Red Sox 6, Phillies 2
Game 3 - Thursday Night, April 9th in Philadelphia
Record - 1-2, Tied for 3rd Place, 2 games behind the Braves
One Sentence Summary: It was cold and dreary in Philadelphia and David Buchanan's nightmare third inning eventually led to the 6-2 loss.
What It Means: The season is not off to a great start with the Phils losing their first series. The Nationals come in to town for three games beginning tonight.
What Happened: Buchanan was chased after three innings having allowed six runs on seven hits and four walks. The bullpen held the Sox scoreless the rest of the game, but the Phillies bats couldn't get anything going. The first five hitters in the line-up were a combined 1 for 19 and the defense committed three errors for good measure.
Featured Card: The Phillies paid tribute to the 100 year anniversary of the franchise's first pennant winner with a pre-game ceremony and the entire team wearing 1915-style Phillies hats. So I guess it's only appropriate that the Phillies dropped this current series to the Red Sox to be consistent with the result of the 1915 World Series.
Here's the flip side of this team card, found within the 1986 Tastykake Phillies set along with team cards for the 1950, 1980 and 1983 squads.
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4 comments:
Great card to dig out to highlight the game! By the way, notice the hats don't match what they wore last night? )t looks like for the team photo they are wearing their away hats. Strange they would take a team photo on the road....
I noticed that too about the hats. Maybe the picture was taken in Boston before the start of the World Series?
I love puzzles like this. So I just compared the list on the back of the card to BBRef's 1915 Phillies roster, and (besides noticing that the Phillies misspelled 2 of the 21 names, "Killifer" and DeMarrer", the second one quite far off!) there are three players on the 1915 roster not pictured:
- Bert Niehoff
- Bobby Byrne
- Stan Baumgartner
Also, I noticed that the stadium is not Fenway, as Fenway doesn't appear to have any support posts in the middle of a row (look up any current photo of Fenway or any from 1915 to confirm). It does look exactly like the Polo Grounds, where the Giants played (see this picture especially: http://www.boweryboyshistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/pologame4.jpg). The Phillies played at the Giants as follows: April 17-21; June 22-24 and September 1-4.
Bobby Byrne played games for the Phillies from the start of the season through August 23, then sat out until October 4. Stan Baumgartner played with the Phillies from May 10 to September 6, then returned September 30. Bert Niehoff played all season and didn't miss a single game against the Giants.
So for the first series at the Polo Grounds, Niehoff and Byrne were both there (and started all 4 games); for the second series the same, plus Baumgartner was on the roster; but for the third series, only Niehoff was present.
My guess would be that (assuming the players are labeled right*), the picture was taken during the final series (September 1-4), and Niehoff missed the photo. Otherwise you would have to assume that two or three players missed the photo, so Occam's Razor says to go with the one with the least assumptions.
HOWEVER...After all that, I have noticed two things (which only solidify the above):
1) George McQuillan joined the team on August 20, and he is on the photo, so it would have to be from the final series at the Polo Grounds.
2) The Phillies card has one more mistake: they only list 9 players in the top row when there are 10! I think that Bert Niehoff is to the right of the tall guy in the middle (who is actually 6'5" Eppa Rixey and not 6'0" Erskine Mayer--another mistake by the Phillies!); and then George McQuillan with his unusual-looking face, is next to him, fourth from the right.
So, Niehoff is there, Byrne and Baumgartner are not, and this picture must be at the Polo Grounds between September 1 and 4. Why they took the picture then, I don't know. Maybe they hadn't taken a team picture yet and they looked at the calendar and noticed that in the final month of the season they had only 7 more home games left, none of which was good for the photographer. Maybe someone knew a photographer in NYC who could take it for them. (Note that the location of the photo is nowhere near the spot where the Giants took theirs that year: http://s685.photobucket.com/user/BillBurgess/media/Miscellaneous/1915NewYorkGiantsTeamLGbbf.jpg.html )
Wow! Fantastic work Steve. I love stuff like this too and I'm glad you took the time to solve this little mystery.
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