You did it! You survived the Phillies’ first three-game losing streak of the season.
Whew! That was tough going for a minute there. Until the Phillies beat the Giants 6-1 on Wednesday, thanks to homers by Nick Castellanos and Kyle Schwarber and a dominant outing from Cristopher Sanchez, they were in line to lose their tenth straight at Oracle Park in San Francisco, in addition to their fourth consecutive game.
It would have been unthinkable to see the Phillies allow the Braves to move within five games of first place in the NL East. Fortunately, we do not live in that world. Atlanta is safely walled-off from the division lead by 6.5 games going into Friday, the Phillies managed to win a second game on their west coast road trip, and they have returned home having little more to deal with than simmering tensions from the almost-brawl, travel plans for London, and, of course, the romantic entanglements of their current and former players.
But imagine, if you can, being back there in that time when the Phillies had lost three straight. Who even were we back then? Those people seem like total strangers, waving through the mists of time. It may shock you to learn that not long ago, losing three straight was a pretty common practice for the Philadelphia Phillies. And something that we’ve kept from that time, other than generational trauma and that .gif of Sean O’Sullivan getting hit in the throat with a return throw, is how to survive.
Historically, this has been accomplished by expelling energy, finding success in other, dumber ways, and generally just looking away from the Phillies.
Booing
This is the oldest, most reliably constructive way to get out your emotions through the majesty of primal noise making. Legend has it that the British were once booed out of Philadelphia by Ben Franklin and returned home, humbled and confused. The muskets also helped.
It is that kind of energy that Phillies fans are channeling in moments of frustration, like when they lost three straight in 2004.
The day after their third straight loss, which had seen them get swept by the Marlins and included a bench-clearing brawl that got a little more real than the one they just almost had in San Francisco, the Phillies weren’t in a great mood. They’d played 12 innings and lost the day before thanks to Florida’s Mike Lowell hitting three homers in one game. So it only took two innings for Todd Pratt and the Marlins’ Alex Gonzalez to start yelling into each other’s mouths following a high and inside heater from Brett Myers.
So the next day, when Jimmy Rollins failed to drive in a runner on third with no outs, the fans “booed him unmercifully,” the weight of three losses crushing everything but their windpipes. Some took it a step further and demanded the Phillies ditch Rollins in favor of that crafty Juan Pierre on the Marlins, who one writer called “a pest, irritating, annoying, a nuisance, a royal pain in the butt, and the best leadoff hitter in the National League.”
Well, great news, guy from twenty years ago: Just eight seasons later, Pierre would be a Philadelphia Phillie for 130 games. And Rollins? Well, eventually, the booing stopped.
Turn to the Olympics
The worst three-game skids are the ones that are actually parts of larger, much more awful skids. Like in 1996, when the Phillies dropped three straight to the Reds, they’d actually lost ten of their last 11 games.
Back then, people could simply turn to the front of the sports sections and find more thrilling athletic endeavors in which to bury their woes. Kerri Strug had just clinched the first gold medal for the U.S.A. women’s gymnastics team at the cost of her entire ankle. More accolades were expected as America ripped medals right out of the Russians’ hands. Eyes turned to the balance beam event, in which Shannon Miller was ready to nimbly and elegantly continue causing international envy.
There was no reason to worry ourselves with a pesky little three-game fiasco for the Phillies! It was the regular season! How has that ever factored into the postseason, other than directly? Besides, with history being made on the global circuit, nobody really cared that the Phillies were blowing it just a couple of weeks after hosting the MLB All-Star Game.
As the Phillies lost games to the Rockies and Giants out west this season, we too can turn to the Olympics. Not currently, but soon enough, the 2024 Paris Games will open and there will be a round-the-clock alternative to watching the Phillies, should they against all odds wind up with consecutive losses again at some point this summer.
Focus on the little things
In 1991, a three-game Phillies oopsie featured back-to-back late inning losses to the Dodgers, who used a sac fly by Mike Scioscia to not only hand the Phillies their third straight loss, but bury the Phillies 4.5 games behind them in the standings.
