This is the first of a three-part series on the historically worst franchises in major league baseball. That explains the title.
By "worst" I don't necessarily mean in terms of overall record, although that of course plays a part. By "worst" I'm basically refering to either a paucity of championship jewelry, an excessive period of time lapsed since the collection of said jewelry, or both. Ringless expansion-era teams like the Astros, Rangers, Mariners and Expos don't make the cut, although the histories of many of these teams have been ill-starred. Nor do futile teams of yore like the St. Louis Browns (one pennant in fifty-two seasons, and that was during WWII, when the talent was in the service), or teams that experienced multi-city dry spells, like the A's (a pennant drought that began in 1931 in Philadelphia, continued in Kansas City, and finally ended in 1972, in Oakland). Teams such as Detroit that have been historically strong but have stunk it up recently don't make it. The three selected 'bad clubs' have something in common with one another that differentiates them from the rest: they have played in one city for over a hundred years, and the dominant theme of their respective histories has been futility.
If any of the readers who are fans of the team in this piece, or the other teams to be featured, think I'm "bashing" your squad... please don't. It ain't like that. I'm just interested in the perversities of life in general, and that includes baseball teams that make it their business not to git-er-done.*
*- first (and very possibly last) Larry the Cable Guy quote I'll ever use.
Philadelphia Phillies
Year of Origin: 1883 League Championships: 5 World Series Championships: 1 Last World Series Championship: 1980
Capsule: We start with Phillies. But with the Phillies, where do we start? The 29 last-place finishes since 1901, including eight out of ten seasons from 1936 to 1945 (the other two seasons ended with the Phils next-to-last)? How about the fourteen seasons in which Philadelphia lost at least 100 games, including a five-year-in-a-row stretch when they lost 105, 106, 103, 111, and 109? The fact that old-skewl Phils pitcher Hugh Mulcahy's nickname was "Losing Pitcher", because that's always what appeared in the box scores next to his name? Or their major league-record 23-game losing streak in 1961? Maybe we should just point out that in their first 82 years of existence, the Phillies won two pennants and zero World Championships, and leave it at that.
... Or, we can go on to mention that even the rare good Phillies team generally fails, and fails in heartbreaking fashion, in crunch time. Like the 1915 National League Champions, who beat the Red Sox in Game One of the World Series, then lost the last four by one run apiece. Or the surprising "Whiz Kids", winners of the 1950 NL pennant, who lost 1-0, 2-1 and 3-2 games in a World Series sweep by the Yankees (the anti-Phillies). Or the 1964 team, six-and-a-half games out in front with twelve to play, who lost ten straight and were beaten out for the pennant by the Cardinals (Gene Mauch overmanaging, and not for the last time). Or the great teams of the '70s, who won three straight NL East titles and cracked 100 wins twice... but lost three straight NLCS, going 0-6 at the Vet in the process. Or the 1993 Phillies, a team I personally have great affection for... but who blew eighth-inning and ninth-inning leads in their World Series loss to Toronto. The Phillies have a 3-11 record in one-run games in the World Series. That's not the stuff that dreams are made of.
However, the Phillies do have a World Championship, and unlike the rest of the clubs in this series, it was at least somewhat recent- well, not that recent, but there weren't trolley-lines to the ballpark anymore. In 1980, a year in which Philly teams made it to the NBA Finals, the World Series and the Super Bowl, the Phils won it all, and won in decidely uncharacteristic fashion: they demolished eighth-inning deficits in the final two games to defeat the Astros in the NLCS, then came from behind to win three times against the Royals in the World Series. And in fairness, the Phillies were one of the best teams in baseball for almost a decade spanning the '70s and '80s.
Baker Bowl
No capsule on the Phutile Phils would be complete without a mention of Baker Bowl, the little ballpark the team called home from 1887 until 1938. Undersized, dilapidated, dominated by a 60-foot high tin-sheeted wall in right field, the Baker was the league's funkiest plant, and it usually housed the league's funkiest team. The litany of woe from Baker Bowl:
1894- The original structure is totalled by a fire (this used to be not uncommon when ballparks were built of wood; in fact, in the same year, the bleachers at Boston's South End Grounds caught fire during a Beaneaters game, and the conflagration spread beyond the park and wiped out a good portion of the surrounding neighborhood).
1903- During a game, the rebuilt Baker Bowl's upper deck collapses, killing twelve Phillies fans.
1915- Prior to the World Series, Phils owner William Baker orders extra bleachers to be added in left field, to add to his bottom line. In the deciding Game Five, Red Sox outfielder Harry Hooper ground-rules two of what were in this era of longball innocence time not doubles, but home runs, into the auxiliary seats. Each cheap shot wipes out Phillie leads, and the Red Sox win 5-4.
1927- A section of the upper deck collapses during a game. This time there are no fatalities. They lost 103 games that year, too. They were cramming ticket windows at 'ole Baker Bowl that year, I'm sure.
