by Frank Deford
SEVEN
So Fatso Ban Johnson got his wish. For the 1903 season he moved the Orioles to New York, thus, it turned out, setting the major leagues in stone with the same sixteen franchises for the next fifty years. Oh, with time a few nicknames would change, RIP: the Beaneaters, Superbas, Orphans, Perfectos, Terrors, Blues, and Highlanders. The latter earned their name because, with Tammany out of power, the American League was finally able to find a place to build a stadium—only the lone option was on the highest ground on Manhattan Island, in Washington Heights, in the far upper reaches of the borough. There was Hilltop Park, a simple wooden structure seating sixteen thousand, raised. It was pretty easy to fling up stadiums in those days (it was also pretty easy for them to either fall down or burn down).
What would become the New York Yankees franchise was purchased for eighteen thousand dollars, the new owners being William Devery, a corrupt former police commissioner, and Frank Farrell, who was known as “the poolroom czar.” Johnson was always ethically selective in putting his wholesome new league together.
McGraw eliminated the American League from his mind, content to enjoy the delights of the big city, build up the Giants’ roster, and prepare to take his first New York team to spring training in Savannah. Mathewson had an even more memorable spring training, for it was his honeymoon. He and Jane were married at her parents’ home in Lewisburg on March 5. The bride’s family approved of Matty and liked him immensely, even if her father was dubious that his new son-in-law should attempt to “make a living playing a child’s sport with a bunch of uneducated ruffians.”
But the wedding was the highlight of the Lewisburg social calendar, and immediately after the fancy reception, the bride and groom caught the Buffalo Flyer south as Matty’s smirking groomsmen handed out leaflets at the depot, advertising the presence of the newlyweds on their wedding night. “He will be easily recognized by his boyish countenance and Apollo-like form,” the pamphlets advised the other wayfarers.
Before plighting their troth, though, Jane and Matty had agreed to something of a pre-nup. In the even-up deal, he consented to leave his Baptist upbringing and worship in Jane’s Presbyterian church while, in return, she swore to give up her Democratic affiliation and join his Republican Party. Bully.
In Savannah, Jane was a notable figure at the De Soto Hotel, for it was unusual for players to bring their wives along. At some point another woman spied her there in the lobby, sizing her up cattily even if she would later write that it was “not a catty reaction.” And John McGraw did not do dirt to Baltimore. The observer was Blanche McGraw, Muggsy’s wife of a year, who was Baltimore Catholic nouveau. Blanche found the Protestant country girl too “strait-laced . . . a Sunday-school teacher, which also made her suspect.” Not only that, but Blanche didn’t care for the way that Jane was sneaking peeks back at her. She was certain that Jane, unadorned as she was pretty, was looking down on her for her sequins and jewelry, that she must be thinking that Blanche was a “hussy.”
Nevertheless Blanche grew curious, and although she decided that she could not ask him about the bride herself, she did finally bring herself to casually inquire of Muggsy about the newlywed young right-hander. “Looks like he can pitch with his head as well as his arm,” he replied.
Of course, Blanche didn’t mean that. She didn’t mean baseball. She wanted to find out what sort of a fellow the lovely brunette’s husband was. But she should have known what sort of an answer to expect. This was how Blanche assessed her husband: “Life without baseball had very little meaning to him. It was his meat, drink, dream, his blood and breath, his very reason for existence.” So it fell to Blanche McGraw to approach Jane Mathewson, and one day soon thereafter in the lobby of the De Soto, she ventured to introduce herself.
Although there might not have been as much apparent difference between the two wives as between the two husbands, there did not, either, appear to be much common ground between the two women. But, in fact, they hit it off right away, and while the men practiced their craft at Forsyth Park, the women chatted and laughed, took tea together, and wandered about Savannah, shopping and sight-seeing, enjoying the warm Dixie air. By the time the Giants prepared to head north, Blanche and Jane not only were friends, but they had brought their husbands closer together.
