The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  “The Red Sox acted sulkily on the train,” Doyle recalled of the Gilt Edge Express, describing the building tension as the cars crawled west. “They don’t seem to be in the right frame of mind. There was none of the raillery that there was before the opening games. It’s definitely more of a war now. The players on opposing clubs only growl at each other now unless they’re trying to get a man’s goat, and there’s practically no sociability.”

  Doyle smiled.

  “And I think I speak for the rest of the Giants when I say, I would rather have it that way than any other,” he said. “You know you’re in for a fight then.”

  Doyle wasn’t alone in noticing the feistiness that had already crept into this burgeoning rivalry after only three games. Hugh Fullerton of the Chicago Tribune, the most renowned and respected baseball writer in the country, could see it from clear up in the press box, and it delighted him, because he was always suspicious when professional ballplayers respected each other too much, worried that there wasn’t enough blood and guts on display as there was in years past, that players didn’t seem to care as they once did. Not now. Not this year.

  “The desperate blocking on the bases, the stopping of runners, is likely to lead to trouble before the series is over,” Fullerton wrote for the Friday Tribune, and for the hundreds of papers in his syndicate, and you could almost see him rubbing his hands together excitedly as he typed the words. “The Giants are working in the road of base runners on all hits, and the second basemen and shortstops of both teams just dive at every runner. A man cannot reach a bag without having to bunt or chop his way there. They are beginning to show the scars badly. Speaker is limping and very slow; Wagner’s legs and hands have been chopped, and Yerkes has taken more cuts than a boxer.”

  Fullerton wasn’t alone in recognizing the rancor that had developed. Heinie Wagner had helped ratchet that after Game Two, insisting bluntly, “Everyone talked about the managers’ battle in the days leading up to the series; well, I think it’s clear that in both games, Stahl had outgeneraled McGraw masterfully.” Asked if he still felt that way after Game Three, Wagner sneered, “Even more so. The Giants are fast and scrappy. But we will win. The harder the fight the faster we go, all season we stiffened when put to the test and now that we recognize the fighting qualities of the Giants we will show our true mettle.”

  “They’re just not as good as half the teams we play in the American League,” Gardner said. “That’s not bragging and that’s not putting them down, it’s just the way things are. Anyone looking objectively can see that.”

  Added Smoky Joe Wood: “They’ve gotten every break known to man so far, and the Series is still only 1–1. They can’t feel good about that.”

  But the Giants were feeling good about themselves, were full of piss and vinegar themselves, starting with their manager, the home office for both piss and vinegar: “I cannot see why we should not now proceed to clean up,” McGraw said. “The Red Sox are not the aggregation that we were led to expect and if we play our game we will surely be able to lay undisputed claim to the championship within the next few days.”

  Said Merkle: “I for one would rather tackle the Red Sox than the Cubs or Pirates.”

  But it was Buck Herzog, the agent provocateur on the field, who was equally enjoying himself in trying to goad the Speed Boys once the fellows with the notebooks started asking him for quotes.

  “We have them completely on the run that I would not be a bit surprised if we win the series in straight games from here,” he said, before throwing a shout-out to the shadows in the grandstands: “In my opinion,” he surmised, “we are now a 4-to-5 choice for the series.”

  Wagner, the chatty Sox shortstop, was his favored target, especially after his bungled assignment in the coaching box.

  “Wagner could have won for his club in the ninth inning if he would have coached Lewis and Gardner as one of our own men would have,” Herzog said. “It did not require daring base running, just ordinary and intelligent base running and Wagner, brainy as he is on the defensive, was not equal to the occasion. Boston doesn’t run the bases anything like as well as we do when we are getting an even break on luck. Wagner’s poor coaching proves that, I think.”

