September 7, 1943: Last-place Allentown beats Connie Mack’s A’s in exhibition

What happens when the worst team in the American League meets the worst team in the Class B Interstate League for a late-season offday exhibition game?

Only 956 people could have told you firsthand, because that was the paltry reported crowd on the night of September 7, 1943, when the Philadelphia Athletics (44-84, 35½ games back, eighth in an eight-team league) traveled to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to meet the Allentown Fleetwings (35-98; sixth in a six-team league).1

Contemporary reports suggest that what happened was a tight, well-played contest in which many Philadelphia regulars played the entire game – only to drop a 5-4 decision to the unheralded minor leaguers. “Maybe our Wings were playing in the wrong league all season,” the Allentown Morning Call quipped.2

In addition to the 84 defeats inflicted by AL foes through September 7, Connie Mack’s team had absorbed losses to two other Interstate League teams earlier in the season. On July 14 the Wilmington (Delaware) Blue Rocks pasted the A’s 8-2 before 4,412 customers.3 And on August 3, the Lancaster (Pennsylvania) Red Roses licked the “Mackmen” by a 12-8 score in front of 3,578 fans.4 Both teams, at least, had been in first place at the time they beat the big-leaguers.5 All told, the Athletics played 14 in-season exhibitions that season – mostly against military or minor-league foes – including three straight from September 7 through 9.6

The Fleetwings, sometimes referred to as just the Wings, were a St. Louis Cardinals farm club. Seven of the players who passed through the team’s roster in 1943 had either previously appeared in the majors or went on to play there. Two future big-leaguers, both native Pennsylvanians, appeared in the exhibition against Philadelphia.7 Catcher Gene Crumling, then 21, caught the whole game; he played six games with the Cardinals in September 1945. And pitcher William “Slim” Emmerich, who posted a 13-21 record and 5.04 ERA for the full season, pitched the final three innings for the Wings. Emmerich worked in 33 games for the New York Giants in 1945 and 1946.

A preview story in the Allentown newspaper noted that a “banner crowd” was expected at Fairview Field, the Wings’ home ballpark, to see the only visit by a big-league team to the city that season, as well as the Wings’ final home appearance of 1943.8

The paper did not venture any guesses as to why fewer than 1,000 fans turned out. The novelty that usually accompanies a visit by a big-league team to a minor-league town might not have applied in this case: Allentown and Philadelphia are only about 60 highway miles apart, so any Allentonian with a strong interest in seeing the A’s would have had plenty of chances to do so before September 7.9 Also, fans in the Athletics’ home city weren’t any too interested in watching them in September 1943 either. The A’s struggled to draw 1,500 fans to several of their home games later in the month, and bottomed out at a reported attendance of 1,000 on September 30 against Detroit.

Many of the A’s who played against Allentown were regular starters, including Eddie Mayo, Johnny Welaj, Jo-Jo White, Bobby Estalella, Pete Suder, and Hal Wagner. A few played out of position: Suder started at shortstop instead of his usual second base, while Wagner manned first base instead of catching. Bob Swift and Jimmy Ripple, who caught and played right field, were also established major leaguers, though not regular starters. The only relatively obscure member of Mack’s starting lineup was second baseman Frank Skaff, who’d played six games with the 1935 Brooklyn Dodgers and resurfaced with the A’s for 32 more big-league appearances in 1943.10

While regulars or frequent bench contributors made up most of the Philadelphia lineup, the start on the mound went to a 21-year-old one-game wonder whose regular-season major-league career had begun and ended about two weeks earlier.

Jim Mains,11 a second-generation major leaguer formerly of Harvard University, had gone 0-8 with a 6.64 ERA at Class A Utica in the Phillies’ system that season. On August 11 the Phils sold him to their crosstown rivals, and on August 22 Mains made his only appearance in the majors. Starting the first game of a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park, Mains went the distance in a 5-2 defeat, surrendering nine hits and three walks while striking out four.

The day before the exhibition, Mack – bowing to World War II-related talent shortages – had given 16-year-old Carl Scheib his major-league debut against the New York Yankees. Scheib was on the team brought to Allentown but did not play.12

The Wings started 20-year-old rookie righty Frank Lugos, whose season statistics with Allentown promised no greatness. In eight games he went 0-3, yielding 34 hits and 30 walks in 19 innings.13 Lugos managed to hold the big-leaguers hitless for the first two innings, but yielded three hits and two runs in the third. The runs scored when White drew a walk, Welaj ran for him, and Ripple laced a pitch over the right-field wall.

Another Allentown rookie, 24-year-old righty John Pakron, took over pitching duties in the middle three innings. For the full season, Pakron posted a 6-17 record and 5.77 ERA in 35 games for the Wings, surrendering 231 hits and 108 walks in 184 innings.14 Like his predecessor, Pakron worked three innings and surrendered three hits. The Philadelphians, though, were only able to solve him for one run. In the fifth, Welaj singled and scored on Ripple’s double to make the score 3-0.15

The Wings collected nine hits against Mains in seven innings, along with three walks. They were unable to make any offense add up until the sixth inning, when their bats suddenly caught fire. Left fielder Tom Astbury drew a leadoff walk and took third on right fielder Billy Marcks’s double to right field. Center fielder Tom Koval singled in Allentown’s first run. Crumling followed with a clutch double that brought home both runners to even the score at 3-3; he took third when the A’s tried unsuccessfully to throw out Koval at home. A fly out from second baseman George Moesch – listed in Baseball-Reference as 16 years old in 1943 – scored Crumling to give Allentown a 4-3 lead.16

Mains remained on the mound in the seventh as Allentown pounded out an insurance run. Shortstop Johnny Hutchinson17 led off with a double. Two outs later, Marcks laced another double to score Hutchinson for a 5-3 lead. Lum Harris relieved Mains in the eighth inning and pitched a hitless, shutout frame for the A’s.18

The game ended in dramatic fashion, with Emmerich on the mound for Allentown. Emmerich retired Mayo and Welaj to begin the ninth, then surrendered a double to Ripple – the right fielder’s fourth hit in four at-bats. Estalella singled to left field, scoring Ripple to cut Allentown’s lead to 5-4. But Estalella, pushing his luck, tried to stretch his hit into a double, and Astbury cut him down at second to end the game in 2 hours and 5 minutes.19 Pakron earned the win, while Mains took the loss.