Matty, of course, had always admired Muggsy. Now he grew to like him. Muggsy liked Matty, too. Of course, everybody did. McGraw must have been jealous of the tall and handsome and popular Mathewson. Of course, everybody else always was. But Muggsy also was impressed by Mathewson’s sharp mind. McGraw, the high school dropout, could, slyly, often be more taken with a player’s brain than with his talent. Blanche, though, also respected Mathewson’s intellect. “He had an unusual mind, a quick mind, and the stubbornness of a person with a trained mind,” she would say.
Muggsy was now thirty years old, almost eight years older than Mathewson. In baseball years, this was a lifetime. Not only that, but McGraw was an old thirty. As a matter of fact, his career as an active player was altogether ended here, one day in Savannah, when his right knee buckled on him during a workout. McGraw was odd; he never seemed to have had any in-between, going almost overnight from being a beardless Katzenjammer Kid to a paunchy dead ringer for W. C. Fields. By 1903 he’d already done some considerable living, too. Mathewson, by comparison, was downright callow. He was polite, McGraw pugnacious; Protestant to his Catholic; a country mouse to the city slicker Muggsy had become; pitcher to his batter; player to his manager; tall to his short; sportsman to his mucker. There seemed to be absolutely nothing that would match John J. McGraw with Christopher Mathewson.
But notwithstanding, so it was that before they returned north, the two couples agreed to live together back in New York. The four of them rented a ground-floor apartment for fifty dollars a month on the Upper West Side, at Columbus and Eighty-fifth Street, convenient to an el station on the line to the Polo Grounds. The way they worked it out was, Muggsy paid for the rent and the gas, and Matty paid for the food.
The arrangement turned out just fine, too. Blanche explained: “Jane and I led normal lives. We fed the men and left them alone to talk their baseball. Their happiness was our cause.” Soon the two men made some financial investments together, too. This odd quartet—did ever any other manager and star player in any sport room together with their wives?—grew even closer in companionship and trust.
And always, McGraw and Mathewson talked the game of baseball. This was years before pitching coaches came into the sport, so even though Muggsy had never been a pitcher, Mathewson listened to him about his craft. It was also true that McGraw was not unintelligent on the subject. (In counterpoint, one recalls Jim Palmer telling his manager, the latter-day McGraw, Earl Weaver: “Earl, all you know about pitching is that you could never hit it.”) When McGraw had first started playing baseball, as a child, he had been a pitcher. In fact, one time, when he was a candy butcher on a railroad and two passengers got into an argument about whether a baseball could truly curve, little Muggsy entered the discussion on behalf of the pro-curve gentleman. When the two riders struck a ten-dollar bet, the conductor bade the engineer stop the train. The passengers disembarked, and there, in a field by the side of the tracks, young McGraw found two stakes and set them up. He was never without a baseball, and so he stood back and pitched his ball, demonstratively swerving it around the stakes. Also, before the assembled returned to the train, for his effort he demanded and received one of the ten dollars that the winner of the bet had taken.
“Pitching was my first love,” McGraw wrote in his memoirs. “To me, it is the most fascinating art in the world. It really is an art, too—not merely science.” While he gave tips on technique to Mathewson—at this time, in 1903, for example, helping him improve the change-up he had picked up from Iron Man McGinnity—where he and Matty had their meeting of their minds was in that art of pitching. Location—the placement of pitches. And: mixing ’em up.
McGraw was amazed at how advanced a st
rategist young Mathewson was. Always there have been big, strong kids who are fireballers, capable of just flinging the horsehide past batters—and so too Mathewson. But almost from the start, Matty was also a thinking pitcher. In this one obvious way, the two different men were twinned. While McGraw called most pitches from the bench, early on he began to allow Mathewson the privilege of choosing his own pitches. Why, soon Muggsy paid him the ultimate compliment, actually comparing Matty to himself. “It is rare,” he humbly declared, “that a man like Christy Mathewson comes along who could remember like me.”
That 1903 season would be magnificent for the Giants. McGraw took the worst team in the majors and added thirty-six victories. Only Pittsburgh and the Boston team in the American League posted better records. Just like that, too, the Giants became fashionable, the talk of the town. Crowds of up to thirty thousand began to show up for the biggest games, with hundreds—thousands?—more who would scamper up to watch from Coogan’s Bluff, which overlooked the park (even if the choicest positions up there allowed but a limited vantage of the diamond).
