by Mike Vaccaro
But the Sox themselves were simply hoping to have enough healthy bodies to take aim at the Giants in what would essentially amount to an official do-over. Jake Stahl understood as much as anyone how fortunate they’d been to escape with even a tie the day before. “You give Matty six runs, sometimes that’s enough for him to win six games,” the manager said as he pulled on his stirrups and entertained a small group of writers before the game. “And here’s the thing: if he’d only had to get us three outs an inning, he’d have had his way with us. But some of those innings the Giants were giving us four and five outs with all the errors and misplays, and my boys, they know what to do with the breaks when we get ’em. Sure, it’s tough not to win a game like that. But it sure as hell beats losing the game, right?”
Tim Murnane of the Globe asked his friend the question that was on everyone’s mind in the press box, in the bursting grandstand outside, and everywhere else where people were deep in debate about this Series: “What about Spoke, Jake?”
“Spoke” was Speaker’s nickname. And Spoke, as the writers could plainly see, was hurting in a terrible way, his ankle swollen and purple, his limp painful to watch, the wince on his face palpable as he tried forcing on his stiff black baseball spike.
“I’d need to physically keep him on the bench to keep him out of the game,” Stahl said. “Maybe there was a time I could even do it. Not now. He’s playing.”
Maybe a hundred yards down the hallway, John McGraw echoed Stahl’s sentiments. “This is the world’s series, boys,” he said. “I haven’t seen Speaker play much, but what I see he could easily have fit in with my Orioles, where unless you had something really wrong with you, you got your ass on the field every day and played like someone was stealing your wallet.”
It was Fred Lieb of the New York Press who broached the question McGraw knew was coming.
“Mac,” he said, “what about …”
“Fletcher?” McGraw snapped, cutting off the query. “No one can induce me to make any change in which Fletcher would be taken out of the team. He is one of the greatest young players on the field. I know it, and I’m not going to let my judgment be influenced for a moment anymore than I was changed in my sentiments of Red Murray because he failed to do much in the world’s series last year.”
Then he gave the writers his very best angry glare.
“Now, if that doesn’t sound good to some of the newspaper-critic managers that’s too bad, because Fletcher will play the series through. And that’s a damned guarantee. Sometimes this is the best job in the world. And sometimes I have to deal with you.”
There was one other sensitive topic in the baseball news that day as it pertained to the Giants, for the owners of the Highlanders had that morning officially sought permission from McGraw and from John T. Brush to sign a lease and share the Polo Grounds starting in 1913. The team’s rent agreement at Hilltop Park had expired and the property had already been sold and dedicated to a new hospital (now known as New York–Presbyterian), and the team was having a difficult time finding a plot on which to build a new park, after a proposed site at Marble Hill, 225th Street and Broadway, fell through. The animosity between the Highlanders and Giants ran deep, and for several reasons. First, of course, was geography, although the Giants were the undisputed kings of New York City, outdrawing the Highlanders by nearly 3-to-1 (and out-victory-ing them by 2-to-1). McGraw had jumped from the Orioles to the Giants back in ’02, and then the Orioles had jumped right back at him, landing in New York City as a transferred franchise a year later, taking the name “Highlanders.” And while it had been the Red Sox who suffered the brunt of the boycott of the 1904 Series, the true cause was a simple one: Neither McGraw nor Brush wanted any part of playing the Highlanders in any World Series, and right to the final weekend it looked like New York might have an American League champion to go along with the Giants in the National League.
“Will sharing the Polo Grounds be awkward?” Grantland Rice of the Mail wanted to know.
“Those animosities are long gone,” McGraw insisted, his generosity no doubt fortified by the 50–102 record the Highlanders posted in 1912. “Besides, when our park burned last year, they showed great hospitality to us. They took us in, and treated us neighborly, and we plan on treating them the same exact way. Though they’ll likely need a new name now that they won’t be playing in the highlands of Manhattan any longer.”
“Our headline writers already call them by a different name,” said Damon Runyon of the American. “They call them the Yankees.”
