PART II:

A Zombie Lawyers Up

Can there be pep in a glacial step? 

The musty corporeal being of 2023 Connie Mack, humming a remix of the 1927 chart-topper “California, Here I Come,” tipped his hat at perplexed receptionist Coco Gentilly on his way out– did old boy just wink at me??– and decamped the Oakland A’s offices, lurching outside. Late morning sunlight perforated the marine murk like buckshot and scattered gaudy coins on the estuary. Mr. Mack’s humming got louder and his stride grew bolder. 

His crumbling jaw was set as he moseyed by tourists and vagrants and contemplated his new goal. This new acquaintance Demetrious Adair was most assuredly right– he would need legal assistance if he was going to make this unlikely transaction happen. Unfortunately, the Philadelphia lawyers he knew were thousands of miles away and presumably six feet under. Reluctantly, the reanimated teetotaler considered that he would do well to find a watering hole and engage the citizenry about his need.

Mr. Mack recalled that the esteemed batsman Lefty O’Doul of the Phillies and other clubs had opened a saloon in his hometown of San Francisco in the last century. And also, Lefty owes me a favor– because he once fleeced me out of $25,000 for a no-hit shortstop. However, a detour across the bay seemed overwhelming at the moment. Despite his recent good fortune in hitch-hiking across the great swath of America– Rube would be so proud of my gamboling spirit–Mr. Mack found that he was down to just a pair of Ben Franklins in his billfold.

Most fortuitously for his present circumstances, he had been buried in Philadelphia’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery on a rainy Sunday in 1956 with 500 dollars and the documents secreted in his suit– and here he was, inexplicably resurrected and somehow on the verge of meeting with the current A’s ownership! The metaphysical mysteries could be investigated later, but right now it was baseball season, and a challenge was before him! But he required a lawyer if this obstacle was to be surmounted. 

The solution to this dilly of a pickle, although obscure, must be under my nose… just like Ehmke, he indulged in a smirk to himself, reveling in a managerial memory from the glory days of 1929.  

The 35-year old journeyman, Howard Ehmke, had been Mr. Mack’s surprise starting pitcher in Game 1 of the World Series. The nation’s sports reporters were flabbergasted by the unlikely selection, but in the end, it was the bats of the mighty Cubs which were most flummoxed. Ehmke twirled a dandy, the A’s won Game 1 and never looked back, rolling on to an impressive championship.

A few strides later, it was the name of the tavern that caused him to stop undead in his tracks. “Heinold’s First and Last Chance.” 

Perfectly poetic. 

Mr. Mack crinkled a grin, ravaged flesh cascading over outpost cheekbones. “Established in 1884,” read a plaque just inside the door, where the dark wood and old framed photos made the visitor feel more in his element.

“That was the last year I had a strong spirit,” Mr. Mack cracked, hooking a long, gnarled finger back toward the plaque as he strode in, traversing the ancient, bowed floor. The bartender nodded stoically, while a few patrons chuckled. When asked if Mr. Heinold was present, the barman informed him that the owner was long extinct. Mr. Mack got straight to the point, removing his hat, clearing his desiccated throat and asking if anyone present happened to be, or know, a well-connected barrister. Silence. Maybe they didn’t know what “barrister” meant?

He then made piercing eye contact with each person in the room, shuffling around in a resolute semi-circle, and an epidemic of goosebumps broke out. “I’m an honest, God-fearing baseball man, and seeing as how I’m back in the game, back on this plane, somehow,” Mr. Mack said, “I see fit to seek some justice for the Oakland A’s.”

Those assembled in Heinold’s First and Last Chance that weekday afternoon may not have been the finest minds of this or any generation, but they knew exactly how to respond to a perfectly calibrated stump speech. Soon, though, the cackles and whoops and cries of “Let’s go A’s!” dimmed down, and after a few more pregnant pauses, it became clear that no helpful answer was forthcoming. 

Once the heady intoxicant of false hope wore off, Mr. Mack’s spirit and spine sagged. He realized with a disquieting jolt that he felt the gravitational pull of his deserted tomb. He was starting to think the “Last Chance” was the more apt half of the bar’s name at this point and planning to turn on his heel and find another public house, a robust potato of a man caressing a vodka and tonic beckoned him over.

