The Old Ball Game

by Frank Deford

  Matty thought his Reds had a chance to win the National League, and they did finish third, after Chicago and New York, but it was a desultory season, with players being called up, and the stands all but empty. Even the Giants drew only 256,000. Mathewson had another problem, too. Almost from the day he took over the Reds in 1916, he had begun to suspect that his first baseman, Hal Chase, was fixing games.

  In retrospect, it is amazing that Chase was still playing baseball. He had been under suspicion as early as 1908, his fourth season in the majors, and along the way he had approached numerous players to help him throw games. He was absolutely brazen. The Sporting News itself even wrote that other players would call out to Chase: “Well, Hal, what are the odds today?”

  Fred Lieb, the baseball historian, always suspected that because Chase was allowed to continue his blatant behavior, that this encouraged the White Sox to fix the 1919 Series. Chase was basically and obviously amoral. He was also a magnificent fielder—some say, even now, the finest ever to play first base, better even than Keith Hernandez. Indeed, Mathewson’s suspicions first grew when he saw Prince Hal botch some easy tosses when the pitcher covered first, ordinary flips that a fielder of his caliber could simply not mess up. Chase was also a pretty fair hitter. At .339, he led the National League in batting average in 1916, Mathewson’s first year of managing in Cincinnati.

  Personally, Chase was charming, seductive in every sense. It was said he was not above sweet-talking his own teammates’ wives to sleep with him. He was handsome, although an illness in 1909 had left his face pockmarked, which apparently made Chase even more disagreeable. He would befriend young players, sizing them up, so that he could then tempt the more impressionable ones with offers to help him throw games. Since he had so much practice at it, Chase was also a master at how he, in the vernacular, “laid down.” He would make marvelous plays afield and go for base hits when the game was not on the line, then make almost indistinguishable errors of omission when it counted. It took someone like Mathewson, watching Chase game after game, to see the pattern.

  Still, it was late in the 1918 season before Mathewson finally felt confident enough to act. On August 6, at the Polo Grounds, Mathewson heard that Chase had approached a Giants pitcher named Pol Perritt, trying to convince him to throw the game. Mathewson confronted Chase, and after a terrible argument suspended him for “indifferent playing and insubordination.” Despite the fact that Chase was hitting .301, not a single player on the team came to his defense. Garry Herrmann, the Reds owner, supported Mathewson, who then diligently went about the task of obtaining affidavits from Chase’s teammates, who testified to his cheating.

  Mathewson in his WWI military uniform, c. 1918

  Incredibly, it would be John McGraw, Mathewson’s friend and the manager of the pitcher whom Chase had tried to corrupt, who would come to Chase’s aid and effectively save him from expulsion from the game.

  But that betrayal lay ahead. Now, Matty was going to war. After long, searching discussions with Jane, he decided that he could not fail to volunteer for his country. He accepted a commission as captain in the Chemical Warfare Service and stepped down as manager on August 27. Soon he was on a troopship bound for France to join what was called the Gas and Flame Division. Several other baseball players and officials had volunteered for the Chemical Warfare Service, including Ty Cobb, who, at the age of thirty-one, likewise was exempt from the draft.

  Matty had always had problems with seasickness. This crossing was difficult, and on top of his mal de mer, he fell even more seriously ill, caught in a flu epidemic that ravaged the crowded ship. He landed, weak and still somewhat sick. It did not help, either, that the autumn weather was chilly and damp.

  Ironically, too, the Germans were in the midst of failing with their last major offensive of the war. With thousands of American troops pouring into Europe, the hopelessness of the German situation was becoming obvious. Noble as Matty’s spirit to volunteer had been, it really served no purpose.

  Mathewson was posted first to Blois, then Tours, and then on to Hanlon Field at Chaumont, about 120 miles southeast of Paris. Hardly had he begun classes at Officers Training School, though, when his influenza grew worse and he had to be hospitalized for ten days. Finally released but obviously still somewhat debilitated, he was ready for his training.

