The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Only, the ball never reached its destination, because Wagner had quickly broken toward second, he’d dived headlong into the muddy basepath, speared the ball, spit dirt out of his mouth, and slingshot a perfect strike to Stahl that beat Fletcher by half a step. Fletcher, like Merkle before him, threw his cap in the air, but by now O’Loughlin perfectly understood his frustration and didn’t say a word.

  Wagner, his uniform filthy now, accepted backslaps and attaboys from every one of his teammates, especially Wood, who understood his shortstop had definitely kept at least one run off the board and had prevented the possibility of a big inning. But even that wasn’t as satisfying as when he peered into the Giant’s dugout, where he saw John McGraw staring back at him, shaking his head, muttering something to Wilbert Robinson, something Robinson later revealed went something like this:

  “That guy,” McGraw had growled, “ain’t that good.”

  The Giant’s manager was beyond aggravated now. He’d ordered his players to take every one of Wood’s first pitches, a strategy that backfired when Wood threw first-pitch strikes to sixteen of the first seventeen men he faced. So in the bottom of the sixth, McGraw reversed himself, telling Jeff Tesreau, “Look for the fast one on the first pitch and smoke it.” And Tesreau, who’d hit only .146 that season, did just that, singling to left. Devore, also obeying, did likewise, and the Giants were set up, first and second, none out. But then Doyle and Snodgrass, swinging at the first pitch, popped to third and grounded into a fielder’s choice, and even though Red Murray let one go by before he grounded out to second, Wood had somehow allowed the Giants to start a rally and then extinguished that rally by using only six pitches. Even the great McGraw couldn’t solve Smoky Joe Wood.

  But, damn it all, he would keep trying.

  So in the bottom of the seventh, with the crowd restless and the Giants’ bench antsy and McGraw getting more and more ornery after Merkle led off with a meek strikeout, everyone was finally rousted back to attention when the scorching-hot Buck Herzog smoked a line drive to left for a single, and now McGraw was back at his hands-clapping, foot-stomping best, calling Wood a bush leaguer, exhorting Chief Meyers to keep the rally going.

  At first it looked like he might, because he lofted a deep fly ball toward dead center field. Plenty of room out there for a ball to roam. Especially with a one-legged center fielder out there.

  For six and a third innings, Wood had kept his promise to his roommate. He’d struck out seven. He’d gotten five groundouts, induced one outfield fly, one infield pop-up, picked one runner off first, even made sure that the six hits the Giants had already collected went either to right field or left field, keeping his roommate perfectly idle. His crazy plan had worked, until now. And while Speaker still tried to ignore the ankle—even attempting to steal after drawing a walk in the fifth, not the best idea he’d ever had—it was impossible for anyone else with eyes to disregard. Especially now. Meyers’s drive wasn’t exactly routine, but a healthy Speaker would have had no trouble getting to it. The wounded Speaker had nothing but trouble getting there, lumbering, limping, finally settling under the ball, which had helpfully stayed in the air a long time, finally squeezing it. A grateful Wood tipped his cap to his center fielder, stepped back on the mound, and went to work against Fletcher.

  And then Fletcher went to work against Wood. McGraw’s advice still held, and when Wood threw a first-pitch fastball Fletcher swung and got great wood on the ball, spanking it down the right-field line for a double that scored Herzog, sliced the Giants’ deficit in half to 2–1, and suddenly the Polo Grounds was alive with energy and noise and possibility. Out of nowhere, the Giants had risen up to scuff the invincible Smoky Joe, and as that news was relayed from one precinct to another, from one scoreboard stand to another, it seemed the entire island of Manhattan was bedeviled by baseball. As the news of Fletcher’s double arrived on the New York Stock Exchange floor, then on its wire, all of Wall Street shut down instantaneously. Downtown, uptown, New York, New England, New World: This game suddenly meant everything to everyone.

