Some good news for sports museums, which were challenged for visitors and revenues even before the recession: The Philadelphia Athletics Historical Society has been saved from likely closure.

The small museum devoted to a largely unsuccessful team that left that town nearly 60 years ago moved into trophy company space as part of the reconstituted Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame at the end of April.

After operating since 1998 in suburban Hatboro, the A’s museum fell upon hard financial times (and some claim mismanagement), and earlier this year appeared to be on the brink of shutting down.

Much of the musuem’s memorabilia — at least what wasn’t auctioned to prepare for the move – is devoted to the glory years of the A’s in Philadelphia, from 1929 to 1931, when they won two World Series and rivaled the best team the game had to offer, Babe Ruth’s “Murderer’s Row” New York Yankees.

(The essential magazine read is William Nack’s Sports Illustrated cover story in 1996; the most recent book treatment is Brett Topel’s 2011 self-published title, “Simply the Best.”)

Connie Mack’s best teams featured eventual Hall of Famers Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Al Simmons and Mickey Cochrane, all of whom he economically acquired to build a powerhouse club. But days after the A’s won the World Series over the Cubs, the stock market crashed, and the Depression took a toll at baseball ticket booths. Notororiously parsimonious by nature, Mack had sold the cornerstone pieces of his club over the next three years.

The Philadelphia A’s not only never reached another World Series, they were among the consistently worst teams in baseball before moving to Kansas City in 1954. Mack died a year later.

But the memories — and the stories — resonate deeply with those who recall them, or who wish to preserve them for future generations. Lou Brissie, one of Mack’s late-era journeyman pitchers (and the subject of a 2009 book by Ira Berkow, “The Corporal Was a Pitcher”), told a suburban Philadelphia newspaper last month that Mack wrote to him and other baseball-playing veterans on World II duty, offering to give him a chance in the game after he suffered serious wounds in Italy.

Brissie, who’s now 88, got his chance while wearing a leg brace, pitching for the A’s from 1947 to 1950, and he still maintains ties to the historical society.

Now the last official connection to the Philadelphia A’s has moved back into town, closer to the now-demolished Shibe Park (later Connie Mack Stadium) where the team played. I’ve always felt being close to hallowed ground makes the work of preservation easier, and I’m hoping this is the case with the relocated A’s shrine.

It’s been 20 years since University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick published “To Every Thing a Season,” his history of Shibe Park and its impact on a community of north Philadelphia that’s as much an afterthought to locals as the A’s.

In a 2011 interview with Philly Sports History, as the Phillies were three years removed from a World Series title, Kuklick couldn’t help but place that achievement in a larger historical perspective:

Finally somebody says, “Sure the Phillies are great. Sure Chase Utley is great. But is he the greatest 2nd baseman that’s ever played here? Absolutely not. He doesn’t even come close.” People don’t realize that the 1929, 1930, and 1931 A’s are better than even this team today, which I think is the best team this franchise has had.

Here are parts two and three of the Kuklick interview. A snippet:

That ballpark is right in the middle of the city. And you are in the middle of an urban area. And you walk into this park, and it’s dark and there’s concrete around, and then you come up to one of the entrances to the field, and you see this green diamond. There’s just something there that’s just incredible.

And another one:

My wife and I went on vacation one time to Club Med, and we were talking to some people, and we said, “Where are you from?” and this guy said “Wrigleyville.” He didn’t say Chicago. And we knew exactly where he was talking about. That ballpark is known all over the Western World. And every once in a while, I think, “Gee if they had only had the foresight.” But basically that area went through a really terrible period. It’s now come up considerably on its own. It’s a lot less nasty and dangerous than it was.

Robert Birnbaum surveys newly-released baseball books at The Daily Beast – many of them in an historical vein, of course — and as usual I came across something unanticipated and refreshingly welcome.

In addition to Stuart Banner’s history of the antitrust exemption, Dennis D’Agostino’s salute to legendary baseball writers and Robert Weintraub’s examination of the immediate post-World War II game comes this gem from Edward Achorn: “The Summer of Beer and Whiskey.”

If that doesn’t grab your attention, the subtitle ought to stoke your thirst (pun intended): “How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game.”

It’s the story of how Chris Von der Ahe, a German-born saloon owner, founded the St. Louis Browns in 1883 — and later the American Association, which became the American League — as a way to sell more beer. Achorn, the editorial page editor of The Providence Journal, writes that Von der Ahe knew practically nothing about baseball. But his suds-selling scheme opened the game up to everyday working people, and in particular immigrants like himself.

