The team that brought baseball back to Philly

Nowhere does the passion for baseball burn hotter than in Philadelphia. With 3.5 million people packing Citizens Bank Park last year - the game's biggest turnout - it seems incredible that big-league baseball once vanished from this city, and was in danger of collapsing everywhere. But, 130 years ago this season, Philadelphians helped bring the national pastime back to life with a show of affection unlike anything anyone had ever seen.

Back then, Philadelphia was America's second-biggest city, a booming hub of trade and manufacturing. Loaded with wealth, Philly had extraordinary cultural advantages - museums, colleges, hospitals - as well as a relatively low mortality rate, thanks to its excellent water and sewer system. Of its 145,000 buildings, the Board of Health boasted, 26,000 had water closets, or toilets, and many more had piped-in water. But Philadelphia lacked one vital amenity of a first-class metropolis: a good professional baseball team.

The National League had expelled the Philadelphia Athletics from its ranks after the 1876 season for failing to play out their entire schedule, and professional baseball had petered out in the city, as fans grew tired of dealing with rowdies in the stands and gambling scandals that raised serious doubts about the game's integrity.

In 1881, Philadelphia theatrical manager Billy Sharsig and cigar-store owner Charlie Mason decided to do something about it. Using gold hidden in a stocking, the life's savings of Sharsig's aged mother, they brought together some players and branded their new team the Athletics, after the famous earlier club.

For a time, it appeared that Sharsig had squandered his mother's nest egg. "When I went around among the newspaper offices and asked them to publish some baseball matter," he recalled, "they said: 'Billy, get out. We have no time to talk about a dead crow.' " But the wretched raven began to revive slowly, and when the co-owners took in a remarkable showman as a third investor, baseball was ready to boom again.

His name was Lew Simmons, and he was one of the most famous stars of the racist minstrel stage, a virtuoso banjo picker and black-faced comic crooner. During the Civil War, he had introduced a stirring new song, "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." In 1871, he invested his earnings in the Arch Street Opera House, which survives today as the Trocadero Theatre. In November 1881, trading stage lights for baseball, he caught a train to Cincinnati to enter his Philadelphia Athletics as a charter member in a new major league.

The American Association presented a stark contrast to the older, stodgier National League, founded in 1876. The National League barred Sunday baseball and liquor sales at its parks; the American Association welcomed both (winning the nickname of "the Beer and Whiskey Circuit") and charged only 25 cents for admission, half the league's tariff, making a game far more enticing to immigrants and working people. While the Athletics eschewed beer sales and Sunday ball, leaving those to the less fastidious Midwest, they drew big crowds in the association from the start.

Though their Athletics finished a distant second to the Cincinnati Reds in 1882, the three owners, who kept no books and divided the take each day, commenced lugging home sacks stuffed with cash. The National League, eager to get a piece of this lucrative market back, added the Philadelphia Phillies in 1883, the same franchise that survives today.

Simmons, meanwhile, poured his money into signing some of the game's best players, including a speedy slugger named Harry Stovey and a dogged little pitcher, Bobby Mathews, who would win more career big-league games (297) than anybody left out of the Hall of Fame. But the salvation of the '83 Athletics was a star pitcher from Yale College, Dan Jones, whose nickname - "Jumping Jack" - described what may have been the most unorthodox delivery in big-league history.

"Base ball," then two words, was a tough and violent game in those days, played bare-handed with a hard ball by hard-drinking men who had to fight for their jobs. Owners rarely paid for more than 12- or 13-man rosters. Those too badly injured to play were sent home, often without pay.

Stovey, limping on a wrenched ankle, and Jones, jumping and throwing with a sore arm, won the American Association pennant in thrilling fashion by the narrowest margin possible, in extra innings by one run and one game. The race had driven the whole country "base ball mad," one observer noted.

Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for a nighttime victory parade in downtown Philadelphia. Along the route, fans cried out with joy and waved jumping-jack toys. "Nothing in the history of ancient Greece or Rome will compare with the reception given to the champions tonight," banquet speaker Thomas Fitzgerald declared.

The "Beer and Whiskey Circuit" effectively disappeared in 1892 (though the National League took over the American Association franchises we know today as the St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Los Angeles Dodgers). But the Athletics had made certain that baseball, from that magical season of 1883 on, would hold a special place in the hearts of Philadelphians.