The Rise and Fall of the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League

In 1954, the Athletics were the only baseball team in Philadelphia that had brought a World Championship to the city.  In fact, the team won five!  Arguably, the team was more popular than the Phillies.  But 1954 was the last season that the American League had a team in Philadelphia.  In the off season, the A's stunned the City of Philadelphia by announcing that they had found a new buyer for the team, and that they were moving to Kansas City.  While the A’s fortunes hand dwindled in the past two decades, the Athletics still had a loyal following.  Indeed, to this day, some Philadelphia baseball fans say the wrong team left.

So what happened?  How did Philadelphia lose the A’s?

Cornelius McGillicuddy, known as Connie Mack for short, guided the Philadelphia Athletics since the inception of the American League as a rival major league in 1901. Charles Somers, who had made his money in the coal industry, invested the money to help seed five of the eight teams that founded the American League.  One of those teams was the Athletics.  Mack, who began his baseball career as a catcher in the National and Players Leagues, become the player-manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1894.  He was fired from the Pirates in 1896, but then hired to manage the Milwaukee Brewers of the Western League, a minor league made of almost entirely of teams from the mid-west.  Around this time, Ban Johnson became the President of the Western League, and harbored ambitions to turn the league into a major league to rival the National League.

Johnson made his move in 1901.  Having renamed the league the American League in 1900, in 1901, Johnson moved teams into East Coast cities to compete with the National League teams already established there.  One such city was Philadelphia, where Johnson tapped Mack to organize the new Philadelphia Athletics.

Mack arranged for Somers to be bought out, with Mack owning 25% of the team, and a new investor, Benjamin Shibe, a Philadelphia sporting goods magnate, owning 50%.  The remaining 25% was bought by sportswriters Frank Hough and Sam Jones.

As happens when an upstart league attempts to compete as a major league, its teams lure talent over from the established league by offering key players better contracts.  And that is exactly what Connie Mack did.  By offering more money that the Philadelphia Phillies, Mack was able to attract such stars as Nap Lajoie, Elmer Flick, and “Strawberry Bill” Bernhard.  But that strategy could only get Mack so far.  Indeed, Phillies owner Colonel John Rogers sued Lajoie and the Athletics in Pennsylvania court and obtained an injunction preventing former Phillies from playing baseball for another professional team in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  Mack and the A’s parted with many of the former Phillies who had jumped leagues for more money by trading them to Cleveland in the second season of the American League.

But that proved not to be so much of an obstacle for the Athletics to field a competitive team.  Connie Mack had made friends and connections nationally throughout the baseball world, and was known for his ability to use his network to find quality baseball players.  In 1902, for example, the year that the Athletics traded Lajoie and Bernhard, Mack was still able to field a quality ball club that won the American League pennant.  This was a feat that Mack repeated in 1905.  Of course, by 1905, the two major leagues had negotiated a peace, and began pitting their respective pennant winners against each other in a revival of the World Series.

In those first fifteen years of the Athletics’ existence, the number of Hall of Fame players Mack brought to Philadelphia was just incredible.  We’ve already mentioned Nap Lajoie and Elmer Flick.  Mack also brought Rube Waddell and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson to Philadelphia.  The first great Athletics’ dynasty, that brought three World Championships to Philadelphia between 1910 and 1914 included Eddie Collins, Frank “Home Run” Baker, Charles Albert “Chief” Bender, and “Gettysburg” Eddie Plank.  If one thing was clear from the early days of the A’s, Connie Mack knew his talent.

Still, Mack learned a painful lesson from that first dynasty team.  And that is, teams that win multiple championships aren’t as profitable as you might expect, particularly in Philadelphia. While the A’s attracted the most fans in the American League in 1910, and 1911, by 1914 the A’s found themselves in fifth place in AL attendance, despite winning the World Series that year.  The situation was exacerbated by two factors.  In 1913, Hough and Jones sold their shares to Mack, making him an equal partner with Ben Shibe.  Interestingly, Shibe had loaned Mack money to buy those share.  Mack and Shibe had an amicable relationship, with Mack running the baseball operations, while Shibe ran the business operations.

But while Mack incurred debt to buy shares in the team, a new baseball league, the Federal League, came on the scene in 1914 in an attempt to compete with the National and American Leagues.  Like the American League before it, the Federal League lured top talent away with the promise of higher salaries. It was a temptation that even “Chief” Bender could not resist, as he joined the Baltimore Terrapins of the Federal League in 1915.

Starting a new league, however, involves lots of money.  The Federal League owners found themselves in deep debt, particularly after filing and losing a lawsuit against the National and American Leagues.  That lawsuit, by the way, which was initially before one Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, wound up with the Supreme Court recognizing an anti-trust exemption for Major League Baseball.  At any rate, major league owners ought out some of the Federal League owners, allowed some to buy major league franchises, and allowed two Federal League franchises simply to fail.

