by Frank Deford
This, of course, was just the start of McGraw’s world. He was also everywhere about town, escorting Blanche to the finest restaurants, to Rosie’s, to Enrico and Paglieri’s, to Mori’s; to the theater and vaudeville. Always, he was driven about. Brush gave him a five-thousand-dollar car as a bonus after the 1908 season, and since Muggsy didn’t drive, that necessitated hiring a chauffeur. He drank more and grew stouter, to “aldermanic proportions,” a friend noted. Muggsy polished his plate. “I always believe in shooting the works,” he said. “Can’t stop once I start.” He was talking about eating on that occasion, but it could have referred to the way he attacked everything in life. Hoping to duplicate his success in Baltimore with the Diamond Café, he invested in two Manhattan pool halls. In one, at Herald Square, his partners were Tod Sloan, the famous jockey, who revolutionized race riding, and a gambler named Jack Doyle. For the other parlor, nearby, his fellow investor was Willie Hoppe, the pool champion, but Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who would fix the 1919 World Series, was a silent partner. Muggsy liked the company of gamblers. Unfortunately, both establishments lost money. Wildcat investments in mining stocks also disappeared. And, of course, regularly he would lose at playing the ponies. At casinos, he loved to gaily dispense twenty-five-dollar chips to all the ladies in his crowd. Florida real estate would be his last, worst gamble.
Moreover, he was the softest touch in town. He’d buy a suit for a down-and-out friend who had a job interview, hire busted old ballplayers for menial jobs around the Polo Grounds—including two sad old future Hall of Famers, Amos Rusie and Dan Brouthers—and always he was a sweetheart target for pals. Eddie Brannick, a Giant employee who was his confidant for many years, explained: “John really had a dual personality. He was a study in human nature. He was tough with tough people and warm with soft ones.” Curiously, McGraw always meticulously noted all those loans he handed out into a little account book; but then he would never call in the debts owed him. He gave away tens of thousands of dollars in his lifetime. “I did wonder if the endless loans or gifts would drain his patience,” Blanche wrote, “but I’m happy to say they never did.”
After all, he was making big money, the highest salary in the game—right up until Babe Ruth and Judge Landis, the commissioner, passed him. In 1909, for example, the Giants paid McGraw $18,000, double what Mathewson played for. By 1916 it was $40,000, then fifty, topping out at seventy. He dressed as befitting a man of means, usually, for some reason, with a fleurde-lis pin on his tie. He made sure that Blanche was awash in jewelry. When the Federal League came into existence in 1914 as a major league rival to the established two big leagues, McGraw turned down a $100,000 offer without blinking—and that was hard cash in the bank.
Then, too, McGraw’s game was prospering, increasing in respectability. By 1910, as cities grew and mass transit improved— especially with electric streetcars—major league attendance had increased to an average of 4,969 per game. It would have been much higher, except that the Giants and several other clubs were still hamstrung by blue laws that prohibited playing games on Sunday, the one full day when the working populace was off. That year the national American sport also gained a further certification, when President William Howard Taft showed up for Opening Day for the Washington Senators.
Apparently it was spur-of-the-moment. The Washington Post had noted that morning that “the opening will not be attended by any ceremony.” But here to the ballyard came the portly president, with his secretary of state and an army general in tow, and thus, the Post declared, did there come about “the auspicious union of official Washington and baseballic Washington.” Taft did not disappoint, either. He had been a pitcher in his svelter salad days. Reported the Post: “A mighty cheer swept across the crowd as President Taft showed such faultless delivery. . . . He did it with his good, trusty right arm, and the virgin sphere scudded across the diamond, true as a die to the pitcher’s box, where Walter Johnson gathered it in.”
More important, perhaps, than even this White House seal of approval was a sweeping acknowledgment from the owners that their growing sport now deserved serious, permanent residences. In 1909 the A’s moved into Shibe Park, the first baseball stadium to be built of steel and reinforced concrete. In the next six years, ten more such parks would be erected, including Wrigley Field, which stands yet today as a monument to the sustained futility of its inhabitants.
