ERIC: Shown in the photo with me is my friend David Raymond, who wrote the foreword to You Stink!. Unless you’re either a long-time, die-hard Phillies fan, or a die-hard fan of the University of Delaware’s football program, the likelihood is that you don’t know who Dave is. Dave’s alter ego is the Phillie Phanatic. He was the original mascot and wore the green suit from the time that the character was introduced in 1978 through the 1993 World Series season, and then he passed the suit on to the current Phanatic’s Phriend, Tom Burgoyne. Dave then founded Raymond Entertainment Group, where his self-bestowed (but very accurate) title is Emperor of Fun and Games. READ ON

Jason Aldean has his copy. Do you?

Everyone had a great time at the book signing event at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, PA this past weekend (12/1/12). In addition to hanging out with legendary N.L. pitcher and broadcaster Steve Blass, we also had the pleasure of signing books for some great folks including Pittsburgh Pirates President Frank Coonelly. Check out the You Stink! Facebook page for more photos and a video post shot during the event. Thanks to everyone who made You Stink! an Amazon Best-Seller in 2012 (Baseball History)  and keep an eye out for upcoming talks and signings in 2013. BTW: We are already hard at work on our follow-up title Baseball’s Could Have Beens.

The Pirates have a number of talented young players. One, in particular, center fielder Andrew McCutchen, is one of the elite young players in the National League. He is the sort of player that franchises build teams around. McCutchen hit .331, with 31 homers, 96 RBI’s, 107 runs scored, and 20 stolen bases. He was the National League Player of the Month for the months of June and July and had a truly outstanding season. With McCutchen to build around, things look brighter for the Pirates than they have in years. 

The Pirates were competitive for the entire season, and actually sat in first place in the National League Central Division for a while during the spring. Pirates fans rejoiced, thinking that the ugly streak of losing seasons was finally going to end. And then the wheels came off.

They went 11-18 in August and a brutal 7-21 in September that featured a 7-game losing streak and a 5-game losing streak. While it looked like the Bucs might have a shot at making the playoffs in early August, hope for a .500 season faded as loss after loss was tallied. When the bleeding was over, their 20-40 finish meant that the team had registered yet another losing season, even though they did manage a third-place finish in their division. 

As one writer, put it: “At midseason, everyone said it — to ourselves, and to everyone within earshot — the Bucs are going to the postseason! Buy your playoff tickets now! (No, really, playoff tickets were actually a thing.) But then, as happens so often in Pittsburgh, the axle snapped off the bandwagon. Clint Hurdle, who was the witty puppetmaster pulling all the right strings as the team surged, went from being a lock for manager of the year to holding the reins of the bandwagon that was breaking down in city after city.

Unfortunately, James McDonald’s second-half was as shocking as the Bucs freefall from the elite teams in MLB. A.J. Burnett and Andrew McCutchen turned the Bucs into a real life gong show in August. The bullpen went right with them.

Suddenly Buccos fans waded out of the fog and looked to find the team was playing just barely above .300 baseball. .300 baseball!” Sadly, there isn’t much else to say. In short, the 2012 Pirates embody the truth of Murphy’s Law: anything that could go wrong for them did. In spades. 

Here is a list of the 20 most depressing facts about the 2012 Buccos, which appeared here (http://espn.go.com/blog/playbook/fandom/post/_/id/12516/the-20-most-depressing-pirates-facts-of-2012):

 1. The Pirates finished 79-83. That record extended their North American professional sports record for consecutive losing seasons to 20. 

2. The Pirates were 16 games over .500 at 63-47 as late as Aug. 8. Their fall from that many games over .500 to a sub-.500 finish is the greatest collapse in the history of Major League Baseball, a league which dates back to the 1800s. 

3. The 2011 Pirates also collapsed after being in playoff contention and well above .500, finishing 18-41. So manager Clint Hurdle came up with a motto for 2012. That motto? “Finish.” 

