Shibe Park and Connie Mack Stadium: Philadelphia's Shared Ballpark

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Shibe Park opened in 1909 as the first concrete-and-steel major-league park, then housed the Athletics and the Phillies together until 1954 and the Phillies alone until 1970 as Connie Mack Stadium.

For 62 seasons, from 1909 through 1970, one ballpark at the corner of 21st Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia hosted major-league baseball. It opened as Shibe Park, a home for Connie Mack's Athletics, and it was renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1953. For 17 of those seasons, from the middle of 1938 through 1954, it was home to two clubs at once, the American League Athletics and the National League Phillies, an arrangement that gave the city a ballpark with a split personality and two very different histories under the same roof.

The park is also a landmark in the architecture of the game. It was the first major-league ballpark built primarily of concrete and steel, and it set the template for the string of fireproof parks that followed in the next few years. This article follows it through four stages: the opening and the Athletics' dynasty, the long decline, the Phillies' years, and the end. Numbers come from the historical record through the 2025 season, and the dates of the park's construction and demolition come from well-documented history.

Opening day in 1909

The Athletics opened the park on April 12, 1909, with a win over the Boston Red Sox, 8-1. It was named for Ben Shibe, a part-owner of the club and a manufacturer of sporting goods in Philadelphia. The man running the team, Connie Mack, had managed the Athletics since 1901 and would do so until 1950, a span of five decades that no other manager has matched.

What made the building unusual was its construction. Earlier major-league parks were mostly wooden, and fires had destroyed several of them. Shibe Park was built of steel and reinforced concrete, with a grand French-Renaissance-style entrance tower topped by a dome at the corner of 21st and Lehigh. It is generally regarded as the first ballpark of its kind in the major leagues, and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh and Comiskey Park in Chicago followed within a few seasons. You can read how those parks compare in the story of Forbes Field and the original Comiskey Park.

The Athletics finished 95-58 and second in the American League that first season. Their attendance at the new park was 674,915, the best in the first decade of the building's life by a margin; it would not be topped by the club until 1925.

The Athletics' great years

The first 23 seasons at the park produced seven American League pennants and five World Series titles for Mack's club, in two separate runs. The first came with the team's early-1910s core, the second with the club of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

The 1931 record of 107-45 is the best in the history of the franchise, and the combined record of the three seasons from 1929 to 1931 was 313-143. The 1929 Series produced one of the most famous comebacks in the game's history, in Game 4 at Shibe Park, when the Athletics trailed the Cubs 8-0 and scored ten runs in the seventh inning to win 10-8. The game was changing around them: the club's team home run totals were 122 in 1929 and 125 in 1930, up from 56 in 1927, and the 1932 team hit 172.

The long fall

Mack did not keep his first great team together. After the 1914 pennant, the club was taken apart, and the results at the park were disastrous. The Athletics finished eighth in the American League in each of the seven seasons from 1915 through 1921. They went 43-109 in 1915 and 36-117 in 1916. In 1919 they went 36-104, and in 1920 they went 48-106. Attendance, which had been 674,915 in 1909, dropped to 146,223 in 1915 and 184,471 in 1916.

Another low came in the mid-1930s and the 1940s. The club went 53-100 in 1936, finished eighth in 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1945 and 1946, and went 52-102 in 1950. That is why the Athletics are remembered as a team of two dynasties separated by long stretches of losing.

The Phillies move in

The Phillies had played for decades at the Baker Bowl, a cramped park that had fallen into disrepair. In 1938 they moved into Shibe Park partway through the season and became the Athletics' tenants, and from 1939 on the two clubs played all of their home games there. The Phillies' first years in the building were among the worst in their history. They went 45-105 in 1938, 45-106 in 1939 and 50-103 in 1940, then 43-111 in 1941 and 42-109 in 1942. The club was renamed the Blue Jays for 1943 and 1944 before returning to the Phillies.

With two clubs in one building, the historical attendance figures show both drawing from the same city. In 1946 the Phillies drew 1,045,247, the first time either team had passed a million at the park, while the Athletics drew 621,793 and were in the middle of a 105-loss season.

The spite fence and the rooftops

Houses on 20th Street stood just beyond the right-field wall, and their owners sold seats on their roofs to people who wanted to watch games without buying a ticket. In 1935 Mack responded by building a tall fence along the right-field side, which neighbors called the spite fence. The episode is a good reminder that a park in the middle of a residential block has neighbors, and that they, too, had a view.

The park sat in a dense residential neighborhood with little room to expand, and that fact would matter when the idea of a replacement came up in the 1960s.

More than baseball

The park was also used for other sports. The Philadelphia Eagles played their home games there from 1940 into the 1950s, and the 1948 NFL championship game, in which the Eagles beat the Chicago Cardinals 7-0, was played in a snowstorm at the ballpark. The Philadelphia Stars of the Negro National League played there in 1948, and the historical record shows them at 27-30 that season. The park hosted the American League's first night game on May 16, 1939.

