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June 12, 2007
Milestone Marks What Phillies Fans Already Knew
By JERÉ LONGMAN
PHILADELPHIA, June 11 — During the 1920s and ’30s, when the Phillies inhabited a park called the Baker Bowl, the fence in right field was adorned by a giant advertisement for soap that read: “The Phillies Use Lifebuoy.”
This only encouraged fans to add a sour retort: “And they still stink.”
In fact, no team has ever stunk so often as the Phillies, who, according to the Elias Sports Bureau, have lost more games than any professional franchise in any sport. The Phillies are 14 losses from a particular threshold of ignominy — the 10,000th defeat for a club that has won one lonely World Series title (in 1980) during its 125 years of often dreadful existence.
“I didn’t know this until a week ago,” Manager Charlie Manuel said before the Phillies defeated the White Sox, 3-0, on Monday. “It means they’ve had a team here a long time. I don’t think we need to celebrate it, though.”
Defeat has been as spectacular and excruciating as it has been regular. On May 1, 1883, the team lost its inaugural game; by the end of that miserable season, a pitcher named John Coleman had lost 48 times. From 1938 through 1942, the Phillies lost at least 103 games each year.
The franchise has set awful records for futility — with a collective earned run average of 6.71 in 1930 and 23 consecutive defeats in 1961. And, of course, 1964 brought one of baseball’s most infamous collapses, when the Phillies held a 6 ½-game lead in the National League with 12 games to play and blew the pennant after losing 10 in a row.
“It was like someone sticking a nail in your head and hammering it once a day,” said Tom McCarthy, 70, an actor who plays the title role in the one-man play “The Philly Fan.”
Penurious and indifferent owners, poor trades, suspect managers and some truly bad teams have conspired through decades to influence Philadelphia’s gloomy faith. Here, victory is fleeting and ephemeral, not an encouraging sign that further success is ahead but a taunting hint that disaster is just around the corner in a city where defeat has become the natural order.
No city with teams in the four major professional sports has gone longer without a title — 24 years, since the 76ers hoisted the N.B.A. trophy in 1983. And no team in Philadelphia has come to represent heartbreak as thoroughly as the Phillies, who lost in the World Series in 1983 and have returned to the playoffs only once.
That last postseason appearance came in 1993, when expectation was slain yet again in the most operatic and distressing manner as reliever Mitch Williams, knowingly called the Wild Thing, gave up a three-run homer to Toronto’s Joe Carter in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 6 of the World Series.
“You keep rubbing that lamp, ‘Please, genie, make the dream come true,’ but the genie never comes out,” said Joe Coyne, 55, a produce manager from Havertown, Pa. “It’s always just a puff of smoke.”
Some players learned early to accept, even embrace, that there would be as little joy in Philadelphia as in Mudville. Dan Casey, a left-handed pitcher for the Phillies in the late 1880s, maintained until his death in 1943 that he was the doomed hitter portrayed in the poem “Casey at the Bat.”
Some fans, on the other hand, have been driven to the breaking point. In January 2005, a 41-year-old man was convicted of 79 charges related to fraud, identity theft and computer hacking after pirating and clogging the e-mail addresses of Philadelphia sportswriters. His lawyer admitted in court that his client was obsessive, perhaps even psychotic, but not an intentional lawbreaker. The man had meant only to say the Phillies stunk.
As the team’s 10,000th defeat approaches, it is being anticipated as a way for fans to commemorate their long-suffering fealty. A Web site, celebrate10000.com, is offering a T-shirt and a pint glass embossed with the box score from the milestone. WIP-AM, the city’s roiling sports-talk station, is considering a parade.
“We might be first to 10,000, but we’re first in something,” said Glen Macnow, a host at WIP and the co-author of “The Great Philadelphia Fan Book.”
No stretch was more miserable for the franchise than the wretched period from the end of World War I through World War II. In the 27 seasons from 1919 through 1945, Philadelphia finished last in the National League 16 times and second to last 7 times.
