by Mike Vaccaro
“Three more outs,” Marquard muttered, to himself and to his left arm. “You can do this. Three more outs.”
Speaker, swinging from his heels, barely missed a Marquard fastball, popping it straight in the air—another baseball seeking the magnet of Art Fletcher’s glove. Fletcher had added a couple of routine grounders to his earlier pop-ups, already had that clutch RBI single in his hip pocket, and was a different player altogether from the one who had taken the field two hours earlier. Even as the barkers at the various scoreboards set up throughout Boston and New York tried to maximize the drama, haltingly announcing “A high … pop … fly … toward shortstop …,” which terrorized those who hadn’t actually seen Fletcher that day, at Fenway it wasn’t nearly that theatrical. Fletcher squeezed his hands a few times when the ball was in the air and then gathered in the pop. One out.
“Two more,” Marquard alerted his wing. “Two more.”
Marquard, still pumping gas, zipped a fastball to Duffy Lewis that was nearly past the Boston left fielder when it ran into the barrel of his bat, producing a slashing grounder that Merkle, at first base, knocked down beautifully with his chest. He recovered the ball, flipped to Marquard for the second out … only, as Marquard felt for the base with his foot, he came up with only dirt. He missed the bag. Lewis was safe. And Fenway Park was suddenly aroused.
“Stupid,” Marquard mumbled. “What a terrible break.”
McGraw, standing next to Mathewson in the Giants’ dugout, didn’t like the look on Marquard’s face all of a sudden.
“I think he’s about to lose his cool,” the manager said.
“Leave him be,” Matty counseled. “He’ll be fine.”
That was to be a hard-earned confidence, because left-handed Larry Gardner jumped all over Marquard’s next fastball, shooting it just inside the first-base line, just out of Merkle’s reach, and now a rising tide of giddiness began to consume the ballpark. Josh Devore, dashing over to retrieve the ball in the right-field corner, reached down, fumbled it once, fumbled it twice, allowing precious seconds to get away from him.
But it was here the Giants caught the break of the Series so far, even if they wouldn’t recognize it for a while. Unlike McGraw, who always manned the coaching lines at third, Stahl couldn’t always direct traffic from there since he was still an active player. So the Sox employed a rotating cast of players to serve in that role, and as Devore was engaged in his juggling act in right field, it was Heinie Wagner who was on duty coaching third. And whether he didn’t get a good look at Devore’s follies, or was simply inclined to play it conservatively, he shot both hands in the air, halting Lewis at third and Gardner at second, even though there was no reason in the world to do that. From the dugout, Speaker could see as much, and so out he came, hobbling as fast as he could, yelling in full voice, “Heinie? Have you lost your god-damned mind?” and waving both his arms, getting the attention of the completely confused Lewis, who hurried home with the Sox’ first run of the game. But Gardner, who should have been able to crawl to third, was instead standing on second. It was a critical blunder by Wagner, compounded a few moments later when Stahl sent a smoking line drive back through the middle that Marquard somehow got a glove on. Gardner, wandering too far off second, was in immediate trouble, and though he slid hard into third, his spikes and the dirt flying practically in Herzog’s eyes, the Giants’ third baseman made the tag—or at least Bill Klem said he did. When Herzog rose out of the dust, he didn’t have the ball in his hands, and Gardner tried to convey that to him in the simplest, gentlest way possible.
“He dropped the goddamned ball, Bill!”
“Not as I saw it,” Klem replied, and that was that. Two outs.
Marquard, looking like a punch-drunk heavyweight in the fifteenth round, exhorted his left arm one last time. “You got one more out in you, old boy?”
It looked that way. Wagner, who already knew he may have cost the Red Sox the game by mismanaging Gardner, stepped to the plate, and he was probably gripping the bat too hard, swinging too crazily, and he bounced a harmless ground ball straight at Fletcher. Even the Royal Rooters had abandoned jeering Fletcher, whose recovery seemed complete, and the Giants’ shortstop easily gathered the ball in his glove, took a crow hop, and fired the ball to first base to end the game.
There was only one problem.
Merkle, one of the best defensive first basemen alive, dropped the ball.
