The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  As a nineteen-year-old he’d won eleven games for the Red Sox in 1909, and he’d already piled up forty-seven wins heading into 1912, but nobody could have expected what would happen during that golden season.

  “He was untouchable,” his teammate, Harry Hooper, would recall thirty years later. “It was like magic. Guys who were good hitters, rugged ballplayers, would all look like bush leaguers against Joe that year. I never saw anything like it before. I never seen anything like it since. For one season, Joe was—there’s no other way to describe it—invincible. He really was.”

  Wood started forty-three games in 1912, completing thirty-eight of them. In 344 innings he struck out 258 hitters, this at a time when striking out was considered a venial sin, when hitters would choke halfway up their bat rather than walk back to the plate having waved at strike three. Even the great Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators, who was generally acknowledged to own the most intimidating fastball in the world in 1912 (and who actually struck out forty-five more hitters in twenty-five more innings than Wood that season), acknowledged Wood’s dominance. Asked that summer which of the two men had the faster fastball, Johnson laughed.

  “Can I throw harder than Joe Wood?” Johnson asked. “Listen, my friend, there’s no man alive can throw harder than Smoky Joe Wood.”

  In what would be the signature game of the entire 1912 season, a full house at Fenway Park got to judge for themselves on Friday afternoon, September 6, and there has never been a heavyweight title fight that inspired more hype or hyperbole than this otherwise meaningless game between a first-place team and a second-place team divided by fifteen games in the standings. Back on July 3, in the second game of a doubleheader, Johnson had thrown six breezy innings in a 10–2 pasting of the Highlanders, improving his record on the season to 12–9. Five days later—the same day, in the other league, that Marquard’s nineteen-game winning streak finally ended—Wood defeated the St. Louis Browns, upping his personal mark to 16–4. And over the next two months, both Johnson and Wood elevated their profession to art, blitzing through the American League with even greater authority than Marquard had done in the National. Johnson was asked to pitch more than Wood, and picked up some wins in relief, and before he finally lost a 3–2 heartbreaker to the Browns on August 28 Johnson had piled up sixteen wins in a row—still a staggering number, and an American League record.

  A record that had stood for all of nine days when Johnson and the Senators arrived at Fenway Park on September 6, and one that looked as if it might not last another nine. Because Wood’s own streak now stood at thirteen, and he was pitching so well that his roommate, Tris Speaker, gushed, “Logic tells you he has to lose again sometime, but then you watch him pitch and you aren’t sure exactly how that’s ever going to happen.” Wood wasn’t originally scheduled to face Johnson; his regular turn in the rotation was to fall on Saturday and Jake Stahl was reluctant to alter his prize pitcher’s schedule for anything or anybody. But then Washington manager Clark Griffith—a Boston nemesis dating to his time managing the Highlanders back in ’04—piped up in the papers. “We will consider [Wood] a coward if he doesn’t pitch against Johnson,” Griffith bellowed.

  Stahl, a former football player, understood a challenge to duel when he heard one.

  “We will pitch Wood,” he said, “and we will win the game.”

  The public bought in, with two fists and armloads of cash. First pitch was scheduled for 3:20 P.M., but by noon the streets around Fenway were choked with humanity. Robert McRoy, the treasurer of the Red Sox, would insist that only 29,000 people were granted admission to the park that day, which still set a record for either league for the biggest crowd ever to see a weekday game. But the real number was closer to 40,000, owing to those who slipped dollar bills into the palms of ushers at the door and those who used more nefarious ways to squeeze into the yard. So thick was the crowd that Wood and Johnson took their warm-ups surrounded on the sidelines by their own personal mobs of admirers.

  “That was the only game I ever remember in Fenway Park, or anywhere else, where the fans were sitting practically along the first- and third-base lines,” Wood would recall some fifty years later. “Instead of sitting back where the bench usually was, we were sitting on chairs right up against the foul lines and the fans were right behind us. The overflow had been packed between the grandstand and the foul lines as well as in the outfield behind ropes. Fenway Park must have contained twice as many people as its seating capacity that day. I never saw so many people in one place in my life.”

