Despite their 10,000 losess, Phillies aren't worst team

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By BERNIE LINCICOME
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Claiming to be the worst sports team of all time is all very well, especially with so significant a number as 10,000 losses for evidence.

That would be the Philadelphia Phillies, having just passed the milestone, or the tombstone, however it should be viewed.

The entire city of Philadelphia, when the old Athletics are thrown in, plus basketball and hockey, may proudly boast something closer to 20,000 losses over the years, still short of Chicago, and very far behind New York, but few will bother to argue that Philadelphia is not perpetually woeful.

Denver, because we are late to loser's math, is still somewhere under 4,000 losses among all teams, which hardly seems fair.

That the Phillies managed to trip over a number with lots of zeroes before anyone else does not mean they deserve to be considered the worst ever. They would have to give back several pennants and a World Series for that.

Thus, am I creating an odor indicator, SNIFF or Special Numerical Index For Failure, designed to smell out the truly awful, and separate the pretenders from the true bums.

Why, in Denver, we have the Nuggets and the Rockies to offer, the greatest flaw of each being they have played so many fewer games than the Phillies.

Is it really fair to consider one team worse than another when that team gets so many more chances to be bad?

The Rockies might rightfully wonder what's so great about losing 10,000 baseball games. It seems as if they do that each road trip.

Research reveals that in order to become the first American sports franchise to reach 10,000 losses, the Phillies have had to average about 80 losses a year since they began in 1883.

The Rockies cannot, of course, hope to ever catch the Phillies, since Philadelphia has a 110-year head start, but the Rockies are off to a faster beginning, losing around 84 games a year now in their 15th year.

Projecting this over the same time as the Phillies, this means that the Rockies would get to 10,000 six years sooner.

So, applying my index and allowing the Phillies to have the SNIFF standard of 100, the Rockies would SNIFF out at 110, meaning they are 10 percent worse than the Phillies.

To be fair, at 97 losses a year, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays are streaking faster. But because they are so new, including them in the SNIFF index would be as wrong as granting the Phillies their status for being so old.

This is the same for Charlotte and Memphis in the NBA, each on a SNIFF pace to wreck the calculations, losing almost seven out of 10, something not even the Rockies have managed in their worst year.

Our advice is to remember that the race is not always to the swift, or in this case to the competent.

The Nuggets are at a disadvantage because NBA teams play only half as many games as baseball teams, so even losing at a faster rate over time (.537 compared with the Phillies' .532), they can never hope to receive the same notice for futility.

The Nuggets SNIFF at 105, or slightly better than the Rockies but hardly worth painting a bedsheet for.

And compared with the Golden State Warriors -- the losingest NBA team ever, or the Sacramento Kings, consistently awful through four cities and six names -- the Nuggets are hardly worth scoffing at.

There is one thing about the Phillies that other SNIFF candidates cannot claim -- stinking longer in one spot. Bad teams are chased or moved, disrupting a sense of generational torment. Only the Cubs really compare, but they are eliminated on grounds of cuddliness.

It just seems wrong that the Phillies should fall into an unearned distinction because they have been around longer and have had more opportunities to lose.

How can the poor Arizona Cardinals ever get any kind of uniqueness as long as the Phillies are around?

As the losingest team in professional football, the everlasting doormat of all time -- it being measured from 1920 when the NFL started and the Cardinals were in Chicago -- their 659 losses seem puny as raw numbers.

But had the Cardinals played as many games as the Phillies, they would have lost more than 11,000 games and would have generously shared their futility over three cities and through four names.

This brings the Cardinals in, by my calculations, at a sports franchise-leading SNIFF of 150, or half again as bad as the Phillies.

Clearly the worst sports franchise ever is not the Phillies, but the Cardinals.

If my math is wrong, well, being wrong is exactly the point.

Sniff. Sniff.

E-mail Bernie Lincicome at lincicomeb(at)RockyMountainNews.com