by Mike Vaccaro
“Pretty smart, as it turns out, wasn’t it?”
McGraw mumbled something Robinson couldn’t quite understand, refolded his arms. “First Cohan makes a killing betting against me, and now this ham-and-egg bum? I mean, shit, if you can’t trust your gambler friends, who the hell can you trust?”
McGraw was ready for the game to begin, ready for some redemption, ready to see his team try to square the series at two games all, ready to make Abe Attell, who had already placed another thousand on the Sox, squirm a little. So was Silk O’Loughlin, the first ump to get a second go-round calling balls and strikes. Right on time, right at the stroke of two o’clock, with the clouds lying low over Fenway Park and a chill lying thick in the air, O’Loughlin announced the batteries—Bedient and Cady, Mathewson and Meyers—and cleared his throat.
“Play ball!” he cried through the soupy mist.
The people who gathered around the scoreboard in Times Square and the Playograph in Herald Square were a little more subdued than they’d been, even if there were more of them thanks to its being Saturday afternoon. Giants fans, who only seven years before thought of their team as a bulletproof baseball machine, had grown into a melancholy lot, still rabid for their team but also certain that, at any time, the other shoe was sure to drop on their heads. How to explain the bizarre way the Giants had lost the pennant in 1908, with Merkle forgetting to touch second? How else to explain how the Giants had been flattened by the Athletics a year earlier thanks to a barrage of home runs (of all things!) off the bat of Frank Baker? How else to explain the way Mathewson suffered through a tie in Game Two of this very series?
“The Giants are a wonderful team,” a thirty-year-old clerk named Paul Frazier said at Times Square. “But they are just about the unluckiest team around. And Matty is the king of the bad break. He always pitches just well enough to lose, it seems.”
The faraway faithful started their sighing and their grumbling early, as the announcers fed them troubling information right away through their bullhorns in the bottom of the first inning:
“Hooper singles to right field!”
“Speaker singles to left field, Hooper to second!”
Already the crowd was licking its wounds. Such was the lot, and the fate, of Giants fans. Mathewson would get out of the jam, inducing a groundout from Duffy Lewis and striking out Larry Gardner, but that didn’t mollify the already disconsolate crowd, stirring where they stood.
“We had our chance,” Frazier explained. “We already blew it.”
For a long time, that seemed to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For as down in the mouth as a lot of New Yorkers were, that’s how optimistic Red Sox fans were, sparked by the Royal Rooters who seemed intent on singing as many choruses of “Tessie” as it would take to get the job done right. While Mathewson wiggled out of a little more trouble in the second inning, Hugh Bedient looked as comfortable on a World Series mound as if he were in his bedroom back in Falconer, allowing only a couple of walks and mesmerizing the Giants with his drop, a pitch that acted, in essence, like a curveball in reverse, darting down and away from left-handers and down and in against righties. Perhaps it was only right that the first Giant to figure the pitch out was Mathewson, whose own “fadeaway” pitch had acted similarly for years, flummoxing hundreds of hitters. Matty stroked a single to center in the top of the third, New York’s first safety, and was pushed to second on a walk to Josh Devore but was stranded right there. You could almost hear the sighs emanating east from Manhattan.
But only for a few moments, because Fenway Park would soon be overtaken by a rollicking, roaring wave of glee. Mathewson tried to fool Harry Hooper with what was essentially a changeup, a version of his fastball that was much, much slower, but Hooper wasn’t fooled a bit, blasting a high drive to center field that Fred Snodgrass misjudged, to almost everyone’s great delight. Snodgrass took two steps in before realizing it was actually flying over his head, and by the time he recovered it was too late and Hooper was flying around the bases, and the ball was now stuck in a tiny hole in the extreme corner of the bleachers, and by the time Snodgrass could pluck it free Hooper was standing on third with a triple. McGraw was incensed, jumping all over O’Loughlin.
“How is that not a ground-rule double, Silk?” McGraw screeched.
“Mac, you were here same as me every time we’ve gone over the ground rules,” the umpire said. “There’s nothing in there about the ball getting stuck in that hole.”
“It’s common sense, Silk!” McGraw raged.