  That was Herzog, underlined, bold-faced, captured in a thumbnail. Born in Baltimore, a city that always knew a thing or two about playing hard baseball and holding hard grudges, he’d already been traded once by McGraw and was destined to be traded twice more from the Giants before his playing career was through, and it is that itinerant résumé that best defines who Herzog was as a player. Perhaps no other player McGraw ever managed more closely resembled Muggsy, which may explain why the two men generally detested each other.

  Still, late in his life, Herzog would say of McGraw, “The old man and I had our arguments, I guess because we both liked to win so well. But, when he got into a pinch and needed someone to put fire into his team, I am glad to remember he always was calling back Buck Herzog.”

  McGraw’s epitaph of Herzog was even more succinct, even more appropriate: “I hate his guts,” McGraw said, “but I want him on my club.”

  The Red Sox, as their train rumbled through the night, across Connecticut, past the New York border, finally into the 125th Street Terminal—where all but one of the Giants disembarked—would certainly have agreed, by acclimation, with the first half of that statement.

  Nobody suffered more than Heinie Wagner, the man who was credited with saving the Red Sox clubhouse from civil war, the big-hearted, good-natured shortstop whose finest season as a major leaguer now threatened to become a footnote to the way he’d mismanaged his duty as a third-base coach, of all things. What Wagner wanted to say to everybody was, Don’t you realize the Speed Boys knew better than to rely on third-base coaches? Why do you suppose they treated the job so haphazardly? Everyone who saw the 1912 Red Sox agreed that this was the greatest batch of baserunners ever collected on one team, so many of them sharing the rare blend of speed, daring, and instinct. No team went first-to-third better. No team scored more runs going from first to home on a double. What the hardscrabble New Yorker inside Wagner wanted to shout—on the train, at the station, at the hotel, at the ballpark—was this: Larry Gardner should have known enough to take third. Gardner was a man who hit eighteen triples that year, who scored eighty-eight runs, who was as smart a baserunner as there was in the American League.

  Of course, Wagner wouldn’t say that. He couldn’t. And so he suffered in silence. He seethed. He was already angry at himself for allowing his ancient feud with McGraw to get the better of his tongue; while he had to smile at how angry the old bastard would get when he saw the quote about Stahl “outgeneraling” him, he knew it was bad form to give a man like McGraw extra motivation to burn you, extra fuel with which to scald you. That wasn’t Wagner’s way; he was a conciliator, a reconciler, not a rabble-rouser, and so in many ways was Buck Herzog’s diametric opposite. Six years later, all of those people skills would reach a fateful, noble climax when it would be Wagner who was asked to reach out to Babe Ruth, then the Red Sox’ prime star, to return to the team after he’d jumped it over some or other dispute in early July, threatening to stay away forever. Ruth was a hardheaded ox, and he wouldn’t have listened to anybody else. But he listened to Wagner. “I’ll come back because of you,” the Babe said softly.

  With the train making its way south from 125th Street toward Grand Central, Wagner sidled up next to Stahl, who was trying to catch a nap using a newspaper to shade his eyes.

  “I’ll make it up to the club, Skip,” he said.

  “You don’t owe the club a damn thing,” Stahl replied. “We’re fine. Look at who we’re pitching tomorrow.”

  That did make Wagner feel better, because in all the games he’d played in his peripatetic career, he’d never felt the same way he felt playing in back of Smoky Joe Wood. Back when he’d had his seventeen-game cup of coffee with the pre-McGraw Giants of 1902, he’d played with Christy Mathewson, but that was di
fferent; Matty was still only twenty-one, he was still finding himself as a pitcher. As a minor leaguer, there was always some new kid with a big arm ready to conquer the world, and invariably they wound up with sore shoulders or small hearts, with reputations far greater than their results. But not Wood. This kid was different.

  “This kid,” Wagner told Stahl, “is something like we’ve never seen before.”

