It’s a Trap! - Part 2 of 2
In 1949, scorned Philly fans threw half a grocery store at the umpires who wronged them, leading to a forfeited game.
This is the conclusion of the story we started last week.
Now, on we go.
In 1949, a columnist named Paul Neville used an anecdote to explain Philadelphia fans to his readers. It holds up:
There is a character in the Brotherly Love metropolis who leans on the rail of the press photographer’s stand in the upper deck of Shibe Park and rides the visiting performers. His foghorn voice carries a mile and his taunting wit has unnerved more than one seasoned performer.
In the summer of 1948, during a game at Shibe Park, Larry Doby of the Indians lost a fly ball in the center field sun. Instead of catching it, as was his hope, the ball bounced off his head1. The misplay led to a game-winning triple for the Phillies and a bruise for Doby.
The next afternoon, Neville’s heckler was ready:
He was wearing a German war helmet, painted a shining white. He also carried a mechanic’s hammer and every time Doby so much as peeped out of the dugout, [the fan] hollered “Hey Larry!” and banged the hammer against the helmet.
Doby went hitless that day.
In the mid-20th century, tough fans had a common name: “wolves.” And Philadelphia was the “home of all baseball wolves and their granddaddies. And the worst thing is that the wolves are so close to the action [at Shibe Park], they can practically reach out and chew on your ears.”
On August 21, 1949, the wolves were on the prowl.
It had been 10 minutes since the crowd revolted over a call made by umpire George Barr, who ruled that a spectacular catch by Philadelphia’s Richie Ashburn was a “trapped ball.” The fans had finally settled down, it seemed, and the game could resume.
There was one out in the top of the ninth inning. The New York Giants had a 4-2 lead, courtesy of the controversial double by Joe Lafata, who now stood on second base. The next batter was the Giants’ shortstop, Bill Rigney.
The umpires resumed their stations: Lee Ballanfant stood along the third base line, Barr behind first, and Al Barlick behind home plate. The Phillies’ pitcher, Schoolboy Rowe, went back to the mound to warm up. This was as close as the game would get to resuming.
When Rigney stepped in, the spectators nearest home plate and the bases erupted in “boos and throws,” coming “fiercer than ever.”
The most accurate missiles were (thankfully) fruit. Philadelphians seemed to have cleaned out a produce department on their way to Shibe that day, and their aim was true, especially along the third base line, where Ballanfant was struck on the cheek by a lemon and on the foot by a pear.
Empty cans were thrown, and torn paper drifted down from the upper level of the grandstand, along with other miscellaneous debris. Some fans reportedly tossed that old stand-by, the seat cushion.
Like the signature drink at a wedding, every ballpark riot has a signature projectile. Seat cushions were popular in this regard, as snowballs had been in 1907, and as candy bars would be in the distant future of 1978 (we’ll get to that one).
Here in 1949, the ammunition du jour was glass bottles. This was fitting, as Shibe was the last park in the major leagues that still handed them out.
One tossed bottle (likely intended for Ballanfant) came within a few feet of hitting Willie Jones, the Phillies’ third baseman. Trying to leave the field, Joe Lafata also reported a near-miss.
Glass flew everywhere. Several reports said a single fan, “a youth in a striped shirt,” hurled over 100 bottles, aided by several female assistants who passed him ammunition. Security tried to find him, but he was never caught.
One missile eventually found an umpire. Lee Ballanfant was struck by a bottle on the bounce. It hit him in the neck or the ear—a close call either way. This was likely the moment the game’s ultimate fate was sealed.
“Ballanfant would have been killed if that bottle had hit him on the fly,” Barr said. According to some vocal members of the crowd, that was the plan.
Cries of “Kill the umpire!” rang out in the stands. Hearing such a primal exclamation coming from a crowd of mid-century fans surprised us. This was a refrain out of time, a relic of 19th century baseball culture straight out of “Casey at the Bat,” which journalist/poet E.L. Thayer wrote in 1888:
"From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar, like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore. "Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted someone on the stand; and it's likely they'd have killed him had not Casey raised his hand."
Here, 61 years later, wasn’t a call for murder a little excessive? Hadn’t we come farther than that by 1949? Evidently not.
Struck by a bottle, Ballanfant ran to home plate to consult with Barlick. The chief umpire was then hit in the back by “a large, overly ripe tomato.” Moving to the relative safety of the mound, they were soon joined by Barr. The players, meanwhile, were moving gingerly off the field.
It had been 15 minutes since anything like baseball had been played. Time was up. “With a 180-degree sweep of his arm,” Barlick signaled a forfeit.
It was “for the good of the people, baseball, and the players,” Barlick said.
I had to think of the safety of everyone. That meant fans who were sitting in the lower stands and were in danger of being struck by pop bottles, fruit, and other missiles being thrown from the upper stands. There just was nothing else for me to do.
