by Mike Vaccaro
“You bush league bastard,” Wood screamed, pummeling O’Brien, blackening one of his eyes, desperately wanting more before he was hauled away, screaming that the Papist son of a bitch was lucky someone hadn’t killed him.
That could have ended things, of course, but only if O’Brien had wanted them ended, only if he’d figured it was time to walk away and put a merciful close to what had already been a perfectly horrible day. The problem with that reasoning, of course, is that O’Brien didn’t see where he’d done a goddamned thing wrong. He’d been handed the ball on a day he wasn’t supposed to pitch. He hadn’t bitched about that. He’d gone out and thrown his ass off, even with a splitting headache and a stomach that felt like the Polo Grounds’ elevated train sounded. He’d given an honest effort and had nothing, and was probably the angriest player on the whole damned train, because he’d been given a chance to wrap up the World Series and he’d spit the bit but, hell, so had the rest of the team, too. And there was another thing.…
“If I’d have had my catcher with me,” O’Brien said, referring to Carrigan, “I’d have been fine, we’d be counting our money, and none of this shit would have happened.”
Hick Cady, who had caught in Carrigan’s stead, was seated only a few feet away.
“What the hell does that mean, you drunken son of a bitch?” Cady raged.
“It means what it means,” O’Brien seethed, not backing down.
“That’s pretty fucking rich,” came a louder voice still, “coming from a quitter.”
It was Smoky Joe Wood, back from calming his brother down, walking back into the inferno, now hearing his favorite catcher being slandered.
“Cady caught you just fine,” Wood roared. “But you’re a gutless son of a bitch and you’re a goddamned drunk to boot!”
And that was that. Soon, Cady was taking a swing at O’Brien, and O’Brien took another swing at Wood, and Carrigan came over to wrestle with Cady, and as one of the noncombatant players’ wives, spying the whole thing, would tell a newspaper reporter the next day, “It was the most disgraceful thing you ever saw.”
“Sounds like a barroom fight to me,” the reporter said, shrugging.
By the time Wagner and Stahl raced back to snuff out the worst of it, they could see that all of their hard work had just been splintered to pieces. Stahl had already realized that his worst fears were brewing: At a train stop, someone had handed him an early edition of the Boston Post, which published a large cartoon featuring a huge satchel of money marked “extra gate receipts” surrounded by two men identified as a club owner and a member of National Commission. That was bad enough.
And now this?
As he pulled Joe Wood away, Stahl could see his star pitcher wide-eyed with fury. “Go and cool off, Joe,” Stahl told his kid pitcher, normally coolheaded and even-keeled, suddenly a tinderbox of ferocity.
“Someone’s gotta pay, Skip,” he said, walking away, leaving his manager to fervently hope he was referring to the Giants.
By comparison, the Giants were a study in harmony, a picture of togetherness. John McGraw, for one, was feeling downright philosophical—wistful, even—as he wolfed down his candy. “If my team had stayed on the ground in the first three games, we would be going home with the championship tonight, and maybe we wouldn’t even be on this goddamned train,” he told the New York Globe’s Sid Mercer, the one writer among the horde of Giants beat reporters to whom McGraw felt even the slightest strain of friendship, even if Mercer was usually the one who would most gleefully poke holes in McGraw’s strategy and his stodginess in his copy.
“How do you explain Larry Doyle?” Mercer asked McGraw, sipping from a glass of wine. The Giants’ captain, who’d had such a masterful regular season, was trapped in a cropping October funk, his fielding spotty and his batting average barely scraping .200. Nobody was tougher on himself than Doyle, who’d worked his way out of the coal mines of southwest Illinois and saw McGraw as a role model and a father figure.
“I look for Doyle to break loose very soon,” McGraw said. “He never has gone so many games with such poor results. I can pick at least eight spots where one of Larry’s long wallops would have broken up a game. He is overdue. You know Doyle has the happy faculty of putting in his wallops where they’re most needed. I’d still rather see him at bat in a pinch than any one else on the club.”
