The First Fall Classic
Page 1
Praise for Mike Vaccaro’s
THE FIRST FALL CLASSIC
“A marvelous book.… In recapturing this bygone era, Vaccaro shows us a baseball world in which gamblers were as ubiquitous as ‘at-bat introduction songs’ are today.”
—Newsday
“It’s no small feat to re-create a sports event when all the participants and observers are no longer with it. But Vaccaro pulled it off.… It was a different time, one that Vaccaro does a splendid job of bringing to life. This book is a treasure for any baseball fan.”
—The Buffalo News
“Nearly a century later, Mike Vaccaro has brilliantly portrayed a pivotal period in baseball history and how the game reflected the times in American society in The First Fall Classic. Readers will thoroughly enjoy this fascinating look at the 1912 World Series and baseball’s transformation into our national pastime. I enjoyed the book so much I didn’t want it to end.”
—Baseball Commissioner Allan H. (Bud) Selig
“A truly compelling read.”
—New York Daily News
“Whether the 1912 World Series was the best of all time is debatable, though, as Vaccaro writes, a case can surely be made that it is. But its importance and excitement cannot be denied. The personalities and style of the game may have changed, but few events can rivet the sporting world like a back-and-forth World Series.”
—MLB.com
“Highly recommended.… As always, Vaccaro has exhaustively researched his subjects.… The book is the third for [him], and it meets the high standards of his first two excellent books.”
—Lowell Sun (Massachusetts)
“Informative yet entertaining, Vaccaro’s extraordinary baseball chronicle renders the early days of our national pastime in all its grit and glory.”
—Publishers Weekly
Mike Vaccaro
THE FIRST FALL CLASSIC
Mike Vaccaro is the lead sports columnist for the New York Post and the author of 1941: The Greatest Year in Sports and Emperors and Idiots. He has won more than fifty major journalism awards since 1989 and has been cited for distinguished writing by the Associated Press Sports Editors, the New York State Publishers Association, and the Poynter Institute. A graduate of St. Bonaventure University, he lives in New Jersey.
www.mike-vaccaro.com
ALSO BY MIKE VACCARO
1941: The Greatest Year in Sports
Emperors and Idiots
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2010
Copyright © 2009 by Mike Vaccaro
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2009.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All photographs are courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:
Vaccaro, Mike.
The first fall classic : the Red Sox, the Giants and the cast of players, pugs and politicos who reinvented the World Series in 1912 by Mike Vaccaro.
p. cm.
1. World Series (Baseball)—History. 2. New York Giants (Baseball team)—History. 3. Boston Red Sox (Baseball team)—History. I. Title.
GV878.4.V33 2009
796.357′646—dc22
2009013121
eISBN: 978-0-385-53218-1
Author photograph © Charles Wenzelberg
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
For Ann McMahon Vaccaro, my first editor, who provided rides to Little League games, offered the loudest cheers at CYO basketball games, tendered unconditional love when it was needed most, and supplies an unrelenting Irish optimism that sustains in a world too often commanded by pessimists, skeptics, cynics, and doubters.
CONTENTS
Cover
Praise for Mike Vaccaro’s The First Fall Classic
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Spring, Summer, Fall, 1912: A Prelude
CHAPTER TWO
October 1912: The Run-up
CHAPTER THREE
Tuesday, October 8, 1912: Game One
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday, October 9, 1912: Game Two
CHAPTER FIVE
Thursday, October 10, 1912: Game Three
PHOTO INSERT
CHAPTER SIX
Friday, October 11, 1912: Game Four
CHAPTER SEVEN
Saturday, October 12, 1912: Game Five
CHAPTER EIGHT
Monday, October 14, 1912: Game Six
CHAPTER NINE
Tuesday, October 15, 1912: Game Seven
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday, October 16, 1912: Game Eight
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wednesday, October 16, 1912
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most of this book—perhaps 80 percent, perhaps more—is the product of reading contemporary news accounts of all the newspapers and periodicals listed in the Acknowledgments section, covering the prime events detailed in this book: the Becker Trial, the presidential campaign of 1912, the assassination attempt of Theodore Roosevelt, and, of course, the 1912 World Series.
Where matters of fact were concerned—the who, the what, the where, why, and how—I made certain that there were at least two sources that concurred. In order to err on the side of accuracy, I omitted all instances where there were differing accounts of basic facts. As for quotes: Everything outside of conversations between characters that appears between quotation marks in this book appeared previously either in one of the cited newspapers or periodicals or in the research materials provided by the National Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. The sole liberties taken involved re-creating conversations that were referred to outside of quotations by the principals involved in those conversations; these I tried to reconstruct as faithfully as possible, given the knowledge gleaned from studying their characters and personalities over the course of fourteen months of research.
