The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Not everyone was so pleased with what had taken place this time at Fenway Park, however. There was McGraw, naturally, who’d watched four errors and some generally shabby play sabotage the work of Mathewson, who’d certainly thrown well enough to win even if he hadn’t resembled his 1905 vintage. Never shy from airing out his personnel in the local dailies, the manager raged, “While I realize that eleven-inning game was a wonderfully spectacular one from a spectator’s point of view, I could not conscientiously call it a well-played ballgame. As a real matter of fact my players have not yet shown the ball of which they are capable. They have slipped up on many chances that they ordinarily would have accepted without an effort.”

  Interestingly, the one player who escaped the umbrella of his rage was Art Fletcher, the grease-fingered shortstop who’d caused so much of Mathewson’s angst and helped allow four of the five unearned runs slapped on Matty’s line score. “Fletcher had a bad day. He is a high-strung player and after a hard season work he is a little fine right now. Nevertheless I look for him to do good work the remaining games. I never blame a man for making physical errors. I always expect those, they’re part of the game. The things I do strongly object to in any players are slow thinking and errors of judgment.”

  McGraw’s professional demeanor wouldn’t prevent his hotel room from coming under siege the next morning, when a congregation of “concerned” Giants fans visited him at the Copley Plaza, knocked on the door, welcomed themselves inside, and insisted that Fletcher be replaced by Tillie Shafer as the starting shortstop. It was an impromptu town-hall debate that lasted exactly ninety seconds, or about as long as it took McGraw to respond, “Unless I missed something, this is still my nine, and I shall manage it the way I see fit. And Art Fletcher is still the shortstop of this nine. Now get the hell out of this room and away from this goddamned hotel!” Giants fans were like Giants players: What McGraw told them to do, they did. And so they promptly skedaddled.

  It was Doyle, the captain, who gave voice to what many Giants fans were really feeling: “When that game was over I felt like walking on the faces of a couple of Giants with my spiked shoes still on. They were all trying to do their best, but when you’re on the field and see chances to win a game kicked away, it riles a guy of my temperament.”

  The tie didn’t diminish the confidence of Bill Carrigan, the most outspoken Boston player, who said, “We still have the jump on ’em, it’ll just take one day longer than we expected,” although Larry Gardner, the Sox’ bruised, bloodied, and beaten-up third baseman, rather presciently conceded, “Whoever loses this series is going to think back all winter to this one and realize what a terrible game this was not to win.”

  Still, for all the raw nerves and hard feelings that bled through the night, players on both sides awoke on Thursday morning, October 10, unified in one common position: They weren’t about to allow the National Commission to screw them—at least not without a fight. The Commission had been founded in 1903, sort of a League of Nations invented to signal the end of hostilities between the American League and the National League (the Giants’ defiant 1904 behavior notwithstanding). It was a three-man board, meaning there were six iron fists always ready to defend the interests of the baseball establishment, always eager to smash player complaints and dismiss them as the chortlings of so many spoiled, recalcitrant children. This autumn of 1912 the Commission was composed of Ban Johnson, president of the American League; T. J. Lynch, president of the National League; and August “Garry” Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati Reds, who served as the Commission’s president and its nominal head. Herrmann was a lavish entertainer whose gifts as a gadfly far surpassed those at managing his own affairs; when he died in 1932, he left behind an estate totaling exactly ten dollars.

  It was the Commission that had set up the grueling schedule for this series that required travel back and forth between the two cities, rather than the traditional two-three-two format (which would have meant two games in New York, three in Boston, and then the final two, if necessary, back in New York with a day off in between site changes). It was the Commission that had immediately declared that Game Two would be replayed in Boston, rather than the Polo Grounds. And it was the Commission, most egregiously as far as the players were concerned, who determined that, even though there was now certain to be at least one extra game played in this Series, the players would not fiscally benefit; they would still share receipts from the first four games of the series, which in this case would now include Games One, Two, and Three, plus the unresolved tie game.

  “If we allowed the players to share in an extra game when there was a tie, what assurance would the public have that more ties would not be played?” was the frank (or cynical, depending on your viewpoint) assessment of John Heydler, the secretary-treasurer of the National League. “The object of a world’s series is for one team to win as quickly as possible, and, in order to encourage the players to win as quickly as possible, it was thought best when the rules were framed to restrict their portions of the receipts to four games, regardless of whether any of those games are ties.”

  The implication—that players would turn crooked the moment you opened the door for them to go that way—may not have been unwise, given the preponderance of gamblers at the games, given the transparent relationships bridging many of the game’s biggest stars and some of gambling’s most notorious names. But it still rankled, and no one was more offended by the inference than Christy Mathewson, chosen by acclimation by players on both sides to fight what they all knew would be a fruitless fight against the Commission to get a portion of a fifth game’s receipts placed in the players’ pool. There was precedent on the players’ side—back in ’07, the players had been paid for all five games, including the tie—but there was no one named Precedent presently sitting on the National Commission. The men named Johnson, Lynch, and Herrmann who did sit there all held firm to the words written in Rule Ten of the World’s Series Agreement, which had been revised after that Cubs–Tigers series:

  “The players pool shall be restricted to sixty percent of the receipts of the first four games after the deduction of the commission’s ten percent, thereof, regardless of whether one or more of such games shall result in a tie.”