It had been like that for McGraw from the moment he’d made Doyle his every-day second baseman five years earlier. It wasn’t hard to see why McGraw and Doyle would take to each other as kindred spirits, the two of them attacking every baseball game they ever played as if someone was going to lock all the bats, balls, and bases in a closet forever. For Doyle, it was an obsession that was easy to trace. Born into a mining family, he spent five long years in those light-starved dungeons, yearning every second for something, for anything, that could liberate him from the darkness. “When you first go down into the earth there comes a sudden realization of what might happen to you,” he’d written a few years before. “Nowadays the mines can be lighted by electricity, and it’s comparatively simple to go through a mine. But when you get caught without a light in some deep labyrinth in the bowels of the earth, it’s no picnic.”
Baseball provided the life raft. At first it was just semiprofessional ball on the weekends, Doyle taking home whatever the teams were willing to pay, sometimes a dollar, sometimes two, sometimes nothing, before gaining a spot on the Springfield team of the Triple-I League. Didn’t matter to Doyle, who saw what twenty hard years in the ground could do to a man’s lungs, and to his spirit, who saw six of his former coworkers for the Breese & Trenton Coal Company perish in a horrific Christmas Eve accident in 1906 when the cage that lowered the miners toward their grim tasks unspooled and crushed them. Whenever Doyle fretted about his batting average—as he certainly was now—or grew angry at McGraw’s heavy-handed guidance, it didn’t take much to snap him from even the shallowest throes of self-pity. It was seven months after the mining disaster that McGraw forked over $4,500 for his services to Dick Kinsella, president of the Springfield club, at the time the highest amount ever paid for a prospect.
For a day or two, McGraw had to wonder what he’d done. Doyle’s train from Springfield arrived in Jersey City on July 21, 1907, and he was directed toward a ferry that dumped him on Manhattan’s West Side. Still as green as weathered copper, Doyle approached a policeman and asked for directions to the Polo Grounds.
“See that elevated train?” the cop said. “Take it to the last stop. You can’t possibly miss it.”
Doyle missed it. He took the train to the end of the line, walked out, looked around for a magnificent baseball stadium, but all he saw was ocean.
“I was at South Ferry,” Doyle would explain years later. “It was the wrong end of the line. I tried explaining that one to McGraw later in the day, and all he said was, ‘I hope you know your way around the basepaths better than you do around the train tracks.’ And from there, we got along like two peas in a pod.”
Now McGraw worried about his captain.
“I hung on to Doyle when the New York fans and critics were calling for his scalp, and that includes you,” McGraw told Mercer. “And today I wouldn’t trade him for any man playing baseball.”
He would trade the impostor who’d been wearing Larry Doyle’s uniform the past six games, however.
By the next morning, Boston was a scalding porridge of rumors, whispers, half-truths, and speculation. “I’m disgusted,” one Red Sox fan declared inside a coffee shop not far from Fenway Park. “If the fix was in, that’s the worst thing there is. But if the fix wasn’t in and they just played lousy baseball? I think that’s twice as bad.”
James McAleer, he heard the rumors clearly and concisely, because wherever he walked in Boston this Tuesday morning, October the fifteenth, there were people pointing at him, sneering at him, cupping their hands over their mouths as they slandered him. Six months ago, McAleer had been toasted as the people’s choice, a co
mmoner who’d risen to the owner’s suite, a man who before spring training could be found in the city’s barrooms and bowling alleys mingling with the people, hawking his team, selling his product, inviting them to the shining new palace by the Back Bay Fens. But that was a long time ago. Now the people wondered if the very man who’d tried selling them on a championship vision had sold that very dream out from under them. McAleer began instantly spinning his own version of the calamitous fate that had befallen his team the day before in New York.
“I was in the dressing room immediately after the game at the Polo Grounds and can truthfully say there was no trouble among the players,” McAleer insisted. “The boys had counted on winning the game and were intensely sorry that they lost but there was not the slightest trace of friction.”