  More often than not, a pitching duel this hotly anticipated yields something else: a 13–11 slugfest, or a one-sided showcase for one of the hurlers. But this time, both men were equal to their billing. Through five shutout innings, the tension mounting inside Fenway grew palpable, and when Wood zipped through the Senators in the top of the sixth the crowd grew restless: What if nobody scored? Would a 0–0 tie be a fitting result, or the worst possible anticlimax? But then, with two outs, Speaker stroked a Johnson fastball down the left-field line that was ruled a double when the ball was swallowed by the overflow crowd. Duffy Lewis followed with a soft, humpbacked liner to right field, and when it fell safely, the crowd nearly imploded: In came Speaker with the ice-breaking run, and now Wood needed only nine outs to earn a splendid one-day Triple Crown: a win over the great Johnson; his fourteenth in a row; and his thirtieth on the season. The nine outs came quickly, and effortlessly, and he finished with a six-hit shutout in only 108 pitches. Johnson, gallant loser, allowed but five hits.

  “In my opinion,” Wood said years later, “the greatest pitcher who ever lived was Walter Johnson. If he’d ever had a good team behind him, what records he’d have set.”

  But Wood had the better team behind him this day, and that team had the better pitcher in front of them. Perhaps fittingly, Wood would extend his streak to sixteen straight before falling to the Tigers in Detroit two weeks after his epic showdown with Johnson. Both men would have to settle for sharing the league record, and they were delighted to do so.

  When the Red Sox finally did secure the AL pennant they weren’t afforded an on-field celebration the way the Giants were, since they learned of their clinching in a Cleveland hotel dining room on September 18, where they’d repaired after their game with the Indians was washed out. There they received wireless reports of the White Sox beating the A’s 9–1 in the first game of a doubleheader in Chicago, which officially eliminated the defending champions and officially elevated the Speed Boys to Boston’s first pennant in eight long, frustrating years.

  Jake Stahl was upstairs, in his room, when there came a knock on his door and the manager discovered the smiling visage of T. H. Murnane, the esteemed baseball editor of the Boston Globe, who’d come to deliver the news personally.

  “You get to match wits with McGraw,” Murnane informed him.

  “Ah, it won’t be me against Manager McGraw,” said Stahl. “It’ll be his boys against my boys, on the field, where it ought to be. These boys worked together as one family, they all had their heart in their work. The more difficult the proposition the stronger they went at their work, so that’s why I think we will land the postseason series with New York. They’ve been working hard since Hot Springs and knew early on they had a chance for the big money. And now they do.”

  Murnane—more than any player, any manager, any owner—was the biggest, most beloved baseball figure in Boston, a barrel-chested man with a full white mustache who had himself played eight seasons of big-league ball as a utility player from 1872 to 1884 (including two years with the Boston Red Caps of the National League) and whose stories in the Globe were hungrily consumed in both morning and afternoon editions by well over a million readers. He could be tough and critical, but he was unabashedly partisan, and in the next day’s newspaper he would gush, in prose as purple as a royal sash: “The thrill that electrifies the baseball fan after the victory is won is no new sensation for Boston, but eight years is a long time and the f
ans of New England are in the proper humor to say, ‘Boys, you did your duty well and we fully appreciate the glorious honor that you have brought to our homes to please the old scouts and delight young America.’ ”

  For now, he would just repeat the challenge that soon awaited his friend. To emphasize the point, he opened up the latest edition of The Sporting News, which had already begun speculating about a Red Sox–Giants matchup well in advance of the teams actually guaranteeing one, and began reading aloud:

  “John J. McGraw looms larger and larger as the real hope of the Champion Giants. In his ten years of Gotham experience, the Little Napoleon has always been about one-third of the team. Now it appears he will have to better this percentage if the National League champions are to annex the ‘rubber’ of this baseball classic.”

