Mr. Baseball

Robert E. Lee had just won a great victory at Fredericksburg when Cornelius McGillicuddy was born at East Brookfield, Mass, on Dec. 23, 1862. Soon after President Garfield was assassinated on July 2, 1881, Cornelius was beginning to be called Connie Mack, a name that fit handily into a baseball box score. Young Connie was a catcher--one of the young game's best. He was in Pittsburgh as manager of the Pirates when Coxey's Army marched on Washington in 1894; he was manager of Milwaukee in the Western League when Dewey took Manila in 1898. And when MacArthur landed at Inchon in 1950, Mr. Mack was still at the ballpark. He was 87, and he had been manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for half a century.

It was an accomplishment simply to have lasted through the roughneck growth of baseball into its age of respectability and glory. But Connie Mack did more than survive: he changed the game.

Behind the Plate. As a string-straight teen-ager refugee from a shoe factory, Connie learned his trade in a day when pitchers lobbed the ball underhand and catchers grabbed it on the first bounce some 15 ft. back of the plate. It was all too soft for Connie. His only equipment a fingerless kid glove, Connie walked out to the mound one day and told his pitcher to fire the ball overhand. The unexpected stunt almost started a riot among the fans, but the style stuck.

Then Connie moved up right behind the batter. That close, he could not resist the temptation to tip bats and trip batters. A good catcher but not a great one, he was tricky and tough enough to move up through the bush leagues into the big time. In that era of fierce competition and low salaries (he got $200 a month in 1886), Connie jumped from the solidly entrenched National League to the short-lived Brotherhood, then to the Pittsburgh Nationals, where he played until 1893, when a broken ankle sent him on to an unparalleled career as manager.

At the turn of the century, when his old friend Ban Johnson decided to take a crack at the majors, Connie gladly took on the job of organizing a competitor for the Philadelphia Nationals. Ruthlessly raiding the opposition, Connie signed up such great stars as Nap Lajoie and Lave Cross. By 1902 he had an American League pennant contender in the Philadelphia Athletics. Then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court barred all the league jumpers from playing for him. Connie was probably the only man who did not believe the A's were through. He remembered a hard-drinking, eccentric southpaw pitcher named Rube Waddell, then dividing his time between baseball and bottle-belting in California. With Rube's help, Connie whipped the league.

That was the first of nine pennants. By 1914 Connie's A's had won three World Series; his "$100,000 infield" (Stuffy Mclnnis at first, Eddie Collins at second, Jack Barry at short and Home-Run Baker at third) was the pride of baseball. Then the A's were humiliated in a 4-0 series with the Boston Braves. Furious, Connie broke up his team, traded his high-priced players for cash. Philadelphia finished with one foot in the cellar for seven consecutive seasons.

Business on the Field. Any other manager would have been fired. Connie owned his team. So he hung on, scouted for rookies, traded shrewdly for established stars. Neatly garbed in a business suit, he was a part of every ball game in Shibe Park. The A's might lose, but it was worth the price of admission to watch Mr. Mack wigwagging signals to his outfield with a rolled-up score card, a bath towel around his thin neck, his famous straw hat hanging near by.

In an often rowdy business "Mr. Mack," as his players called him, remained a gentleman. Rumor had it that his harshest expletive was a mild "Goodness gracious!" In fact, he could spit out an angry "Damn!" when occasion demanded, and he could stand up verbally to the toughest man on his team. Somehow, his excited love for baseball never suffocated under the tall, stiff collars he wore long after they went out of style.

In the late '20s, with a team that included such superlative players as Al Simmons, Lefty Grove, Jimmy Foxx and Mickey Cochrane, Mr. Mack worked his way back toward the top. In '29, '30 and '31 he won his last three pennants. This time the Depression forced him to break up his team. Not until 1948 did the hapless A's get back in the first division. By then, even Mr. Mack's players paid less and less attention to his frantic scorecard signals; Al Simmons called most of the plays from his third-base coaching box. Still Mr. Mack hung on. "If I quit," he said, "I'd die in two weeks."

He quit in 1950 and lived on. Proudly, he counted his five great-grandchildren, but most of his friends were gone; he had passed through the dreary years when an old man watches his world die around him. Last year even the Athletics left him; their franchise moved to Kansas City. Sick at heart from the bickering that marked the sale of his team, laid up with a broken hip, his mind drifting steadily toward the past, the old gentleman was still Mr. Baseball. Even young men who had never seen Connie Mack on the field understood how much had passed when he died in his sleep last week at 93.

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