The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  The game may have been on. But now the World Series—tied at one win apiece—was, most assuredly, on.

  Lena Marquard couldn’t understand what all the commotion could possibly be about. She was spending her Friday morning the way she spent all of her Friday mornings, concocting a batch of grape juice in the kitchen of her home at 3180 W. 46th Street in Cleveland. She frowned as she watched to see if the ingredients would jell properly, and was startled when there was a loud banging on the front door, and even more surprised when she opened it and was immediately blinded by the harsh flash of a photographer’s bulb. Why, there must have been twenty people on her porch.

  “What do you want?” she asked angrily. “I am not interested in salesmen!”

  “We are not salesmen!” one of the mob helpfully corrected her. “We’re from the newspapers. We want to talk to you about your son!”

  “What has that boy done now?”

  The newsmen looked at each other. It was well known that Rube’s father, Ferdinand, had been most displeased with his son’s decision to bypass his education and make his living among the dirty-fingered lot of baseball players. But Rube had always said he had a wonderful relationship with his mother. Surely, she followed his career?

  “Um, ma’am, he won a world’s series game yesterday.”

  Lena waved them in, because she couldn’t stand to be away from her grapes for too long, lest she waste her morning efforts. When they reached the kitchen she said, “He won the game all by himself?”

  “Well, he pitched,” the man from the Plain Dealer said. “The Giants won. And he was the winning pitcher.”

  Mrs. Marquard shrugged her shoulders. What’s that supposed to mean to me?

  “Some people think he’s a hero this morning,” said the man from the Press.

  Finally, a laugh from Mrs. Marquard, and the boys with their pens made sure to note every last chuckle.

  “A hero? Ha! Rube, he ain’t such a wonder,” she said. “What do I care about ballgames? Why are they making such a fuss about that boy? He ain’t such a wonder. He ought to win, right? That’s why they pay him!”

  The scribbling scribes weren’t sure how to react to that.

  “But, Mrs. Marquard,” asked the fellow from the Daily News, “don’t you want to hear more about the game, more about your son’s pitching?”

  She was back with her grapes, and she waved her hands for emphasis, and everyone could see they were a deep shade of purple.

  “He’ll tell me when he tells me,” she said. “We got to eat this winter, ain’t we? I got chores to do. Can’t worry about some silly baseball game.”

  She shook her head.

  “A hero! Imagine that.”

  A few hundred miles to the east, at just about the same moment, the hero in question was walking onto the field at the Polo Grounds and drinking in every last droplet of adulation he could. It turned out he wasn’t nearly as talked-out as he’d claimed he was at Grand Central the night before. He kept talking up and down Broadway until a wee small hour of Friday morning. He’d awoken, headed to work, and talked to the fans in line. When the newsfolk approached, he was more than happy to talk to them, too.

  “All I want,” he told them, “is just one-ninth of the credit for winning that one yesterday. But I can’t help claiming something, and that’s the prediction that I would win my game. As it turned out, it came out just as I said it would, didn’t it, boys?”

  He cackled, picked up a baseball, started having a catch with Art Wilson, the backup catcher.

  “Tell you what, though, boys,” he said. “When we win today, you don’t have to give me even one-hundredth of the credit. Do we have a deal?”

  McGraw was back to playing games, warming up both Christy Mathewson and Jeff Tesreau, but this time the Sox weren’t falling for any of his trickery; clearly Mathewson would benefit—as would the Giants—from his taking an extra day’s rest. The Speed Boys were anxious to see if Tesreau really had learned any lessons from having tipped his pitches in Game One, as he swore he had. Even then, they believed, it wouldn’t matter.

  “He’s a rookie,” Larry Gardner said flatly. “He did well to pitch the way he did in the first contest. The Giants can’t expect him to do that again. We certainly don’t.”

