The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  McGraw—who’d gone to the wall for Merkle, who’d defended him publicly and privately for four years despite all the civic slander his mistake invited—bristled at this overt display of disloyalty. But what could he do? “I need the Bonehead’s bat in my batting order,” he grumped to his coach and closest friend, Wilbert Robinson, over a hand of bridge a few hours later.

  Four hundred miles away, the Red Sox were quietly starting to believe that they, too, had something worth getting excited about. The Sox (then called the Americans) had won the very first World Series ever contested, in 1903, beating Pittsburgh five games to three in a best-of-nine match, and had been hoping to repeat the trick a year later before being rebuffed by McGraw’s Giants, the National League champ that refused to play them. Since that triumphant 1904 season—a pennant made all the more satisfying because it came at the expense of New York City, the Pilgrims outlasting the Highlanders on the final weekend of the season—the franchise had fallen on hard times, bottoming out at a frightful 49–105 mark in 1906. Boston had rebounded to win 88 and 81 games in 1909 and 1910, but a regression to 78–75 in 1911 cost manager Patsy Donovan his job. By then, there had also been a shift in the team’s corporate leadership, as owner John I. Taylor decided to sell half an interest to a group led by Jimmy McAleer, the manager of the Washington Senators who was really a front for AL president Ban Johnson, who wanted a piece of his league’s most lucrative franchise.

  To replace Donovan, McAleer placed a call to the president of the Washington Park National Bank in Chicago, to a thirty-two-year-old man who until recently also played a rather elegant first base for the Red Sox. Jake Stahl had retired after the 1910 season to go work for his father-in-law, Henry W. Mahan, and had settled into a comfortable life as an investment specialist. But Mahan was another of Johnson’s silent partners, and Stahl was promised a stake in the club as well, and so it was that Stahl found himself in Hot Springs in late February, welcoming a team to whom few gave any hope of challenging the champion Athletics.

  “I have lots to do and lots to learn,” Stahl said, “and not a lot of time in which to get acclimated.” But he liked what he saw, especially his outfield, which he knew had the makings of something special. Speaker was blossoming into a star, anyone could see that, but flanking him to the left was Duffy Lewis, one of the slickest-fielding outfielders Stahl or anyone else had ever seen, and to his right was Harry Hooper, a man who’d recently forced baseball’s rule makers to blue-pencil their sacred text. Hooper, it seems, had perfected the art of patty-caking fly balls hit to him in right field, a tactic that was especially useful when a man on third base was thinking of tagging up on a sacrifice fly. Hooper wouldn’t actually catch the ball until he was a few strides back of the infield, a clever ploy that was now rendered useless; the new rules said a runner could now leave for home the moment an outfielder made contact with the ball.

  Stahl himself would play first base. Larry Gardner would play third. Hick Cady and Bill Carrigan would share the catching duties. Wood was a hell of an anchor for his pitching staff, and Stahl figured the rest would shake into place soon enough.

  “I make no predictions,” he told The Sporting News in mid-March. “But I like what I’ve seen so far.”

  Such was the optimism springing up all over the southern half of the nation, where slowly baseball teams were kicking off the rust of a long off-season, where the players were trying to melt off the fifteen or twenty extra pounds they accumulated while toiling in winter jobs that almost all of them took to supplement their baseball income. Such was the happy talk heard in New Orleans, where the Cubs and Cleveland Indians trained, and in Waco, which hosted the White Sox, and in Monroe, Louisiana, where the Tigers worked out, and even in St. Louis, whose climate was mild enough that the hometown Browns and Cardinals opted to keep the boys home for their drillings.

  Even as the season drew nearer, the hold baseball held on the public at large became even more apparent as stories about the game began cropping up in other parts of the newspaper, as well. On February 28, for instance, a bill that would have given cities in New York the local option of playing Sunday home games was buried in committee in the state legislature, killing the proposal for another year, retaining the “blue laws” that kept ballparks quiet on the Sabbath and deprived the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers from reaping the weekly windfall Sunday baseball would surely have provided.