  Murnane rolled the newspaper back up, stuck it under his arm.

  “You against Muggsy, Jake,” he said.

  “Don’t let Muggsy hear you call him that,” Stahl said.

  The two friends laughed, shook hands, and then Murnane allowed Stahl to return to his thoughts and his preparations. In a few days’ time, Muggsy’s Giants and Stahl’s Speed Boys would gather in New York City for the first of a best-of-seven showdown for the right to call themselves champions and to cash themselves a winner’s paycheck that seemed sure to exceed $4,000 per man. Already, the nation’s baseball scribes were hard at work predicting in print that this, at last, might be a World Series worthy of their breathless hype and hope, that perhaps it might even take the full seven games to determine the champion—something that had happened only once in the first eight of these autumnal encounters.

  What they didn’t know—couldn’t yet know—was that what lay ahead would include far too much intrigue and interest, passion and paranoia, fight and fury, angst and agitation, to be contained to just seven games.

  Or even eight, for that matter …

  CHAPTER TWO

  October 1912: The Run-up

  NEW YORK—The very air of New York was vibrant with suspense last night as lovers of good baseball from all over America gathered in this city on the eve of the first great game of the world’s series between the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox. The hotels were full to overflowing as though the stage had been set here for some great convention. The talk in the bars and corridors, the talk in the theater lobbies and in the streets all turned on the chances of the two great rival teams …

  —HARRY CROSS, NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 8, 1912

  THE LINES BEGAN to form on Sunday night, late, with a chilly October breeze buffeting the rocky bluff bearing the name of an old politician named James J. Coogan. The cliffs bordered a grand baseball basilica named for a game, polo, that would never once be played within its walls during its entire fifty-three-year existence. This corner of Manhattan was still a virtual countryside in 1912, a world apart from the tenements that crowded the lower portion of the island, a planet apart from the outer boroughs that had already begun attracting claustrophobic citizens in need of space. This was the fourth outdoor arena that bore the name “Polo Grounds” in New York City; the last had burned to the ground hours after the Giants lost to the Phillies on Opening Day 1911, a wooden tinderbox brought to its knees by a lone cigarette thrown from the window of a passing elevated train that landed on a pile of garbage.

  This incarnation resembled an overgrown horseshoe, with an ornate façade that ringed the upper deck, invitingly short fences in both left and right field, and an endless pasture leading to center field, where the wall was nearly six hundred feet away from home plate. The Polo Grounds was a magnet for the rich and the powerful as well as the poor and the humble. Broadway actors and Tammany Hall politicians would ride horse-drawn limousines and plunk down $2 to sit within squinting distance of the home-team dugout; barbers and butchers and bartenders would take the El, walk down toward the main gate, and hand over fifty cents for grandstand or bleacher seats. In all, 638,000 people would pour through its turnstiles in 1912, the highest number in all of baseball.

  That was the regular season, though. In two days, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the underdog Giants would host the heavily favored Red Sox in Game One of the eighth annual World Series, and that meant if you wanted to watch the game you had to get uptown a couple of days early, bring a blanket and a boxed dinner, and whittle away the hours until the box office opened at 8 o’clock Monday morning, some thirty hours before the first pitch of the Series. And you could forget about those half-dollar seats. Spots in the bleachers, the cheapest seats in the house, would sell for $1; the lower-tier grandstand seats, of which there were some 30,000, would go for $2; and the best views, in the 8,400 available upper-tier rows, would set a guy back $3, the equivalent of $65 a century later.

  “Hardly leaves a guy any scratch to lay down a wager,” said Thomas Brennan, a resident of West Forty-eighth Street, who was the first person to start the queue. But then Brennan laughed and added, “We’ll make do, I’m sure.”

