by Dan Gutman
Matty’s name was on just about everything in the store.
“Look, he even wrote a book,” Bobby said, holding up a book titled Pitching in a Pinch.
Jim paid for his newspaper and came over.
“Matty didn’t write no book,” he said. “Some other guy wrote it and Matty put his name on it. That’s the way it works. They can stick Matty’s name on any old thing and sell it. He doesn’t have to do a thing except count up the loot.”
“Do they ever put your name on stuff?” Bobby asked.
“They were going to, right after the Olympics,” Jim said. “Then my medals were taken away.”
“That sucks,” Bobby said. “They slap Matty’s name on every piece of crap there is.”
“Matty’s the all-American boy,” I said.
“Let me tell you something,” Jim said, leaning close enough so I could smell the alcohol on his breath. “My people settled in this country long before any white men arrived. My ancestors have been here for thousands of years. I’m more American than anybody. And you know what? They won’t even give me American citizenship. Talk about not fair.”
As soon as we left the newsstand, I noticed a crowd of people gathered down the block. Jim hustled over. I thought maybe there had been an accident or he was going to help somebody who was hurt.
But it was nothing like that. The crowd was gathered outside the offices of a newspaper, The New York Evening Journal. There was a huge board mounted on the side of the building. It looked sort of like a baseball scoreboard. Instead of just showing the score though, it also showed what was going on at the game.
“Strike two!” a guy shouted into a megaphone. “That’s one ball and two strikes on Max Carey.”
There was a baseball-diamond shape on the board, with cutouts of little runners at first and second base. Lightbulbs indicated the inning, as well as the number of balls, strikes, outs, hits, runs, and errors.
“Strike him out, Matty!” some guy yelled, as if Matty could hear him. “He’s a bum.”
It was the Giants game at the Polo Grounds. They were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Giants had a 2-1 lead in the third inning. About a hundred people were standing around “watching the game.” Or a simulation of it anyway.
“Foul ball!” shouted the guy with the megaphone.
“Oh man, this is lame,” Bobby whispered to me. “These people need high-def TV bad.”
Personally, I thought it was cool.
“How does the guy with the megaphone know what’s going on at the Polo Grounds?” I asked Jim.
“I thought you boys were from the future,” Jim said. “Don’t you know how a telegraph works?”
Of course! There must have been a telegraph operator at the Polo Grounds who was watching the game and tapping out the action, pitch by pitch, on a telegraph key. He sent it by wire over to the newspaper office, where it got posted almost instantly on the board. It was almost like watching the game on TV. They didn’t have television, but they had this. It was pretty ingenious, in a low-tech way.
“Ball two!” shouted the megaphone man.
People in the crowd were buzzing as if they were watching the real game. One guy said Matty was sure to work his way out of the jam. Another said he wasn’t the dominating pitcher he had been in his younger days.
It was taking a long time for the megaphone man to make an announcement. The crowd seemed to be getting restless. It occurred to me that no news was most likely bad news. It probably meant that something exciting had happened, and the telegraph operator at the Polo Grounds needed more time to describe it.
“It’s a base hit!” shouted the megaphone man suddenly. The little batter on the board moved toward first base. The little runners started to move toward the next bases.
“No!” screamed the crowd.
“It’s a double!” shouted the megaphone man.
“NO!” screamed the crowd.
“Two runs score!” shouted the megaphone man. Both of the little runners crossed home plate. The score was 3-2, in favor of Pittsburgh.
“Nooooooooo!” screamed the crowd.
Jim turned suddenly and headed back down the street in the direction we had come from.
“Where are you going?” Bobby yelled after him.
“The boys are losing,” he said. “They might need me. Come on!”
15
Inside Baseball
“THE POLO GROUNDS!” JIM ORDERED THE CAB DRIVER. “And step on it!”
It was one of those old Model T cars, with tires that weren’t much fatter than the ones on my bike. Jim climbed in the front seat. Bobby and I jumped in the back.
