Phillies evoke memories of '61 | Frank's Place
And that team, with its 23-game losing streak, was epically bad.
Like the overpowering aroma of crab fries in the right-field walkways, the scent of misery was overpowering at Citizens Bank Park on Wednesday.
The night was chilled, gray, and damp. The crowd was small, scattered, and seemingly uninterested. The home team was comatose.
Long before Jeremy Hellickson's first pitch to Colorado's Charlie Blackmon, real Phillies fans, those who had endured a thousand nights like this, knew what to expect.
Inevitably, the Rockies scored seven times in the third inning and coasted to a 7-2 victory. After this 20th loss in 24 games, Inquirer beat writer Matt Gelb noted that the Phillies' 15-29 record was the franchise's worst 44-game start since 1961.
That was no idle comparison. For Philadelphians of a certain age, 1961 is the measuring stick for gloom.
Fifty-six years later, those Phillies have not ceded their place in baseball history. They finished 60 games below .500 (47-107), 47 games out of first place, 17 behind the seventh-place Cubs. They were last in the National League in batting average, home runs, RBIs, runs, ERA, and - no surprise - attendance.
What really set the '61 Phils apart from all the other dreadful teams in franchise history, of course, were their 23 successive defeats in July and August, a record run of ineptitude that had been preceded by losing streaks of 10, eight, and seven (twice).
"We were overmatched," the late Ruben Amaro Sr. once said of that season. "It was like a kindergarten team playing a fourth-grade team."
The '60 Phils, with new manager Gene Mauch, had lost 95 games. With young talent such as Johnny Callison, Tony Gonzalez, and Chris Short, the whiff of better times was in the air.
That feeling intensified in the spring of 1961, when they won 14 exhibition games, prompting Robin Roberts to tell reporters, "There's a momentum you can feel. We're much better than last year."
The trouble began late in camp, when pitcher Jim Owens walked out, claiming Mauch had reneged on a promise to make him a starter.
The press sided with the manager, who called Owens "a liar."
"Jim Owens," wrote the Daily News' Larry Merchant, "is a magnificent pitcher from the eyebrows down."
The attack infuriated Owens' fellow bullpen hell-raisers, Turk Farrell and Jack Meyer, a trio sportswriters called "the Dalton Gang."
Farrell was once fined $250 for smashing a barroom mirror. Another time, he scribbled obscene messages to Lew Burdette on the game balls the Braves pitcher used.
Meyer, meanwhile, trashed his hotel room during the '61 season following a drunken confrontation with a sportswriter. General manager John Quinn fined him $1,200, which Sports Illustrated calculated to be "in proportion to salary, the largest fine ever levied on a ballplayer."
On this historically bad ballclub, the gang's act didn't play well.
"Unlike some of the storied hell-raisers of old," wrote SI's Walter Bingham, "the members of the Dalton Gang aren't really good enough to be so bad."
Opening the regular season with a defeat in Los Angeles, hours before the nation was traumatized by news that the Soviet Union had launched a man into space, the 1961 Phillies never got off the ground.
They dropped seven of their first nine and were 11-26 on May 30, when they slipped permanently into the cellar. At times, Mauch, at 36 baseball's youngest manager, looked as if he wouldn't reach 37.
He tried psychological tricks to rally his club. He set early curfews after some road games. When that didn't work, he tried the good-cop routine, telling players not to report to the ballpark until 30 minutes before game time.
With every failed strategy, every loss, Mount St. Mauch bubbled and seethed.
"You try not to think about the losing," the chain-smoking Mauch said, "but you can't avoid it."
After one loss, he angrily hurled the players' batting helmets onto the field, then began kicking them around like plastic soccer balls. After another, he took a bat to the light bulbs in Connie Mack Stadium's home dugout.
In the second game of an Aug. 9 doubleheader with the Pirates, Mauch got badly bruised participating in a wild brawl. Managers, players, and coaches threw punches in the 10-minute battle that began with a hard tag at home plate and concluded only through the intercession of Philadelphia police.
For those prescribing that kind of fight as a cure for what ails Pete Mackanin's 2017 Phillies, it should be noted that it didn't work in 1961. Mauch's fighting Phillies won the brawl, but were swept in the doubleheader and dropped their next 11 games.
Starting with the second game of a July 28 doubleheader and continuing through the opener of an Aug. 20 twinbill, the Phillies lost 23 straight - 17 on the road, six at home.
A desperate Mauch, as Daily News beat writer Stan Hochman noted, "tried using starters as relievers and relievers as starters." Though Roberts was still on the staff, he wasn't in the manager's plans.
"He's throwing like Molly Putz," Mauch said when asked about the future Hall of Famer's inactivity.
The streak's end precipitated one of the most unlikely scenes in Philadelphia sports history. On their airport return that Aug. 20, 2,000 fans and a marching band greeted the team.
Was the impromptu celebration a good-natured pat on the back, or a sarcastic Bronx cheer from a wounded fan base?
Whatever, the Phillies relaxed. They went 16-16 the rest of the season to save Mauch's job, surprised everyone by improving to 81-80 in '62, and by 1964 were contenders.
If a similar fate awaits the 2017 Phillies, the disheartened crowd at Wednesday's loss couldn't yet sense it.
Instead, like generations of Philadelphians before them, they could only sit glumly in the mist and continue to endure what, with relatively few exceptions, has been the torture of Phillies baseball.
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