From 1938 through 1942, the team lost between 103 and 111 games each season. The manager during much of that stretch, Doc Prothro, had been a practicing dentist, which seemed appropriate if only because watching the Phillies was as painful as pulling teeth. The staff ace in those inglorious days, Hugh Mulcahy, was nicknamed Losing Pitcher, because those words so often attended his name in the box score.
“They weren’t just finishing last; those were some truly down-and-out teams,” said Bob Waterman, a researcher for the Elias Sports Bureau. “People talk about the financial disparity now, but even in the eight-team league era, there were big differences between the top and bottom. The Phillies were about as bad as you get.”
Ownership failings were, and are, a constant source of blame for the Phillies’ shortcomings. In 1917, the Phillies’ president, William Baker, ruined the team by trading pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander to the Cubs after three consecutive 30-win seasons on the mound, fearing Alexander would not return to the club after being drafted into the Army.
The Phillies also have the dishonorable distinction of having had two owners banned from baseball for life. Horace Fogel was barred after the 1912 season, when he complained that umpires favored the New York Giants and called the pennant race “crooked.”
In 1943, William Cox was banned after betting on his team, which reflected not only on Cox’s lack of integrity, but also on his lack of gambling acumen, considering the Phillies lost 90 games that season, after losing more than 100 games in each of the previous five seasons.
“Everybody hates George Steinbrenner, but Phillies fans would gnaw off their right arms to have an owner like Steinbrenner,” Macnow, the radio host, said.
While the Yankees have won 26 World Series titles, the Phillies’ lone championship came in 1980. Troubling to fans here is that stars like Scott Rolen (St. Louis) and Curt Schilling (Boston) have left to win rings elsewhere. And victory has sometimes brought tepid satisfaction even to those stars who remained. Mike Schmidt, perhaps the game’s greatest third baseman, once complained about the thrill of victory and the agony of reading about it in the scrutinizing Philadelphia newspapers the next day.
Here, not only the Phillies fail. Sometimes, the entertainment tanks, too. On April 17, 1972, a hang-gliding daredevil named Kiteman was hired to ski down a ramp at Veterans Stadium and soar to home plate, where he would deliver the first ball of the home season. First, Kiteman panicked and froze. Then he caught a gust of unfortunate wind, clipped rows of seats, crashed into the railing of the upper deck and tossed the ball into the Phillies’ bullpen — about 400 feet from its intended destination.
“I was just relieved that he was alive,” Bill Giles, the Phillies’ chairman, wrote in his autobiography, “Pouring Six Beers at a Time.” “Generally speaking, a dead body is not a good omen for the start of a baseball season.”
It is not the start of the 1972 season, but rather the end of the 1964 season, that still leaves fans of a certain age feeling gut-punched. There was such encouragement that year — a perfect game by Jim Bunning on Father’s Day, a home run by Johnny Callison to win the All-Star Game, the 6 ½-game lead with 12 to play.
The twins Lloyd and Pete Adams, now 60 and living in Marlton, N.J., were entering their freshman year at Notre Dame, confident the Phillies would prevail. Then, on Sept. 21, Cincinnati’s Chico Ruiz stole home with the great Frank Robinson at bat, and the Phillies lost, 1-0.
“My dad said, ‘They may not win again,’ ” Lloyd Adams said.
Nine more defeats followed as the lead stunningly, achingly disappeared. The brothers, like many, contend that Manager Gene Mauch panicked, repeatedly using Bunning and Chris Short on insufficient rest.
“You were like a zombie,” Lloyd Adams, a retired financial analyst, said. “There was nothing to live for. The whole city was in mourning. A year in Vietnam was not as bad as those two weeks.”
For Irish-Catholics here, there were two defining moments of the early 1960s, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the collapse of the Phillies, said Pete Adams, a comptroller for a boiler company.
“Except with the Phillies, it hurt longer,” Adams said. “Even now, when Gene Mauch’s name comes up, I get the shakes.”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
