December 8, 1914: The 1st Athletics Fire Sale

December 8, 1914: Connie Mack breaks up his champion Philadelphia Athletics. It sets a pattern for the franchise that lasts to this day.

Founded in 1901 with the American League, and not the first baseball team with that name, the Philadelphia Athletics were owned by Benjamin Shibe, with Connie Mack -- the former catcher shortened his name so it would fit better in a box score, but never legally changed his name from Cornelius Alexander McGillicuddy -- as the team's manager, treasurer, and 25 percent owner.

They won the American League Pennant in 1902, before the World Series was instituted. They won the Pennant in 1905, losing the World Series to the National League Champions, the New York Giants. They fell a little short of the Pennant in 1907 and 1909, before winning it in 1910, defeating the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. They won the Pennant again in 1911 and 1913, each time beating the Giants in the World Series. They won another Pennant in 1914, but lost the World Series to the Boston Braves, in the competition's 1st major upset.

But 1914 was also the 1st year of the Federal League, which considered itself not bound by the reserve clause, as the AL and the NL agreed to be. So the FL could offer higher salaries, and Mack, as treasurer and part-owner, could not keep up.

On December 2, 1914, Mack's best pitcher, Eddie Plank, signed with the FL's St. Louis Terriers. Three days later, his next-best pitcher, Charles Albert "Chief" Bender, signed with the FL's Baltimore Terrapins. Both pitchers would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Mack could have sold or traded either of them, and gotten something for them. Instead, he got nothing for them.

So he began to sell off his best players. Here's the starting players, and the remaining main pitchers, from the 1914 World Series, and what happened to them:

* December 8, 1914: Sold 2nd baseman Eddie Collins, a future Hall-of-Famer, to the Chicago White Sox, for $50,000. 

* Sometime before the 1915 season: Released pitcher Jack Coombs, who would be signed by the Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were then known). 

* June 6, 1915: Waived pitcher Herb Pennock, who would be claimed by the Boston Red Sox. 

* June 28, 1915: Sold pitcher Bob Shawkey to the New York Yankees for $3,000. So much is made of the Red Sox' owner, Harry Frazee, selling their pitchers to help build the Yankees' 1920s dynasty, but Mack had a big role in that as well.

* July 2, 1915: Sold shortstop Jack Barry to the Boston Red Sox for $10,000. 

* July 15, 1915: Sold right fielder Eddie Murphy to the White Sox, for $11,500. 

* February 15, 1916: After 3rd baseman John Franklin "Frank" or "Home Run" Baker, a future Hall-of-Famer, sat out the entire 1915 season in a salary dispute, Mack sold him to the Yankees for $37,500. 

* July 1, 1916: Released left fielder Reuben "Rube" Oldring. 

* August 30, 1916: Traded center fielder Jimmy Walsh to the Red Sox for Raymond Haley. 

* December 14, 1917: Traded catcher Wally Schang, pitcher Bullet Joe Bush and center fielder Amos Strunk to the Red Sox for Sylveanus "Vean" Gregg, Merlin Kopp, Chester "Pinch" Thomas and, perhaps most importantly, $60,000.

* January 10, 1918: Traded 1st baseman John "Stuffy" McInnis to the Boston Red Sox for Forrest Cady, Larry Gardner and Tillie Walker. McInnis, Collins, Barry and Baker were known as "The $100,000 Infield." 

The results were staggering, in both directions. Coombs helped the Brooklyn Dodgers win the 1916 NL Pennant. Collins helped the White Sox win the 1917 World Series and the 1919 AL Pennant, before 7 of their players "threw" the World Series. (Collins was not in on the fix.)

Pennock, Shawkey, Schang, Bush would help the Red Sox win the 1918 World Series, then would be acquired by the Yankees, as they built their 1920s dynasty. McInnis would also help the Red Sox win that World Series, but did not go on to the Yankees, though he did play a reserve role on the Pittsburgh Pirates when they won the 1925 World Series. Baker would also be a part of that Yankee team, before retiring after the 1922 season.

As for the A's: They went 99-53 in 1914, but dropped to 43-109 in 1915. That net loss of 56 games has never seriously been approached in baseball history. In 1916, they went 36-117. Those 117 losses were the most of an MLB team between the 134 of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders and the 120 of the 1962 New York Mets, and remained the most ever in the AL until the Detroit Tigers lost 119 in 2003. The '16 A's' "winning" percentage of .235 remains the lowest in the major leagues since the 1899 Spiders.

When asked about this worst season in AL history, Mack said something that entered the American lexicon: "Well, you can't win them all."

Slowly, but surely, Mack began to rebuild. Ben Shibe died in 1922, and his sons, Tom and Jack, were amenable to Mack doing pretty much whatever he wanted. Although most teams didn't have full farm systems until the 1930s, Mack developed a working relationship with the Baltimore Orioles, who dominated the International League in the 1920s.

