Welcome to Philadelphia. Two hundred forty-eight years ago, this city gave birth to a nation. One-hundred and seven years after that, this city gave birth again, this time to a ball team.
This year on Independence Day weekend, the Phillies head to Atlanta for three games with the Braves. Atlanta is hovering about 10 games over .500, which would be a pretty good start toward retaining its recent stranglehold on the NL East division if not for the Phillies being 27 games over .500. Both squads are missing key players, and both fan bases will rush to hide behind that as an excuse when their team loses.
Like the founding of this nation, the week of the Phillies’ first Independence Day game in 1883 was considered an “exciting struggle.” The Phillies took on the superior Giants, and once more in Philadelphia there was a single word on the wind: Revolution.
Some called the Phillies the “Quakers” back then, but mostly they were known as the “Philadelphias.” And despite their peaceful nickname … blood would be spilled.
A sloppy series
Whatever you called them, the team had lost the last two games against New York. They’d lose the fourth one, too. But none of those losses were by any more than three runs, and the Phillies scored handedly in each of them. Just not as often as the Giants. That, combined with their slug-like presence on the basepaths and borderline uncountable number of errors, led to disappointment.
But game three! Game three featured some close, intense action, worthy of the cradle of liberty into which the Phillies had been born. Also, there were all those errors I mentioned.
The first thing people noticed as they tried to attend the Giants-Phillies game on July 2 at Recreation Park was that the ticket takers refused to accept silver dollars as currency. Despite this, 3,000 Philadelphians crawled and scurried into the stadium and were boisterous from the first moment to the last. Plus, their pockets were full of those hard, unspent, silver coins to throw if they chose. These days they open your beer for you to prevent any potential damage a hurled, unopened can could cause. In 1883, that wasn’t anticipated.
The Phillies built a 4-1 lead in the bottom of the fifth. The first inning had seen Phillies outfielder Jack Manning work a walk, steal second, and touch third on a wild pitch before being knocked in to score. In the second, they had runners reach on a walk and a Giants error. In a key moment, first baseman Sid Farrar stepped in and worked a count “with six balls and two strikes called.” Somehow the umpire, a man identified in the account as “Lane,” then watched a pitch come in “above the waist and at least a foot from the plate.” Naturally, he called it strike three.
Three thousand hissing Philadelphians voiced their complaints, hands on the smooth silver missiles in their pockets, but none of their vitriol brought Farrar back to the plate. All was forgiven in the fourth, when Phillies catcher Frank Ringo shot a ground-rule double over the wall in left that everybody watched go foul except for Lane, the umpire. He called it fair, the Phillies scored again, and against all odds, a stadium full of Phillies fans kept their mouths shut, allowing the umpire’s incompetence to work in their favor.
Isrors of their ways
Tragically, the Giants’ rally started in the fourth with a very hot grounder being mishandled by Phillies second baseman Bob Ferguson. This is where I will tell you that Ferguson’s goof was one of 13 errors on the day by the Phillies. I won’t write that again, but you can go back and read it as many times as you want. It’s unsettling.
In fact, the Giants barely had to hit the ball hard. They just put it in play like it was the fee to watch a circus act. Once the ball was bouncing to an infielder or dropping in front of an outfielder, the Phillies kicked, dropped, muffed, bungled, fumbled, flubbed and mishandled just about everything that came at them. The base hits the Giants used to lead off the eighth, combined with three subsequent Phillies errors, wound up being the difference. Which… yeah. If you commit 13 errors in a game and somehow win, it should probably count as more than one loss for the losing team.
The last inning brought a new element of gore to a sloppy game. Giants catcher John Clapp was still learning the perils of his position; chiefly that it involved a bat swung very close to his hand. Too close, at times, including in the ninth inning, when Clapp reached a bit too forward and was struck in the left hand by a Phillies batter.
“The bone [of his middle finger] was driven through the flesh and blood flowed freely from the wound,” recounted The Philadelphia Times. The Giants made a very un-1883 decision to pull their bleeding catcher from the game, an unthinkable development in early baseball that often was seen as cowardice.
The Phillies scored in their half of the ninth to make it a 7-6 game, but left the tying run on third. It was a disappointment for the fans, sure, but at least they’d seen a battle. A bumbling, impossibly stupid battle, but a battle nonetheless; one that ended with the numbers “7-6,” likely reminding everyone of that year of 1776.
Redemption, for a day
But then, on July 4 … providence.
The Providence Grays, that is, whom the Phillies played on July 4 in a doubleheader that saw them play a different team, the Boston Braves, in game two. Much like the revolutionaries who freed the United States from King George’s tyranny over a century before, they gleefully defeated Providence, 11-9, in a victory against all odds and amid a sea of struggles. It was a moment of sparkling redemption for the underdogs, who used guile and cunning to defeat their stronger foes, mirroring the success of their nation at the time of its birth.
They proceeded to lose their next nine games and finish in dead last in the NL, at 17-81.
Happy Independence Day weekend!