by Mike Vaccaro
“Be alert out there, Beals, you’re gonna have to score this for us!” McGraw yelped. “Buck, you know this Busher is gonna bounce one past his catcher and when he does you’re off like a flash! Let’s go Arthur, let’s go, let’s …”
Wood went back to the fastball.
“I heard it,” Fletcher would later say. “I didn’t see it.”
Bill Klem did.
“Steeeeee-rike three!” he boomed. “Yer out!”
The crowd exhaled. It was Wood’s tenth strikeout of the game, the first one in his career, he would admit, “that I got solely on guts and will. I had nothing left but desire.”
Yet his work wasn’t done. The Giants still had one more chance, and the crowd started to stir again, waiting to see what McGraw would do now. OK, he’d burned McCormick early, an understandable mistake. Sure, he’d used Beals Becker to run for Meyers (even though a pitcher like Matty or Marquard could have done that) because he wanted a set of legs standing on second with the potential winning run, so Becker’s bat (he’d hit a respectable .264 with thirty-two extra-base hits in ’12) wasn’t available. But Art Wilson’s was. Wilson, the backup catcher, hit .289 in 121 at-bats as Meyers’s caddy that year, and if he wasn’t the perfect choice right now, well, he was the best they had. The fans resurrected a chant they’d used earlier in the day: “Watch Wood, knock Wood! Watch Wood, knock Wood!” Others simply started serenading the Red Sox pitcher, waving at him and yelling, “Good-bye, Joe!”
And then they all turned their gaze to McGraw.
Who did nothing.
Who clapped his hands and yelled, “It’s up to you now, Doc!”
That would be Doc Crandall, the pitcher, who’d won thirteen games for the Giants that year, who’d relieved Tesreau in the eighth and turned in two scoreless innings, who was a fine hitter as pitchers go, hitting .313 that year (and .285 for his career), and who was now hitting for himself with the game squarely on the line. The crowd was dizzy with disbelief: This is for Game One of the World Series and Muggsy is going to go with a pitcher?
“How about a bingle, Doc!” came the cry from the third-base coaching box.
If Wood realized he was facing a pitcher now, he didn’t let on. His arm dangled by his side, only a few droplets of gas left in there, he knew, only a few more bullets left in that chamber. Jake Stahl walked over from first base, said, “One more Joe, and you can rest that wing of yours for a few days.”
“One more,” Wood said.
He started Crandall with a fastball at the knees, strike one. Then he threw two curves, one of which zipped under Crandall’s chin, flooring the Giants pitcher. Then another fastball, high and outside, a 3-and-1 count, the din of the crowd building with every succeeding pitch. Stahl walked over again. “It’s OK to walk him, Joe,” the manager said. “You don’t have to be perfect here, remember that.”
Wood nodded. Then threw another fastball that nicked the outside corner. Full count. Full house. McGraw screamed himself hoarse in the coaching box, Stahl quietly urged, “One pitch, Joe,” at first, and Wood tugged at his pants, gripped the ball between his fingers, rocked, fired his 122nd pitch of the day.
And you could hear the pop! of Cady’s glove all the way up in the water tower.
“Steeeeeeeee-rike threeeeeeeee!” boomed Klem, easily audible in the instantly silenced Polo Grounds.
“Strike three!” came the voice of the announcer in Times Square, amid a hail of groans and some sprinkled boos.
“Strike three!” came the verdict from the man on stage in Boston Common, where close to 50,000 people were now cheering, chanting, hugging one another, and proposing three cheers for Smoky Joe Wood.
Back at the Polo Grounds, the Rooters hadn’t waited long to strike up the band, and as they abandoned the premises they unveiled a custom-designed tune strictly for the occasion, sung to the melody of “In the Good Old Summertime”:
In the good old summertime
Our good old Boston nine
Beat everything east and west
Now they’re first in line
The New Yorks now are after us
Oh me, oh me, oh my!
But we’ll do them as we did the rest
In the good old summertime …
On the field inside the ballpark, Jake Stahl raced over to his exhausted young pitcher, extended his right arm, felt an almost lifeless right hand shake back.
