by Frank Deford
In the event, he started calling on her sometime after he came back to Baltimore, and then, with his European travels behind him and his new business venture under way, Muggsy proposed to Minnie. They were married in downtown Baltimore on a frigid winter’s day, February 3, 1897. McGraw chose Jennings as his best man, with the other Oriole stalwarts in attendance. Indeed, despite the freezing weather, it was SRO in the church, a real celebrity wedding. However, not a single member of McGraw’s own family was at the ceremony. Nonetheless, when the happy couple went off to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, they swung by Truxton, where Muggsy introduced his bride to his father. It was rare that he ever saw his old man, but at least the pain of the past was forgotten. McGraw was a man who famously carried grudges; notwithstanding, if he was never close to his father, neither did he hold him in enmity once he had left home and found his fortune.
He and Minnie returned to Baltimore, there to start a family, as the Orioles sought a fourth straight championship. Neither would come to pass. At least McGraw did not suffer any illness in ’97, but he did endure two serious injuries, and however happy he was as a bridegroom, he was more nettlesome than ever around the diamond. Once, he and Keeler got into a clubhouse brawl when both men were as naked as jaybirds (and Wee Willie, apparently, got the best of Muggsy). He gave no quarter to umpires whatsoever.
John Heydler would later become president of the National League but at this time was on the league’s umpiring staff. It is hard to imagine how much umpires despised McGraw, but this is Heydler’s woeful recollection: “The Orioles were mean, vicious, ready at any time to maim a rival player or an umpire if it helped their cause. The things they said to umpires were unbelievably vile, and they broke the spirits of some fine men. I’ve seen umpires bathe their feet by the hour after McGraw and others spiked them. . . . The lot of the umpires never was worse than in the years the Orioles were flying high.”
McGraw was the obvious choice to replace Hanlon in ’99 as the Orioles manager, and he did an amazing job of keeping the depleted team in the pennant race. If he got too tough on the boys, Uncle Robbie would smooth things out. “Robbie was the sugar and I was the vinegar,” was how Muggsy explained it. He was always up to some new trick. Once, when he was coaching third in a close game against Brooklyn, he called over to the Superbas pitcher and asked to see the ball. Without thinking, the pitcher tossed the ball to McGraw, who simply stepped aside in the coacher’s box and let the ball roll away as the Oriole base runner dashed into scoring position.
Perhaps the only off-putting part of the summer was Minnie’s stomach pains. They came and went, and nobody seemed to know what to make of them. Then, on August 26, when the Orioles were in Louisville, Minnie’s pain became so unbearable that doctors had to come to the house. They diagnosed appendicitis so acute that they dared not move her to a hospital, but surgeons from Johns Hopkins came to the house on St. Paul Street in order to remove the appendix there.
McGraw got the telegram in the midst of a doubleheader and took the first train back from Louisville. By the time he reached Baltimore, the operation had gone smoothly and it appeared to be a success. Muggsy rushed to see her, there in the bed they shared. Alas, three nights later Minnie began to suffer with blood poisoning. McGraw sat with his wife by their bed all that night and into the next morning until finally Minnie Doyle McGraw slipped peacefully into death. She was twenty-two years old and was buried in her wedding gown.
The young widower McGraw did not come back to the team for another two weeks, and it was ten days after that before he put himself in a game. For the first time, people noticed that he had gray hairs. He wasn’t yet thirty years old. He had lost his mother and four of his sisters and brothers, and now, after almost having died himself, he had lost his wife. All from disease.
It is not so surprising, then, that some years later, when Mathewson fell seriously ill, McGraw grew quickly disturbed, behaving even more erratically. This was near the end of spring training in 1906. Mathewson fell sick in Memphis with what at first appeared to be only a bad cold. Soon, however, his illness was diagnosed as diphtheria, although this alarming information seems to have been kept from the public; only oblique references to “his illness” were made in the press. His travail was closely followed, though, MATTY WALKS! headlined the Evening World on that occasion when at last he became ambulatory.