“Take it up with the Commission,” O’Loughlin said. “For now, the runner is safe at third base.”
McGraw said he would do just that, not that it would help his man Mathewson any right now. But Steve Yerkes made that a moot point anyway, driving Matty’s very next pitch to the gap in left center, a clean double for sure that became a triple instead when Snodgrass failed to get his body in front of the ball and it rolled behind him. Red Sox fans couldn’t believe their great fortune: a rally and Snodgrass was pissing up his leg; what a parlay! In half a heartbeat, the Red Sox had a 1–0 lead and the Royal Rooters were already hoarse with satisfaction. Mathewson, knowing that it was now up to him to do everything in his power to keep Yerkes planted on third base, took a deep breath, steeled himself, and glared in for a sign. Glaring back was Tris Speaker, his ankle only moderately better, a man who lived for these very types of situations, who despite his physical limitations was still hitting .294 for the Series and was still the last man any pitcher wanted to see when he absolutely, positively needed an out. This was, after all, Tris Speaker.
But this was also Christy Mathewson.
Twenty-four years later, in 1936, the first-ever class would be inducted into the newly created Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Five names were on that inaugural list. Mathewson’s was one of them. In 1937, the second group would be selected, and there would be eight names on that list; Speaker’s was one of those. By any measure, this was one of the great moments in baseball history (even if nobody at the time could possibly have known that), one of the twelve times Mathewson would face Speaker in this World Series, the only twelve times that 373 career wins would ever take measure of 3,514 career hits. History in a snapshot.
Mathewson won this one, snapping off a fadeaway that Speaker got on top off, rolling it on the ground to second base. Larry Doyle was playing in, but that didn’t stop Yerkes from running toward home, a reckless move that was surely about to change the course of the game, and Mathewson’s first great obstacle was about to be cleared.
Only, the baseball bounded right through Larry Doyle’s legs.
It took a second for anyone in Fenway Park to realize what they’d just seen. Doyle was having his problems at the plate in the Series, but he was never one to take those woes to the field with him. Later, in consoling Doyle, Mathewson would tell him, “There isn’t a player in either league I’d rather have behind me when I needed to get an out.” But that didn’t help any now. Neither did the stand-up way Doyle would accept responsibility later on, saying, “There’s no use apologizing for it because the ball was hit squarely at me and I ought to have fielded it easily. The prisoner pleads guilty.”
The facts were the facts: The Red Sox now led 2–0, Fenway was in a frothy fury, and while Red Murray recovered the ball and gunned out Speaker, trying to stretch into second base, the Giants were suddenly in the kind of hole from which Series-losing teams almost never recover.
Mathewson walked off the mound massaging his right arm, a sight that petrified McGraw. “It’s nothing,” Matty said. “Stiffness. Get me some runs, and I’ll be fine.”
But that would be no easy task. Because as the Giants were about to find out the hard way—and much to the delight of the Red Sox—the Speed Boys were more than just one arm, more than just one man. Hugh Bedient, it turned out, hadn’t won those twenty games in a raffle, or in a lottery. He might not have owned the blow-away stuff that Smoky Joe Wood did at his best, but who did? He
was good enough to fool the American League all year. And on this day, he was more than good enough to reduce the Giants’ bats to sawdust.
Watching this kid who didn’t yet look old enough to shave have his way with the proud Giants batting order, McGraw could contain his rage no longer. As the Giants trotted back to the dugout at the end of the sixth inning, they’d managed only two scratch singles and three walks off Bedient. They’d been virtually noncompetitive, a sin McGraw never could tolerate in any of his teams.
So he gathered his team around him. And went off on them.
“Suddenly it seems any guy with speed and a little control to put the ball where he wants it can beat you fellows now!” he roared. “It’s a disgrace! You disgust me! And you embarrass the whole National League!”
He turned away from them, stalked off to the coaching box, leaving Larry Doyle to hammer the message home.
“Don’t get hacked off at the old man,” the captain said. “He’s right.”
