10,000 A Second Time Around?

One of the things I love about blogging is thrill of "being there"--writing about stuff either as it happens or shortly after.

Last night (or early this morning, depending on how you look at it) was definitely a "being there" experience, though all I meant to do was get a few thoughts down about the Phillies' historic 10,000th franchise loss and do a post later examining how this milestone makes me feel.

Well, I had to put that on hold after glancing at the paper this morning. Apparently, the Phillies "official" count was still at 9,999 after last night's surrender to the Rockies. I went into a full-fledged panic. I flew to my computer and frantically started checking the several sites tracking the total number of losses.

Celebrate 10,000 was all nines. PhillySucks was 9,998 as of July 8th--corresponding with the "official" total. Wikipedia still had a tally of 9,999 losses, which was strange, considering the page displayed the same number after the extra-inning loss on Friday night.

I had checked my math on Saturday morning to make sure that the next loss would indeed be the 10,000th, using Wikipedia as my source. Now, fearing a calculation error, I did it again this afternoon--it added up to 10,000. Wishing to corroborate that information with a different source, I added up the figures posted by Baseball-Reference--which added up to 9,999.

Completely frustrated and on the verge of pulling a Larry Bowa-style freak out, I compared the records, season-by-season, between the two sources. It wasn't long before I found my deviation.

In 1890, the Phillies finished the season with a record of 78-54. This appears to be an officially sanctioned record as it appears almost everywhere: Wikipedia, Baseball Almanac, ESPN, even the Official Site of the Philadelphia Phillies.

There is one place I have found where the record is different--Baseball-Reference. The site lists the 1890 record as 78-53, citing a game on May 23, 1890 against the Chicago Colts (forerunner to the Cubs) that was ruled a no-contest but somehow went in the books as a Phillies loss. A little more research revealed that Phillies PR did indeed address this discrepancy a couple weeks ago, noting that the franchise does not consider the May 23rd game a loss despite what the numbers say on its own official website.

I processed all of this in two distinct phases:

1) I felt horrible for (a) getting the number wrong and (b) somehow letting the PR story slip by me. I try to keep up with the newspapers and press releases, but most of my writing comes from observations gleaned from the information on baseball websites and the games themselves. This isn't meant to be a fast-breaking news blog, after all. Still, an official statement on the subject of the 10,000 losses should have been a target of my commentary. At this point, I seriously considered scrapping my most recent post and acting like it never happened.

2) I kept thinking about it over lunch and finally found some self-sympathy. I've been running these numbers on my own since the beginning of the season. And when every site I used to compile those numbers at the time (this was sans Baseball-Reference) says that the Phillies lost 54 games in 1890, I'm going to take that at face value. I'm just a Joe Schmoe blog--I don't have easy access to 19th century copies of the Spalding Guide. I wish I did, but I just don't. It's easy for me to miss certain minutiae.

Moreover, I looked at the specifics of why the May 1890 Phillies-Colts game was ruled a no-contest. There was an apparent substitution dispute; the umpire wouldn't let the Phils put in reserve outfielder Bill Grey for some reason. The records still say the Phillies eventually lost the game 10-8. I assume that they finished the game under protest and, miraculously, won redress from the National League. Maybe it was more common in those days.

Anyway, I looked up Bill Grey's statistics out of curiosity. I wanted to answer the question: had be been able to play in the game, would the Phillies have won? I don't have the benefit of a complex computer simulation, but the equation Little-Used Reserve Outfielder + .242 Lifetime Average seems simple enough to me. Who knew that the gamesmanship surrounding this incident would be replicated over a century later?

Obviously, the denied substitution didn't seem like a big deal to most people after the fact, hence the 54 losses listed almost everywhere. This information plus my mistrust of the Phillies' PR motives (wouldn't you like the chance to remove losses from your favorite team's record?) went a long way in putting my mind at ease. I won't go so far as to call it a cover-up, but I'd like to think I inadvertently penetrated the Phillies' weird statistical voodoo tactics, kind of like Napoleon's troops stumbling upon the Rosetta Stone out of pure dumb luck.

But if the Phillies want to celebrate their 10,000th loss for a second time, that's just fine with me. Who knows? Maybe they'll find a way to keep that one off the books, too.

Here's How Phils Got the Number [Philly.com]