The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  “Not your fault, Ray,” he said. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Duffy catches that ball blind-folded and we’re already out of this damned inning.”

  “A bad break,” Collins said, handing over the baseball.

  “You gave ’em all hell,” Stahl said, patting Collins on the back before flipping the ball to Charley Hall. Hall had spent much of the season sharing the No. 4 slot in the rotation with Collins, behind the peerless Wood, Buck O’Brien, and Hugh Bedient, and he’d enjoyed his finest year as a big-leaguer, 15–8 with a 3.02 ERA. Born in Ventura, California, he entered the world as Carlos Clolo, a son of Mexican immigrants, and while he’d Anglicized his name before entering professional baseball to deflect some of the overt racism aimed at non-Caucasians during that decidedly inelegant epoch of baseball history, he nonetheless acquired two nicknames: “Sea Lion,” which he took to gratefully, and “Greaser,” which led to more fisticuffs and brouhahas than Hall would care to recollect. “You know what we need,” Stahl said, retreating to first. “Now let’s do it.”

  And the Sea Lion damn near did. On his second pitch, Merkle popped one high into the darkening Fenway sky, and Sox catcher Bill Carrigan barely had to backtrack to put the ball away and restore Fenway’s regular breathing patterns. And on the first ball Hall tossed Buck Herzog’s way, he produced an almost identical picture: a sky-high pop-up, high enough this time that it started to drift, ever so slightly, toward the first-base side of the plate, a little backward, and at first the Fenway faithful started to roar, content that their 4–3 lead was safe for another inning, but as they noticed Carrigan staggering, then stumbling, they switched to a gasp and, lastly, to disgusted disbelief when the ball thumped off the heel of Carrigan’s catcher’s mitt, fell out, and tapped the grass. The silence was harrowing, broken only by the voice of Bill Carrigan.

  “You dumb Irish shit,” he screamed at himself.

  He would soon have plenty of help heaping fury on himself, because granted a second life Herzog lashed the very next pitch into the temporary right-field stands for a ground-rule double that scored Becker and Murray and gave the Giants a 5–4 lead that had their dugout dizzy with glee. A run up, six outs left, and Christy Mathewson on the mound? Surely the motormen could rev the train’s engine up now, if they liked.

  And Matty, given a late lead, knew what to do with it. Steve Yerkes was an easy out on a shallow fly ball to Murray in left. Speaker, his ankle howling at him, tapped back to Mathewson, who threw him out easily, Speaker barely able to make it out of the batter’s box thanks to his creaky wheel. Up stepped Duffy Lewis, still smarting from his game-changing muff, and he put a charge into a Mathewson fastball, sending it high and deep toward the temporary bleachers in left. Matty kicked the dirt at the mound, angry at himself, but turned in time to see Murray go thundering back toward the wooden temporary fence, take a crow hop, and then vault himself three rows into the stands, in the same vicinity where the ball was descending.

  The ball vanished. So did Murray. And neither reappeared for what felt like an hour but was probably only five or six very anxious seconds. Bill Klem, assigned to adjudicate the left side of the outfield, dashed out for a better look, yelling at the fans, “Is he OK? Is he hurt? Did he catch the ball?”

  All three questions went unanswered until finally Murray’s slightly bruised head, and slightly bloodied face, popped up among the fans. The sight of the still-breathing redhead brought a crashing cheer from the rest of the park; when he lifted both arms, indicating he didn’t have the ball on his person, the noise grew earsplitting. The fans in the bleachers, sporting gents all, helped dust Murray off, gave him a hand back over the fence, and saluted him with three cheers for his courage. Klem, still puzzled, had one last query that he needed answered.

  “What the heck happened to the ball?” the umpire asked.

  Someone pointed to a narrow pathway behind the seats, and then to Murray’s bare head. “Same guy who took Red’s lid,” he said, “also took the ball and ran like the devil.”

  Satisfied, Klem pointed two fingers high enough for all to see, officially granting Lewis his ground-rule double, then summoned the Giants’ dugout to fetch Murray a brand-new brim. Mathewson, unfazed and unflappable as always, quietly applauded his left fielder’s effort, then resumed his focus on the matter at hand, on Larry Gardner, whose shattered finger still throbbed and who was still looking for his first hit of the Series after six fruitless at-bats and one sacrifice bunt. Mathewson started him with his famed fadeaway pitch, which Gardner took for a ball, then came back with a fastball, which Gardner hit hard but straight for the Giants’ shortstop, Art Fletcher.

