The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Silk O’Loughlin was the most colorful character of the bunch. He earned his nickname as a boy in Rochester, New York, because of his fine hair and who would go on to call a record ten no-hitters in his career, one of which—on July 29, 1911—had been thrown by Smoky Joe Wood. Like Klem, he was an innovator: He was the first to utilize a booming voice to indicate ball or strike, safe or out, rather than merely informing the nearest available player of his judgment, as had previously been the standard practice. His confidence was unmatched, and decades later umpires were still quoting his two most famous observations. To the victim of an unpopular call, O’Loughlin was fond of saying, “I have never missed one in my life and it‘s too late to start now.” And to just about anyone else who would listen, he would remark, “It’s the Pope for religion, O’Loughlin for baseball. Both infallible.” Rigler, the least-decorated of the quartet, was no less responsible for another bit of baseball legislation; earlier in 1912, while moonlighting as an assistant coach at the University of Virginia, he signed pitcher Eppa Rixey for the Philadelphia Athletics, a move that prompted baseball to ban what had to that point been a common, if quiet, practice: umpires who also served as bird-dog scouts.

  McGraw, the most notorious umpire baiter of his generation, was satisfied with the assignments, likely since he knew his presence in the Series had prompted the National Commission to hire the best men available for the jobs, regardless of politics or preference. “These games will be decided on the basepaths, and not by the men wearing ties,” McGraw said before Game One. “That is as it should be.”

  There was one concern for the Red Sox, and it was a significant one. Larry Gardner, their twenty-six-year-old third baseman, had a right pinky that presently looked like a fleshy z, an injury he’d suffered in late September, with the pennant well in hand, when he’d dived to try and stop a sharp Donnie Bush ground ball in Detroit. Gardner was easy to overlook in a Boston lineup that included the splendid Speaker as its foundation and also featured Duffy Lewis (a team-high 109 runs batted in) and Harry Hooper (who tied Speaker for the team lead with twelve home runs), but Gardner was second to Speaker with a .315 batting average, third on the team with eighty-six RBIs, led the team with eighteen triples, and on July 2 in New York hit two inside-the-park home runs, a feat accomplished only eight times previously. And while he made thirty-five errors, that was actually well below average at a time when the position of third base truly earned its nickname of “the hot corner”; as a point of comparison, eight different men manned third for the Highlanders in 1912, combining to make seventy-two errors. This was not a job for the faint of heart.

  Gardner and Hooper lived together that summer of 1912 in Winthrop on Boston’s North Shore. Both of them were college men: Gardner had played at the University of Vermont and Hooper at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and after each game they would cook shellfish by digging a hole in the sand on the beach in front of their house, throwing in hot rocks, and then covering the hole with seaweed. After his injury, as he returned to the bench, Gardner showed his little finger to Hooper, showed where the bone had fractured so badly it pierced the skin.

  “You think you can jam it back into place?” he asked.

  “Only if you have some glue on you,” Hooper replied.

  Gardner had spent the rest of the season recuperating at his home in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, vowing to play in the World Series even though he essentially now had six fingers on his throwing hand. “Nothing that Q and a little tape can’t fix,” he figured, referring to both Sox trainer Joe Quirk and the most reliable antidote in his toolbox. On October 3, twelve days after the injury, Mathewson and Rube Marquard had stayed behind in Philadelphia after the Giants completed a series with the Phillies so they could get a firsthand look at the Red Sox, who were completing their season with three games against the Athletics. The most notable thing they saw (besides Smoky Joe Wood breezing through the defending champs’ batting order in a 17–5 rout) was Gardner, wincing with every swing, taking batting practice under the watchful eye of the Red Sox’ team physician, Dr. Richard Cliff. He barely got the ball out of the infield, and was sweating profusely by the time he was done, but reported he was ready to return to duty.

  The two Giants pitchers dutifully reported all of this to their teammates when they returned to New York the next day.

  “Damn,” one of the younger Giants said. “I figured he was out. If they didn’t have Gardner, that winner’s money would be ours for sure.”

