Recap: In the first two installments of this short tall tale (links here — Part 1 and Part 2), the re-animated Philadelphia A’s owner-manager Connie Mack has traveled six feet up and 3,000 miles west to lay claim to his former team. Mr. Mack and his new lawyer (gimmicky billboard class-action guy Howard Gumption) have just dropped some bombshell news on the A’s imminently carpetbagging front office: if they try to move to Vegas, he has the right to buy back his team.

 Part III:

“Go West, Dead Man…”

After a whirlwind meeting, Mr. Mack and his entourage left the building. The current owner of the A’s, Joe Fissure, was presently in mid-fume, grilling his high-priced Ivy League lawyer about how the holy hell a dead guy and a billboard clown had him on the ropes.

“I’m not saying we’re on the defensive, Joe,” said the lawyer. “I’m just saying that if that agreement turns out to be legit, they might have a case to present in court.”

Meanwhile Doyle Cabal, the team president, was googling information about the claims that had been put forth in this room. Fissure groaned: “How the fuck am I getting jammed up by a zombie with a cocktail napkin?! I thought zombies weren’t real! Since when is that a thing? I need to be briefed on the new trends.”

Cabal groaned even louder, and all heads in the conference room whipped his way. He grimaced, reading from his screen. “So, it definitely looks like there were league meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1954 when they were trying to sort out the sale of the A’s. So that part of their story lines up, at least.”

Mack’s eldest sons, Roy and Earle, had been the driving force behind the team’s sale, and, by many accounts, were not the sharpest spikes in the equipment room. Mr. Mack, despite being long revered as an icon of the game, was one of the least financially solvent owners in the majors. He’d retired as manager after the 1950 season (his 50th at the helm), but four years later, at the age of 91, had decided that he needed to cash out, for his wife and children, rather than continue the struggle against decreasing odds of success. The other team in town, the National League’s upstart Phillies, had finally tasted some success and stolen much of the A’s thunder, and Mr. Mack couldn’t afford to run a farm system, which was what all the successful franchises were now doing…

It gutted him that he and his sons couldn’t find qualified local buyers to keep the team in Philadelphia. He was not at all pleased that the team would be moving to Kansas City after its purchase by new owner Arnold Johnson, for he knew that generations of Philadelphia Athletics fans would feel abandoned.

So, unbeknownst to almost the entirety of the outside world until seven decades later, the one concession he got that Fall, during special meetings at the Waldorf-Astoria, was an agreement by league owners and AL President William Harridge that, “If the franchise is ever going to head East again, Mr. Mack alone (and not his heirs) will have the first right of refusal to purchase the team back at fair market value.” This codicil (thought to be merely a symbolic gesture at the time) was written on the hotel napkin, and signed by both the league president and Mr. Mack. The man was 91 at the time. Practically insolvent, if not incontinent. It was a gesture. A courtesy.

The Philadelphia A’s weren’t even sold to Johnson’s group until a month later, but it turned out the napkin lasted longer than anything else in that room.

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

And now, 69 years later, the formerly threadbare wallet of Cornelius McGillicuddy was bursting with well over a billion bucks. The GoFundMe started by Ho Gumption had obliterated all previous online fund-raising records, with posts from George Clooney, Stephen King, Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell stoking public interest to the tune of eight figures of donations. Late night TV host Stephen Colbert even had actor James Cromwell, a Mack doppelganger, on the show, portraying the baseball man and “passing the hat.” (Colbert had initially invited Mack to come on the program and do the solicitation, and the gent was game, but the CBS lawyers kiboshed that plan, leery both of his undead status and the legal implications of soliciting funds. Colbert waggishly said CBS was intentionally spiting its top demographic, “centenarians into boring sports.”)

As you may have noticed, billionaires usually get what they want, so it’s kind of extra fun when two are at odds. Current A’s owner Fissure had the support of MLB Commissar Mangled, some of the other owners and some Vegas movers and shakers, but Mr. Mack had… pretty much everyone else.

As the legal claim asserted by Mr. Cornelius McGillicuddy and filed by attorney Howard Gumption in Alameda County’s Superior Court was put on the fast track for a grand jury hearing to determine its validity, a temporary court order preventing Joe Fissure from further engagement with the city of Las Vegas was issued. The appeal was denied, because who wants to say no to a sympathetic, death-defying figure who gave a big league job to a wounded World War II vet?

The team’s two unofficial rebel fan groups, Green Moon Odom and the Oakrobatic Republic of Bongos, hosted a “Back From the Deadl” bonfire party and parking lot Wiffleball game before a late September series with the White Sox. Mr. Mack showed up with Coco Gentilly on his arm, decked out in a dazzling White Elephant-themed jumpsuit. Behind him, a banner was unfurled, reading “The A’s are Back from the Dead: The rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.”

