Brian Dozier is destroying baseballs on a regular basis and it hasn’t helped his team one bit. Dozier is the everyday second baseman for the Twins. He’s hit 39 home runs so far this season, two fewer than the Orioles’ Mark Trumbo, who’s leading the league with 41. At 52-88, the Twins have the worst record in baseball. Hitting home runs and losing baseball games in bunches don’t typically go hand-in-hand. This year they do, and it could be historic.

If Dozier takes the home run lead from Trumbo and the Twins lock down the worst record in the league this season, Dozier will be only the second player to achieve that distinction since league expansion in 1961.

The first was Frank Howard, the right-handed slugger who played outfield and first base for the 1968 Washington Senators (the franchise that eventually became the Rangers). In 1968, the Senators won 65 games and lost 96, for the worst record in the majors. Howard led the majors with 44 home runs that season, eight more than the Giants’ Willie McCovey.

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The 1968 Senators lost 19 games in which Howard homered, including one game in which he went deep twice. This year, the Twins have lost 20 games in which Dozier homered, including Tuesday night’s 11-5 loss to the Royals, when Dozier hit three over the wall.

All of this got me thinking about how many other league-leading performances were done in the service of the worst team in baseball. So I went looking. I made a list of the worst records each season from 1961 to 2015. Then I looked at the league-leaders in several offensive and pitching categories for each of those seasons. On offense, I looked at total hits, doubles, triples, OPS and stolen bases. For pitchers, I looked at ERA, strikeouts, wins and saves.

I found two other best-for-the-worst players. Any guesses?

In the strike-shortened 1994 season, Tony Gwynn led the majors with 165 total hits while his team, the Padres, won only 47 games, against 70 losses. Gwynn bested the Indians’ Kenny Lofton by five total hits, but did so in 40 fewer at-bats. Gwynn’s .394 average that season season is the closest any batter has come to hitting .400 since Ted Williams hit .406 for the Red Sox in 1941.

In 2004, just three years after winning the World Series, the Diamondbacks went 51-111, the worst record in the league by a wide margin. That season, lefty-starter Randy Johnson racked up 290 strikeouts, 25 more than Johan Santana, then with the Twins. Johnson also won 16 games that season, slightly less than one-third of all victories recorded by the D-backs.

(AP Photo) https://images.daznservices.com/di/library/sporting_news/c6/56/tony-gwynn-ftrjpg_vnqarjostzw71ar4yp7i0vs9m.jpg?t=-1517524594&w=500&quality=80 That’s it. Howard. Gwynn. Johnson. A four-time All Star and Rookie of the Year (Howard) and two Hall of Famers. Brian Dozier is tantalizingly close to joining that esteemed list.

A few others came close. Michael Bourn led the majors with 61 stolen bases in 2011. Bourn started the year with the Astros but ended it with the Braves. The Astros won just 56 games in 2011, but Bourn was only around for part of it.

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The 2006 and 2007 Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays were dreadful -- the worst team in the league two consecutive seasons, before making a tremendous turnaround and playing in the World Series in 2008. Carl Crawford was tearing up the base paths for the (Devil) Rays, even as the team floundered. In 2006, Crawford hit 16 triples and stole 58 bases, most in the American League. But the Mets’ Jose Reyes bested Crawford in both categories for the league as a whole, with 17 triples and 64 stolen bases. The next season, lefty starter Scott Kazmir recorded 239 strikeouts -- oh so close to the league lead. Jake Peavy (Padres) beat Kazmir by one, ending the season with 240 Ks.

And there’s Steve Carlton, who won 27 games as a starter for the Phillies in a year when the team won only 59 total games. But the Phillies were not the worst team in the majors in 1972. That distinction belonged to the Rangers, who posted a 54-100 record. Carlton had to settle for winning the Cy Young award that season, and in 1977, 1980 and 1982, before being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1994.

If you love the quirks of baseball history, you’ll spend the next three weeks rooting for Dozier to go deep and the Twins to go south.