Phillies 100 Years Ago: Phillies Downed By Former Athletic and Thoughts on the Women's Suffrage Movement

April 30, 1915

Phillies vs. Brooklyn Dodgers

Athletics @ Washington Senators

The Phillies faced a blast from the Philadelphia Athletics’ past with Jack Coombs on the mound for the Dodgers.  Good ol' Colby Jack began pitching for the Athletics in 1906 and was a key role player during the dynastic years.  In 1910 Coombs he stepped up and became a star, ranking amongst the best pitchers in baseball.  He had a 31-9 record with a 1.30 ERA (182 ERA+!).  It was the only time in his career that he threw over 350 innings and struck out at least 200 batters.  Between July and September of that year he completed 12 shutouts.  Twelve in three months!  Coombs became a hero when he pitched and won three games against the Cubs in the 1910 World Series, the first World Championship for Philadelphia.  The A’s repeated in 1912 and Jack earned himself a win against Christy Mathewson and the hated Giants, avenging Mathewson’s historic World Series performance against the A’s from 1905.  Needless to say Jack Coombs would always have a special place in the hearts of Athletics fans. 

Phillies 100 Year Ago: The Phils Lose For Only the Second Time and The Athletics Pull A Game Out Despite Zero RBI

April 29, 1915

Phillies vs. Brooklyn Dodgers

Athletics @ Washington Senators

There was some news coming out about what was known as the Baseball War between what was then (pretentiously?) called Organized Baseball (aka the American and National Leagues) and the Federal League.  As I’ve discussed before, the Federal League was an upstart circuit hoping to provide a third option for professional baseball fans that in time, the investors hoped, would merge with the other big leagues at a huge profit.  The American League had done a similar thing in 1901.  When the Feds starting playing in 1914 they raided the rosters of the more established leagues in order to make the transition easier for the fans.  Hence we have ourselves a war (Isn’t it funny that writers would call this challenge to professional baseball’s de facto monopoly a “war” considering the most deadly war the world had ever seen was in progress?  Seems a little gauche with 21^st century eyes).  The news coming out today was that the New York Giants had signed Federal League star Benny Kauff.  There were two problems with this.  Problem the first was that the National League had always asserted that they would not accept contract jumpers, and yet here was a National League doing just that.  Secondly, if Organized Baseball wasn’t going to honor the Feds as a actual major league, then Kauff jumping off the new league’s rotation would mean his rights belonged to the New York Yankees, the team he initially jumped from.  The speculation was that fans were now completely turned off by the war and the National League had done little to ingratiate themselves with the public after the Giants’ latest stunt.  Rumors had it that Ban Johnson had struck a deal with the Federal League, which meant the AL/NL partnership could end soon.  John McGraw, man, ruins everything just to get slightly better.[1]

Phillies 100 Years Ago: A's Are Blanked by Walter Johnson and Phillies Shutout the Dodgers

April 28, 1915

Phillies vs. Brooklyn Dodgers

Athletics @ Washington Senators

The Evening Ledger used to run a “movie” everyday at the bottom of their sports page.  It was a comic strip with stick figure men and women usually making silly puns or small jokes about topical events.  For today’s movie, a stick figure man is running after his girlfriend, begging her to wait up so he can ask her an important question.  He gets down on one knee and whispers sweet terms of endearment to her as visions of wedding rings dance in her thought bubble.  Finally he pops the big question: “Will Frank Baker ever come back?”

Phillies 100 Year Ago: Possum Whitted Makes a Name for Himself and Is Help On The Way For the Athletics?

April 27, 1915

Phillies vs. Brooklyn Dodgers

Athletics @ Washington Senators

Today, 100 years ago, the Athletics went down to Griffith Stadium to face the Washington Senators, taking the loss in a jaunty one hour and forty minute game.  The A’s managed twelve base runners but could only push one run across the plate.  Bob Shawkey made his third start and pitched well enough to deserve the win.  Even though he only allowed three hits and walk while striking out seven, the Senators scored two runs and Bob picked up his second lose of the season.  The A’s were not 3-7 and stuck in seventh place, but was help on the way?  Eh, not quite.  The rumor all year was the Frank “Home Run” Baker, star third baseman of the A’s legendary $100,000 Infield who had been holding out all year because of a contract dispute with Connie Mack, was in Philadelphia to sign a contract, though it was with a dairy farm team that played in the independent Delaware County League.  The speculation was the Baker was using this news as a way to spur Mack into giving in to his demands.  But the fact was that Athletics’ fans were tired of the whole damn story.  The back and forth bickering, the quotes from both Mack and Baker saying that they don’t need each other when they so obviously did, the drawn out narrative of who was right and who was wrong.  Enough! It was all too much.  The team was no good and adding Baker would only make them into a slightly less embarrassing bad team.  The train wreck season continued for the A’s.   

