The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Henriksen had shown a proficiency with the bat from the moment he arrived in Boston in 1911, hitting .366 in ninety-three at-bats as a rookie in 1911 and .321 in fifty-six at-bats in 1912 (to go along with fourteen walks in both years, exhibiting a fine eye that would serve him well throughout his career). But the Red Sox outfield was virtually impossible to crack; Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper would both wind up in Cooperstown, and Duffy Lewis was the best left fielder in the league. And, more important, all three men were built out of iron. The Red Sox played 154 games (including two ties) in 1912; Lewis played all 154, Speaker played in 153, and Hooper played in 147. All three had played every inning of the World Series, too, meaning that Henriksen’s opportunities to stir from the bench were practically nil. His only Series appearance had nearly been a memorable one, however: He was racing around the bases at the end of Game Three with the potential tying run when Josh Devore made his spectacular, game-clinching grab of Hick Cady’s drive in the darkness.

  Still, Henriksen had a sense he would be called upon to do something special here, with the season growing short on the Red Sox. “Somehow, in that seventh inning, I got a hunch that I would be sent up as a pinch hitter,” he would say after the game. “After Gardner had flied out to Devore [for the first out], I pulled for Jake to get on for I felt if Stahl reached first the chance I had been waiting for would come.”

  And now it had. Now, Olaf Henriksen, with exactly 149 at-bats under his belt in the major leagues, would face Christy Mathewson, Big Six, the Christian Gentleman, the most decorated pitcher in history, the most beloved sportsman in America. You would think those might be some overpowering odds for the kid from Kirkerup. You would be wrong.

  “I was certain—cocksure—that I could beat Matty,” Henriksen asserted later.

  Mathewson was never one to be especially gracious to younger generations of players who happened to play on opposing teams. As helpful as he was to his younger teammates, he always saw foes of any age as logical successors to his throne, be they hitters who would try to beat him (and take food off his table) or pitchers who might threaten his pitching records (and take money out of his pocket). Joe Wood, for one, would remember bitterly for decades after that as often as he tried to engage Mathewson in conversation during the 1912 World Series, Mathewson was cold, distant, aloof, and completely uninterested in forging a friendship with the younger man.

  Now Mathewson peered in at Henriksen and the Swede instantly understood the great pitcher’s hesitation: He’s never heard of me! He has no idea what kind of pitches I like, which ones I avoid. He has no idea how to get me out! It was here that Henriksen decided he’d let Matty’s first offering pass by, no matter how inviting it looked. So he just stared at a sweeping curve, which dropped in for strike one.

  “Atta boy, Matty!” Meyers, the catcher, screamed. “Two more just like it!”

  Henriksen figured Matty would stay with the curve, the pitch that had made hundreds of major-league hitters squirm, and he was right: As a left-handed hitter, Henriksen could pick the ball up from the moment it left Mathewson’s right hand, the ball seemingly starting somewhere near third base then spinning slowly and magnificently back to the plate. It came in slow and inviting, and Henriksen whipped his bat around, and just like those hundreds of vanquished hitters before him the ball seemed to have a mind of its own, seemed to dance clear around the bat before falling softly into Meyers’s glove. Strike two.

  “He’s yours, Matty!” Meyers roared. “He’s yours!”

  Mathewson came back with a couple of fastballs, a couple inches wide of the plate, figuring Henriksen might chase them. He didn’t. Now, at 2-and-2, with the tying run still sitting there on second base, with his team now seven outs from a championship and $4,000 a man, Mathewson and Henriksen both knew what was up next. When it left Matty’s hand, it was waist high, and right before home plate it dipped straight down, like a diver jumping off a cliff. Mathewson had thrown this pitch so many times before, and he knew when he’d thrown it well. He’d thrown this one perfectly.

  Henriksen was beaten, but he wasn’t fooled. Knowing the curve was coming, he’d kept all his weight back. Somehow, as the ball acceded to gravity, he readjusted his swing, looking as if he were lunging at it with both hands. And the most curious thing happened: The ball met the bat squarely. It wasn’t hit hard, but it was hit hard enough: It hugged the third-base line and found the patch of dirt between the bag and Buck Herzog’s glove, squirting through. Stahl, not a fast runner, could have crawled home with the tying run. Henriksen, a very fast runner, didn’t stop until he reached second.

