. The supporting cast was inadequate -- and played worse than that. A pair of interesting pitchers were Scott Stratton, who had a good season over few appearances, and a young Red Ehret, who wasn't good but still was one of the better arms on the team.
Moreover, the owner was experienced severe financial difficulties and was trying to sell his better players and the league was trying to mess with him so he couldn't. The struggling owner, with nowhere else to turn, tried to balance his books by fining his non-unionized players for whatever he could, creating a Wal*Mart kind of working environment.
The team was managed by four skippers during the year. The last was Jack Chapman, who had managed the team during its more appealing, mediocre, years. Not that his 1-6 record at the end of 1889 was indicative of great things to come.
But Chapman's fortunes were rising anyway. Several things happened between the finish of the 1889 campaign & the beginning of the 1890 season.
- The Players' League formed, a third league partially-owned by the players who played in it. The teams drew from the existing leagues and thus diluted the remaining talent in general.
- Louisville got new owners who were less player-unfriendly.
- The best team in the American Association, the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, and the fourth best, Cincinnati's Red Stockings, jumped to the National League.
During the 1890 season against weakened competition, Hecker returned to form, Ramsey had his final flowering before his arm imploded, several recruits had career years (and never had any other decent ones), Chicken Wolf had a Manny Ramirez year (his best ever), Stratton had is career year, and Ehret grew up and threw the first of a fistful of good seasons.
Playing cohesively in a weakened (and weakened) league, and with a roster having more career years than about any team since, the 1890 Louisville Colonels (renamed by the press the Cyclones because a tornado hit Louisville that year, and because the team was such a major force) had a Pythagorean win-loss of 85-47, enough to win the league, but overperfromed that on the field to the tune of 88-44 (the equivalent in a 162-game season of going 108-54).
The following year, the 1891 Chapman-led Colonels returned to the primordial ooze from which they had come, going 55-84 and escaping the cellar only because the league added the Washington Statesmen, who were 11 games worse. Chapman never got close to great achievement as a manager again.
*source http://cmdr-scott.blogspot.com