The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  And then, louder: “Is anyone with me?”

  With that, Wagner got his answer. First, a voice from a distant corner of the room: “I am.” And then a few more: “Yeah.” “Count me in.” “Let’s beat their asses!” “Let’s go for the big money!” If it wasn’t the kind of classic locker-room speech that would come to define American sports over the coming decades, it was enough to roust the Speed Boys from their wicked slumber.

  Hell, they’d put up with each other for close to seven and a half months.

  What was three more hours? What was nine more innings?

  The Giants walked onto the field laughing, whistling, singing, practically floating in the grass. This was the way they’d spent most of their summer, after all, showing up for work in a ballpark in Boston, or Chicago, or Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati, and knowing they were going to steamroll some helpless opponent and have a hell of a time doing it. It was that swagger that pissed off so many National League teams, that made so many opposing fans want to pelt the Giants with rotten tomatoes and rocks and other assorted projectiles.

  “When they lose, they feel like they’ve been set crooked,” Frank Chance, the recently dismissed manager of the Cubs, had said earlier in the year. “And when they win, they all act like some paragons of virtue. They take their cue from the manager. When they’re playing well, they can infuriate an archbishop.”

  Soon enough, Chance would learn even more about Giants arrogance, because he would soon be appointed the manager of the Yankees, meaning not only would he have to keep a daily tally of how much farther ahead the Giants were in the National League than the woeful Yanks were in the American, he would actually have to pay McGraw money every month in order to play their home games at the Polo Grounds. McGraw would fully delight in this landlord-tenant relationship for the next decade, minding the Yankees’ existence far less than he used to now that he could count on their rent checks. Sharing the town—coupled with his team’s dreadful .411 winning percentage—would soon drive Chance to distraction, and then out of baseball entirely for a time.

  “McGraw,” he would say, “is despicable when he wins.”

  Now, with his baseball team suddenly nine innings away from restoring him to the roof of baseball’s Pantheon, McGraw was hoping the rest of his sport would soon find him similarly contemptible. As the New York press corps gathered around him in the hours leading up to the first pitch, the Giants’ manager sounded every bit as loose and carefree as his players looked on the field.

  “The Red Sox had us on the ropes,” said McGraw, the big boxing fan using his favorite boxing metaphor. “But we survived, and now we’re ready to take what is rightfully ours. We still haven’t even played one game worth a damn, but that’s OK. I think today will make up for the rest, and once we win today nobody’s going to care how we played in the other games.”

  Fenway Park had the look and the feel of an exhausted, burned-out vaudeville house. There were dry brown patches all over the outfield grass, and the infield was a lumpy mess, as if the grounds crew had taken their cue from the Sox themselves and mailed in the past few days of work, too. Not that there were many to complain: Good as their word, the Royal Rooters all stayed away from the yard—with one glaring exception. For once, the two masters that John Fitzgerald served—his baseball team and his city—had irreversibly collided. He felt a loyalty to his Rooters. But he felt an even stronger duty to his constituents. Boston still had a chance to be crowned king of the baseball world (and at New York’s expense, no less), and so even if Fitzgerald the fan would be absent in spirit, Honey Fitz the mayor would be there in body. And in voice.

  It wasn’t only the Rooters who were drenched in disillusionment, either. Before the game, down at the Park Street subway entrance, speculators were vainly trying to sell their tickets, and a full hour before the game they’d already started scrambling, agreeing to settle for face value. Even then, there were only a few takers, and soon the scalpers threw up their hands and started giving them away for whatever people were willing to pay … and still business was as slow as one of Joe Wood’s Game Seven fastballs. The ballpark reflected this: By 1:40, twenty minutes before the scheduled first pitch, the stands were only half full, a shocking sight to anyone, but especially to Red Sox players accustomed to playing in front of a full house. The first-base extension stands were practically empty, the third-base grandstand was barely half full, the bleachers a vast sea of unoccupied slabs of wood. The Red Sox, hoping to make up for numbers with decibels, distributed thousands of wood rattlers to those customers who professed to be Sox fans (Giants invaders were given nothing but quiet thanks for filling the Sox’ coffers another three dollars).