With tightened finances, and with attendance dwindling, Mack sold off his star players, one by one. By 1915, the A’s found themselves in last place, even with the return of Nap Lajoie. That’s where they stayed through 1921.  Indeed, it wasn’t until 1925 that the Athletics emerged from the second division, that is, those teams finishing in the bottom four of the American League.

During that period, Ben Shibe died, leaving his shares in the team to his two sons, Tom and John.  Mack remained close to the Shibe family, even purchasing 141 shares in 1937, after John died, to become the team’s majority owner.  Unlike other owners in baseball, Mack derived his income solely from his ownership of the A’s, which meant his personal financial fortunes were tied to that of the team.

To climb out of the mediocrity of the early 1920s, Mack again relied on his network of friends and colleagues across the baseball world to help him recruit talent.  Frank “Home Run” Baker, for example, had become a manager of a team in the Eastern Shore League, a minor league comprised of teams from Maryland.  In the 1920s, Baker contacted his former manager to tell him about this young, talented catcher from Baker’s team, who had the skill to play in the major leagues.  This is how Mack found Jimmie Foxx, the A’s answer to Babe Ruth.  Similar connections led to the Athletics acquiring the contracts of Al Simmons, Mickey Cochrane and “Lefty” Grove, who made up the core of the second A’s dynasty, which captured three pennants from 1929 through 1931, and won two World Championships.

But again, while the A’s won three straight pennant, and two World Championships, attendance fell.  In 1929, 839,000 fans came to Shibe Park to see the Athletics.  By 1931, despite two World Series wins in a row, only 627,000 fans filled the seats.  The team was further hampered by the onset of the Great Depression.  Caught in a financial pinch, Mack once again began selling off his star players to other teams.

As attendance dwindled after the A’s pennant winning days, so did the A’s prospects.  Mack found himself in an unending cycle.  Without revenue to pay for top talent, in the twenty-one seasons between 1934 through 1954, the A’s finished dead last eleven times.  Three times, the team finished next to last.  And only twice did the Athletics rise out of the second division.

Without quality players on the field, the Athletics struggled to put fans in the seats.  During that same time period, the A’s only finished above sixth in attendance in the American League once.  That was in 1944, when they finished fifth.  Philadelphia baseball fans were not paying the money to see bad baseball.

The financial prospects of the team were probably best exemplified by the construction of the so-called “Spite Fence” in right field.  When Shibe Park opened in 1909, the wall in right field, which ran along North 20^th Street, was twelve feet high.  During the first dynasty, neighbors with houses along 20^th Street would open their rooves and bay windows up to fans who could not get a seat in the stadium during the World Series.  After 1929, the neighbors erected bleachers on their rooves, and charged fans a fraction of what it cost to watch a game from inside the ballpark.

In 1935, with attendance dwindling, the Athletics took aim at their neighbors, whom they saw as syphoning away revenue.  The Athletics built a sixty foot fence in right field, blocking the view of anyone along 20^th Street who tried to watch a game from the rooftops.  While a slight rise in attendance can be seen in 1936, the Spite Fence could not stop the A’s ship from sinking.

One of the key problems to the Athletics’ declining fortunes was Connie Mack’s inability to adapt to modern methods of recruiting new talent.  Mack continued to rely on his network of friends and colleagues to identify talented players in the minor leagues and purchasing their contracts.  This was an expensive way of building a ball club.  In 1925, for example, Mack paid the Baltimore Orioles of the Eastern League $100,600 for “Lefty” Grove’s contract, a record at the time.

Meanwhile, in 1926, Branch Rickey became the General Manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.  He looked for a cheaper and more efficient way of identifying and developing major league talent.  He did so by having the Cardinals organization invest in a network of minor league clubs who would supply their players only to the Cardinals, instead of to the highest bidder.  This was the beginning of the farm system.

Mack, however, viewed this development with disdain.  He derided Rickey’s innovations “chain store baseball.”  Nonetheless, between 1926, when Rickey began working as General Manager, and 1950, when Mack retired, the Cardinals won nine pennants and six World Series, compared to the Athletics’ three pennants and two World Championships.  Indeed, in the 1940s, when the A’s finished last six times, and only once rose to fourth place, the Cardinals won four pennants and three World Series.

Once Mack retired from managing, he came to recognize his mistake.  On his 92^nd birthday in 1954, Mack lamented that the Athletics had not established its farm system earlier, noting that other clubs were more interested in developing their own talent than in engaging in trades. “I guess Branch Rickey’s chain store baseball wins after all,” Mack was quoted as saying.

But the A’s, with Mack at the helm, faced other problems.  In the 1940s, with Mack in his late seventies and early eighties, his memory began to fail him.  Mack would often call out the names of players from the past, who were long gone, when naming a pinch hitter or defensive replacement.  Other coaches would correct Mack’s mistakes.  However, with the A’s being a close knit, family-run organization, no one wanted to tell “Mr. Baseball” when it was time to step down.  Things eventually came to a head in 1950, when Mack retired, and former player Jimmy Dykes took over the managerial role.

