by Frank Deford
The poor and disenfranchised poured in from abroad, making New York a city more variegated in its human splendor than any ever on earth. In the first decade of the twentieth century, almost a million immigrants a year came in. On April 11,1903, just a few days before the Giants began their first full season under McGraw, a record ten thousand newcomers arrived at Ellis Island on that one day. Many would remain in New York, which was now 37 percent foreign-born (and another 38 percent of the residents had at least one foreign-born parent). Jacob Riis, the reformer, noted: “A map of the city, colored to designate minorities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra and more colors than any rainbow.”
Something like 800,000 Germans were in the city, most clustered in downtown Manhattan in what was called Kleindeutschland. There were 275,000 Irish, 220,000 Italians, 60,000 blacks, and perhaps 700,000 Jews from all nations. The German Jews, looking down their noses at their spiritual cousins from eastern Europe, had started calling them “kikes,” from the many names that ended in ki. But then, most stage comedy was ethnic; so too the humorous newspaper columns. Everybody got by, laughing at everybody else. Everybody else’s sister in every other minority was a slut. Everybody but the Jews drank too much. And every mother’s son took up baseball, tossing whatever would pass for a ball over and around the two thousand pushcarts that filled the slum streets, peddling clothing, household goods, and (mostly spoiled) produce. When the price of a standard block of ice was doubled to sixty cents, it created a huge furor, far greater than any fuss made nowadays about higher gasoline prices. The summer heat was unbearable; going up to the Polo Grounds was like escaping to Maine. Even then, the players’ heavy flannel uniforms might gain as much as eight or ten pounds of sweat during a game.
Manhattan was straining at its limits. That plot of land on a hill way uptown—where Columbia Presbyterian Hospital is now located—was virtually the only place on the whole island that the owners of the new American League franchise could find in 1903 to build their ballyard. Downtown, a million and a half people were crowded together on the Lower East Side, 500,000 of those in one square mile, the densest human habitation in the world. It was estimated that two-thirds of Manhattan residents were jammed into six-story tenements—mostly known as “dumbbells”—which held 150 people apiece. The local anthem, “The Sidewalks of New York,” written in ’94 by a blind buck-and-wing dancer named Charles Lawler, tried to make romantic of what was nearly intolerable: “East side, west side, all around the town . . . we would sing and waltz,/While the ‘ginnie’ played the organ on the sidewalks of New York.”
When Blanche and Muggsy first arrived, he would go to work at the Polo Grounds (on the days he didn’t go to the racetrack first) by taking a horse-drawn hack, moseying up through Central Park and into Harlem. At that time the area was mostly middle-class Irish and German with some Jews, but speculation in new housing exceeded demand when the city’s first subway line was built up that way, so the building owners were forced to sell to anybody they could. That was how the African-American migration to Harlem began.
Ah, and Muggsy’s own folk. The Irish were starting to move up the scale. For so long they had performed much of the dirty, unskilled work, building up New York—tunneling that first subway, for example. The joke was that an Irishman turned down a higher-paying job as a diver because he couldn’t spit on his hands before he began that work. But with the new immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe, the Irish finally had someone below them in the pecking order. They became the foremen, bossing Italians about. Onstage, many of the Pat-and-Mike jokes became Abie-and-Sol jokes. As early as 1890, a third of the city’s teachers were Irish women, and that stereotypical Irish cop was, it seems, walking every beat, chomping on free apples. “Good marnin’ to ya, officer.” “Ah, and the same ta you, Mrs. O’Flaherty.”
Not only that but, of course, the Irish began to accumulate power, moving up from street gangs, taking a conspicuous place in Tammany Hall. For national prominence, though, the first Irish mark was in sports. The heavyweight title seemed to absolutely belong to a Son of Erin: Paddy Ryan, the Great John L., Gentleman Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzgibbons, James J. Jeffries. But if Gentleman Jim, anyway, was a social cut above (it was he who introduced the highfalutin term “solar plexus” into boxing), the so-called sweet science, then as now, was more of a déclassé divertissement, and for all that baseballists were supposed to be drunkards, whoremongers, and unreliable reprobates, the game—the game!—was becoming nearly sacred, the American national sport. “Because baseball was the country’s most popular sport, closely linked to the image of a rural Protestant nation,” wrote one New York Irish historian, “Irish players came to represent American adaptability, and their skills in this arena gave them a more acceptable persona than boxing prowess.” In other words, for all that the Irish put into baseball, they took more out.
