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| The Oakland A's are no strangers to the cover of TIME (see more) |
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I have a photo of me, age 9, posed in an A's uniform. A half-century later, I am still that boy, I suppose. Like most fans infected at childhood, I remain loyal to that elaborately scripted letter A (royal blue, not scarlet), to the white elephant that was their logo and their nickname — more important, to the team's occasional surges, like a comet streaking across the sky, and their long dark spells, where a total eclipse of their fans' hearts sometimes lasted for decades.
A'S OF OLD
For the first 50 of the A's 103 years their manager and owner was a slim, severe gent named Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy — Connie Mack. He had been a pro ballplayer in the 19th century, but unlike other managers his dugout apparel was not a team uniform with a 46-inch waist. (The vision of 70-year-old Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, with his bloated cherub face and pear-shaped figure perpetually threatening to burst through the all-too-form-fitting pinstripes, encapsulates a whole lot of baseball's preposterous charm.) Mack wore a conservative suit, a high collar and a tie with stick pin. A baseball game was respectable entertainment, and the A's skipper was bound to dress for the occasion. He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the Standard Oil picnic softball game.
The economic rules of baseball today — free agency, the disproportion of teams' income, the whims of owners (misers or lavish spenders) — create a year-to-year volatility of talent and thus winners. The Florida Marlins, which first fielded a team in 1993, won the World Series in 1997; then they house-cleaned or were burglarized the following season and landed in last place; this year, after paying $10 million for Pudge Rodriguez and getting lucky, they are battling the Cubs for the National League championship. Major League standings in Mack's day made for much more placid statistics. Teams were longtime winners ("perennial contenders") or lovable losers ("cellar-dwellers").
Mack, who seemed a 19th-century anachronism even in the game's salad days, was nonetheless in the mold of 21st-century club owners. He would build a terrific team, win a few pennants, maybe a World Series, and then, believing he could not afford the stars whose success his system had created, sell them off and plunge into — not mediocrity — an incompetence that was both stunning and boring. Mack had a little dynasty from 1910 to 1914, with Eddie Plank and Chief Bender as his dominant starters and Eddie Collins and Frank Baker leading the offense. (All five men in that sentence were later voted into the baseball Hall of Fame.) The A's made the World Series four times in those five years, winning twice. But in 1915 the rival Federal League emerged, siphoning off Mack's best players, and in a year the A's record plunged from 96-57 to 43-100 — a 56-game drop. That must be a record.
They slumbered in last place for seven straight seasons — you did not want to be a young A's fan in that plague period — then climbed back to respectability, a rung at a time: 7th place in 1922, 6th in '23, 5th in '24, and, in '25, when Mack acquired the great minor league southpaw Lefty Grove, all the way to second. (The Yankees, with Ruth and Gehrig, somehow finished 7th that season.) Led by future Hall of Famers Jimmy Foxx, Mickey Cochrane and Al Simmons, the A's remained contenders for the rest of the decade, and in 1929 posted a 104-46 record, an almost exact reversal of their 1915 ignominy. In the World Series they defiled the Cubs in five. Perversely, Mack used Grove only in two relief appearances, relying instead on George Earnshaw, who started consecutive games, and the veteran back-bencher Howard Ehmke, who started the first and last games.
Mack couldn't ignore Grove in 1930. Though it was the greatest year for offense in Major League history (nine clubs batted over .300), Lefty was as imposing as ever, recording a 28-5 won-lost record and a miraculously stingy 2.54 ERA. (Consider that, of the Yankees' 18 pitchers that year, the only one with an ERA below 4.00 was Babe Ruth, who gave up two earned runs in a six-inning spot start.) Grove and Earnshaw started five of the six World Series games that October, and the A's beat St. Louis for a second straight crown. In 1931 they lost a seven-game rematch with the Cardinals. Again Mack sold off his stars, and the A's tiptoed down from greatness: 2nd, 3rd, 5th in the next three seasons, pratfalling into 8th place in 1935.
There the A's found competitive company. The Washington Senators — who won pennants in 1924-25 on the ancient arm of Walter Johnson and off the bat of Goose Goslin (two more Hall of Famers), and remained in contention for most of the next decade — had sunk into a torpor that would have shamed Rip van Winkle, They had winning seasons only four times between 1934 and 1960 (after which they emigrated to Minnesota) and by the mid-50s had achieved a level of failure so iconic that the best-selling book "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant," and the ensuring Broadway musical "Damn Yankees," could boast the plausible premise that the Senators needed infernal intervention — the Devil himself — to secure a league flag. You might think that Washington had earned the motto: "First in war, first in peace and last in the American League"...
...unless you were an A's fan. For decades, our team (I say "our," though I wasn't born yet; such is a sports fan's mark of Cain) was anonymously terrible. No matter how rotten the Senators were, we were worse, finishing behind them 12 years out of 13 (1934-46). If you can't get respect for being good, how about some notoriety — every bit of it deserved — for being awful? We were awful with a capital A's. We had losing seasons in 16 of our last 20 years in Philly. Eleven times in those 20 years we finished eighth in an eight-team league. I don't mean to brag, but hey, dude, we OWNED last place.
A'S OF MINE
I came of baseball age (isn't it always around first grade?) in the last sputtering years of the A's Philadelphia tenancy. I probably plighted my fated troth in 1949, when the A's fluked into a winning season and introduced a pintsize southpaw named Bobby Shantz. Except for this and the previous two seasons, when they achieved winning records (though they were never part of a pennant race, finishing an average 16 games out of first place), the A's had long loitered in the minor leagues of the major leagues — the second division, far below the contenders and pretenders. So I had no recent glory to spur my youthful optimism, no sensible hope of imminent improvement, no future Hall of Famers to show me how the game should be played. But even then, I knew the A's were my sports-fan destiny.
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