The Original Curse
Page 6
“That’s enough of that,” Barrow announced.
Ruth shrugged, turned, and walked back to the dugout. He smiled at Barrow and belched vigorously.
Sunday
Back in Hot Springs. Scrimmage against Brooklyn. Carl Mays—sneering, Mays was always sneering—on the pitching mound, getting ready to throw to Zack Wheat at bat. Barrow leaned in to watch.
“No hooks, Mays,” Barrow said loudly. “Save that arm.”
Mays nodded. Barrow glanced beyond the fence, out to Baptist Hill and beyond, where the Ozarks wrinkled the horizon. Ruth was in right field. Barrow had done some pitching when he was a young man back in Des Moines, and he knew the value of a pitcher. Ruth would remain a pitcher. But Barrow stuck him in the outfield because the Red Sox were so short on material and Harry Hooper had been suggesting getting Ruth into the lineup. Now Barrow had his eye on Ruth, just to see how the kid looked. Not good. He could hardly keep still, fidgeting, bouncing, examining curiosities in the grass. Look at him out there. He’s bored. He’s a pitcher; he needs the everypitch action. But he sure did whack that grand slam back in the third inning. Cleared the fence by, what, 200 feet? Into the alligator pond past the right-field fence.4
After Ruth hit the grand slam, Dan Howley, Barrow’s pitching coach, turned and said, “Never saw one quite like that.”5 Neither had Barrow.
Ed turned back to the mound. Mays was rocking into his submarine delivery. Ed could see Mays’s grip on the ball. Sonovabitch! Barrow’s face flushed. Mays was throwing a curve. “Mays, you bastard!” Barrow shouted. “I said no hooks!”6
Monday
Finally, Leonard was throwing. Ed had been working with six pitchers—just six!—and he needed all the boxmen he could get. Dutch looked to be in good form, tossing for 30 minutes. Coming off the mound, Leonard approached Barrow, wearing that irritating crooked smile. Barrow needed Leonard. He needed pitching. Leonard did not need Barrow. He was said to be making a killing in raisin farming. This annoyed Barrow. In his younger days, Barrow would have knocked Leonard’s smile clear to Little Rock.
“So, when is the Duke coming back?” Leonard asked.
“What Duke?” Barrow said.
“The big gun, the head gizzazzer,” Leonard said. Barrow stared blankly.
“Frazee.” Leonard continued, “You know, we are close, me and him. He and I are just like that,” holding up two crossed fingers. He then reached down and cupped his crotch. “Yup, me and Frazee are closer than my raisins are packed.”7
Barrow did not like this Dutch Leonard.
Tuesday
Discipline was Ed’s strength. And so there were rules that spring. No wives. No poker wagers bigger than 10 cents, and all games were to end by 11:00 P.M. Wake-up call: 8:30, and no one was to be in the breakfast room past 9:30. The team would practice straight through the afternoon, with no lunch. It was two miles between the hotel and the stadium. Players were required to walk or run the two miles each day.8
Ed was clear on the rules.
Barrow himself was huffing and sweating his way to Majestic Park this morning. A few yards from the entrance he heard applause, followed by a shout from a taxi: “Hey, Ed, you are good for a few more blocks!” He turned and looked, and there they were—what looked like half his players, stuffed into a cab, hooting at him. So much for the required two-mile walk. Ed’s neck burned, and his face reddened.9
Of the 16 major-league teams limbering up for the ’18 season, only the Cubs traveled all the way to California for spring training, and that was mainly because stockholder William Wrigley owned land near Pasadena. In deference to the war, spring training was limited to 30 days, and though no one went quite as far as the Cubs, other teams traveled long distances to hold their camps. Four teams were in Florida. Four others were in Texas. Two were in Louisiana, two were in Georgia, and one was in Alabama. The Red Sox and Dodgers were both in Hot Springs, arguably the birthplace of spring training. As the story goes, the 1886 White Stockings (who later became the Cubs) stopped there on their way back to Chicago after a winter of barnstorming and found the area’s mineral baths useful for melting flab and sobering up. Spring training at the time was similar to modern spring ball—teams brought large groups of players, many of whom had no chance to make the club, for weeks of workouts. They played exhibition games against minor-league teams, against nearby big-league teams, or against their own teammates.
