Phillies

Citizens Bank Park sits along the Delaware River in South Philadelphia, its brick-and-green-steel look built to echo the old ballparks the Phillies had already worn out by the time it opened in 2004. It holds 42,901 and replaced Veterans Stadium, the multi-purpose bowl the club had shared since 1970 after outgrowing Connie Mack Stadium, itself once known as Shibe Park. The move to a park built for baseball alone came after decades of playing on artificial turf designed for football as much as anything else.

The Phillies took the field in 1883, and no other one-name, one-city franchise in American professional sport has run that long without a break — not even a five-year stretch in the 1940s when they played as the Philadelphia Blue Jays. Two World Series titles, in 1980 and 2008, sit against eight pennants, a gap that says something about how often the club has come close without closing it out. The 1950 team, the "Whiz Kids," got there on a young roster under Eddie Sawyer, with Richie Ashburn among them; the "Macho Row" side of 1993, managed by Jim Fregosi, reached the Series the hard way and lost it.

Mike Schmidt anchored third base through the 1980 championship and remains the player the era is measured against. The rivalry with the Mets, the "Battle of the Broads," carries the sharpest edge among the club's rivalries, ahead of the long-running friction with the Pirates, the Braves and the Nationals.

Before any of that, there was a wooden grandstand and a National League franchise still finding its footing in a city already crowded with baseball.