The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  “Holy smoke,” Fred Merkle said, loud enough for McGraw to hear.

  “You know how many runs they get for that, Merkle? They get zero runs for that. Next time I catch you admiring their work it’ll cost you twenty-five bucks.”

  Soon enough, the crowd was snapped back into its frenzy, thousands of them plunking down ten cents for a program (a reduction from a quarter the year before, when so many people had complained of price gouging). Harry M. Stevens, the vending magnate, had hired extra workers to keep pushing Coca-Cola, peanuts, chewing gum, “historical sandwiches” and hot dogs, in addition to cigars and cigarettes, and he could barely keep the trays full. The other impresarios doing turn-away business were located far over near third base, in the grandstand. This is where the gamblers had gained a beachhead, and if there was a problem with their presence no one was saying. Not only were they still taking wagers on the Series (at 10-to-8) and the game (even money if Mathewson was starting, 10-to-9 for anyone else), they had also set up a wooden board to accommodate a floating craps game and various brands of poker, silver coins clinking all over the aisles of their little village.

  Three o’clock approached, and McGraw sent both Mathewson and Jeff Tesreau out to start warming up. Typical McGraw, many in the crowd hooted. Leave everyone guessing till the final second, even though everyone knows it’s going to be Mathewson, who looked as resplendent as ever when he peeled off his maroon sweater and started long-tossing. McGraw nervously worked the crowd, shaking hands with all four umpires. Bill Klem, granted the honor of calling balls and strikes for the Series opener, sidled up to McGraw and said, “Let’s not give anyone any reason to send you off to watch the rest of the game in the showers, OK, John?” To which McGraw—who for decades would hold the all-time record for most ejections in a career—replied, “Bill, you know how much I admire your work.”

  “Just admire it quietly today, do we have a deal?” He was smiling, and McGraw smiled back, and before he knew it the Giants’ manager was engulfed by photographers, all of them wanting a shot of him shaking hands with Stahl. Soon Stahl was replaced by even heavier hitters: Honey Fitz and Gaynor, and the governors, and the police commissioner. Gaynor led Fitzgerald’s hands into McGraw’s beefy palm, said, “May I present you, sir, with Boston’s chief rooter.”

  “I hope you’ve had a pleasant stay, Mr. Mayor,” McGraw said, “and that you have an unhappy ride home.”

  Fitzgerald roared, then let the others take their seats in the VIP box while he trundled out toward deep right field to shake hands with the Rooters and to lend his distinctive baritone to his favorite song, “Sweet Adelaide.”

  It was Klem who looked at the clock in distant right field, realized they were already seven minutes late starting the proceedings, and summoned both managers to hand him their lineups so he could announce the starting batteries. And when McGraw handed his card to Klem, he fired the first warning shot that this wasn’t going to be just another baseball series.

  In Herald Square, Jack O’Patrick and the other members of the scoreboard detail knew early on they were in for something different. Over in Times Square, the people were packed even more densely, because just as the folks had flocked to the ballpark early, so too were others now descending on this small segment of town that, not long ago, before the Times moved its offices here, had been a nondescript collection of taverns and burlesque halls called Longacre Square. Half an hour before the game it was already clear that this was going to be the largest gathering in the square’s history, and people kept coming even after that pronouncement. New York City, after all, had waited seven long years for a team that they could rally its full force behind; no matter the length of the odds, the town had fallen hard for McGraw’s feisty charges as they’d never fallen for any other team. And their swelling numbers proved it. At just past 3 o’clock, a man mounted the stage in front of the scoreboard, raised his arms, and brought the crowd to attention.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the batteries!” he boomed. “For the Red Sox, it will be Cady catching and Wood pitching.”

  Scattered boos.

  “And for the Giants, it will be …”

  The announcer paused, looked at the piece of paper in his hands, looked at the man who gave it to him, shook his head, cleared his throat again.

  “And for the Giants,” he said, “it will be Meyers catching and Tesreau pitching.”

  There was a moment’s pause and then … another moment’s pause. At first, among the 15,000 or so gathered in this small space between the Astor Hotel and Criterion Theater on Broadway and the narrow cross streets of Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets, there was a dismissal of newfangled technology.