  The Giants had tried to diminish what they’d seen in Game One, when Wood not only had fanned eleven of them, he’d struck out the final two batters of the game with the tying and winning runs in scoring position, with a raucous Polo Grounds ready to pounce at the first opportunity, and he’d done it without any tricks, without any mirrors. He’d beaten them with his fastball. They knew it was coming. And still never had a prayer.

  And still they weren’t ready to give the kid full credit. Wagner had seen their comments sprinkled throughout the last few days, and they almost made him giggle.

  “He went with his fastball,” Mathewson sniffed, “because he couldn’t get his curve over for anything.” If you still had that fastball, Matty, you’d go with it too …

  “Wood depends too much on speed,” Chief Meyers, the New York catcher, said. “That is bound to sap his reserve energy and his recuperative powers. Wood showed us nothing like the speed [Chief] Bender displayed against Matty in the opening game last year. He is not so hard a pitcher to beat.” Then by all means, beat him if you can.…

  “He’s a fine, fine pitcher,” McGraw half-conceded, “but he’s still got a lot of things he has to work on.” Any suggestions you have, Muggsy, we’re all ears.…

  Even Bill Klem, who’d seen every one of Wood’s pitches up close in Game One, couldn’t find it in his heart to praise poor Joe: “Wood didn’t have half the smoke on his balls that Bender had on his last year.” What do you expect from a National League man?

  Typical of Wood, he was unfazed by all of it.

  “Don’t worry,” he told Speaker, who spent the entire five-hour trip to New York with his foot elevated and his pain splashed plainly on his pale face. “Those boys’ll get another crack at me. Maybe two more. They’ll get their turn.”

  The Gilt Edge Express finally pulled into Grand Central Station, which was where the Red Sox were to get off before catching cabs back uptown to Bretton Hall. At first, they all had to laugh, wearily, because there were three hundred Giants fans on the platform and they all started cheering wildly.

  “Rubes,” Bill Carrigan chortled. “They don’t know the difference between the team they root for and the one they’re supposed to hate.”

  Oh, but they did. Because as twenty-three Red Sox walked off the train, they all noticed that they were joined by one straggling Giant, puffing on an enormous cigar, tipping his bowler hat toward the adoring crowd with a practiced flourish. Rube Marquard had waited a long time for a day like this, and a night like this. What was the point in ending it so prematurely with something as annoying as sleep? He enjoyed every one of the two hundred steps he took toward the cabstand, and when one of the fans started screaming, “Speech!” Rube just smiled and winked.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’m all talked out.”

  Only a rube would believe that for even a second.

  This time, the man everyone wanted to talk to was named John W. Dowd. He had spent Thursday afternoon watching every pitch in Times Square, and the second the final out was announced—as far as he knew, a routine fly ball to Josh Devore—Dowd had sprinted to the nearest subway station and begun the journey all the way uptown. Sure enough, he was the first man in line at the Polo Grounds, although he was quickly joined by a few dozen others, then a few hundred others, then a few thousand more. The whole cross section of a New York baseball crowd was firmly in line as midnight came and went, the obsessive baseball fan and the curiosity-seeking out-of-towner; the wide-eyed schoolboys with one eye peeled for truant officers and the sleepy-eyed bookmakers with their eyes on the lookout for policemen seeking the odd sawbuck or two to look the other way. These merchants expected a swift business today, because with the Series even at a game apiece the betting line had evened out, too. Red Sox fans could suddenly bet even money on their boys to win the Series, after facing odds as steep as 10-to-6 after Game One, and that was a splendid turn of events for the men keeping track of the money.