As early as 1890, when one Bill McGunnigle managed the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, the Irish had a leadership beachhead in New York baseball. Foxy Ned Hanlon would, of course, guide Brooklyn (now the Superbas) to the National League pennants of’99 and ’00. But when McGraw grasped the Giant reins in ’02, quickly establishing front-office hegemony to go with his field command, Irish pride reached new heights. Soon enough, with the possible exception of his good pal George M. Cohan, John J. McGraw would become the most famous Irish-American in the land. His Giants teams were not nearly so Irish as had been his Orioles. McGraw would hire any scoundrel he thought could help him win; he was forever bringing back Turkey Mike Donlin. But the Irish imprint on the Giants was strong.
McGraw was no crusader, either, but in 1901, when the color line in baseball was well established, Muggsy tried to sign an American Indian player, Chief Tokohama, for the Orioles. Only Chief Tokohama was no Indian. The White Stockings owner, Charles Comiskey, a dreadful human being whose parsimony would lead to his players fixing the 1919 World Series, blew the whistle on the Chief, revealing him to be an African-American bellhop whom McGraw had “fixed up with war paint and a bunch of feathers.” In 1923, when Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, was drawing attention to the Yankees, away from the Giants, McGraw found a fellow named Mose Solomon playing Class C ball in Kansas and introduced him to the Polo Grounds faithful as the “Rabbi of Swat.” Alas, the Rabbi lasted only two desultory games, failing to attract throngs of New York Hebrews.
And, of course, McGraw’s greatest player and largest gate attraction was the Presbyterian farm boy, Mathewson. Neither would have become so famous without the other. No coach can succeed, no matter how intrinsically good, without a winning team. Mathewson could have won for anybody, but that he had McGraw’s Giants behind him, playing in New York, gave him all the more fame than he ever would have gained, say, had he honored that contract with Connie Mack’s Athletics down in Philadelphia. Rather, both men found the moment—Mathewson arriving as professional baseball became more respectable, and McGraw taking charge as, likewise, the Irish were gaining a foothold in society.
Irish esteem increased all the more when the phonograph player began to move into homes and, starting in 1906, Americans began to listen to the great tenor, John McCormack, singing indigenous Irish ballads that had never before been heard in the general population—the likes of “The Lily of Killarney,” “The Wearing of the Green,” and “Kathleen Mavourneen.” McGraw was, not surprisingly, a sucker for Irish songs. Sunday nights, the McGraws enjoyed sing-alongs at home, with the host himself favoring “Break the News to Mother” and “Silver Threads among the Gold.” But as often as he would go out to dinner dances, to fine restaurants that featured dancing with dinner, Blanche could never get him up on the floor except for one song. Muggsy would dance with his lady only when the band played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
ELEVEN
The cracker barrel, where those legendary cracker-barrel philosophers held court, was for all intents and purposes made instantly obsolescent in 1898. That was when Uneeda brought out a package of crackers that c
ost five cents. If you could buy your own crackers in a handy package, who needed a barrel to dig into?