“I never threw a ball so hard in my life,” Smoky Joe Wood told his boss. “Thank God that’s over.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Wednesday, October 9, 1912: Game Two
Boston leads, 1 game to 0
BOSTON—Two great teams—two valiant foes striving with every ounce of energy for mastery in an ever-memorable struggle on Fenway Park yesterday—alike met defeat from an unexpected source when darkness, unwelcome and unsought, sheathed the weapons of the rival factions …
—PAUL H. SHANNON, BOSTON POST, OCTOBER 10, 1912
IT HAD ALREADY been an interesting year for Ty Cobb.
Just twenty-five years old, the Detroit Tigers outfielder won his fifth batting title in 1912, hitting a robust .409, and coupled with the .420 average he’d piled up the year before he became only the second man in baseball history to hit .400 in consecutive seasons (Ed Delahanty of the Phillies was the first, in 1894 and ’95; only Rogers Hornsby, in 1924 and ’25, would do it in the century after Cobb). The Tigers, who’d spent a giddy three-year run as the toast of the American League from 1907 to 1909 (though they’d lost in the World Series every year), had finally taken a serious tumble in the standings, finishing in fourth place with a sickly 69–84 record. Manager Hugh Jennings (once John McGraw’s classmate at St. Bonaventure College) had absorbed the brunt of the criticism for that, but Cobb had come in for some withering rebukes, as well. And with good reason.
Cobb had shown up for spring training mad at the world, and he’d briefly quit the team in a huff in early April when, unhappy with the team’s lodgings at the Chicago Beach Hotel, he demanded they seek alternate arrangements. When that didn’t happen, Cobb jumped the team for two days; when he finally returned, he was welcomed back without even having to pay a fine or apologize to his teammates.
He wouldn’t be so fortunate a month later. On May 15, while the Tigers were in the midst of laying an 8–4 beating on the Highlanders at Hilltop Park in upper Manhattan, Cobb suddenly bolted from the playing field and entered the stands to assail a heckling fan named Claude Lueker. Lueker had been riding Cobb for the better part of three innings, and Cobb, never one to turn a cheek or an ear to that kind of thing, responded in kind. For Cobb, however, a product of the post-Reconstruction South, once Lueker amped up the insult exchange by allegedly calling him a “half-nigger,” he believed he was left with little choice but to climb into the stands and try to pummel Lueker into oblivion. The fact that Lueker, the victim of an industrial accident, was obviously handicapped (missing one hand and three fingers on the other) didn’t faze Cobb a bit.
“Stop!” the fans yelled at him at one point, trying to quell the bizarre scene. “He has no hands!”
“I don’t care if he has no feet!” an enraged Cobb responded before he was finally pulled off Lueker—who denied ever making the comment that drew Cobb’s ire. The American League responded swiftly, suspending Cobb indefinitely, and this led directly to one of baseball’s most ignominious moments. The Tigers—upset by Cobb’s behavior but more angered at Ban Johnson’s unilateral punishment of their teammate—voted to boycott a game against the Athletics on May 18. And they did: The Tigers had to recruit a temporary band of college and sandlot and semiprofessional players in order to field a team, which fell meekly to the A’s 24–2 in one of the most shameful displays in the sport’s history. It was Cobb who pleaded with his teammates to return to work, and it was Johnson who shortened “indefinite” to eight games, and while the Tigers were never a factor in the American League their star batsman surely was. And now he was about to thrust himself into the middl
e of the World Series, too, even though his team had finished the season some thirty-six and a half games behind Boston.
Cobb had agreed to write a syndicated newspaper column off the Series, same as Walter Johnson had, same as the great Cy Young had, same as Hughie Jennings had. But while those articles tended to be detached and measured, full of lauding winners and comforting losers, Cobb’s column was … well, pure Cobb. Before the Series ever started, he angered McGraw and the Giants by hinting that the Giants would have been fortunate to finish fourth in the American League behind Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. “I don’t see this as my opinion,” he’d written, “but, rather, a point of fact.”
Now, dictating his thoughts to Damon Runyon, Cobb crafted a blistering attack of the way McGraw handled the late stages of the Series’ first game.
