If you’ve been following my site for awhile, you know I’m also a Phillies fan. I grew up in Philadelphia, so I still follow my home town team a lot. It’s gotten a lot easier to do so in the last 5 years or so with the proliferation of Internet coverage, but I’ve always sort of paid attention to them. Also, my wife is from Pittsburgh. While she’s a major epic level Steelers fan, she only superficially paid attention to the Pirates. She kind of stopped around the time Barry Bonds left there.
I bring this up, because something happened today which gave both of my home town Pennsylvania teams something notorious.
The one for the Phillies happened on July 15, 2007. That was the day the Phillies lost their 10,000th game in franchise history. No other professional sporting team anywhere in any sport has done that. Granted, the team has been around since 1883, so they had 124 years to work on that record. Anyway, it’s pretty impressively awful. BTW Rangers fans – your connection to this was the losing pitcher for the Phillies that day – Adam Eaton :)
The other thing happened with the Pirates today. Today was the day they lost their 82nd game of the 2009 season. This now officially makes it 17 seasons since the Pirates last had a winning record, which would have been 1992’s incarnation, who went 92-70, and lost to the Braves. Right after that, Barry Bonds went to the Giants as a free agent, and the Pirates haven’t won since. Makes you wonder if the Pirates should sign Bonds back as a publicity stunt, and stick him out there to break the Bonds curse. :) Seriously, though – 17 in a row doesn’t seem nearly as bad as 10,000 losses though, but 17 years in a row with a losing record is pretty bad.
And whose record did the Pirates break tonight? That’s right, the 1933-48 Phillies!