If They Don’t Win It’s A Shame: The Atlantics’ Final Season In Philadelphia By Chris Oakley Part 2 (based on “Batter Up” and “Mint Condition” by the same author)
Summary: In the first chapter of this series we recalled the shockwith which Philadelphia sports fans greeted the Atlantics’ decisionin early 1962 to relocate to Miami and the impact the decision andthe controversy surrounding it had on the Atlantics’ performance inthe early part of the 1962 MLB season. In this installment we’ll lookat the turmoil that surrounded the team in the days and weeks leadingup to the All-Star break.
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To say that the Atlantics were having major personnel issues in
June of 1962 would be an understatement. Morale was the clubhouse was
the lowest it had ever been, not just because of the endless losing
and the knowledge the team would soon be leaving Philadelphia for good
but also because of the sense among players and coaches alike that the
team’s ownership could have spared them such from such a grim fate if
only its attitude during its negotiations with City Hall regarding the
lease on Haverty Park had been less confrontational. And it didn’t help
matters any that the Philadelphia press was still raking the franchise
over the coals for its decision to relocate to Miami; sportswriters for
the City of Brotherly Love’s major papers were knocking the team with a
frequency and enthusiasm-- if not outright glee --that called some of
those writers’ professionalism into question. The atmosphere was toxic
to the point where some longtime clubhouse employees of the franchise
had already quit and others were strongly thinking about doing so even
before the season was over.
The Atlantics’ lackluster performance during the first half of June
did nothing to improve team morale. If anything, it got visibly worse;
when the Atlantics were in Houston to face the Rockets(formerly known as
the Washington Capitals), several players staged a brief sit-down strike
to protest a teammate’s suspension for cursing out Philadelphia’s first-
base coach. After the Atlantics got hammered by a combined score of 25-6
in the first two games of a four-game set, it was the fans who wanted to
go on strike in protest of Philadelphia’s dirt-poor performance against
the Rockets. By the time the Atlantics left Houston, having dropped three
of the four games in the series, the entire clubhouse was so hung over by
depression one Houston sportswriter jokingly suggested the Atlantics swap
their water coolers for tranquilizer dispensers.
Some of the Philadelphia front office were tempted to follow through
on that suggestion. They were desperate to turn the clubhouse situation
around and were stumped as to how to go about doing it. The continuing
drama in regard to their upcoming relocation to Miami certainly wasn’t
helping matters any, nor was the bitter infighting between the members
of the principal owner’s family-- many of whom were just as upset as the
fans about the owner’s handling of the failed negotiations on the lease
for Haverty Park. The summer heat only served to make an already horrid
situation that much worse; tempers in the clubhouse flared at the least
provocation, and sometimes no provocation at all. At least five times in
one week during the second half of June the Atlantics’ first base coach
found himself having to break up a fistfight or a screaming match.
With the Independence Day holiday and the All-Star break both fast
approaching, the Atlantics tried everything to right their sinking ship.
They called in doctors, psychiatrists, hypnotists, magicians, Olympic
athletes, even a retired Marine Corps drill sergeant to try and get their
players to straighten up and fly right. Alas, nothing worked; on July 10,
the eve of the 1961 All-Star game, Philadelphia was still stranded at the
bottom of the heap in the American League standings. Even the perpetually
underachieving Houston Rockets, who weren’t doing much better in their new
guise than they had in their old identity as the Washington Capitals, were
winning more often than the Atlantics.
Down in Miami, baseball fans in the Atlantics’ future home city were
starting to wonder if their soon-to-be-ballclub was worth the trouble that
had been stirred up in acquiring it. At least the Dodgers had been fairly
successful during their final decade in Brooklyn before coming out west to
Los Angeles. The Atlantics, however, were losing badly and often-- so much
so that there was talk in some quarters the MLB commissioner’s office was
thinking of investigating the team on possible charges of a conspiracy to
fix games. One Philadelphia Daily News sportswriter responded to the rumor
with a joke to the effect that the accusations of fixing couldn’t possibly
be true since that kind of a conspiracy would require some brainpower, and
nobody in the Atlantics locker room had any brains.
Even the New York Mets, a chronically inept franchise themselves at
that time and already on their way to recording a historic 120 losses for
the 1962 MLB regular season, seemed to be having a much better year than
the Atlantics. To put this situation in perspective Marv Throneberry, the
Mets’ spectacularly incompetent first baseman, managed in the first week
of June to get more putouts by himself than the whole Philadelphia infield
put together had been able to complete for the entire month. To say it was
embarrassing for the Atlantics to be in this situation would scarcely even
begin to scratch the surface of the mortification Philadelphia players and
coaches felt going into the Independence Day holiday.
At the All-Star break, the Atlantics were a full twenty-five games
out of first place in the American League standings and in genuine peril
of dropping thirty back. Philadelphia could only manage to get one player
on the American League All-Star team's lineup-- a relief pitcher by the
name of Alberto Dumar who barely lasted half an inning and gave up three
hits and two runs during that half-inning. (Dumar ended up retiring from
the majors less than a year later.) The flow of criticism which had been
directed at the team almost from the beginning of the '62 season was now
becoming a tsunami, and before Haverty Park closed its doors for good that
tsunami would wash much of the remaining Atlantics coaching staff and team
front offices out of a job.
Still fans kept turning out to see the Atlantics play, knowing they
wouldn't have many more chances to do so before the team pulled up stakes
and decamped for Florida. In one of the saddest ironies of the Atlantics'
final days in Philadelphia, the slumping ticket sales that had been one of
the early factors in their owners' decision to take the Miami deal started
to spike upward dramatically in the first half of July. That spike made at
least some people wistfully consider what might have been if that jump in
ticket sales had happened sooner...