by Mike Vaccaro
“I’ve been on the job for seventeen years and this is the first time I’ve seen so many beat cops reporting for work so early,” the resident of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, said as he chewed on a small cigar. “I think they want to get a good spot the same as the other people do, same as the fans. Me? The hell with the Giants and the Red Sox. I’m a Dodgers fan. I’d like to see them both lose. I’m rooting for rain.”
The great palace where the grand festivities would take place was in pristine condition when the umpires all arrived to inspect the field around 11 o’clock. There had been a burst of ballpark-building all across the major leagues, a trend that would continue for a few more years and produce some of the most memorable green cathedrals in American lore. Shibe Park (later rechristened Connie Mack Stadium) had started the trend in 1909, rising in less than a year in the heart of a section of Philadelphia known as Brewerytown. It was revolutionary not only because of its careful, elaborate design but also because it was the first baseball field built primarily of steel and concrete; when that wayward cigarette from the passing El felled the wooden Polo Grounds two years later, the imperativeness of such progress was keenly evident. In addition to the rebuilt Polo Grounds (which, shockingly, was ready by June after the Giants spent the first three months of 1911 sharing Hilltop Park with the rival Highlanders), new parks sprouting like cherry blossoms would appear like magic in Boston (Fenway Park), in Detroit (Navin Field, opened on the same day, April 20, 1912), Cincinnati (Crosley Field, which opened nine days earlier), Brooklyn (Ebbets Field, which would open in 1913), and Chicago (which had already welcomed Comiskey Park on the South Side in 1909 and would break ground on Wrigley Field on the North Side by 1913).
Still, there was no place quite like the Polo Grounds, a magnificent project that fulfilled the wishes of John J. McGraw and John T. Brush that their baseball team should play not only in a ballpark, but a basilica. The upper deck was decorated by an ornate and detailed frieze, as was the facing of the lower deck, and a flock of steel eagles stood watch at the roof’s very top; the whole presentation was impossible to keep your eyes off of from the moment you first walked into the place. (Yankee Stadium’s copper façade would soon enough become the most famous decorative touch in all of American sporting architecture, but there was little mystery about where the designers of Osborne Engineering had taken their inspiration.) The infield was distinctly shaped like a clover, with ornamental dark circles built into the dirt itself. The dimensions were just as unique. To left field, the official measurement was 277 feet, but the second deck extended about twenty feet over the lower grandstand, meaning if you could get a little air under the ball you could get yourself a tidy 250-foot home run (not that McGraw’s teams, the ultimate practitioners of “small ball,” ever took regular aim at such an inviting target). The outfield sunk, and at the fence it was a good eight feet lower than the infield, meaning that when McGraw looked out from the dugout, he could barely see Fred Snodgrass’s neck out in center field. Even the dirt strip connecting the pitcher’s mound and home plate, commonplace in ballparks of the era, was distinctive, one stripe of darker dirt (and sometimes two or three) bisecting the wider-than-normal strip.
And all along the outfield fence, and in the walls behind the outfield bleachers, every available inch of wood and concrete was turned over to the local merchants. There were advertisements for Adler Gloves (“Fit For Everybody!”) and B.V.D. Underwear (“Be Cool! Loose Fitting!) and the House of Morrison Tailors (“It Fits Well Around the Neck!”), for Bass Ale and Baltimore Whiskey and Peter Doelger Bottled Beer and Ruppert’s Knickerbocker Beer, for Fatima Cigars and Philip Morris Cigarettes, for Adams’ Pepsin Gum and Schweppes’ Dry Ginger Ale and Appollinaris Bottled Water.
When a newspaperman asked Brush one time if there was a segment of his stadium that he wouldn’t sell, Brush, a millionaire dozens of times over, had replied, “Gentlemen, we need to find some way to meet the salaries of our baseball players.”
Into the quiet breach walked the four arbiters in dark blue suits, white dress shirts, and dark blue bow ties, and it was Silk O’Loughlin who is said to have turned to his three cohorts and said, “Better get ’em all right today, fellows, or there’ll be a hundred thousand people who’ll say they were here when you got it wrong.”
