A Baseball Plant Tour

By Bob Warrington

In 1927, an old friend and an old antagonist joined the Philadelphia Athletics’ roster. Eddie Collins and Ty Cobb, fired as managers of the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers, respectively, after the 1926 season, both signed to play with the A’s in 1927.

Eddie Collins, of course, had been with the Athletics before. He first joined the club in 1906 and played with it through the 1914 season. Collins was a key member of the First Dynasty period, in which the A’s won four American League pennants and three World Series championships from 1910-14. Manager Connie Mack began dismantling his juggernaut after the 1914 season, selling Collins to the White Sox for a reported $50,000 dollars. Collins stayed with the Pale Hose from 1915-26, serving as a player-manager during the final two years of his tenure.

Ty Cobb, long affiliated with the Tigers and an enduring nemesis of the Athletics, was a protagonist in one of the most notorious incidents involving the A’s during the team’s early years. On August 24, 1909, Philadelphia was in first place in the American League, holding a precarious one-game lead over Detroit. In a series played in Detroit, there was a play in the opening game involving Cobb and A’s third baseman Frank Baker that instantly entered the Athletics’ Hall of Infamy. Norman Macht, in his biography of Connie Mack, describes what happened.

“On a play at third base, Cobb slid into the bag with his left foot, his right foot about ten inches in the air. Baker had the ball in his right hand and tried to tag the elusive Cobb. He missed, but Cobb’s spikes didn’t miss Baker. They grazed the third baseman’s forearm, opening a gash that spewed blood over his arm. Martin Lawlor came out and wrapped it and Baker stayed in the game. Afterward, it took ten stitches to close the cut.”

Cobb, never hesitant to assert his right-of-way on the base paths, crashed hard into A’s second baseman Eddie Collins in another play, causing Collins’ ankle to swell to the size of a balloon. While Baker and Collins were not seriously injured, Mack was livid over the incidents. He charged that Cobb had deliberately attempted to injure his players and said that organized baseball “ought not to permit such a malefactor to disgrace it.”

The most savage vitriol toward Cobb came from the citizens of Philadelphia, however. He received letters and telegrams threatening him with bodily harm. Several wrote unsigned letters saying they would shoot him if he showed up in Philadelphia when the Tigers were scheduled to play the Athletics at Shibe Park in mid-September.

Huge numbers of A’s fans turned out for the series, both because of the tight pennant race between the two clubs and to vent their anger at Cobb. Philadelphia police provided the Tigers’ star with a motorcycle escort to and from the ballpark. There was a line of police between Cobb, playing right field, and the overflow crowd of spectators roped-off in right field. According to Macht, the A’s stopped the sale of bottled soft drinks during the series—thereby taking these handy missiles out of the hands of irate fans. Despite plenty of loud and prolonged booing aimed at Cobb by Athletics’ loyalists, there was no physical violence and Cobb left the city safely once the series had concluded.

All had been forgiven by 1927. David Jordan writes in his history of the Philadelphia Athletics that when Mack introduced Cobb as a new member of the team at the annual Philadelphia baseball writers’ dinner, the audience gave the former Tiger a standing ovation. Cobb noted, “I’d battled and feuded with the A’s and their fans most of my career, needed police protection at Shibe Park and received a good dozen anonymous death threats there.”

In signing Collins, Cobb, and another veteran—Zack Wheat—to his 1927 roster, Mack realized his still-young players needed some seasoning to become a winning enterprise. The experience and baseball smarts Collins, Cobb, and Wheat brought to the A’s would be essential in tutoring still-developing players. The veterans, moreover, were expected to play, not just teach.

Cobb played the outfield in 134 games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1927, scoring 104 runs, slugging 175 hits, knocking in 94 RBIs, and notching a .357 batting average. Not bad for a 40-year-old! Collins, also 40, played in 95 games, smacking 76 hits and finishing with a .338 batting average. Wheat—a year younger than Cobb and Collins—played in 88 games for the A’s, socking 80 hits and achieving a .324 batting average. All three contributed importantly to the Athletics second-place finish that year. But remember, 1927 was the year of the New York Yankees, and second place still found the Mackmen 19 games behind the Bronx Bombers.

The “Acme Newspictures” wire photo that accompanies this article shows Connie Mack, Eddie Collins, and Ty Cobb visiting the A.J. Reach manufacturing plant in Philadelphia, where the three men learned how baseballs are made. The photo is dated April 15, 1927 and is one of a series taken that day to chronicle the visit. The factory was built around the turn of the 20th century by baseball manufacturing entrepreneur Alfred J. Reach and his partner Benjamin F. Shibe. Located at Palmer and Tulip Streets in the city’s Frankford section, the plant produced baseballs, gloves, bats, and equipment for other types of sports.

The visit by Mack, Cobb, and Collins was clearly intended for publicity purposes. The A.J. Reach baseball was, after all, the Official Baseball of the American and National Leagues. The caption that accompanies the photo describes the piece of equipment the men are standing around and also provides an interesting manufacturing statistic for the Reach plant. It reads:

“BALL PLAYERS BECOME BASEBALL MAKERS FOR A DAY. No—this is not a sausage machine, but merely a mechanical device for taking the rough spots out of the seam of a baseball. Eddie Collins, Connie Mack and Ty Cobb of the Athletics made a tour of inspection of the A.J. Reach factory, Philadelphia, where they learned the making of a baseball from start to finish. The photo shows Eddie Collins feeding baseballs to the machine as Ty Cobb tries his skill at catching the balls which shoot out at great speed. Connie Mack watches the stunt with keen interest. About three million baseballs, from the “Old Bouncer” used by kids on the corner lot to the official National League and American League ball, are made at the factory each year.”