We can’t prove that the Cubs threw all or even part of the ’18 series, but we can wonder—if they did, would reasonable, moral people have done the same in their situation? If participation in that World Series left both the Red Sox and Cubs franchises with curses to carry into the following century, if the baseball gods can’t find them worthy of forgiveness, at least, maybe, we mortals can.
TWO
Luck: Charley Weeghman
CHICAGO, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 9, 1917
It was still dark. Lucky Charley cinched the buttons of his waistcoat. He smoothed the bottom of the waistcoat with both hands, dropped his watch into his pocket, squeezing the fob into the opposite pocket. He slid into his overcoat, pressed his derby over his forehead, and grabbed his kit and bag. He took a deep breath and looked in the mirror. Natty, he thought, smiling. They’d called him a natty dresser as far back as his days at King’s diner down in the Loop, where he was a $10-a-week waiter hustling eggs and doughnuts and mugs of Postum to the midnight crowds, mostly newsmen. But that was 20 years ago. Gray hairs had presented themselves in the interim. Charley patted his waistcoat again. Still thin. Now he was one of the best-known businessmen in the city, owner of a chain of lunchrooms, a movie theater, a billiard parlor. Lucky Charley was a millionaire, president of the Chicago Cubs.
Millionaire? Charley knew better. He was no millionaire, but the papers liked to speculate that he was, and he’d done little to discourage them. He hadn’t really been a waiter at King’s either—more like a night manager—but Charley had spent enough time around Chicago’s newsmen to know that what they wanted was a good and splashy story, details be damned. So he’d let them believe he was a waiter-turned-millionaire.
Charley knew how to work newsmen, and he was planning to do it again this week. When he got to New York, he was going to give Chicago a story, a big story. A Cubs story. He’d give them the greatest pitcher and catcher in baseball today. Perhaps, too, the greatest young hitter. Yes, there was a corker of a story in New York.
Charley stopped in to kiss his daughter, Dorothy, on the forehead before he left. He did not kiss his wife, Bessie. He took the elevator to the lobby of the Edgewater,1 and when he got there he gave a wink and a thank-you to the deskmen who had, with alacrity, brought him the telegram hurrying him to New York today, Sunday, rather than tomorrow.2 The boys gave Charley goofy smiles. Charley loved playing the part of baseball magnate. The lobby boys did not care a whit when the well-to-do lumberyard owners and doctors and auto parts suppliers who lived here at the Edgewater Beach Hotel received messages. But when Charley got a telegram, it was different. The boys fought to deliver it, because they just knew it had something to do with the North Side ball club, and each wanted some part, however small, in putting over the Cubs’ latest transaction. They looked at Charley with admiration. Charley liked being admired.
This morning the telegram told him there was a change of schedule and he should get to New York early for the league meetings. Charley stepped out of the lobby, into a blast of morning cold, to the waiting car. As he slid into the backseat, Charley looked up at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, with its stucco facade and red terra-cotta roof. It looked ridiculous, a luxury resort plucked off the Riviera and placed on Sheridan Road, along the icy shore of Lake Michigan. But the Edgewater’s mere existence, let alone the fact that he lived there, helped to assure Charley that he was as lucky as everyone thought him. These days he needed that assurance.
Coincidences always seemed to fall in Charley’s favor. For example, back in 1914, John T. Connery’s syndicate had attempted to buy the Cubs from Charles Taft for $750,000, promising another $500,000 to upgrade the Cubs’ West Side park. Taft turned down Connery. Charley wanted the Cubs too, but he couldn’t afford them. Instead he bought into the Chicago Whales of the upstart Federal League, which was challenging the dominance of the American and National leagues. By 1915 the Federal League had failed but had done enough financial damage to the other leagues that Taft now wanted out. As part of baseball’s peace deal with the Feds, Charley was allowed to put together a group to buy the Cubs. For $500,000. And Charley, naturally, moved the team to the Whales’ new park at Addison and Sheffield.3 Connery, having missed out on his chance at the Cubs, tried his hand at the hotel game instead. He built the Edgewater. How about that? Charley wound up with the Cubs for one-third less than what Connery offered, and Connery wound up building Charley a place to live.