  Still, as enthusiastic as the crowd may have been, may have wanted to be, the marvelous weather that had made Game One such a pleasurable outing no matter where your rooting interests lay had evaporated without warning. By midnight, the mercury had dipped below fifty and showed no signs of slowing down, and sometime around two in the morning it started to rain, a steady barrage of showers and mist and biting, bracing wind, forcing the people in line to enter into unspoken gentleman’s agreements so they could all seek shelter under the nearby elevated roads during the worst of it without surrendering their hard-earned places in line. When morning arrived, so much rain had already fallen that some in line figured there was no way baseball could be played, and they gave up and went home. Little did they know, however, that late in the season the Giants had installed an ultra-modern, ultra-rainproof tarpaulin so their grounds crew could protect the infield to maximum efficiency. If the rain could give them a break for just a few more hours, they might even be able to make the soggy outfield playable. By 10 o’clock, with the soaked crowd growing restless, Giants secretary O’Brien appeared and announced, “Every effort will still be made to start the game on time.” For the thousands who’d stubbornly stayed in the line, that provided their first cheer of the day, before they’d even walked inside the gate.

  Ninety minutes later, the umpires arrived led by Cy Rigler, the last of the quartet to be assigned home-plate duty. Whether it was a celestial commentary or just coincidence, the moment they showed up at the Speedway Entrance the skies darkened again, and that didn’t escape the folks in line.

  “Even God wants to kill the ump!” someone shouted, eliciting a cheerful roar.

  But the umpires weren’t laughing. Bill Klem had worked the 1911 Series, when what seemed like an isolated thunderstorm had blown in after Game Three and then stuck around for a full week, robbing the show of its momentum, its drama, and ultimately its box-office appeal; the decisive sixth game filled Shibe Park to only two-thirds its capacity. Klem knew that while keeping the grounds dry was not part of an umpire’s supreme powers, it was certainly well within their purview to sweat every minute an ominous cloud lurked overhead. So Klem and O’Loughlin, the two senior members of the crew, took slow, vigilant jaunts around the bases, careful to look for soft pockets of dirt that could easily break an ankle and slick patches of grass that could make a spinning baseball do all manner of odd tricks. They studied the sod grimly. In the outfield, the Seventh Regiment band was practicing for its pregame performance, several of the musicians seeing their shoes sink completely into the turf.

  “It’s bad,” a French horn player named Hans Bauman reported to the fans in line as he left, shifting his horn from left hand to right, pushing his hat up his forehead. “It will probably take two hours of sunshine to dry it up. I just wish the sun would come.”

  It was O’Loughlin who finally walked inside, to the Giants’ corporate offices, picked up a telephone, and called over to the Waldorf-Astoria, where the National Commission was keeping its New York headquarters. August Herrmann, who’d been waiting impatiently for news from uptown, took the call.

  “Well?” he asked. “What’s the verdict?”

  “The grounds are very heavy,” O’Loughlin reported. “If any more rain falls I don’t know if we can play. But John Murphy, the groundskeeper, says if it stays dry the field will be ready. He says that for now they’re fine.”

  O’Loughlin peeked out the window of O’Brien’s office, saw dark clouds, no rain.

  “Me?” he surmised. “I’d say it’s fifty-fifty we can get nine innings in.”

  “OK,” Herrmann said. “Hold the line.” In the ba
ckground, O’Loughlin could hear chatter, could make out the unmistakable voice of Ban Johnson, could hear him warn that if they didn’t get this game in, who knew when they could, it’s the craziness of playing baseball in the fall, it’s a summer game that should be played in the sunshine, more chatter, more debate, and then Herrmann was back on the line.

  “We’re on,” he said. And hung up. It was 11:48, a little less than two and a half hours before first pitch. O’Loughlin called Red Sox headquarters at the Bretton, discovered they were already on their way. The Giants had already started to arrive, one by one, from their apartments in their surrounding neighborhoods. Twelve minutes later, the ticket windows officially opened, signaling there would be baseball today after all, and you never heard such a relieved cheer from 10,000 soaking, sopping baseball fans, some 36,502 of whom would make their way into the Polo Grounds that day with tickets, another 5,000 or 6,000 of whom would duke an usher to let them sneak in, a crowd that would officially be the third largest in the history of this stadium (and, thus, the history of the sport) but unofficially shattered that record to smithereens.