In 1925, the A's went 88-64, and were only 8 1/2 games behind the 1st-place Washington Senators. But the rise of the "Murderers' Row" Yankees delayed Philadelphia's return to greatness. In 1929, they began a run of 3 seasons in which they won 313 games, and game within a Game 7 loss in 1931 of winning 3 straight World Series.

But Mack lost all of his non-baseball holdings in the stock market Crash of 1929. He couldn't fund the A's with any other income. So, after the 1932 season, despite a strong 94-60 record (but 13 games behind the Pennant-winning Yankees), he began to sell of his 2nd generation of stars. The team never recovered, and the Mack family ended up selling the A's in 1954, to a buyer who moved them to Kansas City.

They failed there as well, and Charlie Finley bought them in 1960, moving them to Oakland in 1968. After 5 straight AL Western Division titles, 1971-75, including 3 straight World Series wins, 1972-74, he broke them up, and the team crashed. New owner Walter Haas rebuilt them in the early 1980s, but the pitching collapsed, preventing a new dynasty. The A's rebuilt again, and won 3 straight Pennants, 1988-90, but after another Division title in 1992, were broken up again.

The pattern held: By 2000, the "Moneyball" regime built a team that reached the Playoffs 5 times in 7 years, but won no Pennants. They sold off, rebuilt, and made 3 straight Playoffs, 2012-14. They couldn't afford to keep it going, sold off, rebuilt, and made 3 straight Playoffs, 2018-20. They couldn't afford to keep it going, and sold off. In 2022, the A's lost 102 games, their most since the Finley fire sale bottomed out at 108 in 1979.

Rumors of the A's moving again have been renewed, since they haven't been able to get a deal to replace the Oakland Coliseum. If they do move, how long will it be before they win again? And, if so, how long before they have a 9th fire sale?

One thing is for sure: The A's are not moving back to Philadelphia, where the Phillies, having won the 2022 NL Pennant, are overwhelmingly popular. The city can certainly support one winning team, but not two teams. But, wherever they go, or if they stay, at some point, the A's will go back to their Philadelphia roots, and break it all down and start all over again.

UPDATE: The A's made a deal to leave Oakland after the 2024 season, play at the Class AAA ballpark in Sacramento for 3 years, and then build a domed stadium in Las Vegas to open in 2028.

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December 8, 1914 was a Tuesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. There was professional hockey, in the forms of Eastern Canada's National Hockey Association, and Western Canada's Pacific Coast Hockey Association.

The NHA season didn't begin until December 26, but the PCHA season opened on December 8, with 1 game: The Vancouver Millionaires beat the Portland Rosebuds, 6-3 at the Portland Ice Arena. The Millionaires would win the PCHA title, and beat the NHA Champion Ottawa Senators for the Stanley Cup. No Vancouver team has won the Cup since.

This was also the day that the Southwest Conference was founded. I have a separate entry for that event.

April 18, 1923: Yankee Stadium Opens

April 18, 1923: The original Yankee Stadium opens, at the intersection of East 161st Street and River Avenue in the South Bronx. What was then reported as 74,218 fans, a record crowd for a Major League Baseball game, but was later admitted to be "only" 62,000 or so (still a record at the time), saw the New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox, 4-1.

Yankee superstar George Herman "Babe" Ruth was not happy that the American League's Yankees were leaving the Polo Grounds, which they'd rented from the National League's New York Giants since 1913. Its short foul pole distances made for easy pickings for the Babe's booming bat. But the Giants were jealous of the Yankees beating them in attendance, so they were kicked out, effective the end of their 10-year lease.

It was fine with the team's owner, Jacob Ruppert, who now stood to make enough money as the team's owner to offset his former occupation, the brewing of beer, having been made illegal by Prohibition in 1920. (He lived long enough to see Prohibition repealed.) He built his new stadium near the bank of the Harlem River, almost right across from the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, with Harlem to the south and Washington Heights to the west.

Ruth walked onto the field for the first time, looked around at the biggest stadium ever built for baseball to that point, and said, "Some ball yard." He saw that the right field fence was only 3 feet high, and the pole was just 296 feet from home plate. The money he'd brought into the Yankees got the ballpark nicknamed "The House That Ruth Built," but it also seemed to be a house built for Ruth. And he said, "I'd give a year of my life to hit the first home run in this ballpark."

What the Babe wanted, he usually got. In the bottom of the 1st inning, against Boston Red Sox pitcher Howard Ehmke, he hit a fly ball down the right field line, but it was caught. He batted again in the 3rd, following an RBI single by Joe Dugan that made the score 1-0 in the Yankees' favor. With Whitey Witt on 3rd base and Dugan on 1st, Ruth crushed Ehmke's delivery deep into the right field stands, making it 4-0 Yankees.

