The Philadelphia Athletics of 1910-1914 were Major League Baseball’s first dynasty. From 1910-13, they won three World Series. They won the American League pennant again in 1914, but were swept by the Boston Braves, a ragtag collection of aging discards from other teams and green youngsters. The upset at the hands of the Braves certainly upset the Athletics’ manager/part-owner Connie Mack. After the 1914 season, he nearly broke up the entire team.
“One of the Greatest”
What about those Athletics? Let’s let Rube Bressler, a rookie 19-year-old pitcher on that 1914 team, introduce them, as he did for Lawrence S. Ritter’s book, The Glory of Their Times: “[T]hose 1914 Athletics were one of the greatest baseball teams ever assembled, if not the greatest. That ‘$100,000 infield’ – Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, Jack Barry, Frank Baker. I don’t know of any better infield ever played together. [In today’s dollars, $100,000 is about $3.37 million.] Wally Schang and Jack Lapp catching, Eddie Murphy, Amos Strunk, and Rube Oldring in the outfield, and you know the pitching staff. [I confess I didn’t.] Three future Hall of Famers [Charles Bender, Herb Pennock, and Eddie Plank], that’s all. Plus a few more that should be there, like [Bullet Joe] Bush and [Jack] Coombs and [Bob] Shawkey.” Bressler’s memory may have been playing tricks on him; Coombs pitched in only two games in 1914.
Clad in a suit, a stiff-collared white shirt, and a necktie while managing, Mack never left the dugout during a game. He couldn’t under the baseball rule that allows only uniformed personnel on the field. From the dugout, Mack would position his fielders by waving his scorecard.
MLB managers should go back to wearing suits instead of uniforms.
“Connie Mack. There was a wonderful person,” said Bressler. “A truly religious man. I mean really religious. Not a hypocrite, like some are. He really respected his fellow man. If you made a mistake, Connie never bawled you out on the bench, or in front of anybody else. . . Never raised his voice. Never used profanity of any sort.” Stan Coveleski, who played for the A’s in 1912, told Ritter, “Connie was a good manager. He was a very considerate man.”
The Miracle Braves
On paper, the Braves weren’t in the same class as the Athletics, nor were they devoid of recognizable names. Their double-play combination featured two future Hall of Famers: shortstop Rabbit Maranville and second baseman Johnny Evers. The starting rotation had two 26-game winners in Bill James and Dick Rudolph. But manager George Stallings also had five players who’d never before played above Class B, platooned 11 men in the outfield, and had a 24-year-old catcher, Hank Gowdy, who played just 87 games from 1910-1913 but unexpectedly became the star of the 1914 Series.
“Unexpectedly” describes most of what the Braves did that entire season. Somehow, Stallings’ band of misfits pulled off one of the greatest and most unexpected comebacks in baseball history. July 4 has long been considered a demarcation point where it becomes clear who the contenders and pretenders are. After being swept in a doubleheader against the Brooklyn Dodgers on July 4, the Braves sat in last place in the NL with a 26-40 record. For the remainder of the season, however, they were 68-19 and won the league by 10.5 games over the New York Giants. As a team, the Braves hit .243 through July 4 and .257 for the remainder of the year, although, curiously, six of the 11 most-used players saw their averages decline, some steeply, after Independence Day. Of the players who would be qualifiers under today’s rules, only outfielder Joe Connolly hit over .300.
Today In 1914: The “Miracle” Boston #Braves come all the way back from last place in July to win the World Series! #MLB #History #Postseason
— Baseball by BSmile (@bsmile.bsky.social) 2026-10-13T12:13:02.650Z
Almost a Doctor
Around 1886, Stallings entered medical school but left when the Philadelphia Phillies offered him a contract. His major league career consisted of seven games with the Dodgers and Phillies, going 2-for-20 at the plate. His minor league record is incomplete; what little is available isn’t overly impressive, and he never played above Class A. The Georgia native managed three major league teams before the Braves hired him in 1913. “In his talent for conveying confidence to athletes, Stallings was perhaps without an equal,” Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen told Herbert Simons of Baseball Digest. “His personality had schizophrenic tendencies; off the field he was a cultured Southern gentleman; in the dugout he was a frenzied and profane tyrant, superstitious as a Bushman.” Said James, “I believe he was the first big league manager to platoon outfielders.” According to third baseman Charlie Deal, the Braves’ hot streak started when Stallings ordered them to go out and get drunk.