  Jake Stahl, of course, saw no need to match McGraw, not when he was sending to the mound a man in search of his thirty-sixth win of the season. Joe Wood was eager to pitch, eager to show the Giants he was more than just a fastball wonder, but he had also started to ponder if his prized arm would ever feel normal this day. The biting chill had forced almost all the players on both sides to take to the field and warm up in heavy mackinaw jackets, and some of them wore thick wool sweaters underneath that, and long-sleeved shirts under their heavy flannel uniforms. With that many layers, it was hard to get a ball higher than your chin, much less throw warm-up pitches, so Wood didn’t have the luxury of warmth swaddling his arm. Still, whenever he felt too badly about the stiffness lingering around his shoulder and his elbow, Wood would take a look across the field at his best friend, Speaker, whose ankle howled twice as loudly in the raw weather, who’d actually admitted to him that morning, “Joe, if I can’t run I can’t play. It kills me to say it. But I can’t lose the series for the boys just because I want to play.”

  So Wood made a deal with him.

  “Play,” he said, “and I’ll make sure they don’t hit the ball anywhere near you.”

  That made the rough-hewn Texan roar. What it must be like, Speaker thought, to be young and invincible, and think you can control things that only God can …

  Suddenly, unexpectedly, there rose a roar from the overflow crowd, and it caused the players to stop what they were doing, look around, see the source of the commotion. Was President Taft in the house? Colonel Roosevelt? Governor Wilson? Charles Becker?

  No, it was better than that. The players slowly understood, once they saw their own shadows. The sun had arrived. And as it did, as if by magic, so did thousands of reserve-seat ticket holders who’d kept the expensive seats mostly empty so far. Now that they’d pulled their lace curtains back and seen favorable weather, they hurried to the Polo Grounds, making the day complete.

  Cy Rigler, who before he was done would umpire more World Series games than anyone in history besides Bill Klem, was eager to get the game started on time, lest they start fooling too badly with fickle weather patterns. He grabbed a bullhorn, announced the batteries, and shortly after 2:15 in the afternoon, with the sun still standing sentry in the middle of a temporarily clear sky, he called the parties to action.

  “Play ball!” he cried.

  Conspicuous by their absence from the Polo Grounds were the Royal Rooters, almost all of whom had stayed home in anticipation of a busy Saturday, which would not only include Game Five of the World Series but the Columbus Day Parade, as well, an event that, in immigrant-heavy Boston, was an even bigger secular holiday than New Year’s Eve (though, depending on what part of town you were in, not quite as popular as St. Patrick’s Day).

  The loudest Rooter of all, John Fitzgerald, didn’t let the lack of his physical proximity to the games worry him any. A few minutes before the first pitch would be thrown in New York, Fitzgerald arrived at Washington Street, Boston’s Newspaper Row, climbed onto a stage, and whooped the twenty thousand fans gathered there into a fever-pitched frenzy. Standing directly in front of the Globe building, he lifted his left hand, called for three cheers for the Red Sox, and the crowd enthusiastically responded.

  “Now then, boys,” Honey Fitz continued, “three cheers for Smoky Joe Wood, the peerless pitcher who will take the hill for us today in Gotham!”

  “HIP, HIP, HOORAY!”

  “Three cheers for a Red Sox victory tomorrow, back here in the greatest city in the world!”

  “HIP, HIP, HOORAY!”

  “Three cheers for the Globe!”

  Those cheers were a little more muted, which was just the way Honey Fitz intended them to be; it wa
s, after all, the Taylor family, publishers of the paper, who’d gained control of the Red Sox when Ban Johnson engineered its sale away from Fitzgerald many years before.

  In New York, it hadn’t seemed possible for there to be more interest in the Series than there’d already been, yet this Friday dawned with numerous empty office cubicles and dozens of addled truant officers, summoned to deal with classrooms that looked for the day like the middle of summer. Not only were there well over 40,000 people crammed into the Polo Grounds, there were a good thousand more who’d taken to the old perch on Coogan’s Bluff, just to say they were around the game. Back in the old version of the park, the one that burned in 1911, you could actually follow the game from up there, but the new horseshoe shape kept everything a mystery, just the way John T. Brush wanted it, the better to lure those folks down to his stadium ticket windows.

  At Herald Square, where 20,000 people had already swarmed and where an additional 20,000 would spend at least a portion of their afternoon, a chant rose up immediately after the announcer called out the batteries:

  Old Joe Wood!

  He’s no good!

  Oh yes, I guess

  That he’s no good!

  It was a merry, festive occasion for most. A brass band set up in the second floor of a music shop across the street from the board. The Herald and the Telegram had hired cabaret dancers to perform in between innings. The whole hullabaloo attracted more than just the hard-core baseball fans, and sometimes it accounted for some hard feelings.

