Phillies Look To Avoid Historic 100 Loss Season
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The Philadelphia Phillies slide to the NL East division cellar could hit rock bottom today if they lose to the Miami Marlins in their season finale. The team is one defeat away from losing 100 games, something the squad hasn't done in more than five decades.
In April 1961, John F. Kennedy was a newly minted President, freshly scarred from the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Here in Philadelphia, the Phillies had just launched their own fiasco of a baseball season. They were a combination of inexperienced youngsters such as Johnny Callison, Tony Gonzalez and Tony Taylor -- and fringe-type veterans such as Pancho Herrera and Bobby Del Greco.
Art Mahaffey, then a 22-year-old pitcher in his first full season with the club, says it was a team that couldn't get out of its own way.
"Choo-Choo Coleman, he was a catcher," Mahaffey told KYW Newsradio. "He kept forgetting what he called. He'd come out and say 'Aw, shoot, I'm sorry, I called a curveball.' I nailed two or three umpires that way because he stayed down and they got hit in the mask and everything."
The lowlight of the season was a slow, agonizing bleed that began on July 29 and ended on August 20. 23 consecutive losses...still a major league record. The Phils closed the '61 season with 107 losses. They flirted with a hundred again eight years later, coming up one short. Don Money was a young, struggling third baseman on that squad.
"What I remember is we just couldn't get anything untracked," Money said. "We had players you were expecting to do better, of course they didn't. Myself included."
Money's advise to the 2015 team.
"You just go out there and play whatever you have left and hopefully you win more games," he said, "because when you're on that team that loses a hundred, that's forever."