  Mathewson, who more than anyone else embodied what everyone on the team considered to be “the Giant Way,” frowned. Larry Doyle, the pepper-pot second baseman and team captain, who’d enjoyed his finest year in 1912, who would soon be named the Most Valuable Player of the National League and fueled the Giants with the kind of swagger McGraw craved, was a bit more animated.

  “If you don’t think we can beat the Boston club straight up, then you can get the hell out of this clubhouse and get your ass back to the bushes where it belongs,” Doyle fumed.

  “That ain’t the way we win games around here,” veteran Moose McCormick seethed. “Shit, I don’t care if they pick up Ty Cobb and Ed Walsh [the American League’s best hitter and among its best pitchers, respectively, who played for the Tigers and White Sox, respectively] for the world’s series. We’ll beat their asses, too.”

  “I want to see Gardner in there with everything he’s got,” piped in third baseman Buck Herzog. “When we grab the series, we don’t want to hear any excuses.”

  Mathewson, reclaiming the floor, returned a sliver of solemnity to the lecture. “That’s the way we are. That’s the way it is around here,” he said. “We want to beat Boston, but we want to beat Boston’s best team. And we want to win that winner’s money fair and square.”

  The winner’s money. For Mathewson and the other men gathered in the room, that was the holiest grail, same as it was for the Red Sox. The year before, the Giants and the A’s had split $342,264, the winners receiving a record $3,655 per man. That may not seem a lot—and even in 2007 dollars, that translates to roughly $80,000 or so, a fraction of a contemporary World Series check—but that was a good thousand bucks clear of the average salary ballplayers brought home for the whole year in 1912. In 2007, when a future generation of Red Sox would win a World Series, each of them would take home more than $308,000—tip money in a time when the average player income was in excess of $2.6 million. Mathewson could still bitterly recall the 1905 Series, when many of the Athletics and many of the Giants had paired up and agreed to split evenly the $68,436.81 that was allocated to the players’ pool regardless of who won the Series. Mathewson was not one of the conspirators that year, when the split was 75–25 in favor of the winners, and he was still outspokenly suspicious of the way the National Commission rewarded World Series participants every year.

  For one thing, the players received only a portion of the first four games played in any Series. Baseball owners called that a necessary safeguard; without that cap, there would be nothing preventing players from colluding to play every Series to seven games (or more, if they threw in a few “accidental” ties, too), the better to maximize their profits. Mathewson railed that this was a cynical concession to the lowest common denominator. “Even players who place a bet on themselves now and again have every reason in the world to win that bet,” he reasoned, failing to factor in the possibility that there would be certain players who might bet against themselves, too, depending on the odds. Under existing rules, then, the first four games’ receipts would be divided thusly: 60 percent to the players’ pool (which would ultimately be split 60 to the winners and 40 to the losers), 30 percent split equally by the two club owners, and 10 percent to the National Commission, an arrangement that sure looked like a legal skim to skeptical players. Any other games would go 100 percent into the pockets of the owners; nobody in that fraternity, apparently, seemed bothered by the fact that temptation could just as easily seduce them to artificially extend a World Series by
a game or two—especially in a year when the two facilities hosting the games would, for the first time, each exceed 30,000 capacity, fattening substantially the potential bottom line.

  Asking such questions wouldn’t have done anyone much good, the men who ran baseball agreed. What the public didn’t know couldn’t hurt them. Or the game.

  William Pink wanted to know what kind of self-respecting baseball town would be so tightfisted with its dollars, how any city that thought so highly of itself could think so little of its local nine. Pink was a wholesale liquor dealer from Boston, a member in good standing of the Royal Rooters who’d actually put together the group’s travel itinerary, and a man who was itching to spread his money around. In fact, he insisted, the three hundred Rooters among them had close to $100,000 that they wanted to lay down—if only they could find any takers.