Uneeda knew pricing. The nickel was king in America at this time. It was so common a currency that the dime was, often as not, called a “double nickel.” You didn’t want to get stuck with a wooden nickel. The ultimate depth of worthlessness was a plugged nickel. What this country needed was a good five-cent cigar. At a time when laborers in New York made twenty cents an hour and a good meal would set you back fifteen cents, you could go into a saloon and, for a nickel, get a stein of beer and free bread, salami, pickled herring, and hard-boiled eggs for the asking. “Barkeep, I’ll have another beer.” When the subway opened up, naturally a ride was pegged at a nickel. This was the same as for streetcars, which particularly crisscrossed Brooklyn, so the players had to be nimble to negotiate streets to reach the ballpark: hence, the borough’s team of Trolley Dodgers. The new movies not only charged a nickel, but were not called what they were, but what they cost: nickelodeons. A cuppa coffee cost a nickel. So did a soft drink. “A Moxie, please.” “Surething, mister, that’ll be a nickel” Ice cream was a nickel. Likewise a Tootsie Roll.
Did Jack Norworth—who, as we know, had never seen a baseball game when he wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—know that Cracker Jack cost a nickel when he threw it into his masterpiece just because he needed something to rhyme with back? (Otherwise, surely he would have written: “Buy me some peanuts and popcorn”—right?) Well, Cracker Jack, which had been introduced at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 by two German immigrant brothers, one of whom cried out “That’s a crackerjack of an idea!”—indeed sold for a nickel (although sans any prize—they weren’t included until 1912).
However, if you too have been taken out to the ball game recently, you know of course that once you get in, you’re a captive consumer, so everything costs more than on the outside. So it was then, too, at the Polo Grounds, that the vendors in black coats and white aprons charged double nickels for most of their wares—hot dogs, pieces of pie, beer, and, presumably, Cracker Jack. (Well, scorecards held the line at five cents.) Admission, too, did not come cheap. Box seats went for a buck twenty-five. General admission was half a dollar, and the cheapest bleacher seats were pegged at two bits. A large part of that distant territory was known as “Berkeville,” since so many Irish sat out there.
These heady prices would account for why so many spectators would seek the limited vantage afforded by Coogan’s Bluff, which overlooked the stadium. The Polo Grounds itself, lying under Coogan’s Bluff, was originally Coogan’s Hollow, the farm and salt fields of James J. Coogan, who was the first borough president of Manhattan (and a failed mayoral candidate).
Question: When did they play polo at the Polo Grounds?
Answer: They never did.
Question: Really? Then why—
Answer: It’s sort of like nowadays when so many people wear polo shirts, even though they have never played polo (including Ralph Lauren).
But, you see, there was an earlier real Polo Grounds, located around 110th Street, by the northern extremities of Central Park, where polo was indeed contested. This property was owned by James Gordon Bennett, the newspaper publisher. The original New York Metropolitans adapted the polo fields there as their diamond home from 1883 to 1885, and so too the Giants, who had been the Troy Haymakers when they moved to Manhattan in 1883. When the Giants then moved up to Coogan’s Hollow in 1889, they more or less brought the Polo Grounds name along with them. (The same sort of thing happened with Madison Square Garden, which has kept its original connection to Madison Avenue long after it started moving about town.)
The wooden Polo Grounds had a capacity of about sixteen thousand, but from the very beginning, tucked there under Coogan’s Bluff, it had a bizarre configuration—short down the foul lines, then slanting sharply out to a center field that reached up to five hundred feet away, where, beyond, the Giants had their home dressing quarters. It was in those far environs where Willie Mays would make his fabled catch of Vic Wertz’s long fly ball in the ’54 Series, just as the stadium’s short foul lines were immortalized by Bobby Thomson’s pop-fly home run to left to win the ’51 pennant against the Dodgers. (These sorts of hits were called “Chinese home runs”—meaning cheap—in those less sensitive times.)
None of this geography much mattered back then, though, when there were so few home runs hit and just about everybody played what might be called Muggsy Ball. (Hilltop Park, where the Yankees first played, had even more antic dimensions of 365-542-400.) Besides, spacious center fields provided a place for the well-heeled cranks to park their carriages. In all ballyards in those days, overflow crowds were allowed into the outfield, roped off. Hits popped into this human efflux were marked as ground-rule doubles or triples; better to sell more tickets than to keep the game pristine. Why, the Giants could accommodate as many as another four or five thousand standees in the outfield.
