Tale of the tee: Hershey Sweet Spots
When it comes to sports, Hershey, Pa., is best known as a hockey town and the home of the American Hockey League’s Hershey Bears since the 1930s.
Hershey once had hopes of landing a team in the National Football League and hosted training camps for the likes of the Pittsburgh Steelers and, mostly, the Philadelphia Eagles from the 1940s through the 1960s.
Hershey’s most famous moment in basketball came March 2, 1962, when Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors set a National Basketball Association single-game scoring record that still stands, 100 points.
But well before all of that, and practically from the town’s beginning, there was organized baseball.
Milton S. Hershey founded his model town in south-central Pennsylvania in 1903, opening the world’s largest chocolate factory there in 1905. The next year, Hershey Park, a leisure park for factory employees, opened with festivities that included a baseball game, according to Wikipedia.
And baseball would get much bigger in 1943, when Hershey became the spring training home of the Philadelphia Phillies in what would prove to be one of the most tumultuous seasons in the team’s long history.
Stay has drawn upon Hershey’s baseball bona fides as the basis for our newest design. Now taking the field, the fictional Hershey Sweet Spots Base Ball Club.
The name is a nod to Hershey’s chocolate-making history, of course, and to the “sweet spot” of a baseball bat, or the area that meets the ball when a hitter makes solid contact.
‘Best baseball diamond in the state’
Hershey Athletic Field, located within the park, would become a popular attraction, the games played there prominently covered in the pages of the weekly Hershey Press newspaper.
“Your presence is needed at the baseball game on Saturday at 3 o’clock,” read the lead “local news” item in the May 4, 1911 issue.
The June 13, 1912 issue featured a game story about the Hershey YMCA baseball team and listed the 45-game schedule for the six-team Twilight Industrial League (“June 17, Office vs. Printers”).
An adjoining article lamented the “remarkably poor” attendance, presumably to watch the YMCA team, despite “Hershey this season [having] one of the best teams in its history … .”
“There is no cause whatever why the boys should not have the hearty support of the base-ball loving public of Hershey and vicinity. The fact of the matter is, that if we are to continue to have a semi-professional team the people of this vicinity must give it their support.”
Postcard from 1915, when some 30,000 fans watched baseball games at Hershey Athletic Field.
Hershey Athletic Field stood roughly where Hersheypark’s Carousel Circle is today, enveloped by a bend in Spring Creek. The Comet rollercoaster operates along what used to be the ballpark’s first and third baselines.
Beyond left field stood Convention Hall (later called the Ice Palace), which debuted in May 1915, and the adjacent Hershey Sports Arena (later Hersheypark Arena), when it debuted in 1936.
In 1915, as a Hershey entry joined the six-team Central Pennsylvania League, Hershey Athletic Field underwent renovations that included an expansion of the bleachers and construction of a ticket booth between the grandstand and right field bleachers. Every fan now would have to buy a ticket.
“The athletic field has been put in shape and Hershey can now boast of the best baseball diamond in the state,” the Hershey Press wrote. “The grass diamond which was made during the past two months is a big improvement and fans will be treated to a faster game of ball.”
The “new grounds” formally debuted on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend against Steelton. Milton Hershey threw out the first pitch.
“Mr. Hershey said he had not thrown a ball for many years but would try to do his best,” reported the Press, which was owned by Mr. Hershey himself. “He did and his throw was perfect, landing directly in the umpire’s hands.”
The “big events” occurred two days later on Memorial Day, however, with Hershey playing a home-and-home double header that began in Lebanon and concluded, after a delay caused by the 16-inning opener, at Hershey Athletic Field.
The same Press story alternately described the crowd size as 2,000 or 5,000, but clearly it was significant.
“The crowd was one of the largest that has ever attended a baseball game at Hershey,” according to the Press. “The Hershey band was present and kept things lively throughout the contest. The grandstand and bleachers overflowed and a crowd encircled the entire grounds. The best of order prevailed.”
Headline in Hershey Press, June 3, 1915.