4. The Pirates lost their 81st game of 2012, thereby clinching a non-winning season, on Friday, Sept. 28. How did they lose that 81st game? At home. 1-0. By getting no-hit for the first time since 1971. 

5. Two games later, the Pirates lost their 82nd game and clinched their 20th consecutive losing season. That historic loss came on Fan Appreciation Day. 

6. The 82nd loss came when the Pirates blew a ninth-inning lead. Before that 82nd loss game, the Pirates had been 69-0 on the season when leading after eight innings. 

7. The tying run in loss No. 82 came on a home run from Reds bench player Xavier Paul, who played for the Pirates in 2011 and hit two home runs for them in 230 at-bats. The winning run was scored by Denis Phipps, who came in to pinch run after Ryan Ludwick singled. Ludwick was a deadline acquisition for the Pirates in 2011. He performed terribly in Pittsburgh, with two home runs and 11 RBIs in 38 games. In just 14 games against the Pirates in 2012, Ludwick had two home runs and eight RBIs. 

8. On July 24, the Pirates made their biggest trade deadline acquisition in modern times, acquiring Wandy Rodriguez from the Astros — the worst team in baseball. Unfortunately for Rodriguez, over the final two months of the season his new team had a worse record than his old team. 

9. On Aug. 17, the Pirates began mailing out playoff ticket ordering instructions to season-ticket holders. Team president Frank Coonelly said he was overjoyed to have to read MLB’s manual on postseason protocol for the first time: “Every year, I took it and tossed it into the corner. Last year, I took it and started dusting it off. This year, we’ve been very pleased to actually have to go through it in detail.” The Pirates went 13-30 from the day that playoff ticket information started showing up in mailboxes. 

10. A’s first baseman Brandon Moss fueled Oakland’s playoff run, hitting 20 home runs and knocking in 52 runs since joining the team in June. Moss, a major piece acquired in Pittsburgh’s blockbuster trade of JasonBay in 2008, was an unmitigated disaster as a Pirate, hitting .228 with 13 home runs and 64 RBIs in three seasons. 

11. Orioles outfielder Nate McLouth has played an important role in getting Baltimore into the playoffs. McLouth hit .140 with the Pirates this season before getting released in May. 

12. In the offseason, the Pirates signed 33-year-old free agent shortstop Clint Barmes to a two-year, $10.5 million contract. Barmes hit .229 and had a .272 OBP. Also in the offseason, the Pirates released 27-year-old shortstop Pedro Ciriaco. He became a regular for the Red Sox from July on and hit .293 with a .315 OBP and 16 steals in 19 attempts. 

13. The Pirates were dead-last in stealing bases in baseball with a 58 percent success rate. Andrew McCutchen, thought by many to be the fastest player in baseball, was successful only 62 percent of the time -– a rate worse than any team in baseball (other than the Pirates). 

14. McCutchen ended play on Aug. 3 hitting .373. Buster Posey’s average on that date stood at .325. McCutchen lost the batting title to Posey by nine points. 

15. The Pirates threw out just 19 of 173 attempted base stealers all season –- an 11 percent success rate, dead-last in baseball by a large margin. 

16. In the offseason, the Pirates signed 37-year-old free-agent catcher Rod Barajas to a one-year, $4 million deal with a club option for 2013 of $3.5 million. Barajas hit .206. Also in the offseason, the Pirates chose not to offer a free-agent contract to 31-year-old incumbent catcher Ryan Doumit. Doumit signed a two-year, $7 million contract with the Twins and hit .275 with 18 home runs and 75 RBIs. The Twins threw out 18 percent of attempted base-stealers. 

17. On Sept. 7, in what would become the first loss in a seven-game losing streak that essentially ended their playoff hopes, the Pirates made seven errors against the Cubs. 

18. The Pirates had a September schedule that was ideal for a playoff contender, getting to play the Astros, Cubs and Mets a total of 17 times. They went 6-11 in those games. 

