Philly never embraced 1915 World Series, the Phillies' first

Oct. 8 dawned wet and gloomy, weather befitting the shabby ballpark in which Game 1 of the 1915 World Series was about to take place.

The 2 p.m. matchup between the Boston Red Sox and host Phillies would not sell out and as game time neared, scalpers outside Baker Bowl and at busy Center City intersections dropped their prices below face value. One New Yorker, stuck with $200 worth of unsold tickets, complained that he "couldn't give them away."

There were a few prominent faces among the 19,343 fans who did have tickets, like entertainer George M. Cohan and ex-heavyweight champ James J. Corbett. But celebrities were so scarce that a list of them in the next morning's Inquirer included such lightweight luminaries as the city's retired harbormaster and a justice of the peace from Lewisburg, Pa.

And while several hundred of the Red Sox' rabid Royal Rooters traveled to the game, Philadelphia Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg did not.

A century ago this fall, the Red Sox defeated the Phillies in the World Series. The five games have been long forgotten but 100 years later, the Series itself remains a memorable one for three distinct reasons:

It would mark the first Series appearance by a U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson. It would see the postseason debut of the game's greatest figure, Babe Ruth. And it would begin a 65-year drought for a Phillies franchise that wouldn't win another postseason game for 62 years.

That listless 1915 opener was followed by a Game 2 that an Inquirer sportswriter, with the groaningly bad pen name of "Jim Nasium", hyperbolically described as "the greatest, tensest and most spectacular" in Series history.

Though an exaggeration, the contrast between Games 1 and 2 in Philadelphia was indeed as striking as the different weather in which they were played.

Contested in bright autumn sunlight, before an overflow crowd that included the president and his date, Game 2 was as riveting as Game 1 had been routine.

Following their 1 p.m. arrival from New York on Oct. 9, Wilson and his elegantly dressed fiancee were greeted by an estimated 50,000 Philadelphians en route to the ballpark.

The bespectacled widower threw out the first ball but by all accounts spent most of the game pitching woo to Edith Galt. In fact, his future wife so distracted him that when a band struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner," the 28th president wouldn't rise or remove his light-gray fedora until the anthem's final notes.

Wilson's presence seemed to ignite the city's interest. Baker Bowl was overflowing. On 15th Street, residents draped bunting over their rowhouses and fans clamored to their rooftops. Thousands more massed in front of The Inquirer's Market Street offices and outside City Hall to see Series action simulated on giant scoreboards.

"The first game lacked the glamour of the World Series," a sportswriter noted, "[but] the second had it to a superlative degree."

On Oct. 2, two days after his Phillies clinched their first National League pennant in Boston, owner William Baker and the Red Sox Joseph Lannin met with National Commission chairman Garry Herrmann at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria.

Legendary Bill Klem was picked to head the umpiring crew, influential Sporting News publisher G. Taylor Spinks as its official scorer. Then a quarter was tossed into the air. When it landed heads-up on the suite's thick Persian rug, the victorious Baker opted to host the first two games in Philadelphia.

Baker could have chosen to stage them at the Athletics' nearby stadium, the larger Shibe Park, the way Lannin would eschew his three-year-old Fenway Park in favor of 40,000-seat Braves Field. But the notoriously frugal Phils owner didn't want to share the profits.

He instead increased Baker Bowl's 18,000-seat capacity to 20,000 by placing seats in its outfield, a move that would bite his team at the worst possible moment. Then, citing limited capacity, he declined to provide 600 seats for Boston's Royal Rooters, offering them just 200.

Herrmann eventually resolved a conflict that could have scuttled the Series by giving the Bostonians 400 tickets allotted to the commission.

Philadelphia was then baseball's World Series capital. The 1915 event was the fifth in six seasons to be played here, though it would be the Phillies' first. Perhaps because of that, the city's anticipation seemed muted, even sour on occasion.

A brawl erupted among fans lined up in the rain outside Baker Bowl for Game 1 tickets and 15 were arrested. At Broad and Chestnut, where desperate scalpers hoped to unload tickets, police took 17 into custody. Some optimists attempted to sell $5 box seats for as much as $100, a price that by game time had plummeted to $3.

One of those in attendance was G.R. Metzger, a double amputee who had traveled here from Erie. He saw Grover Cleveland Alexander limit the Red Sox to eight hits and a single run, a victorious performance that nonetheless left a New York Times writer distinctly unimpressed.

The Times' Hugh Fullerton credited Philadelphia's runs to "a scratchy bunch of slow infield grounders" and predicted Alexander would "never pitch a worse game or win a luckier victory." In triumph, Fullerton noted, the Phillies had proved only that "they couldn't hit Boston's pitchers."

He was right on that last count. Philadelphia managed just 10 runs and 27 hits in five games. Boston's Rube Foster, Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard were so effective that the Red Sox needed no other pitchers, including their fourth starter, rookie Babe Ruth.

Earlier in his 18-8 season, Ruth had cracked his first career homer, a moon shot into the Polo Grounds' right-field pavilion. The pitcher hit three more that season, so in Game 1, with Boston down two runs in the ninth, manager Bill Carrigan sent him out to pinch-hit for Leonard.

The 20-year-old was overeager and the crafty Alexander got him to bounce out weakly to first.

A day later, after reading that Wilson would be arriving at the Pennsylvania Railroad's Broad and Market Streets station, Philadelphians flocked to Center City. As, led by a procession of police on horseback, the motorcade moved north on Broad, throngs gathered.

The main attraction, it seemed, was Galt, recently engaged to Wilson, whose first wife died in 1914. Her photo dominated the next day's Inquirer front page where her dress, hat and "penetrant . . . dark-eyed beauty" were amply described.

Once seated in a field-side box, Wilson tossed the ceremonial first pitch to Phils starter Erskine Mayer. Mayer would be outpitched by Boston's Foster, who in the ninth inning also drove in the deciding run in the Red Sox' exciting 2-1 victory.

That loss deflated the Phils. They would drop the next two games in Boston before returning to Baker Bowl for Game 5. There, as so often happened, they were doomed by their owner's penny-pinching.

With the game tied, 4-4, in the ninth, Boston's Harry Hooper hit a ball into the temporary outfield seats. What would have been a regular-season out became the Series-winning blow. Earlier in Game 5, Boston's Duffy Lewis had hit one in virtually the same spot.

The Phillies went down with a strikeout and two ground balls in the bottom of the ninth and the Series was over.

"We didn't have no kick," Phils manager Pat Moran explained.

And the franchise would get no more kicks for a long time.

Baker soon traded Alexander and the Phillies descended into decades of historically dreadful baseball.

"If we had beaten Boston in '15," pitcher Eppa Rixey, another future Hall of Fame pitcher traded by Baker, said years later, "who knows what would have happened? We might have been a team to reckon with for a long, long time."

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz