The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Back at Fenway Park, the relief that greeted Snodgrass’s groundout was soon replaced by a groan that bounced all over the grandstand: Red Murray, one more time, had found a pitch he liked and crushed it, putting a little more space and a little more distance between himself and that calamitous 1911 World Series, the 0-for-21 millstone he’d carried around his neck for fifty-two weeks. This was his tenth hit in thirty-one at-bats in this Series, and as he cruised into second base standing up, he pounded his hands together, and in the quiet still of a panicky ballpark you could hear his satisfied applause from every seat.

  Up to the plate stepped Fred Merkle.

  For four years, Merkle had been searching for just such a moment, for an opportunity to reclaim his good name and restore a reputation that had already taken more of a beating than any twenty-three-year-old should ever have to absorb. He was another unpolished gem that McGraw had uncovered, born in Watertown, Wisconsin, and raised in Toledo, toiling with Tecumseh in the South Michigan League when, late in the summer of 1907, McGraw’s bird-dog scouts noticed him and urged McGraw to sign him. Merkle played parts of fifteen games that year, and he saw sporadic duty in 1908, as well, and at nineteen he had the distinction of being the youngest player in the National League. It was hardly enough to make him famous, however. Few outside the Giants’ most ardent supporters had ever heard of him.

  That would all change, forever, on September 23 of that year.

  In the morning, the Giants’ iron-man first baseman, Fred Tenney, who hadn’t missed a game all year, awoke with a terrible case of lumbago, and when he reported to the ballpark it was clear he couldn’t play. This was a terrible break for the Giants, who were to host the Cubs, the teams each sporting identical 87–50 records atop the league standings. McGraw could have gone a number of different directions, but he decided to go with the kid, and Merkle certainly did his part to justify that faith: In the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and Moose McCormick standing on first base in a tight, tense 1–1 game, Merkle singled sharply to right field, pushing McCormick to third, extending the most critical rally of that 1908 season. And when the next Giants hitter, Al Birdwell, delivered another single, bedlam instantly ruled at the Polo Grounds: McCormick trotted home with the winning run, the Giants had nudged themselves into first place all by themselves with sixteen games to play, and a mob of fans descended on the field to celebrate with their heroes, who were all hustling toward their clubhouse, Merkle included.

  There was one problem:

  Merkle had never reached second base, and once pandemonium invaded the Grounds, he never bothered to—which meant the run technically wouldn’t count if someone had noticed, retrieved the ball, and stepped on second for a force-out. And Cubs second baseman Johnny Evers had noticed. Across the decades, various accounts of how Evers actually got his hands on the ball amid the madness have muddled the details, but this much was certain: Evers yelled at umpire Hank O’Day, pointed at Merkle, then made an elaborate show of stepping on the bag. O’Day had no choice. He called Merkle out, nullifying the run, necessitating a suspended game since there was no way to resume the game with 30,000 people trampling the grounds. As fate would have it, the Giants and Cubs would each go 11–5 over their next sixteen games, so they were forced to play one game for the pennant on October 8. The Cubs won, 4–2 (beating Mathewson). And Fred Merkle, at age nineteen, instantly acquired the worst kind of nickname.

  Bonehead.

  It was a testament to McGraw’s stubbornness—and to Merkle’s own talent—that despite cries for Merkle to be traded, released, tarred and feathered, McGraw didn’t only keep him around, he made him the starting first baseman beginning in 1910, and by 1912 he’d emerged as the Giants’ most reliable, productive hitter with a .309 average, eleven home runs (third in the league), and eighty-four runs batted in. People in New York and everywhere else still referred to “Merkle’s Boner” relentlessly, still razzed him unmercifully, but Merkle had survived.

  And now he was about to put all of that behind him: He connected with a Smoky Joe Wood fastball, looping a sinking line drive toward center. Tris Speaker, as proficient at the position as anyone in the game, knew the smart play was to play it on a hop, hold Murray (who’d had to wait to see if the ball fell safely) at third, and hope that Wood could weasel his way out of a first-and-third, one-out jam. But even the great Speaker wasn’t above losing himself in a nervous moment, especially now that his ankle was pain-free: He ran hard after the ball and made a dive for it, hoping to pluck the ball before it hit grass. Instead, it rolled underneath him. Murray came roaring home, his cleats audibly hitting home plate in the now church-still ballpark, and Merkle raced to second as Speaker retrieved the ball.