Phillies 100 Year Ago: Phillies Get Back On Track and Athletics Fall Off the Track

April 26, 1915

Phillies vs. Boston Braves

Athletics @ Boston Red Sox

Both the Phillies and Athletics had off yesterday, so we took the opportunity to revamp the blog a bit. I hope you like the new look.  I find that it is much nicer on the eyes and much less cluttered.  There are more ways to get in touch me now that we’ve added the Twitter widget.  Speaking of Twitter, you can follow @21standlehigh to get the latest information about the blog.  A big thanks to Liz for the help and creativity!

And now back to 1915!  The Battle of Ypres is still raging on, now in its sixth day.  They are in the Battle of St. Julien portion of this month long battle.  The Germans had launched a second round of chlorine gas on April 24^th, forcing the Allied troops to use unique ways of counterattacking the poison, including wrapping their faces in urine soaked rags.  It wouldn’t be until July when front lines troops received gas masks.  Sadly, the gas would soon become so commonplace that putting one on was part of a soldier’s routine.  They also lent a deathly pall to the battlefield.  Soldiers wearing gas masks while attacking looked like ghosts or grim reapers.  Just look at these pictures of men wearing the gas masks and you can see why the images of the masks became synonymous with death and destruction that was World War I.

Phillies 100 Years Ago: The End of a Winning Streak and the Beginnings of Another?

April 24, 1915

Phillies vs. Boston Braves

Athletics @ Boston Red Sox

Only seven teams had ever started a season 8-0 and no team had accomplished this feat in the 20^th century except, now, for the Philadelphia Phillies.  Confidence was just exploding out the ballpark on Huntingdon and Broad as the fans were treated to something that even Connie Mack’s great Athletics had never accomplished.  Coincidentally, the last team to win 9 games to start the season was the 1888 Boston Beaneaters, the predecessors of the Braves club the Phils would be playing today.  As the gates opened at 3pm, a standing-room only crowd poured into the rickety old woodworks of the Baker Bowl.  If the team was confident, the fans must have been downright cocky about the Phillies’ chance for a win.  With the way the club had hit for the first week of the season, and the way Erskine Mayer had thrown during his two starts, it would take a gigantic effort on the part of the Braves just to keep close.  And they were starting Tom Hughes?  The same Tom Hughes the Phillies knocked around for seven runs the week prior?  This was going to be a piece of cake.

Phillies 100 Year Ago: Eight Straight Wins!

April 23, 1915

Phillies vs. Boston Braves

Wrigley Field turned a year old today in 1915.  Of course, it was not called Wrigley Field and the Cubs would not be the park’s inhabitants for another year.  In fact it wasn’t even an American or National League park one hundred years ago!  The Chicago Whales (formerly the Chifeds) of the Federal League was the original club to play in what was then called Weeghman Park.  Even though the Federal League only survived for two seasons, the Whales had a bit more success in the park than the Cubs would over their next one hundred seasons because they, you know, actually won a championship.  In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James writes that he believes the 1915 FL pennant race, which the Whales won, to be one of the best in professional baseball history, but we’ll explore this more as the season goes on.  Before the games started on April 23^rd, the Whales had the best record in Chicago at 5-3, good enough for second place in the Federal League, the White Sox were battling the Athletics for the AL’s basement, and the Cubs were 3.5 games back of the best team in baseball, the Philadelphia Phillies.