From Allentown, the A’s moved on to exhibition games in Frederick, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania, before resuming their regular-season schedule against their familiar AL foes. Mack’s team went 5-21 with one tie the rest of the way to close the season at 49-105, 49 games behind the first-place Yankees.

The city of Allentown hosted three more in-season exhibition games featuring big-league clubs. The St. Louis Cardinals steamrolled the Wings 21-4 on June 5, 1944; the Phillies beat the renamed Allentown Cardinals 10-3 on July 13, 1949; and the St. Louis Cardinals again beat the Allentown variety 12-1 on July 10, 1951. Allentown lost affiliated minor-league ball after the 1960 season and did not regain it until 2008, by which time in-season exhibitions featuring big-league teams had faded from fashion.20

As for the Fleetwings, they resumed regular-season play the next day and quickly returned to their usual performance. The Wings traveled to York, Pennsylvania, where the York White Roses pounded out 15 hits to beat them 13-3.21 The Allentown team finished the season with a 35-103 record and one tie, 48 games behind first-place Lancaster.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Ray Danner and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for general player, team, and season data.

Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet provides box scores of exhibition games, but the September 8, 1943, edition of the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call published a box score.

Photo credit: William “Slim” Emmerich, Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 The Fleetwings’ record taken from Interstate League standings published in the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call, September 7, 1943: 10. Attendance taken from “Allentown Gets 5-4 Victory over Connie Mack’s A’s,” Allentown Morning Call, September 8, 1943: 9.

2 “Inside Stuff,” Allentown Morning Call, September 9, 1943: 9.

3 John J. Brady, “Blue Rocks Hand 8 to 2 Trouncing to Athletics,” Wilmington (Delaware) Morning News, July 15, 1943: 18.

4 George W. Kirchner, “Mack Praises Roses, but Locals Wish Win Had Been in League,” Lancaster (Pennsylvania) New Era, August 4, 1943: 10.

5 Interstate League standings as printed in the issues of the Lancaster New Era and Wilmington Morning News cited above.

6 Retrosheet.org list of in-season exhibition games between 1921 and 2012. Accessed July 6, 2022.

7 Other major leaguers who played for the Allentown team at some point in 1943 but did not appear against the A’s were Joe Antolick, Duke Brett, Johnny Bucha, Lou Grasmick, and Mike Palm.

8 “Connie Mack Brings His A’s Here Tonight for Game with Wings,” Allentown Morning Call, September 7, 1943: 10.

9 The 1943 Athletics averaged only 4,769 fans per home game in a ballpark with capacity of about 35,000, so getting into Shibe Park wouldn’t have been an issue.

10 Skaff subsequently coached for four seasons in the major leagues. He was the last of three managers for the 1966 Detroit Tigers, taking the reins for the last 79 games of the season after predecessors Chuck Dressen and Bob Swift – Skaff’s former Philadelphia teammate – were forced to retire by ultimately fatal illnesses. He also scouted for the Tigers for many years and died of a heart attack in 1988 at Towson State University in Maryland after scouting a game there.

11 Some news stories about the game spelled the pitcher’s name Maines, suggesting that sportswriters were not familiar with him. Mains’ father, Willard, had pitched in the majors for parts of three seasons between 1888 and 1896. The elder Mains died in May 1923, a few weeks before his son’s first birthday.

12 “Connie Mack Brings His A’s Here Tonight for Game with Wings.”

13 He also struck out 14 batters. Lugos spent the majority of 1943 with Jamestown of the Class D PONY (Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York) League, going 5-3 in 20 games. His incomplete career record on Baseball-Reference suggests he topped out with a single Triple-A game with Rochester in 1946.

14 Pakron also struck out 81 hitters with Allentown. Pakron played three seasons in the low minor leagues and left baseball with a career record of 18-46, including a 1-15 record in his final season, 1945, with Class B Lynchburg.

15 “Allentown Gets 5-4 Victory over Connie Mack’s A’s.”

16 “Allentown Gets 5-4 Victory over Connie Mack’s A’s.” The sixth-inning game action here is also consistent with a description in “Allentown Beats Athletics, 5 to 4,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 1943: 31. Moesch is listed in Baseball-Reference as John Moesch, but Allentown Morning Call game stories from 1943 call him George or Georgie.

17 Baseball-Reference calls the player “Robert Hutchinson?,” but in at least one Allentown Morning Call game story from that season, he is Johnny Hutchinson.

18 “Allentown Gets 5-4 Victory over Connie Mack’s A’s.” Again, the game action here is consistent with a brief description in the Philadelphia Inquirer story as well.

19 “Allentown Gets 5-4 Victory over Connie Mack’s A’s.” The Inquirer story confirms that the final run scored on a double by Ripple and a single by Estalella but does not detail the game-ending play.

20 Retrosheet.org list of in-season exhibition games between 1921 and 2012, accessed July 6, 2022.

21 “York Pounds Allentown Hurlers to Win 13-3,” Allentown Morning Call, September 9, 1943: 14.