by Mike Vaccaro
None of O’Brien’s teammates consoled him when he walked to the dugout, alone, slamming his mitt on the ground, completely numb to what had just happened. In the course of about six hours he’d woken with a hangover the size of the Polo Grounds outfield, then had his brains handed to him by the Giants. Not a great day so far, and it would only get worse. The Sox did scratch out two runs in the top of the second on a double by Engle, Wood’s throwing partner (who’d pinch-hit for O’Brien, mercifully ending the baseball portion of his workday), briefly throwing a scare into Marquard (and forcing McGraw to tell Mathewson, “You’d better get your arm loose, just in case”). But the Speed Boys would only get one other man as far as third base the rest of the way. Their hearts simply weren’t in it any longer. The final was 5–2. It felt much, much worse than that.
The Royal Rooters, to their eternal credit, tried to make the best of what had been a long, fruitless, and altogether raw afternoon, all six hundred of them making for the field in lockstep order, the band blaring as enthusiastically as it had during the first inning. Even Giants fans, pleasantly surprised by their season’s remaining intact, showed their admiration by bypassing the early elevated trains heading back downtown so they could watch and listen. They saw the Rooters march for the Boston bench, saw them execute a war dance around several of the players who had not yet run for cover, and then started for the entrance gate in an emulated collegial snake dance.
Zigzagging to right and left, the Rooters passed in review. On the home plate they loitered for a moment while McGreevy addressed them:
“Tomorrow!” he began, and there he ended too, for the crowd agreed with him and carried out the slogan with a thousand voices.
“Tomorrow we’ll show them!” they cried in response.
And in the middle of it all stood Honey Fitz, his voice still clear and strong, his spirit still unbowed. Before leading the procession off to the train station, he declared, “This only delays the results of the series and the reception of the Red Sox as champions by one day. Fear not!”
The Rooters’ postgame loyalty oaths had briefly taken the attention away from another critical dance taking place just outside first base as soon as Heinie Wagner grounded out to third to end the game. But once the crowd behind first realized what was happening, they piled up ten deep behind the participants. A child, craning his neck, asked, “What the heck is the big deal there?”
“It’s the coin toss,” he was told, “to see where the decisive game will be played.”
Garry Herrmann held a shiny 1912 half-dollar piece in his hands, and he made a great show of displaying it to both men, showing them the Liberty Head, or “Barber,” on the front, the eagle with its wings extended and head facing left on the back. Herrmann then flipped the fifty-cent piece to McGraw, ordered him to toss it in the air.
“Mr. Stahl,” Herrmann said, “call it in the air.”
At its apex, Stahl yelled, “Tails.”
It landed, and a few hundred people strained for a better look. All they really needed to do was look at McGraw’s face, where the joy of victory had already been replaced by the anguish of another bad break.
“Tails it is!” Herrmann said, before turning to the crowd and offering with a half-smile, “Mr. Stahl will now decide where the eighth game of this series will be played, should it be necessary to play it.”
Before Stahl could say a word, McGraw piped up: “Our grounds are available to you if you’d like them,” eliciting a laugh from the disappointed crowd, who now understood that no matter what happened in Game Seven, New York City had seen its last baseball game of the year.
Stahl wasn’t smiling.
“We shall play the game in Boston, Mr. McGraw,” he said, “although I hope not to have to play it at all.”
Stahl turned, the happiness of winning the coin flip hardly easing the anger he was feeling at the game he’d just managed, and all the little dramas that had led up to it, and who do you suppose Stahl saw holding court in front of a few Boston writers? Jimmy McAleer. And the dumb son of a bitch couldn’t even hide his smile. He eavesdropped a little on his way back to the clubhouse.
“There is one thing to be thankful for and that is that we didn’t pitch Wood, who might have been beaten,” McAleer said. “That fact that we didn’t make more than two runs off Marquard and probably would’ve been shut out if it wasn’t for his error in the second will convince anyone that the saving of Wood for tomorrow was a wise move.”