  The Germans were desperate now and using poison gas profligately on the battlefield. Mathewson’s 28th Division suffered large numbers of gas-related injuries. It was Mathewson’s job, after his own training was completed, to instruct troops in how to put on gas masks. The men would be sent into large rooms where gas was released. “We weren’t fooling around with simulated death when we entered those gas chambers,” Ty Cobb remembered. “The stuff we turned loose was the McCoy.” All of the officers must have ingested at least some gas, because it was their duty to be the last to put on their masks.

  And then, in one particular drill, there was something of a panic. “Men screamed to be let out when they got a sudden whiff of the sweet death in the air,” Cobb recalled. “They went crazy with fear, and in the fight to get out jammed up in a hopeless tangle.” Cobb himself had a cough for weeks and lungs full of liquid. He felt that only “Divine Providence” spared him. Mathewson, it seems, missed the hand signal to put on his mask and took in even more of the poison before he could finally snap on his mask and escape. “Ty, when we were in there, I got a good dose of the stuff,” he said. “I feel terrible.”

  In fact, when the armistice was declared on November 11, Mathewson was back in the hospital. Then, before he was shipped back to the States in February, he had the duty to examine ammunition dumps in Flanders, where it is quite possible that residual pockets of gas may still have lingered.

  He came home to Jane and Christy Jr. with a wheezing cough. Pasty white and with sweat pouring from his brow, he was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis.

  Cobb went back to play for the Tigers. It was as if he’d never been away. He hit .384 to lead the majors in 1919. He could never forget that day of panic at the gas chamber, though. “I saw Christy Mathewson doomed to die,” he wrote. “The rider on the pale horse had passed his way.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Because he had gone off to war, Matty had lost his manager’s position at Cincinnati. Given the sudden reversal in the state of his health, he probably wouldn’t have been up to the job’s demands, anyhow. McGraw took him on as an assistant manager for the Giants, a job Mathewson accepted despite the fact that, of all people, Hal Chase was now a valued member of McGraw’s team.

  That January, while Matty was still in France, the toothless new president of the National League, an old retainer named John Heydler, who had once been an umpire, McGraw his bête noire, adjudicated Chase’s case. The evidence against Chase was overwhelming. McGraw even testified himself that, yes, his pitcher, Pol Perritt, had told him that Chase had tried to get him to throw a game. Perritt’s affidavit was introduced. So was Mathewson’s. Cincinnati players testified against Chase. But Chase brought along three persuasive lawyers and, without Mathewson there to testify in person, Heydler buckled.

  It did not help that, incredibly, McGraw said that he believed Prince Hal’s protestations of innocence and wanted him to play first base for the Giants. “Here I am, trying to prove the charges that Mathewson, McGraw’s close friend, has made made against this man,” Heydler whined, “and McGraw is already offering him a job.” So Chase was merely found guilty of acting “in a foolish and careless manner,” McGraw promptly traded for him, and if Mathewson wanted the job with the Giants, he would have to swallow his pride and accept Chase as a colleague. Matty not only put on a good face, but he lied, telling everyone that he’d certainly never accused Chase of cheating. Those charges, he said, had been leveled only by his teammates.

  Poor Matty. He compromised himself this one time, it seems, because McGraw was holding out the promise that he would retire in a few years and Mathewson would succeed him. In fact, McGraw would be al
most at death’s door before he finally took off his Giants uniform. Besides, like so many others, Muggsy— and Blanche, too—had been enchanted by Prince Hal, going back a decade when they were neighbors in the same apartment building. And, as always, McGraw was convinced that there wasn’t a player on God’s green earth that he couldn’t rehabilitate.

  But, of course, Chase was incorrigible. Chase was malevolent. He could not be shamed. Somehow, though, he and Mathewson managed to coexist for the whole year without ever talking to each other. One day at batting practice, Larry Doyle’s bat flew out of his hands and hit Mathewson. In fact, he wasn’t seriously injured, but the whole team rushed to Big Six’s side. Except Chase; he did not move. And, sure enough, soon enough, McGraw began to suspect that Chase was throwing games. Yet even then he could not bring himself to confront him or banish him, and rather even than embarrass him, McGraw simply got rid of him by offering him such a small contract for 1920 that it wasn’t worth Chase’s while to come back from California. Soon Chase was trying to chat up players in the Pacific Coast League, so that he might resume the fixing business in those precincts.