The Famed Middle Man
Evers, of course, was the longtime Chicago Cubs star who was the middle man in the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double play combination immortalized in the Franklin Pierce Adams poem, “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.” From 1906-1910, that trio helped the Cubs win four National League pennants and two World Series. However, by 1911, Cubs owner Charles Murphy began to break up the triumvirate. Frank Chance, who was also the manager, was ordered to stop writing his own name on the lineup card. Evers, who was hitting .179, was compelled to take a mountain vacation. He needed to hit better upon his return to keep his job with Chicago.
Evers hit well enough for the rest of 1911 to raise his final average to .226. He gave the Cubs two more good years, hitting .341 and .285 in 1912 and 1913, respectively. But before the 1914 season began, the Cubs traded him to Boston for second baseman Bill Sweeney, who hit .218 for them and never played professionally after that season. Meanwhile, all Evers did in 1914 was hit .279/.390/.338 and win the NL Most Valuable Player Award.
James recalled the fiery Evers’ value to the Braves while acknowledging his hot temper when speaking to Joanne Ghio of Baseball Digest. “He was good for our club,” said James. “We needed him, and he gave our club spunk but . . . we never got on well together. I got off to a bad start with him at the beginning of the season – and he never forgave me.” It seems that Evers was given a hero’s welcome when he returned to Chicago in a Braves uniform. In that game, James motioned for Evers to change his position for a certain batter. Happens every day in baseball, right? But Evers refused, and the batter hit a single through the spot where James wanted Evers to play. It didn’t matter that James, 22 and in his second year in the majors, was right. “Evers was humiliated that a greenhorn player would openly direct him before his adoring fans,” said James. They had it out after the game. “Evers blew a fuse, and I was never able to make him like me.”
Deal told Bill Libby of Baseball Digest, “Johnny Evers was our tough guy. He was a crafty little bugger. He used to give the umpires back about everything. It got so’s they’d walk him just to get rid of him. They never called a strike on him, just waved him to first.”
A Fake Phone Call and a Fake Drunk
Before the Series, Ty Cobb, writing a guest column for Wheeler Syndicate, Inc., picked Mack’s Athletics to win it. “Look at the Boston club,” wrote Cobb (or a ghostwriter; we’ll just assume it was Cobb herein). “At best it is only a makeshift team. As someone said the other day, you couldn’t really pick out the Boston regulars because you can’t tell from one day to another which men will start and where, with one or two exceptions. The Boston club is just a lot of ballplayers with no tried stars except Evers.”
The Series opened at Shibe Park, which was the Athletics’ home. The day before the game, Stallings asked Mack if the Braves could hold an afternoon workout there to get used to the sun. Mack refused. The Braves trooped off to practice at the Baker Bowl, the Phillies’ home, but not before Stallings staged a fake phone call to Mack in front of the players, acting out his previous conversation in an Academy Award performance. “He put up such a good show that when he came out of the booth [kids, ask your parents], all the players felt just as burned up about the refusal as he did,” wrote Stallings’ son, George Stallings, Jr., for Sage. “Connie Mack had done more to help the Braves by igniting their fighting spirit than the use of his ballpark could ever have done for them.”
There was trouble the morning of the game, too. When Stallings went to the hotel desk to leave his room key, he was confronted by a large man pretending to be drunk and believed to have been planted there by gamblers. The man drew his arm back to throw a punch, and Stallings quickly had him face down on the desk, turning blue. It took four men to pull Stallings off him before the house detective whisked the man away.