But railroad travel had been restricted because of the war, and the Red Sox took a skeleton crew on their 1918 trip. Barrow was short on players, especially pitchers. That limited his opportunities to have regulars vs. Yannigans games, a problem for Barrow (and all big-league managers) throughout the spring. Another issue was that, though he was strong on discipline, Barrow had never been much of a field manager. The team brought in Evers, after firing the popular Heinie Wagner, to help Barrow with his bench coaching and to play some second base. Nicknamed “the Crab,” Evers was baseball’s top “goat-getter,” a role defined by The Sporting News as “loud-mouthed persons who, in uniforms, sit on the benches and attempt to ‘ride’ the enemy with foul abuse of a personal nature … [using] alleged wit and humor of the coarsest kind.”10 Evers, it turned out, also liked getting the goats of his teammates and would soon be let go because he was too sharp-tongued and combative for Red Sox players.
Barrow had other serious problems to solve, especially difficult for a new manager with a limited knowledge of the day-to-day workings of a big-league team. The Red Sox were an almost entirely new mix, with Scott and Hooper the only everyday players returning from the ’17 team. Converting McInnis into a third baseman was a top priority. Left field was the other major question. Boston had signed George Whiteman, but he was out of his league. Barrow, testing all of his options, even tried catcher Wally Schang at third and in the outfield. Asked, at one point, what ground he was covering, Schang shrugged and replied, “Siberia, I guess.”11
Barrow wanted to put his mark on the team with toughness and discipline. About the Red Sox’s first practice on March 13, the Boston Post reported, “It is evident that the men are a little in awe of their new boss.”12 But for all Barrow’s focus on discipline—he had a notoriously quick trigger when it came to fining players—these were still ballplayers, and they were going to have typical ballplayer entertainment. Throughout the spring, the Red Sox bolted from practice as quickly as possible in order to get to the horse races at Oaklawn (Barrow often went too). They hung out at the vaudeville shows in Hot Springs’ Calamity Alley. The players were not so awed by Barrow that they could not poke fun at him, either defying him by hiring a car to the park instead of jogging or by nudging his short temper. Pitcher Sam Jones, speaking years later to Lawrence Ritter in The Glory of Their Times, recalled an exchange with Barrow during 1918. Having pitched the day before, Jones was playing checkers in the clubhouse when the batboy told Jones that Barrow wanted him outside for a photo. Jones ignored the request and, as he told Ritter:
“In comes Mr. Barrow himself. As you might know, he was a pretty rough talker. Huge man, with these fantastic bushy eyebrows. They always fascinated me. Couldn’t take my eyes off them. Well, he gave me a good going over for sitting in the clubhouse playing checkers when he’d asked for me outside….
“‘This newspaper photographer came all the way from Providence to take your picture,’ he says.
“‘Is that so?’ I said. ‘Well, he can go all the way back to Providence without it.’
“Oh, did that get him! … I thought he was going to take a sock at me. He’d been known to do that on occasion, you know. ‘This will cost you $100,’ he shouts. His face was so red he could hardly talk. And you should have seen those eyebrows!
“‘Make it $200,’ I said, still sitting there.
“‘It’s $200 all right.’
“‘Make it $300,’ I said, ‘and then go straight to hell.’
“‘It’s $300,’ he roars, and slams the door.
“Finally, I went out on the field an
d the photographer posed me and Mr. Barrow together. Arms around each other’s shoulders, both smiling, best friends ever. But as soon as the shutter clicked we both walked real fast in opposite directions.”13
More than Barrow’s temper, though, Boston’s spring foreshadowed what 1918 would become: the Babe Ruth Show. Ruth was a popular left-handed pitcher who had gone 47–25 in the previous two seasons. He was immature on and off the field. He had received a 10-game suspension for punching umpire Brick Owens the previous year and in 1916 missed two weeks with a broken toe suffered when he kicked the bench in anger after an intentional walk. He had well-known appetites for food, drink, and women, but there was an appealing innocence about him. Hooper described him as “a big, overgrown green pea.”14 After four years as a pitcher in the majors, Ruth had just nine career home runs, but his swing-for-the-fences approach was unique. He tried for a home run every at bat. That just wasn’t how things were done. The focus of hitters was on making contact, not busting home runs. The fact that Ruth was a pitcher early in his career probably enabled him to become a power hitter later—had he been an everyday player, some manager surely would have forced him to cut down his swing and focus on contact.