As Mr. Mack approached, the human spud, nearly twice his weight and encased in a polo shirt and a cheap windbreaker, dramatically extended his left fist for a bump. Not wise to the social conventions of the day, Mr. Mack regarded the meaty paw, creakily sighed at what he interpreted as a hostile invitation, and, flaring his hat-rack shoulders, squared up into a classic Marquess de Queensbury pose. 

“You’re a bit stout for the job, my good man,” said Mr. Mack, “but I daresay I’ll mop the floor with you if I must.”

“Oh shit!” called out an observant grad student to his friends, who whipped out their phones in tandem. The bartender tilted his head sideways and sighed, then suddenly remembered something in the back office that needed tending to.

All 6 foot 1, 143 pounds of Irish ex-athlete bobbed and wove, like a minnow on the end of a line while the starchy barfly kept his big fist extended, an implacable look upon his face as he slurped up the dregs of his V&T. The patrons gaped at this unlikely tableau, amused and yet also cynically hopeful for a moment of bizarre, perhaps viral violence. “The geezer might snap in half!” gasped one of the grad students.

“Chuck Gumption,” the potato man finally announced, as he dropped his fist and patted the stool for Mr. Mack to sit upon. “I’m an assistant scheduling manager at BART. No big whoop. But my asshole cousin is that workplace lawyer who’s on all those stupid billboards. “Ho” Gumption has Mo Gumption?” 

Mr. Mack shook his head.

Chuck shrugged. “Not surprised. Nobody reads anymore, whaddaya want? Anyway, Howard. He’s a self-aggrandizing asshole, but he’s smart, he’s rich, and he usually wins. Me and him were big A’s fans, too, back in the day. Wanna meet him, like right now?”

Mr. Mack smiled again. Ehmke’s first name had been Howard, too. This was probably a favorable omen.

******************

48 hours later, the Oakland A’s front office was in a tizzy, and the outside world wasn’t too far behind. 

Not because the overmatched A’s had plunged 2 games further in the standings, dropping a pair on the road to a resurgent, rollicking Texas club, whose shortstop Seager sent line drives screaming around the yard and smothered wannabe hits in the hole.

Nor because Coco Gentilly’s son Miles got detention for the second time this year.

But because their Season of Hellish PR had somehow just metastasized into something exponentially, supernaturally worse, like a bad joke come to life.

A zombie walks into a bar… 

… and Oaktown is turned upside down?

The storm started, as most do these days, with social media. Mr. Mack’s YouTube video with infamous Oakland workplace attorney Howard “Ho” Gumption had racked up 2 million views in less than 24 hours. His doleful countenance and hat tip had already been turned into myriad memes, signifying sarcastic courtesy or inscrutable suffering. The video itself was a tight one minute and 30 seconds long, most of it the brash but brevity-minded “Ho” giving an overview of the A’s “Oakland vs. Vegas” plight. The barrister also took a deft swipe at the reviled absentee ownership, stoking the fan base for a potential class action suit, and made a cryptic remark about “legal documents in my client’s possession.”  At the very end of the video, the camera panned over and Mr. Gumption gave a glorious introduction to an “O.G. Hall of Famer, the Grand Old Man of Baseball who’s got something to say– the one and only Connie Mack!”

After numerous takes necessitated by his disbelief that the little cigarette case his lawyer’s daughter was holding was not only a phone but “an Ameche-kinetoscope,” the dignified gentleman uttered just nine words– words that were already emblazoned on the back of dozens of Kelly green t-shirts, covering picketers marching outside the team’s offices: 

“I’m Mr. Mack, and I want my A’s back.” 

The fronts of the t-shirts were headlined RETURN OF THE MACK, with a silhouette caricature of the man himself on front, sporting his trademark 3-piece suit, tie and hat, but “pimped out” with a walking stick and a gold grill.

