The Detroit Tigers were a successful franchise in the 1980s. Tigers teams won 839 games and finished above .500 in each of the decade’s first nine seasons. That tenth season, though? Oof! That was a brutal 59-win season (the third worst in franchise history at that point).
That 1989 team, which included six players that helped the Tigers win a World Championship just five years earlier, was so broken down that even manager Sparky Anderson couldn’t handle it. He took a 17-day leave of absence to recover from the stress-induced mental and physical exhaustion.