In Fenway Park, there was a moment of disbelieving silence followed by an explosion of unyielding hilarity. All across New York City, six seconds after it happened, announcers on stages in Times Square and Herald Square and Madison Square Garden and Park Row each saw what they needed to say and prepared themselves for the inevitable reaction.
“Error, Merkle!” they each proclaimed.
Merkle? Merkle! The same fellow who’d forgotten to touch second base in a key game against the Cubs back in ’08, earning him forever the sobriquet of “Bonehead,” easily the least-flattering nickname in baseball history? The self-absorbed player who’d held out on the Giants earlier in the season? Merkle had done it to us again? Merkle had done it to us again!
Merkle!
In the visiting dugout at Fenway, ironically, McGraw wasn’t nearly as unhappy with Merkle as everyone else. Now was the time to get mad at Fletcher, who could have flipped the ball to Doyle for a game-ending force but who, for all his frayed nerves, loved showing off his strong arm whenever possible. Doyle had been standing on the base, waiting for the relay that never came. McGraw saw that. Mental errors. “Jesus, Fletcher,” McGraw muttered. “That’s how you pay me back?”
Olaf Henriksen, a reserve outfielder who’d pinch-run for Stahl, raced all the way to third on the error. And on Marquard’s first pitch to Hick Cady, who’d entered the game as a defensive replacement, Wagner stole second without a throw. So, after a day in which he’d completely dominated the Red Sox, had regained his old swagger, and looked for a time like the best pitcher on the planet, Marquard was now one base hit away from allowing the Speed Boys the all-time miracle comeback in World Series history. His face was as pale as the Red Sox’ home white uniforms, and in the dugout McGraw looked no healthier, as the wheels had come off so quickly he hadn’t had time to warm anyone in the bullpen. And these weren’t even the most pallid people in the park; that honor belonged to Billy Evans, who saw dusk descending in a hurry, who already had a hard time distinguishing figures in the outfield, who knew things had to be settled now because there wasn’t nearly enough sunlight available for a tenth inning.
“Batter up!” he barked.
But Cady was locked in, and he was ready, and when he saw the fastball leave Marquard’s left hand, the 127th ball Rube threw that day, he had no trouble with the encroaching darkness and he picked the ball up right away, high and inviting and out over the plate. He swung, and the ball connected with a sweet crackle that instantly brought both teams out of their dugouts for a look, and only one of those teams seemed to like what they saw.
“That’s in the gap for sure!” Speaker yelped, hopping on his good foot.
“Get to the ground fast, ball!” Stahl squealed.
“Shit,” McGraw mumbled.
Wilbert Robinson, McGraw’s right-hand man, didn’t even bother cussing, he simply found the nearest pieces of equipment on the bench and started flinging them around. What a way to lose a game. What a goddamned, crazy, miserable way …
But then Robinson stopped: No one else was moving, no one else was stirring. They were all squinting through the gloaming, out toward the right-center-field gap, out to where Josh Devore was blazing a path with his spikes. From the moment the ball was hit, as his heart was sinking, Marquard had seen that, if nothing else, his roommate had gotten a great jump on the ball.
But was it enough?
Most of Fenway Park thought so. The crack of the bat was all many of them needed to see, since they knew they wouldn’t be able to see the play clearly when it ended anyway. And so thousands of
fans, remarkable as it seems, left the ballpark firmly convinced that the Red Sox had just won a heart-stopping game, 3–2. Those who stayed could see only a speck of a man, Devore, loping after a speck of white.
And really, only Devore saw—or, more precisely, felt—the end result. Because the real miracle here wasn’t that he somehow outraced the baseball. The wonder was that the ball missed the glove on his right hand and landed in the bare palm of his left. It was an astonishing play. It was an impossible play. And Devore, after securing the ball, took off on the dead run straight to the Giants’ dugout, straight to the clubhouse, slowing down only to show a gauntlet of umpires—O’Loughlin first, then Rigler, then Klem, lastly a relieved-to-the-point-of-exhaustion Evans—his prize.
“Holy moly!” Marquard shouted. “He got it!”
“I took it over my left shoulder and with my bare hand although I clapped my glove down on it right away and hung on like a bulldog in a tramp,” Devore would soon tell the mountain of reporters surrounding him in the deafening furnace of the Giants’ clubhouse. “The sight of me with that ball was about as welcome to those people in the bleachers as the appearance of a bill collector Christmas week, I guess.”
