by Mike Vaccaro
The Giants understood a couple of things as they readied themselves for the series. First, they were significant underdogs. Almost every major sportswriter had already weighed in, and few expected the Giants to push the Series beyond five games. And while losing the confidence of the sportswriters may have been a blow to the ego, it was losing the faith of the oddsmakers and the bookmakers that really hurt. Even composer George M. Cohan, friend of McGraw and regular Polo Grounds patron, sought out Red Sox owner James McAleer to announce, “I have $50,000 to wager on the Speed Boys,” which would be the equivalent of a million-dollar bet in 2008. Of course, this wasn’t the first time Cohan had transferred his loyalties; a year earlier, he’d bet a similar amount on the Athletics, brought home a bundle, and bragged of his score publicly, a move that put a serious strain on his friendship with all the Giants, especially McGraw (who’d lost the relatively paltry $500 bet he’d placed on his ballclub, a perfectly legal and common practice for the day).
How out in the open was all of this? Even the Christian Gentleman, penning a column for the New York Herald, made no pretense about where the real rooting interest lay for a few hundred thousand of his readers.
“All the advance stats and dope have favored the Red Sox in the series but these figures have been compiled by a lot of experts who have based their deductions on past performances, which don’t amount to much in baseball,” Mathewson wrote. “It’s the future that counts. But this inclination toward the Red Sox has affected the betting and made them a ruling favorite at odds all the way from 10-to-6 to 2-to-1. This is not a disappointment to us but rather an encouraging feature of the outlook. In my opinion the club that is the favorite in the world’s series is under a big handicap. There’s a lot of psychology in it.”
Also a lot of money in it, of course, if you bet the underdog and won.
That wasn’t the only intrigue, though. From the moment it became apparent that the Red Sox and Giants were destined to meet in the World Series, the most delicious kind of revenge began to seep into the bigger picture throughout New England. For the last time Boston had produced a foe as formidable as these Speed Boys, eight years earlier, they had been denied the chance to defend their 1903 World Series championship because McGraw, and to a larger extent Giants owner John T. Brush, had refused to meet them in the postseason of ’04. McGraw, who’d jumped from the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals to manage the Baltimore Orioles in the upstart American League in 1901, had leapt back ever more quickly the following year when the Giants inquired after him—an opportunity too much for this product of small-town, upstate New York to resist. Growing up in Truxton, playing minor league ball in Olean and Wellsville, attending classes each winter at St. Bonaventure College, McGraw had harbored dreams of managing the Giants. And so he vaulted, with both feet, and never looked back.
“I know the American League and its methods,” he declared in late summer of 1904, arguing against participating in the Series. “I will not consent to a haphazard box-office game with [AL President] Ban Johnson and company. No one, not even my bitterest enemy, ever accused me of being a fool. I have taken the New York club from last to first in three short years. Now that New York has won this honor, I, for one, will not stand to see it tossed away like a rag.”
Brush, who was drawn to McGraw’s bombast as it mirrored his own, was even firmer in his refusal.
“There is nothing in the constitution of playing rules of the National League which requires its victorious club to submit its championship honors to a contest with a victorious club in a minor league,” he said, backing up his manager. “We have gained all the glory there is to be acquired in baseball—winning the National League pennant. Some people say it was understood that the champions of both leagues would play an afterseason series. I never was a party to such an agreement or understanding. I never committed myself definitively.”
The outrage was immediate and it was venomous, not only from New England but from the Giants’ own fans, who wanted the series, and from Brush’s own players, who wanted the extra cash bonanza a postseason series would surely generate. So chastened was Brush, in fact, that only one week after the end of the ’04 season—on what should have been the date of Game Six if a World Series had indeed been played—he became a leading advocate in securing a permanent postseason agreement between the leagues. And while both Brush and McGraw took great satisfaction in their 1905 schooling of the American League’s Athletics, both men suffered as the ensuing years brought a Cubs dynasty and an indefinite string of hard-luck losses. It’s why both were so invested in these Giants.
