Friday, January 20, 2023

How Philadelphia's Baseball Teams Have Probably Wrecked The City's Sports Fans Beyond Repair, Part 1: Connie Mack and The Philadelphia A's

 

With the upcoming playoff between the New York Giants and the Philadelphia Eagles, New York papers have been writing about the long time sports rivalry between Philadelphia and New York across every sport and franchise. This rivalry is founded on mutual loathing which on the New York side has less to do with the teams involved and more to do with the Philadelphia fan.

And let’s not kid ourselves. The Philadelphia sports fans utterly loathe and detest all New York teams…and all Chicago teams…Detroit teams...Boston teams…I think you get the point. Hating the opposition is a tried and true tactic of all sports fans. What makes the Philadelphia fan infinitely more loathsome is that they will just as often show their vituperation to their own teams. No matter what the circumstances. In perhaps one of the most notorious audience behavior of all time, Philadelphia outfielder Gus Zernial was booed by the home fans when he broke his leg while making a play. For any other city that would be the nadir of fan behavior. For Philadelphia, it’s a typical day at the ballpark.

Trying to analyze why the Philadelphia fan is something that would take a great deal of psychoanalysis. But if I had to make a guess, I think much of it has to do with the history of Philadelphia baseball. Because no matter how you look at, the baseball history of Philadelphia is probably worse than any city that has more than one team. Much of this must be laid at the feet of the Phillies, to be sure (we’ll get to them in the next part) but I think we do have to put at least some of the blame on the team that shared their city and for a long time, their ballpark: the Philadelphia Athletics. To do that, we have to go back in time.

In the 1950s, with attendance dangerously low for all teams because of television and much of the country’s westward migration, many long time teams left their cities. While the most notorious examples are the Giants and the Dodgers, the migration had begun well before that. In 1952, the Boston Braves left their city for Milwaukee and a period of commercial success and immense improvement in the standings. In 1953, the St. Louis Browns moved east to Baltimore and became the Orioles.  Initially they would have similar commercial success and over the next decade become one of the great powerhouses in the American League.

No one in either city raised much of an objection when either team left because in each case, the team in question had been their city’s poor cousin. The Braves had won two pennants and one world championship in the entire twentieth century and the Browns had won only a single pennant in their entire existence (and that one had occurred in 1944, when all the best players were at war.) The Red Sox might be perennial loser in that same period, but they had a tradition of winning (the ‘Curse’ wasn’t in anyone’s head) and the Cardinals had been the dominant national league team for the past twenty-five years.

But when the Athletics left Philadelphia in 1954, it should have caused as much outrage as the Giants and Dodger’s departure did. Because the Phillies had been around for much longer than the A’s and had achieved far less. Their entire post-season history was two World Series appearances and one World Series win.  Admittedly, they had won a pennant in 1950 but that would be an aberration and by the end of the decade they would be back at the bottom of the standings.

The Athletics, by contrast, had one of the most storied traditions of any team in the American League – indeed, baseball. Before the rise of the Yankees (and as we shall see, even afterwards) they had been the most dominant franchise in the A.L. In the first thirty years of their existence, they had won nine American League pennants and five World championships. They had been the foundation of two of the greatest baseballs dynasties in history with some of the greatest players of all time in each of them.  And even though they had not won a pennant in 1931 as recently as 1948 they had been a serious pennant contender and were still capable of producing great players. So why did the A’s leave and the Phillies stay?

The answer is the man who was the face of the team for half a century: Connie Mack.  The owner and manager of the team, his records of games managed, games won, and games lost will almost certainly never be equaled, considering he managed the A’s for fifty years and more than 7500 games.  One of the most famous names and faces in baseball almost since the game became a business, he is now virtually forgotten today, mostly because his team has since moved all the way across the country. Mack deserves all the credit for creating two of the greatest teams of all time. But he must also take most of the blame for why his team collapsed and why it had to leave Philadelphia. To explain this, we must go back even further in time.

