Shown: SEPT.-OCT.: Boston (dark blue) overcomes Philadelphia (pink) Blowout.

There is a temptation to blur each of Boston's four national association championships together and conclude that they dominated every year. But insofar as getting out to an early lead is concerned, 1873 is the exception. It was a "new" Philadelphia franchise formed by Philadelphia politicians out of Athletic and New York discards that jumped out to a lead of Blowout proportions.

Technically, a blowout consists of a ten-game lead. But this definition is relaxed for 1873 as the season was but about 54 games long. The eight and one-half game lead lost by Philadelphia over the final 23 games is statistically equivalent to a team losing a twenty-five game lead in today's 162 game schedule. Only four teams in history have even attained a twenty-five game lead: 1884 St Louis Unions, 1902 Pittsburgh, and Cleveland in 1995 and 1999. Of those four teams Only the St Louis Unions saw their lead dip as "low" as twenty-one games. Philadelphia's collapse can be attributed to the poor baserunning of a rookie infielder, the sore arm of their ace pitcher, and the schedule making dramatics provided by Harry Wright, manager of the Bostons.

In late July, Philadelphia had a 27-3 record with second place Baltimore at 21-14. The Philadelphia Athletics were third, 17-10, and Boston fourth, 17-11. No other team was near .500. Philadelphia manager Fergy Malone, around July 14, had been so pleased with his team's standing that he took them for a two-week beach resort vacation to Cape May, NJ, wives included. In the first game back from that sojourn, July 30, Philadelphia lost in Boston giving up 23 runs.

Philly then lost their first home game of the season 4-5 to Baltimore's Candy Cummings, August 7th, and the next day got blown out 9-2 by a Washington team who entered the game with a 2-15 record. On August 11th, Philadelphia lost 4-6 hosting New York and their lead suddenly was at five and one-half games. They, along with the Boston club, then traveled to Chicago and Rockford, IL, for two championship games in front of Western crowds and split in front of over 10,000 fans. Western fans were starved for baseball: 1873 was the only major league season with out a "western" club.

Philadelphia then seemed to get back on track with four consecutive wins capped by a hugely attended 6-5 thriller over the Athletics, September 8th, (Ned Cuthbert's career highlight: a 7th inning rbi-single off Dick McBride) and a fourteen inning victory in Brooklyn, four days later, when Brooklyn second baseman Jack Burdock slipped with a Philly runner in a run-down between third and home. Unfortunately, on August 15th, the Elizabeth, NJ, franchise also slipped - out of the association - and their games were thrown out September 1st, Philadelphia losing wins against Elizabeth. Thus during the four game win streak Philadelphia's lead slipped from five games to four and one-half.

One of the reasons Philadelphia had such a commanding lead was because they scheduled so many games early in the season. Now Harry Wright did the reverse: he scheduled games in fourteen consecutive dates, Sundays open. Behind Boston's tight defense, pitcher Al Spalding flipped ten complete games and Boston went 10-1 with a tie. Philadelphia didn't have nearly as many games left to schedule: the best they could do to keep up was to spilt four games, the last of which was a loss hosting Boston when Andy Leonard scored the winning run in the ninth inning on a George Zettlein wild pitch. Zettlein had insisted on pitching despite being ill before the game. (This game shown above as Philadelphia's fourth dot from the left, Monday, September 15.) The lead dropped to two games.

