The Old Ball Game

by Frank Deford

  In London the Americans played a baseball game before thirty-five thousand baffled English spectators, a crowd that included King George. After a side trip to Ireland, the junket returned home on the Lusitania. It was estimated that the journey extended over thirty-eight thousand miles. The diamond wayfarers made it back just in time for spring training.

  If Mathewson was not quite so intrepid as McGraw, he remained a rock—apparently indestructible even as he moved into his thirties. He peaked with that magnificent season of ’08, when he won thirty-seven games, but in season after season that followed he averaged around three hundred innings pitched, twenty-five wins, and under two earned runs a game. Even in his prime his fastball had not been what players call “heavy,” and so as speed diminished with age, he did not lose his best stuff. He still officiated quite well enough with the fadeaway and the curve, and, if anything, his control grew even more precise. In 1913 he went sixty-eight consecutive innings without giving up a base on balls.

  “Chief” Meyers

  Mathewson possessed the most supple arm, and early on he had learned how to preserve it. “There was no strain the way he threw,” Larry Doyle explained. “He just let loose that easy, country boy pitch of his.” All told, Big Six pitched 4,781 innings, and it is almost incidental that he struck out 2,502 hitters, because that was rarely his intent. Rather, his idea was to get by with as few pitches as possible per game.

  What Mathewson sought above all was to put the ball precisely where he wanted it, fooling the batters rather than overpowering them. “Anytime you hit a ball hard off him, you never got another pitch in that spot again,” said Chief Meyers. It helped, of course, that Matty’s supernatural mnemonic skills were such that he would never forget where he’d thrown a pitch that a batter had bested him on.

  Mathewson believed control to be the single most important attribute for a pitcher—counting more than speed, variety, or guile (all of which he did possess in spades). Ring Lardner, who in the fashion common to that era liked to write in dialect—his most famous work being You Know Me, Al—wrote this about Big Six from an uneducated ballplayer’s point of view:

  “They’s a flock o’ pitchers that knows a batter’s weakness and works accordin’. But they aint nobody in the world can stick a ball as near as where they want to stick it as he can. . . . I s’pose when he broke in he didn’t have no more control than the rest of these here collegers. But the diff’rence between they and him was he seen what a good thing it was to have, and went out and got it.”

  It was common for the Giants to journey up the Hudson just before their season opened to play an exhibition against the West Point Cadet team. One year up there the subject of control came up, and Matty—always delighted to respond when somebody would put their money where their mouth was—accepted 12-1 odds on $20 that he could not throw twenty pitches to exactly the same spot. Chief Meyers squatted, rested his catcher’s mitt on one knee, and simply held it there while Mathewson toed the rubber and, twenty times in a row, hit the target squarely, then unashamedly pocketed $240 of the cadets’ money.

  As each season passed, though, as Mathewson realized that he must be nearing the end of his career, he was forced to understand that he would be denied what next he most wanted. That was to become the manager of the New York Giants. At least there was no tease; it was perfectly clear that McGraw wasn’t going anywhere.

  It is a paradox that, whatever the sport, the brightest players— those who would be expected to grow out of a mere game—are often those who never leave. The smart ones begin to see elements that lesser minds fail to perceive, and so they are challenged to move into managerial positions, to plumb new depths of the game. At this time, too, it was more common for the best players to become managers. And, of course, Mathewson had studied at the foot of the master.

  Also, his generation had grown up with the game as it had become something more than a game to America. When Mathewson had entered the sport, baseball was, as his father-in-law believed, a disreputable enterprise played by antediluvian ruffians. Stadiums were thrown up like circus tents, and franchises—even whole leagues—moved with the breezes. But now, the whole enterprise was as sturdy as the grand new ballyards, and more and more of the players were couth and educated. Bucknell? Why now, Bugs and Turkey Mike were gone, to be replaced by the baccalaureate likes of Harvard Eddie Grant.

