Celebrating 10,000

Note: This entry also appears over at The Ghosts of Wayne Fontes, because I'm a lazy son of a bitch.

"Celebrating 10,000". That was the slogan of a website riding the coattails of the ineptitude that is the Philadelphia Phillies. While tailgating for the game on Saturday that had the potential to be the Phils' 10,000th loss (it wasn't) guys were going around handing out fliers for a parade after the game. A parade. For a loss. Now don't get me wrong, my drunken self probably would have participated, but still. Is that what we, as Philadelphia sports fans, have stooped to? Parades for losing?

We did, after all, damn near throw a parade for a horse back in 2004, but not even Smarty Jones could come up big when it truly mattered.

We do, after all, root for our former stars after management decides to trade them away for 30 cents on the dollar because we know rooting for our own teams is a lost cause anyway. (Do you have any idea how many Nuggets fans there are in Philly now? Tons.)

And we do, after all, have roughly 12 years worth of high school graduates who either weren't alive or were too young to appreciate the city's last championship (1983).

Now I'm not looking for your sympathy. One of the guys who writes here is a Cleveland fan. If anyone deserves your sympathy, it's him. But I do want to dissect this whole 10,000 loss thing, which has gotten national attention because apparently nothing else is happening in the world of sports.

Here are some of the facts regarding the franchise with the most losses in American professional sports:

-They now have 10,001 losses, putting the roughly 1,200 games under .500.
-They have had 14 100-loss seasons, including 5 in a row at one point.
-They have had 2 100-win seasons.
-They have won 1 World Series, and lost 4.
-They have lost over 1,200 games to the Giants.
-They have existed for 125 years, which is as long or longer than just about any team in any sport.

It's that last one that interests me the most. 125 years is a long, long time. While the Phillies are indeed the first team to 10,000 losses, and while they have indeed been pretty damn bad forever, they took their sweet ass time getting to 10,000. Other teams will get there in less time, I can assure you of that. In fact, I think the Detroit Lions are on pace to reach the same milestone sometime in 2011, an astonishing feat for a team that only plays 16 games a year.

The thing is, as bad as the Phillies have been (especially in my lifetime, during which they have made the playoffs once in 23 years) they aren't the worst team in sports history, much like the media has made them out to be. They have had some great teams and some great players over the years, and don't really deserve all the flak they've been getting recently. I love them to death and I always will, even if they get to 20,000 losses before I'm dead. And I wouldn't trade being a Philly sports fan for being a fan of any other city, because when I finally do see that championship, it's going to be really, really fucking sweet.

But I still think we should have kept the A's.