Marquard came over and hugged him so tight Devore thought his skin was about to burst. “I had to save my big brother,” he explained. “I have to take care of him.”
Later, in the taxi on the way back to the train station, Devore would confess, “I never came so close to missing anything in my life. And if I had, I couldn’t have faced any of these guys. Especially Mr. McGraw.”
Instead, he set two towns off into delayed frenzies, one of joy, one of bitterness. In New York, all the fans knew was what the announcer told them: “Cady flies out to Devore in right field. Three outs. Ballgame over. Giants 2, Red Sox 1.” They would have to wait until morning to get a fuller account of what they’d just “seen.”
In Boston, that reckoning occurred sooner, and with a great deal more shock accompanying it. After the game, Fred Lieb of the New York Press had hustled back to his room at the Copley Plaza Hotel to file his story and pack his bags in order to make the overnight writers’ train back to New York. Walking into a men’s room on the hotel’s main lobby, he encountered a Boston fan who yelled, “Boston wins! What a great game for the Sox to pull out! What a ninth inning!”
Lieb was surprised, of course, having just seen the game end with his own eyes.
“But my friend, the Red Sox lost. The Giants won, 2–1.”
The man’s eyes flashed angrily. “What do you mean, the Red Sox lost? I just came from the game! I was there! The Red Sox beat Marquard in the ninth, 3–2! It was magnificent!”
“Well, I was there too, and I’m telling you you’re wrong. I saw it all from the press box. The Giants won, 2–1.”
By now, Lieb’s new adversary was more than a little angry and more than a little fueled by local spirits. He shot a wad of tobacco into a spittoon and moved closer.
“What are you doing, trying to make a damned fool out of me? I should take a punch at your nose.”
Lieb tried to cool things. “Well, before we start punching noses, let’s just see what happened. The sports extras of the evening papers should be out by now and we can see just who did win the game.”
The men repaired to the main lobby and saw a big-shouldered bruiser carrying a heaping armful of evening newspapers, among them the Boston American. And there was the banner headline on the front page:
GIANTS WIN THIRD GAME, TIE SERIES
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the man said. “What the hell happened?”
“Well, what happened is that Devore caught that last line drive. You didn’t see the catch in the light fog and gathering darkness, so you thought Boston won. And you left the park in a hurry without checking. And then you ordered your first brandy.”
“I’ll be damned,” the man repeated, walking away, looking as if he’d seen a ghost, shaking his head the whole way. There were a lot of people who would end this day in precisely the same way.
Fred Snodgrass, pictured in the Giants’ distinctive all-black uniforms at the 1911 World Series against Philadelphia, was a particular favorite of John J. McGraw’s.
New York Giants skipper John McGraw (left) was considered the premier strategist of his era as well as a hotheaded umpire baiter. Meanwhile, in Boston, Jake Stahl (center) was coaxed out of retirement and a cushy bank job to manage the greatest assemblage of talent he’d ever seen.
For one season, Smoky Joe Wood was the most dominant pitcher in the game.
James McAleer, owner of the Red Sox, was at first immensely popular with Boston fans … until they caught wind of his apparent wish to extend the Series at all costs.
Children called Christy Mathewson “The Christian Gentleman,” and adults called him “Big Six.” By 1912, he was already acknowledged to be among the two or three greatest to ever throw a baseball.
Tris Speaker had wanted to play center field for the New York Giants but had been dismissed by McGraw as not good enough to make his club, a decision McGraw would rue for the rest of his career.
The right-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds some two hours before the start of Game One of the 1912 World Series.
The Royal Rooters, the most fanatical group of fans in all of baseball, were led by Mayor Fitzgerald and saloon owner Nuf Ced McGreevy (at left, waving a megaphone).
While there were always entire segments of the Red Sox that weren’t speaking to each other, they mostly forgot their differences between the white lines.
The Giants swagger onto the field at the Polo Grounds prior to Game One, to the delight of their fans. Though they hadn’t won a title since 1905, the Giants carried themselves as perennial champions, much to the chagrin of opposing teams and fans.