Mack was part of baseball for so long that one sportswriter referred to him as ‘a tree from the Garden of Eden’. His career began in the 1880s, not long after the National League was officially founded. He played every position except pitcher with little distinction for eleven years and managed briefly with even less. It is likely that his career would have ended would have ended then had it not been for the tumult surrounding the game.

By the turn of the century, the National League was in trouble. Attendance was low for almost every team and the bad behavior in the fields and in the grounds was turning many people away. Then in 1901, Ban Johnson who ran a successful minor league wanted to challenge the majors. The National League dropped four of its poorest performers and Johnson snatched the teams up. He raided other teams with higher salaries, drawing away many of the game stars. He founded teams in cities that already had National League franchises: Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Boston…and Philadelphia. And in order to offer prestige to many of these franchises, he offered ownership to many former players. The most significant ones who became owners were Charles Comiskey, who took over the White Sox, Clark Griffith, who would take over the newly founded Washington Senators, and Mack who took over the Philadelphia Athletics. Comiskey and Griffith had managerial experience but would stay in the front office. Mack named himself manager and held that position for half a century.

Johnson wanted to show that the American League was more ‘civilized’ than the National League, and Mack was the best example of that. He would manage in a coat and tie for his entire career, he instructed his players to be on their best behavior on the field and off, and in an era where few athletes even managed to get through high school, Mack went out of his way to recruit athletes from college campuses. This did not mean he didn’t make exceptions for special talent: one of his greatest pitchers was Rube Waddell, whose exploits off the field would fill a book of their own, much less a column. His players loved and respected him in a way that few players then or now did their managers, and certainly not their owners.

Mack achieved success on the field quickly, winning his first pennant in 1902. Three years later, his Athletics won the pennant again and participated in the second ever World Series against John McGraw’s New York Giants. It was a series with an outcome that will never happen again: all five games were complete game shutouts, and the Giants ended up winning thanks to Christy Mathewson pitching three of them in six days.  Small wonder years Mack would say ruefully: “Mathewson was the greatest pitcher who ever lived. It was wonderful to watch him pitch…when he wasn’t pitching against you.”

Mack spent the rest of the decade slowly building up a great team and in 1910 began the first great dynasty of the American League. The Philadelphia Athletics won four pennants and three World Series in five years with four of their players eventually going into the Hall of Fame.

Eddie Plank was one of the greatest pitchers of all time winning 324 games, which would be the record for a left-handed pitcher until Warren Spahn broke it.  He threw 66 shutouts and has a lifetime ERA of 2.35, yet curiously his reputation was never as respected as Mathewson or Walter Johnson, his contemporaries.

Chief Bender was one of Connie’s most reliable pitchers for this era, though his record was nowhere near as good as Plank’s, winning ‘only’ 212 games and was washed up sooner than Plank. Perhaps it was because of his World Series record of 5 and 2 that he had a better reputation among his peers. (And yes, Bender was a Chippewa aboriginal. Nicknames back then were very racist.)

Mack’s infield was called the $100,000 infield and may very well have been the greatest in history. Eddie Collins has to be on the shortlist for the greatest second basemen of all time: he batted .328 lifetime, stole over 700 bases, and would eventually play on six American League pennant winners, none of whom were Yankee teams.  Frank ‘Home Run’ Baker was one of the more distinguished ‘power hitters’ of time, leading the American League four consecutive years (though never with more than 12). Still he was a great hitter and a superb third baseman.  Shortstop Jack Barry’s reputation was more for defense than anything else, but 1st baseman Stuffy McInnis has a hall of fame worthy career: he played for more than twenty years and has a lifetime batting average of .310, most of it in the deadball era.

It was one of the greatest teams ever assembled. But in 1915, the A’s finished dead last with 43 wins and 109 losses. They would stay there for the next six years. How did this happen? Not long after the 1914 season ended, Mack began to dismantle his championship team, most famously selling off Eddie Collins to the White Sox for $50,000 – the largest cash transaction to that point.

