The Old Ball Game

by Frank Deford

  Polo Grounds, 1908 playoff with the Cubs

  With one out, Art Devlin, the third baseman, singled. Moose McCormick—like Mathewson, a Bucknell man—forced him at second, but then young Merkle took Pfiester the other way, lining a single to right, sending McCormick to third. Al Bridwell, the shortstop, then swung at Pfiester’s first pitch and laced a clean single dead up the middle. In fact, the field umpire, Bob Emslie, had to fall down to escape being hit by the line drive. He got up and dutifully watched Bridwell run safely to first. The plate umpire, Hank O’Day, saw McCormick touch home for the winning run—2–1, Giants. New York was back in first place, and the fans poured out of their seats. As one reporter wrote: “The merry villagers flocked onto the field to worship the hollow where the Mathewson feet have pressed.”

  Matty himself ran out to embrace the happy Merkle and escort the young fellow off the field.

  Meanwhile, almost unnoticed, Johnny Evers, the Cubs second baseman, was standing on second, calling for the center fielder, “Circus” Solly Hofman, to chuck him the ball. Evers was a fidgety little guy who stood at no more than five-neet-nine and weighed only 125 pounds. Nobody, including his teammates, much liked him, but he was a heady ballplayer. Also, he had noticed this same situation only weeks before, in Pittsburgh, but had been unsuccessful in prosecuting his charge then. But here it was again: Merkle, the man on first, was required to move up a base once Bridwell hit safely. No matter how quickly McCormick, the runner on third, crossed the plate, if Merkle didn’t touch second, then he was forced out, the inning was over, the run didn’t count, and it was still a 1–1 tie.

  Three different pitchers—McGinnity, Wiltse, and Mathewson —all seemed to have later remembered that they were coaching first. Since it was the first base coach’s responsibility to tell the runner to be sure to go down and touch second, it’s odd that anyone would claim that dubious honor. Anyway, almost surely it wasn’t Mathewson; he was pitching, after all. McGinnity is the likely choice, because only he of all the Giants seems to have caught on to what Evers was up to.

  Apparently the Iron Man ran out and wrestled the ball away from little Evers (or from a Chicago pitcher, Rube Kroh—details of the chaos differ in almost every account) and hurled it as far away as he could, into the stands. Maybe there was even a fight. “Fists flew on all sides, eyes swelled up and blood flowed,” wrote the World reporter. Did a Cub reserve pummel the fan who caught the ball in order to retrieve it? Whatever, undaunted, Evers somehow regained possession of that ball or, more likely, simply produced another, hailed Emslie, stepped on second, and claimed that Merkle was out. Emslie said he couldn’t rule; he hadn’t been watching Merkle. But prompted by the indomitable Evers, Emslie asked his colleague, O’Day, if he had seen the play at second. Indeed he had, said O’Day, and, yes, Merkle had turned round on the basepath before reaching the base. Therefore he was now forced out and McCormick’s run for the Giants didn’t count.

  By now the field was overrun with the merry villagers and the early autumn gloaming was coming down. Most everybody left the park believing Matty and the Giants had won. Mathewson remembered that even when the Giants, in their clubhouse, heard about O’Day’s call, they at first “laughed, for it didn’t seem like a situation to be taken seriously.” When they realized that O’Day really had called Merkle out and the game a tie on account of darkness, the mood grew darker. Mathewson was bitter. “If we lose the pennant thereby, I’ll never play pro ball again,” he declared. Muggsy, of course, was angrier and more profane, snarling: “That dirty son of a bitch. O’Day is trying to rob us.”

  Poor Merkle was utterly distraught. In the days that followed, Mathewson would write, “He moped. He lost flesh”— twenty pounds—“his eyes were hollow and his cheeks sunken.” The kid was lacerated in the press. W. A. Aulick, the Times baseball reporter, wrote simply that it was “censurable stupidity on the part of player Merkle.” The home fans would hiss upon his appearance on the field. It was, wrote the Sun, “a situation that has baseball cranks all over the country by the ears.” The “boner,” it was called—the Merkle Boner, the dumbest mistake ever made by a player. Never mind that Merkle was only following the fashion of the time. He had done exactly what that Pittsburgh player had weeks earlier, as Evers watched. The Giants’ first base coach, whoever he was, must surely have been at least as culpable. The kid was still a teenager, for goodness sakes. Mathewson admitted that, joyously, he had run to him. Mathewson didn’t tell him to touch second. McGraw didn’t shout it out. In fact, ironically, this was exactly the sort of rule-book intelligence that McGraw was famous for exploiting. And for all the bleatings and threats of the Giants and their fans, even the owner, John Brush, had to admit that “technically”—always technically, not “actually”—Evers and O’Day were right.

