By 1952, the Philadelphia A’s were in trouble.
An American League mainstay, one of the league’s original franchises, for a while they were clearly the best team in baseball. They played in five of the first eleven World Series, winning three of them with a team managed and partly owned by Connie Mack and featuring “The Million Dollar Infield” of Home Run Baker, Jack Barry, Eddie Collins, and Stuffy McInnis.
After a lean period in which Mack sold off his best players to raise badly needed cash, he built another juggernaut from the mid-1920s to mid-1930s that ran off nine straight winning records while competing against the mighty Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. That club featured future Hall of Famers Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons, Lefty Grove and Jimmie Foxx, and even aging versions of Eddie Collins, Tris Speaker, Ty Cobb and Zack Wheat. They won three consecutive AL pennants from 1929 to 1931 and back-to-back World Series in 1929 and 1930.
Then the financial troubles hit again, and the team struggled to attract fans in a two-team town during the Great Depression. Attendance dropped from 11,340 per game in 1929, second only to the Yankees, to 9,496 even as they won their next title. Then to 8,366. Then 5,266. Jimmie Foxx was traded to the Red Sox. So was Lefty Grove. The club finished below .500 in 1934 and didn’t manage another winning record until two years after World War II ended. Only the lowly St. Louis Browns were regularly below them in attendance, and even they managed an unexpected pennant in 1944 and drew enough fans to put the A’s into the league’s attendance cellar in 1945.
Attendance picked up after the war, but everything is relative. Sure, nearly a million fans bought tickets to see the A’s in 1948, but that was still just fifth in an eight-team league. And then attendance began dropping again, from over 12,000 per game in 1948 to 10,604 in 1949, and then a disastrous 4,023 in 1950 as the team finished last and the cross-town Phillies won the National League pennant.
Mack gave up managing the team the next year, turning the reins over to Jimmy Dykes. There was a minor rebound in 1951 but they were still bad, finishing with a 70-84 record in sixth place, with just 5,892 fans seeing each home game. The problem was that they simply didn’t have much top talent on the team. In 1951, there wasn’t a single player who spent any time on the A’s roster who ultimately made the Hall of Fame. Only the Senators could say the same, and the same had been the case in 1950. The only reason it wasn’t also true for 1949, 1948 and 1947 was because they had a very young Nellie Fox on the roster in a part-time role for parts of those seasons before foolishly trading him for backup catcher Joe Tipton.
Coming into 1952, the team was fielding the oldest average lineup in the league. Their best player was probably slap-hitting first baseman Ferris Fain, who had won the 1951 batting title but hit just 6 homers and was already thirty-one years old. Shortstop Eddie Joost was a good defender and was on base all the time, but he was nearly thirty-six when the season started. The pitching staff was younger, but not very good. Alex Kellner had started the most games the year before, and pitched the most innings, but he was just 11-14 with a subpar 4.46 ERA.
Still, there was one potential star on the staff to give Mack, Dykes, and the fans of Philadelphia just a little bit of hope.
His name was Bobby Shantz.
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When I say he brought them a little bit of hope, I mean that literally. Shantz stood just 5’6”, and weighed less than 140 pounds. He was still under five feet tall when he graduated high school in 1943, and was rejected by his draft board when first called up during the war because five feet was the minimum height to pass the physical. He continued to grow, though, and was an excellent all-around athlete. He pitched and played the outfield in a local league, had been a diver on the varsity swim team in high school, was an excellent gymnast, and picked up pretty much any other physical task or game, from bowling to ping-pong, with relative ease. Eventually he passed his Army physical and served in the Philippines, where he played for an Army team against touring major league players.
Once he was discharged, he played semi-pro ball back home in Pennsylvania until he was noticed and signed by an A’s scout and sent to Class-A Lincoln of the Western League in 1948. An excellent year there (18-7 record, 2.82 ERA) earned him a spot on the talent-deprived Athletics for the 1949 season.
