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You know things are getting bad when the local writers start mentioning your name in the same sentence with the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. After dropping to 9-35 with their 4-0 loss in Cleveland to the Indians, (the Spiders did not survive their infamous 20-134 season), John Lowe of the Detroit Free Press has conjured the name of that long ago doomed outfit. While there were mitigating circumstances that brought the Spiders to ruin (their owner transferred their best players to his other National League holding in St. Louis), the 2003 Tigers have no such excuse.

Will they, like those Spiders, decide to finish their schedule on the road? Cleveland spent most of the 1899 season playing as an away team when folks just couldn't stand to see them anymore at home. People on the road were more than thrilled when they showed up to get their daily thumping as the hands of the locals, naturally.

After Wednesday night's loss, the Tigers have now been blanked nine times this season. Should they continue these offensive non-showings at this pace, they will be shutout 33 times on the year. This puts them in some pretty serious low-scoring company. Here is a list of teams selected at random from some of baseball's lowest-scoring seasons in history. These are some of the lowest-scoring clubs in those run-deprived years:

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