Desperately, Philadelphia won two of three at home. But beginning September 29, the team cracked and lost five games in six days. A horrendous 12-13 loss against Washington, giving them now a 3-26 record, on October 1st was the third of those losses. (Note in Game Dots: Boston appears to have a half-game lead after play of October 1st. That's because Game Dots shows "games over .500", a good graphical barometer of team progress in pennant races decided by winning percentage. Boston's 29-12 does beat Philadelphia's 30-14 by today's standards. But remember, in 1873, first place was decided by "most wins".) Then there was the 7-18 loss hosting Boston, October 2nd. The team was in second place. Philadelphia had seemed poised to come back and win that horrendous Washington game when they scored four runs in the ninth inning, but rookie first baseman Art Devlin got caught in a run down between third and home and was tagged out. (Devlin was also the runner caught in the rundown against Brooklyn, mentioned earlier, although he did score on that occasion. Later Devlin became a pitcher and headlined in an 1877 Louisville collapse.) Zettlein was so sick that right fielder George Bechtel had filled in as pitcher. Zettlein made his comeback in the 7-18 loss hosting Boston but both he and the team behind him were listless. In the fourth inning Boston pitcher Al Spalding scored a three-run Little League homerun on a Texas League popup. Another Boston run scored to make it 11-5 when Philadelphia second baseman Jimmy Wood missed second base on a double-play pivot and then threw wild. This was bare-hand baseball on an uneven field.

Enter Wright's scheduling finesse: for the second straight season Harry Wright saved many games against poor clubs for late in the year. Boston finished 24-4 after Labor Day (not yet a holiday) while Philadelphia finished 6-9. Philly's final loss came November 1st: a 1-12 score versus the rival Athletics, the only MLB game started in November until the fifth game of the 2001 World Series.

Just as Newton's Third Law of Motion states that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, every time a team collapses, another team undergoes a reverse of that collapse. In 1873 that other team was New York. As Philadelphia went from 27-3 to 9-14, New York went from 2-14 to 27-10. This phenomenon is rooted in the fact that the winning percentage of all the teams in one league will always be .500. Divisional play, as was instituted in 1969, doesn't change that fact, but it should be noted that while individual winning percentages of divisions may vary, the winning percentage of all the teams in the league will still equal .500. Only inter-league play negates this balance.

By the way, the "Philadelphias" had no official team nickname. Early teams simply took the name of their city. Only if another team existed did the teams adopt a nickname or a neighborhood. As mentioned, 1873 is the origin of the Philadelphias, as a vehicle to promote Philadelphia politicians. The other team Philadelphia, known as the "Athletics" was started by a Handel and Hayden musical society in 1860 to get it's members to exercise more. Their upstanding position in the community was the prime reason the beautiful public park at 25th Street and Jefferson was made available to them. By 1871, as the best of what were hundreds of amateur and semi-pro Philadelphia baseball teams, they joined the national association and the public park became their "stadium". This they shared with the Philadelphias - also called the Pearls or the Fillies.

When the National League was founded on St. Patrick's Day, 1876, lip-smacking monopolistic practices began in earnest and they enacted a "five-mile rule" for the first time. That is: no two league teams may exist within five miles of one another. The NL Philadelphia team, previously the "Athletics", became commonly known as the Nationals. All eight teams in 1876 can be said to have had the same name: "Nationals", although local newspapers and fan groups exercised their right to call teams whatever they pleased.

However, Philadelphia, and New York, were kicked out of the NL late in 1876 for ignoring a September schedule of games delivered to them by the league in August. This delivery came late and Philadelphia and New York chose instead to honor a great number of local exhibitions games that had been haphazardly scheduled. Great franchises for these cities were not resurrected until 1880 when they were known respectively as the Philadelphias and the Metropolitans. When the American Association opened in 1882, they happily picked up Philadelphia as their Eastern bastion. They chose the name "Athletics" in effect stealing the original name of the predecessors of the original Philadelphia Nationals. The same thing happened to the Chicago Nationals in 1900 when the new American League Chicagos took the name "White Sox".

So when the National League "had to have" a Philadelphia franchise in 1883, they reverted to the names "Nationals" and "Phillies" and this state of affairs exists to today. However, as you know, in 1955 the Philadelphia "Athletics" moved to Kansas City, and in 1968 Kansas City moved to Oakland. Thus giving metropolitan Oakland the distinction of being named after a club of string instrument players a continent and some one-hundred and fifty years away.

Team nicknames gained official recognition from the teams themselves between 1910 and 1912. Prior to that they weren't and current efforts to log the nicknames of teams fall under the category of "Nickname the team was most popularly known as", an enterprise that varies in the extreme depending on which newspaper you review.