  Harry Pulliam, the “boy president,” was once again forced to rule in a Giant maelstrom, and, after a week, he upheld the umpires. Tie game. Terrible hate mail poured into his office. Naturally the Giants appealed to the league’s five-man Board of Directors, and they agreed to meet. The Pittsburgh and Chicago owners had to stand down, since their teams would be affected by any decision. The three remaining owners—from Cincinnati, Boston, and Brooklyn—prepared to assemble. Affidavits were called for.

  Merkle, meanwhile, was so depressed that rumors of his suicide began to float about. In fact, he did beseech McGraw to farm him out. “Lose me,” the kid pleaded. “I’m the jinx.”

  McGraw was steadfast. “It wasn’t your fault, Fred,” Muggsy said, consoling him. Indeed, so supportive was McGraw that he gave Merkle a raise for the next season. Of course, it’s also true that at some point Merkle either decided that he had indeed touched second or he was prevailed upon to present that testimony. The affidavits from other Giants and from Merkle swore that the kid had regained his senses after he saw Evers calling for the ball and had turned back toward second and touched the base. All the Chicago affidavits, of course, supported O’Day’s decision.

  On October 5, the three directors—August Herrmann of Cincinnati, Charlie Ebbets of Brooklyn, and George Dovey of Boston—convened in Cincinnati to review the appeal of Harry Pulliam’s ruling. They adjourned at ten-thirty at night, still unable to arrive at a decision.

  FIFTEEN

  The next morning, October 6, the board met again, and this time they agreed to uphold Pulliam’s decision. Since New York and Chicago had finished with identical 98-55 records, the tie game of September 23 must be played off to determine the league champion. (Pittsburgh would finish tied for second at 98–56 with whichever team lost.) Now, however, for one of the rare times in his life, McGraw was infected by a strange indifference. He professed not to care whether or not the Giants played at all. “It’s simply a game of squeal,” he said bitterly, leaving all decisions up to the team.

  The players, too, still claiming they’d been jobbed, were themselves ambivalent about playing, but finally Mathewson led a five-player delegation to see John Brush, who was ill, abed at the Lambs Club. Brush, too, left the decision up to the players, but perhaps when he offered the team a ten-thousand-dollar bonus, principal trumped principle, and the Giants agreed to “imitate Steve Brodie.” He was the fellow who is supposed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on a bet and lived to collect. So: one game, winner-take-all.

  Great tales are now told about the Giant-Dodger playoff of 1951, which ended with Bobby Thomson’s home run, the fabled “shot heard round the world.” In fact, that best-of-three series didn’t attract a single sellout. Only 34,320 fans—a mere two-thirds of the Polo Grounds’ capacity—showed up for the finale. Famous as it is, that ’51 playoff pales before the Giants-Cubs showdown on Thursday, October 8, 1908.

  The Taft-Bryan presidential campaign, down to its last month, was completely eclipsed. Wrote the World: “In every city and hamlet in the United States that could boast of a telegraph wire, frenzied fandom . . . hung on the ticker yesterday and waited with bated breath.”

  The Times was no
t to be outdone in hyperbole in explaining the effect of the game on New York. On page 1, it declared: “Perhaps never in the history of a great city, since the days of Rome and its arena contests, has a people been pitched to such a key of excitement as was New York ‘fandom’ yesterday.” Mathewson, who, naturally, was going to start for the Giants, was no less overcome by the impact of this one game. “It stands out from everyday events like the battle of Waterloo and the assassination of President Lincoln,” he opined.

