The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team’s Collapse Sank a City’s Spirit

On October 7, 1977, the Philadelphia Phillies lost a playoff game to the Dodgers, a game that began so hopefully and ended so disastrously that it has become known in Philadelphia simply as ＂Black Friday.＂ As a season of rare hope and unity crashed to a painful end in a ten-minute sequence of bad plays, so too did the city’s urban renaissance falter and an old sense of inferiority return.

This ambitious examination of the relationship between the team and city delves deep into Philadelphia’s social and baseball history to reveal how the disillusionment of Black Friday affected Philadelphia’s self image and fans’ relationship to the team they both love and love to hate.

Mitchell Nathanson is a professor of legal writing and a professor in the Jeffrey S. Moorad Center for the Study of Sports Law at Villanova University School of Law.