Phillies 100 Years Ago: Superstition and a Record Winning Streak Overshadow War in Europe

April 22, 1915

Phillies vs. Boston Braves

Athletics @ Boston Red Sox

Before dawn on April 22, 1915, Allied soldiers outside the town of Ypres were in the midst of hours of bombardment from German artillery.  As the sun began to rise in their front, the bombing began to fall quiet.  Allied soldiers poked their heads up to see German soldiers firing over 5,000 canisters at their lines.  Along 4 miles of battlefront, a thick slow moving green-yellow gas began to emerge and cling to the air, choking the inhabitants of the trenches and sending them into disarray.  Over 5,000 men would die of asphyxiation in only a few hours after the attack; another 2,000 would be taken prisoner because they were too disabled to protect themselves.  The gas masked Germans made a break through the Allied lines on the Western Front, but probably due to ignorance of just how effective a killer the gas would be, did not follow their advance and the fight was a stalemate.  Lines were reestablished as the month-long annihilation known as the Second Battle of Ypres commenced.  When it was done, the lines would remain relatively close to where they had begun and 100,000 men were dead or wounded.[1] [2]   

Phillies 100 Years Ago: The Phillies Sweep the Giants and the Athletics Yield to the Yankees

April 21, 1915

Phillies @ New York Giants

Athletics vs. New York Yankees

Today, 100 years ago, Americans were greeted with a declaration from president Woodrow Wilson confirming his belief that the United States must remain neutral in the Great War that had been destroying Europe.  Wilson saw America’s role as a helper to all of Europe once the fighting ended.  The president’s neutrality statement put American minds at ease.  It was the European's war, not America’s.  It’s funny to think that only 100 years ago America was still very much an isolationist nation when you consider that American foreign policy for most of the rest of the century involved intervention overseas.  But in 1915, the nation wanted to remain discipline and in control of their affairs.  Wilson told the Associated Press, “So that I am not speaking in a selfish spirit when I say that our whole duty, for the present, at any rate, is summed up in this motto ‘America first’…Let us think of America before we think of Europe, in order that America may be fit to be Europe’s friend when the day of tested friendship comes.  The test of friendship is not now sympathy with the one side or the other, but getting ready to help both sides when the struggle is over.”  In less than a month, Wilson’s words would be tested for their sincerity.  In less than a day, one of the most significant battles of World War I would erupt in the Belgian countryside.  This European war wasn’t going to go away.[1]

Phillies 100 Years Ago: Phillies Smash Rube Schauer while Rube Oldring Smashed the Yankees.

April 20, 1915

Phillies @ New York Giants

Athletics vs. New York Yankees

One hundred years ago, on this fine Tuesday April 20, 1915,  Phillies, who had defeated the Giants the day before with a convincing shutout, were starting to turn heads back in Philadelphia.  The Evening Ledger opined, “Moran has not only a fighting chance, but a real chance, provided, of course, the Phils do not go into their annual state of decay toward the end of July.”  Even way back in 1915 fans and the media were just waiting for the bottom to fall out when good things were happening to their sports teams.  Some things never change.  But they were also sure to mention that they believed Pat Moran to be the man that could hold the team together for a whole season; “(W)hile the Phillies have time and again had a much greater lead than (4 games) in July, they have never had Pat Moran at the helm before, nor have they ever played the peppery style of baseball that they have displayed against the Braves and the Giants.” [1]  The Phillies were getting the attention their great play to start the season deserved.  Meanwhile, an article promoting the Athletics third game against the Yankees started, “During the last few days, Shibe Park has had the general appearance of a morgue.”[2]  This is an interesting because it contributes to the notion that there weren’t factions when it came to Athletics and Phillies fans.  Surely fans may have preferred one club to the other, but the lines were not hammered into stone.  Usually, in cities with multiple teams, there was a tendency for newspapers to cover one team or another with more sympathy, but not in Philadelphia.  The Evening Ledger was running columns about the A’s great chances for another pennant during Spring Training and all but ignoring the Phils.  But now that the roles were reversed, the Phillies were the club that garnered the attention.  This isn’t necessarily a fair-weathered fan event because there was no basis for factions to emerge.  Philadelphia was different from cities like Chicago where the Cubs played in the north and the White Sox occupied the south, or in New York where the Yankees were in the Bronx, Giants in Manhattan, and Dodgers in Brooklyn; the Phillies and A’s were only a few blocks from each other and shared Lehigh Avenue as boundary to their respective ballparks. Identities could not form because fans had to travel the effectively the same distance to the same neighborhood to watch either club play.  These dynamics are fascinating to me because we can really examine the Philadelphia Sports Fan in this nascent period and connect dots through time and explain some idiosyncrasies of the present day fans.  For example, the lack of factions shows why, about forty years from 1915, the Athletics left Philadelphia without much attempt to keep them even though they were the more popular team for the first half of the twentieth-century.       

Phillies 100 Years Ago: Keep That Winning Train Moving.

