The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  James McAleer, the Red Sox’ owner, had ended his uncharacteristic silence by pumping up Bedient to New York writers unfamiliar with his work, telling them, “This boy is going to show the Giants something like they’ve never seen before. He is in fine trim. He has everything. I never saw a youngster just breaking into the big leagues with so much stuff, not even Mathewson or Walter Johnson. Bedient, in my opinion, will beat the Giants hands down.”

  Jake Stahl just rolled his eyes when he heard that hyperbole. Typical McAleer, sticking his head—and his lip—where it didn’t belong, still thinking he was a player even though he was barely a .250 lifetime hitter in thirteen years in the majors, still thinking he was a manager even though he was nearly a hundred games under .500 in eleven years as a skipper, and had never led a team to a first-place finish. Stahl had been lucky most of the year, avoiding the lengthy losing streak that would inevitably have brought McAleer around the club more. Now he approached Bedient.

  “Kid,” he said, “remember one thing tomorrow.”

  “What’s that, Jake?”

  “You got the best damned baseball team in the world behind you, and we’ll all be looking out for you. You don’t have to beat the Giants all by yourself.”

  Bedient, one of the few pitchers ever born who actually knew what it was like to beat a team by himself, shook his head. “I know that, Jake. I’m looking forward to it.”

  Stahl shook his head, saw how calm and collected his rookie pitcher was, thought to himself: Son of a bitch, it looks like he really is.

  Giants fans were the ones in a foul mood now, no matter where you looked, whether it was the fruit-throwing hoodlums on Eighth Avenue or down-in-the-dumps kids who hung their heads all night after the Game Four loss, whether it was John J. McGraw, still furious at his coaching gaffe, or Christy Mathewson, who understood that an entire city now depended on him to reach back and pitch like it was 1905 again or risk nudging the Giants to the brink of elimination.

  In Ironton, Missouri, Charlie Tesreau slowly and sadly read the Kansas City Star, the Arkansas Gazette, and the St. Louis Globe, all of the correspondents coming to the same conclusion, that while young Jeff had fought gamely and pitched admirably, he hadn’t been able to shut down the Sox completely on a day when that’s what was necessary to beat Smoky Joe Wood. Back home a few hours later reporters found him sitting on his porch, whittling a stick of wood and smoking a corncob pipe. He’d sent his youngest son out in search of the papers first thing, because “I just had a sense my boy had done something awfully special yesterday,” but insisted he was still proud of him.

  “He’ll get them fellers yet,” Charlie said. “I know what a pitcher my boy Jeff is and there ain’t nobody can beat him when he’s right. When the real money’s on the line, Jeff’ll know how to get it in his pocket, you watch.”

  By now, the players knew exactly how much real money they were playing for, since after the fourth game the receipts were totaled and the players’ portion of the profits were added up to $147,571.70, meaning that the winning team would divide $88,543.02 and the losers would share $59,028.68. That was by far the richest player pool in the history of the World Series, eclipsing 1911 by some $20,000, and that was a point the National Commission quickly put out in front of the public in order to combat whatever lingering gripes the players might have. And those were significant: There were some Giants and some Red Sox who’d wanted to at least have a conversation about a job action before Game Five to make their grievances public. But those feelings had died down as the rancor between the clubs rose, partly because they really wanted to beat each other, partly because they knew they could never match the Commission’s public relations machine.

  And that was significant. A Commission-friendly writer, Sid Mercer of the New York Globe, scolded the players in print before Game Five, warning, “One of these days the world’s series will go to smash, and that day will come just as soon as the commercial end is played above the sentimental end, a day which will come sooner than expected if the players keep their selfish behavior going.”

  And James McAleer, suddenly very visible and very, very chatty, had this to say about the situation:

  “This talk about giving the players a share in five instead of four games is absurd. The players went into this with their eyes open. They knew its conditions as they were drawn up. I should think that the players would realize that they have been most liberally treated and leave well enough alone.”

  Needless to say, when his players were made aware of their owner’s contempt-laden commentary, they were none too pleased. “There are a lot of long memories in here,” one Sox player whispered to Tim Murnane of the Globe.