  Such as the man and his wife who showed up near the Thirty-fifth Street side of the Playograph maybe half an hour after the first pitch, too late to get a prime spot. The man stood on his toes to see the score.

  “It’s 1–0,” he reported to his wife, who couldn’t have been less interested if he’d given a score from a cricket game in Jersey City. “Giants are down.”

  “I can’t see a thing,” his wife said. “Where are the dancers?”

  “That’s OK,” the man said. “I can see. I’ll tell you every play.”

  “Sure you will. You haven’t spoken to me since we got within sight of the board. You haven’t even noticed I’m here except to slam me on the back and push my hat over to one side.”

  “Well,” the man said, “I want to see the game. It’s important.”

  “All right, then. Let’s get on a streetcar and go out to the Grounds. We can get a seat there and actually, you know, see the game!”

  The man turned, his faced flushed with frustration.

  “Listen here,” he said. “Do you know anything about baseball? Do you think I’d be here if there was a vacant seat up there? Come now and don’t worry me.”

  She tried being a good sport. She enjoyed the dancers. She enjoyed the band. She laughed at how much everyone around her seemed so completely obsessed by the little plastic figurines on the board, and all the fancy lights for balls, strikes, outs, and errors, whatever on earth any of that meant. But she soon reached a breaking point, in the middle of the seventh inning, when a sign was raised ordering, “Everybody Stretch!” and she watched everyone around her responding to the sign like trained circus animals.

  And that was that. “I won’t do it and I won’t be made to do it!” she railed, gathering her hat, her purse, and her overcoat. “I don’t feel like stretching, and I won’t do it for all your old Giants and Cubs and Red Stockings. I’m going home.”

  And she did. She left. Her husband? He stayed.

  “She never could understand me,” he muttered to a fascinated Herald reporter, who’d watched them the whole afternoon. “She’d rather read a novel than watch the game. No wonder we lose when the women folk ain’t loyal.”

  The Giants, in truth, had far more to worry about than any perceived disloyalty among their distaff fans. They had to concern themselves with Smoky Joe Wood; worse, they had to contend with a Smoky Joe Wood with something to prove, a Smoky Joe Wood with a chip on his shoulder, a Smoky Joe Wood who didn’t have near the fastball he’d had in Game One, who had to rely more and more on his curveball, who would surrender nine hits in nine innings, yet who managed to turn rigid and unyielding the moment he sniffed trouble.

  “You can have any pitcher you want to have,” Harry Hooper would say some six decades later. “But for me, if I could have one pitcher in history on my team, it would be Smoky Joe Wood from 1912, because in that year he was the finest pitcher who ever lived, the gamest, the grittiest, the most unbelievable pitcher you ever saw.”

  Tesreau was almost as good, and just as had been the case in Game One, that was almost enough for the Giants. Almost. He’d wiggled his way out of trouble in the first inning when, after allowing the first two men to reach base, he’d induced the hobbled Tris Speaker to hit into a backbreaking double play (and both Speaker and Stahl would be roasted later on for not sacrificing there, a reflection of just how trained people were in 1912 to the ways of small ball), and then was saved a run when Art Fletcher, of all people, made an eye-popping stop of a hard Duffy Lewis grounder. In the bottom of the inning, as Josh Devore bent over to grab a handful of dirt before leading off for the Giants, the Polo Grounds broke into a spontaneous version of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”; the morning papers had brought all of them up to speed on just how remarkable a catch he’d made the day before, and even though Devore fanned on three pitches they serenaded him again on his way back to the dugout.

  Their collective mood wouldn’t stay very festive for very long. Larry Gardner led off the bottom of the second with a vicious drive that sailed over Red Murray’s head in right field and headed for the heart of the horseshoe, allowing Gardner to take third base standing up, and for one of the first times in his remarkable rookie campaign, Tesreau looked shaken. There was a good reason for that, too: Leading off the game, Hooper had drilled a ball right back through the box that Tesreau, instinctively, had tried to knock down with his hand—his pitching hand, his money hand—and instead the ball had ripped the nail right off the middle finger. He told no one, because men were men in 1912 and didn’t ask for Band-Aids. But it affected his usual pinpoint control, a problem that manifested itself right away, when a spitter to Stahl bounded crazily away from Meyers, allowing Gardner to trot home with the icebreaking run.