For Brush, it was an investment that bordered on desperation. On the afternoon of September 11, as Brush left the Polo Grounds in his chauffeur-driven automobile, heading for his home in upstate Pelham Manor, a U.S. Mail truck failed to heed a stop sign at Broadway and 126th Street and plowed into his vehicle. Already in failing health, the sixty-seven-year-old Brush suffered a broken hip and two cracked ribs. The bones didn’t knit properly, and coupled with his other ailments he was rendered an invalid; he would have to watch the Giants’ home games during the upcoming series from a car parked beyond the right-field playing area. Too ill to attend the pre-series meetings, he nevertheless wanted to put some of his longest-standing affairs in order and invited Ban Johnson to his house. Years earlier, the feud that would reach a climax with that 1904 series snub had begun when Johnson, a sportswriter for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, regularly took target practice in his column at Brush, who owned the Reds at the time. Johnson, knowing Brush wasn’t well, took a taxi upstate.
Seeing his blood enemy, Johnson was shocked, horrified, and saddened.
“Ban,” Brush said, “I haven’t long to stay here. Let’s forgive each other. I think this has been delayed too long.”
And with that, the two long-standing adversaries shook hands and 1904 was forgotten, at least in this parlor room in Pelham Manor. Such would not be the case in precincts elsewhere. Red Sox shortstop Heinie Wagner, for one, had harbored a grudge against McGraw, and with good reason, for ten solid years. When McGraw landed in New York on July 17, 1902, he’d demanded total control of all personnel decisions. The Giants were 23–50, thirty-three games out of first place, a pathetic shell of a team, so when his new bosses handed McGraw the roster of his new club, he took a lead pencil and crossed nine names off with a flourish.
“You can begin,” McGraw said, “by releasing these fellows here.”
Heinie Wagner was one of those fellows, only twenty-one, a local product out of nearby New Rochelle who’d grown up dreaming of being a Giant. It had taken him four long years to return to the major leagues, a journey that took him to such baseball frontiers as the Connecticut League, and now he would be playing shortstop against his old team, and his old manager, and it was a delicious irony in so many ways because Wagner was precisely the kind of player McGraw valued most: smart, rugged, hard-nosed, and most important of all a unifier. The Red Sox, for all their success in 1912, were a deeply divided team, the most significant schism falling along religious lines, with the Masons (Protestants like Tris Speaker and Joe Wood) on one side and the KCs (Catholics, such as Wagner, Bill Carrigan, and pitcher Bucky O’Brien) on the other. Sometimes the arguments in the clubhouse grew heated, and sometimes the tension on train trips grew unbearable, but it was Wagner who almost always brought the team back together, however temporarily, preaching the neutral ground of winning.
Wagner had already achieved a small measure of revenge. Three years earlier, the third-place Red Sox and third-place Giants had agreed to square off in a best-of-seven postseason series. It wasn’t unusual for teams who shared the same city—the Browns and Cardinals, the White Sox and Cubs, the Giants and the Highlanders—to engage in these exhibitions, local live-action supplements to the World Series, which in 1909 pitted the Pirates and the Tigers. It was a little different for two otherwise unrelated teams to meet, and the wild apathy that greeted the games in both cities underlined t
hat; only 789 people paid for the privilege of watching the fifth and final game in the Polo Grounds, and the players earned precisely $125 a man for their efforts.
“When anyone asked what we were playing for,” Giants catcher Chief Meyers recalled sourly on the eve of the ’12 series, “we said the championship of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, since it got most of the money.”
Still, it provided the Giants with their first glimpse of both Wood and Speaker, who shined, and the Red Sox’ 4–1 victory in the Series allowed Wagner to chortle, “As a lifetime Giants fan, it looks to me like McGraw could use a shortstop. Too bad. I know one he used to have.”
The newspapers figured the starting pitchers for Game One of this 1912 World Series had to be Joe Wood for the Sox and Christy Mathewson for the Giants, because what fool would choose anyone but the best pitcher of today and the greatest pitcher of all time? Jake Stahl, new to this, wasn’t in the mood to play silly games. “Of course it’s Wood,” he said. “If I chose another man they ought to have my head examined.”
