I think the idea for this post about the worst big-league baseball team ever originated during a chat with my Uncle Don, one of the most knowledgeable baseball fans I know.

We were talking baseball, as we’ve done thousands of times for more than half a century, when the talk veered to bad baseball teams. Really bad teams, ones that re-define the word bad. Teams such as the historically and hysterically awful 1962 New York Mets.

Then I mentioned the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. Who? Uncle Don didn’t know about the Spiders.

The Spiders were far worse than the 1962 Mets. The Spiders went 20-134 in their final season in the National League. That was good enough for a .130 “winning” percentage. If you turn that around, they had a .870 losing percentage. They lost 87 percent of their games.

The 1962 Mets, by comparison, were closer to the 1927 Yankees than the 1899 Spiders. Those expansion Mets went 40-120 and had a .250 winning percentage. In other words, they won a quarter of their games. The 1899 Spiders won 13 percent of the time.

The Spiders were consistent. You got to give them that. They started the season awful, hit their stride in mid-season and stunk up the place and closed the season in a flurry of losses.

This march to historic ignominy came as no surprise to Cleveland fans, who showed their disdain for the team by not showing up at the ballpark. Spiders owner Stanley Robison had moved his best players before the season because he also owned another team, the St. Louis Perfectos, as he called them.

His Cleveland team should have been called the Stinkos. Nobody was surprised they were awful. They lost 10-1 to the Perfectos on Opening Day.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s headline after that game was this: “The Farce Has Begun.”

At least there were few witnesses to the farce. A brief Wikipedia item on the team pointed out that through the season’s first 16 home games, they attracted 3,179 fans to home games. That’s an average of 199 folks per game.

That makes the Rays and Marlins attendance look good. The attendance was so bad that other teams refused to make the trip to Cleveland for games in League Park.

The Spiders played only 26 home games that season and set a record with 101 road losses. That won’t happen again for a good reason. Well, two reasons. Teams play 81 road games and there is better competitive balance now.

They may have been bad but at least the team had players with good names, one redolent of a long-gone age.

Their pitchers included Kid Carsey, Crazy Schmitt and Highball Wilson.

Maybe they spent more time drinking than working out.

The “ace” of the staff may have been Jim Hughey, who was 4-30. Or maybe it was Charlie Knepper, who was 4-22.

Frank Bates definitely wasn’t the ace. He was 1-18 with a 7.24 ERA. Harry Colliflower was 1-11 with an 8.17 ERA.

Their position players included one with a cool name. Outfielder Sport McAllister hit .237 with one homer. They hit only 12 homers all year.

As I mentioned above, they remained consistent all through that 1899 season. The Spiders lost 30 of their first 38 games. They endured a 24-game losing streak at one point. That remains a big-league record.

As Sports Illustrated writer Brad Herzog pointed out in a 1999 piece, the team had six losing streaks of 11 games or more and only once did they win back-to-back games.

They lost on merit. Their league low 529 runs scored were at least 200 runs fewer than any team.

They allowed a league-high 1,252 runs. No other team allowed 1,000 runs, let alone 1,252.

In that Sports Illustrated piece, Herzog pointed out that in the season finale, Cleveland’s starting pitcher was somebody named Eddie Kolb, a cigar-store clerk and amateur player. The Spiders lost 19-3.

I just looked up Eddie Kolb in “The Baseball Encyclopedia.” That game was the only one of his career. He somehow lasted eight innings, gave up 18 hits, walked five and struck out one. He was also 1-for-4 as a hitter.

Cleveland fans didn’t have to endure another season of Spiders baseball in 1900. The team was disbanded after the 1899 season.

In 1901, Cleveland got another team, this one in the fledgling American League. They were called the Blues but eventually became the Indians.

Legend has it they were named after one of the Spiders, outfielder Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indians who played three years for the Spiders, including seven games in 1899. That, though, is an urban myth.

What isn’t a myth is this: The 1899 Cleveland Spiders were the worst team in big-league history, even worse than the 1962 New York Mets.

And that’s saying something.

Now, Uncle Don, you know the rest of the story.