April 19, 1915

Phillies @ New York Giants

Athletics vs. New York Yankees

Happy “140-year anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord if we were in 1915” day, everyone!  To the people living in 1915, the Germans launching a large sea force towards Britain might have felt a little more paramount.  In Philadelphia, though, the Phillies were winning and still undefeated!  The Great War could wait because there was baseball to be played.

Phillies 100 Years Ago: Alexander Takes Down Mathewson and the Giants; Yankees Walk All Over A's

April 17, 1915

Phillies @ New York Giants

Athletics vs. New York Yankees

On this day 100 year ago the Phillies played their first game of the season versus their hated rivals, the New York Giants.  Everything about the Giants made them perfect for the scorn of Philadelphians.  Philadelphia has always had an inferiority complex towards the Big Apple (shh…don’t tell any Philadelphians I said that).  Over the nineteenth-century New York took over as the number one city in America in all the areas where Philadelphia had once held the crown.  As I discussed in a previous article, Philadelphians became shut off from the rest of the world, relying on tradition for self-importance, even as the nineteenth-century drew to a close and the city was noticeably falling behind the times. New York and Philadelphia were the biggest cities in the United States when the Phillies and Giants both joined the National League in 1883, but the teams, much the cities they represented, went in opposite directions. 

Phillies 100 Years Ago: Actually Today It's the Athletics and Babe Ruth 100 Year Ago

April 16, 1915

Athletics vs. Boston Red Sox

The Phillies did not play today and the Athletics game resulted in a tie, but something awesome happened in the game: Babe Ruth was the starting pitcher for the Red Sox.  This was only Ruth’s second season in the majors and the first where he made the Opening Day roster.  The Great Bambino hadn’t even hit his first home run yet!  It was his first game facing Mack and the A’s, though there would be many more important games to come when he became a Yankee.  But in this game Ruth was inconsistent throughout, giving up five hits, four walks, and five earned runs through four innings of work.  It’s amusing to read about a game in the newspaper that Babe freaking Ruth participated in and only have him be casually mentioned, but that’s the kind of game the young Sultan of Swat had today 100 years ago. 

Phillies 100 Year Ago: Second Day of the Season Brings Success for the Phillies, Setback for the A's

April 15, 1915

Phillies @ Boston Braves

Athletics vs. Boston Red Sox

Happy Tax Day, everyone!  Have we all squared away our dealing with the IRS?  Good.  Our subjects would not have been feeling the vague sense of uneasiness that is Tax Day 100 years ago because they would have had the joy about a month earlier in March.  For them, today would have marked the three-year anniversary of the Titanic sinking in the black waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.  There were very few mentions of the grand liner's demise in the newspapers of 1915, but since it is still in our public consciousness over century later, I'm sure it was on the minds of many.  Or, perhaps, there were more important matters to worry about.  There was the news of German Taubes planes doing battle with the British high above London, marking the furthest German planes had gone into England during the war.  And on the ground the Battle of Shaiba had ended the day before with British victorious in defending Basra and wresting control of Mesopotamia from the Ottomans.  

Back in Boston, the Phillies were engaged in their second game of the season against the Braves.  Manager Pat Moran turned to Erskine Mayer to continue the pitching magic started when Grover Cleveland Alexander shut the champs out the day before.  Mayer was a six-foot right-hander from Atlanta, Georgia playing in his fourth season with the Phillies.  He had been a star pitcher at Georgia Tech before working his way through the minor league system until 1912 when the Phillies signed him after a dazzling year playing at Portsmouth, Virginia.[1]  His first two years with the club were good, but Mayer had his breakout season in 1914 when he won 21 games with a 2.58 ERA (114 ERA+) and 5.8 WAR.  Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, 1914 would mark Erskine's peak in the major leagues, though he continued to play until 1919.  On this day he took the ball in rain, snow flurries, and hail that can occasionally occur during Aprils in Boston, hoping to match his friend and roommate's performance from the day before.

The Braves sent Tom Hughes to the mound.  Hughes had pitched for the Yankees sporadically and with varying degrees of success.  He wasn’t in the majors from 1911 to 1913 and only pitched 2 games for the Braves during their miracle run.  Hughes managed an ERA+ of 86 in his career before the 1915 season, so to say he was not very good might be an understatement.  The Phillies took full advantage of his subpar twirling, pounding out four runs in the fourth inning.  Boston cut the lead to three in the bottom of the fourth, but that was all Mayer would allow.  When the Phillies hung another three runs on Hughes in the top of the seventh it was all she wrote.  During his career Mayer was often overshadowed by Alexander, but in the second game of the new season Erskine lived up to his reputation as the second ace of the staff and pitched a similarly excellent game to Old Pete.