Charley Weeghman, ever the sharp dresser, broke into Chicago’s baseball scene as owner of the Federal League’s Whales in 1914. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)
See? Lucky him.
But lately Charley’s reservoir of luck had been draining, thanks to the damned war in Europe. It was difficult enough to watch America mobilize against Germany, his parents’ birthplace (the family name was actually Veichman but had been Americanized after the family settled in Richmond, Indiana).4 For Charley, though, the war was primarily a financial matter. Food rationing had sapped his quick-serve restaurants, which had once seen lines snake around corners in the downtown Loop district. Charley was Chicago’s Lunchroom King, and, at its peak his flagship spot at Madison just west of Dearborn served 5,000 customers daily.5
With the war on, though, the government was conserving resources, and Herbert Hoover (head of the Food Administration) was single-handedly crushing the restaurant business. Hoover pushed the population to cut out certain food groups on certain days—wheatless Mondays and Wednesdays, meatless Tuesdays, porkless Thursdays and Saturdays. Flour was in short supply. Sugar and milk too. Hoover tried to get Americans to eat fish, which was fine in the East but no easy chore in the Midwest, especially for a hurry-up lunchroom like the Weeghman chain. Chicagoans were not eaters of fish, and most fish caught in Illinois rivers was sent to New York. Hoover also asked consumers to cut back on grains, making the bread for sandwiches—that staple of the lunchroom—harder to come by. In September 1917, to conserve the supply of grains, whiskey production was banned, which did not affect Charley’s restaurants but surely affected his ability to cope with his losses. (Beer production, too, would be banned later—the path to prohibition in America was rooted as much in patriotism as in morality.)
Charley’s restaurants were his income. Truthfully, he was a financial lightweight in baseball. He valued his position and his stock holdings in the team, but the Cubs’ real clout was in the investors he had assembled when he bought the club. These were Chicago’s wealthiest businessmen, like meatpacker J. Ogden Armour, Sears-Roebuck head Julius Rosenwald, and chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr. The group was so flush with cash that, when the sale was first announced, one newspaper giddily estimated that the Cubs were a “$100,000,000 ball club.”6 That was a stretch. Either way, Charley’s bank account was not nearly on a par with those of the Cubs’ other owners. He was much better at being around wealthy men than being a wealthy man himself.
He also wasn’t very good, it seemed, at assembling baseball teams. In two years at the helm, success on the field was elusive for Charley, and 1917 had been a particular nightmare. The United States officially entered the war in April, and baseball attendance plummeted. Chicago was still baseball crazy, but for the second year in a row the Cubs struggled to a fifth-place finish with a young, no-name roster. Meanwhile, on the South Side, the White Sox rolled to the AL pennant and led the league in attendance by a wide margin—684,521 fans, well ahead of the Cubs’ 360,218. This greatly displeased the Cubs’ backers. At least they could afford the financial hit. Charley couldn’t. With his restaurants strangled by rationing, if he wasn’t making money on his Cubs holdings, he wasn’t making money. To stay afloat financially, Charley took the painful step of selling shares of Cubs stock to his friend Wrigley. Publicly he was still the face of the Cubs, but privately he was ceding more and more power to Wrigley.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. When he had gained control of the team, Charley spent lavishly to publicize and aggrandize the
Cubs. He employed endless parades and brass bands and dancing girls (there were always dancing girls at Weeghman events, which might help explain his impending divorce). On the spring training trip of ’16, Charley chartered a special Cubs train to camp in Tampa, outfitted with electric pianos, record players, canaries, fine foods, and a singing group called the Florida Troubadors. There was even a billiard table. Baseball Magazine reported, “These gorgeous accommodations were really for ballplayers and not for millionaires.”7
The pool table on the train, it turns out, was a good metaphor for Charley’s finances—impressive looking from the outside but not reflecting the reality inside. The pool table was a beauty, a Brunswick, and as the train stopped along the way to Florida in March 1916, those who saw folks calmly shooting pool most likely whistled in amazement at the decadence. That’s because it was easy to play pool on a train when the train was stopped. For most of the trip, the train was speeding and bumping along. As Tribune writer James Crusinberry noted: “Playing billiards [on a moving train] was like trying to spear goldfish with a table fork. A few of the downstate boys were fooled, however, because whenever the train stopped someone grabbed a cue and started playing, while the fellows outside gazed in wonder.”8
From the outside, folks gazed in wonder at Lucky Charley Weeghman, the $10-a-week-waiter-turned-millionaire-magnate. From the inside, it was a different story.