  None more so than the man in the third-base coaching box. Now, McGraw knew, he had to seize the moment. He sent Tesreau back to the bench. He summoned McCormick to pinch-hit. The sight of big Moose cradling his bat sent another jolt through the grandstands, and it sparked a visit to the mound from Stahl, who had a simple reminder for his pitcher.

  “You’re the best there is,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

  McCormick had earned his nickname for his wondrous eight-foot stride, a gait that was especially impressive when he made his way into a batter’s box. Like Mathewson, he was a graduate of Bucknell, and he would later coach at both his alma mater and at West Point. Periodically he would take sabbaticals from baseball to work as an engineer in the steel industry, so he was an unusual choice to be a favorite of McGraw’s, but Muggsy had signed him once and reacquired him once, and in 1912 he’d hit safely in eleven of the thirty pinch-hit opportunities he was given. That .367 average made him just as popular with Giants fans, who otherwise remembered him as the unfortunate soul who’d been on third base and whose game-winning run hadn’t counted during the famous Merkle Boner Game of 1908. They were used to Moose delivering when it mattered.

  And he delivered here.

  The big lefty dragged his enormous, forty-eight-ounce bat behind him, kicked the dirt out of his spikes (though how much dirt could have accumulated in them as he sat for seven innings in the dugout, no one could quite say), removed a thick wad of chewing gum from his mouth and placed it on the button of his cap, took one practice swing. And then drilled a hard line drive toward the hole between first and second, which Yerkes was able to knock down, an infield single that would keep the rally alive and bring up the top of the order and further demoralize Wood, who was leaking gas by the gallon now, who was shrinking before everyone’s very eyes, who was …

  WHAT THE HELL?!?!

  Have you ever heard the sound of an entire baseball stadium recoiling in horror? If you were sitting in the Polo Grounds this eleventh day of October 1912, right around 3:30 in the afternoon, the sun a distant memory, the chill hanging low and heavy, then that is exactly what you heard—that, and the desperate silence of a promising rally murdered in cold blood. Because the first thing all 36,502 people in the stands had clearly seen, together, was that the ball hadn’t dribbled that far away from Steve Yerkes. Unfortunately, the one man who had to see that, John J. McGraw, would swear he saw something else, would insist he had seen the ball trickle farther away, and so now he was doing the next thing all those people saw, which was to frantically wave Art Fletcher home, a heroic gesture in his mind, a suicidal one among those with a better view.

  Fletcher, obedient soldier to the end, put his head down and dutifully began his trek home even though everyone else in the park—the most important one being Red Sox catcher Hick Cady—had seen Yerkes recover, gather the ball, and fire to the plate, a perfect strike that landed in Cady’s mitt with Fletcher at least twelve or fifteen feet away. It was the easiest call Cy Rigler would have to make in his twenty-nine years as an umpire. Fletcher, knowing he was dead, did what every McGraw-trained baseball player was taught to do: He tried to jostle the ball free, his only hope. But Fletcher, who weighed 170 pounds soaking wet, was never going to live to tell about trying to barrel through Cady, who was built like a brick wall. So Fletcher tried doing the dirty work with his spikes, and those cleats wound up digging into Cady’s chest protector, and Cady took exception to that and told Fletcher so by flicking him off his legs and spiking the baseball about three feet from his head.

  “You can’t beat us playing ball so you try this horseshit?” Cady screamed at Fletcher. “I should pound you into the dirt!”

  “You sons-a-bitches are the god-damnedest dirtiest bastards I ever played against!” screamed Tris Speaker, hopping mad and hopping off the field toward McGraw, shaking his finger at the Giants’ manager, waving his fist, none of it mattering because as angry
as anyone might have been at him, or his players, there was no one anywhere on earth who was angrier with anyone than McGraw was at himself. He’d seen untold thousands of baseball games in his time, and he could recognize the passing of an opportunity when he saw one. The Giants would briefly threaten in the eighth, getting the tying run to third on a single and an error, but Wood blunted the rally by retiring Merkle with his eighth and final strikeout. And when the Sox added an insurance run in the ninth off Red Ames, it seemed to take all the fight out of the home team, which meekly went down one-two-three in the bottom of the ninth.

