Sport: Gracious! Fourth Place

Connie Mack didn’t try to kid the fans. He began the season with his usual prediction : his Athletics would finish last in the American League. After all, they had spent nine of the past 12 years in the cellar.

Last week, to the fans’ surprise, and to Connie’s too, the astonishingly athletic Athletics were playing first-division ball. Arriving at Shibe Park for a home stand, they took a firmer grip on fourth place. Not since 1934 had they stood so high so late in the season. Said their old Manager Mack, who is 84 now: “I’ve been in baseball a long time,* but I’ve never seen a team like this one for spirit and determination.”

The Help of Hustle. All during the Athletics’ lean years, Connie said repeatedly that he had his heart set on winning one more pennant (his tenth) before he quits. The A’s undoubtedly won’t make it this year, but at least they are acting as if they cared. They have pretty good pitching (Phil Marchildon, Dick Fowler, Bob Savage, Russ Christopher), mediocre fielding, and almost the weakest hitting in the league (Outfielder Barney McCoskey is the only .300 hitter). What can’t be measured statistically is their hustle, a lot of it contributed by Rookie Ferris Fain and Shortstop Eddie Joost. One day recently, Star Pitcher Marchildon was being pretty casual about his pre-game warmup. Shouted one of Connie’s enthusiastic young men: “Look, if you don’t want to pitch today, let somebody else do it!” Marchildon pitched—and won.

At 84, Connie Mack’s bushy-browed face rises like an ostrich’s out of a high stiff collar. He could retire tomorrow as baseball’s Grand Old Man, but prefers to remain an active and highly controversial figure. Four-fifths of Philadelphia fans insist that he is the greatest manager in baseball; some of the remaining fifth contend that he is a penny-pinching old Scrooge who trades shamelessly on the incorrigible loyalty of Athletics fans. His detractors say that he profitably broke up his great teams of 1910-14 and 1929-32 because Philadelphia fans, with only the equally sad Phillies as an alternative, would turn out to see a bad club almost as readily as a good one.

Fire the Boss? But fans and sportwriters who holler for Mack’s scalp are wasting their breath; he owns a majority of the club’s stock, and has no intention of firing himself. His son Earle is “captain and coach” of the A’s, but Connie himself runs the team. When people try to second-guess him, he utters one of his strongest oaths: “Gracious!”

Retire? Says spry Connie Mack, his face a spiderweb of wrinkles: “As soon as my players can tell me how the game should be played, and can prove the way I’m doing it is wrong, I’ll retire.”

* To be exact, 64 years. Connie broke in as a catcher with the East Brookfield (Mass.) club in 1883, when catchers caught barehanded, onthe first bounce.