  Estimates of the crowd that stormed the Polo Grounds ranged as high as a quarter million. Probably it was closer to a hundred thousand, but however many were left outside, at least forty thousand managed to squeeze into the park, filling up the bleachers and grandstand hours before Matty threw the first pitch. Police reinforcements had to be called, and a hundred more “bluecoats” rushed up to Coogan’s Bluff. But nothing stopped the crush, not even fire hoses and drawn pistols. Barbed-wire fences were scaled, pushed down. Jane Mathewson, unaccountably carrying their small child into the very heart of this bedlam, was almost trampled, rescued from the mob by a clutch of policemen. Hooks Wiltse needed a mounted police escort to get inside.

  Scores of people were injured, and it was probably fortunate that only one man lost his life. That was an off-duty fireman, one Harry T. McBride, who tumbled twenty-five feet from a vantage he had taken at the 155th Street elevated train station. “His vacant place was quickly filled,” it was duly reported. Indeed, every telegraph pole that offered any view of the field was climbed by intrepid onlookers. One spectator fell out of the grandstand itself but, luckily, only broke a leg. When attendants rushed to carry him off to an ambulance, he beseeched them not to remove him from the premises until after the game.

  The Cubs, of course, needed considerable protection. They were mad enough as it was, as loud and unruly home team fans had encircled their hotel the night before for all hours, seeking to keep up such a racket as to prevent the Chicagos from enjoying any sleep. McGraw then added to their nerves by keeping the Giants on the field beyond their allotted practice time. Frank Chance and Iron Man McGinnity nearly came to fisticuffs as the dispute raged. Later, Chance would be hit in the neck by a soda pop bottle hurled from the stands. Three-Fingered Brown, who was posted to the bull pen, felt that the Polo Grounds on this day was “as close to a lunatic asylum as any place I’ve ever seen.”

  Mathewson, meanwhile, tried to keep his composure. After all, he had a secret that he had shared with Jane before he left their apartment. What he told her, simply enough, was: “I’m not fit to pitch today.” The long season had worn him down, and when Matty warmed up, it only confirmed his fears. “I never had less on the ball in my life,” he would say. He thought the Cubs would clobber him. “I’ll go as far as I can,” he told McGraw as he took off his linen duster and headed, disconsolately, to the mound.

  As it was, Mathewson put down the Cubs in the first inning, and then the Giants lit into Jack Pfiester, the erstwhile Giant killer. When the Giants scored a run, Mathewson sneaked a peek down the bench at Merkle and saw that “for the first time in a month, Fred smiled.” Pfiester was clearly on the ropes. He was nervous and bitching at the umpire’s calls. But Buck Herzog got caught off first, and Frank Chance didn’t even wait for the inning to end. He brought in Three-Finger, and he put out the fire before the Giants could score any more.

  And, really, that was it. Mathewson’s suspicions were realized in the third inning. Joe Tinker, who earlier in his career had enjoyed no success against Big Six, had then taken to hitting against him with a bigger bat. With that, he had become, as Hooks Wiltse said, “the only hitter I know of had a jinx on Matty.” And it was Tinker who made the hit that broke the game open. It was a triple over the center fielder’s head. Fans of Matty made excuses that he had told the center fielder, Cy Seymour, to play back, but Mathewson said no, it was just a curve that didn’t break. Even then, under normal circumstances, Seymour might have caught up with Tinker’s hit, but he lost the ball in the mass of fans who had climbed on up the tower behind home plate. The Cubs scored all four of their runs in that inning. Mathewson was only surprised by “why it took them so long to hit me.”

  Somehow he held on till the seventh, when McGraw took him out for a pinch hitter after the Giants loaded the bases against Three-Finger. Laughing Larry Doyle, who hit Brown well, was the pinch hitter, but he fouled out to the catcher, Johnny Kling, who cornered the pop-up even as a bottle tossed from the stands whizzed past his head. That was the Giants’ last chance.

  In the clubhouse, the smile was gone from Merkle’s face. “It was my fault, boys,” he moaned. He went to McGraw and once again told him to get rid of him.

  McGraw was never more stand-up. “Fire you?” Muggsy asked. “Why you’re the kind of guy I’ve been lookin’ for for many years. I could use a carload of you. Forget this season and come back next spring. The newspapers will have forgotten it all by then.”

  And then he slipped away. Matty heard Merkle say: “He’s a regular guy.”

