‘Like pulling a tractor trailer’: Inside the grind of playing for a struggling MLB club

A 162-game season guarantees failure as much as success. For players on teams stuck in extended losing stretches, keeping the group intact and holding on to belief can become one of the toughest parts of the job.

Published: 2026-07-23. Major League Baseball’s schedule is singular in professional sport, with a 162-game campaign that magnifies both routine and frustration. If you ask professional athletes, they’ll tell you. Losing is no fun. The season’s length combined with the sport’s statistical realities changes the stakes of a prolonged slump.

The sheer volume of games means the results swing over long arcs rather than overnight. An MLB season boasts a whopping 162 games, twice as many as the NBA and NHL, and even the best hitters fail two-thirds of the time at the plate. That frequency of failure is part of baseball’s fabric and it affects how players process losing stretches.

Pitching statistics further underline the sport’s peculiar expectations: If a pitcher wins half his starts, he’s an All-Star. Because of that, says decorated starter Jamie Moyer, a losing campaign takes on a particular consequence. The standard measures of performance and success in baseball can make team-wide downturns feel both inevitable and especially draining.

Within a clubhouse mired in losses the day-to-day grind becomes harder to stomach. Team routines, clubhouse culture and the small rituals that sustain morale are tested when defeats pile up. Maintaining focus across 162 games calls for a collective resilience that is often more difficult to sustain than individual performance metrics suggest.

Players and coaches describe the slog in blunt terms that capture the physical and mental drag of the season’s long haul. The sensation of trying to advance a struggling roster has been summed up with the phrase 'Like pulling a tractor trailer'. That shorthand reflects how the combination of schedule length and the sport’s tolerance for individual failure compounds the challenge of staying cohesive.

The arithmetic and atmosphere of a long season mean losing runs are a recurring reality in baseball. For those inside a team going through one, the central task becomes preserving unity and the belief that the course can be turned, game by game, within the relentless rhythm of 162 contests.