  “We can’t get any bets,” he moaned. “Where is all this Giant money we’ve been hearing about? We run across lots of people willing to argue, but they vanish at the mention of money.”

  “What odds are you giving?” he was asked.

  “Why, it ought to be even money,” he said. “If you have any pride in the Giants you shouldn’t ask odds. Over in Boston when we try to bet we have to offer 10-to-6 or 10-to-5 to get any takers. But it ought to be different here. One of the troubles is that the newspaper articles have made the Giants fans timid. We are only offering even money now but I guess we’ll have to come down to 10-to-9 or 10-to-8 before we can get a bet.”

  He was right; once the New York bookies—the Supreme Court on such matters—announced their odds at 10-to-8, Pink and everyone else found willing dance partners. By Tuesday morning, when a bright sun dawned on New York City, seeming as excited about that day’s World Series Game One as everyone else, it was estimated that more than a million dollars had already been wagered within the city’s five boroughs alone. And that was sure to grow quickly, especially once the boys from Wall Street got involved, which would officially occur that morning. Mostly, before now, the moneymen had concerned themselves with placing bets on the presidential election (Wilson was the current betting favorite, at 4-to-1), but shortstops would soon usurp statesmen, at least for the time being. Besides, Taft (the long shot at 15-to-1) had other issues to deal with. Already stuck on a baseball-free vacation, his official car was nearly run off the road of a narrow mountain between Dalton, Massachusetts, and Brattleboro, Vermont, by a truck speeding recklessly right at him. He wasn’t having a good month.

  Neither were the glut of young boys seized with baseball fever who’d hoped to make an unplanned holiday out of Game One. In fact, so many kids from out of town had made their way to the city from their hometowns that Police Commissioner Rhinelander Waldo put together a special squad at the Polo Grounds to round them up after his office was flooded with dozens of letters from anxious parents seeking aid in tracing missing youngsters. And John Murphy, groundskeeper of the Polo Grounds, found himself having to shoo with a pitchfork fifteen or twenty city kids who’d snuck into the stadium overnight and slept in his toolshed in the hopes of getting a glimpse of the game.

  “It was either that or call the Truant Officer on them, because I’m a busy man,” explained Murphy, who already had his hands full trying to reinforce the wooden portions of the ballpark’s grandstands, which might, for the first time, have to withstand the force of 40,000 people.

  The city was electric. Hotels reported guests who’d come from as far away as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, all flooding concierges with requests for tickets, some offering to pay as much as $100 for a pair of good seats. And over on Park Row, near the Brooklyn Bridge, where ten of the city’s fourteen newspapers were crowded into the same few blocks, newsboys picked up their stash of papers, not sure which front-page story they wanted to hawk louder.

  There was the World Series, of course. But things had also taken a turn for the sinister (and the surreal) in the Becker Trial already; “Big Jack” Zelig, who’d started his career as a pickpocket and had grown into one of New York’s most flamboyant underworld figures, had been gunned down on a trolley car three days before he was scheduled to testify against the disgraced lieutenant. That was one of many reasons why it had taken three full days and more than three hundred potential candidates to finally identify eleven of the twelve men who would sit on Becker’s jury. Being a good citizen could be hazardous to your health, as Big Jack Zelig had discovered during his first and only foray into good citizenship.

  A few weeks before, Zelig had been kind enough to share with Hearst’s American his opinions on the best way to raise children in the modern world. “Make a companion and a chum out of him,” he’d said. “Keep him off the streets. Never let him play marbles for keeps. Keep him away from the small dice and the poolrooms.”

  Anything else?

  “Make an athlete out of him,” Big Jack suggested. “Go and make a ballplayer out of him. A ballplayer is what he ought to want to be anyway.”

  So the newsboys listened.

