Everybody Loves a Loser

Through a dismal midnight drizzle, the chartered DC-6B taxied toward the terminal building at Philadelphia's International Airport, with its cargo of the worst baseball team in the big leagues. The Philadelphia Phillies had just won a game. But the lonesome victory meant nothing, coming, as it did, at the end of the longest losing streak in modern baseball history (23 games). Through a rainfogged cabin window, Phillie Pitcher Frank Sullivan peered apprehensively out at the ramp, where a crowd of 250 damp Philadelphians stood like a lynch mob. "Get off the plane at one-minute intervals," Sullivan advised his mates, only half in jest. "That way, they can't get us all in one burst."

What happened next could have happened only in Philadelphia, and only to the Phillies. As the bone-weary team members deplaned, the waiting crowd set up a cheer. Hand-lettered signs bloomed: "WHO SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE?" "RELAX, FELLAS--YOU'RE HOME NOW." A five-man band struck up Take Me Out to the Ball Game, and sturdy fans in the welcoming committee hoisted Manager Gene Mauch on their shoulders and carried him off at the head of a triumphant procession. "It's unbelievable," said Mauch, tears rolling down his cheeks.

"Hang In There." To understand the warmth with which Philadelphia greeted its tail-dragging homecomers is to understand the spirit of a city that somehow extracts pleasure from defeat. Just as Yankee fans expect a winner, Phillie fans have learned to expect a loser. The Phillies seldom let them down. No other major league team has lost 100 games a season so many times (13). No other National League club has won the pennant so rarely (twice). No other ball team begins a season with such little promise and ends it in such profound despair.

This season the Phillies have outdone themselves at losing. But far from bridling at unrelieved disaster, the fans have opened their hearts in sympathy. At the ballpark, the crowds have evaporated, to be sure--attendance is down some 281,000 from last season--but why pay $2.25 to witness a foregone conclusion? On the other hand, the Phillies' losing trail has been strewn with heartfelt messages of encouragement from as far off as Puerto Rico and Hawaii. "Hang in there and fight," read one. "We have faith that you'll shake this thing yet," read another. Wading last week through a pile of such pep-talk mail. Manager Mauch shook his head in wonder. "I once thought everybody loved a winner," he said. "But I guess they love a loser more."

No Sagging Heads. The Phillies began taxing the endurance power of that love on opening day, when they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers. Since then Mauch's team, a combination of players too young to be good and too old for ambition, has won only 34 games, a meager victory assortment widely diffused by 88 defeats. In a fruitless effort to break the losing habit, Manager Mauch has shifted his players into unfamiliar positions, paraded pitchers to the mound, used as many as 17 players a game, and even tried applied psychology. "Do what you want to," he ordered his men one night after a humiliating defeat. "There's no curfew tonight."

Somehow team morale survived. Shortstop Ruben Amaro, 25, and Third Baseman Charlie Smith, 23, tried so hard that they drove themselves to exhaustion and had to be benched. After collisions with a wall in St. Louis and a Scoreboard in Pittsburgh, Utility Outfielder Bobby Gene Smith went right on giving his all--until a physical examination revealed a broken rib. In the locker room, heads rarely sagged in despair. "We all felt we were going to win each day," said Pitcher Art Mahaffey, who lost ten games in a row. "If you lose that feeling, you might as well quit." Said Veteran Outfielder Lee Walls. 28, who played in 22 of the team's 23 straight losses: "You start feeling sorry for everybody--Mauch, the young players, yourself. Then you fight the mood off and worry about tomorrow."

The Danger of Winning. Even the Phillies' millionaire proprietor Bob Carpenter, who has spent $12,000,000 on promising players and once sacked a manager for losing a mere seven games, takes the benevolent view. "You can't match middleweights against heavyweights," said he resignedly. "Our pitching isn't too good, and we have no power. But Gene Mauch has been great about the whole thing. I certainly don't blame him for the poor season."*

The fact is that no one in Philadelphia seems to blame any Phillie for anything; the pervading spirit is one of dauntless parochial pride. Encouraged and refreshed by it, the eminently vincible Phillies last week turned in their first statistically creditable performance since July: one loss, three wins. In Philadelphia such uncharacteristic behavior might gain them nothing, and could even cost them the loving sympathy of the fans.

* Somewhat less secure than Mauch was General Manager Frank Lane of the American League's cellar-dwelling Kansas City Athletics who was fired last week without notice by Owner Charles O. Finley.

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