Lost In History

Standing at short, English could feel the game slipping away. In front of him Malone stepped off the mound toward home and stuck out his jaw at his catcher, yelling angrily, "You asked for that one!"

Taylor walked forward and tried to calm Malone. "How was I to know?" the catcher asked. "Bear down now and win it back in the 10th. You're the one to do it."

Just then, up to the plate went the menacing Cochrane, who was hitting .429 in the Series. Malone settled down at once and got the A's catcher to bounce a ground ball to Hornsby for the second out. The pitcher was now one out away from extra innings, but his woes were far from over. The Philadelphia leftfielder, Simmons, with his weak ankles and heavy thighs, went lumbering to the batter's box like Br'er Bear in the Uncle Remus tales, carrying on his shoulder his 38-inch-long club. At times like this nobody, except perhaps Foxx, could stir the crowds at Shibe the way the former Aloysius Harry Szymanski, the son of a Polish immigrant from Milwaukee, could.

Simmons was known as Bucketfoot Al for his unorthodox hitting stroke: Instead of stepping toward the pitcher when he swung, he stepped toward third base, into the bucket. A's awkward as the maneuver looked, however, Simmons unfailingly leaned into pitches, driving through them with his left shoulder. Most pitchers were terrified of him because he could drive the ball to all parts of the park. "He had the best power to the opposite field of any hitter I saw," says Hayworth. "He used to hit the ball over the rightfield scoreboard like a lefthanded hitter."

Indeed, for years Simmons's line drives beat like distant drums off the right-centerfield fence at Shibe. On the eve of the '29 Series, in The Evening Bulletin, Ty Cobb had called Simmons "the gamest man in baseball with two strikes on him." Whenever the A's were compared to the Yankees, Simmons was Gehrig to Foxx's Ruth.

For kids who haunted the perimeters of Shibe, Simmons was the grist of legend. This was a time when players often lived in private homes near the ballparks where they played. Simmons lived at 2745 North 20th Street, across the street from Shibe's rightfield fence, in a second-floor bedroom in the home of Mr. and Mrs. A.C. Conwell. Simmons was a notoriously late sleeper, and the discreet Mrs. Conwell would ask neighborhood boys to awaken the star so he would not miss batting practice. One of the lads was Jerry Rooney, whose family lived three doors away, and at age four, he recalls, he entered Simmons's room and whispered to him, "It's time to wake up, Al. You're in a slump, and it's time to go to batting practice."

He was in no slump now. Simmons had an oft-expressed contempt for pitchers. "They're trying to take bread and butter out of my mouth," he used to say. Going to bat against Malone, Simmons treated the pitcher as if he were throwing batting practice. On the second pitch Simmons stepped in the bucket and lofted a drive to right center that looked like a home run. It fell just short, but by the time centerfielder Hack Wilson played the ricochet off the scoreboard, the crowd was on its feet, singing, and Simmons was pulling up at second.

Malone walked Foxx intentionally, setting up a force at three bases, and then Miller stepped into the box, looking for a curve that never came.

Shibe Park, which had opened in 1909, occupied a single city block of North Philly. The stadium, bounded by streets on all four sides, was at the center of a predominantly Irish neighborhood of row houses and small factories. Like a ballpark in a Norman Rockwell painting, Shibe had knotholes in the wooden fence in rightfield where dozens of smudge-nosed boys lined up daily to peer in, as if looking into a giant magic egg. To hear old-timers in Philadelphia remember it, Shibe was a stunning shag rug of deepest green, its paths and boxes and pitcher's mound immaculately manicured, in the middle of a city blackened by factory chimneys and coal-burning locomotives. "Shibe was this perfect place," says Walt Garvin, a 76-year-old Philadelphia native. "Everything was green. No advertisements on the fences. Neat and clean and perfectly kept."

The Phillies played in the dilapidated Baker Bowl, six blocks east of Shibe on Lehigh Avenue, and attending one of their games in those days was tantamount to slumming. From the first year a Philadelphia team played in the World Series—back in 1905, when the New York Giants defeated the A's four games to one—until the Whiz Kids won the pennant for the Phillies in 1950, this was an American League city, a town whose heart belonged to the A's.