Review, Bruce Kuklick, To Every Thing A Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Princeton University Press, 1991

Columbia Missourian, August 25, 1991

Baseball fans frequently date their lives from the significant events they witness on the field. Old-timers can provide a sense of history by linking the exploits of current players to the achievements of past stars. According to Bruce Kuklick, the game provides spectators lessons about excellence, thus connecting them communally to something not available in their daily lives. Kuklick, a professor of humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a micro-history of this relationship between a team and its fans by focusing on Philadelphia’s Shibe Park—later renamed Connie Mack Stadium—home of the Athletics from 1909 until their departure for Kansas City in 1954, and the Phillies from 1938 until 1970, weaving together an urban history of Philadelphia, a business history of baseball, a cultural history of the North Philadelphia neighborhood surrounding Shibe Park, and a fan’s appreciaton of the games excitement and lore.

The Athletics were formed in 1901 as part of the new American League. The two principal figures in the creation of the A’s were Connie Mack and Benjamin Franklin Shibe. Mack, a 38-year-old Irishman, had escaped a life working in factories through his skills as a ballplayer and later manager. Named to manage the team, Mack’s tenure lasted an unprecedented half-century. Mack and Shibe became partners, with Mack managing the team on the field and Shibe and his sons overseeing the business end.

The success of the A’s during their first years convinced the partners of the desirability of a new park. The construction of Shibe Park, Kuklick says, reflected a convergence of technological, economic, political, and social trends. The recent invention of reinforced concrete—steel rods imbedded in concrete—made physical construction of large ballparks possible. The optimistic reform impulse of Americans during the Progressive era created a desire that the park should serve as a beautiful, enduring monument symbolizing a desire to inspire the populace. The main entrance façade featured columns, arched windows and vaultings, and a domed tower designed to give an air of respectability to the nouveau riche entrepreneur Shibe.

In its interior the park was intended to accommodate a range of social classes, with expensive seats around home plate and plenty of cheap bleacher seats and standing room in the outfield. In this way the construction of Shibe Park and several other new ballparks between 1909 and 1920 served to more fully integrate the industrial working class into the emerging mass consumer society. But working-class spectators also had a significant impact on the atmosphere in the new parks, as the crowds were marked by an informality, physical intimacy, and mingling of sexes common in working-class culture.

Despite their magnificent new park, the A’s for the most part played mediocre baseball. The two exceptions to this general trend were the periods 1909-1914, in which the A’s won four pennants and three world championships, and 1925-1932, in which the A’s featured such future Hall of Famers as Mickey Cochrane, “Lefty” Grove, Al Simmons, Jimmie Foxx, and the aging Ty Cobb, and regularly compete with the New York Yankees for first place.

More often, the A’s were a second-division team. The 1916 team was one of the worst in baseball history, with a record of 36 wins and 117 losses. Kuklick attributes the A’s abysmal history to Mack’s managing philosophy. He wanted to win games, but not too many, figuring a dominant team would not draw as well as a team in the middle of a pennant race, and that players on a less dominant team could not demand too high salaries. Thus, after both peak periods, Mack set out to break up the team by selling off its top players.

Kuklick discusses how the team reflected the Irish culture of the surrounding neighborhood in the years before World War II. Many of the players were Irish and several lived in the area. Members of the community frequently gathered at local bars before and after games, but passage of Prohibition in 1920 closed the bars. Residents resented this attack on their traditional culture and in a Philadelphia tradition were not shy about expressing their dissatisfaction. When President Herbert Hoover attended a 1929 World Series game in Shibe Park, the crowd greeted him with chants of “Beer! Beer! We want beer!”

When the Phillies began sharing the park in the late 1930s, they brought with them a tradition of being the worst team in the National League. Shibe Park now featured the two worst teams in baseball. After the war, both teams rebounded slightly, with the Phillies winning their first pennant ever in 1950, only to be swept in four games by the Yankees in the World Series.

Kuklick gives’ a detailed account of the personal and economic troubles that eventually forced the A’s to leave Philadelphia. But he never lets the discussion of finances become too tedious, breaking it up with anecdotes of games played at Shibe.

In the period after World War II both baseball and large northern cities were affected by racial integration. In the neighborhood around Shibe Park working-class white families were moving out and being replaced by African Americans. The growing black presence in the city accompanied the integration of baseball. But both Philadelphia teams were among the most stubborn in accepting black players. Mack, in his last years as manager, passed up the opportunity to sign Larry Doby and Minnie Minoso for $5,000 apiece and Hank Aaron for $3,500 because of his reluctance to employ black talent. Similarly, by the mid-1950s, the Phillies remained the only all-white team in the National League.

In August 1964, Philadelphia erupted in a race riot that included the area around the ballpark. When fans came to watch the division-leading Phillies in the last month of the season, they had to pass through the wreckage left by the recent riot and face the neighborhood’s increasingly resentful inhabitants. Adding to this tension, the Phillies blew a six-and-a-half game lead in the season’s final twelve games to finish tied for second.

Kuklick is concerned primarily with the image of Shibe Park and the teams that played there in the minds of Philadelphians. He insists on taking Americans’ pastimes seriously, not seeing them as merely escapist entertainment. Baseball in Philadelphia, he concludes, has been more than the clash of teams on the field. It has also been the clash of different classes and ethnic and racial groups vying to establish their place in America’s mass democratic society.