Baseball History: 40 Greatest Individual Seasons on Terrible Teams

Baseball history: 40 Greatest Individual Seasons on Terrible Teams

They chose as their #1 season - Steve Carlton in 1972. Hard to argue. The team was 29-12 (.707) in games started by Carlton, 30-85 (.260) in their other games. How bad is .260? The New York Mets of 1962, the worst team of modern times, had a W-L pct of .250 - about the same as the 1972 Phillies without Carlton. In other words, he was 27-10 (with four no-decisions) for arguably the worst team ever to step onto a modern major league diamond.

By the way, Carlton's PCT minus the team's PCT in other starts is impressive, but there is one season even better. In 1995, the Mariners were 27-3 (.900) in Randy Johnson's starts, and 52-63 (.452) in their other games. The Unit's advantage of .4478 edges out Carlton's .4464. In fact, Johnson was so good that year that he could never make a list like the one linked, because he single-handedly took that crappy 11-games-below-.500 team to the division championship ... so that nobody would ever know they were crappy!