  Then, on March 11, a congressional investigation of the “baseball trust, the most audacious and autocratic trust in the country,” was proposed in a resolution introduced by Representative Thomas Gallagher of Illinois, a measure that would create a special committee of seven representatives to inquire of the Department of Justice “what steps have been taken against the base ball trust as against other illegal combinations” to subpoena witnesses and employ assistants. It accused “the base ball trust of presuming to control the base ball game, its officials announcing daily through the press the dictates of a governing commission, how competition is stifled, territory and games apportioned, prices fixed which millions must pay to witness the sport, how men are enslaved and forced to accept salaries and terms or be forever barred from playing.” In trust-busting 1912, when the single biggest issue facing presidential candidates was how they would deal with the nation’s “monopoly problem,” it seemed only right that baseball—still called “base ball” in many places—should undergo similar scrutiny.

  Only baseball didn’t quite see it that way.

  The Sporting News, which billed itself as “The Baseball Bible” but was, in reality, an unabashed house organ for baseball’s owners, raged in an unsigned editorial: “It is not necessary to go into the necessity for contracts, reserve clauses, etc. The ordinary intelligent fan well appreciates the fact that they are regulations required for the conduct of the game. And knowing what is necessary for the game they will have no sympathy for the ‘statesman’ who seeks for some purposes not yet clear to embarrass the administration of the game. Once the fans of his district get the idea that he means to be serious in his attack on their popular sport he is likely to be more ‘put out’ than he is described as being at the smiles of base ball leaders. The players whose interests Congressman Gallagher has so much at heart will be the best witnesses for the defense.”

  The political uprising, not surprisingly, dissolved quietly, and by 1922 baseball would even be granted an antitrust exemption by the U.S. Supreme Court, an immunity that prevails eighty-seven years later. But that didn’t prevent other lawmakers from believing that baseball’s ubiquitous place in American culture merited some heavy-handed regulation to protect it from that culture’s more sinister elements. Later in March, Pennsylvania governor John K. Tener, who had played three years of big-league ball in the 1880s, declared betting a “devil” in the game that “needed to be driven out, at once. If the sport is to be kept clean, local authorities should take steps to prevent pool-selling on the results of games, high scores, and innings.

  “In some cities,” charged Tener, “so much betting has been going on that the state police have been watching it and if District Attorneys are inclined to act I will back them with all the influence of the state administration.”

  Still, as the season finally began on Thursday, April 11, everyone seemed to be settled into their proper place: Merkle in the Giants’ dugout (after finally agreeing to a modest $500 raise), the Red Sox in their gleaming new palace by the Fens, and bookmakers planted in their familiar grandstand locations in all sixteen major-league parks. It was, indeed, time to play ball.

  It didn’t take long, once the games began, to determine the class of either league. The Giants lost three of their first four games, but then rattled off wins in their next nine games and nineteen of their next twenty to keep pace with Cincinnati, which had broken from the gate with an equally sizzling start, and when they arrived at brand-new Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field) on Saturday, May 18, for the start of a five-game series, the Giants, at 19–4, were a hal
f-game ahead of the 20–6 Reds. The hosts won the first two games, both tight, taut 4–3 affairs, before the Giants roared back to win the next three and seize first place—for good, as it turned out.

  In fact, for much of the season, the Giants threatened to make mincemeat out of the National League. After sixty-nine games, their record stood at 56–13, and there has not been a team in the modern era that has approached that kind of scorching start. By the Fourth of July the Giants had a sixteen-game lead on the rest of the league, and not only did that inspire the baseball cognoscenti to wonder if this might not be the finest assemblage of baseball talent ever, it also served them as proof that the sport, as a whole, was on the up-and-up; surely, the argument went, the Giants were killing themselves at the box office by removing the mystery from the pennant race. Of course, Giants fans had long been looked at as a “peculiar” brand of fan, because the Polo Grounds denizens were known to cheer just as lustily for opponents who performed well as for their own homegrown heroes. Besides, Giants owner John T. Brush had already flirted with alienating his fans, eliminating almost all of the twenty-five-cent seats at the Grounds, and switching starting times of weekday games to 4 o’clock from 3:30, the better to lure the prosperous Wall Street crowd uptown. There was a brief outcry, because the later starting time interfered with dinnertime in many blue-collar homes, and an informal poll taken at the turnstiles informed Brush that some 85 percent of his fans wished the starting times moved back. Brush read the results, pondered them, then ignored them.

