When Game 5 finally got under way, play was snappy. Sam Jones took the mound for the Red Sox, and Mitchell trotted out Vaughn again. The Cubs whacked Jones freely, collecting seven hits and five walks, scoring three runs. They threatened constantly throughout the game, putting runners in scoring position in five of the nine innings. Boston’s hitters, meanwhile, barely touched Vaughn, and when they did, the rally was quickly scotched with a double play. Only twice did the Red Sox move a runner to second base. Three times a Red Sox rally was cut short by a double play. The Cubs won easily, 3–0.
But, remember, the Cubs had to win. The teams were still trying to gain some concession on players’ shares, and if the Red Sox had won, the commission would have no reason to give up anything.
THE ORIGINAL CURSE: SHUFFLIN’ PHIL DOUGLAS
Phil Douglas, the pitcher who threw away Game 4 for the Cubs, was an alcoholic. He had grown up in the South, and his youth was marked by three prominent features—day labor, baseball, and corn whiskey. By the time he came to the Cubs as a 25-year-old in 1915, three organizations (the White Sox, Reds, and Dodgers) had been enticed enough by Douglas’s talent to sign him, but repulsed enough by his personal habits to let him go. Douglas was prone to taking what he called “vacations,” a euphemism for benders. Even as a big-leaguer, he tended to drink away his earnings. Before the 1918 season, it was written that Douglas “lives down in Tennessee on a farm so poor that a rabbit passing through has to carry his rations.”16 Though he was a solid pitcher for the Cubs, his drinking was a problem. Manager Fred Mitchell would later say of Douglas, “There was no harm in that fellow. He didn’t fight with the boys, or burn down houses. It was just that I never knew where the hell he was, or if he was fit to work.”17
Mitchell and the Cubs finally gave up on Douglas in 1919, sending him to the master of the reclamation project, John McGraw.
McGraw treated Douglas harshly, keeping him under near-constant surveillance. But he got the most out of Douglas, who went 14–10 in 1920 and 15–10 in 1921. Douglas was 11–4 in 1922 and having his best year when he slipped away from McGraw’s operatives and went on a drinking binge. When Douglas was found, he was tossed in the West End Sanitarium, where he was forced to stay for five days. He was released in early August and, shortly thereafter—perhaps still in a posttreatment haze—Douglas wrote a letter to ex-Cubs teammate Les Mann, who had moved on to the Cardinals.
In the letter, Douglas told Mann he could not stand to pitch for McGraw anymore. If he stayed with the Giants, Douglas feared, he would help McGraw win the pennant. He didn’t want that. “So you see the fellows,” Douglas wrote to Mann, “and if you want to send a man over here with the goods, and I will leave for home on the next train, send him to my house so nobody will know, and send him at night.” At the time, the Cardinals and Giants were tied for the National League lead, and Douglas presumed that, without him, the Giants would lose the race to the Cardinals (he was, in the end, wrong on that count). Mann immediately gave the letter to his manager, Branch Rickey, who turned over the letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Landis went to the Giants’ team hotel, met with McGraw, and decided to ban Douglas from baseball. The New York Times called Douglas a “pitiful figure as he said good-bye to the other Giant players.”18 On seeing Landis, Douglas asked, plaintively, “Is this all true, Judge, that I am through with baseball?”
“Yes, Douglas, it is,” Landis said, visibly saddened.
“Do you mean that I can never play baseball again?” Douglas asked again.
“Yes, Phil, I am afraid that that is just what it means.”
Douglas is usually portrayed as a sympathetic figure who had no real intention of getting involved in a payoff scheme with Mann and the Cardinals. Rather, he is usually seen as a victim of McGraw’s tyranny and the disease of alcoholism. But McGraw certainly did not see him that way and indicated that Douglas’s crookedness went beyond the Mann letter. “We have the absolute goods on Douglas,” McGraw said. “We have the letter written in his own handwriting. We have overheard some of his telephone conversations. He admits the charge, and now he is a disgraced ball player, just as crooked as the players who threw the 1919 World’s Series.… It will be a fine thing for the sport—this exposure of another ‘shady’ player.”19
In 1952, Douglas, 30 years out of baseball and wheelchair-bound, died at age 62, after his third stroke.
