The Philadelphia Phillies: March to Ten Grand

By Bob Herpen
The Phanatic Magazine

The quote is so apt, pulled as it is from the days of carefree youth when careless words were passed back and forth with relative impunity: “Were you born a loser, or did you have to work at it?”

Even as the franchise achieved its 10,000th loss on Sunday following a long, sad countdown, who would even want to venture a guess? Who would even entertain the question let alone acknowledge its presence and meaning other than historians or those with hearts of stone?

Although the team received a badly needed reprieve through the good karma earned last Sunday in Denver, karma alone does not have power enough to hold back a tidal wave. Loss number 10,000 was an inevitability, entering the record books on a warm and humid July 15th as the St. Louis Cardinals slammed six home runs en route to a convincing 10-2 victory over the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park.

It’s fitting, isn’t it? Losing big, exposing the team’s biggest weakness in front of a national audience, with the fears, insecurities and cynicism of a city prominently displayed through a multitude of creative signs? In this city of masochistic baseball lovers, the ultimate twist seemed to be that a good bit in attendance began to cheer towards the end as if taking the dreaded Scarlet “L” with pride.

It’s not an easy process, cataloguing ineptitude. Nonetheless, because a milestone has been reached, the sheer magnitude of misdeeds has to be revisited. This is the story of the Philadelphia Phillies, the losingest team in professional sports history.

Pure Numbers

As far as current archived records indicate, the Philadelphia “Quakers” lost their first ever game on the first day of the 1883 season, a 4-3 loss on May 1st to those Providence Grays, who were out of the National League two years later. Seventy-nine more defeats followed. Thirty-three of them involved the Phils giving up 10 or more runs, and on eight occasions, 20 or more. The club finished with a 17-81 record, eighth of eight teams in the National League, 46 games behind first-place Boston. They were managed by the tag team of Bob Ferguson and Blondie Purcell, and since it does not bode well to speak ill of the dead, I’ll forgo any indictment.

However, Philly’s fortunes did a 180-degree turn throughout the remainder of the 19th Century under Harry Wright, Arthur Irwin and native son Bill Shettsline. The reverie didn’t last long, as the club slipped into a long period of mediocrity following the departure of sharp-hitting Ed Delahanty to Washington of the American League. Aside from an eighth-place finish (52-100) in 1904, the Phils were firmly at the bottom of the first division right up until the 1918 season, a 55-68 year under Pat Moran.

The end of World War I signaled the beginning of the epic 30-year-period which did the most to cement the franchise’s reputation of hapless losers, as well as beefing up the numbers in the loss column leading to our magic number. A first 90-loss season occurred in 1919 (47-90), followed two years later by the second 100-loss season (51-103). From 1921 to 1947, the Phillies only failed to lose less than 90 games on just six occasions (1925, 1929, 1931-32, 1935, 1946), and only one of those (1932) saw the team break .500 (78-76), thanks to the Triple Crown and MVP season of the team’s second great slugger, Chuck Klein.

Eleven times in that span, the Fightins eclipsed the century mark in losses. The 1928 campaign was a truly record-setting season, as the Phils finished 43-109 - setting a National League record for losses in a season, one more than the Boston Braves’ pitiful 1909 performance. They were 52-102 in 1930.

Misery continued in one of the absolute worst stretches for any team in major-league history. From 1936 to 1942, the team lost 100 or more games six times, finishing in last place six times and seventh once. In order, it was 100, 92, 105, 106, 103, 111, and 109. The 1943 (64-90) and 1944 clubs (61-92) seemed tame in comparison. Coincidentally, those were the two years team management attempted to change the team nickname to the “Blue Jays.” It didn’t stick, and in 1945, the re-christened Phillies went 46-108.

It took Eddie Sawyer’s first full season as skipper in 1949, an 81-73 season which saw a third-place finish, to finally reverse the avalanche of misfortune. From ’49 to ’57, the red and white captured the hearts and minds of a generation, and, after three cycles of short-term boom and long-term bust with the Philadelphia Athletics, pushed their competitors out of their own stadium and made the city a one-team town.

Another brief period down in the bowels of the second division from 1958 to 1961 followed, with the added stigma of the current major-league record of 23 consecutive losses in a 47-107 season in ’61. After Gene Mauch, the team finished last in 1968, fifth in 1969 and 1970 in the new NL East, then last again in 1971 and 1972 and fifth in 1973.