Some believed him, the hardest core of Boston fandom that couldn’t allow themselves to believe that any games would ever be compromised, especially World Series games. Many others, however, smiled knowing grins. They understood that baseball wasn’t exactly populated by altar boys or choirboys, whether you were looking in the dugout or inside the executive offices. There had been all those ugly rumors swirling around the 1903 World Series, after all. If you went to a ballgame, any ballgame, everyone knew what section of the ballpark you could visit if you had a few extra dollars burning a hole in your pocket.
Few of them were inclined to allow their outrage to manifest in anything resembling a boycott. Besides, once the morning newspapers started arriving on doorsteps and at newsstands throughout the town, there were more important things about which to aim their outrage. Theodore Roosevelt had concluded his speech at Milwaukee Auditorium the night before, the stubborn act of a physical marvel who held one last captive audience in the palm of his steady hand even as the bullet in his breast precluded him from breathing regularly. By 10:30 he was lying on an operating table at the city’s Emergency Hospital, talking politics with doctors who took X-rays, declared the wound superficial, and approved Roosevelt’s request that he be transferred to a surgical hospital in Chicago.
It was well past two in the morning when Roosevelt was helped off the train at Union Station, but he was immediately approached by an army of newspaper photographers and cried, “Oh, no! Shot again!” before emitting a hoarse laugh. It wasn’t until 3:30 that he was finally at rest in his private room, visited by Dr. George F. Butler, who first offered an excellent prognosis for a full recovery and then exclaimed, “Mr. President, you were elected last night. It was the turning of the tide in your favor.”
To which Roosevelt declared, “Bully!”
That was a popular sentiment. Both Woodrow Wilson and William Taft pledged to suspend campaigning for as long as Roosevelt was recuperating, a stunned Wilson confiding in one of his aides, “I believe Colonel Roosevelt has found the most direct line possible to the people.”
It was such talk that replaced the Red Sox and the Giants for much of Tuesday, which allowed James McAleer to slip away to Fenway Park and to make his way down, one more time, to a private audience with Jake Stahl. Stahl hadn’t slept much once the Red Sox’ boisterous train finally reached Back Bay Station just past midnight, and he’d come to the ballpark early. Just not early enough.
“People are saying a lot of nasty things today,” McAleer told his manager.
Stahl shrugged. What did the man expect him to say?
“I have a favor to ask,” the owner said.
“What could you possibly want now?” Stahl asked.
“I’d like to speak to the team before the game,” McAleer said.
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” Stahl said, shaking his head, amazed at how tone deaf one man could be.
“That’s your opinion.”
“You pay me for my opinions.”
“I pay you to manage this team. But I own this team.”
Stahl knew what was coming next, verbatim.
“And that means I own you, too, don’t forget.”
Stahl just smiled. He’d expected to be boarding a train back to Illinois that afternoon, back to his family, back to the bank. Now he was listening to lunacy, watching his season leak away drop by drop by drop.
“I can make them hear you,” he finally said, “but I can’t make them listen.”
And so ninety minutes later, with the players having arrived quietly, after they’d dressed in silence, Stahl gathered them around to listen to an old-fashioned pep talk.
“I know you fellows don’t believe the stuff in the papers,” McAleer said. “I know you’re professionals. And I know you’re gonna win today’s game. How much confidence do I have in you? I’ve arranged a postgame celebration already, with the finest fish, the finest champagne, the finest of everything. It will be an appropriate celebration to toast you, the finest baseball team in the land.”
“Great!” a voice called out. “What time should we be there?”
McAleer’s silence confirmed what everyone in the room already knew: None of them, the lumpen proletariat, was invited. Most of the Speed Boys were already too exhausted, and too disgusted, to be angry. Smoky Joe Wood? He was plenty of both. And he’d already left the room, hadn’t listened to a word McAleer had to say. He’d heard it all before, anyway.