He was immediately a serviceable big league pitcher despite his size. Shantz was used mostly in relief in his first season in Philadelphia and had a 3.40 ERA in 127 innings. In 1950 he was moved mostly into the starting rotation, increased his workload to 214.2 innings, and struggled a bit. His record was 8-14 for that terrible team, with a 4.61 ERA. But his 1951 season was more hopeful. He won 18 games, lowered his ERA to 3.94, had his innings limited to 205.1 despite starting two more games than the year before, and made his first All-Star team.
When the 1952 season began, he was the number two man in the A’s rotation and got off to a solid start by beating the Yankees in a complete game 3-1 win on April 17. Only 3,660 fans showed up for that Thursday afternoon game. Through his first five starts Shantz was pitching well, with a 4-1 record and 2.57 ERA. He’d completed four of the five starts, too, but A’s fans still weren’t buying many tickets. Four of his five starts had been at home, but the only one with more than 5,800 fans in attendance was for a Sunday afternoon doubleheader against the Tigers on May 4. That one drew 12,655 fans, or about 6,300 per game, a number that would easily be the worst in the league if that trend held.
But then the A’s spent the last half of May on the road, and it started to become clear that Shantz was turning in a special season. He started four of the A’s games on the 13-game road trip, and he not only won all four games but threw complete games in each of them. The wins included a 2-0 shutout against Bob Feller and the Indians on May 18, and a 14-inning complete game win over the Yankees in New York in which he threw eleven straight shutout innings after surrendering a solo homer to Mickey Mantle in the third.
He came back to Philadelphia with a record of 8-1 and a sparkling 1.52 ERA and was suddenly the talk of the town and all of baseball. In his next home start on June 4, a few more fans showed up, 7,827 to be exact, and he won again. It was yet another complete game, too, his eighth in a row. Four days later, 21,949 fans showed up for a doubleheader against the first-place Indians and Shantz didn’t disappoint them. He threw another complete game to bring his record to 10-1 for the year.
Through his first eleven starts he’d thrown ten complete games and 101 innings, and it was at this point that Dykes and Mack might have wanted to think about what the kids call load management these days. This was a 5’6” guy who wasn’t even 140 pounds. While a spectacular all-around athlete, he wasn’t exactly built for pitching durability, and he was still only twenty-six years old. They’d seen that even a moderate decrease in his innings the year before had helped improve his performance.
In other words, there were clear signs that some prudence may have been in order, especially since the A’s weren’t exactly in contention. When they went on another lengthy road trip to basically close out the month of June, their record was just 21-24 and they were in sixth place. Shantz personally had nearly half of the team’s wins, and there wasn’t a pressing need to keep working him at the same rate given the standings.
But they continued to work him hard anyway. He threw another complete game on June 14 to beat the lowly Browns, then another to beat the White Sox on June 19, and another in a loss to Early Wynn and the Indians on June 24. In his final start of the road trip on June 28, Shantz was kept on the mound for all nine innings of a 12-0 whitewash of the Yankees in the Bronx. He was now a remarkable 13-2 with a 1.59 ERA and had thrown 14 complete games in his 15 starts.
In his first start back in Philly, 13,501 fans showed up, nearly double the number who had been buying tickets. And this was for a routine Wednesday night game against Washington, making it even more impressive. Shantz won again, 4-1, and threw yet another complete game. He now stood at 145 innings pitched for the year and it wasn’t even the All-Star break yet.
Shantz finally stumbled a bit in his final start before the break, giving up four runs in four innings against the Yankees in a loss, but he was then spectacular in the 1952 All-Star Game. He faced three National League hitters in his only inning of work and struck all of them out, including future Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial. In his first start after the break he threw a shutout against the White Sox, then ran off five more complete game wins in a row to bring his record to 20-3 with a 1.55 ERA after the game against the Red Sox on August 5. Over 35,000 fans showed up to see him with his twentieth game on that Tuesday night, while only 6,227 paid to see a doubleheader against Boston two days later when Shantz wasn’t scheduled to pitch.