Outside, the men and women on line started to stir. Some had spent the better part of two days in the shadow of Coogan’s Bluff, and they waited impatiently for the Polo Grounds’ main entrance, facing the Harlem River Speedway, to open. Most of them had their heads buried in newspapers. In the Press, an organ of the Bull Moosers, there was an editorial extolling the games, and the game, they were all about to embrace: “With baseball at the top of its popularity and financial prosperity, it is astonishing that the game has been kept so free from the gambling scandal which has ruined horse racing in the United States for this time. Considerable betting does go on in spite of the resolute efforts of baseball authorities to keep their sport free from its blight, though the gambling cannot be indulged on its grounds. The tradition against contact between professional gamblers and players has been stubbornly upheld. Most of the wagers made are of the character indulged by political partisans over election results. If the government of the United States were as efficient, honest, and courageous as the government of American baseball there would be little graft and little complaint of favoritism.”
The World and the American, of course, tried to outscream each other with the latest headlines from the Becker Trial. The World scored the bigger coup, getting an exclusive interview with the disgraced lieutenant on his way back to the Tombs, quoting him thusly: “You don’t mean to say any decent man is going to give any credit to the testimony of such dirty Jews as that crowd against me are? They can’t convict me of anything on the strength of what that bunch swears to.” Becker growled, “They’re the scum of the earth. Let me tell you this: If they convict me of anything on the evidence given by that crew, then the United States is worse than Russia.”
The American had to settle for a firsthand account from one of its photographers, who’d brought his camera to Big Jack Zelig’s funeral at 286 Broome Street, in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. When he aimed his camera the first time, one of the mourners walked over and tapped him on the shoulder.
“If you click that camera here once, I will get you,” the man from the American was informed. “Remember this: If I don’t get you here now I’ll get you if it takes me six months.”
The photographer tried to plead his case to a familiar face nearby, a man who also happened to be a detective for the NYPD, who’d heard every word of that oath. “I need to take pictures!” he protested. The cop just shook his head.
“You’d better not,” he said. “There may be serious trouble if you do. You’ll probably be killed before I had a chance to defend you.”
The story ran without pictures.
It was a quarter till noon, fifteen minutes to the opening of the doors, when suddenly the pilgrims in line heard a raucous ruckus drifting in from the south. Many were shocked by the commotion. But the real baseball aficionados in line identified the source of the tumult straightaway.
“Why lookee here,” one of them said, “if it ain’t the Royal Rooters.”
Their sacred journey had begun more than a hundred blocks downtown just about an hour earlier, all three hundred of them gathering along with a thirty-piece brass band at the Elks Club on Forty-fourth Street at 11 o’clock, some nursing hangovers off a boisterous night of imbibing and propositioning, most of them simply high on the opiate of baseball. They came armed wearing buttons, caps, scarves, sweaters, all of it in deep shades of crimson. They held clackers in their hands, the kind of incessant noisemaker that usually got a rise out of whatever city they were invading. Some brought tiny bats to supplement the percussion. Honey Fitz wasn’t among them, not yet, because the callings of his office superseded that of his baseball lodge and so he was breakfasting with New York mayor Gaynor, New York’s
governor John Alden Dix, and Massachusetts’s governor Eugene Foss. But Nuf Ced McGreevy was there, and so was Dick Field and John J. Attridge, Johnny Keenan and William Pink, all of them unofficial officers of the court. At 11 sharp, they took to the streets, marching ten blocks to where a motorcade was waiting for them, all the while singing their theme song, “Tessie,” a ditty written in 1903 whose annoying melody was surpassed only by its cloying lyrics:
Tessie, you make me feel so badly
Why don’t you turn around?
Tessie, you know I love you madly
Babe, my heart weighs about a pound …
And even then, most people could stand it except the Rooters sang it incessantly, ten times a game, fifteen times a game, twenty times a game. It was their duty, they believed. Back in 1903, the first World Series had opened in Boston and the visiting Pirates had taken two out of three, then took Game Four in Pittsburgh to seize a commanding 3–1 lead in the best-of-nine series. Then the Rooters—who’d all but commandeered the third-base section of the grandstand at old Exposition Park (seemingly unaffected by the rancid odors that would often waft over from the Allegheny River, on whose banks the park was built)—started singing “Tessie,” and the Red Sox won, and they kept winning, and the Rooters kept singing, and when they captured the Series in Game Eight back in Boston, Tessie’s immortality was sealed and the legend of the Royal Rooters was hatched.