  Despite their bravado, there were a handful of Giants who copped to feeling an unusual case of nerves. After all, none of them had ever played a decisive World Series game before, since only twenty-one men had ever played a decisive World Series game before. That was the dirty little secret of this annual baseball event that some newspapers had already dubbed “The Fall Classic”: In many cases, there was nothing “classic” about any of it. In the eight previous Series, there had been one sweep, three one-sided five-game walkovers, two equally unbalanced six-game affairs, and the very first one, in 1903, when Boston and Pittsburgh had played eight games in an unruly best-of-nine competition.

  Only once had the World Series come down to the “ultimate” game, a Game Seven, when in 1909 the Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Tigers split the first six games, setting up what should have been a timeless showdown between the Tigers of Ty Cobb and the Pirates of Honus Wagner but was instead a grisly 8–0 whitewash for the visiting Pirates in the seventh and deciding game. Across the next century of baseball, there were few terms that would conjure more magic or more romance in the whole sport than the words “Game Seven,” but every single example of why was still very much in the future as the Giants and Red Sox went through their final pregame paces.

  During batting practice, Larry Doyle, the Giants’ captain, broke his favorite bat completely in half. Sensing that his favorite teammate was all but grinding his teeth to dust from the pregame tension, Buck Herzog walked over, took the handle out of Doyle’s hands, drove it into the ground, and announced, “You have to punish them properly.”

  Doyle wasn’t amused.

  “That’s a jinx,” he yelped, his voice shaky. “Now I know I won’t get a hit!”

  Herzog roared with laughter; there was little doubt in his or anyone else’s mind that it was long past time to get this thing started and settled. The two managers continued to play their little games, Jake Stahl sending both Hugh Bedient and Joe Wood out to the bullpen to warm up, McGraw, naturally, countering with four pitchers: Christy Mathewson, Rube Marquard, Jeff Tesreau, and Red Ames. By the time they met at home plate for the conference with the umpires, both McGraw and Stahl had to smile as they shook hands one last time.

  “I’ve enjoyed this series very much,” McGraw said.

  “I have also,” Stahl said. “May the better team win.”

  “I think,” McGraw said, unable to resist, “that you can count on that.”

  With that, they were back in their dugouts, and the Sox (with Bedient ambling toward the mound) were jogging out to their positions, and one last time Silk O’Loughlin, taking one more turn behind home plate, announced the batteries—“For the Red Sox! Bedient and Cady! For the Giants! Mathewson and Meyers!”—and then, for what was sure to be the final time in calendar year 1912, he cleared his throat.

  “Play ball!” O’Loughlin roared.

  In a time of reform in America, few things were more sacrosanct than the antitrust legislation that filled every courthouse docket in every jurisdiction in the land. It was Theodore Roosevelt who’d seized the subject during his presidency, who’d gleefully embraced the reputation of a no-nonsense trust-buster who would brook no obstacle in the fight to make sure the United States remained an economy free of monopolists and robber barons. It was both an irony and an indicatio
n of how fast the nation was moving that, in the weeks before the attempt on Roosevelt’s life in Milwaukee, both Woodrow Wilson and William Howard Taft had tried to paint a picture of Roosevelt being too soft on trusts, too lenient on big business, too willing to get cozy with the Rockefellers and Carnegies and Morgans who were alleged to be anathema to antitrust legislation.

  So it was little surprise that early in the afternoon of October 16, 1912, the U.S. Supreme Court was engaged in a bench hearing on the famed “Bathroom Trust” case, officially titled Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company v. United States. The justices were preparing to listen to the government’s case when the lunch recess hit, just before two o’clock. Associate Justice William Rufus Day, before repairing to his chambers, summoned one of his clerks and sent him on a sacred mission.

  “Take these,” Day said, stuffing several dozen thin slips of paper into his clerk’s hands. “I want regular updates.”

  The justices all knew what was taking place in Boston that very afternoon—that very moment, in fact. Not all of them were baseball fans. But enough were. And so for the duration of the lunch hour—“And,” Day asserted to his clerk, “for as long as is necessary thereafter”—they would be kept apprised of whatever was happening at Fenway Park within minutes.