19. At one point this season, the Pirates were more than 10 games ahead of both the Brewers and Phillies -– the closest teams they have to rivals after 20 seasons of irrelevancy. Both teams finished with a better record. 

20. Pittsburgh’s 79 wins ties for the most the franchise has had in a season since 1992.

79 wins–2 games under .500 is the best record in 20 years. That, in and of itself, is a depressing statistic. In all fairness, the team did improve from 2011, when they went 72-90. They have talented young players on both the major league roster and in the farm system. Sooner or later, the streak WILL end. But the question is: when?

Will there be an incredible 21st consecutive losing season in 2013? Will the Pirates further ensconce themselves in the You Stink! Hall of Shame? Only time will tell. This is why we love baseball.

ERIC: On Thursday, September 20, 2012, the New York Mets found You Stink! immortality. And we salute them for it.

A rookie pitcher named Jeremy Hefner started the game for the Amazin’s. The first eight Phillies hitters reached base. The Phillies scored eight runs in the first inning on nine singles, a walk, and a hit batsman. Hefner was charged with 7 earned runs and did not retire a single batter, which certainly fluffed up his earned run average. It was the first time that the Phillies had scored eight runs in the first inning of a game since 1912. The Phillies pounded out 21 hits and 16 runs, their highest production in a single game since July 2009.  Hefner was the first starter to face seven batters and not record an out against the Phillies since Chicago Cub hurler Bill Bonham on August 5, 1975. “The next guy kept coming up and doing the same thing, ” said Phlllies first baseman Ryan Howard, who capped the evening’s festivities with a ninth-inning grand slam in a seven-run final frame. The first inning took 33 minutes, and the nine first inning hits set a franchise record that not even the 1962 Mets (profiled in the book version of You Stink!) matched, and the 1962 Mets are considered to be the worst team of baseball’s modern era.

“Words can’t even describe how embarrassing that is. And it’s not fun to answer questions about it,” Hefner said. “It’s hard. You started that game and you have to watch all nine innings, and I’ve never had to do that before. Never happened to me before. It’s something I’ll never forget and it’s something I’ll try to learn from.”

Adding insult to injury, the Mets eked out only three hits against soft-tossing Phillies rookie pitcher Tyler Cloyd, who seems to channel his inner Jamie Moyer on the mound. ”I saw some things tonight that were unacceptable,” Mets manager Terry Collins said, refusing to elaborate. “No disrespect to Tyler Cloyd, none whatsoever, but three hits? Please. We’re better than that.” Admitting that he was embarrassed and that he had spoken to his team after the game, Collins responded to a question about whether his team had quit, ”You have to ask them. I have my own opinion. And I’m not going to express it publicly.”

The 2012 Mets, channeling their 1962 predecessors, are in the midst of an epic collapse. They have dropped five straight and 11 of their last 12, allowed nine first-inning hits for the first time in the team’s history. They lost their ninth consecutive home game for the second time this season, and dropped to an atrocious 4-25 in their last 29 home games. The previous team to lose 25 out of 29 games was the 1980 California Angels. The loss mathematically eliminated the Amazin’s from the pennant race this year.

“Guys are upset, guys are embarrassed and we should be, because we have been very, very bad in the second half,” said New York third baseman David Wright. A reporter for the New York Times wrote, “The game, a makeup contest for one postponed by rain, was viewed by a crowd of, at most, a couple thousand people, and played in the closest thing to silence attainable at an American professional sporting event.”

Congratulations to the 2012 New York Mets for adding this loss for the ages to their already stellar record of epic losses and for once more enshrining themselves in the You Stink! Hall of Shame.

ERIC: The Houston Astros are playing their final season as a member of the National League. Beginning next year, so that there are 15 teams in each league, the Astros will move to the American League’s Western Division, which presently has only four teams. This should make for an interesting natural rivalry with the in-state Texas Rangers, who are only a couple of hours away. The Astros have been a member of the National League since the franchise began as part of the Senior Circuit’s first expansion in 1962. 