It was clear at this point that Shantz was an enormous draw for the struggling A’s. Once the team returned from the long road trip at the end of May and it was obvious that Shantz was having a special year, attendance routinely spiked for his starts. The chart below shows the A’s attendance in Shantz’s home starts over the course of the season, compared to the next home game after each of his starts.
With the exception of his final home start of the season when the A’s were already eliminated, the attendance for Shantz’s starts was routinely higher by 10,000 or more fans. On August 15, over 14,000 fans showed up on a Friday night to see him face the Washington Nationals, but just 3,400 came the following day. A week later, 21,000 came out to watch him beat St. Louis, but only 3,300 bought tickets to see the A’s face the Browns the next day. In Shantz’s 12 home starts between June 4 and September 4, attendance averaged 21,328, nearly four times the 5,710 fans who showed up for the A’s other 65 home games that season.
Shantz was a gold mine for Mack, at a time when the team desperately needed the money. So when the wheels started coming off of Shantz in the dog days of August, the team kept running him out there. They were still buried in sixth place, and still hanging around the .500 mark, so there was still no competitive reason for Shantz to be used so heavily. It was purely commerce at that point.
On August 10, Shantz gave up four runs and ten hits to Washington and lost. Back home in Philadelphia for that game on the 15th, he won the game but gave up 14 hits and 7 earned runs. On the month’s final day he was thumped by Boston, 11-1, giving up 7 runs and 10 hits in 7 innings, his first game since the All-Star break that he didn’t throw at least 8 innings.
And then, in his first start of September, Shantz was absolutely dismantled by the Yankees. Over 31,000 fans in Philly saw him fall behind 5-1 after six innings but still trot to the mound to start the seventh. He managed to strike out Billy Martin leading off the inning, and also whiffed Mantle a few batters later, but the other six hitters he faced that inning went walk-single-double-single-single-single before he was mercifully pulled. When the smoke cleared he had surrendered 11 earned runs on 12 hits, and his season ERA had jumped by over a third of a run.
Shantz gave up six more earned runs in his next start, and five more in the one after that. Overall, in eight starts from August 10 to September 14, Shantz went 3-5 with a 5.76 ERA. He never missed a start, completed five of those games, and never pitched less than 6.2 innings. Despite never having thrown more than 214 innings in a season, Mack and Dykes had Shantz complete 27 of his 33 starts that season and compile nearly 280 innings of work. All for a team that finished 16 games out of first place.
After the season, Shantz rightfully won the American League MVP Award. His 24 wins, .774 winning percentage, 1.048 WHIP and 8.8 WAR led the league.
And, in a development that should have surprised no one, he developed shoulder problems the following May.
Shantz was limited to 105.2 innings in 1953, and just two games and eight innings in 1954. It was the A’s final year in Philadelphia, as even Shantz’s glorious 1952 campaign hadn’t been enough to fix Connie Mack’s financial woes. The Mack family finally sold the club and it was moved to Kansas City.
Bobby Shantz was never the same pitcher after that. He eventually moved to the Yankees and became a very good reliever for them, winning an ERA title and making his third and final All-Star team in 1957. His remarkable athleticism allowed him to dominate the Gold Glove awards for pitchers once they were introduced, and he ultimately won eight of them before retiring after the 1964 season. It was a solid career, and Shantz is still alive and kicking at ninety-eight to enjoy the honor of being the last living player who played for Connie Mack.
Mack, of course, was elected to the Hall of Fame, and set a record for career wins by a manager that will likely never be broken.
But Bobby Shantz won’t be joining him in Cooperstown, and that might be because Mack and the A’s management rode his 5’6” frame into the ground in 1952.
I saw a video with an interview of 98 y/o Bobby Schantz and he is still very sharp mentally and came across as delightful human being. I can’t remember where I found it, sorry. I don’t see it on YouTube.
I grew up hearing a lot about "little" Bobby Shantz because he was a hero of my father's. He was a NY Giant fan but followed Shantz closely and saw him pitch at Yankee Stadium. You also mentioned my father's other favorite non-Giant, Ferris Fain. He loved short players, underdogs, and lefties. And he loved Fain's name.