Mack’s reasoning for this selling has never been fully explained. In his autobiography, Mack blamed the rise of the Federal League, another league meant to take on the two major league. Many stars abandoned the American League, among them Eddie Plank and Chief Bender. Mack argued that these departures in 1915 led to disloyalty among his players and a decline in their fighting spirit. So rather than try to compete with the good players he had left, he sold all of them off.

This argument has never held much water. For one thing other, less successful teams were more than willing to (at least temporarily) raise salaries to keep their stars on their teams. For another, even after the Federal League dissolved (and they were dead by the start of the 1916 season) Mack kept selling off anyone on his team that had talent. (In one of those ironies that plague baseball, Harry Frazee the man known for selling off Babe Ruth, spent the first years of ownership basically buying any player on the A’s that Mack would offer. What comes around goes around, I guess.)

Understandably, attendance dwindled away for the A’s. Mack spent the better part of the 1920’s slowly but surely rebuilding. It was an incremental process: in 1921, they finished eighth. In 1922, seventh. In 1923, sixth. 1924, fifth. In 1925, with the Yankees in chaos, Mack’s A actually made into first place for the first time in eleven years. It would be temporary, they finished eight games behind the Senators, but the fire was back in the A’s fans.

By 1927, Mack’s A’s were the favorite to win the American League pennant. Well, that didn’t work out. 1928 was a different story. In July, the Yankees had a fourteen game lead over the A’s. Mack’s team, whose stars I shall get to in a moment, slowly but surely eroded the Yankee lead until mid-September that caught and passed them. A late September series would give the Yankees the edge again, but the A’s had still won 97 games and just finished 2 and a half games out. It was a prelude for what was to come.

The 1927 Yankees are considered the greatest team of all time. Some, however, have considered the 1929-1931 A’s deserving of the title. And when you look at who was on their team and their track record, it’s hard to argue it. Because while the only players on the Yankees during this era who are completely qualified Hall of Famers are Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, the A’s of this era had four that have to be considered among the greatest of all time.

Lefty Grove was once considered by Bill James to be the greatest pitcher who ever lived, even though he ‘only’ won 300 games. Grove led the American League in ERA nine times, wins seven times and winning percentage five times, more than any other pitcher in history. And during his three years with the A’s he may have been the most dominant pitcher of any era: he won 79 and lost just 15. In 1931 alone, he went 31-4 and was named the American League MVP.

Mickey Cochrane was the first truly great catcher as we define it in terms of both defense and hitting. Not as much of a power hitter as those to come, his lifetime batting average of .320 remains the highest of any player who spent his career as a catcher.

Al Simmons famously said that he hated pitchers. I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual considering how much devastation he laid upon them. He drove in 100 runs or more eleven straight seasons, and in this period batted over .390 twice.  Near the middle of his career, his average dropped tremendously: he still finished with a lifetime average of .334.

But few hitters struck more fear into pitchers then Jimmie Foxx. At one point, Foxx was second all time to Babe Ruth in home runs, and he was for years considered the greatest right-handed home run hitter of all-time. Twice he hit fifty home runs, and in 1932 he hit 58, just five years after Ruth had hit sixty. He won the triple crown in 1933 and was three times the American League MVP.

The Athletics won three consecutive pennants from 1929-1931 and two world championships. If you had asked a Philadelphia fan in 1931 if twenty five years later one of their teams would leave the city, and then asked which one it would be, I guarantee you no one would have said the Athletics. So what happened?

Well, Mack dismantled his team beginning in 1933, though this time he had a much better reason than before: there was a Great Depression going on and like everyone else, baseball was struggling to survive. Many teams did so by selling off their best players. In the aftermath, the Yankees would manage to resume their dominance over baseball which they would hold on to until 1964 while the Athletics went into the cellar and basically stayed there rarely emerging higher than fourth the rest of the way. The larger question is, why did things grow so dire for the A’s? Sadly that was Mack’s fault.

