April 13, 1954: Athletics prevail on final Opening Day in Philadelphia

No one knew it was the Athletics’ last home opener in Philadelphia, though if you looked closely you could see the writing on the peeling walls of recently rechristened Connie Mack Stadium. But Opening Day 1954 felt less like the end of an era and more like the beginning of one.

The uniforms were new, after the franchise dropped the block “A” and elephant mascot from their jerseys, replacing them with the scripted “Athletics” in royal blue with red trim – in an attempt to reinforce the use of the team’s often-abbreviated full nickname.1

The players were new: Only two Opening Day starters returned from the previous year after an offseason roster overhaul.2 So many starting spots were up for grabs as Philly broke camp that The Sporting News calculated the team had 184 potential lineup combinations.3

The fans’ fervor was new. A crowd of a few hundred surprised the team at the airport when it returned from spring training, and the attendance of 16,331 was the team’s best Opening Day showing in five years. Opening Day always brings optimism, but this year the crowd’s “air of enthusiasm,” The Sporting News said, “was in marked contrast to the atmosphere of palled tolerance” during their team’s seventh-place finish the previous season.4

The invigorated crowd, including Connie Mack Stadium’s namesake himself, sitting in box seats on the third-base line, took in the Opening Day pageantry. “The Philadelphia Band played periodically throughout, and Mrs. Dorothy Parker Langdon kept the stadium’s new pipe organ singing,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Councilman James H.J. Tate did not dislodge a gardenia in presenting Manager [Eddie] Joost with a nine-foot horseshoe of flowers … and Mayor Joseph S. Clark threw out the first ball straight and true.”5

The A’s – or, as the front office now insisted, the Athletics – took command of the game in their first turn at bat against Lou Boudreau’s Boston Red Sox and starter Mel Parnell. With two on and two out in the first, Don Bollweg, nursing a broken finger, rammed a line drive up the middle to score Vic Power. Then Bill Renna drove a double down the left-field line that scored Gus Zernial and Bollweg, and Philadelphia was out in front 3-0.

Starting pitcher Bobby Shantz, coming off an injury-shortened season after winning the 1952 American League MVP award, shrugged off one baserunner in each of his first two innings. But Boston broke through in the third on three straight batters, as Billy Consolo singled, Jim Piersall doubled, and Jackie Jensen hit a sacrifice fly to make it 3-1.

In the fourth inning, the Red Sox struck again on a solo home run by Sammy White onto the left-field roof, and the score was 3-2. It was in this inning, Shantz said afterward, that he felt pangs in the shoulder he had injured the previous season against these same Red Sox.6 The spasms worsened in the fifth, though Shantz escaped a one-out jam with runners at the corners by getting George Kell to hit into a double play.

Zernial did his part to give his starter some pain relief, blasting a two-run homer in the bottom of the fifth to give the Athletics a 5-2 lead. But after just one pitch in the sixth, Shantz “fell back as though struck,” the Inquirer wrote, and Joost lifted him immediately.7

Pressed into emergency service to make his major-league debut, Philadelphia pitcher Ozzie Van Brabant initially faltered. Billy Goodman finished his interrupted at-bat with a single, advanced on Dick Gernert’s groundout to the mound, and came home on White’s single to left to cut the Philadelphia lead to two runs.

Van Brabant collected himself and notched the next five outs with only one more baserunner. The Athletics loaded the bases in the bottom of the seventh, but when player-manager Joost inserted himself as a pinch-hitter for Van Brabant, he flied out to center off Red Sox reliever Tom Herrin to end the inning.

Joost brought in another rookie, Bill Upton, to start the eighth inning, and watched him load the bases with two outs before getting pinch-hitter Harry Agganis to foul out to right. In the bottom of the eighth, the Athletics loaded the bases again, this time against Joe Dobson. When Boudreau brought in Ellis Kinder, the reliever walked Renna to add another run to Philly’s tally and make it 6-3.

Upton came back out for the ninth and allowed a homer to Jensen and a double by Goodman. Down two with two outs, Dick Genert launched a liner to third baseman Pete Suder.

“Suder, the only Mack player except Zernial who was in the A’s opening-day lineup last year, executed a high, twisting jump – and came down with the ball for the final out,” the Inquirer wrote. Philadelphia had won, 6-4.

“For this one day, at least, they are tied for first place in the American League,” the Inquirer wrote of the victors, unleashing a string of peppy participles to summarize the action: “Big Gus Zernial walloped a two-run homer, darting Spook Jacobs rapped out four hits, raw-boned Bill Renna drove in three runs, bandaged Don Bollweg connected twice at the plate.”8

The irrepressible optimism of Opening Day would prove fleeting. After a 6-5 record in April, the Athletics tallied 103 losses for the season to finish last in the American League. Shantz made only one more appearance all season. Van Brabant and Upton each made only one more appearance in their careers. The crowds would dwindle again. And the Philadelphia franchise, which proudly opened a then-majestic Shibe Park 45 years earlier, would limp out of town after the season, sold to Arnold Johnson in Kansas City despite a desperate bid by Roy Mack.

Robert Warrington summed up the sunset of the Athletics in Philadelphia for the Baseball Research Journal. “A bad team, sparse crowds, burdensome debt, and internal strife all were set against the backdrop of playing in an old ballpark located in a declining neighborhood with limited parking and bad transportation,” he wrote.9

But on Opening Day, joy chased away all dreariness. As the Philadelphia faithful celebrated their triumphant American League team, the Inquirer wrote, “all left with the conviction that pre-season reports of their verve and animation had not been exaggerated.”10

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, SABR.org, and The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record.

NOTES

1 Art Morrow, “Athletics Ditch Elephant, Familiar ‘A’ – Add Color,” The Sporting News, February 10, 1954: 2.

2 Art Morrow, “Athletics’ List Represents Biggest Turnover Since ’46,” The Sporting News, January 13, 1954: 9.

3 Art Morrow, “Vic Power Listed as Triple-Threat Man for Athletics,” The Sporting News, February 17, 1954: 18.

4 Art Morrow, “Joost’s Boys Display Rejuvenated Look to Philly Followers,” The Sporting News, April 21, 1954: 17.

5 Art Morrow, “Shantz Reinjures Shoulder as A’s Top Bosox 6-4,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 14, 1954: 47

6 Morrow, “Shantz Reinjures Shoulder.”

7 Morrow, “Shantz Reinjures Shoulder.”

8 Morrow, “Shantz Reinjures Shoulder.”

9 Robert Warrington, “Departure Without Dignity: The Athletics Leave Philadelphia,” Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2010. Accessed at sabr.org/research/departure-without-dignity-athletics-leave-philadelphia.

10 Morrow, “Shantz Reinjures Shoulder.”