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On the last Monday of the 2003 season, Tigers infielder Shane Halter climbed the dugout steps at Kauffman Stadium and scanned the crowd for his family. Halter always liked playing in Kansas City, where he’d started his MLB career, but on this trip he felt mostly relief: the losing was almost over.

The Tigers were steamrolled again that night. Their 118th loss of the season set an American League record, passing the 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, but that barely registered in the Tigers clubhouse because the players for weeks had been focused on avoiding an even more mortifying record. With a week left in the regular season, they had a mere 38 wins and were two losses away from tying the expansion 1962 New York Mets for most losses in a season in baseball’s modern era.

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“It was on everybody’s mind,” Halter said. “The more games we played, over and over it was like, ‘Man, we may be the worst team to ever play the game.’”

It’s one thing to be bad, and another to be historically so. The previous week, a Minneapolis newspaper printed a photo of a broom, with the caption, “Come see the Tigers get swept.” And they were. The flight to Kansas City was quiet. The clubhouse felt, for the first time all season, as if storm clouds had rolled through. The players were humiliated. After the Monday night game, they had lost 10 in a row, and 16 of 17. In the midst of that stretch, catcher Brandon Inge told the Detroit Free Press, “It’s like that dream you had as a kid when you’re walking down the school hall naked and there is no place to go.”

Twenty years later, the players, coaches and executives who formed the 2003 Tigers still vividly recall that slow, inevitable spiral toward the Mets’ 120 losses. That number chased them for months. “Haunted by the worst record of all time,” backup catcher Matt Walbeck said. Since then, other clubs have come close — the Athletics and Royals entered September with 39 and 41 wins, respectively — but none took it to the wire like the Tigers.

There’s an old Tommy Lasorda line that goes, “No matter how good you are, you’re going to lose a third of your games. No matter how bad you are, you’re going to win a third of your games. It’s the other third that makes the difference.”

“I remember telling people, ‘We really put that one to bed,’” said then-Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski, now with the Phillies. The Tigers wouldn’t come close to winning a third of their games.

With a week to go in the season, they were 38-118, 80 games under .500. If the 2003 Tigers were to escape the ignominy of matching the 1962 Mets’ loss record, they’d need to do something they hadn’t managed all season: win five of six games.

They had fallen behind in the second inning of the season and never recovered.

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In the Tigers’ seventh game (and loss) of the season, Jeremy Bonderman — then a 20-year-old starter with no experience above High A — was chased early by the Royals and followed by Rule 5 relievers Wil Ledezma, Matt Roney and Chris Spurling. Such was the state of the pitching staff. Afterward, a handful of Tigers players decided to spend the night in the clubhouse to try changing the team’s luck. They slept fitfully on sofas and in sleeping bags on the floor.

They lost again the next day.

The Tigers started the season 0-9, then 1-17, then 2-19, then 3-25.

“We couldn’t dig out of that hole we’d put ourselves in,” Halter said. “So you’re sitting there in April knowing you don’t have a chance of playing for anything.”

Dombrowski, hired a year earlier to navigate a rebuild in Detroit, had in his first offseason at the helm non-tendered right fielder Robert Fick, the Tigers’ 2002 All-Star representative, and traded veteran starters Mark Redman and Jeff Weaver for young players and prospects. The GM hoped the Tigers could avoid a second consecutive 100-loss season, maybe even surprise some people, but he was realistic.

“We didn’t expect to have a good season, by any means,” Dombrowski said.

The players were under no illusions, either. Catcher A.J. Hinch, now the Tigers’ manager, described the ragtag roster as “a unique collection of Rule 5 players to young guys that were lucky to be there to older guys that were lucky to be there and a few recognizable names.” Still, they had Dmitri Young, Bobby Higginson, Dean Palmer, Steve Sparks, Steve Avery and enough self-confidence that for most of the season they paid no mind to the 1962 Mets.

