Baseball only wants to celebrate the good, such as the 2006 Detroit Tigers, not the 2003 Tigers, and Barry Bonds, not Mario Mendoza (though just how much it really wants to celebrate Bonds is open to debate). It’s a shame: You can learn as much from a bad team as a good one, and sometimes the bad ones can give you something you’ve never seen before.

Over the weekend, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and the Yankees combined to demonstrate what a historically bad pitching staff looks like. In 16 wonderful innings, Rays pitchers combined for an ERA of 20.81. They allowed eight home runs and an aggregate batting line of .506 AVG/.554 OBA/.993 SLG, which is to say that in those two days, the Rays turned the average Yankee into a combination of Ty Cobb and Lou Gehrig.

That series is now over, but we can only hope that the Rays go on to display similar generosity over the rest of the schedule. This is their one shot at history. Despite new management beginning last year, the franchise has been unable to outgrow its origins as the bastard offspring of the 1998 expansion. While the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Rays’ sister expansion team, has won a championship and two other division titles, the legacy of the “Gilligan’s Island”-style leadership of the Rays’ original managing general partner, Vince Naimoli, and his incompetent general manager, Chuck LaMar, has been a team that has lost 91 or more games in every season of its existence — and they’ll do it again this year.

Still, though the Rays have thrice crossed the 100-loss mark (the traditional standard for historiclevel misery), this franchise still hasn’t perfected its imperfections and created a team so bad that it is remembered for its sheer ineptitude. The Rays have been just bad enough at being bad that they lack a true comparison to the 1962 Mets or the 2003 Tigers. But, thanks to the little push they got from the Yankees, this year’s Rays may finally get there.

It’s going to take some work. Until mid-June, the Rays were just your average bad team, losing a few more than they won. Their 29–33 record put them on pace for a forgettably mediocre 76–86 season. The team’s runs allowed (like ERA, but with the “earned” part carved off so as to encompass all runs) was a very high 6.02. Still, the offense was scoring close to five runs a game and was able to keep up to some degree.

At roughly that moment, the pitching staff went Humpty Dumpty on Tampa Bay. Since June 12, the Rays have gone 9–27 with a 6.91 ERA (7.26 RA). Simultaneously, the offense slowed down just enough to compound the problem. The Rays have 64 games remaining. If they keep to their recent pace, they will finish with a record of 54–108, a franchise low, and one that is tantalizingly close to the abjectly miserable season that will satisfy baseball historians and sadists everywhere.

Along the way, the Rays might become just the 12th team in modern history to allow a 1,000 runs in a season, and at their current pace they should get there pretty easily, joining illustrious predecessors like the 1930 Philadelphia Phillies and the 1996 Tigers. The Rays could also post one of the ten highest team ERAs of all time. Maintaining an ERA of 5.98 or higher over the rest of the season would be a testament to how wonderfully special this franchise is. With two exceptions — the aforementioned ’96 Tigers and the prehumidor 1999 Rockies — the other clubs in the top ten were cheaply run, pre-integration, pre-bullpen, 1930s rabbit ball clubs who made their home in hitter-friendly bandboxes. In other words, they had every handicap that a pitching staff could have. History placed those teams in an untenable position, but the Rays messed up all by themselves. And when the ERAs of their forebears are adjusted for park and league context, it becomes clear that the Rays are worse than any of them. Here is the current bottom ten in team ERA, along with their adjusted ERA (also known as ERA+: 100 is average, so a team with an ERA+ of 80 would be 20% below avera g e ) . Stats cited from baseball-reference.com:

What’s most amazing about the Rays’ pitching staff is that it’s as bad as it is while they have three good starters on staff. Scott Kazmir and James Shields are good right now (despite the latter’s participation in Sunday’s debacle), and Andy Sonnanstine has the makings of an excellent control pitcher, with just six unintentional walks in 58.2 major league innings. The problem has been that the drop-off from Sonnanstine to the next worst guy has been like the drop-off the side of the Empire State Building.

Tampa’s quixotic quest for the record books is of more than just academic interest. Should the resurgent Yankees succeed in tightening the AL East race, the Rays will get a chance to play anti-spoilers, or more accurately, enablers for the contenders. If so, the advantage is decidedly to Boston: The Devil Rays have another six games with the Yankees, but they’ll meet the Red Sox 15 more times.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.