Just as Connie Mack was losing his faculties, in-fighting among his family further paralyzed the team’s business operations.  Connie Mack had two sons with his first wife, Margaret, Earle and Roy.  Margaret died in 1892. In 1910, Mack married his second wife, Katherine.  Katherine and Connie had four daughters, and one son, Cornelius McGillicuddy, Jr.  Despite Katherine’s protests, Connie Mack did not involve his daughters in the operation and management of his baseball team.  He only involved his three sons.

Earle and Roy, however, were not fond of Connie Mack, Jr.  In the operation of the club, Earle and Roy preferred to cut costs to keep the team afloat, while Connie Mack Jr. pushed for the team to invest in younger players to build a new, competitive team.  In 1950, the year their father retired, Earle and Roy took out a mortgage from Connecticut General to buy out the shares of Connie Mack, Jr. and the remaining shares of the Shibe family.  Shibe Park was used as collateral.  But, taking out a loan on the team while attendance was still dwindling turned out to be a financial disaster.  The mortgage required Earle and Roy to make annual payments of $200,000, which deprived them of the opportunity to invest in improvements at the stadium.

Meanwhile, the Phillies, who had been the joke of the National League, saw their prospects improve.  The Phillies had made investments in the 1940s in young prospects, who all came up to the major leagues at the end of the 1940s.  This group of young players, dubbed the “Whiz Kids” won the pennant in 1950, signaling the shift in which of Philadelphia’s two teams had become the dominant one. 

By contrast, Earle and Roy cut player contracts, fired Jimmy Dykes in favor of Eddie Joost, and cut back on the number of minor league affiliates.  Even with these cuts in expenses, the Athletics found themselves unable to make the annual mortgage payment of $200,000 at the end of 1954.  Earle and Roy informed the League, who began looking for buyers for the team.

Indeed, there had already been pressure from the American League owners to sell the Athletics.  Connie Mack Stadium, once a marvel of architecture at its inception, had become dilapidated and run down.  Located in the middle of North Philadelphia, it was difficult for American League teams to travel to.  Add to this situation the dwindling ticket sales, and visiting teams found that they could not cover their expenses of playing at Shibe Park, now renamed Connie Mack Stadium, with their share of the ticket revenue.

The American League owners began hearing proposals from investor groups from Dallas, San Francisco and Kansas City.  The Yankees pushed for an investment group, headed by Chicago businessman Arnold Johnson, to buy the team and move it to Kansas City.  Johnson just so happened to be the Yankees’ landlord, as he had purchased both Yankees Stadium in the Bronx, and Blues Stadium, home of the Yankees’ AA affiliate, the Kansas City Blues.

Meanwhile, political forces within Philadelphia focused on supporting the offer of an investor group led by John Crisconi, a car dealer in in the city.  The Philadelphia group presented an offer equal to the best that had been presented to date, which was the offer from Johnson.  Indeed, the Macks had signed a contract and called for a meeting to present the deal to the owners of the American League teams for approval.

Behind the scenes, however, Roy and Earle were experiencing conflicts with each other.  Roy wanted to secure a front office job for himself and his son, Connie Mack, III, with the new ownership group.  He secretly negotiated with Johnson before the ink on the Crisconi contract was even dry.  Once Roy secured concessions from Johnson that better benefited himself and Connie Mack, III, Roy was ready to sabotage the Crisconi deal before the meeting of American League owners.

Meanwhile, newspaper articles citing unnamed league source began circulating before the meeting, questioning the viability of the Philadelphia group to raise the needed capital.  It has been speculated that the unnamed sources came from the Yankees, eager to sink the deal and move the franchise to Kansas City.

On October 28, 1954, the A’s presented the sale of the team to Crisconi’s group to the owners.  With a majority vote needed, the baseball world was stunned when the vote ended in a 4-4 tie.  Specifically, Roy Mack of the Athletics voted against the very deal his team presented at the meeting, a factor that much annoyed Chicago’s owner, Charles Comiskey, Jr.

In the end, the American League owners approved of the sale to Johnson, and then approved Johnson’s request to move the franchise to Kansas City.  Once in Kanasas City, it has been alleged that the team essentially acted as a farm club for the Yankees, due to uneven trades that benefited the Yankees.  From 1955 through 1960, the Yankees rarely engaged in trades with any other franchise than the Athletics.  These transactions included the very lopsided trade that sent Roger Maris to New York.

Whether the Athletics could have continued to survive in Philadelphia is a question that is still in doubt.  Philadelphia lost the A’s around the same time that other cities saw their second franchise move to another city.  The St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore and the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953.  New York City would lose the Giants to San Francisco and the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957.  Indeed, by the end of the 1950s, only Chicago stood as a city with two major league baseball franchises.  With the Phillies becoming a quality franchise, and the Athletics in desperate need of modernization, the A’s may simply have not been able to compete for the support of the city’s notably finicky baseball fans.

By:  William J. Kovatch, Jr. 

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