The First Fall Classic
Page 25
Amid the tumult, the Red Sox announced that tickets for Game Eight would go on sale promptly at 8 o’clock the next morning (after McAleer had unsuccessfully lobbied the National Commission to move it back a day so there would be more time to sell more tickets). Yet as McAleer finally left Fenway Park late that night, he looked around, turned to his wife and said, “Isn’t that queer?”
It was. The long lines that had snaked around Fenway Park before each of the first four games played in Boston were gone. Nobody was in line. Not one soul. “Maybe they didn’t get the message,” McAleer wondered, but it was worse than that.
The fans had gotten the message, all right. Now they were sending one of their own.
CHAPTER TEN
Wednesday, October 16, 1912: Game Eight
Series even, 3 games apiece, with 1 tie
BOSTON—There’s a set of foolish people in Boston this morning. They had an option on seats for yesterday’s game between the Red Sox and the Giants and didn’t go. They missed seeing the one baseball game of ten years. The Red Sox and the Giants had fought out a whole season of heartbreaking travel and play up to the heads of their respective leagues. Then they came together in a world series that won’t soon be forgotten by anyone who saw it …
—FRANK P. SIBLEY, BOSTON GLOBE, OCTOBER 17, 1912
Dawn broke over Boston, and still the streets and avenues around Fenway Park were barren, the only people on the premises a gaggle of speculators with fistfuls of tickets and no one to unload them on. One bemoaned, “I’m going to take a loss that I’ll feel the rest of the year,” to which another retorted, “A loss? I’m taking a bath! These ducats ain’t worth the paper they’re printed on if no one will buy them!”
The locals were bitter, and there were so many candidates for their ire, so many culprits, you needed a program to get all the names right. There was Smoky Joe Wood, of course, right at the top of the list. Wood had only known glory since he’d arrived in Boston, and even if the Irish-Catholic KCs who ruled Fenway Park made Wood queasy, made him feel the forever Mason outsider, they’d adored him as they’d adored few other baseball players in their time. And how had Wood repaid them? By throwing thirteen pitches that would make a bush leaguer blush and then calling it a day. With the World Series on the line, no less!
There was James McAleer, formerly the favorite of working-class fans across New England, recast now as a greedy buffoon who’d tampered with a sure thing, who’d ruffled the magic carpet ride that Jake Stahl had going, who’d tempted karmic calamity by trying to steer the championship back to Fenway Park (despite all his denials), who’d then gone the extra miserable step of alienating the Royal Rooters, of all asinine things.
“If he can treat the Rooters that way,” a Red Sox fan named Paul Halloran was quoted in the morning newspapers, “then what kind of chance do the rest of us have? The Rooters spend their own money to go to Baltimore and Pittsburgh and New York, and they get spit on? This McAleer is a fool and I won’t support any fool with my hard-earned money, no sir.”
Mostly, there was the Red Sox roster, the whole lineup, a group who’d gotten behind in Game Seven and didn’t seem the least bit interested in mounting a comeback. Was this the result of that heartbreaking first inning? Was it the result of something else?
Either way, Boston countered with a response impossible to misinterpret.
It had had enough. It was staying away.
Elsewhere, however, there was no more important festivity than the one scheduled for the Fens at 2 o’clock Eastern Time. When word spread that there were likely to be plenty of good seats available for what was already being hyped as the baseball game of the (admittedly still young) century, a fair number of New Yorkers booked train tickets. Some of them were even baseball fans. Most, however, saw this opportunity as the ultimate business trip, so notable among the pilgrims were the most famed gamblers and bookmakers in New York City and, thus, the world: Max Blumenthal, Honest John Kelly, Leo Mayer, Jakey Josephs, Edward G. Downey. They were offering odds of 10–7 on the Giants. Theirs were the most popular seats on every eastbound train.
In Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt arose to a dull pain in his chest and a team of surgeons eager to tell him he could expect a full recovery.