Matty won thirty games while McGinnity won thirty-one. They were the first two pitchers since the National League got rid of its weak sisters and went with eight competitive clubs to win thirty. Three times that year McGinnity won doubleheaders, and he threw 434 innings, but as indefatigable as he was, curiously, the Iron Man had not earned his moniker for his endurance. Rather, before Muggsy discovered him and brought him to Baltimore in ’99 at the advanced baseball age of twenty-eight, McGinnity had toiled at an iron foundry in Oklahoma.
If Iron Man won one more game than Matty, though, the younger man had, overall, a more impressive record. McGinnity lost twenty games, Mathewson only thirteen. Mathewson also had a slightly better earned run average—2.26 to 2.43—and a much better strikeout-to-walks ratio. Mathewson fanned 267 batters in 366 innings, to lead the league. Already he was the big favorite with the New York cranks—and he knew it, too. Like McGraw, he had a great sense of awareness; unlike McGraw, he had a sense of proportion to match. For all Mathewson’s becoming modesty, he always understood how good he was—and how popular. McGraw’s biographer, Charles C. Alexander, wrote that Matty was “an aloof, rather swell-headed young man, fully cognizant that he was the big attraction.” Indeed, that he could hold himself apart from the hurly-burly might have made him appear somewhat stuck-up, but in time that very quality took on another perception, that he was indeed a special character and not one of the crowd.
Rube Marquard, a Hall of Famer himself, who would assume Iron Joe McGinnity’s role as the number two Giant pitcher, summed up his teammate this way: “Matty never thought he was better than anybody else. It was just the way he carried himself. . . . But it was okay because, what the hell, when you came to it, Matty was different.”
Now, in 1903, happily married, secure with his manager and a winning team, Mathewson was definitely already beginning to develop into what he would become soon enough: the first real full-blooded American sports idol. Indeed, even by now, after just one season with McGraw’s hustlers, Mathewson was well on his way to canonization. Perhaps at this point, only one other American athlete exceeded his popularity. And that wasn’t even a human being; it was a horse: the great Dan Patch.
He was a light bay who stood more than sixteen and a half hands, with a heart that, in death, was revealed to be twice the size of a normal standardbred’s. On October 12,1903, Dan Patch paced a mile in 1:56 ½ seconds, a figure that would seem as astounding to savvy horse-conscious Americans at that time as sixty home runs would to baseball fans a generation later. Dan Patch traveled in his own private railway car and would routinely draw thirty to forty thousand fans when he raced. He would nod to his many fans and pose for cameras, and he was a marketing bonanza. The Dan Patch name was attached to watches, padlocks, sleds, and collars—even stoves and automobiles. There was even a dance named after him: the Dan Patch two-step. He was beloved of Americans. Only Matty would surpass him.
Although the Giants posted this spectacular turnaround success in 1903, and all credit fairly went to McGraw, he suffered a terrible personal setback early in the season. The Giants’ number three starter was a deaf-mute named Dummy Taylor. In these more blunt times, where language was not so (as we say now) appropriate, all deaf-mutes in baseball were immediately tabbed Dummy (just as all Native Americans automatically became “Chief”). In one of the strangest of all baseball coincidences, in 1901, Mathewson’s first full season in the majors, the Giants actually had three deaf-mutes on their pitching staff—George Leitner, Billy Deegan, and Taylor. All, naturally, were called Dummy. By ’03 only Taylor remained in New York; he was a fine pitcher. Also, since McGraw was never one to miss an opportunity, he liked having Taylor around on the bench when he wasn’t starting in order that he might holler at the opponent’s pitcher. Dummy Taylor emitted some kind of rattling shriek that could, apparently, be considerably disconcerting if you were about to deliver a pitch.
Taylor was in the outfield at the Polo Grounds, shagging flies, before the third game of the 1903 season. McGraw was near home plate, slapping grounders to his infielders. Taylor threw a ball back to the diamond that slammed into McGraw’s face. He never saw it coming and went down as if he had been shot. The ball broke McGraw’s nose, severing cartilage, and it also ruptured a blood vessel inside his throat. That caused the most incredible flood, the blood spurting out of both his nose and his mouth. Poor Dummy Taylor was beside himself while the other Giants looked on in shock at their fallen leader. McGraw was rushed to a hospital, where his nose was stuffed with cotton. At last the bleeding was stemmed, and he actually returned to the Polo Grounds late in the game.