These t-shirts were printed up by Green Moon Odom, one of two previously opposed fan groups which had unified and spent the better part of the year rousing public support in hopes of keeping the team in town. The “Green Moon” gang had been so named for its nationally televised stunt at a game last season, when rumors of the Nevada skulduggery began swirling. In unison, four friends dropped trou to reveal Kelly green-painted bums–  covered by tighty whiteys– with S-E-L-L spelled out in gold lettering, in a decent approximation of the team’s English Towne Medium font. (The fact that the 1970’s A’s dynasty had included a star pitcher named Blue Moon Odom made the nickname an easy wisecrack.) 

The heckling heinies had been aimed at the team’s unpopular owner, acid-washed jeans heir Joe Fissure and team president, Doyle Cabal, making a rare public appearance at the outdated and dilapidated Oakland-Alameda County Stadium. 

The fan base had been distraught over the duo’s systematic pillaging of the team, pruning the best players from the roster while slashing the payroll to shreds. Consequently, the on-field product had deteriorated to less than palatable, with the hometown crew suffering over 100 losses in 2022 and the last place gang of 2023 sloshing even deeper down the stadium’s infamous trough toilets. These minor league misfits and elevated interns were a game group, plucky and fun, but on pace for a win-loss record that was historically bad. It would be enough to rival the ignominy of Casey Stengel’s 1962 New York Mets, who “inspired” the classic Jimmy Breslin book, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

Predictably, the Oakland turnstiles grew rust and sprouted cobwebs. Vendors sold peanuts to each other on layaway. For some sadistic reason, Fissure and Cabal decided to raise ticket prices after they’d downgraded their on-field product. It was akin to staging a Broadway show called “Understudies!” They were essentially daring people to show up, like a roadside motel putting “No Air Conditioning” on the marquee smack in the scorch of summer.   

Their carpetbags were tagged for Vegas, to be transported in private jets by Nevada legislators and lobbyists apparently all too anxious to get fleeced. The whole plan was so thoroughly excrenilligent that a sportswriter actually coined the word “excrenilligent.*” 

Despite the drop in quality, diehards like the Green Moon Odom contingent, and their right field former-frenemies, the Oakrobatic Republic of Bongo, refused to take the hint and seek alternative entertainment options. Instead, starting in June they had organized a series of “Reverse Boycotts,” inspiring long-lost fans to dust off their Gene Tenace, Mike Norris, Jose Canseco and Carney Lansford jerseys, to actually pay the poisonous piper, and come back, en masse, to their concrete circle of smell. Banners were waved, chants were raised, and most eerily, choreographed moments of silence descended. On “Reverse Boycott” nights, attendance surged from the incidental to league average.

The Commissar of Major League Baseball, owners’ pet Roi Mangled, heard the passion of the spurned spectators and responded with a sneer: “Let loose the doves! Fair Oakland has risen to the cusp of the median for one shining moment,” he said, when asked about the “Reverse Boycott” nights. “The whole thing rather smacks of a ‘rent party,’ doesn’t it? Remember those? They don’t still have those anymore, do they?”

 Rather than flame out, the movement spread. Outraged fans in nearly every stadium across the land were spotted sporting Kelly green “SELL” signs. A Battle of the Bay regular-season series, typically a hostile turf war between the Giants and A’s, was a kumbaya-fest of solidarity. San Fran fans got in touch with their inner Hippies and spouted solidarity slogans all weekend long. 

Inferior product be damned, this was a matter of civic pride. These Oakland fans desperately wanted to keep their baseball team. They wanted to force eminent domain on the absentee slumlords, a movement which just weeks ago had seemed like a fool’s errand. But now, there was a fresh new blast of wind in the populist movement’s sails, purportedly emanating from the lungs of a long-deceased East Coast icon.

**********************

It was a mini-Mardi Gras on Jack London Square, the little patch of real estate chockablock with Kelly green-clad humanity marching, chanting, dancing and howling to the heavens as a funk band shredded it up. 

Good vibes are one thing, Howard Gumption knew, but long green is another. Before getting out of the tinted-window SUV to meet with Fissure, Cabal and the A’s legal team, the flashy billboard lawyer pressed the button that he hoped would change the course of history, at least of Major League Baseball, and certainly for his undead client and his practice. 