Merkle tried to nudge the boys back into McGraw’s good graces the best way he could, by lofting a long fly into the temporary stands beyond Duffy’s Cliff in left for a ground-rule double, and suddenly the Giants looked alive for the first time all day. Buck Herzog, who’d hit a scalding .571 over the Series’ first four games, was next, but he was experiencing his first difficult day and popped up lazily to shortstop, slamming his bat down in disgust as he saw Wagner squeeze it. Then, when Chief Meyers lofted a routine fly ball to Speaker in center, it seemed the Giants were prepared to squander their best scoring chance of the day, but McGraw still had his favorite weapon in reserve. And while Moose McCormick didn’t get a base hit, he did send a bullet to third base that ate Gardner up, allowing Merkle to score on the error, drawing the Giants to within 2–1.
They were back in business.
And then they weren’t.
Just as quickly as the New York offense sprung to life, it withered again. Bedient was that good. He struck out Devore and Snodgrass in the eighth. He retired Murray, Merkle, and Herzog one-two-three in the ninth, a lay-down that was so inevitable that McGraw never even bothered to move from his spot on the bench, figuring the way the Giants were hitting—or not hitting—it would be silly to occupy the third-base coaching box, and he was right. It wasn’t just the results that were shocking, it was the ease with which the kid did it.
“I wonder,” Heinie Wagner would ask, through a smile so wide you could fit the whole Fenway outfield in it, “if Mr. McGraw still thinks that we are a one-man team?”
The final out, a weak grounder from Herzog that Yerkes fielded and flipped over to Stahl, unleashed the wildest baseball celebration anyone had ever seen in Boston. Even nine years earlier, when the Pilgrims had won the very first World Series with a Game Eight win over the Pirates at the old Huntington Avenue Grounds, there’d been only 7,455 people in attendance that day. Now, every one of the 34,683 who’d entered the gate were still shoehorned inside, and they all wanted to get a piece of their heroes, wanted to climb onto the field, commune with the park and the team and the fact that everyone now stood only nine innings away from the world’s championship. Not everyone got there, but the Royal Rooters all did, and two brass bands did, and the singing and the laughter filled the brand-new ballpark for a full hour after the final out.
In the postgame commotion, hardly anyone noticed Christy Mathewson, who’d quietly stepped out of the dugout to shake hands with Herzog after making the final out, then quietly retreated to the bench to retrieve his mackinaw jacket, fold up his glove, and make the long journey back to the clubhouse and then to the train station.
In his own way, Mathewson was despondent, and it was obvious why. Because as brilliant as Bedient was—and he would never be greater, it would be the highlight of a career that would last for only three more seasons and thirty-nine more victories—Mathewson had, in many ways, been even better. Those two early runs wound up dooming him. But from the moment Speaker slid into second base with the first out of the third inning—the play that started out as Doyle’s fateful error—Mathewson faced eighteen Red Sox. And he retired all eighteen.
“It doesn’t look like I’ll ever win a world’s series game again,” Mathewson said later on, his demeanor stoic even as his shoulders slumped with evident disappointment. “I threw my arm out eight times there today, and there were a couple of innings when I felt like just leaving it in the box and coming on in without it. The old arm was worn by trying to repeat within three days, and in the earlier part of the game it felt like too much of a load. The muscles were so sore that it seemed as if a knife were shooting through me every time I threw a ball.”
He shook his head.
“The Red Sox didn’t hit me as hard today as they did the first time,” he said, a trace of a smile forming. “At first I couldn’t get the kinks out of my arm and I wasn’t able to get the ball to where I wanted it to go. It is an admission of age. The old soup bone is not as young as it once was, when I could come back within two days and like it.”
The smile disappeared.
“Even so,” he said, “we should have won the game.”
All around him, there was a sense of inevitability encroaching on Fenway Park. The Giants would have two days to think about their situation, since Sunday ball was still forbidden under New York City’s blue laws, so Game Six wouldn’t take place until Monday afternoon at the Polo Grounds. The Red Sox would gratefully spend the night in their own beds (after a full evening properly celebrating their impending coronation, of course) before leisurely training over to Manhattan, and already many of them were making arrangements to get home for the winter (after the inevitable victory rally that would be held on Boston Common or in Faneuil Hall or some such appropriate venue).