“This Tin Lizzie will do 40 miles per hour, sir!” bragged the driver.
Bobby and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh. 40 miles an hour?! That was it? But when the driver hit the gas, we wiped those grins off our faces. He was weaving around the other cars and horses like a maniac. Every time the cab swerved, we bounced around the backseat like a couple of Ping-Pong balls.
“Where are the seat belts?” Bobby yelled.
“The what?” Jim replied.
I told Bobby they didn’t have seat belts in 1913, and we grabbed onto whatever we could to avoid being thrown out of the cab. Somehow, we made it back to the Polo Grounds without getting killed.
When Jim opened the cab door, I could hear a brass band playing that old song that goes “East side, west side, all around the town.” People inside the ballpark were banging pots, pans, and cowbells. The smell of roasted peanuts was in the air.
“These boys are with me,” Jim told the guard as we rushed through the turnstile.
Jim dashed through the winding tunnels under the ballpark. He ran with a natural grace, like a deer. Bobby and I were huffing and puffing to keep up.
“When you run,” Jim said, “you draw strength from the four directions—north, south, east, and west. That strength helps you meet the challenges you face.”
“What does that mean?” Bobby asked me.
“Beats me,” I said.
We were just about to collapse when Jim stopped and opened a door. It led directly into the Giants’ dugout. John McGraw was standing there.
“I knew you’d be back,” McGraw barked. “Who the hell are these guttersnipes?”
“Mr. McGraw,” Jim said, “there’s an old Indian superstition that children bring luck.”
“Well, get ’em in here,” McGraw ordered. “We need all the luck we can get. What’s that I smell on your breath, Thorpe? Whiskey? That’ll cost you another hundred bucks. Now get your uniform on!”
Jim ran to the locker room. Bobby and I grabbed some bench. Even though I had been in major league dugouts before, it was still a thrill. I was watching Christy Mathewson, John McGraw, and the 1913 New York Giants! It was like a dream come true.
Bobby had this look on his face like a kid in a candy store. It was so different from the scowl he always carried around back home.
“How cool is this?” I whispered.
“Way cool,” Bobby said.
I looked at the scoreboard. It was the bottom of the sixth inning. Pittsburgh was still leading, 3-2. The Pirates were jogging out to the field and the Giants were coming into the dugout. Christy Mathewson sat down next to me, slapping his glove on the bench. He didn’t look too happy. Nobody likes losing.
The Pirates whipped the ball around the infield. It was pretty much like watching a modern team warm up, except for two things. First, the ball wasn’t white anymore. It was sort of dirty brown. Second, the gloves were tiny! I couldn’t imagine how anybody could catch a ball whizzing at you with a glove that wasn’t much bigger than your hand. But they were doing it, and well. They never dropped the ball.
The shortstop looked familiar to me. He was a husky guy with bowed legs.
“Excuse me,” I said to Matty, “who’s that guy at short?”
I could swear I had seen that guy somewhere before.
Matty looked at me like I must be a total idiot.
Honus Wagner? Of course! Not only had I heard of him, but I had even met him before. The first time I traveled through time, it was with a 1909 Honus Wagner card. But that’s a story for another day.
A guy with a huge megaphone walked back and forth in foul territory behind home plate.
“Now batting for the Giants,” he bellowed, “Red Murray.”
After looking at a couple of pitches, Murray grounded out to short. So did the next batter. Honus scooped each ball up in his huge hands and fired it like a bullet, peppering the first baseman with dirt and pebbles along with the ball.
“Man, Wagner’s got a gun for an arm,” Bobby said.
Jim Thorpe, now in uniform, stepped into the dugout through the back door. He sat between me and Bobby.
“Two outs,” I told him.
“Now batting for the Giants,” the megaphone man shouted, “Fred Merkle.”
Merkle didn’t care what the pitcher did to the ball.
While Merkle was walking up to the plate, the pitcher stepped off the mound, leaned over, and spit on the baseball.
“Did you see that?” Bobby said.
“See what?” asked Jim.