  An open-and-shut case, the Commission believed.

  “When the world’s series was first started, the National Commission made a set of rules that gave the players a certain percentage of the receipts of the first four games, including tie playoffs, and there are many of us who think we are entitled to a share of all the games played,” Mathewson explained the morning of the soon-to-be-replayed Game Two. “The Commission makes new rules without consulting us or letting us know about their intentions. The Commission’s rulings are invariably against the players and we want to be represented whenever our interests—financial or otherwise—are being considered but the time will come when we shall demand to be represented.”

  It was here that the Christian Gentleman fired a rather ominous warning shot.

  “I will not go so far as to say there will be no more world’s series unless our rights are more carefully considered and we fail to get representation,” he said, “but I will say that the National Commission is liable to find itself left flat without a club to play in some future world’s series if they refuse to take up our grievances and give us fair treatment.”

  To emphasize the players’ shared plight, even Smoky Joe Wood lent his voice to the cause after hearing of Mathewson’s comments: “It is no more than what was due us that we should share in any playoff games due to a tie. We worked our heads off for eleven innings on Wednesday and all the benefit we derived from the game goes to the club owners and the National Commission. The Red Sox think that is unjust to us as well as the Giants.”

  The National Commission listened to Mathewson’s concerns, weighed his objections, and took a good three minutes before issuing its verdict:

  “Four games is the rule,” Johnson said. “And four games it wil
l be.”

  Inside the Giants’ clubhouse at Fenway Park, as this was relayed to the disgruntled players, one especially angry veteran grumbled, “They’re worried about us turning crooked, yet they’re the most well-fed thieves in the country.”

  Soon enough, the Giants and Red Sox would have to turn their contempt back on each other. Soon enough. For now, they both seethed at a common enemy.

  The Series had already generated an unprecedented amount of interest, and every day stories surfaced detailing just how impassioned the nation’s baseball fans had become. In Oneonta, New York, security officers at a train station stumbled upon the sleepy bodies of Charlie Weighart, eleven, and John Hamilton, thirteen, both of them from Binghamton, both of whom were trying to smuggle themselves to New York “to see the Giants win,” both of whom were soon shuttled back home in a truant officer’s automobile. Those two adventurous lads simply reflected what had quickly become an obsession among men and women two, three, even five times their age. Ten full-time operators had been hired at the Boston Globe to handle the telephones for Game Two, and they were still overwhelmed by a flood of inquiries that averaged 150 calls a minute for most of the game, 300 a minute as the game reached extra innings, 12,000 calls in all.

  A troublesome tale emerged in Brooklyn, where a pair of workers for A. Schrader’s Son, a leading manufacturer of valves, gauges, and pneumatic tire accessories, began discussing the relative merits of the Giants and the Red Sox during a coffee break. George Brown, seventeen, grabbed a small piece of metal and declared that he was Smoky Joe Wood. Frank Groshaus, eighteen, picked up a two-and-a-half-foot file with a wooden handle and announced that he was Red Murray. Brown flung the metal. Groshaus swung with his file, which, fatefully, was not strongly fastened to the handle, flew out, and struck Brown, embedding in his left side. Another employee made the ill-fated decision to pull the file out, and by the time Brown was rushed to Volunteer Hospital there was nothing that could be done for him.

  And politics was hardly spared World Series conversation. A day before the Series began, Red Murray had revealed that no fewer than eleven of the Giants had formed their own “Wilson Club,” their small effort to boost the campaign of the governor of New Jersey and Democratic nominee for president.

  “What I like,” Murray said, “is that he plays the game within the foul lines. He has speed and control and he knows the inside game of today. The difference between Governor Wilson and the other candidates is that he uses his inside knowledge for those on the outside, and not simply for the gate receipts.”

  When that story and those painfully forced baseball metaphors appeared in just about all the New York newspapers, Lafayette B. Gleason, the chairman of New York’s Republican State Committee and a staunch Taft man, announced that his response would be to instantly switch his allegiance to the Sox, turnabout being fair play, after all.

  “You can’t make me believe that any club made up of men who are going to vote the Democratic ticket can win a world’s championship,” Gleason reasoned. “You might look for Jeff Tesreau to be Democratic because he comes from the Ozark Mountains, where there is more or less a lawless element, but you don’t expect to find such men as Marquard, Fletcher, Doyle, and the rest in that party. I like Mathewson because he has not joined the Wilson club but as for Marquard, I said today when he pitched that I hoped his left hand would cleave to the roof of his mouth.”

  Wilson himself was blithely unaware of the support he’d generated among New York’s National League club, as he was busily whipping a Chicago crowd of 100,000 into an anti-Roosevelt frenzy. Theodore Roosevelt, a renowned sportsman if not much of a baseball fan, was himself assailing Wilson before a huge crowd of 70,000 in Duluth, Minnesota. Which left Taft, the “forgotten candidate,” and the only one of the three who truly cared about baseball (and who also happened to be the sitting president), to rely on the sailors of the ships filling the Hudson River, who would again be getting updates and relaying them to their commander in chief as quickly as they could.

