August 25: ten years without a win

A losing streak can hide some very different baseball games. From 1919 through 1928, the Phillies played on August 25 in ten consecutive calendar years and lost every time. In one of those games, they scored 23 runs. The result still went in the loss column. That contrast is what makes this Calendar Curse worth opening up rather than reducing to a single number.

Cincinnati supplied the opponent in the first three years. Philadelphia lost 7–3 at home in 1919, 5–1 on the road in 1920, and 3–1 at home in 1921. The next August 25 brought a very different final score: the Phillies lost 26–23 to the Chicago Cubs in 1922. These preserved totals support the extraordinary score; they do not, by themselves, establish an MLB record or tell us what happened in each inning.

Chicago appears repeatedly in the remaining years. The Phillies lost 3–1 to the Cubs in 1923, 19–10 in 1925, 3–2 in 1926, and 8–0 in 1927. Between those Chicago games sits a 7–4 loss to Pittsburgh in 1924. The final game in the ten-year sequence was a 2–1 loss at St. Louis in 1928. A one-run margin and a game with 49 combined runs both belong to the same date-based finding.

Add the ten final scores and Philadelphia scored 46 runs while allowing 83. Those totals describe this selected sequence only. They are not season totals, an assessment of any individual player, or an explanation for why the losses happened. One game was played on each qualifying August 25, so ten consecutive losing years also means ten games in this particular interval.

The following August 25 broke the pattern: the Phillies beat the Brooklyn Robins 4–0 in 1929. On the other side, the preserved date stream has no Phillies appearance on August 25, 1918. That missing year matters because this measure requires adjacent calendar years; it cannot be extended backward by simply skipping a date without a game.

The finding belongs to the qualified 1899–2025 Phillies regular-season population. Postseason games and provisional earlier records are outside that scope. Curse is playful language for a memorable sequence, not a causal claim. The next game remains a new game, whatever the calendar says.