  The Sox stormed off the field surrounded by stony silence, 3–1 winners in this game, 2–1 leaders in this series, believing, as their manager would soon crow, “That game right there, boys, means the Series for us. Watch us win tomorrow and drive another nail in the championship flag. We will be back here for one game next week to clinch the title. End of story.”

  Still, as jubilant as Stahl was, he couldn’t quite match the giddiness of his shortstop, who had to believe the karmic gods were smiling on him this day, not only allowing his glove to provide a measure of redemption but spooking his archenemy into one of the great managerial blunders in World Series history.

  “Proper coaching,” Heinie Wagner crowed, “would have held Fletcher at third in that situation. But he was foolishly urged to try for home. And he didn’t have a chance of getting there. Foolish coaching, indeed.”

  By now, Wagner didn’t care if McGraw read that or not. After all, what could he say?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Saturday, October 12, 1912: Game Five

  Boston leads, 2 games to 1, with 1 tie

  BOSTON—Four hundred and twenty years ago yesterday, Mr. Columbus discovered America and yesterday afternoon, Mr. McGraw and some other millions of more or less transient New Yorkers discovered to their astonishment that the Boston Americans possess more than one pitcher …

  —HUGH S. FULLERTON, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, OCTOBER 13, 1912

  IN JULY OF 1908, an eighteen-year-old kid named Hugh Carpenter Bedient, while trying to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, blissfully marked the days and nights of that summer by playing semiprofessional baseball for the Falconer Independents. Falconer is a suburb of Jamestown, New York, crammed into the southwestern corner of the state, seventy miles south of Buffalo and fifty miles east of Erie, Pennsylvania. The Independents played a busy schedule against teams from both sides of the border, and already Bedient had proven to be one of the more gifted pitchers in the league, a hard-throwing right-hander who also featured a sharp-breaking curve and a “drop” (similar to the famous “fadeaway” employed by Christy Mathewson, better known today as a screwball), and earlier that month he’d struck out seventeen men in a nine-inning game against Youngsville, Pennsylvania, winning 7–3.

  That superb performance whet the appetite for many baseball-hungry locals who had already been looking forward to a three-game interstate series between Falconer and Corry, the other top team in the league. And neither team disappointed. The New York team won the first game, played at Falconer, 2–1, and a few days later in the rematch at Corry, the teams played fifteen innings to a draw. The third and final game, set for July 27, was such a hotly anticipated affair that the ballclubs themselves were only a part of the parochial battleground. The Jamestown Evening Journal announced, “A hair-raising game next Saturday in Corry will require a large number of locals to travel with the team to support them,” while the Corry Journal, on game day, warned of “a frenzied, excited mass of people who will greet the invaders.” And when the day arrived, it was every bit as frenzied as advertised. As the Jamestown paper reported: “The Corry fans had some money to bet and backed the home boys believing that the visitors would be overcome. All bets offered were covered, although a few backed up, and a large amount of money changed hands on the game.” They were also covered, unbeknownst to the newspaper, by the fact that Corry had imported three outfield ringers from a team in Erie to square off against Bedient and try to salvage the last of the three games.

  Corry did touch Bedient for a run in the bottom of the seventh inning. Falconer responded by scratching in the tying run in the top of the eighth. That was the end of the scoring for a good long while, but it wasn’t the end of the playing. On and on the two teams battled, into the twelfth, into the seventeenth, into the twentieth. Finally, in the top of the twenty-third, in front of an exhausted gathering of more than 5,000 people, Falconer nudged across two go-ahead runs when the Corry third baseman, his judgment no doubt fried by the sun and the long day, threw wildly home with the bases loaded. The Corry pitcher, Charles Bickford, had performed heroic work, striking out sixteen men, walking only two, scattering thirteen hits, and allowing only the one earned run.