  It was a trade-off, though. These better-bred players didn’t give Muggsy near as much trouble. Or near as much fun, either. “The men don’t get out and fight for the games like they used to,” he muttered. “That’s what’s wrong with baseball.” Even presidents lent their prestige to the proceedings now, stadiums were rock-solid, and it had been a decade since a single franchise had been uprooted. The sixteen big league teams seemed to be as immutable as the Ten Commandments, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the thirteen stripes that flew over America’s grand old game. Baseball had become downright hallowed.

  There was, however, still one hangover from the old days, an impurity. Fans could get into gambling pools for as little as double nickels a week. You could bet the number of runs, wins, whatever your fancy. A lot of newspapers printed odds. Everybody was betting the national sport, and everybody winked at the fact that maybe some players could be enticed to play a losing game. After all, for all of baseball’s success, players weren’t making great salaries. Trapped by the reserve clause, they needed off-season jobs just to get by. There was so much temptation. It was instructive that when people realized that Larry Doyle hadn’t touched home plate in the fifth game of the ’11 Series but no A’s protested, the immediate and natural suspicion was that there must be a fix to it.

  It was funny. Everybody was always wondering, but nobody wanted to believe what everybody was wondering. It was, in fact, very much indeed the way it would be at the end of the century, when steroids entered what had become known by then as “the national pastime.”

  In particular, starting not long after he entered the majors in 1905, a brilliant-fielding first baseman named Hal Chase was regularly rumored to be “laying down.” But then, Prince Hal was a charming sort. The McGraws lived for a time at the Washington Inn at Amsterdam and 157th Street, and in 1908 Chase, playing for the Yankees then, was a neighbor in the building. McGraw took a real liking to him, and despite the buzz, Chase was made playing manager of the Yankees in 1910. The fox was running the henhouse.

  Baseball was simply doing too well for anybody to stop the parade. Why, at some point it even became associated with apple pie.

  NINETEEN

  The 1912 Series—Giants–Red Sox—came on with such excitement that it eclipsed the hoopla that had made the 1911 Series seem the ultimate. Scalpers were getting $125 for box seats. Three hundred reporters from as far away as San Francisco came to cover the games. The line to obtain cheap seats at the Polo Grounds was longer than ever. Intrepid journalists even uncovered a female encamped midst the male throng. She was dubbed “the mysterious woman in blue” before she was finally revealed just to be one Jennie Smith of Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn. A large new electric scoreboard was set up in Times Square itself, and it attracted so many fans during the games that traffic had to be diverted. It was the same sort of mess at Herald Square.

  Down from Boston for the first game came a band of loyal Beantown fans known as the Royal Rooters. They had been led, dating back to the nineteenth century, even before there was an American League, by a saloon-keeper named Nuf Ced McGreevey—his moniker derived from his habit of certifying a statement with the words “enough said” and then a well-placed spit into the cuspidor. Dressed in red, complete with a large band that played a theme song named “Tessie” and boasting a hundred thousand dollars in betting money, the Royal Rooters descended on Manhattan, where they paraded the enemy turf by torchlight.

  The next afternoon before a packed house at the Polo Grounds, the Royal Rooters came on with a snake dance and a cakewalk as the famous Boston mayor John Fitzgerald—“Honey Fitz�
��— bellowed through a green megaphone. The Herald noted, archly, that the mayor “did nothing to attract attention outside of running about the field until they had to hold him in his seat.”

  Once again McGraw designed new uniforms for the Series, eschewing last year’s black and instead dressing his charges in sparkling white outfits with a distinct violet trim. Then, in a decision that displeased Mathewson, McGraw held him (and Marquard) out in order to allow a rookie spitballer, Jeff Tesreau, the chance to start before the home folks. The ploy didn’t work; Tesreau couldn’t hold a lead and the ecstatic Royal Rooters went home with a 4–3 victory for the Sox ace, “Smokey Joe” Wood.