If there is any truth to the scripted musings of the fictional New York Knights’ psychologists’ assertion from The Natural that “Losing is a disease…more contagious than the bubonic plague,” then the Phillies treated losing with plenty of fire from 1974 to 1984 - the fire of passionate ball clubs whose talent eventually led them to six division titles, two pennants and one World Series.

However, just as quickly as the Phillies zoomed out of the muck and into the baseball pantheon, the trip down seemed twice as fast and twice as steep. After losing nine straight to end the 1984 season, the franchise reacquainted itself with failure. From 1985 through 2000, there were only two winning seasons, 1986 (86-75) and 1993 (97-65). The 100-loss watch was on in 1988, 1989, 1992, 1996, 1997 and 2000, but miraculously, 97 losses in 2000 was the closest they came to the abyss.

The post-Millennial Phillies have turned in only one losing record, an 80-81 season in 2002 under Larry Bowa, and historically the current era logs as the fourth most successful in franchise history. Still, the stigma of never reaching the playoffs despite fielding contending teams the last four seasons has added its own particular stain to the Phils’ futility.


The Men, The Myths, The Legends

Throughout its history, Philadelphia has been a breeding ground for managers who found themselves hopelessly hamstrung in their first big-league job only to move on to a better fate somewhere else, or a place for the already-renowned to turn in a questionable tenure.

The phenomenon kicked off with Moran, the inscrutable Irishman from Fitchburg, Massachusetts who replaced Red Dooin after the 1914 season. The Phils finished sixth with a 74-80 record, then vaulted to the World Series in 1915 with a 90-win season. Despite the loss to the Boston Red Sox in five games, the Phillies improved by a game in 1916 but finished second to Pittsburgh. An 87-win year in 1917 gave way to a 55-68 mark in 1918, which signaled Moran’s departure for a more lucrative contract in Cincinnati. Pat “won” the World Series in 1919 as the 96-win Reds topped the dubious Chicago White Sox in eight games - then recorded seasons of 82, 70, 86 and 91 wins before his death in the 1924 off-season.

Bucky Harris was a curious case, in that he didn’t even last a full season here back in 1943 with the nascent Blue Jays. Harris piloted the Washington Senators in two separate tenures to over 1,000 wins, two AL pennants and a 1924 World Series, also managing Detroit and Boston to one sub-.500 year in six. Yet, the pride of Port Jervis, New York could only muster a 38-52 mark at 21st and Lehigh before handing the reins to Freddie Fitzsimmons.

A fresh-faced 40-year-old Mayo Smith was given the job in 1955 to build on what Steve O’Neill maintained in the post-Whiz Kids era, but only coaxed two .500 years and a season-and-a-half of losing before his dismissal 84 games into 1958. After a stop in Cincinnati the following season, Smith landed with the Tigers in 1967, won 103 games in 1968 along with a World Series, and 363 games through four seasons in Motown.

Which brings us to Gene Mauch. Forget Sting, this baseball genius might win the title of “King of Pain” for the entire Delaware Valley. For all his wisdom and unflappability, he alone bears the burden for the decisions that led to the most infamous collapse in National League history.

It doesn’t matter that Mauch never had a losing record during a full season as manager from 1960 to 1968, or averaged better than 85 wins from 1962 through 1967. His legacy will be forever stained by just 10 losses. Of course, they happened to come consecutively, in late September 1964, and cost the Phillies a berth in the World Series.

Rounding out the list is the dearly departed Terry Francona, whose tenure (1997-2000) included a high-water-mark of 77 wins with a 65-win and 68-win season thrown in for good measure. Ordered to nurture a young lineup during a period dubbed “small-market baseball,” the man who once managed Michael Jordan began his first season in Philly at a major-league worst 30-72. Though his upbeat attitude and positive reinforcement produced a 38-22 end to that 1997 season, his inexperience in true pressure situations submarined a 1999 campaign which saw the Phils at 61-48 and in the thick of the Wild Card hunt in August turned into a club which finished 26 games behind division-winning Atlanta.

In a remarkable twist of fate, his name is now synonymous with the instant-classic Curse-breaking 2004 Boston Red Sox and is credited with over 330 wins in Beantown over the last three-plus seasons.

The Diamond Dogs

Naturally, management from the ownership down to the coaches can’t all take the blame. There are at least nine players on the baseball diamond at any one time, each capable of taking over the game for better or worse.