  “Then it occurred to me for the first time that I had done something,” Henriksen would recount. “So I stood on second base, and I was almost hypnotized by the racket of the crowd. I wondered: Is some of that meant for me?”

  All of it was. Mathewson stood blankly on the mound, wondering if there really was some mystical force greater than he who was hellbent on making him pay, retroactively, for those three shutouts from the ’05 series. He stared at Henriksen, who had no business beating him in such a critical spot. He quickly retired Hooper on a lazy fly to center, keeping the game tied. Smoky Joe Wood entered the game and (surprise, surprise!) looked nothing like the pitcher he’d been twenty-four hours earlier, blazing through the Giants’ lineup in the eighth and ninth, allowing only a scratch single and a walk. Mathewson received a small scare in the bottom of the ninth, allowing a one-out double to Jake Stahl, but he induced easy fly balls from Heinie Wagner and Hick Cady to escape the jam.

  So it wouldn’t be enough for the Red Sox and the Giants to wrestle with each other for three wins apiece, for one hard-fought tie, and for nine more innings of an eighth game. No, they would have to go to a tenth inning (and who knew how much longer beyond?) to settle this most remarkable World Series.

  Silk O’Loughlin looked at the sky; there would still be time for a good hour more of baseball. He could only hope that would be enough time.

  “We may have to play this in moonlight,” he joked to Hick Cady when he came out to catch Wood’s warm-ups for the top of the tenth.

  “Might as well,” Cady replied, stone serious. “I have nowhere else I have to be.”

  Or anyplace he—or the others—would rather be. On to the tenth inning it was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wednesday, October 16, 1912

  Tenth inning, Game Eight, Giants 1, Red Sox 1

  BOSTON—It was a series which combined the wildest mixture of brilliant and wretched playing, of impossible catches and easy chances marred, of wonderful and bush league pitching, of desperate chances and dumb, bush league work—a veritable swirl of all that goes to make up baseball from every angle of the game. Games were saved by miraculous work and lost by schoolboy muffs and the only regret both teams might have is that such a drama should close and swing upon a fly ball popping from an outfielder’s hands or an easy foul fly fluttering safely when it should have been snagged with both eyes shut …

  —DAMON RUNYON, NEW YORK AMERICAN, OCTOBER 17, 1912

  HE LOVED THE action, John McGraw did, and it didn’t always have to be contained to the neat geography of a baseball diamond to get his blood racing, even if it was there where all of his diverse passions coagulated neatly. In his youth, in Baltimore, he’d opened up the first duckpin bowling alley alongside his friend Wilbert Robinson, and it had been a huge hit. Later, after he hit the Big Town, he opened up a string of billiard halls, and because he was the famous manager of the New York Giants, nobody ever seemed terribly bothered by the fact that his silent partner was a man named Arnold Rothstein, who a few years down the road would nearly destroy the very game that had made John McGraw famous. He was a well-paid thespian, of all things, spending many of his off-season hours in vaudeville houses in the employ of B. F. Keith, the most renowned theater impresario of the day. In 1912, he would do fifteen weeks on the road, performing a monologue titled “Inside Baseball” that was a mishmash of his own stories and embe
llishments penned by Bozeman Bulger of the New York World. It was, admittedly, a fairly routine (or “dull,” or “sleep-inducing” if you listened to some of the critics) bit that was usually tolerated by the sold-out crowds because McGraw invariably followed Keith’s featured performer, Odiva, “The Goldfish Lady,” who would immerse herself (and her considerable talents) in a glass tank filled with water for two and a half minutes. For his efforts, McGraw would clear close to $60,000 on the stage (and in those pre-income-tax years, he kept every penny of that windfall, worth $1.3 million in 2008 dollars). He even did a silent film, The Detective, in which he played an Irish gumshoe.

