by Troy Soos
The weedy plot of land was littered with broken bottles, bricks served as bases, home plate was a mud puddle, and they were playing with only four boys on a team. But they were clearly having great fun, and their mud-spattered legs testified that it was a high-scoring game.
“Starting to look like soon that might be the only baseball left,” I said.
“Be just as well,” said Jackson. “As long as kids are still playing the game, it’ll go on just fine.”
As I watched the boys scampering with abandon around the base paths, I concluded that Joe Jackson was right. This was baseball, and there will always be baseball whether or not it’s played by major leaguers. People don’t have to pay to watch it, and it doesn’t have to be played by men getting paid to do so. As long as there’s a bunch of kids, a long round piece of wood, and something that passes for a ball, there will be baseball.
“Hey Joe,” I said, “Why don’t you show them how it’s done? Give ’em a thrill.”
He smiled mischievously. “Now that you mention it, I reckon I could do with a little batting practice.”
When the boys found out that Shoeless Joe Jackson was going to hit them a few, they happily broke up their game. So would most major-leaguers, I expected.
Jackson, in a pearl gray silk vest and white starched shirt, stepped up to the mud puddle gripping the heavily taped handle of their little bat. I held his hat and coat and was proud to do so. The biggest boy of the group started pitching to him, and Jackson lifted easy fly balls to the rest of the kids, who clustered at the furthest end of the lot.
Even holding himself back, there was magic to the way Joe Jackson could hit a baseball. He was unique. A perfect swing, no extra movements, smooth and graceful with an explosion when the bat contacted the ball.
Maybe Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth shouldn’t ever be sent to war. They were national treasures. Irreplaceable.
Then I remembered my neighbor, Mrs. Tobin. Her son Harold was as much a treasure to her as Joe Jackson was to these boys. Was it fair for Harold to face death in the trenches while other men were exempted because of their ability to hit a baseball? A pang in my gut answered no.
Jackson called an end to the exhibition with one last shot, a long towering drive that would have been a homer to dead center in the Polo Grounds.
The boys scrambled to retrieve it while Jackson brushed himself off and donned his coat and hat. Before we could leave, they came back to mob him and pepper him with questions. Jackson was trying to make a graceful good-bye when the boy who recovered the ball ran up breathlessly. He rubbed the dirty baseball on his shirt to clean it off and panted, “Would you sign it, Joe?”
“Sorry, son,” he said, “I ain’t got a pen.”
“I’ll get one!” the boy volunteered. He ran into the warehouse and came back with a pencil. He handed the ball and pencil to Jackson.
“Well,” he hesitated, “I’ll sign it if Mickey here will sign it, too. Mickey Rawlings—he plays for the Cubs.”
The boy agreed. He didn’t mind having his ball messed up with my signature in order to get Joe Jackson’s.
Jackson held up the ball and flourished the pencil, then handed it to me. “Sign it right below mine,” he said.
I looked at the ball. There was nothing on it. Then I remembered: Joe Jackson couldn’t read or write enough to sign his own name. I quickly scribbled Joe Jackson, then wrote my own name in smaller letters below.
The boys ran away to show their prize to the rest of the neighborhood kids.
“Better head back,” Jackson said. “Gotta catch a train for Wilmington.”
Retracing our route, I came to the reason I wanted to talk to him in the first place. “You know Comiskey pretty well,” I said.
“Better than I’d like to.”
“There’s been some accidents... and things... happening at Cubs Park. Weeghman thinks somebody’s trying to put him out of business. You think Charlie Comiskey could be behind something like that?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised by nothing Comiskey did,” he promptly answered. “You know what he’s been saying about me in the papers?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen.”
“I thought I was doing what I was supposed to. I work six days a week for the Harlan and Hollingsworth Shipbuilding Company, and on Sundays I play benefit games or do appearances like today. And he says I’m a slacker, says he’s not letting me back on the Sox.”
I decided to let Jackson in on what Weeghman had told me. “It’s just negotiating, Joe. Comiskey figures he can get you back for less money that way.”