  The Giants led, 2–1, news that was greeted, about nine seconds later, with uninhibited delirium in Times Square, in Herald Square, in Madison Square Garden, along New York’s Newspaper Row, and everywhere else in the five boroughs, where the news spread citizen-to-citizen, mouth-to-mouth, fan-to-fan. Newspapers were shredded and tossed in the air like confetti. Young James, the new Times Square baseball mascot, was hoisted into the air, carried on grown men’s shoulders. The Giants’ dugout was a noisy cauldron of sweaty glee, the joy and relief so overwhelming that few of them noticed when Smoky Joe Wood recovered to strike out Buck Herzog on what he would insist were “my hardest three pitches of the season” (“I never saw ’em,” Herzog would later confess, “I just heard ’em.”). With two out, Chief Meyers connected squarely on another Wood fastball and sent a line drive right back through the box; if it got through, Merkle would have scored a critical insurance run and the Giants would be even farther along to the greatest comeback in baseball history.

  But it never got through.

  Wood, acting on instinct, stuck his pitching hand out and the ball collided with his thumb; he gathered the ball up off the ground, lobbed it over to first, and trudged angrily and wearily off the mound. He was scheduled to lead off the bottom of the tenth, and if Jake Stahl had any question about whether to pinch-hit for him or not, it was quickly resolved when Wood showed the manager his priceless pitching hand, specifically a swatch of flesh that, until two minutes ago, had served as his right thumb.

  “That son of a bitch,” Stahl said, “is broken.”

  As, so it seemed, was the Speed Boys’ destiny.

  The truth is, it was astonishing that Tris Speaker acclimated himself as well as he did to his adopted hometown of Boston. The world of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was a far more immense place, the chasm between Up Here and Down There so vast that it really did seem like separate countries sometimes, regardless of how the Civil War had turned out. And if you happened to be from Texas, then New England had to feel like it belonged on another planet to you. Not only did most of the people talk in that odd local brogue, but there were accents of every sort speaking at every street café and restaurant in town: Irish, Italian, German, Hungarian, Yiddish. Maybe the culture shock would have been worse in, say, New York City, which actually prided itself on being a place where all these people mixed their blood, their histories, and their futures, but Boston, Massachusetts was about as far removed from Hubbard, Texas, as a man could wander in 1912.

  In Hubbard, in many ways, the Civil War, only forty-seven years in the distance, had yet to be settled, and the issue of why had little to do with the battles that had been fought and the causes that were espoused. It was a condition far more prevalent in Texas than anywhere else in the former Confederacy, even battleground states like Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi where people still harbored bullet-riddled flags and hard-to-shake beliefs, because Texas had been in the war business far longer than any of its brethren. Old-timers still recalled Texas’s short but bloody War of Independence against Mexico in 1836, where thousands of innocents on both sides were senselessly slaughtered and where the Alamo was, indeed, still remembered. Many who survived that had eagerly joined the U.S. Army to fight the Mexican War ten years later, so th
e Texans who took part in the Confederate cause were no virgins to the bloody authenticity of war, they’d been raised and reared on its realities for generations.

  It was with this history coursing through their veins that a pair of brothers newly recruited to the Texas militia, Byron and James Speaker, rode north of the Red River in 1861 to fight Union-sympathizing Indians. Across the next four years they would visit three separate theaters of the war, they would fight Yanks all across Arkansas and Mississippi, and they would fight Ulysses Grant’s men in Tennessee and William Tecumseh Sherman’s invaders in northern Georgia. James would manage to survive even after being captured by Sherman’s men in October 1864 and shipped to a Union prison camp in Illinois in which a quarter of the 26,000 inmates would die of hunger and be buried in unmarked pauper’s graves; Byron would merely survive, against the long odds of regular conflict. When the brothers reunited after Appomattox, they returned to Texas and filled the ears of their youngest brother, Archery, with tales of their exploits and of Northern atrocity. And Archery, in turn, relayed these stories to his youngest child, Tristram, named for one of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table.