SEVENTEEN
World Series, Game 6, Boston
SEPTEMBER 11, 1918
One thing that’s clear about baseball from the years up to and including the 1919 Black Sox scandal is this: it was not difficult to throw a game. Perhaps Ban Johnson could sell the public on the notion that pulling off a fix of a baseball game would be harder than drawing water from an empty well, but those in the game knew better—and, in retrospect, so do we. The actions of Hal Chase and Lee Magee show that, in 1918, setting up a fixed game was as simple as walking into a pool hall and filling out a check. It wasn’t necessary to have the whole team on board. Chase, apparently, tried to fix games on his own. And, if John McGraw was right in what he told Fred Lieb about the 1917 World Series—McGraw said that second baseman Buck Herzog “sold him out” by playing out of position—then something as simple as an infielder intentionally shading too far one way could have been enough to throw a whole World Series. A fix did not require the unified action of an entire team. One reason the Black Sox were exposed was that their attempt at a fix was audacious, indiscreet, and widely known among players throughout the league and gamblers throughout the country, so that it was only a matter of time before someone started spilling the conspiracy’s secrets. Fixes did not have to be that way.
As for the mechanics of fixing a game, they weren’t very difficult. “It’s easy,” Cicotte said in his Black Sox testimony. “Just a slight hesitation on the player’s part will let a man get on base or make a run. I did it by not putting a thing on the ball. You could have read the trade mark on it by the way I lobbed it over the plate. A baby could have hit ’em.… Then, in one of the games, the first, I think, there was a man on first and the Reds batter hit a slow grounder to me. I could have made a double play out of it without any trouble at all. But I was slow—slow enough to prevent the double play, period. It did not necessarily look crooked on my part. It is hard to tell when a game is on the square and when it is not. A player can make a crooked error that will look on the square as easy as he can make a square one. Sometimes the square ones look crooked.”1
When he was testifying about Chase in 1918, Reds manager Christy Mathewson described the methods he’d seen Chase use to throw games: “I mean such plays as momentary hesitation in handling bunts and then throwing too late to get any runner; getting his feet crossed and catching balls thrown slightly wide, thereby having to try for his catch with one hand and resulting in a muff; playing ground hits, that he could have easily got in front of with one hand, so that the opposing batter got credit for a base hit; going after balls hit almost directly at the second baseman, which compelled our pitcher to make running catches at first base of long, hard throws, frequently thrown by Chase wide of the bag, or starting in for bunts that the pitcher could easily handle, then stopping, leaving first base uncovered. In some of these games, his failure, while at bat, to either hit or bunt the ball in attempting the squeeze play or the hit-and-run play, caused me to order the discontinuance of these plays.”2
Reds outfielder Edd Roush commented that, even when Chase was trying to lose, he made it look good—when Chase was suspended for indifferent playing, his batting average didn’t look very indifferent. He was hitting .301, 12th best in the National League. (Magee, too, was batting .301.) A player could put up very good individual numbers while intentionally kicking away games. “If he wanted to win, you couldn’t throw that ball where he couldn’t come up with it,” Roush told interviewer Lawrence Ritter. “But if he didn’t want to win, he would get over to that bag, he’d always cover that bag late.… Course, he
was slick at it. Now, I hit ahead of Chase in the batting order, I hit third, he hit fourth. In a ball game he’d lose, he might have three base hits in it.”3
Chase, remember, was throwing games right under the noses of his teammates and manager. Reporters covering the Reds that year, who watched every game, sometimes expressed frustration with the team’s performance, but no accusations of crookedness were lodged until Mathewson finally suspended Chase. If Chase and the Reds could fool their beat reporters, average fans would be fooled, too. In Eight Men Out, Asinof explained that a fix could come from anywhere on the diamond: “Exploiting their own talents, bribed players learned to become adept at throwing games. A shortstop might twist his body to make a simple stop seem like a brilliant one, then make his throw a bare split second too late to get the runner. An outfielder might ‘short-leg’ a chase for a fly ball, then desperately dive for it, only to see it skid by him for extra bases. Such maneuvers were almost impossible for the baseball fan—even for the most sophisticated sportswriter—to detect.”4
None of the games in the 1918 World Series were blowouts. None featured the horrible pitching performances and long strings of flubs by fielders that would be features of the blatantly crooked 1919 World Series. A much subtler fix was possible, one that fans, sportswriters, managers, or even teammates might not recognize as it was happening—indeed, one that might not be figured out, ever.