By season’s end, the Press reported in September, some 30,000 baseball spectators had passed through the stadium. (Half that number turned out one day in June when Pennsylvania’s governor spoke there.)
Commando drills
In 1943, World War II raged. The U.S. State Department took over the Hotel Hershey, precluding any guests from staying there. But the baseball games would go on, albeit with travel restrictions that had teams staging spring training close to home. Hershey beat out towns closer to Philadelphia and Lancaster to host the Phillies.
The Phillies’ small roster and staff lodged at the Community Building, according to the Hotel Hershey High-Lights, a newsletter published from 1934-51. The players would work out at the gym in the morning, then at the field in the afternoon.
New manager Bucky Harris, who grew up in Pittston, Pa., had begun managing in 1924. That season, the 27-year-old “Boy Wonder” player-manager led the Washington Senators to a World Series championship.
The Phillies club he inherited was one of the worst in baseball history, winning only 42 games (against 109 losses) in 1942 and finishing last for a fifth straight season.
“I don’t expect wonders of you fellows,” Harris told his new team, according to a United Press article, “but I do want you to act and think like major leaguers.”
Photo: Hershey History Center
The new member of the team wearing No. 2 was eager to show his skills, taking part in a 90-minute workout that included jogging, calisthenics, pitching and fielding, as described in a wire story in the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer Journal.
Except this wasn’t a player trying to make the team. Rather, it was Bill Cox, the head of a syndicate that had just bought the National League club.
It was suggested to Harris that he might be able to insert the 33-year-old Cox into his lineup.
“Yes,” Harris said, “but I hope we never reach that stage.”
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s possible to see the beginnings of the tug-of-war between owner and manager that would overshadow the team’s improvement on the field and at the gate.
Cox was variously described as a “New York sportsman” and a “wealthy lumber broker.” He had played baseball and run cross country in college and brought in trainer Harold Bruce to whip the “Fightin’ Phils” into fighting shape.
Bruce’s “commando” program was patterned after drills used in the armed forces, with exercises such as “jingle jangle” and “gorilla hedge hop.”
A go-getter is soon gone
Infielder Babe Dahlgren, acquired from the Brooklyn Dodgers in a trade, said he was in “tip-top condition” upon his arrival in camp. Dahlgren had bounced among several teams in his seven-year career; the New York Yankees had cut him after the 1940 season claiming that his arms were too short.
“I know the Phils want me, and that I will have a chance to play every day,” Dahlgren said in an Associated Press story that appeared in the Plainfield, N.J., Courier-News. “Besides, I’m impressed by Bill Cox, the new president. He’s a go-getter.”
Soon enough, however, these key figures in the Phils season would be getting gone. The team had a 39-53 record in late July, good for fifth place, but Harris chafed under Cox’ constant interference, according to Wikipedia.
Cox fired Harris on July 27. Friends of Harris informed Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that Cox had bet on games earlier in the season. The New York Times, in its Cox obituary in 1989, wrote:
“Later (Cox) said he had made only small, sentimental bets with friends, even though he had previously admitted to the commissioner that he had placed bets with bookmakers, a false admission, he later argued, that he had made to smoke out a disloyal Phillies employee.”
Landis banned Cox from baseball for life, making him the last person to suffer that fate until Pete Rose in 1989.
Harris would continue to manage, capturing his second World Series title with the 1947 Yankees. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1975.
The 1943 Phillies finished in seventh place in the eight-team National League, their attendance doubling from the previous year. The Phillies moved spring training to Wilmington, Del., in 1944 and 1945, returned to Florida in 1946, and have been in Clearwater, Fla., since 1947.
This undated postcard shows Hershey Athletic Field surrounded by the Comet rollercoaster.
Hershey Athletic Field closed in 1970. In 1971, Hershey Park became the gated Hersheypark and changed from a pay-as-you-ride policy to a one-price admission as it sought to grow beyond a regional attraction. Baseball was not part of the vision.
But from tee ball to Little League, high school to American Legion, baseball continues to be played on fields throughout Hershey.
To the more than century-long history of Hershey hardball, the Hershey Sweet Spots Base Ball Club tips its cap.