Inside Baseball: Before Tasers: Four-legged deterrents

It was the shock heard 'round the world.

Ever since a Philadelphia police officer Tased a runaway fan at Citizens Bank Park this week, baseball and the world beyond have been debating the action.

But during the clinching Game 6 of the 1980 World Series, the Phillies didn't need Taser-armed cops to deter unruly fans. They had policemen with horses and dogs.

"You don't have to worry about Tasers when you've got cops on horses," City Councilman Frank Rizzo, whose father had resurrected the Police Department's mounted unit a decade before the Phillies won their first World Series, said on Friday.

By 1980, the elder Rizzo was neither police commissioner nor mayor. But the tough-talking South Philadelphian had so influenced his successors as commissioner that when the Phillies talked about their security concerns before Game 6, Morton Solomon mentioned the possibility of using horses.

"Solomon was an all-right guy when it came to using force," said Sam Antrim, a retired Philadelphia policeman who was on horseback that night. "He was all for the horses."

Even if Solomon didn't remember how unruly celebrating fans could become, the Phillies certainly did.

Though many have forgotten now, fans in those years frequently stormed the field after dramatic postseason victories.

Four years earlier, Chris Chambliss, arms and elbows swinging as he weaved through the mob, ran a teeming gauntlet of the rowdies who poured onto the Yankee Stadium diamond when his home run gave the Yankees their first American League pennant in 12 years.

Bill Mazeroski had to do the same when his homer won Pittsburgh the 1960 World Series. In 1969, delirious New Yorkers tore up Shea Stadium's turf after the Amazin' Mets' stunning world championship.

And no one who was there on Oct. 1, 1970, will ever forget the chaotic final moments of the Phillies' last game at Connie Mack Stadium, when souvenir-hunting fans were ravenously disassembling the ballpark and the field before the game ended.

Ten years later, the Phillies and the city, which owned Veterans Stadium, didn't want to see a repeat.

"Somewhere around the eighth inning, Wilson Goode came into my box," said Phils chairman Bill Giles, referring to the future mayor who then was the city's managing director. "And we agreed that we didn't want fans running on the field and acting crazy."

The Phillies had never won a championship. And Giles and everyone else knew the city was ready to explode.

Giles told Goode to use the horsemen. But he thought the dogs - in a nation that still remembered when Bull Connor notoriously used them to quell civil-rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Ala. - would present an unnecessarily negative view of the city.

"The city owns this stadium," Goode told Giles, "and I'm going to protect it."

So, sometime after 11:20 p.m. on Oct. 21, 1980, the 65,838 fans who had come to Veterans Stadium gasped, as did the millions of TV viewers watching a Series that attracted a still-record 32.8 Nielsen rating.

Parading in from the outfield bullpens and the infield tunnels, came a dozen or so Philadelphia policemen on horseback and dozens more cops with leashed German shepherds.

"We had been patrolling outside the stadium during the game," said Antrim, 72. "Then just before it ended they told us to go inside and wait in the bullpen."

Did he think that would deter Philadelphia fans?

"I wasn't supposed to think," he said. "I was supposed to follow orders."

At that moment, Antrim wasn't so much concerned about fans acting out as he was the horses. They were often skittish when confined with other horses in a small space. And now, in each tiny bullpen, there were a half-dozen as well as several curious pitchers and catchers.

Not long before Tug McGraw touched off a citywide explosion, the horses exited and, along with the dogs and their handlers, formed a barrier between the field and the fans down each baseline.

When, at 11:25 p.m., Willie Wilson swung and missed, the big crowd roared. But not one fan attempted to run onto the field.

"Once things settled down there," recalled Antrim, who retired in 2003 after 33 years on the force, "they sent us up to K&A [the intersection of Kensington and Allegheny] because the fans were really going wild up there."

Three months later, when the Eagles beat Dallas in the NFC championship game at the Vet, the horses made another appearance. They were no match for Eagles fans, several of whom made it onto the turf.

Thirty years later, the same solution wouldn't work at Citizens Bank Park. The mounted unit was disbanded again several years ago, though after the recent flash-mob incidents, current Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey has talked about reinstituting it.

"Nothing can control a crowd like mounted policemen," said Rizzo. "It's a sure deterrent."