Connie Mack - Personality

Personality

Mack was quiet, even-tempered, and gentlemanly, never using profanity. He was generally addressed as "Mr. Mack." He always called his players by their given names. Chief Bender, for instance, was "Albert" to Mack. Perhaps due to his great longevity in the game, there grew up around him a kind of saintly image; his long-time friends objected to the image of him as "the bloodless saint so often painted, a sanctimonious old Puritan patting babies." His friend Red Smith called him "tough and warm and wonderful, kind and stubborn and courtly and unreasonable and generous and calculating and naive and gentle and proud and humorous and demanding and unpredictable."

Beginning as far back as his first managing job in the nineteenth century, Mack drew criticism from the newspapers for not spending enough money. Some writers called him an outright miser, accusing him of getting rid of star players so he could "line his own pockets" with the money. However, his biographer Norman Macht strongly defends Mack on this question, contending that Mack's spending decisions were forced on him by his financial circumstances, and that nearly all the money he made went back to the team. Mack himself was upset by these allegations; when some writers accused him of deliberately losing the second game of the 1913 World Series in order to extend the series and make more money in ticket sales, he uncharacteristically wrote an angry letter to the Saturday Evening Post to deny it, saying "I consider playing for the gate receipts...nothing short of dishonest." With the Athletics leading the Series three games to one, several New York writers predicted that the Athletics would deliberately lose Game Five in New York so that Mack would not have to refund the $50,000 in ticket sales for Game Six in Philadelphia. After reading this, Mack told his players that if they won Game Five he would give them the team's entire share of the Game Five gate receipts – about $34,000. The Athletics did win, and Mack gave out the money as promised.

Mack supported a large extended family and was generous to players in need, often finding jobs for former players. For instance, he kept Bender on the team payroll as a scout, minor league manager or coach from 1926 until Mack himself retired as owner-manager in 1950. Simmons was a coach for many years after his retirement as a player.

Mack lived through the entire era of racially segregated baseball (the early days of the game in his youth sometimes featured black players, but this ended by the 1890s and the major leagues remained white-only until Jackie Robinson broke down the color barrier in 1947), and even afterwards never displayed any serious interest in signing blacks. According to those who knew him, Mack was not a racist by the standards of his day and had no particular objection to a player's skin color if they performed well on the field. However, he did not want to cross the dictatorial commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis who represented a majority of MLB owners that opposed integrated baseball. Mack may have also thought that black players on the Athletics' roster wouldn't go over well with the fans in Philadelphia.

I shall never forget Connie Mack's gentleness and gentility.