Where can we possibly begin?
With the 17-81 record in their 1883 debut? With the 31-year span in which they produced a single winning season? With the 23-game losing streak in 1961? Or the fatal 10-game slide at 1964's disastrous denouement?
How about with an owner who sold the office furniture to make payroll? With two others who were banned from baseball? With the ex-sportswriter who bought the team in 1912? Or the shoe salesman who owned it two decades later?
No, there is no simple way to explain the Phillies and their lamentable legacy of losing. It's like asking why dogs bark. After 124 years of it, that's just their nature.
What's prompted this renewed interest of Phillies history is a fast-approaching milestone that will cement the club's reputation as the most accomplished loser in American sports history.
Sometime soon, the franchise fortune forgot will become the first pro sports team to suffer its 10,000th loss, an unprecedented, nearly unfathomable accomplishment.
The Phils head into today's game against the Mets needing just five losses to reach the mark.
Certainly, longevity has played a role. Baseball alone has 100-plus-game seasons, and only a handful of teams are as old as the Phils, who played their first game - a loss, of course - in May 1883. And, it must be said, their performance over the last 32 years has, for the most part, been a vast improvement from their first 92.
"We've been around longer than any other team in the city. Only three other teams in the National League were around before us," said Larry Shenk, the Phils' vice president for public relations. "We did some research and discovered that something like 28 percent of our losses came in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Since we moved into [Veterans Stadium] in 1971, we've had some pretty good teams."
Still, whatever the reasons, 10,000 losses remains a remarkable achievement, even for a franchise that featured Tight Pants, Death to Flying Things, Fidgety Phil and Weeping Willie, Stonehands and Dr. Strangeglove, Putsy, Puddinhead and Pinky, and the countless other players who had little to offer a winning team besides a colorful nickname.
They lost no matter where they played, whether it was rickety Baker Bowl, the nation's first collapsible ballpark; Shibe Park, which by the time they finally owned it, was doomed by changing times; or Veterans Stadium and its notorious turf, as hard and unforgiving as Broad Street.