In the winter before the 1918 season, Charley still had hope. He just needed a quick end to the war, and some felt that could happen by the spring. It wasn’t hard to project how things would go from there: mass celebration at home, the end of rationing, lines of diners back at his restaurants, Americans flocking to their favorite diversions. Like baseball. Charley’s task this winter was to land top players for the Cubs so that when fans came back they’d come to the North Side. Cubs owners, tired of losing while the White Sox were winning, had authorized Weeghman to spend $250,000 to acquire players. It was an absurd amount. The biggest purchase price one team had given another for a player to that point was $55,000, paid by Cleveland to the Red Sox for Tris Speaker in 1916. Theoretically, $250,000 would buy four Speakers, and there weren’t four for sale. But Charley made a splash with fans and press wags by very publicly announcing his bankroll. The Sporting News labeled him “The Mad Spendthrift.”9
Few shared Charley’s optimism. Overall, baseball’s 1917 attendance was 1,283,525, a staggering 19.7 percent drop from the ’16 season. That, in a way, made that winter the perfect time for player shopping. Some of the game’s magnates, concerned about the war and facing continued attendance problems, were eager to cut salaries by selling players, hoping to make up for the previous year’s losses and gird the bottom line for the coming season.
It was this business—plucking players and building a sure pennant winner at the National League meetings—that called Charley to New York a day early on that frigid day in December. It was only four degrees outside, and Charley’s early-morning hurrying was probably unnecessary. His train left at noon. At the LaSalle Street station, Charley met Walter Craighead, the Cubs’ 31-year-old business manager. Craighead and Weeghman boarded the 20th Century Limited, a businessman’s special that could zip to New York in less than 18 hours, and Charley had no worries about keeping himself natty over the trip. The 20th Century had a tailor, a manicurist, saltwater baths, and a barber to ensure that businessmen aboard would not arrive in the East a stubbled mess.
Craighead was Charley’s brother-in-law, married to his younger sister, Myral. Charley had been criticized that winter for dumping well-respected team secretary Charley Williams, who had been in Chicago baseball for 33 years, longer than Craighead had been alive. But, for Weeghman, family trumped all. His clan was from conservative German stock and did not necessarily approve of his showmanship and man-about-town bearing, but that did not seem to affect the family bond. He had given his two younger brothers jobs running his restaurants. He had moved his parents to Chicago from Indiana and taught his father baseball. Craighead had no real experience in business or baseball, but Charley still pushed out Williams for his brother-in-law.
In New York, Craighead and Charley were to meet Cubs manager Fred Mitchell, who would be coming down from his farm in Massachusetts, to settle on a strategy for adding players. Already the Cubs had one big deal all but complete. Back in November, Weeghman had agreed to a blockbuster deal with Phillies owner William F. Baker. The Cubs would send two low-level players and a large sum of money to Philadelphia for ace Grover Cleveland Alexander and catcher Bill Killefer. Baker had sworn Charley to secrecy. He wanted to wait before announcing the deal, because he knew the trade would not play well with fans or the press.
That’s because Alexander was, by far, the best pitcher in baseball. Off the mound, he looked like a typical Nebraska farm boy, with a slow, loping gait and a cap that never quite fit his head. But on the mound, he was devastating, with a fastball that zipped in from his three-quarters delivery and pinpoint control with his breaking ball. He was still only 30 and had been incredibly durable, leading the league in innings pitched and complete games for the previous four years straight. Those four years—leading up to the trade to the Cubs—might be the greatest four-season span any pitcher has ever had. Alexander led the NL in wins (121 total) and strikeouts all four seasons and won the ERA title three of the four years.