New York City, which had fallen very much out of love with the Giants just twenty-four hours before, was suddenly crashing hard, fast, leading with its collective heart. Once it was clear that Roosevelt, the city’s favored son, would be all right, there was nothing blocking Giants fans’ affections from spilling into the streets and filling the city with an odd, addictive miasma of hope and good cheer. Even the Becker Trial had lost its momentum for one day, seemingly conceding to the Giants every eye, every ear, and every second of spare time. Men arrived to work early, knowing they’d be trying to leave early, too. Children were encouraged to go to school because a fleet of truant officers would be patrolling every corner, especially where the baseball scoreboards were located. And even the women of many households made an important decision. In those years, each day of the week was assigned a chore: Monday was Wash Day, Thursday was Market Day, Saturday was Baking Day. Well, Tuesday was supposed to be Ironing Day, but as many men discovered when they got home that night, this Tuesday was not.
This Tuesday would be Baseball Day.
Two hours before first pitch, there were 40,000 people already crammed into Herald Square. At Madison Square Garden, every seat was sold and occupied long before the pregame entertainment began. And at Times Square, extra policemen were called in to protect the crowds from themselves: People were so close together, so close to the outer through streets, that they were in danger of getting crushed.
“Oh,” a frenzied observer named Kenneth Jackson, caught up in the moment, yelled at a reporter from the New York American. “To be in Boston right now … to be watching this glorious game in person … how lucky those fans are. So lucky …”
Those fans knew it, too. Red Sox fans had weeded through the paper talk and the discourse and decided: The hell with it. How many times in a lifetime do you get to see your team win a championship? They flooded the streets around Fenway Park, flooded the ballpark itself, all but knocking down the ticket kiosks in an effort to be first through the doors.
In the middle of this glorious merriment, of course, were the Royal Rooters, out in force and in full voice, close to a thousand of them, meeting as planned at the corner of Beacon and Raleigh, taking their march on time, singing and chanting at the top of their vocal cords, their arrival at the Jersey Street entrance to Fenway greeted by the fans and the street vendors with the same appreciation as if they’d just spotted Tris Speaker or Harry Hooper. Players came and went, after all, but the Rooters were forever, the Rooters never got too old to play, never got traded away, never held out for more money.
“The Rooters,” John Keenan, one of their organizers, had said back in New York, “will be here perpetually, rooting on the sons and the grandsons of the Speed Boys long after they’ve passed
this mortal coil.”
The Rooters, knowing how important the day was to them, to the Red Sox, to all of Boston, decided it would behoove everyone to move their routine up fifteen minutes in order to ensure a peaceful start to the day’s true festivities. So around 1:40, they started filing onto the grounds, taking their pregame lap, encouraging fans to get on their feet and root for the Red Sox, and for Smoky Joe Wood, who’d finished a listless session in the bullpen and was now preparing to take the mound for the top of the first inning. The band blared “Tessie,” and the Rooters were joined in the familiar lyrics by the other 32,000 or so jammed into the park. The Red Sox took the field, and that was the Rooters’ cue to make the last segment of their journey, out to left field where they’d spent the first three Boston games of this Series crowding the temporary stands set up in front of the huge Fatima Cigars advertisement in left field. Joe Wood began his warm-up throws. Game Seven of the 1912 World Series was seconds away. Josh Devore walked from the on-deck circle to the batter’s box.
Billy Evans, working home plate this day, shouted, “Play ball!”
But no ball was played, not at that instant and not for some time. Because suddenly everyone was well aware of a commotion exploding in left field, near where the Royal Rooters were supposed to be sitting and were, instead, standing. And still on the field. With John Keenan yelling at a large segment of fans, “Remove yourselves and make way for the Royal Rooters! These are our seats!”
To which he was told, “The hell they are. We bought them with our own hard-earned money. Look at our tickets!”
But neither Keenan nor Nuf Ced McGreevy nor any of the restless thousand people cooling their heels behind Duffy Lewis in left field cared even a little bit about their tickets. What were these people doing here? Had they never heard of the Royal Rooters? It was Captain Thomas Goode of Station 16, in charge of the police detail, who approached Keenan and alerted him that it was true, the Rooters’ seats had been sold out from under them.