It wasn’t just their rabid intensity that separated the Rooters from other loyal fans scattered throughout other cities, lending their support to other teams. Those fan bases tended to be filled with boaters and neckties, as baseball was still a decidedly male pastime; among the Rooters, it wasn’t unusual to see silk stockings and tea hats, for women were more than welcome among their ranks. As they cruised up Broadway this day, their band in tow, a gaggle of the women audaciously carried a banner declaring “Boston Red Sox, World’s Champions, 1912.” And they toted in their purses the same printed cards that their male counterparts carried in their wallets, passed out back at the Elks Club by McGreevy, stating the Rooters’ ambitious goals: “At Baltimore in 1897, Pittsburgh in 1903 and New York in 1904, with the odds against us on the enemy’s battlefield, we cheered them on to victory and brought home the flag.”
Five songs, replete with lyrics, were included on the cards. And as the motorcade carrying the revelers slowed and dropped the leather-lunged brigade out in the midst of the Giants fans stringing out the queue, they finished off a sixth rendition of “Tessie,” plowed their way through “Sweet Adeline,” and then entertained their hosts with some specially written lyrics designed to fill the popular New York tune “Tammany,” the ultimate tribute to their favored nine:
Carrigan, Carrigan
Speaker, Lewis, Wood and Stahl
Bradley, Engle, Pape and Hall
Wagner, Gardner, Hooper too
Hit them, hit them, hit them, hit them
Do boys, do.
It is frightening to imagine what a restless pack of New York baseball fans would do if confronted with similar conviviality administered by modern fans of Boston baseball, especially given such a banal libretto. Suffice to suggest they wouldn’t do what the people in line at the Polo Grounds did on October 8, 1912.
For they offered up a warm round of applause.
Or maybe they were just in a giving mood. Noon had passed, and slowly all thirty-two entrances at the grounds were lifting their steel gates, and now the crowd eagerly passed through turnstiles, finding their seats, waiting for the first look of baseball players on an October day that easily could have passed for June. The mood in the stands was upbeat, and it was catchy. The previous year, the Giants’ giddy captain, Larry Doyle, had remarked to a rookie reporter for the American named Damon Runyon, “Damn, it’s great to be young and a New York Giant!” Now Giants fans, those lucky enough to have a ticket for this grand occasion, co-opted the expression.
“Damn, it’s great to be fifty years old and a Giants fan!” exclaimed William M. Erb, an exiled New Yorker now living in San Francisco who estimated he’d spent close to $500 to cover the basic costs of his sojourn: train travel, lodging, food, cab service from the Hotel Knickerbocker to the Polo Grounds, and, of course, “enough left over to entice the gentleman in the grandstand to engage me in a wager at favorable odds.”
While all of this was going on, the players started trickling into the clubhouses, located beyond the outfield fence. Most of the Giants lived in apartments in nearby Washington Heights, although the McGraw and Mathewson clans each owned property farther downtown befitting the heft of their social and financial strata. The Red Sox arrived two-by-two in a procession of cabs from the Bretton, with the exception of McGraw’s nemesis Heinie Wagner, who’d stayed with his parents in suburban New Rochelle. It was impossible not to run into players on opposing teams in the cramped quarters of the neighboring dressing rooms, but not one of the forty-five available players on either side dared exchange greetings or even silent pleasantries. Not now. Maybe not even later. The trainers were busy, tending to Larry Gardner’s pinky and Duffy Lewis’s cold in the visiting room, to Chief Meyers’s sore foot in the Giants’ room.
McGraw didn’t want any of his players bothering with the swarms of newspapermen who’d beaten them to the park, so he handled the duties himself, inviting a few of the scribes into his tiny office where he was pulling on his uniform.
