A’s pending relocation has echoes of 1954 exit from Philadelphia

Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics pinched pennies and blamed fans toward the end of their tenure. Sound familiar?

As the Athletics’ days in Oakland dwindle, the team will return to the city where it first started — and from where it first picked up and left.

Before the Swingin’ A’s and the Bash Brothers and Moneyball, there was Connie Mack, Shibe Park and two dynasties that brought five World Series championships to Philadelphia. And before John Fisher announced the Athletics would move from the Oakland Coliseum to a minor-league stadium starting next season, Mack’s once-great franchise was forced to leave his once-great ballpark in 1954.

Now, the Oakland A’s will visit their former home one final time before a multi-year stay in Sacramento with a proposed final landing spot in Las Vegas. They’ll take on the Phillies for a three-game set at Citizens Bank Park starting on Friday in the town where it all began.

With the A’s heading to Philadelphia, it’s a reminder of the franchise’s nomadic history and the circumstances that have surrounded the team for decades.

The Philadelphia Athletics began as an American League charter club in 1901 and were managed by Connie Mack, who led the A’s on the field for a record 50 years and owned at least part of the club for its entire tenure in the city. They moved into the venerable Shibe Park, the first steel-and-concrete ballpark, which turned into the hub of its North Philadelphia neighborhood. Mack’s Athletics dominated the early 1910s with championships in 1910, 1911 and 1913. He stripped that team down, then built it back up with titles in 1929 and 1930.

But as Mack — often referred to as the “Grand Old Man of Baseball” — aged into his 70s and 80s, he struggled to replicate that success after selling away his great players in the 1930s. He ran a frugal operation and would ship out players if he felt the payroll got too expensive. In his best years, Mack excelled at finding replacement players on a bargain, but his strategy ultimately doomed the Philadelphia A’s in the end.

Dr. Bruce Kuklick, a retired University of Pennsylvania history professor and author of “To Every Thing a Season,” a book documenting the history of Shibe Park, noted that the signs of potential collapse were there, even as the Athletics found success.

“In 1929, folks would have thought you were crazy to suggest this,” Kuklick said of the idea of the A’s leaving Philadelphia in an email exchange for this story. “But in retrospect, you can see that Connie’s cheapness and his inability to calibrate exactly how to construct a competitive and winning team were going to get him in trouble, as indeed they did in 1948 to 1954.”

This is where the current Oakland A’s hold a connection to their Philly roots beyond the elephant emblem they continue to boast on their uniform sleeve. The Athletics have won four World Series in Oakland and found relative success with a limited budget in the 2000s. But the trading of stars, low payroll and dreadful win-loss records in recent years have diminished the interest in the team.
While many fans have tuned out, some have turned up the intensity over the years to keep the team in Oakland. Jorge Leon, president of the A’s supporters group the Oakland ‘68s, has been part of the effort since 1998. His group has put together demonstrations to call for Fisher to sell the team, arguing that an owner unwilling to invest in the roster won’t find success on the field or at the box office.

“It’s the old playbook from ownership, and we as fans need to kind of wake up from that,” Leon said in a phone interview. “They create these false narratives saying we can’t support them. But they don’t look at the actual numbers and what ownership does to create the situation like in Oakland, for example. That’s a playbook that ownership’s been using since the (beginning) of time — since the Connie Mack era — and it’s just frustrating.”

Philadelphia A’s fans felt the same way.

As Mack stepped down as manager in 1950, his sons Roy and Earle joined the ownership group and continued their father’s penny-pinching ways. “The Mack family as a whole was a pretty shabby lot by the ‘50s,” Kuklick said. “Roy and Earle were not very bright. Their dad was too old.”

Philadelphia baseball fans began to buy into the National League’s Phillies after their 1950 run to the World Series, and the failing A’s struggled to fill their aging ballpark, renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1953. Rumors swirled in the newspapers that the Athletics could relocate to a number of different cities. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin published letters to the editor from fans about how to keep the team in town. Readers wrote about improving the stadium, its parking situation and holding promotional events. The most common feeling, however, was that a better on-field product was needed, which fans doubted could happen with the Macks in charge.

While many locals called for the Mack family to sell the team, the city organized a “Save the A’s” campaign in the summer of 1954 when it became obvious the Athletics were at risk of being sold and moved, putting the onus on the fans to support the club and keep it in Philly. A small surge of patrons followed, but not enough to make a difference. As Bulletin sports columnist Hugh Brown opined at the time, the damage was already done.

“No city, no matter how large and charitable, can be whipped or cajoled into supporting a team that has finished in the cellar eight times during the last 13 years, (finishing in the league’s top half) only twice during that long period,” Brown wrote. “… The Athletics’ miseries are deep-rooted. They cannot be cured by a brief eruption of ticket sales that will merely postpone the inevitable.”

A similar tune applies to the Oakland A’s and their reverse boycotts from last season. Athletics fans came in droves to voice their displeasure with Fisher and show they can still support a team. But an entertaining product — and an owner committed to a city — is what gets fans out to the park consistently. With the news of the A’s leaving for Sacramento, even some die-hards like Leon are abstaining from the games, refusing to support Fisher financially. He’ll return to the dilapidated Coliseum for the final home games of the year as a send-off, but he’ll never forgive those involved in the relocation.

“For Major League Baseball, John Fisher and (MLB commissioner) Rob Manfred, this will always — definitely — be a black eye,” Leon said.

Just as the Athletics are leaving Oakland, the Macks moved the club away from Philly after running out of funds to operate. They sold the team to businessman Arnold Johnson, who moved the A’s to Kansas City, Missouri, their home from 1955 to 1967 before heading to Oakland. The Philadelphia A’s reached heights that few other clubs in the history of baseball have, then their ownership stopped providing the resources the team needed to succeed. Many Philadelphia baseball fans were devastated and — even worse — many others were simply apathetic.

The story has followed the team to the current day, as Fisher has failed to put winning teams on the field as he angles to move the franchise out of Oakland. The Athletics are on the move once again, and a quick stop at their old home is only fitting.

“It is too much to say that the A’s as a franchise are cursed,” Kuklick said. “But maybe they are. The Philly A’s left Philly in disgrace. For many years in (Kansas City) they were a Yankees farm club. They went to Oakland where they have been underfunded and underhoused, and are now going to play in a minor-league park before they leave Sacramento for Vegas. This has got to be a peripatetic record.

“I have read that the Vegas people are really committed to them, but I will only believe this when I see it.”