Some of baseball’s best teams fell short of title

The 2011 Pirates just missed the cut.

The ’73 Reds lie in contrast with the 2001 Seattle Mariners, whose 116 wins tied for the most ever in a season. The Mariners lost to the Yankees in the ALCS that year, assuring them of a high spot on the list of top non-champions. But they still didn’t impress quite as much as the Reds did. The unbalanced American League produced four teams (29 percent of the league) with 96 or more losses that year (there was only one such NL team in 1973), giving the Mariners a power rank /standard deviation score of 2.45, good for third on the list behind the Reds and the 2005 Cardinals (2.75), a team that took its division by 11 games and won 100 games during a season in which no NL team hit the 100-loss mark. Another renowned post season loser, the 109-win Baltimore Orioles of 1969 who dropped the World Series to the “Miracle Mets” (those pesky Mets again), also fall lower on the list than you might expect (No. 10) – the expansion that added two teams to the AL that year inflating their win total.

Others in the great-but-we-hardly-knew-ye club: Cincinnati’s 1973 cousins, the 1970 Reds (2.39), who won their division by 14 ½ games and swept the Pirates in the NL playoffs before falling to Baltimore in the World Series, the 1973 Dodgers (2.35), a dominant team that didn’t even make the playoffs thanks to the misfortune of playing in the Reds’ division, and the 1995 Cleveland Indians (2.34), a power laden club led by Albert Belle and Manny Ramirez(notes) that finished thirty games ahead of the second place Royals on their way to the AL flag, only to drop a six-game World Series to the Atlanta Braves.