Athletics Story

October 27, 2012

by S.O. Grauley, staff writer, Philadelphia Inquirer. The following are excerpts from a wonderful piece on Connie Mack by S.O. Grauley in today’s Inquirer.

Connie Mack has regained his peak. After fifteen long, nerve-racking years, crammed with worries, brimful of disaster and invariably discouraging, the “Lean Leader” of the Athletics has again that honor which was his so many times when the famous White Elephants ruled the baseball kingdom.

Year after year, since the utter rout of his champions of 1914, Mack could never build a winner…He faced long bleak seasons of untold bitter disappointments and most discouraging endings. Seven times he finished the AMerican League season in last place.

Such a showing would have driven most baseball men to despair. Many would have tossed up their arms and and said, “What’s the use? Fate is against me.”

But Mack, like Ben Hur, who in the climax of the chariot race, was grateful for the grueling years at the oars of the galley, became hardened to those sneers. The elongated leader of the club had fait in his own convictions, own judgement and was firm in his determination to again prove to Philadelphians…that he could come back. Year after year, during those lean seasons when the Athletics were the door mat of the American League Connie often was assailed with the sneering remark, “Get another manager, youre too old to stay in modern baseball.”

But those who sneered and jeered at the silent man of the team, the man who has become famous again through his persistency to come back and win games by signaling his players’ movements in the field, via his famous scorecard, are now the first to acclaim this man, who is now nearly three score and ten, as the greatest manager in baseball.

That he and his wonderful team will go into the 1929 World Series bearing the good wishes of every local fan is quite evident. Timely hitting, good pitching, and a strong defense has carried the A’s to the American championship. Well managed, well balanced, and well executed plays enabled the Macks to sweep aside the Yankee menace and bring to Philadelphia a pennant so greatly desired.

Philadelphians always made much of the Athletics. Ever since 1901 when the American League swept east, planted a team here and there on the Atlantic coast, fans took to the new invasion. Here in Philadelphia the Athletics went over big…The fight between the new league and the National over players and the showing of the Athletics in the race brought Philadelphia fandom flocking to the gates of the new park out 29th street. So popular became the Mackmen that the expression of “Follow the crowd”, which the Inquirer had so timely suggested as a slogan, became famous throughout the land of baseball.

Twenty nine years of baseball. Seven pennant winners, six second places. Surely Mack has just cause to feel proud of this achievment. The Inquirer extends hearty congratulations to the Man Who Came Back.

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