“When the time comes for you to give your inauguration speech,” Dr. Alexander Lambert, the Colonel’s personal physician, told him, “you’ll be strong as an ox.”
“You mean strong as a bull moose,” Roosevelt said.
Later, to the newspapermen, Lambert said, “I shudder when I realize how narrow an escape from instant death Colonel Roosevelt had. The bullet struck him from below at an angle such that unless deflected it would have surely passed through the little lobe of his right lung upward and inward through the auricles of the heart or the arch of the aorta. The folded manuscript and heavy steel spectacle case checked and deflected the bullet so that it passed up at such an angle that it went outside the ribs and in the muscles. If this hadn’t happened Colonel Roosevelt would not have lived sixty seconds.”
Roosevelt, a lifelong New Yorker, was eager to get back to his house in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, and just as eager to read a box score from Game Seven. A newspaper was provided him and there it was: His local nine had prevailed to live another day. Just as he had.
“Outstanding,” Roosevelt said.
Throughout the country, one last time, crowds began to flock to the local newspapers late in the morning to secure ideal positions to follow the game on the remote scoreboards. In downtown Newark, where the Evening News had its board set up, a dockworker named Daniel Connon unwrapped a brown paper bag filled with his lunch and prepared himself for a long day of anxious baseball-watching. Three thousand miles away, outside the Los Angeles Times building, the mostly male group of early-morning arrivals noticed a rare sight in their midst, a slight, gray-haired woman whose smile seemed permanently affixed.
“Do you have a rooting interest?” she was asked.
“I most certainly do,” she said. “I’m for the Giants!”
The men laughed. “Why, you must have picked them for their uniforms,” they said, slapping their knees. But the woman shook her head.
“No, sir,” she said. “I root for them because my son plays for them. He’s the center fielder. His name is Fred Snodgrass.”
In Manhattan, extra police had already been called to work because authorities were expecting the entire city to play hooky. The opening bell on Wall Street was greeted quietly, the floor of the stock exchange barely populated. Schoolrooms were scarce. Trial judges—at least those not presiding over Charles Becker’s Trial of the Century—granted adjournments and continuances without thinking twice.
The biggest crowds gathered in Times Square, watching the Times’ electric scoreboard on the north façade of the Times building. Before noon, the crowd already extended ten yards out from the building to the Astor Hotel in Seventh Avenue and the Criterion Theater on Broadway, while the plaza from Forty-third to Forty-fourth Streets was thronged with eager fans. People were also able to see from the air, since the big electric sign on the roof of the Hotel Rector was being wired during the contest. The main board was sixteen feet in length and seven feet high, continued the batting order of the two clubs, and showed what player was at bat and the result of every ball pitched, showing whether the ball was hit safely or fouled, ball or strike, putout or error. The Herald Square Playograph, a few blocks away, drew secondary crowds that were already being measured in the tens of thousands. A half-mile east were the more modest presentations along Newspaper Row, and a half-mile south the elaborate showplace at Madison Square Garden, both ensnared by humanity.
“There is no reason,” Damon Runyon would write, “for any New Yorker at any time in their day today to be unaware of exactly what is transpiring in their sister city to the east. Listen closely enough and you may be able to hear the pop of a glove in Boston all the way in Greenwich Village. Although I can’t promise you that.”
There
was but one place in all of New York where the singular conversation didn’t revolve around baseball, and that was on Chambers Street, early in the afternoon. It was then that Mrs. Herman Rosenthal walked into the courtroom, locked eyes briefly with Mrs. Charles Becker—her former best friend, the wife of the man now accused of making her a widow—and raised her right arm to be sworn in. She was asked about a night the previous April, just before her husband’s murder, when Becker led a raid on the family business.
“When they came to the house that night, there was so much hammering that I went down to see what was the matter,” Mrs. Rosenthal told a rapt gallery. “I said to Becker, ‘For God’s sake, stop hammering and I’ll open the door!’