  For McGraw’s sake, it was probably best that he had a short memory, because by the time Saturday morning broke and he descended to the Copley Plaza lobby for breakfast, he’d already forgiven himself for needlessly killing the Giants’ key rally the day before, reasoning, “It was all about the weather. On a dry day, that ball gets by Yerkes easily and Fletcher can walk home. But the wet grounds slowed the ball up enough for Yerkes to stop it.” McGraw conveniently failed to explain how, exactly, it was that he’d suddenly forgotten about the rainstorms that had practically drowned his field, and none of the writers cared to engage him so early in the morning. They rolled their eyes when McGraw told them, “I don’t care to reveal who my pitcher today will be,” all of them knowing that if McGraw didn’t throw Mathewson, John T. Brush would rise from his sickbed and fire his manager personally. But the scribes did find it interesting when McGraw turned his attention to the Red Sox, who, like them or not, were certainly sitting in the catbird’s seat. McGraw, not surprisingly, disagreed.

  “I believe that my team can beat any pitcher that Boston has with the exception of Wood, and I think that the next time we have him we will beat him, too. Wood has been pretty lucky to get away with the two games that he has won, and we see the Red Sox as having only one man who can beat us, anyway.”

  There it was. He’d said it. A one-man team. For weeks, the newsmen had been goading McGraw, guiding him, leading him, looking for him to say exactly that. Now that he had, they dutifully sought out selected Red Sox when they all arrived at Fenway Park later that morning. Mostly, the Sox were used to McGraw’s bluster, and mostly they laughed it off. All except Heinie Wagner.

  “I’ll take our one-man team over their twenty-man team,” Wagner said.

  In fact, he already had, as had everyone else on the Red Sox team. And at quite agreeable odds, too.

  In truth, the only team that was having a rougher go of things than the Giants as this Columbus Day dawned was the squad of high-powered Republicans whose mission it was to keep William Howard Taft in the White House. The party had suffered through a devastating summer, selecting Taft over Theodore Roosevelt at its convention in Chicago and then watching helplessly as Roosevelt joined the nascent Progressive Party, redubbing it the “Bull Moose,” and surging ahead of Taft in almost every poll conducted since the middle of the summer. Harsh reality was starting to settle in; it would have been hard enough to reelect Taft with a unified party behind him, but with Roosevelt siphoning off millions of would-be GOP votes, Taft’s backers were merely hoping the sitting president wouldn’t be humiliated, that he wouldn’t get shut out in the electoral college or finish—horror of horrors—fourth behind Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs.

  Of course, the one person least bothered by all of this hullabaloo was Taft himself, a man who never much desired the presidency, who in fact had always aspired to the Supreme Court instead, who found following the popular Roosevelt an impossible burden and the fishbowl of the Executive Mansion a suffocating bore. Many were the days that Taft would take refuge at local golf courses throughout southern Maryland and northern Virginia, and despite his 350-pound girth he would gladly prefer walking nine holes to sitting in his office for nine hours. It also seemed, to his round of critics, that he spent most of his time watching baseball games, and while that was a
slight exaggeration it was true that he threw out the first pitch at fourteen major-league games during his four years in office: seven in Washington (although he was forced to miss the 1912 opener because he was poring over the grim news coming in from Titanic survivors), three in St. Louis, two in Pittsburgh, and one apiece in Chicago and his beloved Cincinnati.

  It is probably an urban legend that it was Taft who unwittingly invented the seventh-inning stretch by rising late one game at Washington’s American League Park to uncoil his massive frame from the park’s small, restrictive, wooden seats; what is a matter of public record is his statement that “any man who would choose a day’s work over a day of baseball is a fool not worthy of friendship.”

  Taft finally won a small victory from his wife this Saturday, after spending most of a week having to make due with dribs and drabs of baseball news thanks to Mrs. Taft’s refusal to rearrange their schedule early in the week to accommodate his wish to watch a game at Fenway Park. After a few days’ leisure in New England followed by his official review of the naval fleet back in New York, the Tafts were back on vacation (much to the chagrin of anxious campaign officials), floating on the Mayflower, the presidential yacht, in the waters off Newport, Rhode Island. The boat was scheduled to be passing in the vicinity of Beverly and Nashon Point at about the time Game Five would be played, and so he arranged that every detail of the game would be relayed to him via U.S. Navy ships posted at the Torpedo Station.