Until the subway was opened in 1904, the cheapest, fastest way to get to the game was on the Sixth Avenue elevated line. The trains could only go up to twenty miles an hour, however, because any greater speed would cause the track’s superstructure to shimmy something awful. Still, it was pretty convenient. When the subway came in, it did forty-five miles an hour, and a “baseball special” from Wall Street made only one intermediate stop, at Forty-second Street. If you didn’t have to work that day, you could drift up the Harlem River by excursion boat. Or, if you were flush, you and some buddies could rent a horse-drawn coach. That cost a dollar for the first mile, forty cents each additional, and forty cents for each fifteen-minute waiting period. It’s cheaper than it sounds, too, because there wasn’t a lot of lollygagging in those days once the deep-throated man with the megaphone announced the lineups, so most games were comfortably completed in less than two hours. Since the games started at three-thirty or four, any crank cum fan could be home to his mutton dinner or standing with a foot on the bar rail at a very reasonable hour indeed.
(In fact, nobody ever knew, back then, how good they had it. When baseball juiced up the balls some in 1911, putting cork in the center, this helped the batters enough so that there were more hits, and a love-struck Ring Lardner, covering the games for a Chicago paper, wrote his fiancée: “It appears to be impossible to finish a game in less than two hours. It’s bad enough now, but it’s going to drive me crazy when it keeps me away from my home.” Could Lardner ever have imagined that his press box descendants would be held captive for three hours, even more?)
Living together their first full season with the Giants, 1903, McGraw and Mathewson would, midday, bid Blanche and Jane good-bye and hie to the park. Notwithstanding Muggsy getting clobbered by the ball Dummy Taylor threw, it was a glorious time for them both. Mathewson won thirty games for the first time, age twenty-three. McGraw was just thirty, but he only embellished his managerial reputation, taking the Giants from the ’02 cellar, with forty-eight wins, to second place behind the redoubtable Pittsburgh nine, with eighty-four victories. Overnight the city’s attitude about the Giants changed.
Despite the fact that the Giants couldn’t catch the Pirates, McGraw (and John Brush, the new owner) began to envision a lucrative postseason exhibition series against Pittsburgh—Senior Circuit number one vs. Senior Circuit number two. But instead, to McGraw’s horror, Barney Dreyfuss, the Pirates’ owner, opted to play against Ban Johnson’s upstart champions, the Boston Americans, in what was termed “the championship of the United States.” To make matters worse, not only did Pittsburgh lower itself to consort with the American League, but Boston won the best-of-nine showdown, five-to-three.
This made McGraw look all the more foolish the next year when, as early as July, with the Giants winging toward the National League pennant, Muggsy began to make declarations that he had no intention of meeting the American League champions should the Giants win. “I know the American League and its methods,” he orated. “I ought to, for I paid for my knowledge. . . .
They still have my money. . . . No one, not even my bitterest enemy ever accused me of being a fool.”
Brush backed him to the hilt. “There is nothing in the constitution or playing rules of the National League, which requires the victorious club to submit its championship honors to a contest with a victorious club in a minor league,” he declared.
Hardly another soul, however, agreed with the Giants’ owner and manager. Mostly they were lambasted, simply, as “cowards”—all the more so as they were putting up the best record in either league. McGraw’s team won 106 games, finishing 13 games ahead of the Cubs. Mathewson went 33-12 with a 2.03 earned run average, but even he had to take a backseat this year to the Iron Man, for McGinnity had his best season, going 35-8, 1.61. Dummy Taylor won 21 games and southpaw Hooks Wiltse 13, so the starting rotation won all but four of the 106 victories between them. McGraw had always been leery of left-handed pitchers, but now that more and more left-handed batters were coming into baseball, he saw the advantage of countering them with left-handed pitchers. And wouldn’t you know it? Around the middle of the season, to add punch to his outfield, McGraw got Turkey Mike Donlin back, from Cincinnati, where he’d worn out his welcome by drinking and fighting. Donlin was soon even more of a presence in New York nightlife than McGraw. Lock up the showgirls!