Unlike the National League, which didn’t play on Sunday and didn’t sell alcoholic beverages at the ballpark, Von der Ahe did both, selling tickets for 25 cents for any and all comers to enjoy booze and ball on the Lord’s Day. From an excerpt on the NPR website:

With cheap tickets, Sunday ball, and beer, he grabbed control of the dying game in St. Louis and, in a turnaround at least as improbable and dramatic as the one engineered by the 2011 Cardinals, infused it with new life and popularity—while perhaps saving all of professional baseball in the bargain. Von der Ahe also played a role in founding a flamboyant new major league, whose influence echoes loudly through Major League Baseball to this day.

(Achorn, author of several baseball history titles, including Twitter star Old Hoss Radbourn, is interviewed by NPR’s Jacki Lyden here.)

The title of the book comes from how National League snobs regarded the maverick league, calling it the “beer and whiskey circuit.” But Von der Ahe’s entrepreneurial ruse changed the game during a time when the fate of what’s become the national pastime wasn’t always certain.

In addition to Birnbaum’s survey is a notable “project” by Los Angeles Daily News columnist Tom Hoffarth, who recently embarked on a review of 30 baseball books in 30 days — it’s become an annual thing. Sports media writer Ed Sherman did this Q & A with Hoffarth last month:

I’m also huge on history-related books, but only if they’re written well, not like a college dissertation but with a writer’s flare to insert color and not just research. This year, another book by Robert Weintraub nails it with “The Victory Season.” The opposite is true with a bio on “Smoky Joe Wood.”

Hoffarth also references baseball book maven Ron Kaplan, proprietor of Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf and author of  the recently released “501 Books Baseball Fans Must Read Before They Die.”

The book is organized into 15 chapters, detailing books according to categories, such as biography and memoir, the minor leagues and for young readers.

The meter’s running, folks. I say it’s time to get cracking with some of those.

One day between the National League Championship Series and the World Series is what’s been allotted, enough time for the Detroit Tigers to fly west for Game 1 tomorrow night against the San Francisco Giants.

Time — television time, to be specific — is all that matters now.

This clip from the “Baseball’s Golden Age” series has nothing to do with the World Series but rather with three perpetually failing teams that left their original cities after playing second fiddle to more successful franchises. This rare (colorized?) footage of the St. Louis Browns, Boston Braves and Philadelphia Athletics is a real treat, a quick glimpse of what became the Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves and Kansas City and Oakland A’s.

I could watch this stuff forever.

“Despite the perennial warnings of baseball Cassandras, time has yet to pass baseball by. What remains to be seen is not whether the game will survive, but how Americans in a rapidly changing world will again reinterpret and reinvent their national pastime.”

The conclusion to Jules Tygiel’s elegant meditation, “Past Time: Baseball as History,” isn’t just for Americans. The Irish blogger and soccer devotee known as Fredorrarci surely would be interested after expounding on The Classical about his admiration for the sport’s sense of its own past.

He writes this as he watches Ken Burns’ lauded  “Baseball” film, and his closing flourish is especially worth noting:

“I’ve got my first real feel for the heft of baseball history. That’s another way in which sport can feel appealingly bigger than yourself. It’s a powerful thing to step into something that’s existed for so long relative to your own puny span that it may as well have been going forever, and for all you know may continue indefinitely. That can be dangerous thinking, because a sport is just a culture, and cultures are fragile things that get born and dead like nobody’s business. But that’s just why a sense of history is important. My principle sporting passion, soccer, seems to be in the process of shedding its memory, believing itself to be an invincible megabeing that sprung from nothing, fully mega, around 1992. I don’t know enough about baseball to know whether, for all its apparent history-fetishism, it suffers from the same thing these days. I may be wrong, but it seems to have a better sense of where it’s come from than soccer does.”

He should know that baseball’s last existential crisis, on the heels of the 1994 strike that cancelled the World Series, left many fans revolted, forever swearing off the game. But as was illustrated by last night’s walkoff playoff finishes (especially for Yankees and A’s fans), the thrilling immediacy of events feeds the unbroken loop of history.

“Sport’s continuity is one of its most attractive qualities, but we should feel that it’s eternal while knowing that it’s not. There’s the false consolation of eternity, and there’s the consolation of false eternity, and a thin line between them.”

As I felt a couple of decades ago at the start of my immersion into global soccer, I hope this is also the beginning of a beautiful exploration.