The Astros are making their farewell to the National League one for the ages. With 13 games yet to play, they’ve already lost 101 games this year, which means that they should eclipse their franchise-worst record of 56-106, set last year. So far this year, the ‘Stros are 49-101, which means that they’ve got a good shot at losing 110 games this year, which would place them squarely among the elite members of the You Stink! pantheon of truly atrocious teams. If they manage to lose six more games this year, they will end the season as the worst team in the Major Leagues since the 2003 Detroit Tigers lost an epic 119 games. 

As it stands, with two really atrocious seasons in a row, the Astros are well on their way to an extended run of really bad baseball as a result of most of the franchise’s talent being traded away in draconian budget cuts. Having unloaded most of the formerly competitive team’s talent, and playing a roster of guys who probably should still be in the minor leagues, the Astros look like they’re headed for an extended run of wretchedness that should posture them for true You Stink! immortality.

Here at You Stink!, we’re rooting for them to go 4-9 or worse down the stretch, as we really would like to see them reach 110 losses and make their final season in the Senior Circuit a truly memorable one. Welcome to the You Stink! Hall of Shame, 2012 Houston Astros! We salute you!

ERIC: Every year about this time, those of us who reside in Phillie Nation are forced to remember the single most painful memory of a franchise that dates back to 1883. Every fall, the Ghost of 1964 rears his ugly head. He’s not welcome in the home of any Phillies fan, but he appears anyway, determined the torment the denizens of Phillies Nation. He also haunted the New York Mets in 2007, but he still lives in Phillies Nation.

From 1919 through 1947, the Phillies finished last a total of 17 times and next to last seven times. The 1961 edition of the team—profiled in the book version of You Stink! was one of the worst teams to ever take the field; that team still holds the major league record for most consecutive losses in a season with 23. A 1962 cartoon in a baseball magazine depicted a ballplayer arriving at a French Foreign Legion outpost, declaring, “I was released by the Phillies!” Nobody wanted to be a member of the Phillies.

However, those Phillies teams had Gene Mauch as their manager. Mauch, hired to manage the team in 1961 at the young age of 35, was known as the father of small ball. He was known for squeezing runs out of simple fundamental plays such as bunts, sacrifice flies, hit and run plays, and the like. His teams were known for good pitching, solid defense, and good fundamentals. Although Mauch never won a World Series, he is considered to be one of the most influential managers in the history of the major leagues.

Mauch surrounded himself with some solid talent. Outfielder Johnny Callison, who had movie star good looks, had developed into an excellent player. Center fielder Tony Gonzalez played good defense and blossomed into a .300 hitter. Popular second baseman Tony Taylor played excellent defense and was a fan favorite. Most importantly, Mauch had two fine starting pitchers. Right-hander Jim Bunning, a future Hall of Famer, was the first pitcher to win at least 100 games in each league. Lefty Chris Short became a reliable and effective starter. Things began to look up for the Phillies.

In 1962, the team went 81-80, posting their first winning season in years. In 1963, they went 87-75 and finished fourth. 1964 looked like it could be a good year for the talented young team.

“We executed better than any team in the league,” Jim Bunning has said about the team. “Moving base runners, turning the double play. We seemed to do everything perfectly.” The Phightin’s won eight of their first ten games that season and spent the first half of the season locked in a pennant race with a San Francisco Giants team filled with future Hall of Famers such as Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal.

Then, on June 21, 1964, Father’s Day, Bunning twirled a perfect game against the New York Mets in Shea Stadium. Bunning’s perfecto was only the fifth of the modern era, and the first in the National League in 84 years. Even the Mets fans appreciated the significance of Bunning’s accomplishment: “The Phils won the contest…before 32,904 fans who were screaming for Bunning during the last two innings,” noted a New York sportswriter. “Yesterday’s perfect pitching turned the usually loyal Met fans into Bunning fans in the late innings. From the seventh inning on…Bunning had the crowd…behind him.”

