A New Beginning
“This is not a sixth place ball club,” said Phillies’ new manager Pat Moran at the team’s 1915 spring training camp in St. Petersburg, Florida. Referring to the club’s disappointing finish the previous year, Moran sensed that he had a pennant contender on his hands and knew it was his job to turn winning potential into winning performance. In managing the Phillies, history was not on his side.
A member of the National League since 1883, the Phillies had yet to win a single title. Often fielding good teams, the Phillies placed second three times and third on seven occasions prior to 1915. But, a pennant remained elusive, and Moran was asked to accomplish what all who preceded him as manager had not—a first place finish.
As a reserve catcher and coach with the club since 1910, Moran was familiar with the players’ talents and personalities, especially the pitchers. He made it known right away that his spring training camp would be disciplined and demanding. Players were required to walk the three miles between their hotel and Coffee Pot Park, where training was held. Learning what Moran called his system of “inside play,” players practiced cutoffs, pickoffs, double plays, hit and run plays, double steals, bunting, and other basic skills that teams master to become winners. One writer covering spring training wrote of Moran, “The manager with a thousand eyes he was called, for never before did the team have such a regulated and painstaking drill as during the three weeks in Florida.” The manager also instilled in his players a fighting spirit, noting that the longer a team stays in a pennant race, the harder it becomes to keep up with the leaders.
The Players
Baseball history is filled with cases of very good teams becoming champions after a few key player acquisitions. The 1915 Phillies were no different, rebuilding their infield and strengthening their pitching staff by off-season trades and by plucking a gem from the minor leagues. A swap with the Boston Braves brought in Possum Whitted to become the club’s leftfielder. Pitcher Al Demaree and third baseman Milt Stock were obtained from the New York Giants. Second baseman Bert Niehoff was landed in a trade with the Cincinnati Reds. Finally, the Phillies picked up Dave Bancroft from the Pacific Coast League, who would fill the gap at shortstop on his way to a Hall of Fame career. All of these players would contribute importantly to the Phillies’ pennant drive.
The newcomers joined an already impressive roster. In the forefront was pitching great Grover Cleveland Alexander. As a rookie with the team in 1911, he led the league in wins (28), complete games (31), shutouts (7) and innings pitched (367). The best was yet to come. In 1915, Alexander posted a 31-10 record, the first of three seasons in a row he won 30 or more games for the Phillies. While with the club between 1911-17, Alexander led the National League five times in wins, shutouts, complete games, and strikeouts. He was the leader in ERA on three occasions. As baseball writers noted throughout the 1915 season, the Phillies’ fortunes would rise or fall on the right arm of “Alex the Great.”
Alexander was ably supported by other members of the pitching staff. Righthander Erskine Mayer won 21 games for the Phillies in 1914 and matched that total in 1915. Two other pitchers contributed significantly to the Phillies’ race for the pennant. Newcomer Al Demaree chipped in 14 victories while Eppa Rixey notched 11. Rixey’s greatest years still lay ahead of him, but as in the case of Bancroft, they would be mostly spent with a club other than the Phillies. Pitcher George Chalmers rounded out the starting rotation, winning eight games, and George McQuillen, picked up by the club in June, helped out late in the race by contributing four victories to the Phillies’ total.
Complementing the solid pitching staff was a line-up loaded with offensive punch. At the top of the list was right fielder Gavvy Cravath. A power hitter in the Deadball Era, he led the National League in home runs six times. Cravath hit his peak in 1915, leading the league in runs (89), home runs (24), RBIs (115), and walks (86). A defensive asset as well, Cravath also led outfielders in assists (28).
The Phillies’ offense was also supported by the stick of first baseman Fred Luderus. Appointed team captain by Moran in 1915, Luderus was only a fair fielder—he led National League first baseman in errors four times. But, he compensated for his defensive shortcomings by feasting on opposing pitchers. Like Cravath, Luderus’s career year came in 1915 when he set personal highs in batting average (.315) and doubles (36). An incredibly durable player, Luderus played in 533 consecutive games between 1916-20 and still holds the Phillies’ record for most games played at first base (1,298).
Another critical member of the 1915 Phillies was catcher Billy Killefer. A pedestrian hitter (.238 lifetime average), Killefer more than proved his worth to the club with his astute pitch calling and deadly throwing arm. Alexander’s favorite catcher, baseball historian David Jordan has called Killefer in 1915 “simply the best catcher in the league.” He proved the man to handle the pitching staff that season.
The Season
Baseball writers were not impressed with the Phillies’ chances in 1915. An early season poll made the team 30-1 underdogs to win the pennant. The Boston Braves were the odds-on favorites to repeat as league titleholders amongst those in the know. The Phillies, however, started the season like wildfire, taking their first eight games in a row—outscoring opponents 41-10—and then going on to win 11 of their first 12 contests.