Baker Bowl's right-field foul pole was 280 feet from home plate. It was 300 feet in the right-center alley. Hence the tin fence, 25 feet higher than the 'Green Monster' and emblazoned with an ad for Lifebuoy Soap. The park's funny dimensions were a source of torment to Phillie pitchers, who couldn't stop anyone, as well as Phillie hitters, who could never score enough to win. In 1930 Philadelphia hit .315 as a team, scored more than six rpg, had a team ERA of 6.71, lost 102 games, and finished in last place (they also had a pitcher named Phil Collins ).
It has been said that for a period of time in the 1920s, the club eschewed conventional lawnmowing equipment in favor of three goats. They were removed after one of the temperamental beasts went after a team official. The Phillies fled Baker Bowl for Shibe Park, home of the Philadelphia A's, in mid-1938. The two clubs combined for sixteen last-place finishes- eight apiece- in the seventeen seasons they were 'roomies'.
Shibe Park was five blocks down Huntington Street from Baker Bowl. Can you imagine two MLB teams playing five blocks apart?
The Phillies and A's
The '50s marked the breakup of two-team Boston, two-team St. Louis and three-team New York City. In the cases of Boston and St. Louis, the team that left town was clearly the inferior of the two. The A's played a lot of brutal baseball in the first half of the century, but they won nine pennants to the Phillies' one, and at two different periods- 1910-14 and 1929-31- were the best team in baseball. But in 1950, the year the Phillies won their "Whiz Kids" pennant, the A's were 52-102 and 87-year old Connie Mack, who started managing in 1897, was trying to call Rube Waddell out of the bullpen to stop frequent meltdowns by his starters. The Phillies hit a run of competent baseball at a time of flux, and the A's still sucked. Following the 1954 season Philly's AL rep, who then as now were what they call "undercapitalized", decamped for Kansas City. Had the franchise-shifting trend come at any point in the previous four or five decades (or in other words, had the jet engine been invented sooner) it probably would have been the Phutile Phils hiking it to greener pastures, and not the A's. That the name "Athletics" is much more portable than "Phillies" must be weighed into this useless counterfactual.
JimmyJack Posted: 6/24/2005by: Jimmy This is the best oranization of all time for a few reason's. The 1993 team with Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk, Curt Schilling, Darren Daulton...to name a few. The all white-trash team!!! Ditto Posted: 6/24/2005by: PhilsFan I would like to nominate this franchise as the worst in all of sports. More losses than any franchise in the history of sports deserves special recognition. Kayvon Posted: 6/20/2005by: Jesse L. Well, you're right about me overlooking Steve Carlton's 27-win season for a 59-win team in 1972. That definitely should have been included. But as bad as the Phils have been in the last two decades, their history pre-WWII is another dimension of awfulness. So I concentrated on that era. Also, after dealing with Charlie Manuel for three years in Cleveland, I'm not so sure I wanted to even mention his name anymore, ever.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for the info.
.. Posted: 6/20/2005by: Bryan Damn echos Duh Posted: 6/20/2005by: Bryan You know, they're like horses...only not Is that it? Posted: 6/20/2005by: Kayvon With all of the club's modern-era futility, we're left with just a mere mention of the '93 team? Don't let '80 and '93 fool you, these (especially '93) were Roget's definitions of "aberration." No mention of the worst ballpark in post-war baseball? No mention of Steve Carlton having almost half of the team's total wins in the early seventies? No mention of the tens of millions of dollars the organization threw away to install a cushier turf so Scott Rolen would stay as long as it took CB Park to be built? No mention of Ed Wade being the Stuart Scott of MLB GMs (pact w/ Satan)? No mention of Charlie Manuel platooning Chase Utley for three months while putting up, arguably the best numbers for an NL 2B? No mention of the fact Manuel admits he doesn't know what a fucking double switch is (how did Matt Millen's hiring of Mariucci warrant an investigation/fine but Manuel just slides under the radar)?!
This reads more of a Chaps. 1-3 of a 12-part series then an in-depth analysis. Though I love the old-timey stuff - it's rarely covered in any sports media outlet. Dear Bryan Posted: 6/20/2005by: Patrick What are horeses? shit Posted: 6/20/2005by: nick at least we will always have Sandbar? ?? Posted: 6/20/2005by: Bryan Soooo, are they named after cheesesteaks or horeses?? Thanks a lot Posted: 6/20/2005by: Steve Jeltz I'm of the generation that has never seen a championship in Philadelphia, yet all of it's historical sporting woes I have memorized thanks to my father and my father's father, be it the Phillies, Eagles, Sixers, or Flyers. I come here for escape. Leave it to a Philadelphia sports fan to read this article anyway. But now I'm depressed. Thank you for that. I suck at life again.