Ruth’s spring success with the bat made an impression—with Barrow, with Hooper, and, most important, with Ruth himself. He was a pitcher, but he liked hitting. His home runs riled the fans. In the Red Sox’s 14 games with Brooklyn that spring, Ruth hit .429 with four homers in 21 at bats. No other Red Sox player hit more than one home run. The Globe’s Edward Martin described the home run Ruth hit on March 24: “The ball not only cleared the right field wall, but stayed up, soaring over the street and a wide duck pond, finally finding a resting place for itself in a nook of the Ozark hills.”
Ruth joked, “I would have liked to have got a better hold on that one.”15
On April 3, the Cubs arrived in Bakersfield, California, from Fresno, prepared to wrap up 17 days of training on the West Coast and begin the trek back to the Midwest. It hadn’t been a good trip. Mitchell was having the same trouble in California that Barrow was having in Arkansas. Conditions were bad, and not enough players were on hand. A weeklong holdout by Grover Cleveland Alexander hadn’t helped. Now there was one last game before the team would begin heading east, a trip that promised to be a slow crawl, because the Cubs were scheduled for a packed slate of games against minor-leaguers throughout the Southwest. The final game before they left California was in Taft, 46 miles west of Bakersfield, and—this was fitting, given the Cubs’ spring travel woes—the only way to get to Taft was by stagecoach. This helps explain why, over the course of the California mis-adventure, the Cubs called themselves “Weeghman’s trained seals.”16
Still, the Taft game drew 3,000 fans. Before it started, a band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a practice that was becoming more common during the war. Most of the Cubs were not quite sure what to do. Outfielder Les Mann, who had served in a quasi-military position in the off-season, training soldiers for the YMCA at Camp Logan in Houston, instructed them—take off your caps, put them over your hearts, face the band, and, for Pete’s sake, shut up!
Miserable travel conditions notwithstanding, there were some positive aspects to the Cubs’ stint in California. Already, it appeared that 21-year-old shortstop Charley Hollocher—who stood just five-foot-seven and weighed about 150 pounds—would make good. Hollocher showed terrific bat control and plate discipline, nearly impossible to strike out. He was also quick, with good footwork in the field. This was a relief for Mitchell, who worried about his infield. The Sporting News wrote, “Too much boosting has been the handicap that many a likely youngster coming up to the majors has found his undoing, but Charley Hollocher, the new shortstop of the Chicago Cubs, gamely faces the barrier and believes he can make the jump, however high the bar has been set…. He is a mite of a fellow physically, but bold with the bat and shifty as a rabbit in the field.”17 In the course of spring training alone, the Daily News ran two feature stories on Hollocher and his St. Louis background. By the second week in April, James Crusinberry wrote that it was “Little Charley Hollocher, the boy shortstop of the Cubs, upon whom hinges the success or failure for the Chicago team this year.”18
Another travel problem struck the Cubs on their way back to Chicago. On April 4, they were late leaving California on their way to Deming, New Mexico, and were delayed further when their train died because the engine ran out of water outside Yuma, Arizona. By the time they finally got to Deming, near the Mexican border, they still had to head about 40 miles north to the copper mine at Santa Rita (a town so small it no longer exists) in cars. The ride took two hours. According to the Daily News, “Traveling Secretary John Seys has a few more gray hairs trying to get the club to its destination.”19 Once in Santa Rita, the Cubs were slated to play the mining company team, headed by former journeyman pitcher “Sleepy” Bill Burns. Because the Cubs arrived late, they could not get back to Deming and spent the night at the mining companies’ dormitories. It wasn’t all bad. Burns was pleased to be among big-league friends. The Cubs “were given an excellent wild turkey dinner, at which Bill Burns … was the host. Burns killed the birds himself.”20
Let’s pause to remember exactly who Bill Burns would become—one of the central characters in the World Series scandal that turned the 1919 White Sox into the Black Sox. Burns and his partner, Billy Maharg, helped orchestrate the plot to throw the series and attempted to have the venture backed by gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein. After Rothstein ostensibly turned him down, Burns was approached by Rothstein’s right-hand man, ex-boxer Abe Attell, who promised he’d get Rothstein to finance the fix after all. Burns and the Sox players proceeded with the scam. When the grand jury began investigating the 1919 World Series, Burns turned state’s evidence.