When Mathewson finally returned to the pitcher’s box on May 5, attracting a huge midweek crowd of fifteen thousand on a miserably wet afternoon, the Times still attributed his absence of more than a month only to “a rather severe cold.” The throng, said the Tribune, “rose en masse to give him a standing ovation,” and Mathewson responded with a fairly good effort against the Beaneaters, or, as the Herald would have them, “the savants from the grove of Academe.” Matty gave up three runs and seven hits in seven innings, and left with a lead, but McGinnity blew it in relief. Nevertheless, said the World, “the great pitcher proved that he retained his grip on the hearts of New Yorkers.”
All along, though, McGraw was aware of the true nature of Matty’s malady; he knew it was diphtheria from the moment it was diagnosed. Muggsy was beside himself. For much of that time, Matty had been quarantined. It was especially important to keep him away from Jane, who was pregnant. Telephones were in general use now, and McGraw stayed in constant touch with Matty and Jane and the doctors. It did not seem possible that it could happen to him again, that someone else he loved would be taken from him. His behavior grew more erratic than ever. His “constant bickering only brings discredit,” the Tribune chastised him. He was “overindulgent in conversation” with the umpires, regularly “calling [them] names from the bench” and making “useless objections.” They were not just incompetent; now they were thieves.
Thieves! Harry Pulliam, the young National League president, grew angrier and more frustrated at each more egregious McGravian transgression. Muggsy was thrown out of more games, even drawing a three-game suspension. In Providence, for a mere exhibition game, about the time Mathewson was conclusively diagnosed with diphtheria, McGraw went completely haywire, taking the whole team off the field in protest over some ordinary decision. The furious spectators started to descend on the Giants, who were obliged to brandish their bats in defense. Finally the umpires prevailed on McGraw to finish the exhibition.
Muggsy had become a drinker by now. This time, when Matty was sick and maybe dying, was a time when too often he started drinking too much.
TEN
The 1890s, when John J. McGraw came to national prominence, were known not only as the Gay Nineties, but also the Electric Nineties, the Romantic Nineties, possibly even the Moulting Nineties. Together with the beginning of the twentieth century, the period was known as the Banquet Years, or the Mauve Decades (don’t ask). The era began with the terrible economic Panic of’93, and the nation was bifurcated then as now by region, as underscored by William Jennings Bryan and his cross-of-gold theatrics. But once beyond the economic travails, as the century turned, Lord, did the country start busting its buttons.
The United States was, if gingerly, taking on the trappings of empire, managing that with the chips it took off the table from Spain. Then there was gold in Alaska, and soon enough a bull in the china shop in the White House. Perhaps nothing illustrated the rambunctious nature of the times more than the big hit of ’98, the favorite of all the Spanish-American War bands: “They’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tb-Night.” It was a nation of obstreperous strivers. “America, as yet, had no place for the idle rich, chiefly because there had been, as yet, no idle rich,” observed Mark Sullivan. The humorist Finley Peter Dunne, writing in an Irish accent as the famous Mr. Dooley, declared that “the crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.”
Still, America remained agrarian. As the new century began, 60 percent of Americans resided on farms or in small towns. Good grief, there were still two thousand individual farms in New York City, and as late as 1908 wild goats roamed Fift
h Avenue, around 90th Street, just north of the magnificent mansions that lined the country’s most famous boulevard.
But more and more Americans were moving to the cities—not only coming from the countryside, like McGraw and Mathewson, but also from abroad—turning them into (as the brand-new term suggested) “melting pots.” A new type of city dweller began to emerge. Among other things, since the six-day, sixty-hour-a-week work was growing shorter, there was more time for leisure—specifically for our purposes: more opportunity to attend baseball games. The boom in stadium attendance in the first decade of the new century probably had as much to do with more leisure opportunity as it did with any better brand of baseball.
Henry Adams described this fresh new urban American thusly: “[He was] a pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors . . . work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; he never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it.”
