Golden Knights’ Instant Success Has Never Happened in MLB
From the very beginning for me, there was baseball and everything else. Other sports come and go in my consciousness, but—as Terrance Mann so artfully puts it in Field of Dreams—the one constant through all the years has been baseball.
But sometimes other sports provide a story that’s too compelling to be overlooked. Such is the case with the Vegas Golden Knights, the upstart darlings of the National Hockey League. A year ago they had never played a single game as a hockey franchise, and now they’re playing in the Stanley Cup finals. For an American hockey team to sprout up in the desert and contend for a championship in its first year of existence in a Canadian-dominated league is, well, unbelievable. And yet here we are.
To celebrate this achievement, I looked for a parallel in the sport I love and, not surprisingly, I couldn’t find one. Expansion teams have fared brutally in the major leagues, ever since the first modern expansion franchises were born in 1961. The Los Angeles Angels won 70 games in their inaugural season, and finished 38 1/2 games behind the New York Yankees. The other expansion team that year, the Washington Senators, did even worse, dropping 100 games and finishing a staggering 47 1/2 games behind the Yankees. Nobody said the first year was easy.
The following season, the National League expanded by two teams, and the 1962 New York Mets set the single-season futility record that still stands at 40-120. In over a half-century since then, no team in MLB has managed to do worse than that expansion team did. If any of the surviving members of this team—all of them in their 80s by now—follow hockey, they are probably as stunned as the rest of us by what the Golden Knights have done on the ice this year.
In the five rounds of expansion since 1962, which is essentially this writer’s lifetime, the most successful franchise baseball has seen was the 1969 Kansas City Royals, who won just 69 games and lost 93. The Seattle expansion teams (the Pilots in 1969 and the Mariners in 1977) each finished with identical 64-98 records. And the two expansion teams in the National League in 1969—the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres—each lost 110 games.
History has shown that new franchises have to take their lumps when they first come into the league. The average record of all 14 expansion teams in baseball’s modern era is 61-101 (or 40 games below .500), and they finished an average of 41 games out of first place. Even losing “only” 95 games in a season—as the Colorado Rockies did back in 1993—can be counted as a success, for an expansion team.
But the Golden Knights have disregarded this rule like it’s the “Las” in front of their home city’s name. Which makes sense, because don’t we all think of it as “Vegas” anyway?
Elvis helped to make Vegas what it is today, and even though it never has been—and may never be—one of baseball’s major league cities, all of us who appreciate what the Golden Knights have done as an expansion team can sing “Viva Las Vegas” as the NHL season comes to a conclusion in the next week or two.