The critical fund-raising process officially commenced now. Howard knew he needed massive doses of cash and public support if Mr. Mack’s improbable goal had even a chance of happening. As a workplace lawyer, Ho knew that narrative ingredients were essential to swaying opinions, and fortunately he had an unprecedented embarrassment of riches in his arsenal. With one point-and-click, he launched a “GoFundMe” page for one Connie Mack, imploring “not only Oakland baseball fans, but people who valued loyalty, community and were against callous billion-heirs” to chip in what they could, in order to help out “a 161-year-old Hall of Famer who helped give injured WWII veteran Lou Brissie a job in the big leagues. Click here for the true story.”

With the fundraising phase now commenced, another front in the battle needed to be advanced—negotiating with the rival party. So Howard, along with his 20-year-old social media advisor/daughter Zelda, his brother Chuck and two beefy, multi-credentialed bodyguards escorted a rather giddy Mr. Mack toward the A’s offices he’d strolled into just two days ago. 

On the Square, the contingent briefly mingled with the cheering throng of hundreds. When Connie tipped his straw hat, the crowd went bonkers as two trombone players slithered around the group. The crowd belted out lyrics and the crowd belted out lyrics that had been distributed before the event. 

“Welcome back, Mr. Mack! Welcome back, Mr. Mack! Lead the Green and Gold Attack!” 

Zelda did a popular TikTok dance with the singers in the background.

Those who didn’t wear the new MACK t-shirts were sporting the classic green “SELL” shirts that had been cheap seat chic all summer long.

Demetrious and some of his security associates, monitoring the crowd for rogue elements, opened the doors for Mr. Mack’s group with professional nods. The elderly Irish-American client gave a hearty wave to the Oakland security man. “I’m sorry we’re tardy, Mr. Mullen,” Mr. Mack cheerfully proclaimed, shaking the surprised man’s hand, as they stepped inside the offices, leaving the cheering crowd behind. 

Without a further word, the stately gent strode across the lobby and pulled a single lily from his jacket pocket, presenting it to Coco at the front desk.

“And please do accept my floral apology for the scare the other day, Miss… ?”

“G-Gentilly. Coco Gentilly,” she smiled and nodded her appreciation–classyass old man, a man admitting he was WRONG?– shooting a quick look at Demetrious, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Thank you, Mr. Mack.”

“Connie,” he insisted. “Unless you prefer Cornelius.”

“Cornelius it is,” said Coco, placing the lily in her emptied Monster energy drink bottle, and feeling herself flush a little. Mr. Mack tipped his hat once again and the phalanx moved forward. 

An assistant GM emerged from the nearby elevator and tried to corral Mr. Mack, but Gumption, swinging his big, brass-cornered briefcase around like a laser pointer, would have none of it. “Take us up to see Fissure and Cabal, junior,” he said. “The grown-ups have some business to discuss. They might wanna get the commish on the blower, too.” He turned to Mr. Mack– “Do you call the telephone a blower? I’ve seen that on Turner Classic Movies, and always wanted to try it myself.”

Mr. Mack nodded. “Yes, we did. Also an Ameche.” 

The young exec held up his hand for a bubble of privacy, texted a message, and nodded at the quick reply. “Follow me, please, folks.”

Mr. Mack patted the young exec’s arm as the group boarded the elevator: “Much obliged. That’s quite a crackerjack Ameche you’ve got there, young man.”

Howard Gumption waggled his hand onanistically as he stepped into the elevator, telling the junior exec, “Yeah, it’s the cat’s pajamas, junior.”

***********

Look for Part 3 of “Return of The Mack” next Sunday, exclusively on Bardball

About the Author: Michael X. Ferraro grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs on 6-for-a-buck soft pretzels. His comedic football novel Circus Catch explores what would happen if a superstar athlete did the unthinkable– and tried to overturn a referee’s call that was in their favor. 

 For “Return of the Mack,” he owes a debt of gratitude to the real-world research and writing of Warren Corbett for The Hardball Times and Connie Mack biographer Norman Macht. And also, a massive tip of the inspirational cap to Chris Bachelder for his ground-breaking and hilarious novel of re-animation, political extremism and pop culture, U.S.!