Then on the night after April 13, 1911, Opening Day, a huge fire took down the Polo Grounds. What to do? There was some talk of putting lights in Washington Park, the Dodgers’ stadium situated hard by the Gowanus Canal, and playing Giant games there at night after the Dodgers cavorted in daylight. Such a revolutionary idea was abandoned, though, when, of all people, Andrew Freedman came to the aid of his old team. Freedman had become a small, minority part owner of the Highlanders, and he and his partners invited the Giants to share their American League field until a new Polo Grounds could be constructed.
And yes, from the ashes rose a palacial monument to baseball. The new steel-and-concrete Polo Grounds featured Italianate marble boxes around the upper deck, Roman-style pylons, a balustrade with American eagles and coats of arms of the National League teams, all under a cantilevered roof above that was bright blue, while gold banners fluttered in the breeze. Incredibly, this diamond masterwork was ready for the Giants on June 28, barely ten weeks after the conflagration. By the end of the season, when the Giants took on the Athletics in the World Series, the spectacular new Polo Grounds could accommodate thirty-eight thousand spectators, all with seats designated for their fannies. The quaint days of overflow crowds standing on the field of play were all but gone. The new park was actually supposed to be called John Brush Stadium, but it was the same as when New York unsuccessfully tried to turn Sixth Avenue into the Avenue of the Americas. It was the Polo Grounds, and it stayed the Polo Grounds for more than another half century, until after the Giants had fled to San Francisco, until after the Mets had left for the new Shea Stadium, until even then, when they tore the dear old strange place down.
But now, in 1911, John J. McGraw had an edifice to match his own grandeur. “His very walk across the field is a challenge to the multitude,” Grantland Rice wrote. And, of course, Muggsy knew it. He could be insufferably domineering. Sammy Strang hit a home run once, but McGraw promptly fined him twenty-five dollars because he was supposed to bunt. “You do what I tell you, and I’ll take the responsibility if we lose,” he informed his charges. Except perhaps for Mathewson, everybody else operated under his explicit orders. “I think we can win if my brains hold out,” Muggsy humbly declared.
Interestingly, Mathewson was coming to the conclusion that there might be more liability in this control than McGraw appreciated. For almost all his career, though, he kept this thought to himself. Maybe it was simply that Matty was otherwise awed by what the Little Napoleon could create just by the force of his personality. “McGraw leaps in the air,” Mathewson wrote, “kicks his heels together, claps his mitt, shouts at the umpire, runs in and pats the next batter on the back and says something to the pitcher. . . . The whole atmosphere inside the park is changed in a minute. . . . The little silent actor on the third-base coaching line is the cause of the change.” The Polo Grounds was as much his pulpit as his stage, he as much a spiritual force as a theatrical one.
McGraw was fortunate, too, in one major respect. Not unlike the Yankees today, he had the luxury of playing for the moment. With Brush’s bankroll, he could buy his way back up to contention whenever the Giants slipped. And although he cried at least once when he traded a favorite player, he never let sentiment get in the way if he thought dispatching one of his pals would help the team. Nevertheless, despite his authoritarian reputation and the additional demands he placed in training his men, most players liked working for McGraw. Casey Stengel, who played three years for McGraw, was an utter disciple. When he was still a bachelor, Stengel would spend many late nights at the McGraws’, talking baseball with Muggsy, periodically
fixing plates of bacon and eggs while gobbling down raw peas in between. Mathewson said: “On the field, he is the captain-general and everybody knows it. Off the field he is a member of the team and personal friend of every man. Therein lies the difference between other managers and McGraw.”
Muggsy took advantage of every weakness, every foible. For some reason, superstitious ballplayers believed that a cart full of empty barrels meant good luck. When his team was in a slump once, McGraw actually hired a carter to drive past the ballpark again and again with a load of empty barrels as his players arrived for the game. From his deaf pitchers, he learned signing and used that for baseball signs. He was a master at knowing how to treat different personalities differently. Wrote Heywood Broun, Matty’s bridge partner: “An important part of McGraw’s capacity for leadership was that he could take kids out of coal mines and wheat fields and make them walk and talk and chatter and play ball with the look of eagles.”
However, Muggsy’s supreme confidence betrayed him in one respect. He was convinced that he was so tough and incisive, both, that he could take any scoundrel and control him. Anyway, he liked the test. And he surely saw some of the worst of himself in these difficult types of players. For a prime example, McGraw took a shine to a busher named Art Fletcher because, in an exhibition game in Texas, Fletcher called McGraw, to his face: “The yellow-bellied manager of a yellow-bellied baseball club.” Since that was McGraw’s kinda guy, he brought Fletcher to the Giants the next year and eventually he became a valued starter in the infield.