Game 1
Boston won the first game easily, 7-1. Rudolph pitched a complete game, surrendering five hits and three walks while allowing no earned runs and striking out eight. Gowdy was a perfect 3-for-3 with a double, triple, walk, stolen base, two runs scored, and an RBI. Gowdy got the scoring started when Bender walked center fielder George Whitted to begin the second inning. One out later, Bender got two strikes on Gowdy and came in with “the sort [of pitch] that he eats up,” according to the newspaper account. As the pitch was on its way, Gowdy shouted, “Wheat in the mill!” What on Earth does that even mean? As far as Stallings and the Braves were concerned, Gowdy could give a shoutout to any natural grain he desired if he delivered what came next: a double off the bleacher fence to score Whitted. Maranville followed with a single to center to score Gowdy. The rest, as they say, was academic.
Cobb wrote that the outcome “surprised” him, but he had an explanation: “I have always contended that the Athletics could be beaten if properly pitched to, and the team was properly pitched to today. Stallings certainly had all the hitters’ weaknesses doped right, and Rudolph had the hand and the control to pitch at them.”
Game 2
In the second game, James and Plank traded eight scoreless innings. In the top of the ninth, Deal crushed a one-out double over the head of center fielder Strunk. James, the next batter, bunted through a pitch, leaving Deal in no-man’s-land. Deal chose to race to third base, successfully beating the throw from catcher Schang. James struck out, bringing up right fielder Les Mann. Mann launched a “curving fly” which made it past Collins’ “superb try” for a single to score Deal (a “Wilkinsburg boy,” The Pittsburgh Gazette Times proudly pointed out). James retired Philadelphia in the ninth to preserve the 1-0 victory.
Cobb was becoming a believer. “The only thing that can save the Athletics now,” he wrote, “is a complete change of tactics and a revision of their mental attitude as I figure it. Otherwise, they are a beaten club. . . I believe that they are in a bad slump.” Stressing that he was “not trying to detract from the Boston victory,” Cobb criticized Schang for foolishly getting thrown out at third base trying to advance on a short passed ball in the sixth inning.
Game 3
As the Series shifted to Boston, the games were moved from the Braves’ home at South End Grounds to Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox. Demand for tickets was high, and Fenway had a larger capacity. The Athletics’ bats finally woke up somewhat, but they lost in 12 innings, 5-4. Gowdy was the hitting star again, going 3-for-4 with a home run, two doubles, an intentional walk, a run scored, and two RBI.
With Lefty Tyler on the mound for the Braves against Bush, the game entered the 10th inning tied at 2-2. In the top of the inning, with Murphy on second and Schang on third, Baker beat out a grounder to Evers. Schang scored easily, and as Murphy rounded third, he hesitated and then scored while Evers stood, talking to the ball. Apparently, this behavior alarmed nobody, perhaps because the ball didn’t talk back. In any event, Baker had a rare two-run infield hit and the A’s led, 4-2.
In the bottom of the inning, Gowdy led off with a home run to deep center. Later in the inning, Connolly’s sacrifice fly tied the game again. Then in the home half of the 12th, Gowdy led off with a towering fly ball that bounced into the left field stands for a book-rule double. Mann pinch-ran for Gowdy and Larry Gilbert pinch-hit for James, who entered the game in the 11th. Gilbert was intentionally walked. Right fielder Herbie Moran laid down a sacrifice bunt. When Bush’s low throw to third base skipped past the third baseman, Mann dashed home with the winning run.
“Mack’s Men Are Beaten Aggregation” read the headline in Cobb’s daily column. Cobb now predicted the Athletics would lose in four straight and wrote, “I believe [this] marks the crumbling of the great Mack machine, not because it has worn out, but because it has lacked the extra aggressiveness and spunk which the Braves have carried.” He criticized Bush for not holding Mann close to second in the 12th, reasoning that if he were going to take a shot at the lead runner, he should first have made sure that he couldn’t get a good lead. After praising baseball as “an honest sport,” Cobb said that part of the Athletics’ problems stemmed from not stealing the catcher’s signs.