  His chief rivals would continue to beat each other up this day, Governor Wilson attending a Knights of Columbus gathering at the Astor Hotel in New York (his remarks coming in a whisper, thanks to campaign-induced laryngitis), Colonel Roosevelt railing in Chicago that if Wilson were elected the nation’s monopolies would find him “a most delightful and harmless companion.”

  What Taft probably found most amusing about all of this was that even if his chances of reelection were decidedly slim, it seemed most of the country favored his own priorities, because voting registration had commenced at the same time the World Series had, and it was down some 30 percent from 1908. The New York Times was far more appalled about this than the President, scolding its readers, “Men of voting age who could get away from their daily labors devoted their leisure to seeing the Giants get walloped a second time by the Boston Americans, or to watching the scores of the game in the bulletin boards and on the tickers. We put the matter plainly to the baseball managers: Is it fair thus to interfere with the welfare of the country?”

  Then the Times answered its own question.

  “The country must be governed, and we cannot change the Constitution just to accommodate the world’s series. Hereafter baseball days and registration days must not conflict. Let that be understood.”

  Taft surely read that sentence with a smile and a hearty chuckle, knowing that soon enough neither upholding the Constitution nor overseeing the government was likely to be his problem any longer.

  The day didn’t begin auspiciously for the Giants. As they were gathering in the lobby at the Copley Plaza, a patron on one of the upper floors dropped a cigar out an open window and immediately set four of the hotel’s awnings ablaze. Chief Meyers, a cigar smoker himself—“It’s good medicine,” he explained—helped direct the firemen when they arrived, and was so fascinated by their work that he had to be dragged away so he could tend to his own job.

  Nor did it proceed well for one of their fiercest rooters. John Wilson, who’d seen Games One and Four at the Polo Grounds, had decided to take in a road game as well, and as an automobile enthusiast he decided to take his brand-new, six-cylinder Stutz for a nice long ride. But as he was headed for Mattapan Square, maybe ten miles outside Boston and less than a mile from a police station, he was halted by two thugs in golf caps who jumped out of nearby roadside bushes. One of them pushed a revolver under his nose.

  “Empty your pockets,” he snarled. “Wallet. Watch. Jewels. Cash. Everything. Hurry, make it snappy.”

  Wilson was traveling light. He dropped a few coins from his pocket.

  “That’s all?”

  “All I have otherwise,” he said, “is this,” and he removed a single ticket to Game Five from his glove compartment. “I’d rather keep it if you don’t mind.”

  The crooks looked at each other.

  “I hate baseball,” one of them said, pushing Wilson out of the way, hopping into the Stutz, and speeding away. Wilson walked the mile to the police office and filed a report; the cops were nice enough to give him a ride to Fenway Park.

  “I hope they find the car,” he said from his seat behind the Giants’ dugout. “I need a ride home.”

  Around him was already the most boisterous crowd of the series, so many of the 34,683 having already taken part in parades, parties, or other such festive gatherings celebrating Columbus Day. Street kids had been prowling the avenues around the park, peddling salted peanuts and hot coffee, the beverage of choice on a morning that dawned with frost on the Fenway grass rather than dew. Some of the more entrepreneurial among them arrived bearing pieces of cloth, cardboard, and old linens, selling them to the weary dwellers of lines on Ipswich and Lansdowne Streets for anywhere from a quarter to fifty cents, throwing in a newspaper-stuffed pillow for another two bits.

  At seven o’clock they produced the day’s first loud roar when a lieutenant groundskeeper showed up for work, bringing with him a bright red pennant with RED SOX stenciled in white, and he carefully opened the door of the ticket shed on Ipswich Street, raised the banner to the top, and officially signaled that Fenway was open for business at last. By 7:30, streetcars started arriving and they wouldn’t stop for hours, dropping the folks off and flooding the area every five minutes. By 8 the gates finally opened, and by 10, fully four hours before game time, most all of the seats were already filled, a sight that made James McAleer gasp and at least one of his players grumble.