  But it was the ponies that truly captured McGraw’s attention and most of his non-baseball devotion. As a player in Baltimore, he’d often frequent the famed Pimlico Raceway, and after the original Orioles were dissolved and McGraw had been shipped out to St. Louis, he took solace in the fact that the city’s most popular track was located right next to Robison Park, where the Perfectos played home games. Every off day in New York would find McGraw leaning against the rail at Belmont Park, or Aqueduct Raceway, or at nearby Empire City Raceway in upstate Yonkers. Once, in fact, there was a widely circulated (and widely accepted) tale that McGraw had dispatched two players to Yonkers to lay down money on a horse named Confessor that was going off at 10-to-1. Five hundred dollars richer, it was easier for McGraw to swallow the 20–5 shellacking the Pirates had laid on his team that day.

  It was this equine affinity that had led McGraw to Los Angeles in the spring of 1907. McGraw had sold John T. Brush on the idea of the Giants training in Southern California by emphasizing the public-relations coup of a big league team visiting virgin baseball territory. In reality, McGraw had heard about the many wildcat racetracks that dotted the L.A. area, and figured that was as good a place as any to hold his annual baseball boot camp. And so it was, that early in that spring of 1907, a catcher for St. Vincent’s College, against whom the Giants were scrimmaging, caught McGraw’s eye.

  A year later, McGraw was back in California (on his own dime now, as Brush had caught on to his game) and was working out on his own in between visits to the track, when he was trying to fill out two teams to put together a pickup game, and he badly needed a catcher.

  “What was the name of that kid from St. Vincent’s?” he asked one of the locals.

  “Fred Snodgrass,” he was told. “He’s the best semipro catcher in California.”

  Snodgrass was summoned, played, and played as well as McGraw remembered. Afterward, he approached the twenty-year-old backstop and shook his hand.

  “Are you thinking of playing pro baseball?” McGraw asked.

  “A little,” said Snodgrass, “but not too seriously, to tell the truth.”

  McGraw reached into his pocket, removed a contract, told Snodgrass to bring the contract home, talk it over with his parents, and if he still wanted to stay home and play ball only on weekends, no hard feelings. But if he wanted to go to spring training with the New York Giants, the train for Marlin, Texas, was leaving in four days and he could expect to earn the princely sum of $150 a month.

  “And really,” Snodgrass would say years later, “what choice was there to make?”

  Two months later, Snodgrass broke camp with the Giants as a third-string catcher, and over the next two years McGraw kept moving him around the diamond, looking for a place for him to play. Snodgrass was quick to anger and he had a fresh mouth, and some managers would have sent him home the moment he popped off about playing time. Not McGraw. He liked young players who believed in themselves. Hell, he would say, I’d be more inclined to send him home if he wasn’t mad about not playing more. Guys like that, guys who were in it just for the paycheck, they were stealing money, and you couldn’t win with guys like that. But you could win with guys like Snodgrass. So on the Giants’ first road trip of the 1910 season, McGraw knocked on Snodgrass’s door in the Cincinnati hotel.

  “Hey, Snow,” McGraw said. “How would you like to play center field?”

  Snodgrass was furious. This son of a bitch was sending him to the minor leagues! “For which club?” he asked, his face reddening.

  “Why, for this club, of course.”

  Snodgrass was stunned, but he was also ready. He hit .321 for those 1910 Giants, who won ninety-one games and finished second behind the Cubs. He hit ten triples in 1911 and stole fifty-one bases (while getting on base nearly 40 percent of the time), and he’d learned his defensive position so well that he’d become among the most reliable outfielders in the National League. McGraw loved him, because he was proof positive that not only could McGraw spot talent in even the most far-flung places on the map, he could mold that talent into something approaching stardom.

  But there was a cost to that fealty, a blind spot that sometimes prevented McGraw from being as hard on Snodgrass as he was on other players. Snodgrass had some spasms of selfishness and incivility that angered his teammates, especially when there were no visible ramifications. During the 1911 Series, he’d caused an unnecessary furor when, in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game Three, in a 1–1 struggle, he’d tried to intentionally get hit by a ball thrown by Jack Coombs. When the umpire didn’t buy it, Snodgrass eventually worked out a walk but kept chattering about how he’d been screwed, then, after advancing to second base on a sacrifice, he made the ill-fated decision to take third on a short passed ball. The throw beat him by ten steps, but Snodgrass kept coming, kicking his spikes deep into Frank Baker’s shins.

