The Main Event

  • September 14, 1929 – The Athletics clinched the American League pennant with a win over the Chicago White Sox, Connie Mack‘s club rolling to a 104-46 record on the way to a World Series title over the Cubs — the franchise’s first pennant since the 1914 dynasty broke up.

On September 14, 1929, the Philadelphia Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox to clinch the American League pennant, the first flag for Connie Mack’s franchise since 1914. It looked, at the time, like a nice moment for a proud club that had spent most of the 1920s rebuilding. It turned out to be the opening act of one of the most dominant three-year runs in the history of professional sports, a team so stacked with Hall of Fame talent that serious baseball historians still argue it deserves to be called the greatest team ever assembled, ahead of even the 1927 New York Yankees of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

That the 1929 Athletics are not part of the sport’s popular mythology the way Murderers’ Row is says more about the power of a good nickname and a bigger media market than it does about the quality of the baseball played at Shibe Park. Here is a full look at the roster Mack built, the honors those players compiled over their careers, and where this team truly stands among the Athletics’ other great eras, the best teams the Phillies ever fielded, and the game’s all-time pantheon.

Connie Mack’s Long Road Back

Mack had done this before. His original Athletics dynasty won four pennants and three World Series between 1910 and 1914, built around the famed “$100,000 infield” of Eddie Collins, Home Run Baker, Jack Barry, and Stuffy McInnis. A financial squeeze brought on by competition from the short-lived Federal League, combined with a stunning upset loss to the “Miracle” Boston Braves in the 1914 World Series, led Mack to sell off that core piece by piece. The Athletics finished in last place seven times in eight years afterward.

Mack rebuilt patiently through the 1920s, adding pieces like outfielder Bing Miller in 1922 and slugger Al Simmons in 1924. By 1925, catcher Mickey Cochrane, pitcher Lefty Grove, second baseman Max Bishop, and pitcher Rube Walberg had all joined the club, and the Athletics posted their first winning season in more than a decade. A young Jimmie Foxx arrived as a teenage catcher and third baseman in 1925, moved to first base by 1929, and blossomed into one of the most feared hitters in the sport. Righty George Earnshaw rounded out the rotation in 1928. By 1929, Mack had built something even better than his first great team, and this time he had the pieces to prove it.

The Everyday Lineup

Mickey Cochrane caught nearly every day and hit .331 while running the pitching staff and setting the tone defensively. Jimmie Foxx, only 21 years old, hit .354 with 33 home runs and 118 RBI in his first full season at first base. Al Simmons, an outfielder with an unorthodox open stance that Mack himself once tried to fix and gave up on, led the team with a .365 average, 34 home runs, and 157 RBI. Second baseman Max Bishop provided on-base ability at the top of the order, shortstop Joe Boley and third baseman Jimmy Dykes anchored the infield, and Mule Haas and Bing Miller rounded out an outfield that hit for a strong combined average without ever needing to lead the league in runs scored, since the pitching staff more than made up the difference.

One veteran presence deserves special mention. Eddie Collins, the second baseman from Mack’s first dynasty, was back with the Athletics as a 42-year-old part-time player and de facto coach in 1929, closing out a career that would finish with 3,315 hits and a .333 average. His presence on the bench tied Mack’s two great teams together directly, a living thread between the 1910s dynasty and the one that clinched the pennant on this date in 1929.

The Pitching Staff

Lefty Grove went 20-6 with a league-best 2.81 ERA. George Earnshaw won 24 games. Rube Walberg added 18 wins, and knuckleballer Jack Quinn, already in his mid-forties, chipped in 11 more. Eddie Rommel, a converted starter, handled much of the relief work in an era before the modern bullpen existed. Grove and Earnshaw finished first and second in the American League in strikeouts, and the staff as a whole allowed the fewest runs in the league, a trait that would define the Athletics for the rest of their pennant run.

Six Hall of Famers, and a Case for the Best Five-Year Stretch Any Pitcher Ever Had

Add it up, and six future Hall of Famers were connected to the 1929 Athletics: Grove, Foxx, Simmons, Cochrane, and Collins as players, plus Mack himself as manager. Their combined career honors are staggering.

Jimmie Foxx won three American League MVP awards, in 1932, 1933, and 1938, and captured the Triple Crown in 1933 by leading the league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. He finished his career with 534 home runs, at the time the second-highest total in history behind only Ruth, and was inducted into Cooperstown in 1951.

Al Simmons won back-to-back batting titles in 1930 and 1931, hitting .381 and .390, and became the fastest player in major league history to reach 2,000 hits at the time he did it. He finished with 2,927 career hits, a .334 average, and twelve 100-RBI seasons. Simmons was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953.

Mickey Cochrane won American League MVP honors in 1928 and 1934 and retired with a .320 career batting average, still the highest ever posted by a catcher who played a significant number of games behind the plate. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1947.