All of that—well, except for the business about not caring for the power—fit John J. McGraw to a tee. It is ironic that whereas Matty would become the first great American sports hero, Muggsy was much more representative of the rampant young American male of the Mauve Decades. Matty was the all-American boy grown up; Muggsy was the all-American striver (or, well, hustler). It wasn’t just that he made a life out of baseball, out of a game; he made sure to make a lot of money out of it, too. “From the start,” Blanche Sindall McGraw wrote, “I saw him as a young man of indestructible confidence, ever of visible optimism and hope, but not of the Pollyanna variety.”
She first met him a year after Minnie died, when he and Hughie Jennings—himself also already a widower—were invited by a friend to come by the Sindalls’ fine house for a party. McGraw and Jennings were both out of mourning, Muggsy back from that one rare relaxing season in St. Louis, where he made a lot of money without expending much energy. Blanche’s first impression was that the famous young man was “courteous and self-assured.” Well, away from the diamond, he usually did strike folks as a different breed of cat.
Blanche was only nineteen, almost a decade his junior. She had sable eyes and hair to match, was barely five feet tall, and what we knew then as “pleasingly plump.” It was the fashion; Lillian Russell, the grandest female star in show business, weighed in at a hefty 165. She just ate like a horse and tightened her corset. Blanche, like Jane Mathewson, was also a rare college girl for that time, attending St. Agnes College for Young Women.
But then, Blanche’s father, James, was a prosperous businessman. Minnie Doyle’s father had been only a dour government functionary, a widower, up in years. James Sindall was a vigorous self-made man who had started out selling stoves and then took out on his own as a contractor. The Sindalls lived in a house James Sindall had built himself; it was, as Baltimoreans are wont to say, “out” York Road, in the fashionable new Waverly area. McGraw was not only admiring of James Sindall, but even a little intimidated by him; the toughest ballplayer in the land took several months getting up the nerve to ask for Sindall’s daughter’s hand in marriage. But McGraw not only fell in love with Blanche, he adored the whole Sindall family. He’d never really been part of a big, happy family before, and had, as Blanche put it, “a gnawing hunger” for such a thing.
Indeed, for all that was going on in McGraw’s life as 1900 passed into ’01—as he became the linchpin for the new Baltimore franchise in the new American League—he courted Blanche leisurely. He brought her flowers regularly. They both loved to go to vaudeville and musicals downtown, and worshiped at St. Ann’s together. The Sindalls were not Irish; they were of Dutch heritage, but they were staunch Roman Catholics. Blanche knew nothing of baseball when the romance began, but things were certainly progressing nicely by the spring. For Opening Day, the Orioles’ first game in the new American League, with Ban Johnson throwing out the first ball himself, from all of Baltimore to pick from, it was the Sindall family that manager John McGraw chose to invite to sit in his box.
Now that the season had begun, McGraw’s favorite escape from his baseball duties was to take out the Sindall family carriage, meandering through Druid Hill Park with Blanche by his side. It could not have been more innocent; they would stop for ice cream sodas. Curiously, McGraw always had Blanche hold the reins on the mare, Fanny. For whatever reason, in all his life, horses or cars, McGraw never liked to drive. It was just one of those things; he certainly wanted to run everything else. Mathewson on the other hand fancied cars as soon as they came into fashion and, to Jane’s dismay, was even something of a daredevil behind the wheel. In 1912 he would be fined a hundred dollars for whipping along at thirty-one miles per hour in a car given him by his adoring fans. At the ballpark, it was Matty’s signature to walk from the clubhouse to the diamond wearing an automobile driver’s long white linen duster over his uniform.
McGraw, though, was at heart really something of an old-fashioned fellow. He never even took to moving pictures. For that matter, as he grew older, he wouldn’t be very good at adapting to the new manner of ballplayers. As cagey as McGraw was, he was pretty set in his ways by the time he fell in love with Blanche. The way the world turned when the Orioles were riding high was the way he liked it. We don’t think that hard-boiled types can be sentimentalists, but McGraw put the lie to that stereotype. The meaner McGraw got, the sweeter the past seemed to him. And, if he didn’t realize it then, the past essentially ended on January 8, 1902, when he married Blanche at St. Ann’s.
