Across the river a 12 year old boy with $500 in his pockets was shot dead with an assault rifle while sitting inside a 1994 Oldmobile outside a Camden housing project. Both the boy's 28-year-old mother and his grandmother thought the 12 year old was sleeping at the other's house that night. His mother had an explanation for the boy having $500 in cash in his pockets. It was money the grandmother had saved in a cookie jar that the boy had taken to buy her a birthday present. Somehow that story makes this whole business of the Phillies being the first major league franchise to lose 10,000 games seem like a puny tale of woe.

The only similarity, on a metaphoric level, is that Phillies fans get to watch a loved one die over and over, day by day, year by year, decade by decade. By adulthood every lifelong baseball fan has suffered a thousand small deaths when his team loses; the Phillies are simply the first franchise to roll that victory apnea over into five figures. As my friend Steve Lopez once observed when he was writing a newspaper column in Philadelphia, "Some teams flirt with losing. The Phillies have sex with it." Take the 1930 Phillies - please! In that year the Phillies scored more runs than any other team in the National League and finished 40 games out of first place. That year the Phillies led by MVP Chuck Klein (170 RBI, .687 slugging percentage) set club records for hits (1,783) runs (944), doubles (345) and total bases (2,594) and still finished last with a record of 52 wins and 102 losses. In 1930, Phillies pitchers gave up a major league record 1,193 runs, roughly one run more per game than the seven runs the Phillies bats averaged.

In those days the Phillies played in Baker Bowl at 15th and Huntingdon in North Philadelphia. On the left field wall there was a huge advertisement for deodorant soap in bold letters that declared, "THE PHILLIES USE LIFEBOUY." One night a fan snuck in and painted a message underneath, "AND THEY STILL STINK." I wasn't there, of course, but I know that story because it's in my DNA as a Phillies fan, the same way the names Chico Ruiz and Manny Motta cause me to wince involuntarily. In every Phillies fan's heart there is a secret joy, the Germans have a word for it, schadenfreud. Shameful glee at another's misfortune. It is the Phillies fan's final defence against ultimate major league baseball humiliation.

At least we're not Cubs fans.