Mr. Mack gave a well-received speech, at first causing the fans to gasp when he admitted that his original intention had been to bring the team back to Philadelphia. “But the Bay area has won my heart in more ways than one,” he said, flicking a glance at the blushing former receptionist of the A’s. “So, when I am permitted to buy my club back, you can rest assured I will not only keep the A’s here, but I vow to upgrade the pitching AND the plumbing!”

The crowd erupted. Mr. Mack wildly waved his hands in the air in celebration, and then a second gasp went up from the crowd. His nose had fallen clean off. However, Coco’s son Miles nabbed the loose sniffer in mid-air, and smoothly flipped it back to his new “Uncle Connie.” The Oakland faithful roared again, as Mr. Mack shuffled off, waving farewell. (“Nose-diving A’s may have new life!” said an internet headline)

The ballpark was sold out for three straight nights, with fans chanting “Sell the Team!” throughout the games. Miles’ nose-catch had gone viral, too, of course. Connie was being called The Wizard of Schnoz. By the time the Sunday game rolled around, some wag from the Oakrobatic Republic of Bongos had changed the lyrics to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and distributed lyric sheets outside the park. The end result was a Seventh Inning Stretch that will never be forgotten. Oaklandians, 43,000 strong, led by the Green Moon Odom crew, local celebs including film director-rapper Boots Riley and Green Day drummer Tre Cool pounding the green-and-gold bongos, serenaded their sporting slumlords not once but three times, as police seized the P.A. system, earning top story coverage around the globe, from CNN and ESPN to the BBC and Al Jazeera, and even the dark web:

(to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”)

“Sell the team to the Zombie
Sell the team to him now.
We don’t want Fissure
or Cabal back,
We just wanna meet Old Connie Mack!
So it’s root, root, root for a quick sale.
If the A’s skip town, it’s a shame
For it’s 1-2-3 strikes you suck
At the old ballgame!”

 There were just two weeks left in the regular season, and the A’s had long since been eliminated from contention.  However, the movement was gaining steam. Mr. Mack, both Gumption brothers, Coco, Demetrious, and, at the 161-year old’s insistence, Green Moon’s Javier Ramiro and Peter Francis Sullivan, plus the ORoBs Bitsy Bindursky and Yodakia Veneziano, all gathered after-hours at Heinold’s First and Last Chance Saloon (again, Mr. Mack’s idea) to discuss what the fan base would like to see happen with the club under Mack ownership.

He was heartened by their passion, their egalitarianism, their sense of civic duty. Despite being a billionaire and nearly three times as old as anyone else in the room, the numbers being flung around occasionally overwhelmed Mr. Mack. He was shocked by the salaries, but even more so, the ticket prices around the league. “But how can a working family afford to have season tickets?” he asked. “They don’t,” he was told.

Despite the potentially disconcerting proposition that Mr. Mack was indeed a human being who had ceased to be extant nearly 70 years ago, most of the nation, and indeed the world, had shrugged the miracle and its ramifications off. With other technological and medical advances, it seemed inevitable, and frankly a blessing that the “first one back” wasn’t Hitler or Elvis. Mr. Mack’s staunch Catholicism effectively prevented the Christian right from calling him out as some kind of underworld demon.

Whether it was simply a tactic or actual emotion, Commissar Mangled expressed fear and outrage at the prospect of a team being owned by a man legally declared dead in 1956. He tried to win that rhetorical battle when appearing jointly (via Zoom) with Mr. Mack on an edition of “Nightline.”

“For the life of me,” sputtered Mangled to the show’s host, “and I personally do have life… I can’t understand how our national pastime would allow somebody from… the “other side” to own a team. What unholy message would that send to America’s youth?”

Mr. Mack scoffed. “That everybody has equal opportunity, I suppose, no matter what their situation is. I’m ashamed to say that it wasn’t until 1947 that Mr. Jack Roosevelt Robinson integrated our game, and as an owner, I had a role in that long-standing denial of rights. The denial of the pursuit of happiness. Now, more than 75 years later, it is somewhat contradictory that Mr. Mangled is alarmed or skeptical of my presence, is it not?” posed Mr. Mack.

The news anchor tilted his head, curious: “Why do you say it’s contradictory, sir?”

“Well after all,” Mr. Mack said, lips twitching at the corners. “This gentleman is the one who has magically conjured up ‘ghost runners’ in the 10th inning of ball games!”

The public relations war was over before it started.

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

Next Week: Look for the thrilling conclusion, Part 4 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.!