“That guy just spit on the ball!”
“Yeah, so?”
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked Bobby.
The players on the bench all turned and looked at Bobby like he was crazy.
Bobby doesn’t know much about baseball history. I whispered to him that the spitball wasn’t banned until 1920. He slapped his forehead.
But Fred Merkle didn’t care what the pitcher did to the ball. He whacked a drive into the gap that went all the way to the rightfield wall. By the time the Pirates got the ball in, Merkle was chugging to third base. The Giants fans went crazy. “Go back to Peoria, busher!” a fan yelled at the pitcher. “Adams, you stink!”
John McGraw hopped off the bench and went to coach third.
McGraw went out to coach third base.
He was a riot to watch. He was yelling encouragement, jumping around, taking off his cap, putting it back on, patting his head, and touching his ears. If you didn’t know he was coaching third and flashing signs to his players, you’d swear he was one of those crazy people you see on the street.
“Now batting for the Giants, Larry Doyle!”
Doyle didn’t swing at the first pitch, but the umpire jumped up dramatically to call it a strike.
“You have to learn, before you’re older,” the ump hollered in a singsong voice. “You can’t hit with the bat on your shoulder.”
The next pitch looked good. Doyle took a healthy cut at it, but missed.
“It cut the middle of the plate,” sang the umpire. “But you missed ’cause you swung late.”
“What’s up with that ump?” I asked Jim.
“That dude is annoying,” Bobby added.
“That’s Lord Byron,” replied Jim. “They call him the Singing Umpire.”
With a runner at third, and two outs and two strikes on the batter, the Giants were desperate to score the tying run. That’s when John McGraw did something I’d never seen before.
“Hey, Adams!” he yelled to the pitcher from the third base line. “Lemme see that ball for a second, will ya?”
The pitcher looked over at McGraw, who was holding out his hands to catch the ball. Adams hesitated for maybe half a second, then he shrugged and flipped the ball underhanded to McGraw. But instead of catching it, McGraw simply stepped aside and let the ball roll down the third base line.
“Go!” McGraw shouted to Merkle at third, and everybody in the dugout started yelling, “GO! GO! GO!” Merkle didn’t need the advice. He took off and crossed the plate standing up.
“Awesome!” shouted Bobby, who got up and tried to give Merkle a high five as he jogged into the dugout. Merkle looked at Bobby like he was from Neptune.
The Pirates’ manager ran over to Lord Byron and started shouting at him.
“That’s illegal!” he argued. “You ain’t allowed to do that. It’s a dead ball!”
“Look in the book and read the rule,” Lord Byron sang. “If you throw away the ball, you’re a fool.”
John McGraw didn’t join the argument. He came back to the dugout chuckling to himself.
“Oldest trick in the book,” he said to the guys on the bench.
That run tied the game. The next Giant struck out to end the inning.
Matty grabbed his glove and went out to pitch the seventh. I watched him warm up. He had a nice, easy, graceful delivery. It looked like he wasn’t even trying. But the ball moved so fast, it was nearly invisible after leaving his hand. It popped in the catcher’s mitt with a BANG you could hear across the ballpark.
When Matty was throwing the ball, it didn’t even look like he was trying.
Most of the Giants were out in the field now, with the exception of Jim Thorpe and Charley Grant, that black guy who McGraw was trying to pass off as an Indian.
“How about putting me in there, Mr. McGraw?” asked Jim.
“You’ll get in when I say so,” McGraw snapped.
While Matty was warming up, McGraw had his head in a book titled Rules of Baseball.
“Gee, I would think you’d know that stuff by now, Mr. McGraw,” Charley Grant said.
“I know it by heart,” said McGraw, jotting down a note on one of the pages.
“So why are you reading the rules?”
“To figure out how to break ’em,” McGraw replied.
The Pirates’ leadoff batter slapped down at the ball and hit a high hopper wide of the first base bag. Fred Merkle grabbed it and arrived at first the same time as the batter. They collided, falling on top of each other. The ump called the batter safe. Runner on first, nobody out.