In 1949, our favorite rule (3.18) was designated “Rule 68; section 2,” but the language was the same, empowering the umpires to call a forfeit “in the event of a crowd entering a field during the progress of a game and interfering with the play in any manner.” The Caller B’s reasoned that bottles could constitute a crowd, even if the people throwing them stayed in the stands. No announcement of their decision was made over the public address, as “the boos of the fans made it impossible to hear anything.” The three umpires abandoned the field.
For the umpires and the Philadelphia players, safety was a long walk away. Anticipating the moment when the Phillies would need to evacuate the Baker Bowl, Shibe Park had been built with a third full-size clubhouse. To reach it—and the nearby umpires’ dressing room—you had to walk in front of the stands to a runway in left field. The runway could have become a veritable shooting gallery, but after the forfeit the fans in range let the umpires go with only “some harsh words tossed in their direction.”
The air seemed to be let out of the crowd. At the end of a long day of baseball, one kind of a loss had merely been exchanged for another. According to one observer, “the fans quieted down and seemed to leave the field in a repentant mood.” Or perhaps they had just run out of sins.
George Barr, who somehow escaped untouched, told reporters it was unusual for a game to be forfeited by the fans, rather than the club or the players’ action. Barr was clearly unaware that the most recent forfeit (in 1942) was precipitated by a wild horde of children.
In this world, a great deal of journalism came down to recall, and results varied. Some reports of the August 21 forfeit correctly identified the previous forfeits in 1941 and 1942. One thorough timeline made it all the way back to the Big Stall of 1937. Other reporters on a deadline retreated into indefinite language: “No one seems to recall another instance of this sort.”
Many accounts of the game referenced a similar and interesting forfeit anecdote from 1905, one in which angry Dodger fans, tired of seeing the great pitcher Christy Mathewson blank their team at Ebbets Field, overran the park and ended the game.
We’d never heard of that one, and for a few exciting minutes it seemed we might have rediscovered something lost. We prepared to write our own name in history alongside the great Gary Frownfelter, godfather of all forfeit research, but alas, this was not to be, because no such forfeit ever happened. Someone suffering from the Mandela Effect included this hallucinated game in their copy, and the wire-services picked it up and spread it like a virus, across the country in 1949 and to us, decades later.
George Barr never backed down from his trap call. “I called it as I saw it,” he said. What else could an umpire do?
The ferocious abuse Barr and the other umpires took didn’t get them any sympathy from Eddie Sawyer, the Phillies’ manager. “Barr was the only one in the park who didn’t see Ashburn catch the ball. It was a stupid decision.”
Sawyer also reminded a reporter that this umpire crew had “caused trouble,” in Chicago earlier that season, a reference to the Andy Pafko “trap” call that cost the Cubs a game. Sure, the details might have been a little different, but the end result was the same. Once was unfortunate. Twice was a pattern.
How many in the crowd had also seen things this way?
The internal mechanics of a forfeit gave to some and took from others. Schoolboy Rowe was found in the clubhouse, “moaning about having found a new way to lose a ball game,” until someone told him pitcher wins and losses were not recorded after a forfeit. Hearing this, Rowe “danced around the room like a kid who had found a lost toy.” In the visitors’ dressing room, someone had to explain to New York’s Larry Jansen why he didn’t get a win he’d earned.
On the day of the forfeit, Shibe had been staffed by a typical complement of 50 ushers and 30 “attendants,” which we think were what we’d today call private security. The city of Philadelphia had a detail of 80 police officers working traffic management outside the park, but only a few of them ever came inside and “not in an official capacity,” i.e., when they had to use the bathroom.
Whatever police were on hand for the day’s uprisings, “they wanted no part of things and stayed under cover until the heat was off, when they made several pinches.”
A handful of men were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for throwing bottles. One of these unfortunates, John Aguado, 54, reportedly suffered a heart attack as he was being detained and ended up at Temple University Hospital.
Just a handful of bottle tossers saw the inside of a courtroom. There, the presiding magistrate called the fracas:
…one of the most disgraceful things that have ever happened in this city. It’s lucky that someone wasn’t killed. If any of the spectators there knows the name of any of the bottle tossers, I wish they would contact me so that I can issue warrants for arrest.
When he recovered enough to defend himself, John Aguado insisted that a bottle tossed by someone else landed by his feet and that he was merely “pushing it away” when he was pinched. The charges against him were dropped, but he got to keep the hospital bills and heart damage, so still a very bad day for him overall.
Those with less convincing stories received $25 fines that some commentators found underwhelming:
A few malletheads in a crowd can ruin everybody’s fun if they are not curbed, and the only way to curb them is to make the penalty for bottle throwing really tough. Let them do the umpiring, for instance, with the regular umpires lined up with a couple of cases of bottles ready to fire when a decision is muffed.
The violence in Philadelphia made national news and gave journalists a chance to try for a moniker that would stick in history: “The Philadelphia Pop Party,” “The Battle of Philadelphia2,” “The Bottle-and-Beer-Can Riot,” but nothing ever seems to have caught on. The reviews were universally unkind:
A sad occurrence...