I am confident that having applied these standards to every sentence, everything contained in this book is factual and faithful; any errors that do appear are mine and mine alone to answer for.
INTRODUCTION
BOSTON—The muckerishness of the fan is exceeding itself in muck this Fall. Boston howled that it was “all fixed,” then raved over their team when it won. New York screamed that the Giants were throwing the series. After every game in New York and Boston we were compelled to listen to wild yarns of drinking and dissipation. Such persons really aren’t worth answering, but to them one can only say: If they will invent some system by which baseball games can be made crooked without being detected in two innings they can make fortunes …
—HUGH S. FULLERTON, CHICAGO DAILY TRIBUNE,
OCTOBER 20, 1912
“THE FIRST TIME you see that sign,” David Wright said, “it scares the crap out of you, especially if you know a little bit about history.”
Wright, the third baseman for the New York Mets, was sitting in front of his locker at Shea Stadium in the spring of 2008, pointing over to where the words of Rule Twenty-one were posted on a far wall of the home team’s dressing room. In one form or another, the same words have appeared in every clubhouse in every major-league baseball stadium since 1927, when Rule Twenty-one was officially adopted at the urging of Kenesaw Mountain
Landis, the first commissioner of baseball, a man hired in the wake of the most infamous gambling scandal in the history of professional American sport. From the moment a baseball player signs his first pro contract, these words—and the spirit of the words—are drilled, and instilled, and grilled, in a place of permanence and prominence deep within their souls:
“Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has not duty to perform, shall be declared ineligible for one year. Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.”
“It’s hard to conceive of a world in which that kind of stuff is even possible,” Wright said, before nodding at another sign listing another set of crimes and consequences. “Now that, I guess, seems more relevant to me.”
He was pointing at a new set of regulations freshly introduced to baseball clubhouses in recent years, detailing the punishment schedule for any player found using performance-enhancing drugs. For most of its latter history, baseball had turned a blind eye to steroids, HGH, amphetamines, and every other manner of illegal or illicit pharmaceutical (since 2002, it has tried to first minimize and now eliminate entirely steroids’ scourge from its landscape, a slow and painstaking process). In its own way, that mirrored how, for most of its earlier history, baseball had turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to the gamblers, bookmakers, shylocks, and fixers who crowded its grandstands.
Wright shook his head, smiled. The average baseball salary in 2008 was $2 million, meaning ballplayers weren’t quite the easy marks they were a century earlier, when many of them barely made $4,000 a year. The bookmakers who resided in the game’s shadows at the turn of the last century had been replaced by steroid suppliers at the dawn of the new one.
“I guess every generation has its temptations,” he said.
Speaking in a different century, inside a different New York City ballpark, describing in many ways an entirely different game, John J. McGraw held court before a small group of New York City newspapermen on the eve of the 1912 World Series, sitting in a dugout at the Polo Grounds, watching his baseball team take batting practice.
“I don’t worry about my boys,” said McGraw, manager of the National League-champion New York Giants, “and I wouldn’t worry about any group of baseball players good enough to win the pennant in their league. You have to be good at the game, and very skilled, that’s true. But you’d also better be of sound mind and character. If you are, then nothing else matters. Certainly not something as simple as money.”
Then McGraw, whose scatology was legendary in those early years of the twentieth century, smiled, spit a stream of tobacco, and summarized his sentiments in a sentence that made the sportswriters smile.
“Any son of a bitch can make money,” he said. “But it takes a special son of a bitch to be a world’s champion.”
Such was the way baseball conducted its business and policed its players in those times that are often described either as “simpler” or “more innocent”; times, we have long been told, when men were men and they played for the love of the game, before the sport was polluted by money and greed and the corrupting peripheral influences endemic to them. True students of baseball have long had a word for that fable: “Nonsense.”
McGraw, were he so inclined, might have chosen a different word.
“Bullshit,” for instance.
In 1912, when ballplayers played for as little as $1,500 a year and as much as $15,000 a year, they endorsed everything from cigarettes to smokeless tobacco to shoes to whiskey to automobiles and everything else available to consumers flush with disposable income in a relatively prosperous time. They authored books, published newspaper columns, lent their surnames to dram shops and eateries of both high repute and low esteem. They made, on average, anywhere between 5 percent and 200 percent more than the average American worker, traveled in first-class accommodations, lodged at the best hotels, ate gourmet meals mostly on the arm, and if they knew which saloons to visit they could drink to their liver’s content without ever once blowing dust off their billfold.