  “JINTS AND SOX TODAY AT THE POLO GROUNDS!” they cried. “JINTS AND SOX START THE SERIES TODAY!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Tuesday, October 8, 1912: Game One

  NEW YORK—“Smoky Joe” they call him, although when he made his appearance in the land of the living twenty-three years ago this month, his fond parents thought the world would know him only as Howard Ellsworth Wood. But “Smoky Joe” it was who emerged from that fierce fight up under Coogan’s Bluff yesterday afternoon …

  DAMON RUNYON, NEW YORK AMERICAN, OCTOBER 9, 1912

  THE POLO GROUNDS was the place to be this morning of October 8, 1912, but it wasn’t the only place to be if you wanted to follow what would be happening up there later in the day. Already, in three different places across New York City, and in several spots throughout Greater Boston, workmen had begun putting the finishing touches on remote scoreboards that would attract tens of thousands of people, all of them with their gazes fixed on the numbers, lights, and figurines that would replicate the baseball game being played at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in Upper Manhattan. Already, electricians were working out the bugs between the telegraph lines set up in a lower box along the first-base line and those scoreboards; the papers all boasted that it would take no longer than six seconds for any action uptown to be transmitted downtown, or to Boston, or to any other city anxiously awaiting updates. Already, three Boston newspapers had set aside telephone lines to be used exclusively for callers who wanted updates from the games. Already, the six afternoon newspapers in New York and the three afternoon papers in Boston had held staff meetings with circulation people, making sure that fresh-off-the-presses extra editions would be in the hands of newsboys within minutes of the final out.

  “Telephone 4500 Fort Hill!” screamed the house advertisement in that morning’s editions of the Boston Globe, and that city’s biggest newspaper had already hired two dozen temporary workers to man the switchboards inside its business office so callers could get instant score updates. Outside, the paper would construct its own temporary scoreboard, and another would rise in the middle of Boston Common sponsored by the rival Herald.

  A century later, it would be virtually impossible to walk a city block without having instant access to scores and pitching changes, to trade rumors and injury reports. Taxicabs have mobile scoreboards affixed to the tops of their roofs. Televisions have a continuous blur of numbers and names crawling across the bottoms of their screens. A click of a button on your cellular phone and you can access video of a home run hit two minutes earlier two time zones away. In 1912, you had to be a little more inventive, a little more creative, except in October. In October, if you walked along the streets of a great city, you were going to hear about the latest development in the World Series whether you wanted to or not. A man would strike out in New York or Boston, Chicago or Detroit, and within six seconds that information would be relayed to a waiting scoreboard somewhere in Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Los Angeles or
Cincinnati. There was a reason why baseball called it the “world’s series”: No matter where you traveled in the nation—the only “world” that mattered to most Americans in 1912, five years before the killing fields of France would permanently expand those boundaries—you found thousands of people hungry for scores, thirsty for baseball information.

  Still, nothing compared to the buzz in and around a city when your team was in the series. And so it was that in Times Square, in the hours before noontime, long before the first pitch would be thrown at 3 o’clock uptown, a crowd of several thousand had already gathered outside the offices of the New York Times, mindful that to arrive later would mean a poor view and a craned neck. Thousands of others had migrated to Herald Square, outside the building belonging to the New York Herald, where its sister paper, the Evening Telegram, had built an even bigger, far fancier display board, dubbed a Playograph, replete with color-coded lights and live-action mannequins to represent, as best as possible, the likenesses of Tris Speaker and Fred Merkle, Smoky Joe Wood and Christy Mathewson. Down on the Lower East Side, where so many other papers were bunched together, another board rose along Park Row, sponsored by Hearst’s morning and afternoon papers, the American and the Journal. And if you fell somewhere in between the privileged few thousand who had actual tickets to the game and the masses who waited impatiently for news nuggets on the newspaper boards, you could spend anywhere from fifty cents to two bucks and pay for a seat inside Madison Square Garden in New York or inside the Arena in Boston, where the information would be fed to you along with frankfurters and other hors d’oeuvres, beers and other beverages, where you could listen to some pregame music, too, if you so desired.

  Jack O’Patrick, one of a hundred police officers assigned to keep the peace in Herald Square, shook his head as he reported for duty on Tuesday morning and spotted the gathering throng.