McGraw, naturally, delighted in playing silly games. Especially with those sonsofbitches from the papers, always looking for a story, for an angle, for a scoop.
“It’ll be Mathewson,” he announced, watching many of the three hundred gathered sports scribes jotting the name in their notepads. “Or it’ll be Marquard,” he added, laughing as he saw them all make their revisions. “Or it’ll be Tesreau,” he said, pleased with himself as the writers dutifully made another amendment. “Or it’ll be Hooks Wiltse,” he said, and now even the more gullible of writers knew he was toying with them—he had to be, right? “I’ll see how the mood strikes me.”
McGraw had gone to scout the Red Sox late in the season and had made a very public point of summarizing them as “mostly a one-man team.” That rankled the Red Sox, who knew gamesmanship when they saw it. They knew McGraw was trying to send a message to that one man, to Wood, who for all his accomplishments in 1912 was still a kid in many ways, a kid who’d never even seen a World Series game before, much less played in one (as almost all the members of the Giants’ roster had).
McGraw had no way of knowing that he was late to the party, that no fewer than a dozen of his anonymous neighbors in New York had already tested Wood’s nerves by sending him unsigned letters threatening him with consequences as innocent as a thrown tomato to his head and as dire as a bullet to the chest if he opted to take the pitcher’s mound for Game One. Were they jokes? Cowards? Cranks? Neither Wood, the Boston police, nor Red Sox management could determine that. All they knew was that all the missives had New York City postmarks. Two were filled with bad spelling, signed illegibly. Another was written in blood-red ink, with a knife and gun drawn at the bottom:
“You will never live to pitch against the Giants in the world’s series! We are waiting to get you as soon as you arrive in town!”
Another:
“You better stay in Boston where you are safe among friends.”
And a third:
“Look out for us! We’re gunning for you!”
“They’re just kidding,” Wood told James McAleer, who wanted to provide him with a bodyguard, a service this child of the Wild West rejected out of hand. “If someone wants to hurt me, they’ll hurt me. They won’t announce themselves first.”
Nevertheless, McAleer hired a detective agency to shadow the players in New York City, and he altered their usual travel itinerary. Normally, the Sox stayed in one of midtown’s opulent hotels, but McAleer suddenly thought it prudent to avoid the glare of the White Light District, so when their Knickerbocker Limited train arrived in New York at around 6 o’clock on the evening of Monday, October 8 (after receiving a rousing lunchtime send-off at Back Bay Station by 6,000 pennant-waving supporters), they were immediately shuttled from Grand Central Station to the Bretton Hall Hotel, on Broadway and Eighty-sixth Street, a relatively quiet segment of the big town, not quite as stocked with shylock and showgirl. They were given a 10 o’clock curfew.
The Royal Rooters, of course, had no such restrictions, and gleefully checked into their own headquarters at the Marlborough Hotel fifty blocks south, right in the middle of the white lights, “right in the heart of enemy territory,” Nuf Ced McGreevy said, “the way we like it best.” The trips each morning to the Polo Grounds, all the way up at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, would take a while, but the Rooters were nothing if not inventive when it came to passing the time.
There were three hundred of them, each personally guaranteed tickets for Game One (without having to stand in line) thanks to the efforts of their most visible member.
On September 30, Boston’s Mayor Fitzgerald had telegraphed John T. Brush, seeking tickets for himself and his constituents. Brush, knowing that when a politician called seeking a favor he rarely brought his checkbook with him, was reluctant to part with the revenue those seats could generate, but he sent a reply to Boston asking, “What will you do for Giants fans who wish to go to Boston?” To which Honey Fitz immediately replied: “I give you my word that if three hundred seats are not provided for the New York fans by the Boston management I shall refuse a license to play the game.” Brush was convinced. The Rooters got their seats.