“Yankees, eh?” McGraw said. “Hmmm. I wonder if that name will catch on?”
There was, naturally, more pomp and more ceremony scheduled for this bonus day of Boston baseball, and given the way things had ended the day before, they combined to brew a serious cocktail of anxiety for Billy Evans, the twenty-eight-year-old umpire who would call balls and strikes this day and whose mission, above all else, was to ensure that this game be played to a conclusion. Jake Stahl had gotten his car the day before from grateful Boston boosters and now it was Tris Speaker’s turn, the Boston center fielder receiving his ride in recognition of winning the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. With the largest baseball crowd in the history of Boston—34,624—already restlessly wriggling in their seats, Speaker decided the time was right for a crowd-pleasing stunt, and so he approached Larry Doyle, the Giants’ captain, who’d been given the exact same car for the exact same reason two days earlier.
“How fast do these things go?” Speaker asked Doyle.
“About as fast as you want ’em to go,” Doyle replied.
“Care to join me for a spin?”
Doyle, admittedly a little shaken by this overt display of fraternization in an era when even looking an opponent in the eye was considered a sign of weakness, shook his shoulders, hopped in the passenger’s seat, and then held on to his lunch with both hands as Speaker floored the gas pedal and jolted the matching MVPs off onto a brief, speedy joyride that mostly utilized only two of the Chalmers-Detroit Touring Car’s four wheels, the tires squealing every bit as loudly as the delighted fans, John McGraw looking on in horror as his captain and second baseman’s face turned six shades of green. As a chuckle, the Royal Rooters’ band launched into a rendition of “When I Get You Alone Tonight.” And when Speaker finally slammed on the brakes, leaving a swath of torn-up sod and an infield dust storm behind him, the crowd roared one last time. Doyle, the color finally returning to his face, shook Speaker’s hand and tried to make the most of it.
“He thinks he’s a regular Harry Grant,” Doyle said, referring to the Boston-area driver who’d competed in both the 1911 and 1912 Indianapolis 500.
Billy Evans wasn’t laughing. They were already an hour late getting started, and the sunlight wouldn’t last forever. With as much urgency as he would ever use in his career, he pleaded, “Play ball!”
He didn’t have to ask Josh Devore twice. Devore’s roommate, Marquard, had been right: McGraw had penciled his name back onto the lineup card, and he promptly seized the moment, punching a ground ball through the hole between shortstop and third base. Doyle, no doubt still jumpy from his impromptu ride in the park with Speaker, skied lazily to center field for the first out, and Devore, feeling his oats, decided to try to steal second on the first pitch to Fred Snodgrass, hitting third. But Bill Carrigan gunned him out, the ball beating Devore’s spikes to the bag by a couple of feet, and as Devore dusted himself off he made a beeline for the opposite side of the dugout from where he knew McGraw was standing. He didn’t want a lecture. Got one anyway.
“That’s what I want to see, Josh.” Devore looked up: McGraw. He bowed his head. “Get your head up!” the manager ordered. “That was the right thing to do, and you just got caught, that’s all. How many times I got to tell you guys: physical mistakes happen. It’s when you play with your head in your ass that I’ll jump you.”
McGraw turned to the player to Devore’s right.
“Ain’t tha
t right?”
“Yep,” said Art Fletcher, nervously pounding left fist into right hand.
Years later, Devore would marvel about McGraw’s ability to be equal parts intimidator and motivator. “He was this gruff, angry guy sometimes, but the reputation was worse than the reality,” he said. “How do you think he got so many different kinds of players to play so well for him through the years? Sometimes his strategy would make you scratch your head, and he could yell paint off the walls. But he knew how to handle people. He was a master at that.”