September 11, 1918, opened with an early frost in New England and disturbing news for Bostonians—or maybe disturbing, maybe not. The city’s Board of Health announced fears of a Spanish flu epidemic by direly warning that citizens should restrict such routine behaviors as spitting, riding in elevators, or sharing a drinking cup. Up on Corey Hill, the tent camp housing the sick was growing. But while acknowledgment of the presence of a serious and spreading sickness should have been cause for alarm, there was a nothing-to-see-here feel to the way that authorities were handling the Spanish flu reports. A doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital said there had not been an unusual number of cases of flu combined with suffocating pneumonia, the hallmark of the Spanish flu. The head of the local naval district said there were only about 160 cases, and “He is of the opinion that it’s just plain grippe, without any fancy Spanish influenza trimmings.”5
He was wrong.
For the members of baseball’s National Commission the day opened in Boston with nasty hangovers, but, in a happy change for Johnson, Heydler, and Herrmann, it did not open with further harassment from the committee of players seeking to wring more money out of their World Series shares. The players had given up on the commission. Instead, the player committee (now represented by Harry Hooper and Carl Mays for the Red Sox, Bill Killefer and Les Mann for the Cubs) met with more reasonable power brokers—their team owners. Both Charley Weeghman and Harry Frazee assured the players that the teams would try to find a way to increase their compensation, either by petitioning the other owners or by having the teams themselves fill in the monetary shortfall as much as possible. It’s likely that the players took these vague promises with due grains of salt. But it was, at least, something.
It was still chilly by 2:00 P.M., 30 minutes before the start of Game 6. The crowd, anxious about whether the game would start or be called off by another player strike, was relieved to see both teams on the field in uniform. Not that there were many present. The cold, combined with the general disenchantment over the ugliness that had delayed Game 5, further depressed attendance. Only 15,238 showed for Game 6, the smallest World Series crowd since 1909. The public wanted to hurry the 1918 baseball season to its end, and, it seemed, so did the players. During warm-ups, according to the Chicago Herald Examiner, “The Red Sox took a horrible chance. They posed for a picture as champions of the world half an hour before play started.… Money worries and strike problems have escaped athletes to forget their natural superstitions. It must be due to the war.”6 Thus the Red Sox virtually declared themselves champions while the World Series was still in play. The gambling fraternity was not so sure—the Boston American claimed that, even with a lead in the Series, odds of only ten to eight or ten to nine were being given on Boston.7
The Red Sox had Carl Mays, whose underhanded pitches had been so baffling for the Cubs in Game 3, on the mound for Game 6. Chicago countered, of course, with a left-hander—Lefty Tyler, going on one day’s rest. Mays appeared to be in good form from the beginning. He usually had trouble only when his submarine shoots got too high in the strike zone, and on this day he was keeping his pitches low. Mays set down the first five Cubs hitters in order when, with two out in the second inning, Charley Pick looped a single off the inner part of his bat handle. Before Mays threw another pitch, though, he looked over at Pick at first, wheeled around, and flung the ball to McInnis. Pick was picked off easily.
Tyler was shaky to start. He retired Hooper and Dave Shean, but when Amos Strunk floated a fly ball to shallow left field, Charley Hollocher ran out from shortstop, bobbled the ball, and dropped it. Strunk was awarded a hit. But Tyler escaped damage when George Whiteman followed with a long fly to Dode Paskert. In the second, Tyler again retired the first two batters but walked Fred Thomas. Wally Schang hit a grounder to Hollocher, who fielded it and paused before flipping the ball to Pick at second base. Thomas was safe, and Hollocher would have been charged an error, except that Thomas overslid the bag, and Pick tagged him out. Tyler had gotten by without giving up a run, but the defense behind him was not inspiring much confidence.