Turkey Mike Donlin was, of course, forever a work in digress. Even in the midst of his superb 1905 season, when he hit .356, Donlin found himself in jail after he pulled a pistol on a train waiter who wouldn’t serve him any more liquor and announced: “Mr. Gun talks loud.” Muggsy had to bail him out.
Like Donlin, who married a showbiz star and went onstage himself, Rube Marquard, a fine pitcher, was a sometime actor who got romantically involved with his vaudeville costar, the leggy Blossom Seeley. She left her husband for Marquard. It was all very steamy, including a hurried escape out of a hotel room fire escape. McGraw, the Victorian, harrumphed: “Let him get all the free advertising he can, but let him use some sense in choosing his methods.” Closer to home, at spring training one year in Marlin Springs, Texas, Marquard got hold of a six-shooter and shot out all the lights on the town theater. Muggsy had to ante up to keep Marquard out of the hoosegow.
McGraw also did his best to lecture Jim Thorpe, the great football player and Olympian, to steer clear of booze and cards, but it was a losing battle. McGraw’s greatest nemesis, though, was Bugs Raymond, a pitcher with considerable potential, little of it realized. Even McGraw admitted to defeat here. “I believe that worrying over Bugs Raymond took five years off my life,” he said once, and whenever he suffered travails, Muggsy would moan: “Now you know what I went through with Bugs.”
Raymond was, essentially, a hopeless alcoholic. Once, when McGraw sent him out to the bull pen to warm up, he took the ball across the street, entered a gin mill, and traded the ball in for drinks. He arrived at the mound, in relief, roaring drunk. Not that McGraw shouldn’t have known what to expect. Playing for Shreveport, Bugs made a bet that he could drink two whole bottles of bourbon, eat an entire turkey, and then pitch and win a doubleheader—which he succeeded in doing. Like so many diamond reprobates of the time, he could be quite charming, though. McGraw hired a private detective named Fuller to watch over Bugs, but Raymond soon sweet-talked the dick into his camp. Standing at the bar rail with his “keeper,” Raymond would order two shots, announcing: “I’m full, and he’s Fuller.”
Damon Runyon, who started covering the Giants in 1911, immediately saw a good story. “I can spend a lifetime writing about Matty, and I shall know enough about Bucknell and other aspects of clean living to found a monastery,” he wrote. “Or I can breathe freely and hang out with Bugs Raymond and get the money.” On one occasion, Runyon asked Bugs what McGraw might have to say to him when he arrived at the park too drunk to pitch. “He’ll keep his mouth shut,” Bugs snapped.
“The feller won’t try to kill you?” Runyon inquired.
“I’ll take his head off with one punch,” Raymond responded.
“And I’ll tell you something else. I would’ve knocked the first Napoleon on his ass, too.”
Actually, most of the money that McGraw docked Raymond in fines he would then, surreptitiously, send to Mrs. Raymond. Nothing helped, though. Bugs drank himself to death at the age of thirty, only a year after McGraw finally let him go.
McGraw snooped on his players to try and keep them on the straight and narrow. He had clubhouse spies and bed checks; he would tip the night clerks at the hotel, so that when a player snuck in after hours, the clerk would ask the player to autograph a baseball. McGraw would then have signed proof of the player’s guilt. He also would review the hotel meal checks to see what his overweight players were eating. Battling back, one of the chubbier athletes, Shanty Hogan, would have the waiter put down “asparagus” when he ordered pie a la mode. One year at spring training, Hogan arrived in a suit he had bought that was purposely three sizes too big. He hoped thereby to convince McGraw that he was shucking weight. It didn’t work. “You still look like the back end of a truck,” McGraw told Shanty.
Occasionally, though, it was Muggsy who came a cropper. A catcher named Earl Smith hated McGraw intensely. “That little potbellied son of a bitch,” he would mutter. Traded to Pittsburgh, Smith was still camped out there in a hotel when the Giants came to town, registering in that same hotel. McGraw had a black trainer named Smokey, who performed bed checks. Smith trapped Smokey, locked him in a closet, and told all his old Giant friends to go out and raise hell all night.
