Philly Front Office

For this week’s Phillies vs Athletics series preview, I have a good story for you about where those cookies you used to buy in the mall came from…

Tuesday, May 5 at 6:40p – Cristopher Sanchez vs Luis Severino (R)
Wednesday, May 6 at 6:40p – Zack Wheeler vs Jeffrey Springs (L)
Thursday, May 7 at 6:40p – Andrew Painter vs JT Ginn (R)

Citizen’s Bank Park – Philadelphia, PA

There is no team in baseball with more off the field stories than the Athletics. Earlier in the year I wrote about how MC hammer used to be their Executive Vice President, but this story might be even better. They were essentially the first step in delicious cookies permeating shopping malls nationwide when they gave a job to Ms. Debra Jane Sivyer.

Friday Fun: Meet the A’s 11-Year-Old Executive VP

In the 1970s, the A’s were owned by a man named Charlie O. Finley. While Finley was notoriously cheap, he had a very good eye for making money and winning baseball games. One of those money-making ideas was “inventing” ball girls. Was it a particularly novel idea to imagine baseball fans would enjoy seeing young, attractive women on the sidelines of baseball games retrieving foul balls? Probably not, but no one had ever done it before. While it was said to be done to get women more interested in baseball, it was pretty obviously just a ploy to get more younger men through the turnstiles.¹

Well one of the first of these new employees was Ms. Sivyer. In addition to her job of looking good and getting foul balls, she was also tasked with baking cookies and serving lemonade to the umpires between innings. Not kidding! The idea here was to perhaps curry some favor with the men in black and perhaps get a few extra calls for the home team. Did it work? Well, the A’s did win Tom Emanski style back-to-back-to-back World Series from 1972-1974. It clearly didn’t hurt.

Well, Ms. Sivyer rather enjoyed making the cookies and got quite good at it. So good that she decided to start a business when she was just 21 years old making homemade style cookies. The company took off and was soon in every airport and shopping mall you could imagine. Why don’t you know the name Mrs. Sivyer’s Cookies then? Because shortly before she started the company, she married Randall Keith Fields. Yes, the humble beginnings of Mrs. Fields cookies come from the Oakland A’s trying to get a favorable strike zone from the umpires.

Idea for the Story: Big Hair and Plastic Grass by Dan Epstein

1. They were high school girls at first which was not a red flag at the time for some reason, but yikes! ↩︎