Welcome to the Baker Bowl

The origins of this blog are best explained by a story once told to me by a wizened soft pretzel vendor just outside Veterans Stadium, at the corner of Pattison and Broad:

With the popularity of baseball growing in America throughout the industrial age, many cities built palatial parks to further enhance their public appeal. The city of Philadelphia was no exception, and early one spring it celebrated the unveiling of its very own baseball palace. It was widely praised as state-of-the-art by media and fans alike. It was home to a competitive baseball club for years after its grand opening, drawing sellout crowds eager to see a perennial championship contender.

The year was 1909 and the park, of course, was Shibe Park, home of the American League's Philadelphia Athletics--a team that boasted 3 championships in its first 5 years at Shibe.

The A's shared the city with their older National League counterparts: the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies played in the Baker Bowl, a similarly state-of-the-art ballpark when it opened in 1887. Unfortunately, the opening of a new stadium for the Phillies did not inspire a level of success anywhere near that of the Athletics. Although managing to reach the World Series in 1915, the Phillies went from mediocre to bad to just plain awful. Even when times were lean for the A's, they were often even leaner for the Phillies.

But the most curious aspect of the Phillies' general futility in the first half of the 20th century was the way the Baker Bowl itself reflected the team's struggles. The left field bleachers collapsed in 1903. The ones in right field did the same in 1927. One of the most prominent ads on the outfield wall read "The Phillies use Lifebuoy Soap" to which many observers added, "...and they still stink." But the most telling incident occurred in 1894, only seven years after the Baker Bowl was first built:

It burned to the ground.

And thus began the cycle of constant decay and rebuilding that characterizes professional sports in Philadelphia to this day.

This blog shall focus on this and other similar phenomena in the world of sport. My purpose is to explain all the unreasonable doubt and damned frustration that populate the mind of a typical Philly sports fan as applied to sports around the country and around the world, and how this inexplicably makes everything turn out the way it should (after all, it was the A's that skipped town and the Phils that continue to toil just off I-95).

It's not sports news, it's sports neurosis.

Welcome to the Baker Bowl.