  By dawn, the lines had begun to slither west from the stadium entrance at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue toward Bradhurst Avenue, and south for thirteen blocks to 142nd Street. And by the time the box office finally opened, it had grown even more, reaching 138th Street to the south and Edgecombe Avenue to the west. By then, the usual casualties of impatience and impertinence had already infiltrated this temporary village. Some in the line complained that all you needed to do was slip a two-dollar bill to a cop and he’d find you a favorable place near the front. One man grumbled to a reporter that he’d gotten in line at 5 A.M. and failed to make any visible progress by 10. “I’ve actually lost ground,” he said. “It’s like I’m going backwards. I’ll be in the Bronx soon.”

  The system was simple and effective: Something was passed to the cop—at first, indeed, a $2 bill, but later the price steepened to $5—and the contributor received a timely “bump” into the line. Complainants were dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

  “Shut your mouth,” one of New York’s Finest retorted to one such dissident, “or you can go to the back of the line.”

  “Or,” added his partner, “you could always go home.”

  The Giants, who’d watched ticket speculators make a fortune a year before during the 1911 World Series, had sweetened the pot for those policemen not interested in shaking down the folks in line: For every would-be broker they nabbed, they would offer a one-dollar bonus. John Heydler, the secretary-treasurer of the National League, speaking on behalf of the three-man National Commission that ruled over the sport, boasted, “The ticket scalpers will be defeated this year.”

  To ensure that outcome, the cops rousted anyone who looked even remotely suspicious, such as poor Donald Murphy, who lived in the shadow of the Polo Grounds and was discovered in tears by a columnist for the New York World.

  “I got here at 2 o’clock in the morning and I’ve eaten all but one sandwich, which I have wrapped in this newspaper (thankfully, not the World). I wouldn’t know a speculator if I saw one and I’m a regular patron. My money is as good as anybody’s, yet here I am thrown out of line. Worse than that, I’m here to buy two tickets for my boss and now I’ll lose my job.”

  “I vouched for the guy,” a man in line said. “But the cop told me, ‘Mind your bee’s wax if you know what’s good for you.’ ”

  The man unfolded his newspaper—the World, of course—and pointed to the front page. “In this town,” he said, “it’s best to listen to the police.”

  There, on the page, were two prominent stories. One referred to the very line the man was standing on, and the World Series for which the line had formed. The other, bolder, brassier, all but screaming loud enough for everyone in this half-mile line to hear, referred to Lieutenant Charles Becker, who not so long ago had been among the most powerful officers in the NYPD but was now about to be the featured player in what the World, the American, the Herald, the Mail, and even the staid Times were calling “The Trial of the Century.” And even if the century was bar
ely a dozen years old, it was hard to believe there’d ever be a story to match this one. The world’s series could come the closest; hell, even the stories about Wilson, Roosevelt, and Taft were buried inside.

  Back in July, a small-time Jewish bookmaker named Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal had gone to the World and spilled his guts all over Page One. Rosenthal and another Lower East Side product named Arnold Rothstein were both protégés of Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan, but while Rothstein’s reputation and bankroll had blossomed (to the point where he was now a silent partner with none other than John J. McGraw in several New York pool halls), Rosenthal’s had stagnated, mostly because he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Becker, who headed a special-detail vice detail boldly (and unabashedly) dubbed the Strong Arm Squad, regularly shook down Rosenthal (and dozens of other hoods), and when the bookie finally balked at his methods, Becker shut him down. That’s when Rosenthal called the newspaper.

  And that’s when Becker—allegedly, of course—made a telephone call of his own.

  Two days later, as Rosenthal walked out of the Hotel Metropole just off Times Square, a car packed with guns happened by him, took aim, and put Beansie out of business permanently. It didn’t take long for the trail to lead back to Becker, who was arrested along with the gunmen and spent much of the summer following his beloved Giants’ pursuit of the pennant from the Tombs, the detention center located thirty blocks from the Polo Grounds. Becker would spend the Series commuting back and forth to the courthouse at 52 Chambers Street and sharing a large swatch of the public imagination with those very same Giants, who would be enduring their own kind of public trial.