The club’s fast start was casually dismissed by New York Giants manager John McGraw. He would rather have the Phillies in first place early in the season than any other team, McGraw said, because they would eventually fall out of contention from sheer force of habit. Other teams would try to remain in front once they got there. McGraw’s scorn infuriated Phillies’ players. In a game at New York’s Polo Grounds on 20 April–a few days after McGraw’s ill-chosen remarks—the Phillies bested the Giants 5-2 behind the fine pitching of Erskine Mayer. In the sixth inning, Beals Becker, playing leftfield for the Phillies, smacked a two-run homer to help seal the victory. After circling the bases, Becker grabbed the megaphone from the announcer near home plate, ran to the Giants’ dugout, and yelled, “How do you like that, McGraw?”
The Phillies were in contention for the flag from day one of the season. Early on, the Chicago Cubs posed the most competition. Both teams bobbed in and out of first place through mid-June. Then, the Phillies suffered a miserable hitting slump, which allowed the Cubs to hold the top spot for nearly a month—from 17 June to 12 July. One writer lamented in late June that “the team is not hitting” and praised “the inordinate strength of their pitchers” for keeping the Phillies up close. While the batting slump prompted some to predict that the club was beginning to yet again fade out of the race, a more perceptive columnist who followed the team wrote, “The 1915 model Phillies are made of different stuff than the teams which represented the Philadelphia Nationals in the past, as the other clubs will doubtless find out before the season is many weeks older.”
Baseball fans often look back on a team’s championship season to find the moment when the die was cast that it would win the title. For the Phillies, it was their 19-21 July series against the Cubs. They had crept ahead of Chicago and into first place a few days earlier and held a razor-thin lead of one game. A Philadelphia writer, sensing the importance of the series, declared that the Phillies “must show superiority over the Cubs if they hope to win the pennant.” The city was abuzz with excitement, and “the biggest crowd in years” squeezed into National League Park for the opening contest of the four-game series. They came, in the words of one fan, to ask of the first-place Phillies, “Is it going to last?”
The team answered that question with a definitive “Yes!” With one game rained out, the hometown crew swept three from the Cubs by scores of 5-4, 8-6, and 1-0. The Phillies fell behind in the second game, but came roaring back with a six-run eighth inning to win it. The third game was a brilliant two-hitter thrown by Alexander. Chicago eventually faded from the pennant race and the Phillies stayed in first place the rest of the season.
But the club’s worries were by no means over. The Brooklyn Robins stayed close to the Phillies’ heels, holding second place and staying within a few games of the lead through much of August and September. The Boston Braves came on strong late in the season, as they had in 1914, but this time, it was a case of too little too late. The Phillies clinched their first pennant on 29 September, tallying 90 victories by season’s end, with the Braves finishing seven games behind and Brooklyn a full ten games back.
The strength to hold off these late-season challenges wasn’t just a matter of talent, but also of spirit. One writer who followed the team closely observed that “the Philly players acted like a different ball club” after mid-July. No one would admit it openly, but the notion that the title would be theirs seized the club and its fans. Confidence replaced nervousness, and a belief that the team would triumph overshadowed early season fears that the Phillies would skid badly, as they had done in the past.
Much of this new-found assurance could be found in the success of Grover Cleveland Alexander. One sportswriter called him “the most valuable athlete on the circuit,” noting that whenever the Phillies began to falter, Alexander would pitch a “supermiraculous” game to put the team back on track. In his first 199 innings of work, Alexander gave up just 44 runs and 118 hits while striking out 138 batters. His clutch pitching became even more important in the second half of the season when Mayer’s effectiveness tailed off considerably. Mayer compiled a 12-4 record through 1 July, but he went just 9-11 during the rest of the campaign. Alexander filled the gap.
Other players stepped up to ensure the Phillies’ success. When third baseman Bobby Byrne broke his finger in August, Milt Stock filled in with effective fielding and timely hitting, becoming the team’s regular at that position from then on. Reserve catcher Eddie Burns took over the chores behind home plate and provided solid service when Billy Killefer went down with a shoulder injury in early September. Rookie Dave Bancroft became, in the words of one writer, “the best shortstop in the league, both in fielding and hitting.” Manger Moran called Bancroft the difference between the team’s sixth place finish in 1914 and winning the pennant in 1915. With Cravath and Luderus delivering much of the heavy offensive firepower for the team, the Phillies were headed to post-season play for the first time in the club’s history.