On off days, and in their spare time, they played poker, bridge, rummy, checkers, chess, billiards, and golf, and they didn’t exactly play strictly for the love of those games, either.
“We were professionals,” Fred Snodgrass, a center fielder for McGraw’s Giants, would say near the end of his life, looking back fondly from a distance of fifty years. “And professionals get paid.”
Not nearly enough, either, if you asked them to tell the truth.
Still, there was a stubborn saliency to McGraw’s words. The ballplayers who were only in it for the money, and who made no pretense about chasing dollars more than dreams, tended to spend their careers mired in the second division. Hal Chase, for instance, a gifted first baseman who made his major-league debut in 1905 for the New York Highlanders of the American League, was known to consort with gamblers in public, and it was an open, dirty secret that some of his strikeouts and some of his fielding errors were significantly more than the product of baseball probability. He was for sale, and the Highlanders (later the Yankees), Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Reds, and New York Giants—and, briefly, the Buffalo Blues of the short-lived renegade Federal League—suffered for his proclivities.
No, the men of McGraw’s Giants, who in a few days would host the men of Jake Stahl’s Boston Red Sox in the first game of the ninth annual World Series, surely wanted to win a championship. They wanted to be able to hang the large “World’s Champions” flag that would fly high over the victor’s ballpark for all of the 1913 season. They wanted to wear the commemorative clips that generally went to the winners, a permanent symbol of triumph. Back in 1905, after the Giants had captured their first Series title, McGraw had outfitted them in gaudy uniforms that declared them world champions in big block letters, and had provided them with the finest livery and cab service to out-of-town ballgames.
Fine perks, all of them.
But so were these: The $4,000 or so that would go to each member of the winning side (compared to less than $3,000 for the losers), which for some was equal to if not more than their annual income. The vaudeville contracts the winners would be awarded, which could bring in as much as $200 a week depending on the generosity of the impresario, the size of the house, and the breadth of the heroics turned in by the lucky winners.
To say nothing of the potential return on their investment if they’d decided to lay a few dollars down with any of the bookmakers who were as visible at the ballparks as vendors, ushers, and umpires. And if you played for the Giants, you could get yourself at some pretty favorable odds, too: two days before Game One, bookies were pegging the Red Sox as 10-to-8 favorites.
In years to come, all of this would prove to be too much for ballplayers who’d grown tired of watching team owners rake in huge profits from these annual October get-togethers, who’d grown weary fighting with the National Commission, the sport’s governing body that never, not once, ruled against the owners in matters of arbitration. Seven years hence, in fact, some of the nation’s most prominent gamblers would pull the ultimate coup: They would neatly fold eight members of the Chicago White Sox into their back pockets and fix the World Series, nearly crushing the sport in the bargain.
That, though, was still well in the future. For in 1912, baseball would witness a genuine, beautiful contest quite unlike any that had ever transpired. There would be, that year, a World Series that would put the World Series on the map, and it would take years for another series to come along to match it.
For now, even while those very same prominent gamblers were very much in public view—even as the most prominent, a New York hustler named Arnold Rothstein, was entering into a partnership with McGraw opening pool halls across the city—baseball would get lucky, at least in October of 1912. Th
e sport would get two teams, winners of a combined 208 games during the regular season, who may well have been the two finest ballclubs ever assembled to that point. No fewer than five of the men in uniform in that world’s series would ultimately find a permanent home in Cooperstown, New York, enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Most important, during the course of eight games spanning nine days in that marvelous baseball autumn, they would elevate the World Series from a regional October novelty to a national obsession, they would show just how arresting and addictive the game could be (especially when it was played on the level—or, at the least, mostly on the level), they would introduce the rest of the nation to the reality of rabid, passionate, unyielding fans willing to go to any length to support their teams. The games would fight for space on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, battling both an assassin’s bullet and the most sensational trial of the young century, with the games often carrying the day and earning the “wood.”
And they would deliver what remains, nearly a century later, the greatest World Series ever played—so great, in fact, that in all future years, both words would be permanently capitalized. In so many ways, then, the World Series was really born in 1912. What follows is why.
CHAPTER ONE
Spring, Summer, Fall, 1912: A Prelude
NEW YORK—The advance fanfare is over. The English language has been plucked of its final consonants, and the last of all figures extant has been twisted out of shape in the maelstrom of a million arguments. And now, at the end of it, there is nothing left. Nothing left but the charge of the Night Brigade against the gates at dawn to-morrow—and after that the first boding hush as Harry Hooper flies out from the Red Sox coop and stands face to face with Mathewson, the veteran, or Tesreau, the debutante …