The Phillies used to offer pitchers a ride to the mound in a bullpen cart. Some would rather walk.

They ate lunch in the bullpen, played catch in the outfield, and roamed all day around Veterans Stadium. It was the perfect summer job for a bunch of Philly teenagers in the early 1970s. And for Jim Marino, the best part was when they tossed him the keys to the baseball buggy, a golf cart topped with a giant Phillies hat that took relief pitchers to the mound each night.

The buggy — which was delivered by Major League Baseball to all 24 teams in 1972 — had two seats carved out of a giant baseball with headlights that sat inside mitts and a roof held up by two baseball bats. The finishing touch was the maroon “P” cap.

Each night, the buggy offered a lift for whomever the Phillies called to tackle the late innings. And each day, the buggy zipped Marino up and down the stadium’s concrete ramps during his first summer working for the Department of Recreation.

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The baseball buggy was electric powered with a governor to limit its speed. But it wasn’t a stick shift, so Marino could drive it when he had an errand to run. It did the job.

“Whenever they needed somebody to ride something around, they would throw it in there and tell me to take it to somebody,” Marino said. “Or they’d tell me to give someone a ride somewhere in the stadium. I could’ve had that thing all the way up on the 700 Level. We just made sure it was plugged in every night and ready to go so it wouldn’t die on the Phillies when they were using it.”

The White Sox introduced the bullpen cart in 1951, but the in-game vehicles didn’t become widespread until the 1970s. The Phillies joined the fray in 1971, providing a “fire truck” for their relievers and a “gasoline truck” for the visitors in the Vet’s first season.

“The player got in and it had a shade on the back,” said Mike DiMuzio, who worked for the Phillies for 50 years before retiring in 2022 as the director of ballpark operations. “There was writing on the shade. So as they’re driving the pitcher in, the driver would pull the cord and the shade would come down. It would say like, ‘He’s going to put out the fire’ and the visitors’ would say ‘Fuel for the fire.’”

The fire truck was replaced in 1972 by the league-issued buggy, an 1,100-pound vehicle designed in California that Major League Baseball said “adds fun to the game.” The 1970s saw the rise of multipurpose stadiums, artificial turf, polyester uniforms, and powder blue. The baseball buggy — a toy replica of which will be given out Thursday night to kids 14 and under — fit in with a changing game.

The Phils’ cart was driven by Fred Kraske, a SEPTA mechanic and longtime Phillies employee known as “Foul Ball Freddie.” The ride looked sharp, but it wasn’t the safest way to travel.

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“You couldn’t see out of it,” DiMuzio said. “You could hardly see in front of you and you definitely could not see behind you. It was this big ball you were sitting in. They always had to have someone there telling you to back up. It took forever.”

The buggy parked on the right-field ramp and drove down to the bullpen door for each pitching change. A pitcher had a choice: take two steps and hop in or get stepping to the mound. Many were first eager to climb aboard. But eventually, the pitchers soured on the free ride.

“I liked jogging in,” said Ron Reed, who joined the Phils’ bullpen in 1976. “I took it a few times, but I wanted to charge in. I wanted to let the other team know, ‘Hey, I’m charging in on foot and I’m ready to go to war with you’ instead of coming in with a cart.”

The pitchers warmed up in a plexiglass-walled bullpen — “That wasn’t the best stuff to look through,” Reed said — that was about as safe as the bullpen cart.

“When we first got out there, we had a roof over the bench but we didn’t have any protection once we got onto the bullpen mound,” Reed said. “Some of our more illustrious Philly fans would come by and throw a bunch of stuff down to get our attention, I guess. Then we put a net over it.”

The bullpen was 330 feet from home plate, so the ride toward the mound — it would drop pitchers off near first base — was brief and silent.

“They didn’t say anything to us because they knew we were going in with the game on our mind and nothing else,” Reed said. “We’re not worried about anything else.”

Tug McGraw, who joined the Phillies a year before Reed, seemed to take the cart every time he left the bullpen. His ERA in 1976 was more than a run better than it was the previous season. Maybe it was the energy he saved from sitting in the passenger seat.

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“The first thing you would see was Tug would throw his glove out of the cart,” DiMuzio said. “Basically, that’s how you knew it was Tug. His signature thing was throwing his glove to the bat boy. Then he would get out and the bat boy would give him a towel, he’d wipe his head, and then he’d go to the mound.”

The buggy wasn’t the only method of transportation used to keep relievers off their feet as the Yankees tried a Datsun and the Mariners opted for a tugboat. But the carts proved to be another fad of the 1970s, as most of them faded away from baseball just before McGraw threw the pitch that delivered the Phillies their first world title.

In 2018, a few teams paid homage by bringing back the cart and the Nationals still offer relievers a lift. Twins reliever Steven Okert tipped the driver $5 earlier this season after entering a game in Washington. The bullpen cart — and chivalry — is not yet dead.

Marino spent 44 years with the Department of Recreation before retiring in 2019 as the race director of the Broad Street Run. That gig at the Vet was a gateway to his career and he landed it by simply asking for a job when Bob Crawford, the city’s commissioner of recreation under five mayors, visited his neighborhood playground in East Falls.

Crawford told Marino, then a student at Roman Catholic, that he could be a “swimming pool maintenance attendant” at the stadiums in South Philly. But the stadiums didn’t have swimming pools, Marino replied.

“He said, ‘Yeah, that’s the job title. But you’re not going to be working with pools, obviously,’” Marino said. “That’s how I got on.”

The Vet’s pool boy mowed the grass outside, pulled weeds, and cleared drains. He spent a summer covering JFK Stadium’s wooden bleachers with fiberglass. That, Marino said, was brutal. But he often finished his shift by hanging around the Vet to catch the Phillies game. And he would watch as someone else took his baseball buggy for a spin.

“They used it every night,” Marino said. “We worked hard everyday. It wasn’t a cake job. The corridors were shining. It was a really cool place to be at. That was a pretty cool job, to be honest with you.”

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