  “If only this could be a best of twenty-one,” McAleer sighed, cash registers jangling in his mind’s eye.

  “Look at this place,” Duffy Lewis said to Harry Hooper as they walked on the field, the first of the Sox to do so, greeted by cheers and songs and general merriment. “You mean to tell me we don’t deserve a piece of this gate? You think these people are here to see McAleer, McGraw, and Johnson?”

  The people were already causing more of a commotion than the four previous crowds put together. Already, the swollen mass in center field had knocked the fence down once, requiring police attention, and it was being pushed near the bursting point again. Soon enough, they would be roused to the brink of rebellion thanks to a stunningly audacious display by, of all people, Fred Snodgrass. Snodgrass had already incurred his manager’s wrath once, and invited his teammates’ mistrust, when in Game One he had allowed Jeff Tesreau’s no-hitter to go up in smoke by misplaying what should have been a routine Tris Speaker fly ball into a triple. He’d also scuffled at the plate, amassing only three hits in sixteen at-bats, and had yet to drive in a run.

  While the Red Sox were taking their batting-practice swings, Snodgrass and a few other Giants were wandering around the outfield, taking a few wind sprints, shagging some flies, flipping some of the more battered balls into the stands to grateful souvenir-seeking fans. The crowd was in a fine mood and so were most of the other Giants, despite their predicament in the Series. Snodgrass, though, had come to the park in a dark mood, and when Red Sox fans started riding him about his minuscule .188 batting average, Snodgrass shot right back at them, which all but guaranteed that the Sox fans would be relentless the rest of the day. And they were.

  “They call you ‘Snow’ because your bat’s so cold?” one yelled.

  At that, a ball came flying into the outfield, just past Snodgrass, and a few men jumped over the vulnerable center-field fence, racing to get the ball. But they had to pass Snodgrass first, and the Giant inexplicably lowered his shoulder and tackled one of them, a shocking blow that set the other fellow scampering for the safety of the stands. But Snodgrass wasn’t thro
ugh. He reached down, picked up the ball in question, and fired it at the trespasser just as he was climbing back into the bleachers, barely missing the man’s back, to say nothing of his backside. It hit the fence with a dull thud. Snodgrass laughed as the crowd began to boo, and curse him by name, and by now they were cursing out the rest of the Giants too, and before Snodgrass could continue the debate Larry Doyle came running over, grabbed him by the front of the jersey, and pulled him away.

  “What the hell is the matter with you, Snow?” the captain screamed, inches away from Snodgrass’s nose. “It isn’t hard enough to beat these bastards without inciting a riot? You want to get us bloody killed?”

  “They were getting on me, Cap …”

  “Getting on you? Is this your first day in the big leagues, Snow? This is the world’s series for professional baseball for crissakes. Act like a pro, or I’ll tell Mac to find someone who will!”

  McGraw himself, sitting in the dugout, didn’t yet know why the ballpark was starting to sound venomous, but he had his own problems. Sitting next to Wilbert Robinson, he pointed to a man standing with a gaggle of Royal Rooters, yukking it up and having a jolly good time.

  “You know who that is, Robbie?” McGraw asked.

  “Who’s that, Mac?”

  “That’s Abe Attell, the featherweight. He was champion until a few months ago. Lost to some fellow named Kilbane. Twenty rounds. Abe’s people put some junk in his gloves to make Kilbane go blind, and it didn’t take.”

  “I guess he didn’t punch him enough in the face, eh?”

  McGraw folded his arms. He knew Attell well through a mutual friendship with Arnold Rothstein, the fastest-rising gambler in New York, with whom McGraw had gone into the pool-hall business.

  “Abe’s mad at me now,” McGraw said. “Yesterday, at the Polo Grounds, this kid comes over to me, tells me someone wants to say hello, I tell the kid to go stuff himself, I’m getting ready for a game. Kid says, ‘Come on, Mac, he wants to say hello, is all.’ And I tell the kid, ‘That’s Mr. McGraw to you and to whoever your guy is.’ Well, the guy was Abe. Right there, he walks over to the grandstand and puts a grand down on Wood and the Sox, can you believe that?”