“Fadeaway, Matty!” some of the fans chanted when play resumed. “Fadeaway!”
“What’s a fadeaway?” Bobby whispered to me.
“That’s what they used to call a screwball,” I told him.
I knew the fadeaway was Matty’s signature pitch. Instead of twisting his wrist out as he released the ball, he twisted it in. It made a reverse curve that broke toward a right-handed batter. It’s very hard to throw, because our wrists don’t twist in naturally.
The next Pirate squared around to bunt, and dropped one down on the right side of the infield. Matty rushed in and whipped the ball to second for the force out. The runner flung his body at the base, taking out the shortstop before he could even think about throwing to first for a double play. One out. Still a runner at first.
This, I knew, is the way baseball used to be played back in the Dead Ball days. It was very hard to hit a ball out of the park, so teams would choke up, bunt, slap at the ball, steal bases, hit and run, or rely on their wits to score runs. And if all else failed, they’d cheat. It was called “inside baseball.”
Personally, I liked it better than the modern game. I always thought watching a home run go over the wall was boring. I’d rather see a guy hit a triple and watch runners tearing around the bases while the defense scramble to relay the ball in and throw them out. That’s exciting.
“Did the Giants win their division last year?” Bobby asked me.
“There are no divisions,” I told him. “There’s just an American League and a National League.”
“So they don’t have playoffs?”
“No playoffs.”
“No wild card?”
“No,” I told him. “You finish in first place, or you go home.”
“Wow,” Bobby said. “No wonder they play so hard.”
The next batter fouled Matty’s first pitch into the third base stands. I assumed the umpire would throw Matty a new ball, but he didn’t. Instead, some big guy ran into the stands and grabbed the ball away from the fan who caught it. What a jerk!
But the guy who stole the ball didn’t keep it or run away with it. He threw it back to Matty. That’s when I remembered that in 1913, fans weren’t
allowed to keep foul balls that went into the stands. The guy was only doing his job.
They had been using the same baseball for the whole game. No wonder it wasn’t white anymore. It was brown and scuffed up, covered with spit, dirt, and who knows what else. And these guys were expected to hit it and throw it accurately.
The Pirates scored a run in the eighth inning to go ahead 4-3, and that was still the score when the Giants came up to bat in the bottom of the ninth.
Buck Herzog led off for the Giants, slapping a single past the second baseman. The next guy, Red Murray, bunted, but the Pirates’ catcher pounced on the ball and whipped it to second. There was a collision there, and Lord Byron called Herzog out.
Well, John McGraw went nuts. He ran out of the dugout and stuck his face right into Lord Byron’s.
“Get some glasses, you fobbing, swag-bellied hedge pig!” he shouted. “My man was safe, you loggerheaded, toad-spotted maggot pie!”
“You got 60 seconds to state your case,” sang Lord Byron, as he pulled one of those old-time watches out of his pocket. “Then it’s time to shut your face.”
McGraw didn’t use his 60 seconds. He snatched Lord Byron’s watch, threw it on the ground, and stomped on it.
The fans went crazy. Some people started throwing vegetables onto the field. I guess they brought them to the ballpark just so they could throw them. Strange.
“McGraw, I’d say you’re out of luck,” sang Lord Byron. “That’ll cost a hundred bucks!”
“It was worth it!” McGraw said as he stomped back to the dugout.
Matty was due up next, but with the Giants down by a run in the bottom of the ninth, McGraw was looking toward the bench for a pinch hitter. Jim grabbed a bat and slid forward, trying to catch the manager’s eye.
“Chief Tokahoma!” barked McGraw. “Grab a bat!”
Jim slammed his bat back into the rack while Charley Grant jumped off the bench.
“Pinch hitting for the Giants,” announced the megaphone man, “from the Cherokee nation, Chief…Tokahoma!”
Charley headed for home plate. But before he got ten feet out of the dugout, the Pirates’ manager was out on the field, shouting at the umpire.