His best friend already knew that. When Evans had officially announced the Giants’ battery into a megaphone—“Marquard and Meyers for the Giants!”—Marquard had started muttering to himself, specifically about his prized possession. His right arm gave his left arm a reassuring squeeze and he said, “Old lefty, my side partner, do our duty for dear old New York’s sake.” McGraw saw all this and couldn’t keep himself from laughing. He walked over to his pitcher, the erstwhile lemon, patted him gently on the left shoulder. “There’s lots of these sons-a-bitches think you’re gonna get your head knocked off today, kid,” McGraw said. “I ain’t one of ’em. Go to it, Rube.”
It was all Marquard needed to hear. In later years, Marquard would admittedly become something of a handful. He would try to jump to the Federal League in 1914, a naked act of betrayal that would break McGraw’s heart. He would engineer his own trade from New York to Brooklyn in 1915, encouraged to do so by his manager. He married a showgirl, loved the nightlife, divorced the showgirl, later found a second career working a pari-mutuel window at racetracks in both New York and Baltimore, and conceded that his left arm contained far more talent than his 201–177 lifetime record reflected. But for now, at age twenty-five, all he needed was four words from McGraw—Go to it, Rube—to make him believe he could throw a baseball two hundred miles an hour if he needed to.
He wouldn’t pitch quite that fast this day. But he was awfully damned good. He breezed through the first inning one-two-three, freezing Steve Yerkes on a curveball the Sox second baseman later insisted “broke all the way from Brockton before cutting the plate in two.” Through the first six innings, he surrendered only four singles, and only once did a Red Sox runner reach as far as second base, Larry Gardner sacrificing Duffy Lewis in the second, which is where he died when the inning did. The Red Sox tried to throw a little 2008-style baseball at Marquard, taking pitch after pitch, trying to build Marquard’s pitch count and wear down his fickle left arm, but Marquard foiled that strategy by throwing strike after strike. Red Murray lent a helping hand in the fifth, making a spectacular, somersaulting grab of a sinking Heinie Wagner drive to left that would have been two bases if it fell, and perhaps four if it slithered past him. Otherwise, Marquard was every bit the pitcher who had shackled the National League for the first three months of the season or, as no less an authority than Walter Johnson would write for the next morning’s newspapers, “Every bit the pitcher of his idol, Matty.”
Even the hard-to-please, seen-it-all-and-seen-it-twice McGraw, who’d ignored so many calls to exile Marquard to the bullpen, couldn’t camouflage his delight. After Marquard briefly flirted with trouble in the seventh, issuing a two-out double to Stahl, he’d immediately coaxed Wagner into an easy fly ball to right and walked off the mound with the most confident gait a pitcher could own. Seeing that, McGraw ambled by his longest-serving foot soldier with wonder in his eyes. “Matty, look at him,” McGraw said. “He’s really got something today. Look at his eyes. He won’t let us lose today.”
By then, the Giants had even gotten him a couple of runs to work with, grinding to a 2–0 lead over Buck O’Brien, who really could break curveballs off from Brockton because that’s where he was born. O’Brien had waited a long time to make it to the major leagues, scuffling through various local leagues before finally signing with the Red Sox in 1911, who promptly “loaned” him to the Denver Grizzlies, where he blossomed into a star, winning twenty-six out of thirty-three decisions. Back in Boston the next year as a thirty-year-old rookie, he made the most of the opportunity, going 20–13 with a 2.58 ERA, earning the distinction of starting the very first game in Fenway Park history (though he didn’t figure in the decision) and enjoying every fringe benefit, on and off the field, to which big leaguers were even then entitled.
New York opened the scoring in the second inning by scratching a run straight out of the McGraw textbook: leadoff double by the red-hot Red Murray, sacrificed to third by Fred Merkle (since under McGraw, even the heart of the batting order was expected to give itself up when necessary), and driven home on a sacrifice fly to left field by Buck Herzog (much to the consternation of Heinie Wagner, who was certain that Murray left the bag early, an argument in which Bill Klem, umpiring the bases, didn’t wish to engage). But the more satisfying inning for McGraw came later, in the top of the fifth. Herzog led off with a double and moved to third on a swinging bunt by Chief Meyers.
That brought Art Fletcher to the plate.