“I couldn’t find the key. So they broke the door in. Then I ran upstairs. Becker followed me there. I said to him, ‘What does this mean?’ He said, ‘Sssh! It had to be Herman or me.’
“I said, ‘Please don’t let them break the furniture. Then Lieutenant Becker said, ‘Tell Herman to call that debt off. Tell him to go and see that man and tell him to call off that mortgage for $1,500. Tell Herman it’s all square. He knows what man to see.”
There was a pause. Maybe it lasted only a few seconds. It felt like a few months.
“Two days later,” Mrs. Rosenthal said, “my Herman was dead.”
Finally there was a recess. The newspapermen in the gallery raced for the banks of telephones located in the hallway, and one of them, the man from the Journal, was livid; he couldn’t get anyone on the phone back in his newsroom. What the hell!
It was the man from the World, who looked at his watch.
“Two-thirty,” the man sighed. “The ballgame’s started.”
The man from the Journal shook his shoulders and hung up the receiver.
———
In the morning, slumped in a chair in the corridor of the Copley Square Hotel, there sat a gaunt figure with hollow cheeks and deep furrows in his brow, a man who looked to be fifty years old, whose hair was graying at the temples, who looked badly in need of a hot meal and a warm bed, who might have been mistaken for a vagrant but for the fact that he was bedecked in a soft hat, brown three-button sack suit, two buttons of the waistband showing, knitted tie, high turndown collar, and tan shoes.
In reality, the man had only recently celebrated his thirty-second birthday, and while he might never have had it in him to challenge Jim Thorpe for the title ceded him by the King of Sweden, there wasn’t a soul striding in this hotel lobby—or anywhere else in America, for that matter—who wouldn’t have acknowledged that this was one of the greatest athletes on earth if they’d known his true identity.
“I’m tired,” Christy Mathewson had admitted that morning in his syndicated newspaper column.
“I think all of the fellows on both teams are tired. The baseball season is a long grind, and if you’re lucky enough to play in the World Series, the way we are and the way Boston is, it can be exhausting. But we also know there’s nothing to save ourselves for now. After today, we can relax. But we have a ballgame to play first.”
Mathewson had been the first one to hit the coffee shop, just past 8 o’clock, and he’d ordered the fifty-five-cent club breakfast of cereal, bacon and eggs, and a pot of coffee. Tired as he was, as much as fatigue may have been eating at his bones and muscles, he wasn’t nervous, and he wolfed down his food. Nervous? It was far too late in the game for Matty to get nervous for one pitching assignment, no matter how high the stakes might be. His legacy was already secure, as was his future: Most simply assumed that when his right arm finally ran out of gas, he’d succeed his very good friend, John J. McGraw, as manager of the Giants—unless he was more inclined to pursue business interests, or law school, or politics. He would have no lack of secular suitors if he ever opted for life outside the white lines.
“Mathewson,” McGraw once said, “is the greatest man in America. Not simply the greatest pitcher, or baseball player, or athlete. The greatest man.”
Theirs had long been a most improbable (if not utterly implausible) friendship, the hard-charging, hard-living, single-minded manager and the urbane, sophisticated Renaissance Man of a pitcher. McGraw’s own wife, Blanche, had once said, “Life without baseball had little meaning for John. It was his meat, drink, dream, his blood and breath, his very reason for existence.” No one would ever think to associate such a sentence to the Christian Gentleman.
Yet starting with a 2–0 shutout thrown by a twenty-one-year-old Mathewson on July 24, 1902, just after McGraw had moved north from Baltimore to assume the reins, McGraw and Mathewson, star pitcher and ultra-ambitious manager, were virtually inseparable. In 1903, John and Blanche McGraw moved with Christy and Jane Mathewson into a furnished seven-room apartment at Eighty-fifth Street and Columbus Avenue, a block from Central Park. The couples split the fifty-dollar monthly rent and other living expenses, and would share those accommodations for three seasons, or until young John Christopher Mathewson (named for McGraw) was born early in 1906.