  “You go, Matty!” McGraw yelled from the dugout.

  “The best there ever was,” Meyers thought to himself, removing his mask, watching the play develop, shaking his head in awe.

  He was soon shaking his head for another reason. Because before anyone could believe what they were seeing, the ball scooted through Fletcher—who never even laid a finger on it—and into left field. Lewis—who’d purposely held up, hoping against hope to screen Fletcher—sprinted home joyfully, amazed that his little piece of gamesmanship had worked to perfection. It was tied, 5–5, and even the stoic Mathewson couldn’t help himself; he stared at Fletcher, or at the very least at the hole that had magically appeared in his chest that allowed the ball to scamper untouched.

  It was Fletcher’s third error of the game, his fourth already of the series, to go with the fifty-two he’d been charged with during the regular season. Fenway’s foundation was teetering, the place was so revved up. And the Giants all at once looked like a beaten bunch, especially when Jake Stahl followed with a single, then promptly stole second, giving the Sox two men in scoring position, putting them one hit away from blowing the game open and all but blowing the World Series open, too. But here Mathewson reached back to 1905, throwing four pitches—one high, one low, one close, one wide—that Heinie Wagner swung through, swung through, fouled off, and swung through.

  The game was still tied. The Giants were still alive.

  Barely.

  Back in New York, back in Times Square, an even larger crowd than the one that had gathered the day before filled the air with a nervous hum that turned to a vicious rage when the announcer declared, “Error by Fletcher, New York; run scored by Lewis, Boston; game tied at five runs to five.” A few blocks away, a few seconds later, the Morning Telegram’s Playograph flashed the same information, with the mannequin standing in for Lewis rounding third and heading home amid a thick stew of catcalls and curses and worse.

  “McGraw shouldn’t only fire that bum,” one disgruntled voice declared. “He should have him shot as a traitor!”

  Out in the Atlantic Ocean, on the luxury liner Oceanic, the news was relayed to Prince Brancaccio of Rome, who’d spent much of a leisurely few weeks’ vacation in New York earlier that summer at the Polo Grounds, learning baseball, adopting the Giants. He’d already secured tickets for Game Three at New York, declaring he was immersing himself in baseball “in order to feel the pulse of the American people.” Now he felt his own pulse quicken, wondering if Game Three would now be the Giants’ last hurrah.

  Back in Boston, the Giants tried to reverse the tide of momentum that now threatened to carry them into the off-season. They loaded the bases on two walks and a base hit, but with two outs Red Murray grounded sharply to Wagner, the Red Sox’ shortstop, who rubbed a little more salt in New York’s wound by keeping a routine play routine and flipping to second for the force. Mathewson, refusing to succumb, set the Red Sox down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth. There would be extra-inning baseball in Boston, even as the sun began to disappear beyond the horizon.

  The tension was now spilling everywhere. In the federal courtroom of Judge William Hough, located right on Broadway in New York City, the rancor of the crowd kept spilling through the windows, drowning out the opening arguments of a case pitting the Pennsylvania Steel Company against the City of New York fo
r $200,000 owed for the building of the Queensboro Bridge. Howard Taylor, counsel for the plaintiff, was trying to question his first witness when another burst of cheering overwhelmed him. Judge Hough ordered the windows shut. When that didn’t keep the next sea of boos and cheers and chants from invading the room, Hough banged his gavel and threw up his hands.

  “I think,” Hough said. “we’d better surrender to the Giants. Adjourned.”

  Across town, on Chambers Street, Justice John W. Goff may have been freed from crowd noise, but he was experiencing his own late-inning meltdown in trying to locate a twelfth and final juror for the Becker Trial, as one talesman after another begged out of the jury box citing one hardship or another. “A remedy must be found for this,” Goff warned. “Man after man has taken the stand and sought by subterfuge to be excused. When we can find neither honesty nor patriotism in our citizens we are helpless.”