Jesus …
“There are no excuses for O’Brien,” McAleer continued. “He was in good physical condition and anxious to pitch. But it turned out he had nothing at all in the box. Still, we haven’t lost yet. You’ll be hearing from us tomorrow.”
McAleer stuck around for a good long while. Stahl didn’t. He had to get to the train before he did something even dumber than not throwing Smoky Joe Wood.
Later that night, in Wisconsin’s largest city, newsboys hawked evening editions of the Milwaukee Sentinel outside the Hotel Gilpatrick, the massive crowd waiting for Theodore Roosevelt to emerge also eagerly awaiting the results of that day’s baseball game and that day’s developments from the Charles Becker Trial, which had quickly seized the national curiosity.
It was just after 8 o’clock when the Colonel walked out of the hotel, waved vigorously at the delighted crowd, and stepped smartly toward his waiting automobile. As he did, a short, stocky man—later identified as John Flammang Schrank—fired a pistol toward him. The wild-eyed crowd instantly seized the gunman, and cries of “Lynch him! Kill him!” went up before Roosevelt, relieved to be unhurt, cried out from behind an open window, “Do not hurt him! He is sick! Get him to the hospital!” before his own car sped away, toward the Milwaukee Auditorium where he was due to make a speech. It was after the car was about four blocks clear of the shocking mob that John McGrath, one of Roosevelt’s secretaries sitting across from the former president in the limousine, suddenly lifted a quivering finger.
“Look, Colonel,” McGrath said. “There is a hole in your overcoat.”
Roosevelt found the hole, unbuttoned the big brown army coat he had over it, and thrust his hand beneath. When he withdrew, his fingers were stained with blood.
“Well, then,” Roosevelt said, “it would seem that I have been shot.”
“To the hospital at once!” McGrath yelled at the driver.
“Nonsense,” Roosevelt said. “I have a speech to deliver. And I shall deliver it.” And the car, despite howls of protest from the backseat, proceeded on to the Auditorium.
CHAPTER NINE
Tuesday, October 15, 1912: Game Seven
Boston leads, 3 games to 2, with 1 tie
BOSTON—Dawn broke today on the restless, shattered slumber of two red-eyed, nerve-racked clams who were to rise again and face their seventh fight for the championship of the world. There is glory enough in a fight like this—and the only pity is that one must lose where another must win. Both have fought with too much heart and courage to miss the laurel which only one can wear …
—GRANTLAND RICE, NEW YORK EVENING MAIL,
OCTOBER 16, 1912
THE FORMER PRESIDENT was in no mood to be told what to do, even now, as blood oozed from his jacket, as the shocked men in his automobile pleaded with him to proceed on to a hospital so doctors could tend to his wounds. Nonsense, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed. Though pain was just now starting to manifest itself in his breast, Roosevelt grunted and reached into a pocket of his coat and retrieved two items that made even this usually impossible-to-impress man gasp.
“Well,” he said. “What do you know.”
In his hands he held a steel eyeglass case as well as the fifty-page speech he was prepared to deliver. Both had small holes in them, and Roosevelt understood that the case and the speech had blunted the bullet’s path, and had saved his life, at least for the time being. By now, Roosevelt’s motorcade had arrived at the Milwaukee Auditorium and the candidate had been hustled into a dressing room just o
ff the stage, close enough that he could hear the commotion of twenty thousand excited citizens waiting to be whisked to a higher plane by the power of his words. But first he would have to audition before a pair of doctors, Scurry Terell and John Stratton, who told him in the strongest words they could summon that the place for the Colonel right now was an emergency room, not an auditorium. But Roosevelt would return their serve twice as hard.
“I will deliver this speech or die,” he said. “One or the other.”
He was the boss. They relented, shaking their heads at the man’s pain threshold, listening as in the adjacent main room Henry F. Cochems, Milwaukee’s Progressive Party chairman, introduced Roosevelt, waiting for the explosion of glee to die down before informing the multitude, “The Colonel speaks as a soldier with a bullet in his breast—where, we don’t yet know.”
With this, the crowd began to murmur, shock bouncing off every wall as Roosevelt appeared and walked slowly to the podium, his hands elevated.