Lefty Grove finished his career 300-141, a winning percentage that remains the highest of any pitcher in the 300-win club. His nine ERA titles are the most by any pitcher in baseball history, and he won the American League MVP award in 1931 after going 31-4. He entered the Hall of Fame alongside Cochrane in 1947. Baseball historian Bill James, in his win-shares rankings, placed Grove 19th among every player who ever lived, with Foxx 29th, Simmons 71st, and Cochrane 72nd.

Eddie Collins finished with 3,315 career hits and a .333 average across 25 seasons, making him the sixth player in history to reach the 3,000-hit milestone. He was inducted into Cooperstown in 1939.

And Connie Mack, who managed the Athletics for 50 consecutive seasons, remains the all-time leader in managerial wins with 3,731, a record that will almost certainly never be broken given how the position is used today. He won nine pennants and five World Series titles across his career and was part of the Hall of Fame’s second induction class in 1937.

The 1929 World Series

Philadelphia met the Chicago Cubs in the World Series and won in five games, but the way they won Game 4 has become the stuff of legend. Trailing 8-0, the Athletics scored ten runs in the bottom of the seventh inning, the largest single-inning comeback in World Series history, a total aided when Cubs center fielder Hack Wilson lost a fly ball off the bat of Mule Haas in the sun, turning it into an inside-the-park home run. Philadelphia held on to win 10-8. Two days later, trailing 2-0 in the bottom of the ninth of Game 5, Haas tied the score with a two-run homer, and after a Simmons double and an intentional walk to Foxx, Bing Miller doubled home the winning run to clinch the championship, the Athletics’ first title in sixteen years.

Where the 1929 Athletics Stand Among the Greats

The 1929 team went 104-46, a .693 winning percentage, and outscored opponents 901-615. That alone places it in any conversation about the sport’s great single seasons. But the fairest way to judge the team is across the three-year run it kicked off, 1929 through 1931, when the Athletics won three straight pennants by a combined margin of 18, 8, and 13.5 games and never had a real challenger after midsummer in any of the three years. The 1931 team, at 107-45, holds the franchise record for wins that stands to this day across the club’s stops in Philadelphia, Kansas City, Oakland, and now Sacramento, exceeding even the celebrated $100,000-infield teams of 1910-14.

The most rigorous comparison, laid out by baseball historian Bryan Soderholm-Difatte in a widely cited analysis for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), pits the 1926-32 Athletics directly against the 1926-32 Ruth-and-Gehrig Yankees, since that stretch marks the full run of both dynasties. The Yankees won four pennants to Philadelphia’s three, but the Athletics actually posted a higher winning percentage over those seven years, .636 to .629. From 1928 through 1932, the Athletics’ .662 winning percentage is exceeded in modern history only by the 1906-10 Chicago Cubs, and no Yankees team built around any era, not Ruth and Gehrig, not DiMaggio, not Mantle, not Jeter, ever matched it over a five-year stretch.

The Yankees outhit the Athletics thanks to Ruth and Gehrig, leading the league in scoring in six of those seven seasons, but Philadelphia’s pitching staff was the far better unit, leading the league in fewest runs allowed four times to New York’s one, and the Athletics led the league in strikeouts for six consecutive seasons. When both offense and run prevention are weighed together, the Athletics actually outscored their opponents by a wider average margin than the Yankees did across the shared five-year window.

The Yankees had the edge in star power at the very top, since no one on the Athletics matched Ruth or Gehrig individually. But where the Yankees could point to two transcendent superstars, the Athletics could point to four core players – Grove, Foxx, Simmons, and Cochrane – at their absolute prime and playing at a level few teams in history have fielded simultaneously. That depth of Hall of Fame talent is a major reason serious historians, while acknowledging the 1927 Yankees’ iconic status, have made a real case that the 1929-31 Athletics were the better team in context.

Various all-time rankings have slotted the 1929 Athletics anywhere from the top ten to the top twenty-five teams in baseball history, generally behind only teams like the 1927 Yankees, the 1906 Cubs (116-36, the best winning percentage ever recorded), the 1998 Yankees (114 regular-season wins and a championship), and the 2001 Seattle Mariners (116 wins, no championship).

Compared to the Athletics’ Other Great Eras

The 1929 club has real competition even within its own franchise history. The 1910-14 dynasty won three championships in five years behind the $100,000 infield, a run that ended almost as abruptly as it began when Mack broke the team up for financial reasons, foreshadowing exactly what he would do to the 1929-31 core during the Great Depression. After the franchise relocated, the Oakland Athletics of 1972-74 won three consecutive World Series titles, the only three-peat besides the Yankees of 1998-2000, led by Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and Sal Bando under fiery manager Dick Williams. The “Bash Brothers” Athletics of 1988-90, powered by Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, won three straight pennants but only one championship, losing surprising upsets to the Dodgers in 1988 and the Reds in 1990.

Measured strictly by peak dominance and depth of Hall of Fame talent, the 1929-31 Athletics have a strong claim as the best of all the franchise’s great eras. They won more games in a single season (1931’s 107) than any other Athletics team ever has, and their four inner-circle Hall of Famers in their absolute primes outnumber the star power of any of the other title runs. The 1910-14 group is the only real rival, and it is closer to a wash than a case of one team clearly surpassing the other, since both were broken up by the same owner-manager for the same financial reasons within a year of their sport’s economic peak.