Led by rookie of the year Dick Allen (29 homers and 91 RBI’s), a fine season by Callison (.274, with 31 homers and 104 RBI’s), the Phillies spent 112 days in first place in 1964. Callison also hit a walk-off, game-winning three run homer during the All Star Game that year, permitting the host National League to win the game 7-4. Callison finished second to Ken Boyer of the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League MVP voting for 1964. Bunning posted a 19-8 record that year, with 13 complete games, 5 shutouts, and even 2 saves. Short went 17-9, with 12 complete games and four shutouts. Short also had 2 saves. Reliever Jack Baldschun had 21 saves and a fine 3.14 ERA, but Mauch lost confidence in him.

That summer, started Dennis Bennett began having arm trouble. That arm trouble cost the Phillies the National League pennant in 1964. “My arm started bothering me then and they couldn’t find out why,” Bennett recalled. “They took X-rays and they did this and they did that. On road trips, in every town I went to, I would go to see their top physicians. I even went to the Mayo Clinic and they couldn’t find anything wrong. I was still pitching but I couldn’t throw that good really. It hurt so much.”

In September, Bennett had a three-game stretch where his arm felt normal, beating the Dodgers 5-1 and the Giants 1-0 in back-to-back complete games. He then defeated the Houston Colt 45s 1-0 with a little help from closer Jack Baldschun. Then, Bennett’s arm started to really hurt. That prompted Mauch to employ a two-man starting rotation of Bunning and Short, and the two workhouses inevitably wore out.

On September 20, 1964, Bunning tossed a five-hitter and defeated the Dodgers, 3-2 (both runs were unearned and the result of an error by Vic Power). The victory gave the Phillies a 6 1/2 game lead with 12 games to play. The Phils looked like a lock. The team had already printed and begun selling World Series tickets. 

Then the Reds came to town. With the teams deadlocked in a 0-0 tie in the 7^th inning, Reds back-up infielder Chico Ruiz was on third base. As Phillies hurler Art Mahaffey began his wind-up, Ruiz dashed for home. He should have been out by 20 feet, but the flustered Mahaffey unloosed a wild pitch, and Ruiz scored the game’s only run. Dick Allen said of the play: “The play broke our humps.” The Reds swept the series. Then the Milwaukee Braves swept the next series. And then the St. Louis Cardinals swept the Phillies and moved into first place. The Phils won their last two games, but it was too little, too late. They finished 92-70, tied with Cincinnati. The Cards won the pennant and then the World Series against the New York Yankees.

“The one thing we never got in ’64,” Bunning said, “was the one performance, the one big hit, the one huge pitching performance that could have stopped the bleeding.”

When asked why he stopped using Baldschun as his fireman down the stretch that summer, Mauch coldly replied, “I could see the fear in his eyes.” Baldschun had 21 saves and a 3.15 ERA, but Mauch stopped using him. That, in turn, helped lead to the overworking on Short and Bunning. And the rest, as they say, was history.

Phillies catcher Gus Triandos called 1964 the Year of the Blue Snow, referring to the legend of Paul Bunyan and the fact that something really unusual was going to happen. Triandos had no idea how right he was. What began as a joyous reference still haunts us Phillies fans to this day as we think about that frustrating, horrific collapse. The Phils went 86-76 in 1965 and 87-75 in 1966 before a long, slow descent sunk in. Eight long years and a lot of very bad baseball passed before the Phillies finally had another winning season in 1975 before they won three straight National League Eastern Division titles in 1976, 1977, and 1978, and then their first World Series championship in 1980.

