It's official.  The Philadelphia Phillies are the worst team of any sport, having reached a new low in losing their 10,000th game.  No other team is close to such a magic number, even the few baseball teams as old as or older than the Phillies.  Since 1888, the Phillies have succeeded in defining athletic failure for generation after generation of beleaguered fans.

I, sadly, am one of those fans.  I find it especially bitter since I grew up knowing the Phillies in their too brief period of winning.  In the 1970s the Phillies had a pretty good team, with some pretty good players.  Who can forget Carlton's fast ball or Schmidt's bat?  Or Bowa's temper, and Luzinski lumbering around left?  When they signed Pete Rose, they had the final piece to their World Series puzzle, scoring their one and only Series victory in 1980.  These were the Phillies I knew.  I had been spared the monumental collapse of 1964 (the real benchmark of sports failure), but I had been suckered into thinking mine was a team of winners.

To be sure, the 1980 Phillies were winners.  But by 1983 it was over, and reality began to set in.  The '64 Whiz Kids began to make sense.  The real destiny of this team, one cursed with poor ownership since day one, playing in the shadow of the Philadelphia A's, accomplishing 100 losses a season throughout the 1930's, was one of endless failure.  The really amazing part, however, is, with all the losses and miserable seasons, they still exist.  Even during their darkest seasons, so many of them, they hung around.  They never folded when they should have, even as their owner was selling the furniture to make payroll, and they kept on losing.  The lesson of futility also obviously lost.

I don't delude myself anymore, no longer expecting a respectable showing, an occasional playoff berth, or a remarkable late season run.  I look forward only to a mediocre start and a post All-Star game trip to the bottom of the standings.  It's an annual pattern in Philly, a bad team slowly gets worse as the season goes on, and in case you need any proof the Phillies are a bad team, they now have 10,000 losses to prove it.  Way to go, Whiz Kids.