  “How can we believe you’ll get the scoring right when you can’t even get the battery right!” one disgruntled fan yelled at the announcer. Unfortunately for this ill-tempered Giants backer, had he traveled a few blocks away to Herald Square, he would have heard the same announcement, felt the same puzzlement; same with the board over in Newspaper Row, on Frankfort Street, where crowds peering at the Sun’s board choked off traffic to the nearby East River bridges. Two hundred and fifty miles away, in Boston’s Newspaper Row on Washington Street, there was a mirror reaction: sheer delight at the prospect of sending Smoky Joe out against a rookie rather than the great Mathewson. And at the Herald’s scoreboard on Boston Common, a small group of fans nearly revolted: “Don’t lie to us!” they protested. “Only a fool would keep Mathewson on the sideline today! Only a fool or a crook on the take!”

  Back at the Polo Grounds, where Klem’s announcement had caused no small amount of angst among the Giants fans and the gamblers to equal degree, McGraw could hear disenchantment from the faithful, but as he would explain later he was neither fool nor felon; he wanted to keep Mathewson in reserve for Game Two, which would be played in the hostile environs of Fenway Park, no place for a rookie like Tesreau no matter how much affinity McGraw felt for the kid. And so it was. There was still more ceremony to go through: Doyle, the Giants captain, was presented with a new automobile, a Chalmers-Detroit Touring Car, his reward for being named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Then Mayor Gaynor, stroking his beard for good luck, engaged in a full windup before throwing out the ceremonial first pitch, which he merely tossed toward the pitcher’s mound. There, Tesreau picked it up, he fired home to Meyers a few times, and Klem delivered the time-honored umpire’s blessing: “Play ball!”

  And when they did, when this ninth World Series would finally be shifted from debating parlor to baseball diamond, Tesreau very nearly made John J. McGraw look like the wisest man to ever inhabit a dugout. The newspapers had all summer declared Tesreau the best thing to ever come out of Perryville, Missouri, deep in the heart of the Ozarks, whose original settlers were mostly French and thus were still loyal to King Louis while the patriots of Boston and the Tories of New York were engaged in their first true disagreement a century and a half before. In order for his family to keep up with Jeff’s progress, his father, Charlie, had to go “into town” to Ironton, a good hour away, to gather up the big-city newspapers from Little Rock, Kansas City, and St. Louis, study box scores, and then engage the locals in telling tales about his son the big-leaguer.

  For a time, it seemed that Tesreau the elder would have quite a bit to discuss on his next trip over the hill, for his son kept the mighty Speed Boys off the scoreboard for five innings. Actually, he’d done even more than that: He’d kept the Red Sox without a hit for five innings, his spitball all but giggling at the flailing hitters as it splashed past into Meyers’s glove. He’d walked Harry Hooper leading off the game, a clear product of nerves that had rendered his pitching fingers virtually numb. Hooper made it all the way around to third on a couple of groundouts to Doyle at second, but Tesreau buckled down, inducing Duffy Lewis to hit a lazy fly ball to Fred Snodgrass in center field. There was one other small bit of trouble in the third, when Wood reached third thanks to a walk, a sacrifice, and a fielder’s choice. Up st
epped Speaker, who tried unnerving the kid pitcher by taunting him, daring him to challenge with a fastball, but Tesreau was smarter than that, and when ball four fluttered past a frustrated Speaker yelled at him: “That’s OK! I’m just as pleased with a walk as a home run, Bush League!” When Lewis again ended the threat with a pop fly to short, Tesreau avoided the temptation of telling Speaker how pleasing that was as he left the field.

  Before long, the crowd inside the Polo Grounds (and the one that had formed above the Polo Grounds, ringing Coogan’s Bluff even though the best vantage points yielded views of maybe half the outfield) had been whipped into a fury because the Giants had seized the Series’ first lead. With one out in the bottom of the third, left fielder Josh Devore drew a walk, and he scampered to third when Captain Doyle hit a pop-fly double that Lewis, already having a rough Series, lost in the sun. Wood bore down and blew three fastballs past Snodgrass for the second out, and up stepped Red Murray. Murray was already off to a better start in 1912 than he’d been a year earlier, drawing a walk in the first. Now, with the crowd urging him on, Murray slammed a hard line drive to center, scoring Devore and Doyle, putting the home team up 2–0. The crowd saluted Murray with a huge ovation after the inning as he trotted out to right field and again later on, as he walked back to the dugout; he stared straight ahead both times. His friend Doyle witnessed all of this with genuine bemusement.