“The Giants looked dangerous,” he wrote. “But Manager McGraw had used one of his best pinch hitters, McCormick, to bat for Tesreau in the seventh and the fatal mistake, I believe, was when he ordered Beals Becker to second to run for Meyers in the ninth. Most any of his substitute players could have scored from second on a hit, but to face a pitcher like Wood on a crisis, was a different proposition. Becker, a very strong hitter, in Fletcher’s place, might have wreaked havoc with the hopes of the Red Sox.”
When McGraw heard about Cobb’s commentary, his face reddened with anger. When he saw the comments of Bill Carrigan, a Red Sox catcher who hadn’t even played in Game One, he grew even more agitated.
“After sizing up the first battle between the Sox and the Giants,” Carrigan said, “I believe we will win four straight. I do not believe McGraw’s men will win even one game. I believe we have their measure and that nothing can stop us now.”
“Pure Bush League,” McGraw muttered. “You win the world championship on the ballfield, not in the newspapers.”
Of course, it would have helped McGraw if he’d taken his own counsel seriously, because he had already sat down with Harry Cross from the New York Times, the man who served as McGraw’s personal ghostwriter. And while he repeated for Cross what he’d already murmured on the bench, suggesting his players played differently in October than they did the rest of the year, he specifically called out his catcher for dropping the key pop fly in the seventh that extended the inning and ultimately allowed the Red Sox to rally for two runs.
“It should have been an easy play for Chief,” McGraw said. “In my opinion, he should have had the ball. Moreover, the two hits that followed I blame more to Meyers’s poor judgment than Tesreau’s poor pitching.”
It was Mathewson who would relay these words to Meyers the next morning, inside the Giants’ team headquarters at the Copley Place Hotel, and it was Mathewson who would have to physically restrain Meyers from leaving his room, knocking on McGraw’s door, and punching him in the jaw. Which, in a way, was perfect, for it was Mathewson who, a year earlier, had shown just how complicated ballplayers moonlighting as sports columnists could be, because in his column he’d ripped Rube Marquard for a pitch he’d thrown Frank Baker in Game Two that the man nicknamed “Home Run” would clobber for a game-winning blast; whatever hard feelings Marquard may have harbored for that morphed into quiet satisfaction the very next day when Mathewson, too, served up a critical home-run pitch to none other than Home Run Baker.
“Maybe,” Mathewson surmised, in a column that appeared Wednesday, October 9, the morning of Game Two of this World Series, “it’s time to put the pen and paper away and worry just about the bat and the ball.”
Maybe. Still, no fewer than fourteen members of the Giants and Red Sox would have deadlines to meet whenever Game Two ended. And all fourteen would get their stories in on time.
There was little time for feeling too good, or too bad, about the way things had gone in Game One. Within ninety minutes of the final out, both teams were back at Grand Central Station, waiting on trains that would take them to Boston for Game Two the very next day. While the players had argued plenty in the past that asking them to travel every day during a World Series was punishing, and that the result—having eighteen exhausted players battling each other every day—diminished the product significantly, player complaints were rarely taken seriously by the National Commission. So in 1911, the Giants and Athletics had alternated days between New York and Philadelphia, a grueling grind interrupted only by the blissful arrival of rainstorms that halted play for a full week between Game Three and Game Four.
Christy Mathewson had been the last Giant to leave the clubhouse after Game One of this series as dusk descended on the Polo Grounds, the burden of what he’d soon have to face suddenly dawning on him. That McGraw was a pip, he said to teammates who were quickly dressing and abandoning him, racing to make taxicabs to Grand Central. He thinks I’m a magic man, thinks I can roll out of bed and shut out a team as good as the Red Sox. There was a time, sure. But he really did it to me this time.
By now, he was speaking to an audience of one, Giants secretary Joseph O’Brien, who looked nervously at the wall clock and realized that if McGraw’s star pitcher wasn’t on the train, it wasn’t the star pitcher who was going to get an earful about it.
“Let’s go, Matty,” O’Brien said. “You want to get to the station and get aboard and start taking it easy as soon as you can. You have a hard day’s work ahead of you.”