Dombrowski had also hired Hall of Fame shortstop Alan Trammell as manager to help a young core emerge from this roster of misfits. As Trammell assembled his staff, he looked for coaches who loved to teach and had the patience for imperfections. One of his first calls, though, was to a former Tigers teammate known more for his temper and intensity. “People thought I was crazy for bringing Kirk Gibson on,” Trammell said. But the first-year manager had made no mistake. It was Gibson who’d get his hands dirty teaching the team how to win.

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Trammell and Gibson were yin and yang. The manager was a motivator and an optimist. “The most positive person, let alone Hall of Famer, I’ve ever met,” Hinch said. The bench coach was laser-focused on winning each game. “He lived and died by it, man,” reliever Brian Schmack said. “He hated losing.”

As a bad start turned into a bad season, the coaches taught. The daily pregame itinerary began including early work before batting practice, an hour of fundamentals that are common in spring training but are typically ditched during the season. The Tigers ran baserunning drills and practiced cut-off throws. “It was borderline instructional league,” Hinch said. Gibson was the drill sergeant.

“We were pissed. Nobody liked it,” outfielder Craig Monroe said. “But we respected it because we knew they were trying to help us get better.”

Today, Gibson remembers that the 2003 Tigers played hard. They had to learn how to work before they learned how to win. And they had ground to make up. “Some of them should have been in Lakeland,” he said, meaning A-ball. “Seriously.”

In early September, on the Tigers’ last off day of the 2003 season, they held a team dinner in New York City and talked about how not to make history.

They had crossed the 100-loss mark at the end of August and had just seen Opening Day starter Mike Maroth handed his 20th loss of the season earlier on the road trip. But as the regular-season finish line and the Mets’ record came into view, they still had something to play for. The math was simple: 20 games in 20 days. They needed six more wins to avoid the record, five to tie, four or fewer to set a new one.

“We knew exactly what we needed to do to not go into the history books for the wrong reasons,” Hinch said.

But the losses kept coming. The Tigers were swept by the Yankees, lost three of four to the Royals, then were swept by the Blue Jays and Twins to bring them to the last week of the year. “It was hard every day going to the ballpark,” Walbeck said. “I almost had this horrible sense that if we lost a game by a run it was a success.” The Tigers had endured 10 losing streaks of at least six games, and this skid came at the worst time. With each defeat, the doomsday clock ticked closer and the outside noise increased.

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“You had most of the world cheering for us to break the record,” said Young, who was authoring a career season — a .297/.372/.537 slash line and 29 homers — in spite of the team’s win-loss record. “For us, that was where the pride came in.”

“There was so much more attention focused on us because we were getting close to (the record),” Dombrowski added. “You normally would be just a bad club, and now all of a sudden you’re going to go down as maybe the worst club in history, at least from a statistical perspective.”

In Detroit, the local newspapers ran daily graphics showing the Tigers were right on pace with the 1962 Mets. Schmack noticed the news crews arriving in advance of the last week of the season. He saw a reporter from The Wall Street Journal and thought: What are they doing there? Do they even cover sports? Then came ABC, NBC, The New York Times and Rolling Stone. They all had come to write the eulogy for the worst team in baseball’s modern history.

“I was like, this is serious,” Schmack said. “This can’t happen.”

After the Monday night steamrolling in Kansas City, the Tigers were without their manager and their highest-paid player for the next two games. Trammell’s mother had died of a heart attack over the weekend, so he flew to San Diego to be with his family. Higginson was serving a suspension for throwing his shin guard and accidentally hitting the home plate umpire. He didn’t appeal. Better to serve the suspension in a lost season than let it bleed into the next one.

Late Tuesday night in San Diego, Trammell’s cellphone rang. It was pitching coach Bob Cluck calling from the visiting clubhouse at Kaufmann Stadium with good news: the Tigers had won, 15-6. It was their largest margin of victory of the season, and five more runs than they’d scored in any other game. They won again Wednesday, 4-3, their first consecutive wins since the first week of September — and their first back-to-back nine-inning wins since mid-July.