McGraw had a slow first baseman named Dan McGann, who played several seasons for him in both Baltimore and New York, but after he traded McGann to Boston, there was no love lost. When McGann got caught running out a grounder, McGraw bellowed “Ice wagon!” at him—ice wagons being famously slow conveyances. Infuriated, McGann came looking for McGraw that evening and found him in the billiards room at the Copley Square Hotel. McGraw knew McGann was a loose cannon—in fact, he would commit suicide a couple of years later—so on this occasion he put down his dukes, hastily retreated up to his room, and locked the door.
And, just for the record, when he was with one of his favorite players, McGraw got off perhaps the best spontaneous inside-baseball one-liner ever. He was walking down the street with Irish Meusel, an outfielder with a weak throwing arm who made up for his fielding deficiencies as a good hitter. As they moseyed along, they were approached by a one-armed panhandler who most politely said: “Pardon me, sir, I had the misfortune to lose my arm.”
“Get on your way,” McGraw snapped. “Irish ain’t got it.”
SEVENTEEN
In more than a century of World Series, only two teams have lost three years in a row. That one of them would be the fabled Giants, led by John McGraw with the mighty Christy Mathewson on the mound, seems fantastic, but so it would be in 1911, ’12, and ’13. Events were not quite so bizarre as those that centered about the unfortunate Merkle, but dramatic they were, and odd, too, the weirder still that Big Six would be somewhat the goat and mostly the fall guy, but always, at the end, the loser.
After chasing the pennant winners of 1909 and ’10 as respectable also-rans, McGraw had guided his Giants back on top in ’11 with a team that played just to his fancy. These Giants stole 347 bases, a record that still stands to this day. New York ran, literally, ragged, sliding so often that the Giants were constantly having trouble on the road with ripped pants. The team was so worn down near the end of the season that McGraw put in a call to his jolly buddy, Wilbert Robinson in Baltimore, to come join the team as his aide just to lighten the boys up.
Muggsy had also finally found a pitcher who could replace Iron Man McGinnity as the second half of his one-two punch on the mound. This was the unpredictable Marquard, whom McGr
aw had purchased from the minors two years previous for the unheard of price of $11,000. Since Marquard pitched poorly his first two seasons, he became known as “the $11,000 Lemon,” but in ’11 he suddenly blossomed, winning twenty-four games to Mathewson’s twenty-six and helping Matty lead the Giants to an easy pennant. So then, presto, shades of King Kelly, “the $10,000 Beauty” of 1887, Marquard became “the $11,000 Beauty” of 1911. The sports scribes were running dry.
Connie Mack’s Athletics, defending World Champions, batting almost .300 as a team, breezed to an even easier victory in the American League. This not only set up a rematch of the ’05 Series, but since Philadelphia and New York were separated by a mere ninety-four-minute train ride, it created an especially intense rivalry, with only New Jersey as an unwilling buffer. Betting was rife before the opener. McGraw, in fact, was beside himself that his dear buddy, George M. Cohan, dared bet the A’s. Action was easy. “Thousands of Philadelphians came to New York with their pockets loaded with money,” it was reported. “Every cent they offered was covered at even money.” Not only that, but even though both cities had beautiful new steel ballparks with greatly increased seating capacity, there was a mad crush for tickets.
In New York, outside the Giant offices at Twenty-sixth and Broadway, ticket agents employed so-called huskies to stand in the long lines—coffee and sandwiches provided—to buy the pasteboards that could then be scalped. It was a “seething mob” barely held in check by Pinkerton’s. Two-dollar tickets were going for at least fifteen bucks. Tickets were also being counterfeited. The night before the opening game, so many fans bivouacked around Coogan’s Bluff—resting in makeshift tents and before fires as they waited for fifteen thousand one-dollar bleacher seats to go on sale—that the scene resembled a “regimental encampment.” The next day a record announced crowd of 38,281 pressed into the spiffy new Polo Grounds, with thousands more catching glimpses of the game from the Bluff. A hundred scalpers were arrested, including one especially canny fellow who bought a bundle of newspapers and a vendor’s cap for two dollars, and then, posing as a newsboy in the grandstand, tried to scalp tickets for future games.