  Even allowing for McGraw’s idiosyncratic taste in certain rapscallion players, Chase’s ability to bamboozle him is perhaps the most baffling personnel mystery in McGraw’s career. Or maybe it is just the ultimate proof of how beguiling Prince Hal really could be—that he could put that much over on that grand old student of men, Muggsy McGraw.

  As for Mathewson, after he and Chase parted, forever, at the conclusion of the 1919 season, Mathewson went west to the World Series, where the White Sox were playing his old Cincinnati team. He sat alongside the esteemed Hugh Fullerton, of the Chicago Herald and Examiner. Rumors about the fix had already begun to spread. Ring Lardner, emboldened by whiskey, had swayed through the White Sox railroad car, singing (to the tune of “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles”), “I’m forever blowing ball games.” In the press box, Mathewson would take his pen and, on Fullerton’s scorecard, circle all the plays he thought were funny. There were a number of them.

  Luckily for baseball, the lively ball (and Babe Ruth in particular) came to the fore at this time, diverting attention from the shame of the Black Sox scandal. Meanwhile, McGraw’s own presence grew somewhat paradoxical.

  On the one hand, never had he been so personally imposing. Gene Fowler, the acerbic columnist, wrote: “There were two ‘Misters’ on the New York scene in the 1920s, men who were always so addressed, Charles F. Murphy, leader of Tammany Hall, and John J. McGraw of the New York Giants.” Somehow he rebuilt the Giants into even more of a juggernaut than his teams of the early 1900s or the 1911–’12–’13 clubs had been. The Giants became the first major league team to win four consecutive pennants, from 1921 through 1924. Finally, too, McGraw broke his string of World Series losses, taking the championships of ’21and’22.

  McGraw and Babe Ruth, 1922 World Series.

  Yet in the face of this success, the Giants were losing the city— and, in a real sense, the sport—to their heretofore poor municipal cousins, the Yankees. Once The Babe showed up in pinstripes in 1920, the whole of baseball was changed. He hit fifty-four home runs that year, more by himself than all but one entire team in the majors. Previously, while most New York newspapers had sent a reporter on the road with the Giants, the Yankees were usually covered by a single traveling pool reporter. Now, the press hopped on the bandwagon. Everyone wanted to read about the home run marvel, the “Sultan of Swat”; everybody wanted to see The Bambino for themselves. In 1920, as a tenant in the Polo Grounds, the Yankees became the first team in history to draw a million fans. McGraw’s McGraw’s team sold 360,000 fewer tickets, and the Little Napoleon seethed.

  Even before that, when Sunday baseball was made legal in New York in 1919, the Giants wanted all the best dates for themselves and told the Yankees to find a new residence. McGraw savored the eviction, knowing that there was surely no real estate in Manhattan that could accommodate a new ballyard. When the Yankees announced that they would build their stadium out of Manhattan, in the Bronx hinterlands, Muggsy chortled: “They are going to Goatville, and before long they will be lost sight of.”

  It didn’t happen, of course. Ruth only hit more homers. Much as McGraw might have cringed at this new emphasis in his sport, though, he adjusted to the new strategic realities. The Giants very quickly became one of the top power-hitting teams in the league. Muggsy was no diamond Luddite. But that didn’t mean he had to like the new order. A letter Ring Lardner wrote him probably expressed his own feelings as well as the writer’s: “Baseball hasn’t meant as much to me since the introduction of the TNT ball that robbed the game of the features I used to like best—features that gave you . . . and other really intelligent managers a deserved advantage . . . what I enjoyed in ‘the national pastime.’”

  Of course, it was not just the new anti-McGraw style of play that upset McGraw. Ruth stole the Giants’ thunder. In a very real way, too, Ruth replaced Mathewson as the nation’s baseball idol. Once Matty had begun to decline, there really was no single figure to take his place. Cobb in particular was simply too ill tempered to be any sort of a national hero, and no other player had risen to popular heights until Ruth came along. Having himself been so adored, Mathewson probably understood the phenomenon and appreciated why The Babe was so appealing far more than McGraw could comprehend (or admit). “Ruth is what he is,” Matty said. “It is his temperament that makes him so valuable to baseball and so worthy of his salary. The mass of people on the bleachers care most for a man whom they can cheer today and jeer tomorrrow, and Ruth fits that picture.”