The Tigers returned to Detroit for a season-ending series against the Twins. Minnesota had already clinched the division, so manager Ron Gardenhire planned to pull his starters early. “I think we were playing the Rochester Red Wings,” Hinch joked. That cracked the door open a little wider. Still, the Tigers’ path to avoiding the Mets’ loss record required winning three of four games against a Twins team that had won 23 of its past 24 games against the Tigers.

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“I just feel like every guy just kind of took it personally,” Monroe said, recalling the clubhouse took on a defiant vibe that last series. “You didn’t want to be the laughing stock of f—ing baseball, especially when your manager is Alan Trammell. His f—ing name is on the wall. You’ve got Kirk Gibson, who got some of the biggest hits baseball has ever seen. So it was just a pride thing.”

In the series opener Thursday, with Trammell back on the top step of the dugout, the Tigers came back from one-run deficits in the seventh and eighth innings to send the game into extras. Halter, who had entered as a pinch-hitter after missing the previous two games with a strained quad, stepped into the batter’s box with two outs in the 11th inning. He smashed a fly ball into the right-field seats for a walk-off homer. A fan went home with the baseball off Halter’s bat, but another game ball now resides in pitcher Chris Mears’ home office in Boston, where he is the Red Sox’s pitching coordinator. It was the only win of his only season in the majors.

“We walked into the locker room afterward, and it was almost as if a bubble had burst,” Halter said. “I just remember thinking: I just took the weight of the world off our shoulders. Hey, we have a chance to not set the record.”

The Tigers still needed two wins to miss the Mets entirely, and one to tie. Neither would come the next day. The Tigers battled into extras again Friday — stranding runners in scoring position in the eighth, ninth, 10th and 11th innings — before losing on Michael Cuddyer’s 11th-inning solo shot.

That set the stage for the game the players all remember best. The Twins, behind Brad Radke, raced ahead to an 8-0 lead. Trammell almost pulled his starters midgame, all but assuring the Tigers would draw even with the Mets, but he left them in after Monroe’s RBI single got them on the board in the fifth. The Twins bullpen melted. The Tigers scored three in the seventh and four in the eighth to tie the score.

In the ninth, Tigers leadoff man Alex Sanchez drew a one-out walk off 46-year-old Twins lefty Jesse Orosco, then stole second and third. Infielder Warren Morris dug in for Orosco’s 2-2 delivery. The final pitch of Orosco’s decorated career was a breaking ball Morris swung through that skipped in the empty right-handed batter’s box and past catcher Rob Bowen. Morris was the last to realize what was happening. He stood there as Sanchez sprinted home, his arms raised above his head. The Tigers had just walked off on a strikeout/wild pitch.

“I was thrilled it happened,” Morris said, “whether I got a hit or just got out of the way so the ball could hit the backstop.”

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The Tigers streamed out of the home dugout to celebrate. Trammell was beaming. Gibson’s bald head was visible in the middle of the dogpile at home plate. “He was so excited, running around, jumping, dancing, screaming when we won,” Schmack said. It was the Tigers’ biggest comeback to win since June 20, 1965, and it ensured they could do no worse than tie the Mets.

“It was almost like winning the World Series,” Monroe said. “Doesn’t that sound crazy as hell? But that was a moment. That was our feeling. We felt like we won the World Series when, damn, we lost 119 games.”

The last day of the season, the Tigers sent Maroth to the mound.

Trammell had given Maroth a chance to bail from the rotation before he reached 20 losses. (Bonderman had no choice. Trammell pulled him at 19 losses. Bonderman said: “It’s just a number they put next to your name.”) Maroth refused. The soft-spoken lefty had earned the respect of his teammates. When Maroth became the first 20-game loser since Oakland’s Brian Kingman in 1980, Young told reporters in the clubhouse, “Y’all’s asses better be back here next year when he wins his 20th, too. He’s a better man than most of us in here.” On the last day of the season, Maroth twirled six innings of two-run baseball. The bats backed him up, pouncing on reliever Adam Johnson for six runs on six hits in the sixth, then tacking on another against Kenny Rogers, a starter coming out of the bullpen who could never have suspected then that he’d be pitching for the Tigers in the World Series three short years later. The Tigers won, 9-4.