Dummy Taylor
The hemorrhaging soon returned, however. Indeed, the blow would affect McGraw’s sinuses and cause debilitating upper respiratory infections for the rest of his life. But at that moment the Giants were scheduled to begin a road trip in Philadelphia, and, naturally, Muggsy prepared to leave town with his team. Blanche, however, put her foot down, telling her husband that she would not let him go unless she accompanied him. Reluctantly, McGraw finally agreed, but with one proviso: Matty must stay behind in New York. McGraw’s reasoning was simply that he felt concern for Jane Mathewson, that, with Blanche in Philadelphia, she would be left alone in their large, new apartment in the strange, big city. McGraw mandated that Matty must stay with his young bride even though it meant that his star pitcher would miss his turn to start in Philadelphia.
Nobody had ever before heard of such a concession on the diamond from the likes of Muggsy McGraw. And it having to do with a woman! “Only one per cent of ballplayers are leaders of men,” he declared once. “The other ninety-nine per cent are followers of women.” And a bride! Here is the wives’ tale he offered on that subject: “Very few ball players are ever as valuable to a team the first year they are married as they are before or after.”
But then, he had begun to truly love the Mathewsons, as they were learning to love him. Growing up, McGraw had never had much of a family life—certainly not a happy one—and he had already had a childless marriage before he married Blanche. Probably he sensed by now that he must be sterile, that he could never sire a son of his own. His relationship with Mathewson was always so strange, and their ages were too close for McGraw to pose as a father figure, but Matty had already become, in some fashion, his boy, his kid brother—or maybe just his alter ego, the man Muggsy would have been if he had only been blessed, as a child, with books and looks and love.
EIGHT
No two boys could have had more different upbringings than Muggsy and Matty. Growing up, their only shared experience was as successful young ballplayers. Whereas Mathewson was raised comfortably in a sweet, settled home life, McGraw’s dismal family experience of poverty and death seems more appropriate to Ireland itself, whence his father John left to escape poverty and death, than to the United States.
Not much is known of that older John McGraw’s first years
in America, except that he emigrated around 1856 and, during the Civil War, was drafted into the Union Army—a circumstance that many of his Irish brethren protested with riots. Why should they do the fighting in a war in which they had no real interest, where in fact they would be dying so that black men should be freed to compete with them for jobs? John McGraw also took a wife, probably shortly after being mustered out, probably in New York City, but she died giving birth to their first child, a daughter, and, so, with the baby girl, Anna, he headed upstate, settling in the village of Truxton, in Cortland County, then about an hour and a half’s time south of Syracuse. It was there that he met and wed Ellen Comerford, who gave birth to their first child, a boy, who was John Joseph McGraw, born April 7, 1873.
The elder John McGraw was not an ignorant man. He had had many years of schooling in the Catholic schools of his native Ireland and sought work as a teacher. Although he was never close to his eldest son, we can imagine that he spoke highly about education to young Johnny; also, surely, he bewailed his fate that he himself could not find honest work at a school, but had to settle for laboring on the railroad. He was, it seems, a good man, who did his best by what became a brood of children. But also he was dull and dark and unimaginative. Certainly, like so many immigrant parents, he could not understand how his son could be so taken by a game.
Johnny McGraw, though, was absolutely captivated by baseball. He paid ten cents for a copy of Our Boys Base Ball Rules and became as much an authority about the game as he was a prodigy. He was a responsible kid, though, an altar boy who took odd jobs about town. Later he worked as a paperboy for the Elmira Telegraph and then as a butcher boy on his father’s railroad, the Elmira, Cortland & Northern. There, days, he walked the aisles hawking snacks and magazines. Always, though—as we know from that episode where he earned his first professional dollar, pitching a curveball for the edification of train passengers—always Johnny carried his baseball with him. His first one cost a dollar, which he sent away to Spalding for. Other baseball expenses, earning even more of his father’s ire, came when John Sr. had to pony up for windows broken on account of his son’s slugging.