The World Series
The 1915 Fall Classic pitted the Phillies against the Boston Red Sox. The American League champions had won 101 games with a strong cast of pitchers—Rube Foster, Ernie Shore, Smokey Joe Wood, and Dutch Leonard. Its strength on the mound allowed Boston not to pitch a 20-year-old rookie—Babe Ruth—who had gone 18-8 for the team. The Babe appeared only once during the World Series, grounding out as a pinch hitter in the ninth inning of the first game. With a solid outfield of Tris Speaker, Harry Hooper, and Duffy Lewis, the Red Sox were odds-on favorites to take the Series.
The first two games took place at the Phillies’ National League Park (informally known as Baker Bowl), and Game 1 featured Alexander against Shore. With the score tied 1-1 in the bottom of the eighth, the Phillies combined two infield hits and a walk to load the bases. One run came in on a fielder’s choice, and a second crossed the plate on an infield hit, giving the Phillies the lead and the game by a 3-1 score. The fans went wild, rushing out on the field and parading the players around on their shoulders. The joy, however, would be short-lived. Not only was it the sole victory for the Phillies in the 1915 Fall Classic, the team wouldn’t win its next World Series game until 1980.
The Quaker City crew lost the next three games to Boston by the identical scores of 2-1. Phillies’ pitchers did a good job keeping opposing hitters contained, but several Red Sox players unloaded with their bats. Lewis hit .444, Hooper .350, and Speaker .294. For Phillies’ hitters, Fred Luderus was outstanding, batting .438. Bancroft recorded a respectable .294. The rest of the team’s players, however, went cold at the plate, and Red Sox pitchers held the club to a combined batting average of .182. Cravath, Paskert, Stock, Burns, Niehoff, and Whitted together came to the plate 99 times during the Series and collected a measly 12 hits.
Down three games to one and facing elimination, the Phillies returned to National League Park looking for a comeback. Club president William F. Baker, seeking to expand ticket sales, had placed extra seats in front of the leftfield bleachers and right centerfield, reducing the size of the playing field. He had turned down the Philadelphia Athletics’ offer to use the more commodious Shibe Park for the World Series because Baker didn’t want to have to pay rent for use of the ballpark. The Athletics, it will be remembered, had been in the World Series in four of the preceding five years, a record which Baker could only envy.
The Red Sox, on the other hand, did accept the Braves’ offer to use their ballpark for games played in Boston. Braves Field, which opened on August, 18, 1915, held 40,000 patrons, compared to Fenway’s 35,000. Thousands of additional patrons could be admitted and allowed to stand behind ropes strung across the outer reaches of the outfield—a common practice of the time to increase gate receipts for important games. Had Baker accepted the Athletics’ offer, 1915 would have been the first and only World Series in which none of the games played took place at the competing teams’ home ballparks.
Baker’s refusal to use Shibe Park came back to haunt the Phillies in the fifth game of the Series. They took a 4-2 lead into the eighth inning, one of the runs scoring on a homer by Fred Luderus—the only Phillies’ home run in the Series. In the eighth, Boston outfielder Duffy Lewis hit a homer into the temporary on-field seats in right centerfield with a runner on to tie the score. In the ninth, the Red Sox’s Harry Hooper also smacked one there, giving Boston a 5-4 lead that was enough to win the ball game. Baker’s decision to add seats to the outfield turned two Boston fly balls into Series-winning home runs.
Even with Baker’s ill-advised move, the Phillies’ anemic batting doomed their chances to beat the Red Sox. Injuries also took their toll. Killefer’s absence behind home plate was sorely felt. Alexander, in addition, wrote a post-Series article for “Baseball” magazine in which he acknowledged straining his shoulder during a Labor Day game and not being at peak effectiveness thereafter. Because of his aching arm, Alexander declined Moran’s request to start the fifth and deciding game of the Series. “Alex the Great” spent the rest of his life wondering if the outcome would have been different had he taken the ball on that occasion.
Despite the disappointment of losing to Boston, the club could take some solace from having won its first National League title. Team members also each got $2,520—a losing player’s share from the World Series. (To show how times have changed, Detroit Tigers’ players each received $291,668 for losing the 2006 World Series.)
Aftermath
The Phillies remained competitive for the next two years, finishing second in both 1916 and 1917. Team president Baker, a tightwad owner who believed the club should be financially self-sufficient without investing any of his own funds, began selling star players after the 1917 season. Alexander and Killefer went first for two inferior players and $75,000 in cash. Other key members of the 1915 championship team followed as Baker continued to trade on-field talent for funds to operate the club.
The results were as devastating as they were enduring. Starting in 1918, the Phillies and their fans endured 14 consecutive second division finishes. After a fourth place showing in 1932, the club resided in the second division for 16 more years in a row. During their descent into mediocrity, the Phillies lost 100 or more games in a season 12 times.
But, in 1915—their 33rd year in the National League—the Phillies finally won a pennant. They would not win another one for 35 more years. That one title over such an expanse of time makes the success of the 1915 team stand out brightly in Phillies’ history.