But you know what? The next day, they came out and hit the ball. Mickey Morandini, burdened with a heinous slump, had a couple of knocks. Lenny Dykstra fought his way onto the basepaths a couple of times. John Kruk bashed a home run with a two-strike count. It was a glorious performance that showed these Phillies, despite their trifecta of imperfection the last three games, were still alive.
Did they win the game? Of course not. The Giants had gotten all the runs they’d need to beat the 1991 Phillies (3) by the end of the third inning. But still. The effort was there, and didn’t we just learn that Phillies fans will forgive anything as long as you try hard? Well, there’s context for that. Around here, “anything” is sort of slang for “anything except a fourth straight loss that puts the Phillies 16 games under .500.”
Hey, is that a World War over there?
“The Phillies have lost three straight games and they’ll be in the National League dungeon to stay just as soon as the Cincinnati Reds move out,” read the papers in May 1941.
It wasn’t just other teams coming through Philadelphia that were the Phillies’ opponents in 1941. It was the draft board, which popped up to snatch away a team’s best player without warning, all thanks to a little misunderstanding called “World War II.” All Star pitcher Hugh Mulcahy was no longer available to the Phillies, having been the first MLB player to get the call from Uncle Sam nine months before Pearl Harbor. And now solid outfielder Joe Marty was getting fitted for a uniform, too, and it didn’t have a “P” on the hat.
Baseball was being gutted, and soon the rosters would be filled with sandlot dreamers, soft-tossing rec leaguers, fringey, toolsy, weak-armed stand-ins to entertain America back home as the starters took it to the Nazis (or in many cases, hung out at a stateside base or tanned on the beach in Hawaii).
Perhaps, then, it was worth focusing on the very current events that were picking baseball apart, guy by guy, instead of dwelling on the fact that the Phillies had lost three games. And if that’s not enough, well, there’s always the Fifth Annual Electric Kitchen Show at 9th and Sansom. I hear they’re having a poetry contest with an “electric refrigerator” as the prize. I mean, cooling things with electricity? Absurd.
You know what’s hot this summer? Civic issues
It was true that the Phillies had lost three consecutive games to the Reds in 1896, as was reported in Pennsylvania newspapers. But, if you counted the four straight games they’d lost before that, it was actually seven straight L’s for the Phils. Sorry about all the math—that’s baseball, I guess.
The Phillies rolled into Pittsburgh looking for a change in direction. They did not find one, and lost an eighth straight time. By this point, it was still May, and there was time to figure out other ways in which to spend a summer in the Philadelphia area. With the Phillies clearly out of it, people turned to a new citywide menace: The bicycle.
“One need not be a prophet or the son of a prophet to understand that the bicycle has come to stay, and very numerously,” read the report in the Philadelphia Times. “The procession of riders… is an endless one.”
Unbelievable. People are just trying to soak up the sun, walk around town, and not think about the local ball team. They don’t need bipeds whistling by in every direction on the streets, on the sidewalks, and presumably one day in their very homes. And while laws are already in effect here in 1896 that prevent “wheelmen” from doing so, the problem is, well, the buggers are very hard to catch. They can maneuver around other traffic and disappear around a corner, or into one of the city’s massive lines of cyclists.
“A reckless rider may collide with a dozen people and still get off scot free,” it was written, which sounded less like a warning to pedestrians and more like an invitation to cyclists to commit violent crimes repeatedly.
We can look back on these stories with a pompous smirk because these days, the city has of course resolved all of its transportation issues, and people may cross any intersection in Philadelphia without fear of being creamed by a two or four-wheeled vehicle moving at unreasonable speed. This is because the time it takes for an accident to take place is usually so instantaneous that there simply is not time to feel fear. Problem solved!
There are still plenty of other matters with which to get involved should the Phillies lose three straight games again, though, as Philadelphia is a city of great abundance when it comes to “issues.” From little successes to world wars, there’s always something going on in the summer—you don’t have to let it be the Phillies losing.