  At Fenway Park the next afternoon, Mathewson was not particularly sharp, and, in concert, the Giants’ defense made five errors, costing six unearned runs; after eleven innings, in “the gathering darkness,” the game was called, a 6–6 tie. Marquard won the 2–1 makeup game the next afternoon, but when the Series returned to New York, Smoky Joe won 3–1. Back in Boston, Mathewson gave up only five hits and two earned runs, but lost 2–1. He didn’t allow a base runner after the third inning, and in the sixth, Chief Meyers told McGraw: “I never saw him have more.” But to no avail. Ever since Home Run Baker had hit that four-furlong drive, it was as if Matty was snakebit in the Series.

  The Giants were down three games to one now, but Marquard won again, 5–2, at the Polo Grounds, and back at Fenway the Giants routed Wood and tied the Series with an 11–4 win. McGraw snarled: “The Red Sox cracked and broke today.” And predictably, the rumors flew that the Sox had given away the last two games so that the Series would go the limit and both franchises would profit with the extra gates.

  Rube Marquard

  The game, however, was not nearly so interesting as the events that surrounded it. The Red Sox management, in some fit of idiocy, sold most of the Royal Rooters’ regular seats out from under them, catering to rich, new Johnny-come-lately VIP fans. As a consequence the Rooters marched about before the game, stormed the bleachers, and after the game showed their displeasure by rooting for the visitors. “Three cheers for John McGraw and his ball club!” they chanted as the Giant supporters happily waved their blue pennants in joyous surprise.

  Not only that, but Boston had won the coin flip, giving the Sox the home field for the deciding game, but the Rooters boycotted the game. Moreover, they were joined in their stayaway strike by many other furious Bostonians, who were sympathetic to how the Royal Rooters had been mistreated. As a consequence, only 17,034 showed up at Fenway, and 1,500 of those had come up on trains from New York. Meanwhile, down in Manhattan, perhaps a hundred thousand or more spilled into the streets to follow the action on the huge scoreboards.

  This day, October 16, was a gloomy one, and Mathewson seemed a match for the weather. He was gaunt and withdrawn. One reporter wrote: “As he sat in the corridor of his hotel this morning, it could be seen that he had little left to give. The skin was drawn tightly over the bone on his jaw and chin, and in his hollowed cheeks the furrows of recent years were startling in their depth.” The old-timer was all of thirty-two years.

  Yet despite Mathewson’s dreadful aspect, once the game started, the Sox were “helpless in the face of his speed and elusive fadeaway.” The Giants managed a run in the third, and although they squandered several other chances, Big Six took that 1–0 shutout into the seventh. A single and a rare base on balls here gave Boston its first real chance, though, so with two outs, manager Jake Stahl pinch-hit for his starter, Hugh Bedient. The batter he chose was a very ordinary left-handed hitting outfielder named Olaf Henriksen. He had been born in Denmark, but naturally everybody in baseball called him “Swede.” Henriksen managed only 487 at bats in seven seasons in the majors, hitting a modest .269. But here, swinging late on a curve, “the confounded son of Thor that he is” (wrote the World), slapped the ball down the left-field line. The ball hit the third base sack and bounded far enough away into foul territory to bring home Boston’s first run. Fred Snodgrass in center made a nice running catch to end the inning, but now it was 1–1.

  Despite the fact that the Giants had routed Smokey Joe Wood the day before, Manager Stahl now called for him in relief. He was a different pitcher this day, however, and New York could not score. For the first time, a deciding game went into extra innings. But then in the New York tenth, the Giants got to Wood. There was poetic justice, too, that none other than Fred Merkle drove in the run that put New York ahead 2–1. Surely this heroic single would erase the memory of his infamous boner. It was only fair.

  And so did Mathewson head out boldly for the bottom of the tenth. “Is Mathewson apprehensive as he walks to the box?” asked the Times. And it answered: “He is not. And the confidence that was his when the blood of youth ran strong in his supple muscle is his now.”

  Fred Merkle

  To lead off, as a pinch hitter for Wood, Stahl sent up Clyde Engle, a weak-hitting utilityman. So began the most upside-down inning, where the weak were strong, the strong weak— even if the luck all went to Boston. Down two strikes in the count, Engle lifted an easy high fly to left-center. Snodgrass moved over a couple of steps. “The globe plumped squarely into the Californian’s glove,” the Herald wrote. “It also plumped promptly to the sward.” Engle pulled into first. Snodgrass was a fine fielder. No one, least of all Mathewson, could believe it. Uncharacteristically, Matty would “swing his gloved hand in a gesture that is eloquent of his wrath.”

