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)
Citizen’s Bank Park – Philadelphia, PA
Wednesday, May 6 at 6:40p – Zack Wheeler vs Jeffrey Springs (L)
Thursday, May 7 at 6:40p – Andrew Painter vs JT Ginn (R)
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.
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
Phillies vs Braves: Braves Free Agency Since Greg Maddux
The Braves are one of the more interesting teams out there when it comes to free agency. In fact, the success of free agency in a way comes back to them and Ted Turner when they signed the very first officially sanctioned free agent ever with Andy Messersmith’s 3/$1m contract back in 1975. Since then?…
Phillies vs Braves: Ted Turner, Gary Matthews, and the America’s Cup
Ted Turner was wild. He was known to spend lavishly, act crazy, and basically do whatever he wanted. Why? Because he could. To many, he was an asshole. To more still, he was a genius. Well, he was also the owner of the Atlanta Braves and in the late 70s, all of these personality traits…
Phillies at Diamondbacks: How did Arizona win a World Series in Just 4 Years?
The Phillies were around for 97 years before winning their first World Series. The Diamondbacks did it in 4. It took 93 years for the Phillies to have a 100 win season. The Diamondbacks did it in 2. What the hell??? How in the world did they manage that? Monday, August 31 at 9:40p -…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
- They were high school girls at first which was not a red flag at the time for some reason, but yikes! ↩︎
Leave a Reply