I confess I did not follow the World Series very closely this year. I caught a few bits and pieces of games, including the latter innings of Game Six, but for the most part missed them. My first thought after hearing about how it turned out was “Gosh, I wonder who the last team to lose consecutive Series was”. My guess when I asked myself that was the 1977-78 Dodgers, but that was wrong – the 1991-92 Braves were the last team before the 2010-11 Rangers to do it. The full list of such teams is fairly short list. Here they are, courtesy of Baseball Reference:
2010-11 Texas Rangers (?)
1991-92 Atlanta Braves (1995)
1977-78 Los Angeles Dodgers (1981)
1963-64 New York Yankees (1977)
1952-53 Brooklyn Dodgers (1955)
1936-37 New York Giants (1954)
1923-24 New York Giants (1933)
1921-22 New York Yankees (1923)
1911-13 New York Giants (1921)
1907-09 Detroit Tigers (1935)
The year in parentheses is when they next won the World Series. The Tigers had the hardest luck among them – among the original 16 teams, only the Phillies (1950), Dodgers (1955), and St. Louis Browns (1966, as the Baltimore Orioles) took longer to win their first championship. The Rangers, going back to their days as the reborn Washington Senators (the original Senators franchise became the Minnesota Twins in 1961), now have a longer drought than every team except the Dodgers and Browns/Orioles (the Astros are a year behind them), but they do have the chance to be the first team in 99 years to lose three World Series in a row. I don’t think that will be much consolation to their fans, however.
UPDATE: Of course, the Phillies won their first World Series in 1980, not 1950. Some days I really do need an editor. Thanks to Ed Sills for the catch.
“they do have the chance to be the first team in 99 years to lose three World Series in a row. ”
Why stop there? Why not aspire to be the Buffalo Bills from 1991-1994?