  So nine men in black robes would join thousands of truant schoolchildren and thousands of recalcitrant workers in having their attentions greatly and grandly divided by the final baseball game of 1912, and like their fellow citizens they would remain riveted for the next three hours, rendered practically breathless by a baseball game that, even as it was unfolding, was slowly taking its place alongside—and, ultimately, far beyond—the greatest baseball games ever played to that point.

  And everyone knew it. There may only have been 17,034 people inside the yard, but from the beginning they made the noise of twice that number. They were loud, they were enthusiastic, and they celebrated both teams. There was a fair segment of Giants fans, but this went beyond pure partisanship.

  “Rarely,” Runyon would write, “have paying customers ever gotten their money’s worth the way these partisans did.”

  For much of the afternoon, it would be Christy Mathewson who would command the most attention, the loudest cheers, and the deepest devotions. There wasn’t a man anywhere near Fenway Park who would testify that Mathewson bore even a shadow of a resemblance to the pitcher he’d once been. And yet, as the innings mounted on this day, as his pitch count grew, so too did his aura. Even as a youngster he didn’t have Joe Wood’s fastball, and even though he would collect two hundred or more strikeouts five times in his career Mathewson truly earned his legend as a pitcher, not a thrower, as a craftsman rather than a marvel of nature. And never was he more at one with his craft than on this day. Across the first six innings, he would strike out only four hitters and he would be anything but overpowering.

  “You would watch from the bench, and you could barely contain yourself, you’d want to grab a bat and get up there and take your swings,” Tris Speaker would recall many years later. “And then you’d actually have a bat in your hands, and it was almost like he could read your mind. He knew exactly what he had to throw to make you look incredibly foolish. That’s what great pitchers can do, even to very good hitters.”

  Speaker reached Mathewson for a first-inning single and reached second base when Doyle (proving he really was a bundle of jangling nerves) committed an error, but Mathewson calmly stranded him there by striking out Duffy Lewis. In the second, the Red Sox had two on and one out, but a pop-up and a ground ball quickly ended that threat. And in the sixth, when the Sox finally got a man as far as third base (after Steve Yerkes singled, moved to second on a walk, and to third on a fielder’s choice), what did Mathewson do? He picked Yerkes off third base. End of inning. End of trouble. And what looked like the start of a very, very, very long winter for the Speed Boys.

  There was only one problem.

  The Giants were having just as much trouble getting to young Hugh Bedient, the pride of Falconer, New York. They stranded one man in the first and another two in the second before finally scratching a run off Bedient in the third, Red Murray continuing his Series-long redemption tour by stroking a two-out double that scored Josh Devore.

  Of course, they should have had at least two more runs.

  And, of course, there was a story behind both of those failures.

  In the fourth, with Fenway finally starting to buzz nervously, Buck Herzog smoked a line drive that soared over Speaker’s head in center field. McGraw, coaching third, started jumping wildly: A ball could ricochet forever out there, and the question, in McGraw’s mind, was a simple one: Should he play it safe and hold Herzog at third with a triple? Or should he really press the issue, send him home for a chance at an inside-the-park home run that would surely crush the Red Sox’ spirit? So many choices, so many …

  Hey! McGraw heard himself yelling, What the hell is Klem doing … ?

  What Bill Klem was doing was enjoying the rare pleasure of using McGraw’s own words, his own affinity for capturing every conceivable edge, and dropping them right back in McGraw’s lap. What Klem, umpiring at second base, had seen was the same thing Tris Speaker had seen: The baseball, instead of rattling around the cavernous outfield, had somehow settled into a tiny hole in the extreme corner of the bleachers—the same tiny hole, in the same extreme corner of the bleachers, that Harry Hooper had found four days earlier, in Game Five.

  Suddenly, chillingly, McGraw remembered his own words.

  “How is that not a ground-rule double, Silk?” McGraw had yelled at Silk O’Loughlin that day. “It’s common sense, Silk!”

  “Take it up with the Commission,” O’Loughlin had urged, and that’s exactly what McGraw had done, and for once they had actually listened to him, they’d changed the grounds rule, and McGraw had taken such satisfaction when they’d done it. It was his rule, changed at his insistence. And now it was going to bite him in his trousers.