  And not one soul left the ballpark in Corry that afternoon talking about poor Charles Bickford. Because when Hugh Bedient got the lead that day, he quickly slammed the door shut on the home team by striking out the side in the bottom of the twenty-third.

  For his fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second strikeouts of the day.

  Immediately, word of this world-record feat—at least, people suspected, it had to be a world record, because no one would try and make up such a fantastic tale, and no one yet had—was sent out on the national newswires, picked up in hundreds of towns, read by millions of readers. Sight unseen, no fewer than nineteen professional organizations descended on Falconer, helping to solve the riddle of how Bedient would spend at least the immediate segment of the rest of his life. He’d settled on Fall River, a team in the New England League, gone 13–9 in 1910, been purchased by the Red Sox, farmed out to Providence, loaned to Jersey City after struggling with good minor-league hitters, rediscovered his form, was bought back by the Red Sox, and in 1912 he’d stormed upon the American League at age twenty-two, winning twenty games, losing but nine, allowing just under three runs per nine innings. Almost seventy years later, the Society for American Baseball Research would retroactively name him the AL Rookie of the Year, an award that didn’t yet exist in 1912, and he would win the honor in a landslide. He was that good, that young.

  Late in the evening of October 11, 1912, Bedient was sitting on the Red Sox train, keeping to himself, watching the small towns and factories of Connecticut and Massachusetts rumble past his window. All around him, his teammates were bitching and complaining about the Giants, about their spike-first tactics and their haughty attitudes. No one was more furious than Speaker, although Carrigan was just as steamed. Bedient smiled: No two men better represented the subtle, smoldering divide on this team than Speaker, the Southern Baptist from Hubbard, Texas, and Carrigan, the Irish Catholic from Lewiston, Maine, and yet here they were, sharing the same side of an argument for a change, united in their loathing of McGraw and the National League. Wisely, both clubs had decided to take separate trains back to Boston, preventing any of the on-field bad blood from spilling into dining cars.

  To make matters worse, the Sox already had survived a harrowing trip together earlier in the day, when frustrated fans along Eighth Avenue had spotted the procession of taxis containing Boston players. At first, the fans good-naturedly booed them, and the Speed Boys just waved back. But then a more sinister element took over, and a few of them started throwing mud, stones, and overripe fruit at the vehicles. Buck O’Brien had actually been hit in the side of the head with one of the rocks, and he was still oozing blood. A few of the players’ wives had splattered fruit now covering their designer hats.

  “New Yorkers are savages,” Smoky Joe Wood sneered.

  “Not all of us are,” insisted Heinie Wagner, the son of New Rochelle.

  Every day, it seemed, the feelings between the teams grew more and more bitter. And none of them did anything to camouflage the contempt.

  “The opposing players do not talk to one another anymore except to snarl their remarks,” Christy Mathewson had written for his Saturday-morning column, drawing back the curtains of alleged sportsma
nship and letting the world know about the bile boiling in the Series. “At the least provocation there is a flare-up. And I suspect we haven’t seen the last of the harsh words exchanged between us.”

  Hugh Bedient had grown up the way millions of others of his generation had, not only idolizing Mathewson as a pitcher but practically worshipping him as a person. Periodically, Mathewson’s tips on pitching would appear in the Sporting News, and inevitably those issues would be the first to disappear from the newsstands in Falconer. Bedient would study the Evening Journal box scores whenever Matty pitched, visualizing what it would be like to pitch in the World Series, what it would be like to be on one of those enormous baseball fields about which he’d read so often but never seen. Well, tomorrow he would know all about that, all right. In Game Five of this series, he would square off with Mathewson, and there wasn’t a soul anywhere who believed the day would end well for him. How could it? The Sox had already beaten Matty once; even they knew it would be an awful task to try to replicate. Plus, the Sox were playing with house money: Already up 2–1 in the series, with Smoky Joe Wood set to go at least one more time, they could afford to pitch the kid, let him get his feet wet. Why waste one of the veteran arms against Matty? That would make no sense.