Fitzgerald, meanwhile, basked in the reflected glow of his favorite team, elated at all the attention the Red Sox’ winning ways had afforded him. Back in 1904, he’d come close to purchasing the club but had been headed off, most notably, by Ban Johnson, who was enough of a political operator himself to recognize one who was far more skilled at the job than he. That hadn’t stifled Fitzgerald’s loyalties, though, either to his team or to the sport. Baseball could solve a lot of ills, he believed, a philosophy especially helpful to him because his eldest daughter, Rose, had begun seeing a lad named Joseph P. Kennedy, a raffish, ambitious young financier whose lone redeeming quality, to Honey Fitz, was that he’d been a star baseball player at Harvard.
Fitzgerald was intent on sitting among his people at the Polo Grounds Tuesday afternoon until he received a telegram just before departing for Boston from Robert Adamson, the secretary for New York’s Mayor Gaynor: “The Mayor asks if you will give him the pleasure of sitting in his box to-morrow to witness the defeat of the Red Sox by the Giants.”
This was an invitation that no politician of Fitzgerald’s stripe could possibly refuse. He answered the message directly: “It will give me great pleasure to be your guest as the Red Sox begin their onward march to the world’s championship, and to congratulate you upon the fact that your city, the greatest in the country, possessing the best team in the National League, will have the distinguished honor of adding to the glory of the best city in the world and to the laurels of the finest ball team ever organized.”
If there was one fly in the ointment for Fitzgerald, it was that for all of his bluster and all of his blarney, he was not the highest-ranking statesman in the Red Sox’ stable. That honor belonged to William Howard Taft of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., currently embroiled in a vicious campaign to retain that address. Employing footwork that not only belied his 350-pound frame but would also make future candidates proud, this son of Ohio made no pretense of his affinity for the Reds before winning the presidency in 1908. In 1910, he became the first chief executive to throw a ceremonial first pitch, handling the honors at the Washington Senators’ home opener, and from that day forward, he pledged, he would be a devoted Senators fan … until he decided to adopt the 1912 Red Sox “because,” he explained in mid-September, “they’ll be in the world’s series and the Senators will not. And I shall watch them when they play in Boston.”
Sound political reasoning. Alas, as would befall untold millions of American men across the next century, Taft’s baseball plans would be sabotaged by an irresistible force. Mrs. Taft, it seems, had already accepted an invitation from friends in Vermont and New Hampshire to visit in early October. Taft, it was reported, was hoping his friends would either reconsider or postpone their invitations, but they were
stymied by Mrs. Taft, who wanted to make the trip. So the President would have to make alternate arrangements to follow the series—and, in his spare time, the campaign.
The details were set. Both teams had already written out $10,000 checks to the National Commission, security to ensure (it was assumed) that both teams would be playing on the level. The umpires had been selected, and for the first time the World Series would be policed by a four-man crew, rather than the two-umpire setup that was standard for regular-season games; befitting a series of such quality, the men chosen were the four most recognizable, and accomplished, umpires in the land. In fact, in the entire history of baseball only eight umpires have ever been enshrined in the Hall of Fame; two of them would work this series. From the American League came Francis “Silk” O’Loughlin and Billy Evans, from the National League Bill Klem and Cy Rigler.
Klem was tabbed with the duty of calling balls and strikes for Game One, an appropriate honor for a thirty-eight-year-old who was already considered the “father of umpires” and who was seven years into a distinguished thirty-seven-year career that would ultimately lead him to the Hall of Fame, the first-ever arbiter so honored. He was an innovator, the first umpire to use hand signals while calling balls and strikes, the first to use a very primitive form of chest protector to guard against foul tips that could assault umpires like shrapnel if they weren’t careful. And he was also completely immersed in the sport that gave him both his livelihood and his fame. “To me,” Klem once said, “baseball is not a game, but a religion.” Evans, the other man with a future appointment in Cooperstown, was a precocious soul who’d become an umpire at twenty-two, worked his first World Series at twenty-five, and retired young at age forty-three to switch sides and become a general manager, first for baseball’s Cleveland Indians, later for football’s Cleveland Rams.