“I’m going to ask you to be very quiet,” he said, and the obedient room instantly hushed. “Please excuse me from making a long speech. I’ll do the best I can but you can see there is a bullet in my body. But it’s nothing. I’m not hurt badly.”
The crowd was silent, but not for long.
“It takes more than that,” Roosevelt boomed, “to kill a Bull Moose!”
The crowd roared its apoplectic approval. And Roosevelt delivered his entire speech. It took ninety minutes.
The details of this would crawl across the country, and most Americans who’d gone to bed either marveling over the Giants’ resilience or clucking over Charles Becker’s impending doom would wake up to the most unbelievable headlines imaginable.
MADMAN SHOOTS ROOSEVELT IN WISCONSIN
COLONEL SHRUGS OFF WOUNDS, DELIVERS SPEECH
DOCTORS FEAR LOCKJAW, EXPECT FULL RECOVERY
ROOSEVELT SAYS HE FEELS ‘BULLY’ TO NURSES
At the precise moment when John Flammang Schrank squeezed his trigger, three separate trains were already well on their way from New York’s Grand Central Station, bound for Boston’s Back Bay. All three trains contained passengers who would remain blissfully unaware of the attempted assassination until the next day, and so, for now, were fully engaged in what seemed like the most important thing in the world. It was, after all, called the “world’s series” by everyone, by players and managers and newspaper columnists, and if the capital W and capital S wouldn’t be formalized for some years, the sentiment was still the same.
By far the merriest train of the three was the first to pull out of the station, occupied by Honey Fitz, Nuf Ced McGreevy, and the rest of the Royal Rooters, who were just as unbowed as they’d been at the Polo Grounds. “We’ll be front and center again tomorrow, and this time we’ll be on our own familiar turf and it’ll shake those New Yorkers all the way back to where they came from!” proclaimed McGreevy as he led the last of the Rooters onto their 5:45 train. “And we look forward to bringing the world’s championship home. That’s been our mission, and it will remain forever thus.” By now, the Rooters were a sensation all across New England. Their train would make two stops; at New Haven, Connecticut, with little prompting, they emerged onto the platform to regale three hundred locals with a full-throated rendition of “Tessie,” and at New London, forty-five minutes later, they went with “A Hot Time in the Old Town,” for an even larger gathering approaching seven hundred. When they finally reached Boston, McGreevy gathered them all one last time to announce that they’d be meeting at 12:50 P.M. at the corner of Beacon and Raleigh Streets to prepare for the most important pregame march of their Rooting careers, which would commence promptly at 1:10. “You’re there on time, you’ll get a ticket, guaranteed,” McGreevy said. “ ’Nough said.”
The Giants’ train wasn’t quite the burlesque show on rails that the Rooters’ procession became, but it did feature twenty-three baseball players who were overjoyed to still have a season in front of them, to be embarking on another trip to Boston that, to be blunt, few of them thought they’d be eligible to take when they’d arrived for work that morning. Such is the momentum of a short baseball series, though, that they now spoke in terms that made them feel close to bulletproof, especially when it came to the prospect of again facing Smoky Joe Wood, who in their minds suddenly wasn’t the invincible wonder who’d twice flummoxed them already. In the comfort of their cozy traveling clubhouse, the Giants looked, and sounded, a lot braver than the team that had seemed almost ready to accept their fate just a few hours earlier.
“Wood will be beaten,” Buck Herzog boldly proclaimed, “and beaten badly.”
“He is not strong after a short rest,” Larry Doyle declared, “and he has already pitched two hard games. We don’t get fooled thrice.”
“I hope they finally start Wood,” Chief Meyers pronounced. “I have no doubt that he can’t come at us again the way he did the first two times. Nobody beats the Giants three times in a row if we have anything to say about it.”
Three hundred similarly infused Giants fans saw the team off at Grand Central, and while they applauded each Giant as they walked up the stairs, they reserved their strongest huzzahs for the manager, for John McGraw, the one man among them who’d defiantly predicted his team’s survival for two days and was now munching triumphantly from a tin box of hard candy tucked under his arm.