  In a movie theater in Los Angeles, where the game was being played out by telegraph, Snodgrass’s mother fainted dead away with the report of her son’s error.

  McGraw came out of the dugout. “Stick to ’em, Matty. Stick to ’em,” he shouted.

  Next up, Harry Hooper. Rattled, Mathewson threw him his pitch and Hooper drove it deep to center. This time, out by the wall, Snodgrass made a terrific catch. Engle went to second. The batter now was Steve Yerkes, a light-hitting second baseman. Unbelievably, Matty, who had walked only three batters in the twenty-eight and a third innings he’d worked in the Series, walked Yerkes on four pitches. This brought Tris Speaker, the “Grey Eagle,” to the plate. Speaker hit .383 on the year. He was as considerable a threat as Yerkes had been hardly any. So what happened? Speaker swung at Matty’s first pitch and popped a weak little foul fly over toward Merkle, who was playing first.

  Accounts differ. Some say Merkle simply froze. Some say he moved to make the catch exactly as he should have. Whichever, and for whatever reason, Mathewson, running toward the play himself, screamed: “Chief! Chief!” That meant that Chief Meyers, the catcher, should catch the ball. Now, for sure, Merkle stopped in his tracks. Meyers lunged but didn’t even get his mitt on the ball.

  That should have been the third out, the game, and the championship. Two flies to Snodgrass, a pop foul to Merkle. Instead, there was only one down and two men on, and as Mathewson crossed back to the mound, Speaker called out: “Matty, that play’ll cost you the Series.”

  Sure enough, on the very next pitch, Speaker hit Mathewson’s curve for a single, bringing in the tying run—Yerkes to third, Speaker to second on the throw in. Mathewson made the percentage move next, walking Duffy Lewis to set up a force play at any base, but it was for naught. Larry Gardner flied out deep enough to right for Yerkes to tag up and score with ease.

  In the press box, a tough baseball writer, Steve Mercer of the New York Globe, looked down on Matty standing there forlornly, and began to cry unashamedly.

  Ring Lardner started to type his lead for the Chicago Tribune. It read:

  “Boston, Mass., Oct. 16—Just after Steve Yerkes had crossed the plate with the run that gave Boston’s Red Sox the world’s championship in the tenth inning of the deciding game of the greatest series ever played for the big title, while the thousands made temporary crazy by a triumph entirely unexpected, yelled, screamed, stamped their feet, smashed hats and hugged one another, there was seen one of the saddest sights in the history of a sport that is a wonderful picture of joy and gloom.
It was the spectacle of a man, old as baseball players are reckoned, walking from the middle of the field to the New York players’ bench with bowed head and drooping shoulders, with tears streaming from his eyes, a man on whom his team’s fortunes had been staked and lost, a man who would have proven his clear title to the test reposed in him if his mates had stood by him in the supreme test. The man was Christy Mathewson.

  “Beaten 3 to 2 by a club he would have conquered if he had been given the support deserved by his wonderful pitching, Matty tonight is greater in the eyes of the New York public than ever before. Even the joy-mad population of Boston confesses that his should have been the victory and his the praise.”

  McGraw, always ready to defend his players, did not blame Snodgrass for the loss. “It could happen to anyone,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for a lot Snodgrass did, we wouldn’t have been playing in that game at all.” Just as he had given Merkle a raise after ’08, so now would he do the same for Snodgrass. Neither did Mathewson put the onus on his center fielder. He wrote: “I blame Meyers and Merkle for failing to catch Speaker’s foul far more than I do Snodgrass for his error.” But for most everybody else, almost from the moment Snodgrass let that ball tumble to the sward, he had cost the Giants the championship. Nobody much ever even credited Snodgrass for the terrific catch he made in deep center on Hooper’s ball just after he’d dropped Engle’s.

  Fred Snodgrass