April 29: nine years, nine losses

Some dates barely register on a baseball calendar. April 29 earned a second look. From 1998 through 2006, the Phillies played on that date in nine consecutive calendar years and lost every time. Different opponents, different scores, same letter in the results column. That is the kind of small historical oddity that makes StatWatch stop scrolling.

The run began with a 1–0 loss at Cincinnati in 1998. A year later, the Reds appeared again, this time in Philadelphia, and won 7–3. The calendar kept turning, but the result did not. St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Florida and Pittsburgh also appear in the nine-game trail. Those are the opponent names recorded for the era; Florida is not silently relabeled Miami.

These were not nine identical games. Four were decided by one run: 1998, 2000, 2004 and 2006. The Phillies scored six runs against St. Louis in 2000 and still lost 7–6. They scored none in the opening game of the sequence. Across all nine games, Philadelphia scored 27 runs and allowed 47. The final scores offer plenty of contrast without inventing an inning-by-inning drama.

There are clear boundaries on both sides. The Phillies beat Pittsburgh 8–2 on April 29, 1997, before the stretch began. On April 29, 2007, they beat Florida 6–1. That makes 1998–2006 a closed nine-year sequence in the preserved record, rather than a streak still waiting for its ending.

Zoom out and the date looks much less ominous. In the qualified 1899–2025 regular-season population, the Phillies went 50–54 across 104 April 29 games. The nine losses belong inside that larger sample. They are not a reason to treat the next April 29 game as already decided. The word curse is our playful headline language, not an explanation of how baseball works.

The counting rule matters: one appearance on the date in each of nine adjacent calendar years, with every game a loss. There were nine games in this particular stretch, so no doubleheader changes the count. A missing year would break a consecutive-year run; a consecutive-appearance measure would instead skip that year. This article uses original source-assigned dates, excludes postseason games, and makes no claim about seasons before the qualified calendar baseline. Sometimes the calendar supplies the hook. The evidence still gets the last word.