  “John,” the captain asked, “why didn’t you tip your lid?”

  And with the question, “John” turned as “red” as his nickname suggested he might. “That’s the same bunch hollering there that burned me in effigy down on 135th Street because I didn’t get a hit in the Series last year,” Murray seethed. “I think I recognize some of the guys now. Do you suppose I’d tip my lid to that bunch or any other? If I drop one or fan out the next inning, they will all be after me.”

  The next day, in the New York Globe, Doyle would surmise, “It’ll take some time for Red to warm back up to the fans of New York, I’m afraid.”

  Soon enough, the fans of New York would have other problems. With one out in the sixth, Tesreau’s bid for a no-hitter came to a crashing halt when Speaker hit a high and relatively deep fly toward left center field, a ball that felt so routine off his bat that Speaker slammed his weapon into the dirt in anger and frustration. It looked like a far easier play for Devore in left than for Snodgrass in center, to the point where Devore was planted under the ball, waiting to put it away, even as Snodgrass was running at full tilt. Watching this from the mound, Tesreau screamed: “Stay away from him, Snow! Stay away!” But the rule on the Giants was a simple one: If the center fielder believed he could catch the ball, he caught the ball. McGraw had been preaching that since his days with the old Baltimore Orioles, and so when Snodgrass screamed “I got it!” Devore, out of habit, stopped short to avoid a collision, and in so doing, he distracted Snodgrass. The ball fell untouched, and Speaker, propelled by his fury, was already standing on third base, no doubt supremely pleased by this gift triple. This time Lewis delivered, scoring Speaker on a sacrifice fly to center, and the Giants’ lead was officially cut in half.

  Back in the dugout, McGraw fumed. For all of his bluster, McGraw was proud of the fact that he’d been a terrific player himself and knew that physical errors happen, they’re part of the game, he’d made 413 of them himself across a sixteen-year career. It was the errors that took place between the ears that drove him batty, and even though Snodgrass was his own special project—McGraw had personally shifted him from catcher, seen him blossom into a terrific outfielder—he wasn’t about to spare the rod.

  “What the hell happened with that mix-up out there?” he raged as Snodgrass jogged back to the dugout. “That was Josh’s ball all the way!”

  “That’s your rule,” Snodgrass reminded McGraw. “Besides, it’s loud out there, and I never heard him call for the ball.”

  “No, you son of a bitch, my rule is that you act like you’ve played baseball before and use common sense. And listen more carefully out there!”

  Then he turned his attention to Tesreau, worried that his rookie would be rattled by allowing a run that should never have scored. “You OK, Jeff?” he asked.

  “Never better,” came the reply.

  But it was plain that Tesreau was shaken, or just tired, or simply overcome at last by the gravity of the game. After buckling Boston’s knees for six innings, Tesreau finally succumbed in the seventh, and again his demise was helped along by a little self-sabotage by his teammates. With one out Heinie Wagner singled, and catcher Hick Cady followed with another single, putting runners on first and third, one out, the Sox now capable of scoring the tying run without the benefit of a hit. McGraw chose to play his infield deep with Wood stepping to the plate; even though he was a good-hitting pitcher (and would, in fact, become a full-time hitter in his later years, after that magic right arm wore out), McGraw liked his chances. And, again, he proved prescient: Wood connected with a Tesreau spitter and sent a hard grounder to Doyle at second, a textbook-perfect double-play ball … except Doyle slipped on the dry dirt, fell down, and could only get the force at second. Wagner scored the tying run, and it was as if someone had jabbed a knife into a balloon at the Polo Grounds. Dread crept in, and with good reason: Hooper soon lofted a high pop foul that would have given Tesreau a huge second out in trying to wiggle out of the inning, but Meyers struggled picking it up, faltered, and dropped the ball. Given new life, Hooper doubled on the very next pitch, nudging Wood to third, and when second baseman Steve Yerkes, the Sox’ lightest-hitting regular, singled to left, it plated Hooper and Wood to give the Sox a 4–2 lead—a two-run advantage that, with Wood on the mound, eight strikeouts in his pocket already, suddenly felt like twenty.