It had been only five years, shy a month, since he had married Minnie, and many of the same players returned, principals in this wedding party, too (Wee Willie gave the couple silver oyster forks). Keeler and those other Old Oriole teammates standing up for McGraw could barely stifle their laughter, too, as the presiding priest, Father Cornelius Thomas, felt obliged to wrench baseball into his charge to the newlyweds.
“Let selfishness be no barrier to your happiness, but understand that each must give up much, renounce himself, that both may enjoy delightful fruit,” he began conventionally enough. But then: “For you know that it is the sacrifice hit that adds to the number of runs and wins in the game.”
And to McGraw (as his groomsmen snickered): “Lead her around the hard ’bases’ of life until she reaches the ’home plate’ of happiness. . . . The church ’signs’ her over to you. You will not have trouble to ’manage’ her.”
And Muggsy didn’t. He ran the marriage as he did his ball club, calling all the pitches. Blanche was his most ardent defender; she trusted him implicitly. Even though he was promiscuous with loans and given to making atrocious investments, Mrs. McGraw did not complain. “I never knew the exact nature of John McGraw’s financial philosophy, and I never worried about it,” she blithely explained. “He gave me everything I ever asked for or failed to ask for. I wanted for nothing, and so I never questioned his income or what he did with it.”
It was only a few months into their marriage when the Oriole franchise began to founder, when Muggsy began to look for a way out of Baltimore, secretly taking trains up to New York to meet with Andrew Freedman. If McGraw let on that he might be taking Blanche away from the city where she had resided all her life, he didn’t tell her much. “My job was faith,” is how Blanche described the situation. Then, when McGraw did take her in tow to New York, she looked upon it as a grand adventure. Like her new husband, Blanche adapted quickly to the bustle and delights of the big town.
Much would be made of the fact that Babe Ruth and the Yankees were so perfect a match for the New York of the Roaring Twenties, but it’s just as accurate to say that it was only appropriate that Muggsy and Matty gave Gotham baseball glory when they did. Turn-of-the-century New York was exploding. It had, it seemed, everything else but a winning baseball club, and once Brooklyn and the other boroughs were consolidated with Manhattan, the city’s population soared to almost three and a half million. Only London in all the world was lar
ger, but more tellingly: New York used four times the electricity that London did. The gaslights were going out all over.
Ground-breaking for the city’s first subway line, which would run from city hall, near the bottom of Manhattan Island, all the way up to 145th Street—felicitously for the Giants, not that far from the Polo Grounds—took place in March 1900. “Fifteen minutes to Harlem!” was the somewhat optimistic boast; but hey, it really would take only twenty-six. It was a wondrous advance for New Yorkers. Looking back, one historian would write: “Only Armistice Day, V-E Day, V-J Day and the return of Charles Lindbergh . . . produced as enthusiastic an explosion of public joy.” But then, even before the subway had opened for business on October 27,1904, the aboveground railroads in New York were already carrying more passengers than all the other steam trains in both North and South America. Cars were rapidly replacing horses. In 1895 there were perhaps 300 automobiles in New York; a decade later there were 78,000. If you had to get outta town, the 20th Century Limited averaged forty-nine miles per hour and could deposit you in Chicago in twenty hours. If you were a letter, you could get to San Francisco in four days. Longdistance could put you through to Omaha. President Roosevelt sent a telegraph message clear ’round the world in 1903.
New York had the largest hotel in the world—the Waldorf-Astoria—1,100 rooms, 765 baths. It had the tallest building—an amazing twenty-nine stories high, soaring above Park Row. The Metropolitan Opera had opened in 1887, Carnegie Hall in ’91, and the Bronx Zoo in ’99. Construction on the New York Public Library would begin in 1902, about the time the McGraws got off the train from Baltimore and checked into the Victoria Hotel. Macy’s also opened in ’02, bringing the best shopping area farther uptown from the “Ladies’ Mile,” which had topped out at Twenty-third Street. New theaters were springing up, too, and Longacre Square became Times Square in 1904 (the first New Year’s ball dropped in 1908). Also, there were twenty-five thousand prostitutes (“It costs a dollar, and I’ve got a room”).
