August 25, 1910: Philadelphia native Danny Murphy cycles but Athletics fall to Browns

The league-leading Philadelphia Athletics saw their six-game win streak snapped at the hands of the “meek and lowly trailing Browns of St. Louis”1 in a Thursday afternoon game at Shibe Park, the first game in a three-game series. The Browns entered the game with a record of 34-77; this meant that they were 43 games under .500 and 44 games behind the 79-34 Athletics.

Not only had the Athletics won six in a row, but they earned victories in 10 of their last 11 contests (and they were on their way to finishing August with a 22-7 mark), while the Browns came to Philadelphia having lost seven in a row and 9 of their previous 11 games. In head-to-head matchups prior to this game, Philadelphia had prevailed in five straight meetings, outscoring St. Louis 25-9.

Yet on this day, the Browns persevered. According to the St. Louis Star and Times, “Connie Mack sent eighteen of his tried and trusty gladiators in against them; all proved absolutely harmless.”2 The only exception for the home team came from right fielder Danny Murphy, who went 5-for-5 at the plate and hit for the cycle in the losing effort.

St. Louis jumped on Philadelphia starter Eddie Plank for a run in the first inning and then added two more in the third.3 Then, in the fifth inning, the crowd watched a bit of entertainment, courtesy of Browns manager Jack O’Connor. Cy Morgan had taken over the pitching duties for Philadelphia in the fourth inning. With a 3-0 lead, George Stone was on third base and Pat Newnam stood at second. With two outs, Bobby Wallace stroked a hard grounder that ricocheted off pitcher Morgan’s leg and rolled toward shortstop Jack Barry. Stone scored easily and O’Connor, standing in the third-base coaching box, waved Newnam home. Barry scooped up the ball and fired home to catcher Ira Thomas, who, in home-plate umpire Tommy Connolly’s opinion, tagged Newnam before he touched the plate.

Instead of appealing to the umpire, O’Connor “ran towards the plate and yelled, ‘Did he touch you? He didn’t, did he?’”4 The sports pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “the crowd let out a roar at O’Connor’s odd way of objecting to a decision, and even Umpire Connolly was forced to smile at Jack’s remark.”5 Two more runs had scored, increasing the lead to 5-0. The Browns added a sixth run in the top of the sixth inning, and that was all for Morgan. He was replaced by Jimmy Dygert, who pitched the seventh.

Philadelphia finally put up some tallies in the seventh inning. The Athletics plated five runs off Browns starter Fred Link, who could get only two outs in the inning. Bill Bailey came on in relief to get the final out. Chief Bender, one of Mack’s pitchers, had pitched a nine-inning complete game the day before and had picked up his 21st victory, so he was unavailable to toe the rubber, but Mack used him as a pinch-hitter for Dygert. Bender bashed a two-run double, to raise his batting average to .286.

St. Louis answered with a run in the eighth and two more in the ninth. Philadelphia tried to rally in the bottom of the ninth, as Mack sent in his ace pitcher, Jack Coombs, as a pinch-hitter. Coombs, who had pitched a 10-inning complete game two days earlier and was scheduled to pitch against these Browns the next day, struck out. The Athletics did get one run across on Murphy’s solo home run to complete the cycle, but they lost the game, 9-6.

As stated earlier, the lone bright spot for the Athletics was the hitting of Murphy. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Above all the fuss and feathers, the hitting of one Daniel Murphy stuck out like a sore thumb on a player piano’s mitts.”6 Murphy was home-grown, born in Philadelphia in the centennial anniversary year of the nation (August 11, 1876). He was perfect at the plate, collecting five hits and extending his hitting streak to eight games, which was tied for second-longest of the season (Murphy put together a 10-game hitting streak from June 7 to 18).

Murphy tied a team record for the 1910 season by totaling 11 bases in one game. But in only one inning (the seventh) were any of his teammates on base when he got a hit. He finished the game with a lone run batted in, from his solo home run. He did raise his batting average eight points and his slugging percentage 21 points, to .463.

The top of the Browns’ lineup set the pace. Frank Truesdale, Stone, and Newnam each collected three hits against the Athletics hurlers. Truesdale and Stone each doubled and Newnam tripled in the game. Interestingly, Bailey was awarded the win, his third of the season against 13 losses. Link had pitched 6⅔ innings for St. Louis and left with the lead, but he did not get the victory.