A scene of unsportsmanship3 by fans unrivaled in Philadelphia’s long baseball history…
The most moronic and disgraceful spectacle of the year…
One editorial, titled “The Era of Bad Manners,” saw the trouble in Philly as evidence of America’s (perpetual) demise.
The disgraceful conduct and atrocious taste that has become so common in politics in recent years has gradually entered the realm of sports, and it is the rare occasion today when sportsmanship as it was once known in America is still observed everywhere.
Whatever misgivings Shibe Park management had about wax-paper cups suddenly cleared up. Going forward, glass would no longer be served to customers, or (theoretically) allowed into the park.
Connie Mack Jr. was the treasurer of the Athletics, who owned and operated Shibe Park. The Phillies had their own employees to work their games, but everybody shared the same equipment and supplies, leaving it to Mack to make the necessary changes in the concessions department. “Hereafter, all vendors who serve soft drinks from bottles will be required to pour them in paper containers for the customers.”
The new policy, Mack warned, would “not entirely solve the problem.”
In those days, beer was never sold in any form inside Shibe Park, and according to Mack, “hundreds of bottles which the grounds crew picked up after the game were beer bottles and beer cans brought in from outside.”
“We cannot search every fan who comes into the park, we cannot eye suspiciously every large package that comes through the turnstiles.”
“It frightens me to think what might have happened,” he said. “The fans were determined to throw at someone, no matter who it was. I saw a bottle land less than two feet from [third baseman] Willie Jones.”
The changes were effective immediately. “If the concession department does not have enough paper cups tonight, soft drinks will not be sold, with the exception of the usual orange mixture.”
The what now?
Project 3.18 can’t resist a tempting rabbit-hole, and we wondered just “mixtures” people were drinking (and throwing) at a “dry” ballpark in 1949. Seeking answers, we discovered this Shibe concession menu from 1954.
In 1954, you could get Coca-Cola (obviously), Hires root beer, or something only labeled only as “orange.”
Plenty of branded orange sodas existed in the late 1940s, more than exist today, in fact. But whatever “orange” was being served at Shibe was apparently generic and—according to Connie Mack Jr.—could still somehow be dispensed even if the park ran out of cups. What are we dealing with here?
Any pop experts out there? Please, be in touch.
“Umpiring has been dismally erratic, this season, to say the least,” the Philadelphia Inquirer declared after the forfeit, “and the Phillies have been the victims of some of the worst.” Still, “boos aimed at gentlemen who seem deserving are all right once in a while, but bottles heaved at the same targets are wrong at any time.”
“An umpire’s skin bruises as easily as the next man’s,” another writer said. “Only his ears are tougher.”
The three umpires involved in one of the more ugly forfeits in a fifty-year span had relatively little to say about it afterward. Lee Ballanfant umpired until 1957, retiring as the senior man in the National League. Al Barlick, the youngest of the crew, umpired until 1971 and ended up in the Hall of Fame. Tellingly, he was a driving force behind the installation of a dedicated umpire behind second base for all games.
George Barr soon decided he was more interested in the teaching of umpiring than the practice, which had worn him down. He retired from active duty at the end of the 1949 season.
In a 1955 magazine article, he had this to say:
In recent years umpire baiting has become vicious. It’s threatening to undermine the authority of the one group of men who keep baseball as a game, and not an anarchy. So I think it’s time an umpire broke with the old precedent of suffering in silence and talked back, loud and clear.
I think you should know the inside facts about the guys who are really out to kill the umpire. And I don’t mean the hysterical home-town fans who get carried away in moments of frenzy. I mean the professionals who should know better—the players and managers who trigger the actions that incite demonstrations.
In Barr’s view, “behind the riots, behind those flying pop bottles,” there was always an instigator in a uniform. And it only took a single theatrical gesture—say, a glove thrown down in frustration—to launch a hundred missiles.
Do you know any people that you like? Let them know you care by sending them a link to check out Project 3.18. Are we among those people? If so, restacks are always appreciated!
We’ll be back next week to bring you a 1930s story of baseball and the awesome power of mother nature. We’ve looked at our share of wet-weather drama here, but this story overtops them all.
On March 3: “Up a Creek”
As we prepared to publish, White Sox prospect Oscar Colas kindly furnished us with a visual aid. We hope he’s okay!
How derivative.
These days, “unsportsmanship” is not a word, in the strictest sense. But, you know, we don’t hate it.
If I had a handful of female assistants, I bet I could throw 100 bottles at umpires also.
I enjoyed this one, Paul.
1) Regarding taunting a player, the calls of “Larry” reminded of when Chipper Jones would be at bat and people in the stands who were fans of the opposing team would yell “Larry” which was Chipper’s real name.
2) I went to an Orioles game in the 70’s and I had a megaphone styled container for popcorn and saved it to get autographs on.
3) I wonder if “Orange” was something like orangeade in a little carton, which they serve in New York theaters. They wouldn’t make much of a projectile. Just guessing.
Again, thanks; always interesting. Meg