The very first Red Sox hitter that day, Harry Hooper, had inevitably lofted a towering pop fly over the infield, and as Fletcher settled under it each of the 34,624 people crammed inside Fenway Park—minus the three hundred or so Giants fans who were too petrified to even look, let alone utter a sound—had hollered at Fletcher, trying to unnerve him, hoping for an encore of the day before. But Fletcher had squeezed that pop-up easily, and repeated the task on a Yerkes pop-up in the fourth, meaning he’d handled flawlessly the only two balls hit his way so far. Still, as early in the game as it was, that runner on third base could prove to be a critical run. And now, as if sent by silent courier, the same message seemed to be transmitted, kinetically, to and from all Giants fans.
One leather-lunged acolyte at Fenway Park stood up and yelled, “McGraw! Send up McCormick, McGraw!” Back in Times Square, where another enormous crowd had congregated, the announcer actually took the bold step of saying, “Fletcher, hitting for himself,” which invited a loud chorus of boos. In Herald Square, after a similar reaction, an old ballplayer named Seth Sigsby, who’d pitched briefly for the Giants in 1893, said he sympathized with Fletcher’s plight in a way few members of the angry mob around him could. “There is a psychological connection between the spirits of the team and the humor of the crowd,” Sigsby explained. “It takes one day before any of us gets down to cases. That’s the reason I never stuck in the big leagues. I blew up my first trial and they wouldn’t give me a second. Good thing Fletcher’s boss is more understanding than that.”
Fletcher’s boss never even made a move for a pinch hitter, simply clapped his hands in the third-base coaching box and yelled, “One time, Fletch! One time!” And Fletcher delivered, a hot shot up the middle that made the score 2–0 Giants, sent Fenway into a fitful silence, and turned tens of thousands of fickle Giants fans into longtime Art Fletcher fans. McGraw clapped his hands some more.
Sometimes, this really was the best job in the world.
Back in Herald Square, Giants fans nervously communed, waiting for the bottom of the ninth, alternately wanting to leap for joy at the imminent prospect of a tied World Series and cower with fear at how the Red Sox might conspire to break their hearts again. A photographer from the Herald tried to snap pictures of these fans, wanted to get reaction to what they were all seeing on the Playograph, yet invariably they all tried to hide their faces, either under a hat or beneath the sleeves of their overcoats.
“That’s the influence of the Becker trial,” one of the hidden, huddled masses explained. “You don’t want anyone to know where you are or what you look like. Either you’re afraid your boss will see you out here when you should be working, or you’re afraid your wife will see you in the picture standing by that lady.”
“My wife,” another man said, “is worse than any hanging judge. If she knew I was here there’d be hell to pay.”
The Becker trial, as the afternoon papers had already begun to inform the crowds in Herald Square, in Times Square, and on Newspa
per Row, had finally seated a full jury and finally had its first explosive moment, as a waiter named Louis Krause, who’d witnessed the murder with his own eyes, officially named three of the men he saw that night: Jacob Seidenshner (also known as “Whitey Lewis”), Harry Horowitz (aka “Gyp the Blood”), and Louis Rosenberg (aka “Lefty Louie), though he couldn’t quite say for sure if a fourth gentleman, Frank Cirofici (aka “Dago Frank”), was there.
“It’s like this ballgame,” a fan named Joseph Murphy (aka “Joseph Murphy”), craning his neck on Park Row, said. “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.”
Back in Fenway Park, where a funereal silence had lingered for much of the afternoon, a flicker of hope had sparked in the souls of the faithful in the top of the ninth inning when Speaker, playing on only one good foot, made an almost impossible grab of an Art Fletcher line drive, a play that was especially important because Chief Meyers, on first, had already rumbled around second and was certain to score a third Giants run when the ball stuck in the thin webbing of Speaker’s glove. Speaker, who almost seemed as surprised as Meyers, flipped the ball into his bare hand, pegged it back to first base to complete the double play, and dragged himself back to the dugout showered in cheers that followed him all the way to the batter’s box, where he led off the bottom of the ninth.