  John Fitzgerald was one politician who needn’t worry about how he received his baseball news, because he was going to get it almost as soon as it happened—even though on this day, he’d have to receive it secondhand, through couriers and messengers, since he hadn’t expected there to be a game at Fenway and had scheduled a full day of city business to make up for his two-day baseball sabbatical that ended with Wednesday’s tie. But while the mayor had made good on his promise to make three hundred tickets available to Giants fans for Game Two (and went the extra yard to guarantee them all seats at the make-up game), he was unable to guarantee them an extra night’s lodging in his overrun city, and a lot of those fans who figured they might as well stick around to see a game to conclusion wound up either wandering the streets in search of a bed-and-breakfast, sleeping in Boston Common, finding sympathetic Red Sox fans who agreed to house them for the evening, or simply congregating, as most did, in all-night eateries, guzzling coffee and amusing themselves with song lyrics that may not have been as familiar as the Rooters’ standards, but kept them just as awake:

  Fifteen men to a looking glass

  Never such murderous scenes

  We gash and slash our faces to hash

  En route to the city of beans

  Rarely has a group of strangers been so eager to see a baseball game begin.

  Josh Devore would never have registered his complaint with John McGraw directly, of course, or with the papers, because to do that would have been to sign his own exit visa to Pittsburgh or Philadelphia or Cincinnati or some other god-awful baseball outpost. No twenty-four-year-old player, no matter how gifted, would ever be long for New York or for the Giants if he took on baseball’s most powerful manager in public. And while Devore was a key part of the Giants’ attack—he’d stolen sixty-one bases in 1911, and already had 135 steals in only three full years of service, including four in one inning on June 20, 1912—it wasn’t as if he was Christy Mathewson. He was certainly not irreplaceable.

  As a youngster in Terre Haute, he’d been a precocious athlete, could run faster and hit baseballs farther than just about anyone else in western Indiana. When his older brother, Bill, read about an opening for an outfielder on the Meridian, Mississippi, club he decided to “place” Josh, who was working in the family general store in Selleyville, Indiana. The manager, Guy Sample, wasn’t particularly interested until Bill agreed to deposit expense money in manager Sample’s bank account—the cool hundred dollars that ensured he would be placed. But Sample soon discovered he’d received a damn fine ballplayer, and so it was in Meridian where McGraw’s bird-dog scouts would find Devore, and by 1910 he’d made it to New York.

  But McGraw had benched Devore in Game Two, and Josh had watched every pitch of that 6–6 tie without ever leaving his spot on the bench. The next morning, as he and his roommate, Rube Marquard, arose at the Copley Plaza, Devore wasted little time bending his close friend’s ear.

  “Look, Roomie, I know I’m not a Ty Cobb against most lefthanders, but I do believe I could get a million hits off Collins if McGraw would give me a chance against him,” Devore groused. “Southpaws who are also side-wheelers shouldn’t be allowed in the league. But this Collins bird pitches overhand and no pitcher, right or left, can do that to me and get away with it. They’re the kind I dote on.”

  “It was one game,” Marquard said. “I’m sure the old man will have you back out there today. He knows I like pitching better when I got you covering your patch of the outfield.”

  Marquard himself, full of piss and vinegar even on his quietest days, had spent most of the World Series engaged in nonstop chatter with his teammates, his opponents, the press, his manager, the fans. The former peach-turned-lemon-turned-peach had actually spent most of late summer reverting back to sour citrus, turning in two disappointing outings for every solid one. His final numbers for 1912—26–11, 2.57 ERA—looked perfectly gaudy until you considered that nineteen-game winning streak that started the year m
eant he was only 7–11 from July forward. Still, this was a man who’d begun his professional career bumming his way on a train from Cleveland to Waterloo, Iowa, for a one-shot deal, arrived in time to beat a team from Keokuk, 6–1, then hopped back on the train when the manager reneged on the $5 he’d been promised. He’d seen some things in his day. The World Series didn’t exactly have him biting his fingers to the quick, as it did poor Art Fletcher.

  “Let me say that I am in better condition right now than ever,” Marquard announced to whoever was listening after Wednesday’s game, when McGraw officially announced him as the make-up game starter.

  “Better than April and May?” one skeptical scribe asked.

  “Yes,” Marquard said, “even better than the spring, when I won those nineteen straight. The nervous strain in that fight for a world’s record told on me for weeks. In fact I never did feel right after that until about ten days ago. Then I worked five innings against the Dodgers over in Brooklyn and never had more stuff on the ball in my life. My fastball had tons of smoke on it and it sailed up to batters as it never did before. It had a hop on it that jumped easily a foot. No team in the world can hit that fast one when I’m on edge. I am better today than ever in my life and I will be shoving them over at these alleged swatters of Boston so fast that they won’t be able to see the ball. I had a fine workout during the last two innings today and [coach] Wilbert Robinson, who caught a few of my fastballs, said I never had so much stuff in all my life. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘don’t waste those,” I told him, ‘Don’t worry, Robby, I’ll save plenty for the Sox.’ ”