If They Don’t Win It’s A Shame: The Atlantics’ Final Season In Philadelphia By Chris Oakley Part 1 (based on “Batter Up” and “Mint Condition” by the same author)
They were one of the original dynasties of the American League
and a Philadelphia institution for six decades; they won three of the
first four World’s Series while helping to grow the AL from an upstart
rival to Albert Spaulding’s National League to a significant baseball
organization in its own right. Their longtime home field, Haverty Park,
was once considered a Philly landmark right along with the Liberty Bell
and Independence Hall. In short, the Atlantics commanded a loyalty from
notoriously hard-to-please Philadelphia sports fans no other franchise
had been given before and precious few have been able to even come close
to since.
But in the mid-1950s those bonds started to fray. The departure of
the Boston Braves to Milwaukee, the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles, and
the New York Giants to San Francisco sparked fears among Atlantics fans
that their team too might one day pull up stakes; those fears only grew
deeper after the hapless Washington Capitals left D.C. in 1960 to become
the Houston Rockets. Then in January 1961, a week after the inauguration
of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States, their fear turned
into outright terror as rumors began flying that a Florida-based team of
investors had their sights set on buying the Atlantics and bringing them
south to Miami.
Hoping to use this to leverage concessions from the Philadelphia
city council on a new stadium deal, the Atlantics ownership started to
drop subtle yet ominous hints in local newspapers that it might just be
tempted to accept the Florida group’s offer if it didn’t get a deal on
a new stadium. Haverty Park, for all its retro charm and historic legacy
as one of the American League’s most famous ballparks, was definitely
showing its age and the Atlantics’ top business execs feared they would
have a harder time competing with their league rivals without benefit of
a new stadium. Negotiations to extend the Atlantics’ lease at Haverty,
which had been going fairly smoothly at the start, gradually deteriorated
and by the final month of the 1961 MLB season had hit an impasse. In late
September those discussions were suspended indefinitely-- and as it would
turn out, forever.
On February 17th, 1962, his patience with Philadelphia city officials
worn out completely, the Atlantics’ principal owner contacted the Florida
group’s chief legal counsel to inform him the team had decided to accept
their offer. When news of the decision hit Philly newspapers the next day
the collective reaction among baseball fans in the City of Brotherly Love
was one of mingled alarm and outrage. Just three days after the impending
relocation was made public, a group of more than 2000 Atlantics loyalists
braved bone-numbing winter cold to hold a protest rally at City Hall; for
four full hours they stood in front of the building chanting demands that
the city government resume Haverty lease negotiations with the franchise
immediately. But there was little that could be done to reverse the tide.
The two sides were simply too far apart. More to the point, construction
work had already started on a new ballpark in downtown Miami that had at
least double the number of available seats at Haverty; time and momentum
were working in favor of the relocation.
That didn’t stop some people from trying to halt the move anyway
as the Atlantics started their spring training for the ’62 MLB season.
The Philadelphia police received dozens of bomb threats in the first two
weeks after the Miami deal was announced, and such threats would keep on
coming well into the 1962 MLB regular season. On a more legal note, three
diehard Atlantics fans who were also attorneys filed an injunction in the
city courts to halt the relocation proceedings pending further discussion
of alternative solutions to the stadium problem; this well-intentioned if
somewhat quixotic gambit collapsed when the presiding judge threw out the
injunction on grounds of insufficient cause. A South Philly-based group’s
petition to force the team’s owners to resume talks with City Hall failed
badly when its organizers could gather only one-fourth of the signatures
they needed.
Opening Day of the 1962 MLB regular season was a sad occasion at
Haverty Park-- not only because of the growing realization Philadelphia
was about to lose its American League team, but also because Baltimore
blew the Atlantics out 12-0 in a lopsided contest that saw the Atlantics
get only four hits the entire game while the visiting Colts racked up an
astonishing nine hits in the first inning alone. Most of the crowd had
already left the stadium by the end of the fourth inning; a substantial
portion of the rest would depart by the time the seventh inning was over.
That twelve-run shutout was the beginning of a six-game that damaged the
already sorely battered spirits of Atlantics fans even further.
Within three weeks the Atlantics were thirteen full games out of
first place and Haverty Park had taken on the depressing atmosphere of
a mausoleum. On those rare occasions when the Atlantics did manage to
scratch out a win, the cheers that greeted such wins usually came more
from rote than from enthusiasm; one Philadelphia Daily News baseball
scribe was moved to comment after a rain-shortened victory against the
Cleveland that “they should remake this place into a cemetery when the
season’s over”. Some people would have said Haverty Park was already a
cemetery-- a graveyard for the legacy of six decades’ worth of American
League baseball.
******
On May 5th the Atlantics began their first western road trip of the
1962 season. An air of gloom hung over the team when their charter plane
landed in Houston for the start of a four-game series with the Rockets,
who having shed their previous identity as the Washington Capitals seemed
to be flourishing under the Texas sun. Indeed, in what was a rare event
for the usually star-crossed ballclub they were actually making a quite
respectable run at the first-place New York Rangers; in a three-game
home stand against the Bronx Bruisers just a week earlier Houston had
won two out of three against New York with one of those wins a ten-run
shutout. Things were not looking good for Philadelphia.
Indeed, by the time the Atlantics left Houston their already grim
season had become even grimmer. The Rockets took three out of the four
games of that series against Philadelphia, and even when the Atlantics
did finally manage to eke out a 4-2 victory to close out the series it
came at a high price: Philadelphia shortstop and Québec transplant Serge
Dumont was lost for the rest of the season after injuring his right leg
during a base-stealing attempt in the sixth inning. As devastating as it
was for Atlantics fans, it was even more traumatic for Dumont himself; he
was in his final season in the majors at the time and been hoping to play
his farewell game in front of a hometown crowd when the Atlantics ended
their season with a three-game series at Haverty Park against the Chicago
Furies. Instead Dumont would now be reduced to literally and figuratively
watching from the bench as his teammates struggled through the rest of an
already agonizing season.
Things didn’t get much easier for the Atlantics when they ventured
into Boston to meet the Red Socks. Boston essentially had Philadelphia
for lunch in the first two games of a three-game set at Fenway Park; one
of those wins, in fact, witnessed the Socks handing the Atlantics a 17-1
drubbing that ended with the Atlantics’ third-base coach resigning on the
spot as soon as the final out was recorded. Photographs of the now-former
third base coach storming out of the visitors’ dugout were on the front
pages of Philadelphia’s newspapers the next day and injected a brief note
of comic relief into an otherwise gloomy situation.
What happened to the Atlantics when they ventured into New York
City to play the Rangers, though, was no laughing matter. Indeed, in the
eyes of some sportswriters the Atlantics-Rangers quartet in the Bronx
had an air of Greek tragedy about it before even one batter came to the
plate-- the Rangers were an American League institution in the midst of
another era of greatness, while the Atlantics were a hard-luck franchise
on the verge of not only finishing in the AL cellar but losing their home
city to boot. And sure enough, Philadelphia would get their heads handed
to them before they left the Bronx...