“Damn skinflint.” He sounded disgusted.
“You know, sometimes I think baseball would be a better game if you didn’t make money at it.”
“I don’t. I play for Comiskey.”
“He does. That’s the problem. Him and Weeghman and the other owners.”
We walked in silence back to Jackson’s hotel. By the time we got there, I had an idea. “Why not work in Chicago?” I asked. “Bennett Harrington’s got these munitions plants. He’d give you a job. You could keep playing for the Sox that way. And Comiskey would have to get off your back.”
“Harrington? No.”
“You could—”
“No. I wouldn’t work for Bennett Harrington. No way.” Jackson clamped his lips like Edna.
I tried to go back a step. “So about Comiskey—”
“Like I said,” Jackson snapped, “nothing he did would surprise me.” That was the last he would say on the matter.
Chapter Thirteen
Trains are good for thinking. Even on a brief journey, like the one we were taking now from Philadelphia to New York. Maybe better on a short trip—long ones tended to lull me into a stupor. Since I didn’t play cards and couldn’t read on a train without feeling queasy, sleep and contemplation were the only activities left for me to pursue.
I was becoming confident that I might finally be on the right track about who could be after Charles Weeghman. The idea was to see who would benefit if he lost his baseball team.
And then I realized that the same logic could be applied to a subject of far more importance to me than Weeghman’s business: Willie Kaiser’s murder.
I’d been looking at it almost solely from the angle that somebody might have something against him, either personally or because of his heritage. But there are more motives for murder than revenge or anger or prejudice. Greed, for example. Did anyone benefit from Willie’s death?
At first, the answer seemed an obvious no. There was one person, though, who came out ahead because of it: Wicket Greene. He inherited Willie’s job at shortstop.
Greene’s gain was the Cubs’ loss. He simply could not play a ground ball cleanly. He made a fielding error in each of the four games with Philadelphia and, as a bonus, two throwing errors in the final contest; his bad throws cost us the game and left us with a split of the series.
The question was: Did Wicket Greene want to start so badly that he killed Willie Kaiser? The notion seemed farfetched, but I couldn’t dismiss it entirely.
Wally Dillard returned from the club car with a soda pop and interrupted my daydreaming. “Hey, Mickey!” he said excitedly. “The guys are setting up a poker game, and Hippo Vaughn says they’ll let me play!”
I stifled a laugh. I also stifled the urge to warn him about getting into card games—telling him not to play would only make it more appealing.
“That’s great,” I said. “How much money you got on you?”
“Twenty-eight dollars.... Why?”
“Let’s see.”
He pulled out a roll of bills. I took it from him, peeled off a ten, and handed the rest back to him. I stuck the ten in my vest pocket. “I’ll keep this so you won’t be completely broke when we get to New York.”
“What if I win?”
I couldn’t hold back the laugh this time. Rookies.
He went off to join Hippo and the others. Hippo... Maybe an animal nickname. Wally Dillar
d didn’t have the bulk to be “Hippo” of course. Rabbit? No, Rabbit Maranville had that one taken. Possum... Muskrat... Doggie. Doggie Dillard. That had a ring to it.
Having solved that problem, at least temporarily, I went back to mulling over Willie’s murder. I’d been working under the assumption that his death and the sabotage at Cubs Park were unrelated because they seemed so different. Again, I’d been thinking the wrong way. I should have been looking for similarities.
It didn’t take long until I found one. A possibility, anyway.
There might have been sabotage that Weeghman wasn’t aware of and that I hadn’t caught onto either. Until now. When I told Weeghman there hadn’t been any additional incidents, he’d said “not yet.” I now revised that to “not that we knew of.”
Wally Dillard came back to his seat before we were halfway through New Jersey.
“How’d you do?” I asked, though I could see the answer in his face.
“Pretty much broke even,” he said with a taut smile. I never heard a card player yet admit that he did any worse than break even. After a couple of minutes, Dillard added, “Uh, I can use that ten back.”