  The Cubs went on to beat the Tigers in the World Series. It would be the last time they were champions, ninety-six years on. And, of course, for Merkle, the newspapers—and everybody else—never did forget his lapse. Yet for all the abuse Merkle suffered for his boner, for all his life, McGraw was right: he was a tough kid. No matter how often he heard someone scream, “Hey, Merkle, touch second base,” he never packed it in. Merkle would play another sixteen hundred major league games, making a last at bat in 1926 when he was thirty-seven years old.

  On the other hand, no one can be sure how much the ramifications of the end of the 1908 season affected Harry Pulliam. Surely, though, it was a great deal. He was a nervous man, fragile, something of an idealist, and the brutal criticism he endured for sticking up for his umpire obviously told on him. A few months later, in February, at the winter meeting of the National League, there were more disputes where Pulliam found himself in the crossfire. He suffered a breakdown. He returned to the job soon enough, but he seemed more detached and unsettled than ever.

  In the middle of that season, on July 28, 1909, Pulliam took a room at the New York Athletic Club. He put on a fancy dressing gown, lay down, and blew his brains out. The “boy president” was thirty-nine years old.

  The next year, George Dovey, owner of the Boston Braves and one of the three directors who ruled against the Giants in the Merkle game, spoke with a writer from the New York Tribune named W. J. Macbeth. What he told Macbeth was in confidence, but some years later, after Dovey had died, Macbeth published what the owner had told him.

  Dovey said that when he and Ebbets and Herrmann were wrestling with their decision, the affidavits were so completely in conflict that the three directors were “up a tree.” Then they came to Mathewson’s sworn statement. Alone amongst his teammates, Matty told the truth. It cost him another victory and, as it turned out, it cost the Giants the pennant and a chance at the World’s Championship. Still, he told the truth.

  “Mathewson,” Dovey told Macbeth, “swore that Merkle did not touch second base. He said that he . . . embraced Fred when Bridwell’s hit was delivered and ran shouting to the clubhouse after the Giant first sacker had run about halfway to the midway.”

  Dovey then said: “We took all the other affidavits and threw them into the waste basket. Matty’s word was good enough for us.”

  So it was that Big Six didn’t get to pitch in a World Series after a season where he had won his most games. Then, that winter of ’08-’09, he went back to Factoryville. His kid brother Nicholas, who was nineteen years old, was home from college. The three surviving Mathewson brothers had all become pitchers. McGraw had given Henry, the middle brother, brief, unimpressive tryouts with the Giants, but Nicholas seemed to be closer in form to Matty. Hughie Jennings, McGraw’s old Baltimore teammate who was managing Detroit, had even tendered Nicholas a contract offer, but he had decided to enroll at Lafayette College.

  Nicholas had gotten homesick and said he had be
en feeling poorly, and so he had not gone back to school after Christmas. On January 15, he left Matty and his parents and went fishing. On his way back to the house, he gave the two nice pickerel he caught to a family friend. He told the older neighbor that he had always paid him well when he cut their grass, so he wanted him to have the fish as a present.

  A bit later, Matty went out to the barn. When he came back into the house, evenly, constraining himself, he told his parents: “I have awful news, but all of us have to remain calm.”

  Matty had found his kid brother’s body in the barn. Nicholas had written a hasty, incoherent note and then shot himself in the brain. That is why he had given the pickerel away.

  SIXTEEN

  Mathewson’s 1908 season of extremes—majesty followed by disappointment, by defeat, by tragedy—faded into, simply, more excellence. He was 25–6 with a 1.14 ERA in 1909, then 27–9 and 1.89 in 1910. He kept winning at least twenty games a season thirteen years in a row, right on through 1914, when he was thirty-three, and then, just like that, his arm seemed to wear out overnight. But for all Matty’s personal success, he in particular and McGraw and the Giants continued to be dogged by the most incredible bad luck. Starting with Merkle’s lapse, fate seemed almost whimsical for the team.

  The Giants, though, in good times and the few bad times, remained the crown jewel of baseball—“the most spectacular team,” the Tribune rhapsodized, “whose fame has been sung in every household from Father Fan to Jimmy and Johnny and the rest of the male brood, as they lugged to their breasts their first baseball bats.” In another vein, Harry Golden, famous for his Only in America, would reminisce: “The Giants represented the New York of the brass cuspidor—that old New York which was still a man’s world before the advent of the League of Women Voters; the days of swinging doors, of sawdust on the barroom floor and of rushing the growler.”