Compared to the Best Phillies Teams

Turn to the other side of the city and the gap becomes much clearer. The Phillies have won two World Series in their history, in 1980 and 2008, and reached the Fall Classic in other strong seasons such as 1915, 1950, 1983, 1993, 2009, and as recently as 2022, part of their current run of NL East contention. But no Phillies team has ever approached the 1929 Athletics’ regular-season dominance. The best regular-season win total in Phillies history is 102, set in 2011, followed by back-to-back 101-win division-winning teams in 1976 and 1977 under Danny Ozark, none of which are remembered as approaching the greatest teams in the sport’s history the way the 1929-31 Athletics still are in serious historical rankings. Even the beloved 1980 champions won only 91 games in the regular season, and the 2008 champions won 92. Put simply, the single greatest regular season in the history of either Philadelphia franchise belongs to the American League team, and it is not particularly close.

The Verdict

The 1929 Athletics never got their own catchy nickname the way the Yankees got Murderers’ Row, and Connie Mack’s decision to sell off the team’s stars for cash during the Depression, just as he had done with his first dynasty fifteen years earlier, meant this era of Athletics baseball never got a second act the way the Yankees kept reloading through the DiMaggio years. But by the numbers and by the sheer weight of Hall of Fame talent on one roster, the case that Philadelphia fielded the best team in baseball history in 1929, or at least across the three-year run it launched, is not a fringe theory. It is a serious argument made by serious baseball historians, and September 14 marks the day that team’s dominance became official.

Philadelphia Baseball Events for September 14

  • September 14, 1949 – Ed Sanicki homers in his first major league at bat, in a game at Pittsburgh. He hits two more home runs that month, but those are his only three career hits.
  • September 14, 1962 – Johnny Callison hits a ninth-inning home run off Lindy McDaniel to beat St. Louis 2-1. He’d also homered in the ninth inning of the previous game, a 2-1 win over Warren Spahn and Milwaukee — the first time in team history the Phillies won back-to-back games on walk-off homers.
  • September 14, 1984 – Backed by two Mike Schmidt home runs, Steve Carlton defeats the Expos 9-5 for his 235th win as a Phillie, breaking the team record held by Robin Roberts. Schmidt’s homers gave him 100 RBI for a team-record seventh season.
  • September 14, 1990 – The Phillies strike out 12 times against Sid Fernandez and the Mets but still win 4-1 — a week after also fanning 12 times against David Cone and the Mets and beating them by the same score.
  • September 14, 2008 – In the first game of a doubleheader, Chase Utley is hit by a pitch leading off the sixth inning — his 26th plunking of the year, breaking the team record he’d set the previous season.
  • September 14, 2011 – Roy Halladay throws a complete-game shutout, beating Houston 1-0, clinching a playoff berth in the team’s 146th game — breaking the franchise record set in 1915, when the Phillies clinched in game 148 of 150.
  • September 14, 2014 – Jonathan Papelbon blows a three-run lead, then grabs his crotch while exiting the field to boos from the crowd. He later receives a seven-game suspension for the gesture, which he claimed was an equipment adjustment.
  • September 14, 2017 – With barely a month in the majors, Rhys Hoskins hits his 18th home run in his 34th major league game, becoming the fastest player in MLB history to reach that mark.
  • September 14, 2025 – The Phillies clinch a postseason berth — their fourth straight — when the Dodgers beat the Giants 10-2, eliminating San Francisco from wild-card contention.

ICYMI

Philadelphia Baseball Birthdays for September 14

  • Kid Nichols (born 1869) – A 361-game-winning Hall of Fame pitcher, Nichols spent nearly his entire career with Boston before the Phillies picked him up off waivers in 1905; he went 10-6 with a 2.27 ERA that season and made four more appearances in 1906 before retiring, closing out his career in Philadelphia.
  • Bunny Madden (born 1882) – A backup catcher claimed off waivers by the Phillies in June 1911, Madden appeared in 28 games and hit .276 for the club — the final major-league action of his career, though he played on in the minors for another decade.
  • Willie Hogan (born 1884) – An outfielder who made his major league debut with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1911, playing his only big-league season with the club before finishing his career with the St. Louis Browns in 1912.
  • David Bell (born 1972) – Part of a three-generation baseball family, Bell played third base for the Phillies from 2003 to 2006 and later returned to coach on the club’s staff before managing the Cincinnati Reds.
  • Delmon Young (born 1985) – An outfielder/DH who signed with the Phillies for the 2013 season, hitting .260 with 8 home runs in 80 games before leaving as a free agent when the club fell out of contention.
  • Andrew Vasquez (born 1993) – A left-handed reliever claimed off waivers by the Phillies in 2022 and reclaimed that November; he pitched for the big-league club during the 2023 season.

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