I forked it over and he quickly changed the subject. “Can’t wait to play in Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds,” he said.
I couldn’t either. Because when we did, I’d be keeping an eye on Wicket Greene.
I love being booed. Well, I don’t love it exactly, but it’s a hell of a lot better than being ignored. There’s nothing worse than being announced to the crowd and hearing dead silence in response.
That wasn’t a problem for me in the Polo Grounds. After playing three years for John McGraw’s Giants, I was sure to be jeered every time I returned to the park in an enemy uniform. Especially this year, as a member of the Cubs, when there was so much publicity about it being the tenth anniversary of the 1908 pennant race between the two clubs.
Fred Merkle didn’t feel the same as I did about being heckled. But then, the taunts thrown at him were downright vicious. And why? Because ten years before, as a rookie with the Giants, he’d made a base running mistake in a critical game of that fabled pennant race. Some claimed his blunder had cost New York the pennant, and Fred Merkle became known thereafter as Bonehead Merkle.
The chants of “Bonehead! Bonehead!” rocked the Polo Grounds when Merkle took his position at first base for infield practice. I wanted to go over and say something to him—“Don’t let it get to you” or “You’ll show’em.” Merkle’s face was steeled, though; he was pretending not to hear the crowd. I decided it would be kinder to let him maintain the pretense.
As an added attraction for the final game of our road trip, Fred Toney and Hippo Vaughn would finally face each other in the rematch that Willie Kaiser’s death had postponed.
When Fred Toney came out to pitch for the Giants, he was cheered by the fans. It was his first appearance for New York, having been recently acquired from Cincinnati. The Reds were eager to deal Toney away because he had become too much of an embarrassment for them. First, he was arrested for draft evasion—he’d exaggerated the number of his dependents in order to be granted an exemption. Then, he was indicted for violating the Mann Act, the white slavery law (the newspapers referred to his transgression as “traveling with a woman not his wife”). When Cincinnati made Fred Toney available, New York didn’t hesitate to add him to their pitching staff. It would take more than an immoral draft-dodger to embarrass John McGraw.
It bothered me, though. I couldn’t get over the unfairness of Toney being cheered and Fred Merkle ridiculed.
As the innings rolled on, my thoughts were barely on the game. I was thinking that baseball has a cruel side. Despite the illusion that a ballpark is its own little world, it really is not a sanctuary. The baser aspects of human behavior can manifest themselves as easily at a ballgame as they can anywhere else. People just naturally have a mean streak in them, and baseball is one more avenue for them to vent that meanness. Whether it’s in the name of nationalism or team spirit, label the fellow in the other uniform “the enemy” and then you have free license to make his life hell.
Hippo Vaughn ended up outpitching Fred Toney to take the contest 6–3. I paid enough attention to playing the game to pick up one single in four at bats. Wicket Greene set a record for wildest overthrow by a shortstop in a National League park.
And Fred Merkle was the star of the game. He went three-for-four, including two doubles and four runs batted in. He also stole two bases.
Sometimes there is justice. And I felt better being reminded of that fact.
The time was somewhere between late Saturday night and early Sunday morning. The Cubs team was somewhere between Pennsylvania and Indiana. I was between the sheets of my berth, a lower berth, in the Pullman sleeper car.
The rhythmic rocking of the train failed to rock me to sleep. I was reviewing everything that had happened over the ten-day road trip.
Some of it was fun. Brooklyn, for example. Between games of a three-game sweep of the Dodgers, I’d taken Wally Dillard—he’d declined the “Doggie” moniker—to Coney Island and a number of the borough’s other attractions. I even gave him a tour of the Vitagraph Motion Picture studios, where I’d once made a few movies. Dillard took to big-city life the same way Willie had on his first visit.
Beating the Giants two out of three in the Polo Grounds was fun, too, and it left us with a full three-game lead over New York in the standings.
And of course there was the thrill of meeting Joe Jackson in Philadelphia.