The Phillies were now 2-0 and sat in a first place tie with their rivals the New York Giants.  Amazingly, the only other undefeated team in professional baseball (including the Federal League) after the April 15^th games were played was the Chicago White Sox.  This was a good omen for the Phillies and they eagerly looked forward to completing the sweep of the Braves the following day.  Alas, Mother Nature would step in a ruin the Phillies grand debut.  The good news was that the Giants and White Sox did play on April 16^th and lost to the Brooklyn Robins (or Dodgers) and St. Louis Browns respectively, leaving the Phillies in first place in the National League for the first time that season and the only undefeated team in major league baseball.  The rain allowed the Phillies to travel to New York a day early and prepare for a four game series that would give them a chance to put some space between them and the Giants. 

Meanwhile the Athletics did not continue their winning ways like their North Philadelphia neighbors.  Bullet Joe Bush made the start for the A’s against the Red Sox and began what would be his most forgettable season.  He was wild all game, walking five and giving up six hits and, despite only allowing two runs, Connie Mack pulled him with two outs in the fifth for Weldon Wyckoff.  The A’s seemed to right the ship after the pitching change as Rube Oldering and Stuffy McInnis contributed a double and a RBI each while Amos Strunk had two hits and a RBI.  Going in to the top of the seventh the Athletics had a 3-2 lead and were poised for their second win of the season.  But Wyckoff could not hold the lead, surrendering three runs over the final three innings right as the A’s bats cooled off.  Final score was 5-3 Red Sox. 

This probably looked like a slight bump in the road to Mack and fans, but we know now that this loss was the beginning of an epic collapse of the illustrious Athletics.  After this game, it would take an Opening Day win in 1920 before the Athletics had a winning record at any point in a season.  Let me say that again.  The A’s, winner of the four of five AL pennants led by the best manager in the league, would not have a winning record at any point in any season from April 14, 1915 until April 15, 1920.  Five full years of losing records.  To make matters worse, the A’s lost on April 16, 1920 and spent two more seasons without a winning record.  It wasn’t until 1922 that the Athletics had two days in a row with more wins than losses.  Over this eight-year dive into the deepest canyon of shit the A’s would ever know, they lost 799 games, just fewer than 100 losses per season.  It’s amazing to sit in 2015 and think about a manager losing that many games over that period of time and not have the fans run him out of town.  But Mack did hang around and he did manage to build a second dynasty at the end of the 1920s.  What’s truly amazing, though, is that during the decade of the A’s self-destruction the Phillies only managed to be equally as popular to the American League club in attendance.  One would assume that what the Phillies were building in 1915 would carry the day over the worst team in baseball, but it just wasn’t the case.                        

     

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[1] “Erskine Mayer,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, accessed April 15, 2015, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/4c1d7d5d.  

Phillies 100 Year Ago: Philadelphia Fans Find Fortune in Opening Day

April 14, 1915

Athletics vs. Red Sox

Phillies @ Braves

“Once more the grand old pastime has

been launched upon its way,

Old Europe’s war has been forgot,

the U.S.A. is gay;

The fans of every big league burg are

            Adding to the din,

Each one can prove by talk alone his

            Team is sure to win.”

A History of Baseball In Philadelphia

Welcome to Opening Day 1915!  It’s a beautiful day for some baseball and we have a full slate of games.  Now, before we jump in, it behooves me to give a brief account of baseball in the nineteenth century and during the beginnings of the Deadball Era to get all the readers on the same page.  The 1915 Phillies did not happen in a vacuum and some context will go far in adding color to the story.

Announcing the Phillies 100 Years Ago Series!

If you watched Phillies play the Red Sox last Thursday night, you saw them celebrating the club that won the National League pennant in 1915.  When I say celebrating I mean there was banter about the price of milk and eggs in 1915 and some jokes about the nicknames of some of the players.  Oh and they wore different hats!  Which was all fine and good because it’s hard to connect with something that happened decades before our grandparents were born.  Everyone working in the organization now has at most only heard stories of that club, so there is no real emotional connection.  For one reason or another, the Phillies have an aversion to any of their history before 1950.