  So Speaker, very much an outsider in his new city, was just as much an outsider in his own clubhouse when he was called up to the Red Sox in 1907, and his whole life he felt compelled to fight, if not with his fists then with his antics and his actions; he learned early on that no one was going to sponsor you in this world. What you wanted, you had to take. As a child he’d broken his right arm falling off a horse, forcing him to rely on his left hand, and even after the injured arm healed he kept throwing, hitting, and eating left-handed. Later, while playing college football at Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute, he hurt the left arm so badly that his doctors wanted to amputate. Speaker told them to forget it, he healed, and two years later he’d shown up in Boston, gotten three hits in his first nineteen at-bats, and so impressed the Red Sox that they traded him to the Little Rock Travelers of the Southern League in exchange for the use of the Travs’ spring training facilities in 1908.

  Outraged and humiliated at, quite literally, being swapped for a bag of balls, Speaker decided to make the forty-five-mile pilgrimage from Hubbard to Marlin in the spring of 1908 to present himself to John J. McGraw and offer his services as a center fielder. It is worth noting that if this meeting had gone smoothly, then it could well have been Tris Speaker roaming center for the Giants this October 16 instead of Fred Snodgrass, but the meeting went anything but well. “McGraw said he had no place for me,” Speaker would recount decades after the fact. “I did everything I could, but I couldn’t get him to change his mind.”

  It wouldn’t take long for McGraw to second-guess himself; during their 1909 postseason exhibition, Speaker had dominated the series so completely that McGraw was moved to marvel, “I had read a lot about that young fellow but I didn’t think he was that good. He is without doubt one of the greatest players of all time.”

  For now, though, Speaker’s misplay in center had helped nudge McGraw’s Giants to within three outs of the world championship, and as McGraw’s friend and meal ticket, Christy Mathewson, eased out of the dugout McGraw approached, put his hand on Matty’s shoulder, and exchanged wordless glances.

  Finally, finally their moment was at hand.

  Larry Doyle, the Giants captain who’d worshipped Mathewson from the moment the great pitcher had shaken the nervous infielder’s hand upon his arrival in New York five years before, jogged out in front of Matty and excitedly shook his fist. Mathewson smiled and told his captain, “I’ll float my old arm out there right after the ball if I have to in this inning. I’ll win the game.”

  Mathewson warmed up quickly and efficiently, and was somewhat surprised when he didn’t see Joe Wood (who’d hit a perfectly respectable-for-a-pitcher .290 in 1912) greeting him in the batter’s box but instead a pinch hitter named Clyde (Hack) Engle, who’d been the Sox’ incumbent first baseman until Jake Stahl had been lured out of retirement. Engle had accepted his demotion reluctantly but quietly, and he’d hit only a soft .234 in 171 at-bats during the season (though he’d doubled off Rube Marquard and driven in the Sox’ only two runs pinch-hitting for Buck O’Brien during their Game Six meltdown at the Polo Grounds two days earlier). Chief Meyers jogged out to the mound, went over the signals with Mathewson, then pointed to the Sox’ dugout where team trainers were looking grimly at Wood’s thumb.

  “I got him right square on the hand,” Meyers said. “No way he can pitch again, much less hit here.”

  Mathewson, with uncommon boldness, said, “Let’s make that a moot point.”

  Engle took Mathewson’s first pitch right down the middle for strike one, and Fenway Park was so quiet that the ball popped in Meyers’s mitt and echoed all across the ballpark. And when Engle made contact with Mathewson’s second pitch, another rising fastball, such was the hush that you couldn’t only hear the unmistakable thud when Engle threw his bat down in disappointment after lifting a lazy fly ball toward left center field, you could hear two voices rise above the melancholy. One was a joyful Larry Doyle, who tracked the flight of the ball from his spot at second base and gleefully squealed, “That’s one of ’em!” The other belonged to Fred Snodgrass, who clearly and loudly proclaimed:

  “I GOT IT! I GOT IT! I GOT IT!”