The New York Nationals in 1885 began to be whispered as "the giants" (note the lowercase!) because of any number of tall and heavy players that might have paired up with their behemoth first baseman: Roger Condor. After their first World Championship in 1888 team manager Jim Metro reportedly cheered "My Giants! My Giants!" emblazoning that nickname upon the franchise forever. The nickname even survived 1894 when two regulars were 5'6" and only one regular was six feet tall. This actually is a watershed moment in the history of team nicknames, namely: the nickname stuck even though the team had changed.

Up until then great nicknames would be dropped when the team changed character. The best example of this is the nickname of the Chicago Nationals, 1880-1887: the White Stockings (i.e., White Stockings or White Sox). So named for the color of their socks, chosen as the color of ash which defined the city after the great fire, this team won five championships in seven years. (Baseball historian R. J. Lesch of Adel, Iowa, has pointed out that white was also used by the Chicago baseball team in 1870, before they switched to red for 1871.) The nickname ended when the team switched to black stockings in 1888 after losing a close pennant race to Detroit. In 1890, player-manager Cap Anson went with an all rookie team and these players were known as the Colts. When Anson finally retired in 1898 the team was known as the Orphans. It was Charles Comiskey's greatest stroke of genius to steal the unprotected moniker "White Sox" for his new Chicago AL team in 1900 ironically taking the name from his 1880's St. Louis nemesis. The Chicago Nationals became the Cubs under manager Frank Selee five years later.

Another name I'll delve into is "Indians" a Cleveland moniker whose origin has seen many theories in recent years. The original team to sport that nickname was the Indianapolis team of the American Association in 1884, merely a play on their city name. Until 1888, the New York AA club was often called the Indians too because they were owned by Tammany Hall, the remarkable New York political mafia which borrowed a litany of Indian themes and existed until the Great Depression. A Cleveland fan poll around 1911 gave the team "Indians" officially as all teams were just then adopting official names. The team had been incidentally known as the Indians since 1898. Often you will hear that this was because of their famous Indian player Louis Sockalexis. (This argument, for example, appears in the 9/14/1898 issue of the Milwaukee Daily Journal.)

There's some truth to that. But sometime after 1895 there's a window in which the word "vagrant" (think "homeless" today) became synonymous and interchangeable with the word "Indian". During this etymological twinkling Cleveland owners in 1898 - disgusted with low attendance and city ordinances that did not permit Sunday baseball games - announced that the team would reschedule many home games away from Cleveland. This included games in Rochester, NY. That's where you first see the term "Indians" come into play by the Sporting Life newspaper (Philadelphia, PA). The earliest use of the term "Indians" for Cleveland that I have is from an April 23, 1898, game report in that paper. (Dickson's Baseball Dictionary may have an earlier reference.) This occurred after owner Frank De Haas Robison threatened that the team would never play in Cleveland again.

The depiction of an Indian as a "Brave" in connection with the Boston Braves franchise (now Atlanta) has it's roots in the sale of the team to owners affiliated with, once again, Tammany Hall, the corrupt New York political party. They named the team the Braves in 1913 and asked new manager to incorporate a Braves face as a team logo. Superstitious manager George Stallings had the image of a "lucky Indian head" penny sewn into the player's jerseys. In a few years, the coin aspect of that logo was discarded and just the Indian head remained. Cleveland copied the move a few years later. (They also copied Stalling's three-man pitching staff and destroyed pitching arms.) In 1943, Walt Disney and a team of animators drew cartoon mascot images for each US Air Force division. These men then painted these images on their planes. The modern "Cleveland Indian face" is a variation of a Disney image adapted by Cleveland owner Bill Veeck.

The term "Braves" also bobs up for Cincinnati in 1895 when managed by ex-Giant Buck Ewing. The Reds were then known as "Buck's Braves". As for the Boston Braves, they moved to Milwaukee in 1953 and then snuck off in the night to Atlanta in 1966, a team which still sports "Braves" thanks to the superstitious nature of a 1914 manager and a turn of the century New York political organization.