That defense finally broke down in the third inning. Tyler walked Mays on four pitches, and Hooper moved Mays to second base with a sacrifice. Tyler walked Shean, and both Shean and Mays moved up on Strunk’s ground out. With two outs and runners on second and third, Whiteman came to bat. He sent a line drive to right field, and Tyler, sure he had escaped the jam, began walking to the dugout. But, as the New York Times reported: “Flack came running in to make an easy catch. He caught up to the rapidly descending ball and had it entirely surrounded by his hands. Tyler was offering thanksgiving for crawling out of a bad hole when the ball squeezed its way through Flack’s buttered digits. As the ball spilled in a puddle at Flack’s feet, both Mays and Shean were well along their way home before Flack’s alarm clock went off and woke him up.”8 In the Tribune, I. E. Sanborn thought, perhaps, Flack had an excuse: “Max muffed it squarely, with only the fact that he was on the run and the sun was in his eyes to excuse him.”9 To the Boston American, Flack seemed distraught: “It was a fearful muff and broke Flack’s stout heart, but it just naturally happened.”10
The Red Sox led, 2–0, but in the top of the fourth inning Flack almost single-handedly cut the lead in half. He drove a single to right field and moved up on a ground out by Hollocher. Mann was hit by a pitch but was picked off by catcher Wally Schang. As Mays was walking Paskert, Flack broke for third and stole the base safely. Fred Merkle followed with a single, scoring Flack and putting the score at 2–1, Red Sox. Tyler continued to struggle with wildness, and the Cubs defense continued to look unsteady. In the fourth, the Red Sox beat out two infield hits, and Tyler walked another batter, but again, Tyler avoided damage thanks to nice plays from his infielders. At the plate the Cubs did not even dent Mays. He did not allow a hit in the fifth, sixth, or seventh innings. In fact, as Mays zipped through the entire Chicago lineup, not one Cub knocked a ball out of the infield in any of those three innings—of the nine outs made, five came on harmless taps back to Mays.
That changed in the eighth, when Fred Mitchell made a last desperate attempt to salvage the Series. He pulled Deal for pinch hitter Turner Barber. Mays swooped into his delivery and sent a pitch down around Barber’s knees. Barber reached down and clubbed the pitch into left field. “Whiteman,” the Hartford Courant reported, “before the series hardly known to baseball fame, rushed in with the ball dropping faster and faster, grabbed the sphere below his ankles and took a clean somersault, the great momentum rolling him up on his feet again. He staggered dizzily, but with great elation,
slammed the ball to Scott and the ball went flying around the infield as an expression of the joy of the Sox in such a remarkable catch.”11 The fans roared. Whiteman’s teammates went out to see if he was hurt. He waved them off at first, but after the next out was made Whiteman came off the field with an injured neck. Ruth took his place in left field. Yes, that’s right—Babe Ruth was a pinch fielder for George Whiteman.
The catch capped the brief brush with glory for Whiteman, the slightly paunchy, 35-year-old Barrow purchasee. Whiteman hadn’t done much of note during the season. He hadn’t done much of note throughout his career, spent mostly in the minors. He had been called up to the Red Sox in 1907 with Tris Speaker, but while Speaker went on to become a Hall of Famer, Whiteman played just four games and went back to the minors. He resurfaced in 1913, at age 30, when he played 13 games with the Yankees. Now the catch on Barber’s liner sealed Whiteman’s status as World Series hero. He hit .250, with a .348 on-base percentage, scored two runs, knocked in another, and, in Game 6, hit the liner that was muffed by Flack for two Red Sox runs. “He was the active principal in all four of the Red Sox victories,” Hugh Fullerton wrote, “got on base more times and in more ways than any other player; made the decisive plays and [in Game 6] he capped the climax.”12 All of this was fitting. Not only did Whiteman’s performance shred Mitchell’s plan to limit Ruth’s impact on the Series, but, as one Cub said, “[Whiteman] wouldn’t even be in the league but for the war.”13 The baseball season had been dominated by war, and here the star of the World Series was a player whose very presence in the big leagues was owed entirely to the fact that the war had drained the Red Sox of all other options.
The Original Curse Page 23