By then, the Giants had won two National League pennants and dominated the Philadelphia Athletics to win the 1905 World Series, and Mathewson had emerged as the greatest pitcher of his generation by throwing three shutouts at the A’s. Both men believed that there would be many more seasons just like it, believed they were on the ground floor of the greatest baseball dynasty ever assembled. But then the Cubs had usurped the Giants for a few years in the National League, and they’d lost that rematch with the A’s in the 1911 Series, and now here they were, seven years later, the two of them hoping to drink championship champagne one more time (if not one last time).
Mathewson wanted to win the Series.
But he believed his friend needed to win the Series.
“It is right that McGraw be seen as the greatest manager in the game, because it’s what he wants and it’s what he deserves,” Mathewson had written. “If we win this series, I’m sure that’s how he will be seen.”
In the home clubhouse at Fenway Park, nobody was much concerned with niceties. This was a simmering, blistering cauldron of a room this Wednesday morning, a place where hard feelings were no longer camouflaged, a place where the tension was so thick as to be almost unbearable. It didn’t help any that as soon as the Speed Boys reported for work they were greeted by yet another stuffed suit wanting to tell them what was expected of them and what they had to do. This time it was Ban Johnson, the founder of the American League, better known to the angry souls in the room as one of the three cheap sons of bitches who’d denied them an extra gate after the Game Two tie.
“Boys,” Johnson said, “you have got to win this game. You have the ability, both mentally and physically, to beat the Giants. Go in and play for all you are worth and don’t stop fighting until the last man has been retired. Upon you depends the future popularity of the American League. The Giants are going to make a desperate stand and will be hard to overcome, but if you play your best game you will be triumphant. Now buckle down to work and show the Boston baseball people how game you are!”
As quickly as he’d materialized, Johnson disappeared, and if the Red Sox were moved by his speech they did their best to hide those emotions. They continued to dress in quiet, looking like a beaten team, when Smoky Joe Wood finished buttoning his jersey and went across the room, knocked on the manager’s office door, and stepped inside.
Jake Stahl glanced up from his newspaper, nodded his head.
“Come on in, Joe,” Stahl said. “Take a load off.”
Wood’s message was a simple one.
“I’m ready to pitch today, Skip,” Wood said. “You can count on me.”
Stahl nodded his head. It wasn’t in him to interrogate Wood, to ask what had happened the day before. As far as he was concerned, for the record, Wood simply hadn’t had it against the Giants. All pitchers get raked every now and again, even the great ones. Stahl couldn’t crawl inside Wood’s brain. He could only go by what his pitcher told him.
You can count on me.
Stahl gave Wood a stern look that said a couple of things, primarily this: This time, it’s me keeping you out of the game, no one above me, and that’s the manager’s prerogative. But there was also this subtle message, too:
Whatever you did yesterday, it was what you needed to do.
This is what I need to do.
“I’ll stay ready,” Wood said, rising from the chair, walking toward the door and back into the chilling quiet of the clubhouse. It was almost too much to bear, and there was only one man who would be able to pierce it.
“Listen up,” Heinie Wagner said, and instinctively his teammates gathered around the Red Sox shortstop. All season long, it had been Wagner who’d called team meetings, who’d soothed hard feelings, who’d massaged egos, who’d made certain everyone kept their eyes firmly fastened on the prize. One last time, he’d have to do it again, he’d have to recalibrate this fractious, delicate baseball apparatus.
“Look, whatever’s happened, we still have a shot to win the world’s championship and to get our hands on that winner’s share,” Wagner said. “We don’t have to like each other. Hell, I’m past believing most of you guys can even tolerate each other and I have to tell you: I want to punch a couple of you in the jaw myself right now. But we got nine innings left in the season. No reason why we shouldn’t get after it with everything we got. Is anyone with me?”
There was a quiet pause, as if they were all pondering their options.