  It was also the case that Ruth’s national popularity developed at a time that came to be called the Golden Age of Sport. The Sultan of Swat was only the brightest sports star in the American heavens. Sportswriters had never been better at yodeling their chansons de geste, lifting athletes in several sports to new positions of heroism. Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion, and Red Grange, the running back, became celebrated national figures. Big Bill Tilden in tennis and Bobby Jones in golf were the first champions in those two country club sports to become, as the term put it, household names. Even a polo player, Tommy Hitchcock, became reasonably well known. If Muggsy had no place in this pantheon of playing gods, he still remained by far the most famous manager. In his lifetime only Knute Rockne, the football coach at Notre Dame, would begin to approach his celebrity. When the New Yorker chose him for its first sports profile, McGraw was lionized as more than just a manager. The magazine wrote: “He is the incarnation of the American national sport. . . . There is no man in baseball more coldly, cruelly commercial than John J. McGraw, manager and magnate, and no man more selflessly engrossed in the game for the game’s sake than Muggsy McGraw, baseball artist.”

  Alas, personally he was deteriorating. His health, especially in the spring when allergies affected his sinusitis, was more dicey all the time. Blanche always felt that he never really recovered from the effects of being hit by Dummy Taylor’s throw from the outfield in 1903. He would sit in the dugout in his street clothes, sweating through his Cuban shirt, sneezing and coughing. Sometimes, even blood would flow from his nose. Occasionally he became so sick that he would remove himself from the dugout and manage the team by telephone from the clubhouse. His weight had continued to rise, though, and he had taken on a potbelly, or what was more decorously known then as a “corporation.” He weighed as much as two hundred pounds (and remember, he was only five-feet-seven). He also drank more and more to excess. His hair turned white. He didn’t reach his fiftieth birthday till 1923, but he looked a decade older.

  As the 1920s rolled by, though, if ever he pondered quitting, his health would pick up by the end of the season, and he would be raring to go come spring training. He simply could not bear to tear himself away from the game. Life without baseball had little meaning for him. . . . So in 1924 he and Charles Comiskey, the “Old Roman,” owner of the White Sox, decided that it was time again to present baseball
to the deprived English, show the Crown what it had been missing. As a baseball evangelist, then, Muggsy led another foreign tour. Unfortunately, the British were still no more inclined to cozy up to baseball than Americans were to cricket or soccer. George Bernard Shaw wrote a story about how frightfully boring it was. But Shaw also had a long meeting with Muggsy—oh, to have been a fly on the wall—and was perfectly beguiled by him. Shaw had, he said, “at last discovered the real and authentic Most Remarkable Man in America.”

  Muggsy and Blanche then went on to Paris, where they set up headquarters at the Grand Hotel, making forays hither and yon, returning to entertain at their grand salon.

  Yet as attractive as McGraw could still be with the likes of Shaw, he could, increasingly, also be a mean drunk. He knew that himself. Was he drunk? he was asked after one dreadful dustup. “I must’ve been, because I never fight unless I’m drunk,” he replied. That was not altogether accurate, but it did get to the heart of his problem. He was becoming the stereotype of what he had always railed against: the red-faced Mick rummy.

  Some of the incidents were more than embarrassing. They were brutal. Once in Pittsburgh after a game, already plastered, he arrived back at his hotel suite. He took umbrage at some remark that an invited guest made and, without warning, pummeled him so badly that the man was forced to bed for several days. On another occasion, the Lambs Club suspended his membership for fighting with an actor. Some time later, coming home from the Lambs Club after a night of boozing and another fracas there, McGraw, for some unknown reason, slugged the very friend who was helping him to his door. The man suffered a skull fracture when he fell to the sidewalk. This time McGraw was expelled from the club. There always seemed to be some embarrassing skirmish; Muggsy was probably lucky that he wasn’t hauled into court.