For the suffering New York Mets fans of the 1960s, any sign of progress was thrilling, especially after the team’s comically bad debut season, in 1962, when it set the modern-day Major League Baseball record for losses in a single season: 120.

Getting them just from laughingstocks to respectably bad — let alone a winning team again — is going to require a shift in philosophy from the top of the organization.

At the very end of an awful season for the Chicago White Sox, there was a small sign of hope in the Deep South. That’s where the Birmingham Barons — Chicago’s Double-A