Mathewson nodded, fixed his necktie, and walked with O’Brien out to the cabstand, the weight of a thousand burdens on his shoulders. Didn’t they realize how hard this was? Didn’t they know he was thirty-two years old? In the real world, of course, that was a young man’s age. Many of his classmates at Bucknell University were only now entering their prime earning years on Wall Street, or as lawyers, doctors, professors, business executives. His arm sure didn’t feel thirty-two. It was an arm that had thrown an average of 322 innings a year for the past dozen years, and to put that in perspective, consider this: In 1980, Steve Carlton of the Phillies would throw 304 innings to lead the National League; he was the last man, through 2008, to even approach 300 innings of work, and that is a milestone likely to stand forever in a modern era of pitch counts and five-man rotations and pitchers used to being babied like newborns.
All around him in that postgame clubhouse, Mathewson had heard his teammates crow about how, hell, the Sox might have gotten lucky and taken one off of us, but just wait, they haven’t had to face Matty yet.
“The old mainstay has had a good, long rest now and I am sure he will uphold his reputation of being the most consistent winner that ever hurled a world series game,” Rube Marquard had crowed to reporters. “Matty is right just now, and he will accomplish all that is asked of him.”
Said Snodgrass: “We have Matty going tomorrow, boys, so you can start concentrating on what’s going to happen in the third game.”
Even McGraw, who should have known better, couldn’t help chattering.
“I shall pitch Mathewson today and I figure he is almost certain to win this game,” McGraw said. “Mathewson is a veteran who pitches as well away from home as he does before a home crowd and is one of the greatest money pitchers the game’s seen.”
But Mathewson knew that McGraw knew better than that. It was McGraw who had gone to Mathewson with the idea of shutting him down for the rest of the season after the Giants wrapped up the pennant with nearly two weeks to spare, and though there were few things that Mathewson usually found more contemptible than pitchers who shirked their regular duties, he’d agreed to it. The season had been a strain: no shutouts, whispers every time he took the mound that, while he was still the great Mathewson, he was no longer the Great Mathewson, the marvel who’d have clubs beaten before he ever took the slab. Those days, McGraw feared and Mathewson knew, all belonged to yesterday, even if his 23–12 record, 2.12 ERA, and 134–34 strikeout-to-walk ratio were still about as good as pitching got.
So Mathewson settled into his seat on a special train, No. 26, reserved specifically for the Giants and the Red Sox, the National Leaguers sitting
in the back, the Americans in the front, and it left Grand Central promptly at 6 o’clock. About an hour into the trip, though, the whole caravan came to a screeching halt: There’d been an accident up ahead and they’d need to wait until the tracks were cleared. Perfect. The train had been only minimally stocked with food since everyone assumed they’d all eat when they got to Boston, so by the time the train got going again, most all the ballplayers were famished; by the time they arrived at the South Street Station in Boston, just past 2:30 on Wednesday morning, they were ravenous. There were a good three hundred or so fans waiting for the Red Sox, who descended to the platform first (led by Wood, smoking a pipe), and of course there was a small four-piece band, and of course they started singing “Tessie.”
“I swear,” McGraw said to his friend, coach, and bridge partner Wilbert Robinson, “that song is enough to make me want to punch someone.”
The Giants soon left the train, wolfed down a dinner/breakfast combination at a local beanery, and were in their beds at the Copley by 3:30—eleven and a half hours before game time. Only they know how well those beans sat overnight.
As soon as the final out of Tuesday’s game was announced at the portable scoreboards in downtown Boston, there was a rush to reach Fenway Park, to engage in the same kind of chilly slumber party Giants fans had enjoyed at the Polo Grounds a few nights earlier, all of them swarming the Lansdowne Street side of the park. The first brave soul in line was young James Lehan, a seventeen-year-old from Roxbury who claimed he’d seen “twenty to twenty-five” games in the Sox’ new home this year, “although the new place is a little too new for me. I rather miss the old Huntington Avenue Grounds. That’s what a real ball yard is supposed to look like.”