There were also some frustrations. Neither the Brooklyn nor the New York City libraries carried the Spalding Baseball Guides, which caused me to question what good was a library like that. It wasn’t until the last day of the trip that I was able to look up the records I wanted. To get them, I visited Karl Landfors’s old employer, the New York Press. Their sportswriter, Fred Lieb, let me use his back issues of the Guides, and I was able to obtain all the information I needed.
On the national and international fronts, events of the past week and a half were bewildering.
Some was encouraging: Secretary of War Baker gave baseball an extension until Labor Day and would allow the World Series to be played immediately thereafter. Only one month of the season would be lost.
Some was frightening: a German U-boat fired on Cape Cod, sinking two tugboats. The attack made me want to run out and enlist. My country was under attack, and I would defend it. The war wasn’t just “over there” anymore.
Some was disheartening: in Detroit, a man named William Powell was sentenced to twenty years in prison under the Sedition Act; his crime was that he had said he thought some of the stories of German atrocities might have been exaggerated, like the one about German planes dropping poisoned candy onto French streets in order to kill off France’s children. It saddened me that my country could do such a thing to one of its citizens.
I’d concluded several things by the time the Cubs boarded the train to go back home. One was that I would no longer read any part of a newspaper except the sports page. Another was that no human being could make as many errors as Wicket Greene had this season unless they were intentional.
And I was starting to have an idea of who killed Willie Kaiser and why. The question that remained for me was: Who else was in on it?
Chapter Fourteen
I was tired and cranky by the time we arrived in Chicago and more than half-tempted to take a taxicab home from Grand Central Station. Going along with the war-time austerity program, I resisted the temptation and opted for the El with a transfer to a Lincoln Avenue street car.
From Lincoln, I trudged on foot to my house, with a satchel in one hand and a small suitcase in the other. It was a dry, hot summer morning; I was soon tired, cranky, and thirsty. My shoes kicked up little dust clouds that floated up and danced on shimmering waves of simmering air. I began to visualize a tall frosty glass of ginger ale. Then I figured since it was only imagination I might as well go all the way, and I c
hanged the object of my fantasizing to an enormous glass of beer, dark amber with a thick head of foam.
As I turned from Herndon Street onto Wolfram, I spotted Mrs. Tobin on her front porch knitting away at the piles of yam. I hoped to get by with only a quick greeting and go into my house. I liked coming home from road trips and had a regular routine: check the mail, dump the dirty laundry from my bags, and sprawl out in the comfort of my own place with something cold to drink.
Not to be. Mrs. Tobin halted me by crying, “Mickey! I have something for you!”
Leaving my luggage to fry on the sidewalk, I approached her porch with as big a smile as I could muster. “That’s a fine-looking sweater, Mrs. Tobin. If they give a medal for best-dressed soldier, Harold will win it easy.”
With a beaming smile, she said, “Well, so long as he’s warm is all I care about.” She paused from her knitting to point one of the needles at a wooden crate on the other end of the porch. It was the size of a block of ice. “That come for you.”
After the minimum number of words necessary to be polite, I said good-bye and lugged the heavy crate home and into my parlor. I had no idea what was inside but was tremendously excited by the prospect. This was even better than mail! Before retrieving my bags from the sidewalk, I got a hammer from a cupboard and pried off the loosest-looking board. Inside the box, neatly lined up with their spines facing me, were Willie Kaiser’s Mark Twain books.
There was no note, no return address. Edna Chapman apparently had as little use for written words as she had for spoken. Her message, however, as always, was clear: she didn’t want me coming to their house to pick up the books. Nor for anything else, I was sure.
My spirits considerably dampened, I went to the kitchen, where I guzzled a glass of tepid tap water, then retrieved my bags from the sidewalk.
Back inside, I checked the mail and found a note from Karl Landfors. The letter said he’d be out of town for a week, but he thought he was close to getting the autopsy report on Willie Kaiser. There was no date on the note—Landfors must still be rusty in his reporting skills. The envelope was postmarked two days ago.