He had hit the 1st home run in Yankee Stadium. Did he give a year of his life for it? Hard to say: The Babe was a heavy smoker, and it was throat cancer that took his life in 1948. He was only 53 years old.

The Yankees won that 1st game, 4-1. The winning pitcher was Bob Shawkey. As far as the Yankees were concerned, the Roaring Twenties were well underway.

You'll notice, in the photo above, that the triple-decked stands hadn't yet been curled around the foul poles. That wouldn't happen in left field until 1928, and in right field until 1937. The configuration of Yankee Stadium that most of us are familiar with was one in which Babe Ruth never played. He never hit one into the upper deck at the Stadium: It didn't yet have one for him to hit one into. Even Lou Gehrig only played 2 full seasons with that configuration: 1937 and 1938.

The opening of the original Yankee Stadium began a 2-week stretch in which 3 of the greatest sports venues ever built opened. The original Wembley Stadium opened in London on April 28, and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum opened on May 1.

Also opening in 1923: The Memorial Stadiums (memorials to the servicemen lost in World War I) of the Universities of California, Illinois, Nebraska and Oklahoma; and what became known as Spartan Stadium at Michigan State University.

The Yankees won the World Series in 1923, their 1st season in Yankee Stadium, and their 1st title, having won their 1st 2 Pennants in 1921 and '22, but losing the World Series both times to the Giants, their Polo Grounds landlords. Before the original Stadium closed in 2008, they won 37 Pennants and 26 World Series while playing there. It hosted the All-Star Game in 1939, 1960, 1977 and 2008.

The scoreboard, and the YANKEE STADIUM sign and the

Longines clock above Gate 4, mean this photo was taken no earlier than 1959.

The sandstone exterior, not yet painted white, and the green seats,

not yet painted blue, mean it is no later than 1966.

The original Yankee Stadium also hosted some legendary college football games, including Notre Dame's win over Army in 1928 that included coach Knute Rockne's invocation of late Notre Dame Star George Gipp, "Win one for the Gipper"; and another Army-Notre Dame game, in 1946, with both teams undefeated. It was billed as "The Game of the Century," but it didn't live up to the billing, ending 0-0. From 1971 to 1973, and again from 1976 to 1987, the Whitney M. Young Jr. Urban League Classic featured black college football teams.

The New York Giants football team played there from 1956 to 1973. They won the NFL Championship Game there in 1956, beating the Chicago Bears. But they also lost it there in 1958, against the Baltimore Colts in an overtime classic that has been called "The Greatest Game Ever Played." They lost another NFL Championship Game there in 1962, to the Green Bay Packers.

Legendary soccer teams have played there, including Brazilian club team Santos, the Brazil national team, and, in the 1976 North American Soccer League season, the New York Cosmos, all with the greatest player in the sport's history, Pelé. AC Milan and Internazionale played a Milan Derby there, and Glasgow giants Celtic and Rangers both played there, although not against each other. A 1952 match featured the last 2 Champions of England's Football League, with Tottenham Hotspur of North London demolishing Manchester United 7-1.

And the old Stadium hosted lots of prizefights, including Joe Louis knocking out Max Schmeling in 1938, Rocky Marciano knocking out Archie Moore in 1955, and Muhammad Ali beating Ken Norton in 1976.

In 1973, the Yankees celebrated Golden Anniversary Day, and invited Shawkey to throw out the ceremonial first ball. In 1976, following a 2-year renovation that required that they share Shea Stadium in Queens with the New York Mets, they reopened Yankee Stadium, and Shawkey threw out the first ball again.

With Monument Park fully fleshed out,

and the interlocking NY logo behind home plate,

this photo was taken in 1996 or later.

The last game at the old Yankee Stadium was played on September 21, 2008. With regular catcher Jorge Posada injured, the last home run was hit by his backup, Jose Molina. The new Yankee Stadium opened across 161st Street on April 16, 2009, and Posada hit the 1st home run, but the Cleveland Indians spoiled the party, 10-2.

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April 18, 1923 was a Wednesday. It was the off-season for the NFL and the NHL, and there was no NBA yet. But it was Opening Day of the 1923 baseball season, and a full slate of games was played. In addition to the Yankee Stadium lid-lifter:

* The New York Giants beat the Boston Braves, 7-4 at Braves Field in Boston.

* The Brooklyn Robins beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 6-5 at Ebbets Field. They were named for their manager, Wilbert Robinson. When he was fired after the 1931 season, they went back to using the name Dodgers.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Washington Senators, 3-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox, 6-5 at League Park in Cleveland.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-2 at Redland Field in Cincinnati. It was renamed Crosley Field in 1934.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 7-2 at Cubs Park in Chicago. It was renamed Wrigley Field in 1926.

* And the Detroit Tigers beat the St. Louis Browns, 9-6 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.