July 25, 1929: Foxx and Grove lead resurgent A’s to 21-3 rout

Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s hadn’t won an American League pennant since 1914. But the team was beginning to contend again after finishing in eighth place for seven straight seasons from 1915 through 1921. Beginning with the 1922 season, the 66-year-old Mack, the only manager the A’s had ever had since the franchise debuted as an original member of the league in 1901, had been steadily rebuilding his team with ever-improving finishes as Philadelphia went through 1929 spring training in Fort Myers, Florida.1

The 1928 club had finished second, a scant 2½ games behind the New York Yankees.2 Mack, though, was “dubious about the prospects of his team” as the A’s returned north, telling Philadelphia sportswriters that “if the boys can be made to hustle the way they were hustling the end of last season, I think that something might yet be done, so far they have not been.”3

Al Simmons’s health was a major concern. Simmons had helped get the rebuild going, debuting with the A’s in 1924. He hit .308 as a rookie and never lower than .341 through the 1928 season.4 But the “black-visaged concocter of swats … had a slight recurrence of rheumatism late in the exhibition season,” and had been advised by his doctor not to play for at least two weeks.5 Simmons was so discouraged that he “threatened to pack up and go to Milwaukee and take to the North Woods for the season,” but he reconsidered after a visit by Mack and club vice president John Shibe. “[They] have always treated me royally. I will wait and see how things stand a little later,” Simmons said.6

Philadelphia opened with a 13-4 win at Washington on April 17 without Simmons. But thoughts of the North Woods proved premature and Mack was likely pleased to have his slugger back in the lineup as a pinch-hitter by the A’s’ fifth game, on April 23. Then, after May 17, when the A’s won to stand a comfortable 15-8 with a half-game lead, they hustled to 10 more straight wins to increase the lead to four games. By the close of play on July 24, they were firmly in control with a lead of 10 games.7

Fully recovered from the rheumatism that had delayed his 1929 start, Simmons was back in left field and having another prodigious season through July 24, hitting .361 with 22 home runs and 93 RBIs. But two other pieces of the A’s rebuild, first baseman Jimmie Foxx (.388 with 20 home runs and 77 RBIs through July 24) and starting pitcher Lefty Grove (16-2 in 22 starts with a 1.95 ERA), were easing Mack’s preseason concerns as well. Both had debuted for Mack in 1925 and were in their fifth major-league season. Foxx, though, had been a teenage prodigy, reaching the majors at age 17.8 Grove, 29, had spent five years prepping in the minors and was already in his 10th season of Organized Baseball in 1929.9

Veteran Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter James C. Isaminger10 wrapped it up nicely in his game story lead, showing off his penchant for history in classic late-1920s style: “Athletic bats made a river of blood run at Shibe Park yesterday afternoon when the league leaders slashed, hacked, and poleaxed Cleveland to fine bits and made a second Austerlitz of the afternoon by winning 21-3.”11 Throwing in everything but allusion to a baseball game with a football score, the scribe described the romp as “the limit in worstings” and a “real debacle,” opining that “never did the Indians have a chance to win after the amplifiers announced the batteries.”12

Grove started for the A’s and, given the outcome, Cleveland surprisingly had a short-lived lead, scratching out a run in the top of the first inning on a one-out single by Lew Fonseca. The Athletics came back with vengeance in their first against Indians right-hander Johnny Miljus (6-7, 4.90) with a varied attack featuring a leadoff bunt single by Max Bishop, a pair of walks, appropriately scattered singles that kept the merry-go-round moving, Grove’s own two-run double, a bases-loaded triple steal that scored Bing Miller, a Cleveland throwing error, a “synthetic” bad-hop inside-the-park home run by Mule Haas, and Foxx’s 21st home run, which scored Simmons ahead of him.

Eight runs behind and with still only two outs in the Philadelphia first inning, Cleveland got a ray of hope when “rain descended so hard that [home-plate] Umpire [Dick] Nallin called time and the players ran for cover.”13

But “after a wait of more than twenty minutes, the rain died down to a Scotch mist and there was a peek of sun” after a 35-minute rain delay.14 Victims of a vicious onslaught but still game, Cleveland finally got out of the first inning without further damage, then nicked Grove’s tightened arm for a run in the top of the second when Ed Morgan singled home Luke Sewell, who had doubled with one out. The A’s rudely retaliated with five more runs in their second and third innings, with Foxx’s two-run homer in the third – his second of the day and 22nd of the season, tying him with Simmons for the team lead – the biggest blow. Sewell scored a small-ball run for Cleveland in the fourth, but the A’s matched it in their half.