  “Look at the club Brush has,” a fan named Seamus Kelly said one July afternoon, waiting outside the Grounds to purchase tickets for a game against the Cubs. “He thinks he can get away with doing anything he wants with it. And he’s right.”

  The Giants’ dominance was fueled by excellent pitching, though not by the pitcher you might suspect. Mathewson turned in his usually resplendent season—23–12, 2.12 earned run average, thirty-four complete games in forty-three starts—but two odd things occurred. First, for the first time since a six-game sip of coffee as a rookie in 1900 (and for what would be the only time in his whole seventeen-year career), Mathewson failed to record a shutout. More surprising, for much of the year, he wasn’t the clear-cut ace of the New York staff. That honor fell to one of baseball’s fourteen Rubes—in this case, Richard William Marquard, a city kid from Cleveland who earned his nickname as a minor leaguer in Indianapolis thanks to his physical resemblance to another hard-throwing lefty of the day, George Edward “Rube” Waddell. Marquard had been a pet project of McGraw’s, the manager paying Indianapolis an unheard-of $11,000 to secure his services for the Giants. The New York sportswriters quickly dubbed Marquard “The $11,000 Peach,” but after three years, after he’d put together an unsightly 9–18 record in forty-three career games, the scribes had gleefully switched that moniker to “The $11,000 Lemon” instead.

  But in 1911, Marquard had unexpectedly blossomed into a star, going 24–7 with a 2.50 ERA and emerging as a perfect left-handed sidekick to Mathewson. So delighted was McGraw by his protégé’s development that he gave Marquard the honor of pitching the season opener in 1912, an 18–3 romp for the Giants over the Dodgers in Brooklyn’s Washington Park. Marquard won his next start, too, at home against the Braves, and his next one, as well, at Philadelphia, and he kept winning, and he kept winning, and by the time the Giants arrived at Chicago’s West Side Park on July 8, not only did the team have a gaudy fifteen-game lead in the standings, but Marquard’s record sat at an otherworldly 19–0 (and should have been 20–0; on April 20, Marquard had relieved Jeff Tesreau late in a game the Giants trailed 3–2 before rallying for a 4–3 win. The official scorer, for reasons known only to him, nevertheless awarded the victory to Tesreau). Nineteen, twenty, it didn’t really matter: No pitcher before or since has approached that number.

  The Cubs, of course, took great delight in removing the zero from the right side of Marquard’s hyphen that afternoon of July 8, riding the right arm of rookie Jimmy Lavender and stomping the Giants 7–2. What neither team could know was that not only would that game send Marquard into a two-month tailspin (he’d go only 7–11 after the historic start), it would also lead to a most unexpected pennant chase. The Cubs took three out of the four games in that series, spoiled a one-day visit by the Giants ten days later with a 3–1 win, and by July 16 found themselves only nine games out of first place. Suddenly there was a whiff of panic apparent among the faithful in the Polo Grounds, and even a little self-doubt among the Giants themselves, for as much swagger as McGraw and his crew carried around with them, the Cubs were their own personal kryptonite, the New Yorkers having finished second to them in 1906, 1908, and 1910. Would the hex Chicago seemed to hold in even-numbered years continue, even after the Cubs spotted them sixteen games?

  Almost. The Cubs whittled the lead to six when the Giants returned to West Side Park on August 15, and when the Cubs took two out of three the newspapers back home responded with due terror. This was the peak of New York’s grand newspaper wars, Joseph Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s American street-fighting for every reader in New York City (along with twelve other Manhattan-based dailies), and there was no surer way to separate a citizen from his two pennies than to satisfy his baseball jones with huge scare headlines chronicling the collapse of the local nine. And it would get worse: After another failed one-day trip to Chicago on August 21 resulted in another loss, and after the Giants split a doubleheader in Pittsburgh the next day while the Cubs beat the Braves, the Giants’ lead shrunk to only four games, the smallest it had been since May 27.