Just as the final few Giants were boarding, the Red Sox arrived on the other side of the vast platform, awaiting their own special coach. Spotting Buck Herzog—still a nemesis, despite the mutual truce both men entered into after Game Five—Tris Speaker yelled, “Enjoy it while you can, Giants! You fellows will have to knock Wood tomorrow!”
To which Herzog gleefully replied: “We’ll do to him tomorrow what we did to O’Brien today!” Then he hopped into the train, the doors closed behind him, and the Giants were off on their jolly way. Speaker wasn’t laughing. There wasn’t a thing about the past ten or so hours that he—or any of the other Speed Boys—found even remotely amusing. And their mood wasn’t about to brighten anytime soon.
What Herzog, the Giants’ chief instigator, couldn’t possibly have known was just how sore the scab he’d just picked really was. For thirty preseason games, for 152 regular-season games, for the first five games of the World Series, all the rifts and schisms that threatened at any time to break the Red Sox apart had been handled, massaged, dealt with, filed away. Sure, Heinie Wagner had been a large part of that, his knack for bringing teammates together never more appreciated, or appreciable, than during this long spring, summer, and autumn. Jake Stahl surely deserved credit, the manager making sure that whatever personal differences his players might have harbored in private, there would never be an on-field issue that would splinter them apart. Mostly, of course, it had been the players themselves who’d kept the peace in the oldest, most reliable way possible: by winning early, by winning often, by winning two-thirds of the games that didn’t count, and then by winning sixty-nine percent of the games that did, and then by winning seventy-five percent of the games that really counted, storming to that 3–1–1 Series lead that they’d carried to the Polo Grounds that morning.
Still, from the first hour of spring training in Hot Springs, it had been a delicate, almost exhausting balance. And now, at the worst possible moment, that carefully crafted house of cards had begun to tumble. It had started on this very train twenty-four hours earlier, James McAleer inviting the wrath of the karmic gods by sidling up next to his manager. Buck O’Brien had been the next to succumb to its weight, unwittingly at first when he’d dived headfirst into the New York night, then purposefully when he’d balked home the first run and proceeded to unravel in front of the entire baseball world. The chaos quietly bled into the stands when all of those who’d put more than just their rooting interests in the hands of the Red Sox—primarily Paul Wood—saw their investments turn to ash before the first inning was even over. And everything had come to an explosive head within seconds of th
e final out, back in the visiting clubhouse, when the smoke coming out of Smoky Joe Wood’s ears finally set off alarm bells.
“You were an embarrassment out there,” Wood told O’Brien flatly.
O’Brien, in no mood for debate and already showered and dressed, answered with his right fist before being dragged out of the clubhouse, shoved into a cab, and hauled off to the train station. So it was that the alliances holding the Red Sox together—even if they were fashioned merely out of staples, paper clips, and good intentions—began bursting apart. The fact that it would occur with Wood and O’Brien as the principal combatants simply exposed every raw nerve, and every basic conflict, that had been so carefully papered over for so long.
O’Brien was Catholic, a son of Irish immigrants, very much a northerner, very much a New Englander, very much (for one unfortunate night, anyway) a drinker, the kind of player that Wood and Speaker saw as an “insider,” blessed through birth or geography to always fit in perfectly in Boston. Wood was Protestant, a son of the Wild West whose soul was very much a product of the distant Confederacy, a teetotaler and, along with Speaker, the kind of player that O’Brien, Bill Carrigan, and the rest of the traditional Celts on the Sox viewed as an “outsider,” bringing hard thoughts and old ideas into Boston’s modern, growing, city on the hill. All year long, the papers could sense the simmering, going so far as to themselves divide the Sox by group, by the “Knights” or the “KCs” (O’Brien, Carrigan, Harry Hooper, Duffy Lewis) and the “masons” (Wood, Speaker, Cady, Yerkes). The players had long publicly denied all of it.
But they weren’t in public anymore. They were in the privacy of their own train. And it would be Paul Wood—out $100 of his own money, out a whole lot more in proposition bets he’d made on behalf of a whole lot of other folks—who finally found O’Brien, drinking again, and in a dark mood.