  “I knew I would have to throw shutout ball, or close to it, to beat Wood on a day like this—dull, with a slight mist hanging over the grounds,” Tesreau would later lament. “It is a day made for his speed, not for my finesse. In my anxiety to keep the ball away from the center of the plate on Stahl I turned loose a wild pitch and Gardner scored. I was solely responsible for the first run. I accept that.”

  The Red Sox added a run to make it 2–0 in the fourth when Hick Cady, denied the hero’s laurels a day earlier, drove in Stahl with a sharp two-out single. With Smoky Joe Wood on the mound, 2–0 could well have been 20–0, and the quiet of the Polo Grounds reflected that hopelessness. But those who’d seen every game knew that the match couldn’t possibly continue without something for the papers to chatter about.

  Not that they would need it, necessarily. Downtown, on Chambers Street, the most electrifying moment yet at the Becker trial had already occurred early in the afternoon, and rewrite men at all fourteen New York papers were already spinning the tale. It seems a small-time hood named Morris Luban had been called by the prosecution, been sworn in, and under oath testified that two weeks before the sensational murder, he’d heard Charles Becker tell Jack Rose, a fellow underground associate, “If you don’t croak Rosenthal, I’ll do it myself.”

  The judge then asked Luban, “Did you see who fired the gun?”

  Luban pointed. It wasn’t enough for the judge. “Touch him,” he said.

  And so Luban, visibly quivering, frightened out of his mind, left the witness stand, walked over to where Frank Cirofici—Dago Frank—was sitting. Luban touched him on the shoulder, said, “I saw this man shoot, your honor.”

  The gallery gasped, the judge called for a recess, reporters
raced for the telephones in the hallway. The news quickly spread uptown, buzzing around the Polo Grounds, the only buzz in the building thus far.

  That, not surprisingly, was about to change.

  Heinie Wagner wanted so badly to make amends for what he’d done, or what he hadn’t done, and figured the best way to do that was to have a big day against the kid pitcher, Tesreau, collect two or three hits, knock in a bunch of runs, and that would be that. But that hadn’t happened. He’d flied to center in the second, grounded out to first in the fourth, and while his team had a 2–0 lead with their ace on the mound as they took the field in the bottom of the fifth, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being carried to glory on the shoulders of his teammates, along only for the ride.

  All these thoughts crowded his brain as Fred Merkle stepped to the plate to a spattering of boos, Giants fans growing impatient with Merkle’s growing résumé of ill-timed missteps. By now, Wood had struck out five Giants but he’d all but abandoned his fastball, which was anything but smoky this time around. Feeding Merkle a big, sweeping curve, Merkle tapped out a slow roller to the left of the mound, where the still-soaked grass ate it up and killed its momentum. Merkle, running hard out of the box, figured he had a sure infield hit, and so did the rest of the Polo Grounds, but suddenly in swooped Heinie Wagner, his spikes sloshing in the turf, his bare hand reaching down for the soaked ball, firing it as he launched his body parallel to the ground before falling with a dramatic splash. Somehow, there was plenty of mustard on the throw. Somehow, the ball popped Stahl’s mitt at first an eyeblink before Merkle’s foot slammed into the base. O’Loughlin bellowed “Out!” and Merkle, in disbelief, slammed his cap to the ground.

  “Watch yourself, Merkle!” O’Loughlin warned.

  “I’m not mad at you, Silk,” he said. “How the hell did he make that play?”

  Everyone wondered the same thing. Wood helped his shortstop to his feet and sent him back to his post with a simple “Thanks.” He then allowed a sharp single to Herzog (already Buck’s seventh hit of the Series), which would have been far more problematic if not for Wagner’s acrobatics. Wood settled down, struck out Chief Meyers, then figured to have little trouble with Art Fletcher, who may have cured his defensive hiccups but was still the lightest hitter in the New York lineup. Some in the stands murmured for a pinch hitter, but it was far too early for that and, besides, when Wood offered up a not-so-fast fastball, Fletcher clobbered it, and the ball appeared destined for left center field and the Giants appeared set up for first and third, two out, with Moose McCormick taking a walk toward the bat rack.