“Are you nervous, John?” Sid Mercer of the Globe asked, breaking the ice if not the tension.
“Nervous? Sure I am! Sure we are. I wouldn’t give a snap of my finger for a player so stolid in his makeup that he didn’t feel the thrill that comes just before a contest such as this one. But when the game begins that nervousness will disappear and the men will give the best that’s in them.”
Down the narrow corridor, a smaller crop of writers had surrounded Jake Stahl, pestering him for a prediction, until finally he had to say something to get them away from him and off to the press box.
“I don’t call this a prediction,” he said, “but I just know that flag is going to fly in our field in the Back Bay next year.”
“That sounded like a prediction to me, Jake,” Murnane of the Globe said.
“I’m confident in the boys, Tim,” he said. “What else do you expect me to say?”
At exactly 12:45, with the bleachers and most of the grandstand already packed to the gills, the long gate at the bottom of the right-field fence creaked loudly and began to open, parting the Baltimore Whiskey and Peter Doelger ads in half, revealing the hallway leading to the clubhouses, and the loud buzz that had swarmed the Polo Grounds, turning it into a human beehive, disappeared at once … and out stepped Dick Hennessey, the Giants’ mascot, who was greeted with a loud, disappointed sigh that soon dissolved back to silence. But when McGraw strode purposefully out of the darkness a few seconds later, the solemnity was replaced by a roar that rattled the year-old yard to its brand-new foundation. Mathewson came next, of course, followed by Rube Marquard and Jeff Tesreau, then Snodgrass and Merkle and Doyle the captain, who was the only one who waved at the adoration. The Giants wore brand-new uniforms, but they were of the exact same design as the ones they wore during the season, more gray than white, with pinstripes and the team’s distinctive “NY” logo prominently stamped on the front; there was no sign of the imposing all-black uniforms that McGraw had ordered specifically for the Giants’ two previous World Series appearances, in 1905 and 1911. Some of the players wore maroon sweaters, too. All of them seemed a little curious at the glee surrounding them, a continuous five-minute spasm interrupted only by the lady with the Royal Rooters who stood up as the manager passed by and unfurled a brand-new sign:
WE WERE HERE IN 1904, BUT …
REMEMBER THAT, JOHN.
McGraw couldn’t help himself when he saw that. He laughed. Then he tipped his cap.
Immediately behind the Giants came the Red Sox, and they were an irresistible sight, walking slowly with gray uniforms and red stocking
s, each of them wearing striking red blazers. They were greeted with polite applause by most of the gathering throng and with unbridled enthusiasm by the three hundred rooters and thirty trumpeters singing yet another few bars of “Tessie,” occasionally throwing into the air their interchangeable straw boaters, all of which featured flaming-red hatbands with “Oh! You Red Sox!” stenciled on them. The Giants were well into their batting practice, and Red Murray drew a few cheers and a loud sarcastic yell when he drilled one of the first pitches he saw about ten rows deep over the left-field fence, off a grooved lob from BP pitcher Louie Drucke.
“Hey, Murray!” came the voice, slicing through the rest of the crowd noise like a foghorn. “You gonna be on the take again this year? You were oh-for-twenty-one last year, Murray, did you have a pile on the A’s? You taking the Sox this year too?”
Murray stepped out of the batter’s box and walked over to Larry Doyle.
“Pay him no attention,” Doyle said.
“That’s the same son of a bitch been on my back all damned year,” Murray said. “I’ve wanted to foul off a pitch in his mouth since spring.”
“Keep hittin’ ’em straight and long,” Doyle said. “That’ll shut him up.”
When the Giants were finished, the Sox hustled to replace them and the first man in the batting cage was Tris Speaker, who took three practice swings and sneered at the pitcher, “Let ’er rip.” Then Speaker took one of the most vicious swings anyone could ever remember seeing outside of a real game, and he sent the ball soaring on a breathtaking arc toward right field, over the fence, and over the entire grandstand, the ball finally coming to rest ninety feet beyond the back wall.
There was an audible gasp, then instant silence. It was the longest ball anyone had ever seen hit in this stadium, or in any of the previous three stadiums bearing the name “Polo Grounds.”