  So the Becker Trial would have to wait at least one more day, which was just as well, because it was obvious that there was only one thing consuming the thoughts and passions of the citizens of two great cities right now, and for a wild, wonderful moment, all along the sidewalks of New York, it seemed the Giants really would find a way to restore their fans’ belief in their destiny. For Merkle boomed a deep fly over Lewis’s head in left, and by the time the ball stopped bouncing he was standing on third base. Three batters later, after Herzog grounded to short against a drawn-in infield and Meyers was intentionally walked, McGraw—still smarting, no doubt, from the avalanche of criticism unleashed that morning by the army of critics in the newspapers—sent up Moose McCormick to pinch-hit for the nearly catatonic Art Fletcher. McCormick, professional hitter that he was, responded with a long fly to left, plenty deep enough to score Merkle and give the Giants the lead. Once again the Giants handed the ball to Mathewson, this time needing only three outs to get even.

  All across New England, men and schoolboys abandoned their scoreboards, racing home to make dinner, knowing few ever got a second chance against Matty and nobody ever got a third. In New York, most of the fans decided dinner would have to wait, too sweet was the prospect of seeing the scoreboard masters plant one more zero under the Boston line for the tenth inning. And Matty wasn’t inclined to disappoint, inducing Yerkes to barely tap the ball in front of home plate, which McCormick gobbled up and threw to first. One out. Two to go.

  Up shambled Tris Speaker, whose ankle was getting worse, who was fearful he’d broken it, who had prayed for six innings that nobody hit a ball anywhere but right at him in center field, because there was no way he was catching up with anything else. Mathewson threw a fastball that Speaker barely waved at. And then another.

  This one, to everyone’s astonishment—even Speaker’s—exploded off the bat as if it were shot out of a cannon, to dead center field. Beals Becker was off with the crack of the bat, but even that was no help—it sailed over his head by a good fifty feet. And now, as if by magic, the limp vanished from Speaker’s gait and he was tearing around first, and roaring around second, and he was just about to touch third with his bad leg when Becker finally retrieved the ball and heaved it back to the infield, and Speaker wasn’t sure whether he was being told to hold up or run by the third-base coach, because he was going to run, dammit, run all the way home and all the way around the bases again if he had to, there was nobody going to stop him, and …

  And then somebody stopped him.

  It was Buck Herzog, the Giants’ third baseman. Following the play all the way, he had no relay responsibilities. But he did have an unwritten obligation, one that had roots in the rough-and-tumble world that McGraw used to occupy in Baltimore, where the old Orioles vowed to beat you by any means available, any means possible. Mostly, they wanted to beat you fair and square. If that didn’t work, they cheated. Or, as McGraw himself would write years later: “If nobody saw you doing anything wrong, then you didn’t do anything wrong,” a tenet that the Franciscans who’d given him his college education may have taken issue with, if not any of his fans.

  Herzog didn’t tackle Speaker; that would have been too obvious. He didn’t grab Speaker by his belt loops, which was McGraw’s preferred move back in the day. No, as Speaker rounded third, Herzog merely moved a few steps in and to his left, and … well, accidents happen. The two men collided. What’s a fellow to do?

  What Speaker did was scramble back to his feet in an effort to complete his journey, with 30,148 people going positively berserk all around him. But the wasted seconds cost him: As he neared home plate, Tillie Shafer (Fletcher’s replacement at short) caught the ball from Becker, wheeled, and gunned it home to Art Wilson (Meyers’s replacement at catcher). The throw beat Speaker, and O’Loughlin was ready with his right hand to call him out. But Wilson dropped the ball as Speaker slid past, and O’Loughlin screamed, “Safe!” Speaker, the fury bubbling inside him now, rose from the ground, dusted himself off, stomped on home plate one more time for emphasis (with his bad foot, no less), then ran after Herzog.

  “You dirty son of a bitch!” he screamed.

  “Get the hell away from me if you know what’s good for you!” Herzog yelled back, narrowing the gap between them.

  “You crooked bastard! That’s a Bush League play and you know it!”

  “You oughta know, playing in a Bush League!”

  By now Stahl had raced out and grabbed Speaker, and McGraw had done the same thing, pulling Herzog away, and peace was about to be restored when Speaker pointed at McGraw and yelled, “You teach them this shit, Muggsy! I hope you’re proud.”

  Bad enough to be labeled a cheater. But who was Tris Speaker to be calling him Muggsy? McGraw forgot about Herzog and started after Speaker himself, before he was restrained by Wilbert Robinson.