Philadelphia skipper Connie Mack, the Tall Tactician, set a season record when he “sent in every one of his six pitchers in an effort to stem the tide of defeat.”7 It was to no avail, as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported; “[b]y lamming our pitchers all over the lot and jumping on our team like a lot of abysmal brutes, this gang of Jack O’Connor’s piled up a six-run lead on us in six innings.”8 The hometown paper pulled no punches on its pitching staff, writing, “As for our pitchers, they performed consistently throughout. They started bad and they were bad all the way.”9 Plank’s record dropped to 14-8.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tried to blame the Athletics loss on superstition. For example, “the Athletics have won only one game on a Thursday since last June.”10 As a second reason, the Athletics had been nearing the .700 winning percentage mark, and it seemed that every time they came close, they would lose. That plateau had become a Sisyphus-type scenario for the Mackmen. They came into this contest with a record of 79-34, giving them a win percentage of .699, but it was “too much of a hoodoo to get over.”11

Murphy was the second of three players in the 1910 season to hit for the cycle. On July 3 Pittsburgh’s Chief Wilson accomplished the feat at the expense of the Cincinnati Reds, and on October 6, during the last week of the regular season, Bill Collins of the Boston Doves recorded a natural cycle (by hitting a single, double, triple, and home run in that order) as Boston12 crushed the Philadelphia Phillies, 20-7. Murphy’s cycle was the first for the Athletics since the inaugural season for the American League (1901), when Philadelphians Harry Davis (July 10) and Nap Lajoie (July 30) each hit for the cycle.

In addition to Murphy’s cycle, another exciting event occurred with ties to the American League. The newly installed lights at White Sox Park (later renamed Comiskey Park) “received their first real tryout”13 when a lacrosse game between the Illinois Athletic Club and the Calumet Lacrosse team was played under one million candlepower of light, “which constitutes a portion of the light plant that will give Chicago night baseball in the near future.”14 That future took close to 30 years to arrive, as the first night game at Comiskey Park took place on August 14, 1939. Four years earlier, on May 24, 1935, the Reds and Phillies played the first night game in major-league history.

The August 25 loss brought Philadelphia’s record to 79-35. With 37 games left to play in the season, the Athletics needed only 21 victories to reach the century mark. The Evening Journal (Wilmington, Delaware) ran an article the day after this game, proclaiming, “The Athletics are going to win the world’s pennant.”15 The story quoted Ed Bang of the Cleveland News as saying, “By drawing comparisons, I firmly believe that the Athletics will prove themselves masters of the Cubs, Pirates, or whoever may win the National League flag. The one big reason why the Athletics should win the world’s championship is that the Cubs are not the great machine they were two, three and four years back. They have been going; the Athletics have been coming.”16

Philadelphia won 23 of those 37 games to finish the season at 102-48. (The Athletics tied Cleveland in an 11-inning scoreless game on September 21.) They then beat the Cubs in the World Series, making Mr. Bang’s prediction come true. Danny Murphy, a .300 batter during the regular season, “batted .400, lashing eight hits, including three doubles and the only home run of the series, and drove in nine runs as the Athletics crushed the Cubs 4-1 for Mack’s first World Series win.”17

SOURCES

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

Regarding the decision to give Bailey the win instead of Link, the author consulted SABR’s Records Committee who shared “All the Record Books Are Wrong,” by John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball (Ourgame.mlblogs.Com/All-the-Record-Books-Are-Wrong-340d12173b88 – accessed July 2018). Thorn writes, “Scoring rules governing won and lost decisions by a pitcher did not become official until 1950. It was decided that all pitching decisions during the period 1920-1949 shall stand as they are in the official records, but that for the period 1876-1919 the 1950 ruling shall be in effect. The reason for this was that since 1920 the official scorer did exist, and he had the explicit authority to award the victory based on common practice, which was very close to the rule adopted in 1950. In the pre-1920 period, however, there was no official scoring rule or common practice for wins by a pitcher and for many years no official scorer.” Therefore, today’s practices of awarding the victory to a pitcher who had the lead after pitching at least five innings did not always apply.

NOTES

1 “League Leaders Fear Our Browns,” St. Louis Star and Times, August 26, 1910: 7.

2 “League Leaders Fear Our Browns.”

3 Play-by-play for this game Is not available, and the newspaper accounts do not explain how the runs were scored.

4 “Browns Play Smart Ball In Defeating Mack’s Men,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 26, 1910: 7.

5 “Browns Play Smart Ball in Defeating Mack’s Men.”

6 Jim Nasium, “Mackies’ Pitchers Get Bamboozled,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 26, 1910: 10.

7 St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

8 Jim Nasium.

9 Jim Nasium.

10 “Browns Play Smart Ball in Defeating Mack’s Men.”

11 “Browns Play Smart Ball in Defeating Mack’s Men.”

12 In 1906, the National League’s Boston Beaneaters changed their name to the Doves, which lasted four seasons. In 1911, the team was called the Boston Rustlers, and in 1912 they became the Boston Braves.

13 “Commy Shows That Night Baseball Is Possible,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 26, 1910: 7.

14 “Commy Shows That Night Baseball Is Possible.”

15 “Cubs Not So Strong; Athletics Stronger,” Evening Journal (Wilmington, Delaware), August 26, 1910: 10.

16 “Cubs Not So Strong; Athletics Stronger.”

17 Doug Skipper, “Danny Murphy,” sabr.org/bioproj/person/ef6684c3. Accessed June 2018.