The Whiz Kids at 75

BY JOHN ROSSI

Seventy-five years ago, a miracle happened in Philadelphia. No, I am not referring to the signing of the Declaration or the Proclamation of the Constitution. I am talking about the Philadelphia Phillies winning a pennant. Why a miracle? The Phillies were a baseball team that had won exactly one pennant in its history. A team that over a thirty-year period (1919-1948) had one winning season and had finished in the cellar or 7^th place over those thirty years, a record for futility unmatched in baseball history. Also, a team during those years that traded away future Hall of Famers like Lefty O’Doul and Chuck Klein – usually for cash – although for sheer incompetence it is difficult to imagine a worse trade than Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander for someone named Pickles Dillhoefer.

Things began to change in 1942 when the team was purchased from the perennially cash-challenged husband and wife team of Gerry and Mae Nugent by a businessman named William Cox. In typical Phillies fashion, Cox was forced to sell the Phillies a year later when he was found to be betting on baseball. A savior appeared in the person of 23-year-old Robert Carpenter, a member of the DuPont family whose father paid $400,000 for the franchise. For the first time in team history, cash ceased to be a problem.

Bob Carpenter spent his father’s money wisely. His first action was to hire Hall of Fame pitcher Herb Pennock as a General Manager, something the team never had in the past. Pennock quickly went about using Carpenter’s cash to build a franchise. The Phillies had no farm system. Pennock changed that creating a 12-team farm system and lavishly spending Carpenter’s money on young talent, including Robin Roberts and Curt Simmons – the latter signing a $65,000 bonus contract, then the largest in baseball history. He also hired a young manager, Eddie Sawyer away from the New York Yankees’ organization to develop the kids pouring into the Phillies system. In 1948 he moved Sawyer to the parent club. Pennock believed that Sawyer was the kind of father figure the young team needed.

There was a surprisingly quick pay off. The formerly dreadful Phillies were stocked with young talent: future Hall of Famers Richie Ashburn and Robin Roberts as well as quality players like Del Ennis, Andy Seminick, Granny Hamner and Willie Jones shocked the baseball world by finishing in third place and winning 83 games in 1949, their first winning season since 1932.

Toward the end of that season, Sawyer called the team together and told them to come back the next year and be ready to win a pennant. It seemed preposterous, but he was serious. He believed the line-up was now set with young talent at every position especially with first baseman Ed Waitkus fully recovered from being shot by a demented woman in June of 1949. The Phils also added two young pitchers in Bubba Church and Bob Miller to a staff that already boasted four pitchers who won in double figures during the ’49 campaign.

The Phillies opened the ‘50 campaign and quickly sent a message, beating the Brooklyn 8-1 on opening day before 36,000 fans, the largest crowd in Phillies history. The team nick-named “the Whiz Kids” because of their youth were one of the hottest clubs in the NL for the first half of the season, going 44-29 – resting in first place by the All-Star break.

The offense led by Ashburn, Ennis and Jones lagged behind the powerful Dodgers but the pitching was the surprise of the league. Robin Roberts at 10-3 blossomed into one of the dominant right-handed pitchers in the league while lefty Curt Simmions finally achieved the success predicted for him and was sitting at 10-5. Bob Miller surprised everyone, winning 9 against just 2 losses. But the real surprise of the league was the performance of relief pitcher, Jim Konstanty.

The oldest player on the team at 33, Konstanty turned into something the National League hadn’t seen: an almost unhittable relief pitcher. Using a deceptive palm ball, he had National League batters flailing at the seemingly hittable slow pitch. Twice during the season he would pitch 9 innings of relief, appearing in 74 games and saving 22, the highest total in National League history. He also won 16 games. He would be named the NL Most Valuable Player for the season.

Predictions that the young team would stall as the pennant race heated up proved false. The Whiz Kids stayed hot in July and August led by Ennis who drove in a team record 41 runs in July with rookie Bubba Church joining Miller to stabilize a n already solid staff. Together they shut out the Cubs in a doubleheader on July 25^th. By the third week of August, a month in which the team would go 20-8, the Phillies lead over the Dodgers was 7 1/2 games. A pennant seemed assured.