  “What are you gonna say?” McGraw’s old friend whispered. “You do teach them this shit.”

  But McGraw did have one more complaint to air; ever the detail man, even as everyone was watching the flight of Speaker’s ball, he had been studying Speaker’s legs. And what McGraw clearly saw—and what most of the boys in the media would reluctantly confirm later on, since they were all quartered near first base in a makeshift press box—was that Speaker, in his haste, had missed first base by a good two feet. McGraw was trying to get Mathewson to resume play, step off the mound, and throw the ball to first on a protest play, but umpire Cy Rigler halted that posse where it stood. “Runner was safe!” he yelled, and now McGraw was really mad.

  “You either didn’t see the play, missed the play, or you’re crooked!” McGraw fumed. “Which one is it?”

  “Runner,” Rigler repeated, gritting his teeth, trying to forget his own leg pain, “was safe.”

  And that was that. Peace was restored, barely, and Duffy Lewis promptly reinvigorated the crowd by lashing another ball over Becker’s head, though this time Beals was able to hold the runner to two bases. Now the winning run was on second, but here was where Mathewson, stunned but still steady, turned back into Mathewson, retiring Gardner and Stahl to end the inning amid shouting and tumult that grew ugly as Herzog ducked into the dugout.

  The Series’ first genuine to-do had shooed whatever lingering nerves may have been affecting the players, but now it was Silk O’Loughlin’s turn to be fidgety. It was nearing 6 o’clock, and darkness was rapidly descending. He watched the Giants get two men on base in the top of the eleventh, then saw McGraw—who could damn well see how dark it was—send both runners to second on steal attempts, and watched both men get caught by five feet apiece. He watched Wagner, Carrigan, and Hugh Bedient—seven, eight, and nine in the batting order, all of them also knowing how dark it was—each swing at Mathewson’s first pitch in an effort to generate quick lightning, with only Bedient’s ball—a sharp two-hopper back to the box that Matty himself snared—generating a rise out of anyone.

  And now Silk O’Loughlin looked to the skies, tried to find more daylight where there was none, and reached the only sad conclusion that he could.

  “It’s too dark
for any more baseball today,” he proclaimed. “We’ll resume with a fresh ballgame tomorrow, at these grounds.”

  McGraw started to protest, was too tired to do it. Besides, it was too damned dark to keep playing. He saw Mathewson slowly amble into the dugout, remove his cap, and place his glove next to him.

  “Hardest game I’ve ever played,” Matty said.

  “Damnedest one I’ve ever seen,” McGraw said.

  They both nodded, knowing they were both right.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Thursday, October 10, 1912: Game Three

  Boston leads, 1 game to 0, with 1 tie

  BOSTON—For four seconds yesterday, more than 34,000 persons held their breath. There were men at third and second, with two down, when Forrest Cady, a farmer’s son with a strong heart and a mighty punch, came to the plate. Marquard was appealed to put everything he had on the ball, for it meant the game for Boston. The big left-hander took his time, measured the Boston man for a fast one, and cut loose …

  —T. H. MURNANE, BOSTON GLOBE, OCTOBER 11, 1912

  THE REVIEWS, AS they came tumbling off the nation’s presses, were almost universally breathless. “A CLASSIC!” roared the Los Angeles Times. “Greatest Ball Game in History!” screamed the Washington Post. And in Boston and New York City, the citizens hungrily grabbed as many newspapers as they could find, perhaps weeding through so many in order to find the one that would disprove what the others were insisting, that after eleven innings and close to 250 pitches the Red Sox and Giants were still unable to reach a resolution regarding Game Two of the World Series. This wasn’t unprecedented; precisely five years and one day earlier, on October 8, 1907, the Cubs had rallied for two runs in the bottom of the ninth to tie the Tigers in Game One of that World Series at Chicago’s West Side Grounds, the tying run scoring when Detroit catcher Boss Schmidt dropped a third strike to Del Howard, allowing Harry Steinfeldt to race home with the squaring run. Three innings later darkness descended, forcing umpire Hank O’Day to rule the proceedings a draw; the Tigers never recovered, dropping the next four games in succession (and eight of the next nine Series games they’d play against the Cubs over the next two years, too).