It was 15-3 Philadelphia after four innings. Cleveland was done, but the A’s weren’t. Buoyed by his big lead and turning his thoughts to hitting, Grove “lofted a high homer over the right field wall, scoring three more runs” in the Philadelphia fifth as the home club tacked on five more tallies.15 After Grove retired the Indians in the sixth, Mack gave him a rest; Eddie Rommel pitched the final three innings and the A’s scored a run, their 21st, for him in their final at-bat. Grove’s outing hadn’t been anything to write home about – over six innings, he gave up three runs on eight hits and walked five, and his ERA went from 1.95 to 2.03 in the process – but he did what he needed to with a sizable lead and got his 17th win of the season.

Grove’s three-run home run was the only four-bagger he hit in 1929. With his double, he had five RBIs. With Foxx’s four driven home, the duo still accounted for fewer than half the Philadelphia runs. Simmons had only one of the A’s 25 hits – his average dropped two points to .359 – but he scored three runs and drove in a pair.

The win pushed Philadelphia’s lead to 10½ games over the Yankees. That increased to 18 as the A’s rolled to a 104-46 record and the 1929 American League pennant.

The inevitable clinch came with a 5-0 win over the White Sox at Shibe Park on September 14. The A’s had clearly absorbed Mack’s finely tuned remarks through the press back in April when he questioned their hustle. With the season-long resolve reflected by 103 other wins and no losing streak longer than four games, the July 25 romp over Cleveland was just one more piece of evidence16 that the team Mack had put together for 1929 was fully capable of meeting his expectations. Now he re-addressed them, quietly as always and again through the press, in the wake of the pennant-sealing victory: “I feel my boys have worked hard and deserve every credit for standing by and playing such consistent ball all through the season.” And this time he acknowledged the Philadelphia faithful as well: “I am also delighted to know how pleased Philadelphia fans must feel. Without their encouragement we could not have done this.”17

And he had to have been even happier a month later when the A’s capped the 1929 season with a near-sweep World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs at Shibe Park, winning Game Five with a hustling ninth-inning, come-from-behind rally.

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes I used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet for the box scores noted below, team and player pages, and day-by-day logs.

baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHA/PHA192907250.shtml

retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1929/B07250PHA1929.htm

NOTES

1 Spring Training Sites – American League entry, Baseball Alamanac.com, accessed February 12, 2019.

2 The 1927 A’s had also finished second, but 19 games behind the legendary “Murderers’ Row” Yankees.

3 “Connie Mark Far From Satisfied with Showing of His Players,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 1, 1929: 18.

4 Granted, both major leagues were on the cusp of the explosive offensive production that culminated in 1930 and 1931, but Simmons’s average of .354 with 191 hits and 111 RBIs over his first five seasons (1924-1928) is remarkable.

5 “Al Simmons, Again Ailing, Is Lost to Mackmen for Indefinite Period,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 10, 1929: 18.

6 “Al Simmons, Again Ailing, Is Lost to Mackmen for Indefinite Period.”

7 The A’s played .711 baseball (42-17) from May 28 through July 24. The Yankees were in second place, 10 games behind; Cleveland was a game over .500 at 46-45, 20½ games back in fourth place.

8 On the recommendation of his old third-base stalwart Frank “Home Run” Baker, managing in 1924 at Easton in the Eastern Shore League, Mack had signed Foxx, still a high-schooler, in 1924. “Jimmy Foxx,” John Bennett, SABR Baseball Biography Project, sabr.org, accessed February 5, 2019.

9 Grove, who ultimately won an even 300 games in the majors, was developed by the International League Baltimore Orioles and won 111 minor-league games from 1920 through 1924. Mack acquired Grove’s contract from Baltimore for $100,600 in October 1924.

10 Isaminger first covered sports in Philadelphia in 1905, and moved from the Philadelphia North American to the Inquirer in 1925. He received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974. James Isaminger entry, Baseball Hall.org., accessed February 7, 2019.

11 James C. Isaminger, “Athletics Slaughter Cleveland, 21-3,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 26, 1929: 18. The Austerlitz reference is to the Battle of Austerlitz, fought on December 2, 1805, in Moravia, now a part of the Czech Republic. It is considered one of Napoleon’s greatest military victories. Austerlitz entry, Britannica.com, accessed February 7, 2019.

12 Isaminger.

13 Isaminger.

14 Isaminger.

15 Isaminger.

16 The 21 runs Philadelphia scored on July 25 weren’t even the club’s biggest output in 1929. On May 1, they had lit up the Red Sox at Fenway Park, 24-6, scoring 10 runs in the sixth inning. Grove was also the starter and winner in that one.

17 “Connie as Happy as Schoolboy Over Winning of Pennant,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 15, 1929: 1.