Phillies fans were in for a shock. First, came the injury bug. The team had avoided any losing streaks because they had been surprisingly healthy all season.  The same eight regulars backed by the steady pitching of the team’s Big Four had suffered no serious injuries. Then things quickly turned sour. The team’s leading pitch-hitter and team leader, Bill Nicolson came down with diabetes and was lost for the season.

Sawyer knew there was a chance he would lose Simmons to the draft with the Korean War raging. He hoped that he could keep Simmons until after the season and the World Series if the Phils won the pennant; but despite efforts by the team to ask for an extension, Simmons joined the Army on September 5. At that point he was 17-8 having just shut out the Boston Braves 2-0 and as Sawyer once told me, pitching even better than Roberts. Still, the Phils seemed in good shape. They had back-up starters in Russ Meyer and Kenny Heintzelman – both of whom won 17 games the previous season to fill in, although they struggled during the ’50 campaign.

Ten days after Simmons was lost to the team, Bubba Church started a game against the Cincinnati Reds. At that point he had won eight games and was pitching well. In the first inning, Reds slugger Ted Kluszewski lined a ball back to the box which hit him in the eye with the ball rolling all the way to Ennis in right field. Church lay on the ground, bleeding from the eye. Meyer, the first Phil to reach him, thought Church was dead. He was carried off the field and not win another game that season.

Any doubt of a jinx was removed the next day.  Bob Miller who had started the season 8-0 but had struggled with arm injuries dropping his record to 11- 6, had to leave a start with shoulder pain. In two weeks the Phils had lost their leading pinch hitters and three starters. Still their lead at 7 1/2 games over the Dodgers with fifteen games remaining seemed safe. From that point the Phillies won just four of the season’s remaining games while the Dodgers suddenly got hot.

The last two weeks of the season were the most traumatic in Phillies history – at least until the 1964 losing streak that cost the team the pennant came along. Rookie pitcher Paul Stuffel said suddenly “everyone tightened up.” From that point the Phillies averaged 3.9 runs per game, a decent enough average but a figure that is wildly deceptive. It included two games where they scored nine and 12 runs. They were shut out three times and in two games they only plated two runs.

Entering the last week of the season, with the Phils scheduled to play the suddenly red-hot Giants and the equally torrid Dodgers, they were barely hanging on. After losing five consecutive games, the Phillies season came down to the final game against the Dodgers with Roberts matched up against Don Newcombe. If the Phils didn’t win, a best of three playoff would take place – and given the state of their pitching staff that would have meant disaster.

The Phils won Game 154 behind a masterful pitching performance by Roberts who finally won his 20^th game after five tries. Dick Sisler’s three run homer in the tenth off Newcombe was the winning hit but Richie Ashburn’s throw to nip the winning run in the bottom of the ninth might have been the single most important play of the season.

The World Series was a letdown. The Phillies seemed exhausted while the Yankees were relaxed. There was a sense that the Phillies were happy to have survived the season and win the pennant. The team was young and many baseball fans believed that they were be contenders for the foreseeable future; The Whiz Kids were unfortunately a one-shot phenomenon.

There are many reasons to explain what happened. Bob Carpenter fell in love with his Whiz Kids and held on to them too long. He also continued as General Manage,r but he lacked the baseball insight that Pennock had brought to the franchise. As a result, the farm system dried up and failed to produce a quality player until the 1957 season, pitcher Jack Sanford. The Phils also made a series of bad trades, the worst of which was sending catcher Smokey Burgess – off three seasons where he hit .296, .292 and .368 – to the Cincinnati Reds for sore legged Jim Greengrass.

Another factor, and maybe the most significant reason, for the team’s lack of success was the failure to sign quality Black players; the Phillies were the last team in the National League to sign a Black player. When they did finally integrate the team in 1957, it seemed half-hearted. The first Black player on the Phillies, John Kennedy, got in just 5 games with two at bats. The first great Black player the Phillies produced was Hall of Famer, Richie Allen – who made his appearance in the majors seventeen years after Jack Robinson integrated the game.

The Whiz Kids won the hearts of Philadelphia’s fans – not an easy group to please – and especially in the case of Roberts and Ashburn were among the most popular athletes in the city’s history. Not a bad epitaph.