  To no one in particular, McGraw muttered at inning’s end: “I have some ballplayers who in the fall cannot seem to stay on the ground. They wait until the big series to pull stuff that they would not be guilty of at any other time.”

  Throughout New York City, thousands of people shared McGraw’s gloom as the game finally wound its way to the bottom of the ninth inning. In Times Square, the 25,000 people had been mostly peaceful, if fitfully apprehensive. Inside the Polo Grounds, the only audible noise as Wood completed his warm-up throws came from the Rooters; otherwise the crowd sounded as subdued as 35,730 people could sound gathered in such a confined space.

  That would soon change.

  Murray led off the inning with a fly ball to right, but then Merkle stroked a clean base hit to left and third baseman Buck Herzog followed with a bloop single to the same spot. That drew some interest. Then Meyers, still angry at himself for muffing the pop-up in the seventh that opened the floodgates for the Red Sox, smoked a vicious line drive toward the gap in right center. Merkle scored easily, and it seemed Herzog would follow right behind him with the tying run, but McGraw, coaching third base, saw that Hooper had made an astonishing play, cutting the ball off and sending it back to the infield in one fluid motion. Herzog was chugging around third at top speed, but suddenly he saw his manager throw up his arms and scream, “No, Buck, no!”

  So the score remained 4–3, but now it was the Giants in business, second and third and one out, one well-placed single away from kneecapping the Speed Boys, delivering the most improbable comeback in the short history of the World Series. Now the city was turned upside down. Fire engines positioned near Herald Square unleashed their furious horns as the mannequins on the Morning Telegram’s Playograph sped around the bases. The Rooters had stopped singing “Tessie” and started reciting “Hail Mary.” Up above, the 3,000 people who’d formed a half-moon around the Grounds on Coogan’s Bluff, or standing on the bridge of the Sixth Avenue El, all started screaming, too, a reaction to what they heard from the crowd below since they couldn’t see a thing on the field. There were others, trying to steal a portion of the day: the twenty people who’d climbed the scaffolding supporting the biscuit ad beyond the center-field bleachers; the water tower in right, where
some fifty fans braved the height (and the only “free” vantage point that actually yielded a view of the infield). All of them wanted to be a part of what was happening now, of this unfolding Giants triumph.

  McGraw’s brain was working on overdrive now. This was what he lived for, games where he could actually have impact, where his intellect and his savvy for strategy could prove the difference between winning and losing. He summoned Beals Becker, a reserve outfielder, to pinch-run for the slow-footed Meyers on second base. Instinctively, he started to call out the name of Moose McCormick, a thirty-one-year-old veteran who’d become McGraw’s most reliable pinch hitter, then stopped himself: Damn it all, he’d already used McCormick in the seventh, two outs and a man on, a hopeless rally but the only one McGraw figured he had a right to expect against Wood.

  So Art Fletcher, the shortstop, would hit for himself. Fletcher hit a fine .282 that year, and would hit .277 across thirteen big-league seasons, but he was, by McGraw’s own description, “a little nervous, especially in a big spot in a big game.”

  This was both: big spot, big game, inside the biggest baseball stadium on the planet. Wood, as was his custom, tugged at his pant leg as he took the sign from Cady, then whirled and threw to second, trying to pick off Becker to no avail. He did that a second time. And a third. The tension was nearing an unbearable level, so McGraw walked halfway down the third-base line, Fletcher met him there, and the manager put his arm around him.

  “Kid,” McGraw said, “just think of how great it’s gonna feel in a few minutes when you knock these guys in and these folks are carrying you off the field.”

  That relaxed Fletcher for about twenty seconds, the time it took Wood to unleash a wicked fastball that Fletcher swung at but fouled back.

  “That’s it, kid!” a manic McGraw screamed. “You’re right on it! This is a Bush League pitcher from a Bush League team! You own this Boston bastard!”

  Wood’s face was pale from exhaustion, and it took all his energy to tug his pant leg before starting his windup and throwing a curveball that started four feet over Fletcher’s head and then danced obediently downward until it passed the plate near his belt buckle. Strike two.