Killefer, Alexander’s best friend and batterymate, wasn’t bad either. Though not a great hitter, he was considered the best in the league at working with pitchers and calling a game. That Charley was willing to trade for him shows just how determined he was to build a winner. In 1914, Killefer had signed a contract to jump to Weeghman’s Federal League Whales but jumped back to Philadelphia when Baker upped his contract offer. Charley sued Killefer (challenging baseball’s treasured reserve clause) and lost, but still, the judge in the case scolded Killefer, calling him, “a person upon whose pledged word little or no reliance can be placed.”10
The Cubs needed players, though, and this was no time for Charley to hold a grudge. The deal for Alexander and Killefer was set, and if all went well, Charley would add a third feather to the Cubs’ cap. Mitchell had been pushing the team to buy the best young infielder in the game, Rogers Hornsby, from St. Louis. That would be trickier, because the Cardinals’ new executive, Branch Rickey, already had been giving the Cubs pains on a Hornsby deal. Charley wasn’t sure how to handle Rickey, who was different from most of the game’s magnates because he could not be plied with good scotch or a bawdy story about some dancing girl. To Charley, Rickey must have seemed so strict a Methodist that he felt a tall glass of lemonade was a sin. But still, Charley had an endless supply of cash, and surely Rickey could not turn down cash.
Aboard the 20th Century, Charley and Craighead could daydream about the 1918 Cubs roster, complete with Alexander, Killefer, and, maybe, Hornsby on board. Mad Spendthrift, indeed.
By 5:00 P.M. on Tuesday, the second day of the NL meetings, word of the Killefer-Alexander deal spread through the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the site of the meetings. Weeghman stepped into the lobby to a pack of reporters and well-wishers. (Today’s baseball scribes who chase general managers around hotel lobbies at league meetings can take comfort: it’s an old tradition.) Weeghman ratcheted up the charm. He claimed he had paid Baker $80,000 for Killefer and Alexander, plus two players—Pickles Dillhoefer and Mike Prendergast. Weeghman said the total value going to the Phillies was $100,000. The Chicago Daily News took Weeghman at his word, and the headline in that evening’s paper read, in large type: “CUBS PAY $100,000 FOR ALEXANDER AND KILLEFER.”11 That wasn’t quite true. The Cubs paid closer to $55,000, and whatever creative math Weeghman used to value Dillhoefer and Prendergast remains a mystery. But bigger numbers made for a bigger splash. In an aw-shucks style befitting his rags-to-riches, former-waiter persona, Weeghman claimed that his heart nearly stopped beating when he signed the check. “This is the biggest transaction ever completed in the history of baseball,” he declared.1
2
Things were less joyful for Baker and the Phillies. In selling two stars, Baker had ensured 1918 would be a disaster, but he was betting that, with the war, it would be a less expensive disaster this way. Baker knew, too, that Alexander, as an unmarried man with no dependents, was a prime target to be drafted. Still, the deal was not well received. Baker hadn’t even told manager Pat Moran. “It was pathetic to see Moran after the announcement,” the Daily News reported. “He actually wept when asked to discuss the deal and what it meant to him. He looked as if he had lost his entire family.”13 Baker called local beat writers into his room for a quiet dinner at the Waldorf and explained his side of things. One Philadelphia Inquirer reporter wrote: “President Baker … has deliberately chased the Quaker city off the baseball map. In parting with Alexander and Killefer, he has not only obliterated any chance the Phillies had of coming back next season, but he has given to Chicago the players who will doubtless make the Cubs the only rival of the Giants.”14
There was more behind the deal, which Baker apparently kept to himself. According to excerpts from Harry Grabiner’s diary, Baker thought Killefer and Alexander were involved with gamblers. Grabiner’s private investigator later reported, “Baker said Killefer and Alexander [were] traded after they were crooked.”15 On the day after the deal with the Cubs was announced, an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reported, “In justifying the trade, Mr. Baker said today that if one-half the things about the Philadelphia club were known to the fans, he would not be blamed for practically breaking up his team.”16 It is not difficult to piece together what Baker meant. If fans knew Alexander and Killefer were “crooked,” he would not be blamed for trading them. It’s likely that Baker, a former New York police commissioner, would have had a pretty good sense of when someone was being less than honest with him. It’s also important to note that, if Baker really did think Alexander and Killefer were crooked, he did not try to bring them to justice. Instead he simply traded them. That pattern—moving players suspected of gambling rather than exposing them—seems to have repeated itself endlessly in the 1910s.
The Original Curse Page 3
