Column: The worst teams for a ’90s child to support

The New England Patriots beat the Philadelphia Eagles so badly last weekend that PETA intervened on an injured Michael Vick’s behalf and the Republican-controlled House of Representatives changed the national bird to the F-16.

Not really — but it was a brutal 38-20 loss that caused Philadelphia fans to chant, “Fire Andy [Reid, Eagles Head Coach]” before the game had ended. As Tom Brady glided his passes through a devastated Eagles secondary, I had a memory of consciously choosing to be an Eagles fan instead of a Patriots fan in the late 1990s.

I was on vacation from Boston with my father and grandfather in Lancaster, Penn., watching Donovan McNabb scramble on TV. An Amish man who lived nearby was reconciling his religious beliefs with modernity by using the family phone, Al Gore was America’s future president and the Patriots were a mediocre football team: Only one of those things is still true.

Of course, it could have been worse. I could have visited my mom’s family in Detroit and chosen to root for the Lions and Chrysler.

I offer the story of my own football allegiances as illustration of greater principle: The choices we make about which sports teams to root for in childhood exert a tremendous pull. It’s hard to abandon a team you have rooted for since the beginning of your sports consciousness. Some kids, however, make worse choices than others.

Sports fans often debate what team is or has been the best over a period of time. I am drawn to a slightly different question: What was the worst professional team for someone born in the late ’80s/early ’90s to choose to root for?

For this article, I will limit my discussion to baseball, because it is the sport I have followed most closely since childhood and I believe has the richest history of failure and disappointment.

In baseball, the lack of competitive balance has produced a plethora of options. Rooting for the Baltimore Orioles would have been a terrible choice. After winning 98 games in 1997, the Orioles have not had a winning record in the last 14 years.

A sports fan born in 1990 might have chosen at the tender age of seven to root for B.J. Surhoff and the talented Orioles. This Orioles fan might have been disappointed at the age of eight, in 1998, when the Orioles won 79 games and finished fourth in the AL East.

By the time he or she turned 21, however, this fan would remember the 1998 season as the second best in memory.

The Kansas City Royals have also been a terrible team to root for. In perhaps the second-weakest division in all of baseball, the AL Central, the Royals have not once made the playoffs in the last 15 years. In fact, the Royals have not made the playoffs in, wait for it ... 26 years. The problem with picking the Royals and Orioles, however, is that these teams were so bad that they never even had the opportunity to produce dreams to crush.

The Cubs, by contrast, have definitely raised and then subsequently destroyed the hopes and dreams of many impressionable sports fans. The Steve Bartman incident in particular stands out as one of the most devastating single moment in recent baseball history for many fans.

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Still, the Cubs won their division three times in the last decade, so it would be hard to say that on any given day a Cubs fan was more unhappy than a Kansas City or Baltimore fan.

Other baseball fans from San Diego, Toronto, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Houston, Los Angeles and Cleveland all have legitimate cases to make for their teams being the worst to root for. But one team has managed to be both so horrible and dream-destroying that it has ruined the sports lives of millions of young fans in two separate countries.

The Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals is/are the worst franchise/franchises to root for. The Expos/Nationals have not made the playoffs in 30 years: The team’s last playoff appearance was in 1981.

What truly separates this team from the competition, however, is its uncanny ability to give away great players for nothing. The Expos let go of both Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson, two of the five best pitchers in the last 20 years.

The team’s greatest disaster, however, may have been a trade made during its ill-fated playoff run in 2002. It ranks as perhaps the worst trade in modern history in any sport. Expos management, unaccustomed to their success that season, traded Grady Sizemore, Brandon Phillips and Cliff Lee to the Cleveland Indians for Bartolo Colon in the vain hope of making the playoffs. Colon was under contract through 2003; he was a pretty good pitcher.

All three of the players traded to the Indians, however, would go on to be future All-Stars. Lee has become one of the best pitchers in baseball, Sizemore has been one of the best center fielders of the last decade and Phillips has been a significantly above-average second baseman.

The worst part about this trade was that the Expos would not only miss the playoffs but also miss it by 12 games. Colon would subsequently be traded to the White Sox after the season for nothing of value. The Colon trade is emblematic of Expos history: a terrible team with lots of young talent making short-sighted decisions that destroy future hopes.

In 2005, the team was finally moved from Montreal and relocated to America’s capital, sending many Canadians into nationalist fervor (or perhaps French-Canadian, anti-Anglo, separatist fervor).

Now, save for Stephen Strasburg, the Nationals are a national embarrassment for Americans, which perhaps is the only saving grace for an embittered, formerly impressionable Montreal Expos fan.