Perhaps most telling of all, Buck Herzog made a detour before heading into the Giants’ clubhouse, walking straight out to center field, where Tris Speaker was limping his way in. Herzog’s uniform was as filthy as his reputation as a hard-ass player, but he never minded telling a foe what he thought about him. Even a bitter one.
“You’re a hell of a player, Speaker,” Herzog said. “You play hard. You play hurt. You play the way I like to play.”
Speaker, stunned somewhat, drawled, “Thank you.”
Herzog stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings?”
Speaker stuck out his. “None.”
The Boston crowd, acknowledging both an overt act of sportsmanship and a covert act of concession, cheered wildly. Someone might have said that it was all over but the shouting, but that wouldn’t have been right. The shouting had already begun.
The pressmen stared at the headline.
SOX PUSH GIANTS TO THE BRINK
“Depressing, isn’t it?” one of them asked.
“Awful,” another replied. “Now all we’ll have to sell newspapers is that damned crooked cop. Baseball is better.”
Up and down Park Row, the heartbeat of New York’s newspaper community, the same conversations were taking place, between pressmen, between city editors and reporters, between publishers and managing editors. Two things moved papers better than anything in the city: baseball and blood. Blood, it seemed, never went away. But from mid-October to early March, every year, baseball did. It was always a sad time.
The Becker Trial would get the bigger headlines the next morning, in the World and in the American, in the Herald and the Tribune and the Times and everywhere else, and it wasn’t just because thinking about the Giants made everyone a little more depressed. In what was one of the most electrifying moments anyone could ever remember in the history of New York jurisprudence, a self-confessed “collection man” named Bald Jack Rose—so named because he didn’t have a single follicle of hair on his entire body, eyebrows and eyelashes included—all but tied Charles Becker into the electric chair himself with the kind of testimony normally reserved for the final five pages of a pulpy novel.
“I asked Lieutenant Becker why it had taken him so long to get downtown after I had rep
orted to him that Rosenthal had been killed,” Rose recalled of the night Beansie went bye-bye. “His answer was that he had gone by the police station. I then asked if he had viewed the body.”
The courtroom on Chambers Street was practically out of oxygen by now.
“And what did Lieutenant Becker say?” asked Charles Whitman, the district attorney.
“Becker said, ‘It was the most pleasing sight I have ever seen, the sight of that squealing son of a bitch,’ ” Rose replied. “He said that if you hadn’t been standing right by him at the time, Mr. District Attorney, he would have reached down and cut out his tongue and hung it up. ‘As a warning to all squealers,’ he said.”
The pressmen shook their heads.
“Hell of a story,” one of them said, pointing at the 6,000-word article that filled half of page one and two full pages inside.
“It better be,” the other one said. “It’s all we’ll have left soon.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Monday, October 14, 1912: Game Six
Red Sox lead, 3 games to 1, with 1 tie
NEW YORK—William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, District Attorney Whitman and the Marines can cheer up. Maybe they can be quoted at length after to-day. The world’s series, which has been taking the minds of the rooters off the issues at stake next month and seriously interfering with the exploitation of the fleet and the Becker trial, may end this afternoon. And then again, it may not. In which case, everyone wins.
—SID MERCER, NEW YORK GLOBE, OCTOBER 15, 1912
FOR THE TWO managers, Sunday’s day of rest provided either a welcome respite from the fray or an unwanted spasm of inactivity, depending on which side of the field you happened to be sitting on. Jake Stahl was the toast of the Hub, always a popular mainstay as a player but thought of mostly as a figurehead who’d essentially stayed out of the way while his talented gaggle of Speed Boys ran away and hid from the rest of the American League across most of the summer of 1912. He had been hired as a favored son and he had performed his job admirably, dutifully filling out lineup cards and cajoling the boys in the clubhouse and watching with great delight as Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood blossomed into the kind of once-in-a-generation superstars that can carry a team for months—even seasons—at a time, and, oh by the way, he’d had a fine season himself, hitting .301 and driving in sixty-six runs, no mean feat after spending a full year behind a bank desk and away from the batting cage.