The Phillies have a long and storied history of trotting out has-beens, never-weres, washed up pseudo-heroes, lesser-skilled siblings, as well as giving up early on some bona-fide talent which made their opponents richer in the deal. Perhaps most telling of all, the Phillies carry the ugly burden of having an unfortunate record in race relations which stain the franchise in the minds of baseball lifers to this day.

On the short list are: Irish Meusel (brother of the Yankees Murderers’ Row Bob Meusel), Chief Bender and Jimmie Foxx (A’s retreads), Vince DiMaggio, Dick Sisler (brother of George), John Buzhardt, Frank Torre, Lew Burdette, Jack Sanford, Bob Uecker, Frank Howard, Bo Belinsky, Fergie Jenkins, Joe Lis, Ken Brett, George Bell, Ryne Sandberg, Von Hayes, Charles Hudson, Mike Maddux, Ron Jones, Pat Combs, Bobby Munoz, J.D. Drew, Jeremy Giambi and Michael Garciaparra.

Even though de facto segregation of the Major Leagues was ended with Jackie Robinson’s signing with Brooklyn in 1947, the Phillies were painfully slow to change with the times. It was not until 1957 when the team signed its first American-born black player (John Kennedy of Jacksonville, Florida), and his tenure lasted all of five games that season.

The Phillies were the first club to display outwardly vicious behavior towards Robinson during his storied career, and were the last club in the National League to feature a roster which was not exclusively Caucasian. Only the Boston Red Sox, who relented with the signing of Pumpsie Green in 1959, beat the Phils in the quest to be baseball’s last integrated roster.

Chief culprit in this macabre madness was a good-old-fashioned redneck racist, an Alabama-born cuss by the name of William Benjamin “Ben” Chapman. Chapman, according to long-time baseball writer Bill Conlin, was “a man saved by baseball from a career of riding through the night in a pickup truck wearing a hood and a white sheet.” As Conlin wrote in his historical tome for the Daily News’ “The Phillies: 100 Years” in 1983 of Robinson’s baptism-by-fire:

“The Phillies, spurred on by their manager, tore at him with their voices and their spikes. They tried to dent his head and bloody his legs, but they could not compromise his spirit or his dignity…During his Hall-of-Fame decade with the Dodgers, Robinson reserved some of his most memorable performances for Shibe Park. ‘Of all the league’s parks in those difficult first few seasons, that one was the lions den,’ Robinson said years later.”

Chapman’s reign of terror lasted, mercifully, from 1946 to early in the 1948 season. Nonetheless, it wasn’t until 1964 that the Phillies featured a roster which starred at least three minority players: scrappy second-baseman Tony Taylor, outfielder Tony Gonzalez, and the enigmatic Dick Allen.

Virtually every team ahead of them in the 50’s and 60’s improved their fortunes on the field and in the stands by availing themselves of a new reservoir of talent from the African-American and Hispanic communities. The Dodgers, Giants and Reds exploded into prominence with future legends: Roy Campanella, Frank Robinson, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Vada Pinson, Orlando Cepeda, the Alou brothers, Willie McCovey, among others.

The Pirates had Roberto Clemente, and even the Cubs boasted Ernie Banks. Meanwhile, the faces of the Phillies happened to be a fleet-footed, sweet-swinging outfielder from rural Nebraska, a workhorse starter from rural Illinois, and a lanky right-hander and future senator from Kentucky.

Despite winning the 1964 NL Rookie of the Year, Allen’s seven-year tenure in Philadelphia was pockmarked with rancor. After challenging teammates, and fraying last nerves of managers and team executives, his tenure ended in a bitter trade to St. Louis in 1970, which then created huge ripples throughout the baseball world by having his trade counterpart, Curt Flood, challenge baseball’s reserve clause.

Although notable players such as Garry Maddox, Gary Matthews, Juan Samuel, Ron Gant and Jimmy Rollins have patrolled the Vet’s Astroturf and the new stadium’s verdant grass, it took 36 years before the team claimed another breakout star from the minority ranks - reigning NL MVP Ryan Howard.

The Fields of (Mostly) Nightmares

1883-1886: Recreation Park
1887-1894: Philadelphia Baseball Ground
1895-1938: Huntingdon Street Baseball Grounds/Baker Bowl
1938-1970: Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium
1971-2003: Veterans Stadium
2004-present: Citizens Bank Park

“Garland them with with timeless lilies! Although they are a bunch of dillies, who give honest men the willies. We still love them for their sillies. Hail! The Phillies.”

- James Michener