It also has a place in the history of integration. In April 1947, when Jackie Robinson visited the park in his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Phillies' manager, Ben Chapman, and some of his players directed vicious abuse at him from the dugout. The episode is among the best-documented incidents of Robinson's first season.

Connie Mack Stadium

In 1953 the park was renamed Connie Mack Stadium in honor of the man who had managed the Athletics for half a century and had left the dugout three years earlier. The new name arrived at a bad time for the Athletics. They went 59-95 in 1953 and 51-103 in 1954, drawing 304,666 fans in their last season at the park. After 1954 the club moved to Kansas City, and the Phillies became the sole tenants.

The change left the Phillies with a building that had been designed for a different era. Their attendance did grow after the Athletics left, reaching 1,146,230 in 1957, up from 738,991 in 1954, which suggests that the city supported one club better than two.

The Whiz Kids and the collapse of 1964

The Phillies had two moments at Connie Mack Stadium that people still talk about. The first was 1950, when the club went 91-63, won the National League pennant and drew 1,217,035 fans, a team remembered as the Whiz Kids for its youth. The Phillies were swept by the Yankees in the World Series, and Games 1 and 2 were played at Shibe Park.

The second was 1964. The Phillies finished 92-70, one game behind the 93-69 Cardinals, in a race they had led by a wide margin late in the season. The club lost ten games in a row near the end, an episode known simply as the collapse of 1964. It was also the best year for attendance in the building's history, with 1,425,891 fans. The combination of a great season and a heartbreak in the final weeks makes 1964 the park's most emotional year.

The ledger: two tenants, two records

Adding up the seasons shows how lopsided the building's history was. The records below are full-season records for the club that called the park home in those years, from the historical record, so they include road games as well.

Across the whole run the Athletics were 3,247-3,738 (.465) in 46 seasons as the park's tenant, and the Phillies were 2,273-2,866 (.442) in the 33 seasons from 1938 through 1970. The same building held two strong periods for the Athletics, in 1909 to 1914 and 1925 to 1931, and a long period of failure in between and after. The Phillies' first twelve years there, at .367, were worse than the Athletics' seventeen shared years at .405, and the later Phillies were better but still below .500.

The pattern also says something about what a ballpark can and cannot do. A good building does not produce wins, and neither of the clubs that used this one was able to turn its home into an advantage in the standings for long. The park's real distinction is that it set a standard for how a baseball stadium should be built.

Why steel and concrete mattered

Before 1909 most major-league parks were wooden, and wooden grandstands burned. The Polo Grounds in New York, for instance, was destroyed by fire in 1911 and rebuilt with a steel-and-concrete grandstand; the story of that building appears in the history of the Polo Grounds. A fireproof grandstand was safer, held more fans and lasted far longer, and the new material allowed a double-decked stand that rose over the field rather than spreading out beside it.

The cost of that permanence is flexibility. A ballpark built of concrete and steel and set into a city block cannot be easily enlarged, which is why the parks of this generation ended up stranded in neighborhoods that had grown up around them. The same features that made them beloved, the closeness of the seats and the way the building fitted the street, were what doomed them when clubs wanted parking and more seats.

The last years and what remains

By the end of the 1960s the stadium was run down, the neighborhood around it had changed and the Phillies' attendance had fallen to 519,414 in 1969. The club played its final season there in 1970, finishing 73-88, and moved to Veterans Stadium for 1971. The empty building suffered a fire in the early 1970s and was demolished in 1976. A church was later built on the site, and the corner of 21st and Lehigh no longer looks like a ballpark.

The life of the building ran from the era of the dead ball through the integration of the game to the television age. Its story is a useful companion to the other great parks of the same generation, including the original Yankee Stadium, Tiger Stadium and the Polo Grounds. Each was built on a city block, each had a personality shaped by that block, and each disappeared when the game decided it needed something larger.

Common questions

Who played at Shibe Park? The Philadelphia Athletics from 1909, the Phillies from 1938, and the NFL's Eagles in the 1940s and 1950s.

When did it become Connie Mack Stadium? In 1953, three years after Connie Mack retired as the Athletics' manager.

Why did the Athletics leave? The club moved to Kansas City after the 1954 season, after attendance at the stadium had fallen to 304,666.

What was the Phillies' last season there? 1970. They moved to Veterans Stadium for the 1971 season.

Is the stadium still standing? No. It was demolished in 1976.

Where to go next

For the team that plays in Philadelphia today, see the Phillies team page and the ballparks and fans topic page. If you collect items from old parks, the guide to sports memorabilia and authentication explains how to avoid forgeries.