The crowds at the 1912 World Series were unprecedented both in their enthusiasm and their sheer numbers, as evidenced by this line at the Polo Grounds.
The New York Herald was one of the first newspapers to provide wireless play-by-play coverage of World Series games, beginning in 1911. By 1912, ten of the fourteen daily newspapers in New York City, and four Boston papers, provided similar services, drawing mammoth crowds.
The four stalwarts of the Red Sox lineup (left to right): Duffy Lewis, Larry Gardner, Tris Speaker, and Heinie Wagner.
Giants owner John T. Brush had become one of the World Series’ fiercest advocates after leading the charge to cancel the event in 1904.
New York Police Department Lieutenant Charles Becker, of the so-called “Trial of the Century,” and a devoted Giants fan.
The jury heard more and more stories of Becker’s ties with underworld figures such as “Lefty Louie” Rosenberg and “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz (above, seated, with their NYPD captors).
As prosecutor in the Becker trials, Charles Whitman sealed his political career and paved his way to the governor’s chair, in which he sits on the morning of his inauguration in 1915.
Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest by a saloon owner named John Shrank on October 14, 1912, on his way to deliver a speech at the Milwaukee Auditorium. Despite the fact that his would-be assassin’s bullet was still lodged in his chest—as clearly visible in his X-ray—Roosevelt refused to seek medical attention until he was done delivering his speech.
Roosevelt recovered quickly from his wound and returned to his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
President William Howard Taft (left) was a noted sportsman and followed the 1912 World Series closely—possibly to the detriment of his re-election campaign.
Christy Mathewson admitted he knew very little, if anything, about the Red Sox reserve Olaf Henricksen (pictured here), but by the time Henricksen’s at-bat was over, Mathewson knew he would never forget the only major league player ever born in Denmark.
The press boxes at the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park filled to overflowing with such familiar bylines as Damon Runyon, Hugh Fullerton, Grantland Rice, and Tim Murnane, and the telegraph booths were busy transmitt
ing pitch-by-pitch updates all over the country.
Few players channeled McGraw on the field as completely as Buck Herzog, who nearly caused several brouhahas during the 1912 World Series.
CHAPTER SIX
Friday, October 11, 1912: Game Four
Series even, 1 win apiece, with 1 tie
NEW YORK—Swift spurts of “smoke,” low-traveling under a damp, gray sky, streaked once more under the shadow of Coogan’s Bluff this afternoon. Behind them, turning the Red Sox Gatling, marksman Joe Wood again pumped a lethal volley into McGraw’s brigade …
—R. E. McMILLIN, BOSTON HERALD, OCTOBER 12, 1912
THE RED SOX, they were in a foul mood.
Larry Doyle could sense as much on the 6:30 P.M. train that pulled out of Back Bay Station, the players on both sides plainly weary from the Series, and wary of each other. On the trip from New York to Boston two days earlier, various Giants had bumped into various Red Sox during the journey, a perfectly natural expectation given the close and crowded quarters, and while it would never dawn on any of them to share a meal, or even a pleasant conversation, with members of the other team, there had been a flurry of nodded heads and shaken hands and tipped hats. They were still all gentlemen, after all, dressed to the nines as they were.
But that had all been before.
Before the tie game, which still bothered both teams. Before the National Commission’s ruling, the one spasm of unity between the clubs, which only peeled farther back the already-exposed nerves on both sides. Before Buck Herzog’s bump of Tris Speaker at the end of the tie game, an act of gamesmanship for which Speaker swore revenge if it took him the rest of his career. Before Larry Gardner’s spikes-high slide into Herzog in the ninth inning of Game Three, which jostled the ball free even if Bill Klem had refused to call it that way for the record. Before Fred Merkle—adding to his terribly busy ninth inning—may or may not have bumped Gardner, Herzog-style, earlier in the inning as he legged out a double, a charge the Boston players insisted was true even as the Giants dismissed it. Before Herzog—a man who didn’t mind getting his uniform dirty—had driven his spikes into Steve Yerkes’s shins while being thrown out trying to steal in the top of the ninth, a play both teams nearly forgot in the ensuing hubbub until Yerkes peeled off his game pants and saw the bloody tracks left behind.