But here was Burns, 18 months ahead of the Black Sox plot, hosting dinner for one of the favorites to represent the National League in the 1918 World Series. That’s no crime, of course, but there are Burns-related dots that are interesting to connect. In an interview given to Eight Men Out author Eliot Asinof, Abe Attell pointed out that Burns was no stranger to fixes. Before Game 3 of the 1919 World Series, Attell said he was visited by Burns, who warned him about Dickie Kerr, that day’s starting pitcher. Kerr was not part of the Black Sox fix. Here’s what Attell (who, it should be noted, had only a loose association with the truth) said Burns advised when it came to betting against Kerr: “I’m an old-time ballplayer and we’ve been behind pitchers and tried to lose a game and he pitched such a good game, the players couldn’t toss it off.”21
Burns himself claimed to have bet heavily against Kerr and lost. Either way, we can assume Burns had been involved in game fixing during his career. And we know he played with several members of the Cubs, including Alexander and Bill Killefer in Philadelphia in 1911. Those two were dubbed “crooked” by Phillies owner William Baker, according to Grabiner’s diary, and were sold because of it. (Maharg, too, had connections here. It appears he was sort of an honorary Phillie. In 1916, at age 35, he played one game for the Phillies and was photographed as the team’s assistant trainer.22) Burns played with Cubs coach Otto Knabe in Philadelphia, too, and according to Grabiner’s diary Knabe was no stranger to baseball gambling either.
All of this is not to say that the Cubs and Burns sat down to plot a throwing of the 1918 World Series then and there, while chomping on drumsticks and white meat. But it’s a lot of dots. Gamblers were never far from players. If some Cubs got a notion to dabble in game fixing, it would not be hard to find those who could make it profitable.
After the interlude with Burns’s turkeys, the Cubs continued their crawl back to the Midwest. Opening Day in St. Louis, on April 16, was the ultimate destination. Each stop was punctuated by games played at war camps before crowds of soldiers in drab uniforms—the “Khaki League” tour. They faced Burns’s Santa Rita team at Camp Cody in Deming, and, before the game, the Cubs watched a group of about 20,000 soldiers perform in a
review parade. Then it was off to Houston on April 9, to play the Texas League’s Buffaloes for the benefit of the Camp Logan soldiers, and to Waco, to play the Navigators at Camp MacArthur. The Cubs were in Dallas on the 11th and began their journey north from there.
As spring training wound down, there was added poignancy to the presence of soldiers. In March, German forces began a major offensive on the Western Front, and, rather quickly, the war turned in the Germans’ favor. Leaders in Britain and France wanted more American troops, and the United States would pluck those troops out of the crowds of boys at the Khaki League games. They could be cheering stars like Alexander now and be headed for the front a week later. And it could work both ways. Stars like Alexander could be in a baseball uniform now and be in a khaki uniform a week later.
THE ORIGINAL CURSE: BILL KILLEFER, OTTO KNABE, AND JOHN O. SEYS
Given their geographic proximity to the White Sox, maybe it should not be astonishing that so many Cubs were sucked into the orbit of the 1919 World Series scandal. According to Harry Grabiner’s diary, “Knabe who intended betting on the White Sox was told by catcher Killefer (of Cubs) to lay off as the White Sox had been gotten to. Rumors are that games were thrown during 1919 season by … Hendrix, Killefer, Cubs.”23 That means, at least according to rumors of the day, that Killefer and Knabe were aware of the fix. And that Killefer may have been up to no good himself.
Cubs secretary John O. Seys—who had such a rough go of things getting the team to California and back in the spring of 1918—certainly was aware of the fix. In July 1921, he was called to testify about his involvement with bets placed on the 1919 World Series. Seys said he met up with Attell in Cincinnati, and, “He told me he was betting on Cincinnati. That was on the first day of the series. [Gambler] Louis Levi was with Attell. He was betting on [Cincinnati]. As we went down an elevator in one building, Attell bet $600 to $500 Cincinnati would win the first game, the second game and the series. I held the stakes.”24