  “They don’t seem so unbeatable now!” the Cubs’ manager, Frank Chance, crowed in the next day’s newspapers, and by Labor Day, September 2, the difference between the clubs was still only four games, with three do-or-die games between them set for the middle of September that everyone in New York had already circled in black ink, knowing how readily the Cubs always feasted on the Giants when they had to.

  But then, just as quickly as the Giants had faltered, they righted themselves. They swept a Labor Day doubleheader from the hapless Braves in Boston, pushing the lead back to six. The Cubs—against whom the Giants went 9–13 in 1912 while battering the rest of the league to the tune of 94–35—couldn’t keep up. By the time they arrived in New York for that hotly anticipated series the cushion was back up to ten and a half games, so even though Chicago took two out of three (of course), the panic had vanished. The Giants clinched the pennant on September 26 by sweeping two from the always-helpful Braves, and 10,000 rowdy, yet relieved, fans stormed the Polo Grounds to celebrate the coronation.

  The Red Sox suffered no such late-summer drama, though they did have to contend with a smoking-hot start from the White Sox, who won twenty-eight of their first forty games. But the Red Sox were fortified by a twenty-one-game home stand that took them through most of May and allowed them to stay within striking distance of first place. When they nipped the Browns in St. Louis, 3–2, on June 10, they improved to 30–18 for the year, .005 percentage points ahead of the White Sox, suffering through their first losing spell of the season. The next day they shut the Browns out, moved into first place all alone, and remained there for the rest of the year. Their lone challenge would come from the defending champion Athletics, who pointed all spring and throughout most of the early summer to the six-game series they would play against the Red Sox across the Fourth of July holiday, in front of large, expectant crowds in Philadelphia. The A’s entered the series trailing the Red Sox by six games, but were only four back in the loss column and playing as well as they had in 1911. But Boston took four of those six games, left town eight games ahead, and dropped the A’s to fourth place. Philadelphia never recovered, and though the A’s did finish in second place with ninety wins, they ended up a distant fifteen games back of the Red Sox, who suffered only two losing streaks of longer than two games all season.

  Throughout six months of relentless command, there were two things that sto
od out above all the other glories that the Red Sox and the Royal Rooters savored. The first was the gleaming state-of-the-art home that John I. Taylor had commissioned for them, a baseball palace unmatched in the American League that from its first hour of life was christened “Fenway Park.” On April 9, in front of 5,000 curiosity seekers and a few dozen construction workers eager to tend to the park’s final few details, the Red Sox beat the Harvard University baseball team, 2–0, in an exhibition game that officially opened the doors. Nine days later, the Sox were scheduled to open the place for real, against the Highlanders, but rain scotched those plans, which was just as well, for much of the city’s attention was focused on another matter of significant local import: the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic, which had hit an iceberg on April 14, killing 1,517 people, more than a few of them New Englanders. By now survivors had arrived in New York and tales of grief and loss filled Boston’s newspapers; by the time the Red Sox finally beat the Highlanders 7–6 in an eleven-inning thriller on April 20, in front of 24,000 witnesses, it was still a proud civic moment, just not the all-consuming event it was otherwise expected to be.

  The other was the performance of Howard Ellsworth Wood, nicknamed “Smoky Joe,” a hard-throwing twenty-two-year-old born in Kansas City and raised in Ouray, Colorado, “not far,” he would later say, “from places with names like Lizard Head Pass and Slumgullion Gulch.” His father was a lawyer, but his hometown could easily have been the set of a spaghetti Western, “and every day I’d see these big stagecoaches go by, drawn by six horses, two guards sitting up there with rifles, guarding the gold shipment coming down from the mines.” Which makes it all the more interesting, then, that Wood’s first professional team would be the Bloomer Girls, an itinerant team of women, and men who dressed as women, similar to the barnstorming House of David teams that would take on all comers in future years wearing long beards as their trademark and Stars of David as their logo. Wood earned $20 for three weeks’ work and liked the idea of playing baseball for a living.