The headline in the next day’s Detroit Free Press:

Mets 120, Tigers 119

“The finish of it was somewhat miraculous,” Dombrowski said.

“It was magical,” Monroe echoed.

There are no champagne showers for last-place teams, but they celebrated, breathed sighs of relief, and headed their separate ways. For some members of the 2003 Tigers, like Mears and Schmack, it was their only shot in the majors. For others, it was a stepping stone. On the last day of the season, Walbeck met with Trammell and Dombrowski in the manager’s office. They told him they couldn’t keep him on the roster, but he could manage their Low-A club. “I thought, if I can’t play on one of the worst teams ever, it’s probably time to make a move,” Walbeck said. He managed Low-A West Michigan to a league title in his first year.

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Even now, 20 years later, people will ask Trammell if 2003 was the worst year of his baseball career. He shakes his head. He tells them the players were receptive to coaching and didn’t cause any problems in the clubhouse. “We just didn’t win ballgames,” he says. Trammell and his staff were replaced after the 2005 season.

“When people talk about the Detroit Tigers of ’03, you’re talking about one of the worst teams record-wise in baseball history. That’s OK,” Trammell said. “You want to do that, we can take it, whatever. That’s fine. My name is on it. The Detroit Tigers and Alan Trammell. But you know what? I’m still kicking. I think about good things out of that season in regards to development.

“They won five out of six. And I’m glad that we did. I’m not going to tell you differently. But if we didn’t, I’m not sure how different it would have been, because it was a bad year record-wise. But I’m glad we didn’t. And I’m sure the players felt exactly the same way. At the end of the season, there were some smiles. And then we went home.”

Three years later, Halter drove to St. Louis with a few friends for the third game of the 2006 World Series. They had tickets in the second level at Busch Stadium, first-base side. Halter handed out hugs and handshakes to old Tigers teammates in the visiting dugout: Monroe, Inge, Bonderman, Nate Robertson, Fernando Rodney and a few more. Those that remained had gone, in three years, from one of the worst teams in baseball history to the World Series. Or, to put it the way Young does now, “some of the guys who were on that team getting their butts whooped were whoopin’ ass.”

The main pieces of the 2006 Tigers had begun to fall into place shortly after the 2003 season, when ownership was ready to pour more money into the roster. Dombrowski signed catcher Iván Rodríguez and traded for shortstop Carlos Guillén. The Tigers had the second pick in the 2004 MLB draft — back then the leagues alternated picks each year, so the Padres had first pick despite having a better record than the Tigers — and took Justin Verlander. They acquired Magglio Ordóñez, Plácido Polanco and Kenny Rogers, then brought back closer Todd Jones. Halter was out of baseball by then. But he liked to think the 2003 team had helped lay the foundation.

“I went from being on one of the worst teams ever to watching them in the World Series,” Halter said. “So, yeah, it made me feel good.”

Despite holding the AL loss record, the 2003 Tigers aren’t remembered as much as they might be if they’d tied or passed the 1962 Mets. Halter now runs a baseball academy in Texarkana, Texas. When he talks to players about failure, he’ll say, “I lost more games than you’ll lose in your lives. If I can come through it, you can, too.”

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But every summer, right as the dog days set in, players from the 2003 Tigers find themselves scrolling through the MLB standings and doing some mental math. They want to see if any other team is threatening the 1962 Mets record. Whenever a team is trending toward 120 losses, Walbeck silently roots for them to turn things around. He knows how miserable that can be. “It was the last year I played,” he said, “so it’s stuck in my DNA now. I think about it all the time.”

For a while this season, the Athletics and Royals both dipped into the danger zone. But then the Athletics reeled off a winning streak and the Royals got hot around the trade deadline. It really doesn’t take much to reach 43 wins. The Royals cleared that bar earlier this week. The Athletics swept the Angels over the weekend, then beat the Blue Jays on Wednesday for their 43rd win this season. So, for another year, the 1962 Mets stand alone, with the 2003 Tigers just behind them.

(Top photo of the Tigers’ Shane Halter after hitting a game-winning home run in late September 2003: Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)

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