  “Bill,” McGraw asked sheepishly, “are you sure the ball went in the hole?”

  “Saw it with my own eyes, John,” Klem said. “It’s a double.”

  On another day, in another situation, McGraw might have offered up a few choice observations about the quality and the reliability of Klem’s eyesight, but not now, not in the fourth inning of the decisive World Series game, not with McGraw knowing who’d caused the rule change in the first place. So instead of an inside-the-parker, or instead of having a man on third and nobody out, it was a man on second and none out. Big difference. Made even bigger when Chief Meyers, Art Fletcher, and Mathewson could not drive Herzog home.

  That was one galling, missed opportunity.

  The next one came an inning later, when with one out Larry Doyle stepped into a Bedient fastball and absolutely pulverized it, sending it on a majestic path toward the bleachers in right field. Doyle knew he’d gotten all of it.

  “So much for the jinx!” he crowed to himself as he slowed into his home-run trot.

  There was only one problem: In right field, Harry Hooper hadn’t conceded the play yet. He was still tracking the ball, even as he ran out of outfield, even as his back collided with the short fence, even as the ball kept soaring behind him. Hooper figured he had little to lose, so he jumped, lunged his glove hand toward the ball, then disappeared into a tangle of humanity.

  Doyle was still trotting, unmoved.

  “There’s no way he caught that ball,” he muttered to no one in particular.

  Klem and Cy Rigler, the first-base ump, raced out to right field just in time to see Hooper’s head emerge from the crowd, and then to see him lift his glove—with a baseball safely nestled inside—in triumph.

  Rigler, satisfied, raised his arm.

  “Batter is out!” he yelled.

  Doyle was apoplectic, screeched, “I was jinxed!” but he was stoic compared to his manager, who came roaring out of the dugout and dashed to greet the umpires.

  “There’s no way you
can tell for sure that he caught that ball!” McGraw raged. “For all you know, he picked it up off the ground after he fell in the stands! For all you know, a fan gave him the ball!”

  Rigler listened to McGraw, let him have his say.

  Then repeated, “Batter is out!”

  Unbelievable, McGraw thought. By rights, his team should be up 3–0, and there was no way Matty was capable of giving up a three-run lead. Hell, as good as he was pitching, 1–0 might well be enough. But 3–0 sure would have been better.

  McGraw was reminded of that as the Speed Boys mounted one more desperate push in the home half of the seventh inning. With one out, Jake Stahl blooped a single into the unoccupied gap between left and center, and then Mathewson issued a full-count walk to Heinie Wagner. Suddenly, there was one more set of raindrops for Matty to dance through, the tying run was in scoring position, and the Sox fans inside Fenway Park began loudly waving their wooden rattlers, trying to shake Mathewson in any way that they could.

  But Mathewson was equal to that challenge, jamming Hick Cady on his fists with a fastball, coaxing an easy pop-up to Art Fletcher at short for the second out. Now Stahl had a decision to make. Bedient had pitched well, but he knew the Sox might never get a better chance than this to score the equalizer. From second base, he ordered Joe Wood to remove his mackinaw jacket and hustle to the bullpen to start throwing. And then he pointed to the dugout and ordered into the batter’s box a twenty-four-year-old reserve outfielder born in Kirkerup, Denmark, named Olaf Henriksen.

  Or, as a ten-year-old boy loudly and boldly asked in Times Square, amid the nervous, quiet throng surrounding the Times scoreboard:

  “Olaf Who-riksen?”

  It was a fair question.

  There have been close to 17,000 men who have played at least one inning of major league baseball since 1869. Olaf Henriksen is the only one ever born in Denmark. His family emigrated to the United States just before the turn of the century and Henriksen’s schoolmates dubbed him “Swede,” of course, since geographic accuracy was never of any concern in the half-second it took to come up with a nickname (hence the dozens of ballplayers of German descent through the years who would be called “Dutch”). Henriksen grew into a fine baseball player, a slender athlete who could run and throw and whose hitting caught the eye of the Red Sox scouts after a single season playing for the Brockton club in the New England League.