  The move not only fired up the Athletics (who won that day and two of the next three, too, to sew up the Series), it nearly cost Snodgrass something greater: Death threats poured into the Giants’ offices, and into their hotel, and a rumor quickly spread that Snodgrass had been shot dead by a furious Philly fanatic. His teammates never forgot that, and neither did the press, and so when Snodgrass picked that silly fight with the members of the bleachers prior to Game Five, it lit a lot of smoldering embers.

  “Fred Snodgrass is, off the ballfield, apparently as level-headed a fellow as one could meet, but when he dons his uniform and goes into an important series before a big crowd when everything is at stake he seems fated to make some bull-headed move that queers not only the situation but himself and his fellow players,” Sam Crane had written in the Journal after his Fenway Park antics. “He not only makes himself obnoxious to the people he is evidently striving to anger but he aggravates the Giants themselves and their friends and rooters to a degree that is dangerously effective as a boomerang.”

  Perhaps that sounds sensationalistic. But there was another correspondent in another newspaper that day who seemed to concur fully:

  “It is not my policy to criticize, since I have my own soul to take care of,” opined temporary sports columnist Christy Mathewson, in close to three hundred newspapers nationwide, “but Snodgrass simply has to be better than that.”

  McGraw heard, saw, and read all the criticisms and flicked them away. The Giants had gotten this far with Snodgrass and all the regular dramas and furies that sometimes traveled in his wake. He was McGraw’s boy. Surely, when the chips were down, he would be equal to the task.

  For now, though, the moment got to Fred Snodgrass, leading off the top of the tenth inning. Snodgrass looked at one Joe Wood fastball whistle right down the heart of the plate and then swung at the next one, drizzling a ground ball right back to Wood, who lobbed to Jake Stahl for the first out. It wasn’t until Snodgrass returned to the dugout that he realized how much it hurt to try to straighten out his fingers; that was how tightly he’d been gripping his bat.

  Which was perfectly understandable. The Giants and the Red Sox were in uncharted waters, engaged in a battle that was beyond exciting now and had reached a point of utter excruciation. And everyone could feel it. The moment the Red Sox had tied the game in the seventh, Ban Johnson had left his seat and started wandering around Fenway Park, trying to burn off nervous energy that had him practically muttering to himself. In the dugouts, where res
erves could only watch and bite their fingernails and whittle away the minutes, there was an almost unbearable tension. Jeff Tesreau and Rube Marquard, who’d both done their jobs to simply allow this decisive game to occur, talked gibberish to each other, neither able to keep their brains focused on anything but the pitch at hand. In the stands, John Fitzgerald had long allowed his anger to abate—especially since he’d already visited John McAleer and extracted the promise of an apology, win or lose—and was now absently thumbing the rosary beads in his pants pocket.

  Everywhere else, the pressure was pure and it was palpable. In New York, the police had simply given up the ghost when it came to crowd control; there were a hundred thousand people in midtown alone, between the Times scoreboard and the Herald Square Playograph, and the word was the only time a crowd had even approached this one was for the presidential election returns of 1900, 1904, and 1908. Most of the masses near the Times building had virtually adopted a ten-year-old boy from the East Side of Manhattan named James, who’d climbed the subway kiosk and had been cheering—pleading, almost—ever since the Giants took the lead and who had to be consoled in the bottom of the seventh when news of the Red Sox’ tying run had reduced him to a whisper: “That can’t be! Matty wouldn’t let that happen!”

  In Boston, the Royal Rooters boycott may have kept Fenway freed up with breathing room, but as word of the epic struggle crisscrossed the town, 50,000 citizens gathered along Newspaper Row, living and dying and breathing with every pitch. If they’d so desired, they could have walked a few more blocks to Fenway itself, where a disconsolate bunch of ticket brokers was getting ready to throw the ducats into a bonfire, but why would you want to go there, anyway? There were three times as many people right here. In New Jersey, as the “zero” was slotted under both teams in the ninth inning on the scoreboard sponsored by the Newark Evening News, Daniel Connon tried to ignore the tightness in his chest and the shortness of his breath. And in California, Adie Snodgrass peered intently at the Los Angeles Times’s scoreboard during her son’s tenth-inning at-bat, exhaled when the announcer said, “Ground ball to the pitcher, one away,” and hoped Fred would have other chances to distinguish himself, and deliver the Giants, before the afternoon was through.