The Main Event

  • August 20, 1961 – The Phillies beat the Braves in the second game of a doubleheader, snapping an all-time record 23-game losing streak.

No team in the modern history of Major League Baseball has lost more games in a row than the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies. From July 29 to August 20 of that season, the Phillies dropped 23 straight games, a streak that remains the longest by any National or American League club since 1900. Only two 19th-century teams — the 1889 Louisville Colonels (26 straight) and the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (24 straight) — have ever done worse, and both of those clubs are remembered as historical oddities rather than modern baseball organizations. The 1961 Phillies, by contrast, were a real team playing a real major league schedule, and the way the streak built, and finally broke, still stands as one of the strangest stretches in franchise history.

A team already going nowhere before the streak began

The Phillies entered 1961 with modest expectations. Sports Illustrated’s preseason preview bluntly listed the team’s weak spots as “pitching and hitting” — essentially the entire roster. Gene Mauch, only 35 years old and in his first full season as manager, was working with a young, unproven club. By the end of June the Phillies were already buried at 22-45, and in May they had traded one of their better arms, Turk Farrell, to the Los Angeles Dodgers for outfielder Don Demeter and third baseman Charley Smith. The Phillies actually won their July 28 game against the San Francisco Giants to move to 30-64 on the season — their record heading into the streak. Nothing about that record suggested a contender, but nothing yet hinted at the historic collapse that was about to follow.

The skid started the next day, July 29, when Mauch ordered an intentional walk to Willie Mays with runners on second and third — only for Orlando Cepeda to follow with a grand slam in a 4-3 Giants win. From there, the losses piled up in miserable fashion. A trip to St. Louis in early August turned into a four-game sweep by the Cardinals, including an August 4 game the Phillies led in the ninth inning before a baserunning blunder helped cost them a 9-8 loss — a defeat bad enough that Mauch threw his helmet and delivered a postgame clubhouse lecture. Curt Simmons, a former Phillie, and Bill White‘s two home runs finished off a shutout the next day, and Ray Sadecki and Carl Sawatski combined to beat Philadelphia twice more in an August 6 doubleheader. On August 17, the Phillies even lost an 11-inning game to the Milwaukee Braves, 7-6, their only extra-inning defeat of the streak. Manager Gene Mauch summed up the daily grind at the time, saying he couldn’t stop thinking about the losing because “everyone keeps asking you about it.”

The stretch wasn’t just about bad luck — the 1961 Phillies were genuinely one of the worst offensive and pitching clubs baseball had seen in decades. For the season, Philadelphia hit just .243 as a team, posted a .310 on-base percentage, and scored only 584 runs, all of them the worst marks in the National League. The pitching staff was equally poor, finishing with a league-worst 4.61 ERA. Individual numbers tell the same story: John Buzhardt finished 6-18, Frank Sullivan went 3-16, and future Hall of Famer Robin Roberts — by then in the twilight of a brilliant career — limped to a 1-10 record. Don Demeter led the team with 20 home runs and 68 RBI, and outfielder Tony Gonzalez paced the club with a modest .277 batting average. Against the eventual NL champion Cincinnati Reds, the Phillies went a brutal 3-19 for the year.

Breaking the streak in Milwaukee

The streak finally ended on August 20, fittingly in a doubleheader against the red-hot Braves, who arrived on a nine-game winning streak of their own. Milwaukee took the opener 5-2 behind 40-year-old Warren Spahn, stretching the Phillies’ skid to 23 games and the Braves’ win streak to 10. In the nightcap, Philadelphia turned to John Buzhardt, who happened to wear uniform number 23 and had also been the winning pitcher in the Phillies’ last victory before the streak began. Buzhardt went the distance, catcher Clay Dalrymple collected three hits, and recently acquired outfielder Wes Covington — a former Brave himself — homered to help Philadelphia pull away for a 7-4 win. Second baseman Tony Taylor, who made a costly error earlier in the game, called the victory “like we won the World Series.” When the team’s charter flight landed back in Philadelphia after 1 a.m., roughly 200 fans were waiting in the rain to greet them, hoisting Mauch on their shoulders in an impromptu celebration.

Life after the streak, and the losses that followed

Breaking the streak didn’t turn the Phillies into a good team overnight, but it did mark a real shift. After starting the season 30-64 and then going winless for 23 straight games to fall to 31-87, Philadelphia actually played respectable baseball the rest of the way, going 16-20 over its final 36 games — a .444 winning percentage, dramatically better than the pace that produced the streak. The Phillies finished 47-107, 46 games behind Cincinnati and dead last in the National League, but the young talent on that roster — Taylor, Gonzalez, Callison, Dalrymple and others — became the foundation for a genuine turnaround. In 1962, Philadelphia improved to 81-80, the first of six consecutive winning seasons that eventually built toward the franchise’s ill-fated pennant race in 1964.

A record that has been chased but never caught

More than six decades later, the 1961 Phillies’ mark remains the longest losing streak by any modern-era major-league team. It has been threatened only rarely — most recently in 2024, when the Chicago White Sox lost 21 consecutive games, tying the American League record but falling two games short of Philadelphia’s total, before going on to set the modern record for most losses in a single season. For as long as that comparison keeps coming up, the 1961 Phillies’ 23-game losing streak is likely to stay exactly what it has been since the moment it ended in Milwaukee: the gold standard, or perhaps the low bar, for baseball futility.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for August 20

  • August 20, 1938 – At Shibe Park, Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig hit the 23rd grand slam of his career off Philadelphia’s Buck Ross, a major-league record that stood until Alex Rodriguez tied it in 2012; the Yankees beat the Athletics 11-3.
  • August 20, 1955 – In the ninth inning at Connie Mack Stadium, Robin Roberts — who had thrown a complete-game shutout the night before — came on to face pinch hitter Don Newcombe with Brooklyn trailing by a run, got him to ground out, and earned the save.
  • August 20, 1964 – Johnny Callison‘s deep fly to center drove in two runs on a double sacrifice fly, with Rick Wise and Tony Gonzalez both tagging up to score.
  • August 20, 1984 – The Phillies traded Kelly Downs and George Riley to San Francisco for Al Oliver and a player to be named later.
  • August 20, 1986 – Juan Samuel‘s 10th inning home run was the only run of the game as the Phillies beat San Francisco; starter Don Carman was perfect through eight innings.
  • August 20, 2021 – The Phillies signed Jorge Bonifacio to a minor league contract.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for August 20

  • Lee Riley (born 1906) – An outfielder who appeared in four games for the 1944 Phillies, going 1-for-12; he later became a longtime minor league player and manager, and is better known today as the father of NBA Hall of Fame coach Pat Riley.
  • Bill Crouch (born 1907) – A right-handed pitcher who spent part of the 1941 season with the Phillies during a brief big-league career that also included stints with Brooklyn and St. Louis.
  • Mark Holzemer (born 1969) – A left-handed reliever who closed out his six-season MLB career with the Phillies in 2000, having previously pitched for the Angels, Mariners, and Athletics.

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