Too Young to Understand
“We did have a prima donna,” Deal told Libby. “That was Hank Gowdy. He was catching ‘most every game, so he didn’t want to wear himself out and wouldn’t practice with the rest of us.” It paid off as Gowdy, a .243 hitter during the regular season, was 6-for-11 in the Series. His .545 average for the Series was a record that stood until Babe Ruth hit .625 (10-for-16) in the 1928 Series for the New York Yankees.
Six-foot-two and lanky, and, according to major leaguer Al Demaree, writing for Collier’s, looking like “Uncle Sam himself,” Gowdy came up with the Giants in 1910 as a first baseman. In the middle of the 1911 season, the Giants traded him and Al Bridwell to the Braves for Buck Herzog. Gowdy began catching that season but didn’t become a full-time catcher until 1913.
Gowdy, a Columbus, Ohio native, was described by John Kieran of American Magazine as a “brash youngster.” Kieran’s theory on why Gowdy performed so well in that 1914 Series: “Hank was so green and wrapped up in the thrill of being a big league ballplayer that he didn’t know the pressure was on. The Series to him was just a chance to have more fun.”
Gowdy, by the way, was the first major league player to enlist in the Army in World War I. He entered as a private in June 1917, saw action in France, and was promoted to sergeant. He re-enlisted in World War II, even though he was 53 years old, and became a major.
Hank Gowdy was born #OTD in 1889. Hit .317 for the 1913 #Bisons and hit .270 over 17 major-league seasons. He was the first active major-league player to enlist to serve in the U.S. military during World War I. Also served during WW II at the age of 53.
— The Herd Chronicles (@herdchronicles.bsky.social) 2026-08-24T12:33:17.110Z
Game 4
The Braves took the Series by winning Game 4, 3-1, with Rudolph outdueling Shawkey. All the scoring happened in the fourth and fifth innings. The difference was Evers’ two-run single in the bottom of the fifth with two outs. It didn’t matter that Shawkey promptly picked Evers off first after his hit. Whether Evers was talking to another piece of baseball equipment at the time is lost to history. Rudolph pitched all nine innings, giving up seven hits and one walk while striking out seven. The game ended with McInnis grounding out to Deal.
Fans swarmed the field. Athletics players congratulated their rivals. Mack didn’t leave the dugout, claiming that the crowd made it too difficult, and sent catcher Ira Thomas to convey his congratulations. Wrote Cobb, “This did not make Mack look as good a loser as his players.” Stallings made a speech to the crowd. Evers was Boston’s second-best hitter in the Series, going 7-for-16. The Braves used just three pitchers in the four games.
The Post-Mortem
Cobb summed up the Series thusly: “As I figure the whole series, the Philadelphia defeat can be attributed directly to lack of preparation and over confidence [sic] which made the club look sluggish. . . The Athletics naturally figured that the Braves had been forced into a hard finish in the National League and that they would not be right in the world’s series, that the pitchers would be fagged.”
Years later, Bressler, speaking to Ritter, agreed and added one more point. “Overconfidence was the thing that did us in more than anything else,” he said. “We thought it would be a pushover. Also, Connie sent Chief Bender and Eddie Plank home to Philadelphia a week before the Series to rest up, and they lost that fine edge. Their control was off.”
Columbus held a big parade to honor its hometown hero. With a brass band in front and behind, Gowdy sat between the Governor of Ohio and the mayor of Columbus in a big automobile that cruised down the main drag. Wheat in the mill!
It seems to me that when a team is overconfident and unprepared, that’s the manager’s fault. But Mack wasn’t going to fire himself. Instead, he cleaned house, and the 1915 A’s were 43-109. They used 27 pitchers in 1915, as though they were a 2026 team. Mack wouldn’t resign as the Athletics’ manager for another 36 years, when he was 88 years old.