  In the dusty miasma of memory, there would be some through the years who would insist that by rights Red Murray, in left field, should have called for the ball, that because Hack Engle was a soft-hitting right-hander Snodgrass was shaded toward right field to start the at-bat, that he’d had to cover some ground to get to where the ball was landing in left center. There are others who would swear that Murray, after being called off the ball, had taken a knee, an overenthusiastic way of getting a good, up-close look at the first of the three outs the Giants would need to make them champions, and still others who would testify that even as the ball was descending toward earth, acceding to gravity’s wishes, Murray was yelling at Snodgrass to flip him the ball after catching it, so he could say he was a part of an historic final inning. All of these theories tend to dissolve when you remember one of John J. McGraw’s most fundamental rules:

  If the center fielder believed he could catch the ball, he caught the ball.

  It was the statute by which Snodgrass and Josh Devore had abided in Game One, you may remember, when Speaker’s ball fell between them for the fly-ball triple that broke up Jeff Tesreau’s no-hitter and awakened the Sox’ slumbering offense, and it was surely in play now, with Snodgrass easing over to plant himself under the fly—a “can o’ corn” in the parlance of the day, since it resembled the ease with which a general store owner could drop canned vegetables from high shelves into his waiting hands—and calling for it loudly. What all the excuses and all the conspiracy theories speak to, in all probability, is the basic hidden terror that lurks within every ballplayer, from T-ball to Little League to the majors, from Wiffle ball games to stickball games to softball games, the innate fear that when a ball is right over your head, the easiest play in the game, that somehow, someway, you will do the improbable, the impossible, and drop it.

  Fred Snodgrass dropped it.

  In Herald Square, the name “Engle” suddenly appeared next to second base and a puzzled voice cried out, “A fellow named Engle hit a double off Matty? That can’t be!” Then the board showed what had happened: error, center field. “Surely, it had to be a hard play,” another patron yelled. “They are notoriously difficult scorers in Boston, you know.” In Newark, people started to notice that Daniel Connon was sweating a little more than seemed natural on such a cool autumn day, and asked if he was all right. And in Los Angeles, there was no immediate explanation for why a runner suddenly appeared on second base with nobody out, and Adie Snodgrass listened to the lunchtime crowd talk about how overrated the Great Mathewson must be if he let a man named Engle get a hit off him with the World Series on the line.

  Out There, there was so much mystery attached to what h
ad just happened.

  In Here, inside a Fenway Park that now sounded as if someone had just pushed a plug back into the wall, there was nothing but the simplest truth abounding.

  As Snodgrass himself would say later: “I just dropped the thing.”

  And now Engle, who’d been running all the way in what felt at the time like fruitless hustle, was standing on second base, already in scoring position, amazed at the whims of fortune. Mathewson was dazed. He waved his glove hand in disgust, and it was hard to know if he was directing his emotions at Snod or at God; probably both, since both had forsaken him at that moment. But whatever self-pity he might have felt evaporated in a few seconds; now he had to face the top of the Red Sox batting order, and he had to rein in all the swirling emotions and feelings raging inside him.

  Harry Hooper was due up, naturally, as if Matty needed another reminder that this game, by rights, should already be over, and they should all be on a Gotham-bound train sipping champagne if not for Hooper’s defensive magnificence. Now Jake Stahl had a decision to make: Should he have Hooper bunt, sacrificing Engle to third? McGraw, who absolutely would have played it that way, had his corner infielders, Herzog and Merkle, pinch in so close to home plate it looked like they could grab Hooper’s bat. But Stahl, one last time, proved he wasn’t McGraw. Hooper, grateful for the freedom, took a vicious hack at Mathewson’s first pitch and the moment it struck his bat the faithful inside Fenway began to roar: It was a blast, heading deep into the gap, deep over Snodgrass’ head, and not only was Engle going to be able to walk home with the tying run, Hooper was surely going to make it all the way to third with the potential winning run, and …