The times in baseball were beginning to change even as Mack’s second dynasty was beginning. More teams were building farm systems to grow their own players. Mack never truly did that, continuing to scout the minor leagues. Meanwhile, many of his closest associates like him were growing older and dying off.  But the biggest problem was Mack himself.

At some point, Mack should have seriously considered retirement from one or both of his positions and started looking for a successor. The older he got it became increasingly clear that it was harder for him to keep track of what was happening on the field: by the 1940s, it was rumored that his son Earle (called a ‘coach’) was managing the team and that Connie was basically a figurehead.   More than that, because Mack had been around for so long, no one was able to tell him the things he should be hearing or to relinquish ownership. Mack said in an article in 1948: “that if he lost the team, he’d be dead in two weeks.” This was an eerily prescient comment – Mack ended up dying not long after the A’s left Philadelphia – but the fact remains the team probably could have been saved had he been willing to give up some of his responsibilities.

But too many people were interested in celebrating Mack than helping the A’s.  In 1951, not long after commemorating his fifty years in baseball, Mack finally resigned from both managing and ownership.  By that point, while the A’s were not a terrible team - they would finish fourth the next season and still had many good players – mismanagement and blundering on many levels led to the A's being sold in 1953 and moving to Kansas City in 1954.

Perhaps its an exaggeration to say Philadelphia was never the same after the A’s left – they hadn’t contended in a very long time and their attendance had been miserable – but it’s hard not to imagine a similar sense of betrayal that Giants and Dodgers fan felt a few years later. A team that in the minds of many adults that was known for greatness and one of the most distinguished fixtures in baseball had abandoned its home, leaving Philadelphia fans forced to root for a team whose entire history, as we shall see, was just losing. I would feel enormous animosity towards baseball and maybe every other sport.

The A’s have never recovered.  In the nearly seventy years since they went west, they’ve effectively become the nomad of baseball, playing in Kansas City and then Oakland to stadiums that have been notoriously empty even when times are good.  There’s also an argument that the dignity that Mack imbued his franchise with for fifty years left the minute the A’s left Philadelphia. During their tenure in Kansas City, they were best known for trading away their best players to the Yankees and getting has-beens in returns. Charles Finley took over the team in 1961 and almost immediately became the gadfly and monster of ownership for the entirety of his tenure, treating the establishment, the fans, his management and his players with utter disdain and contempt, with his reputation utterly overpowering the brilliant team he would eventually build up. Even his own dynasty in the 1970s -with five consecutive division titles and three consecutive World championships  - was always being overshadowed by Finley’s treatment of the players and fans in Oakland.  The ballpark they played in was a horror show, and the A’s frequently had the lowest attendance in baseball even when they were winning.

Even when Finley left, the A’s would never become dignified when they won: their dynasty in the 1980s was built around self-proclaimed bad boys who in the cases of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire issued in the era of steroids that afflicted the game for more than fifteen years. Periods of contention and momentary greatness under Billy Beane has always been overshadowed by the fact that the A’s are now a small-market, cash-poor team. For the past quarter of a century, the A’s have almost always been under discussion as likely to leave Oakland, no matter how well they do in the standings. Perhaps some day it will finally happen.

I have  read a lot, as this article no doubt makes clear, about the A’s and Connie Mack. And I don’t think he was the kind of person who even in death was capable of deep abiding bitterness. Nevertheless, I can not help but look at the fate of the A’s since leaving Philadelphia as a deathbed curse: condemned to wander the country, unloved, unappreciated for reasons that are lost to history and unlike all other sports curses, never to be redeemed even after victory.

This article sums up the tragedy of Philadelphia baseball. The conclusion deals with farce, which if you know even the bare minimum about the Phillies seems to be treating it too lightly and too seriously at the same time.

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