Mauch tried to keep it all in perspective. “People don’t realize what a great year it was,” the late manager Gene Mauch told USA TODAY in 1989 on the 25th anniversary of the collapse. “They say to me, ‘Oh, what a tough year.’ For 150 games it was the most beautiful year in the world. They were a great bunch of kids. When somebody brings it up about how tough it was for me, I don’t even think about that. I think about how tough it was for a great bunch of young people.” Mauch never did manage a World Series team in his long, Hall of Fame career.

In 1977, my friend Jack Wondowski and I visited a flea market where we often went to buy baseball cards, and while wandering one day, I found a block of four 1964 Phillies World Series tickets that I bought for $2.00. They look just like the ones pictured here, and they hang on the wall of my office taunting me each and every day. We Phillies fans enjoy suffering. It’s who we are.

• Season Summary: 92-70

• Final Rank: 2, GB: 1.0


• Days in First: 112 (last on September 26, counts the days a team played and was in first at the end of the day)

• Most Games over .500: 31 (last on September 17)


• Most Games under .500: never

• Biggest Lead: 7.5 (last on August 23)


• Farthest Behind Leader: 2.5 (last on September 30)

• Longest Winning Streak: 5 (May 29 to June 3, July 2 to July 9, and August 7 to August 12)


• Longest Losing Streak: 10 (September 21 to September 30)

• Most Runs Allowed: 14 (July 18 and September 27)


• Most Runs Scored: 13 (July 23 and August 11)

• Longest Game: 16 innings (August 18 and September 19)

• Times Shutout by Opponent: 11


• Times Opponent Shutout: 17

On July 31 of this year, the Indians were 50-53, and were sitting in third place, just six games out of first place. They were young, competitive, and interesting to watch.

And then the wheels came off.

The Tribe posted a 5-24 record for the month of August, dropping to 55-77, in fourth place, and headed toward the basemen. In so doing, the Indians tied a franchise record for worst month on record, tying the 1914 edition of the Indians for most losses in a single month (the 1914 Tribe finished 51-102, and were THE worst team in Major League Baseball that season). The Indians became the 46th ream since 1921 to lose at least 24 games in a single calendar month. The Houston Astros also lost 24 games in August, meaning that this is the first year since 1982 that two teams chalked up 24 losses in a single month. Their loss on Friday night was the team’s fifth straight. “It’s been a really tough month for all of us,” said pitcher Ubaldo Jimenez, with great understatement, “so we can’t wait until [September].”  

“You can lose a lot in a month, but we lost a lot in just a couple of periods of time–big losing streaks that we didn’t have throughout the first four months here,” said manager Manny Acta. The Tribe’s 5-24 August ties the 1982 New York Mets and the 1961 Washington Senators for the worst record in the month of August since 1944, meaning that this team has gained baseball immortality resulting from its inability to score runs or get hitters out. 

Over their last 68 games ending on August 31, the Tribe managed to his just .194 with runners in scoring position while the team’s starting rotation posted a pathetic 6.47 mark, the worst in the majors over that period of time. Hence, the losing month comes as no real surprise.

Fortunately, it will take a really epic collapse by the Indians for them to match the atrociousness of their 1991 edition, which lost 105 games, the team record (one of the teams profiled in the book version of You Stink!); if they win only 3 more games the rest of the season, they will avoid that fate. Nevertheless, this team has been a tremendous disappointment, and will probably cost Acta his job. Nothing Acta tried worked or seemed to help before the Tribe finally broke their losing streak on September 1.

“Our focus every day is to make the best out of the next five weeks, regardless of where we are in the calendar,” said Acta. “It has been such a bad month that it doesn’t matter; we could win 10 in a row, and it will feel good at the moment, but you could always go back and say, ‘They won 10 of their last 30.’ You can approach it and say, ‘[The month] is gone–but there’s still baseball on the field.’” Not surprisingly, the manager noted that August was the hardest month of his managerial career.

And so, we honor the 2012 Cleveland Indians by inducting them into the You Stink! Hall of Shame for posting their pathetic 5-24 record.