The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  And just as abruptly as Snodgrass had stuck the plug in the wall, he kicked it back out again. Because somehow, someway, running as fast as he could, reacting as quickly as he could, and diving as far as he could, he made one of the most extraordinary catches in baseball history. Now, no video exists of it—the way it does of Al Gionfriddo in 1947 or Willie Mays in 1954 or Ron Swoboda in 1969, and some of the other spine-tingling catches in World Series history—so all we can do is go by the accounts of those who watched it. And even decades after the catch, they were still shaking their head.

  “I saw thousands of games,” Tris Speaker said in 1949, “and I never, ever saw a catch like that before or after. It was like a magic trick.”

  “It was so impossible, it was hard to describe,” McGraw would say in 1931.

  Engle, as awestruck as anyone, was already around third and had to scramble back to second to avoid being doubled up. One more time, Mathewson waved his glove, although this time it was to acknowledge the shared munificence of the almighty and the outfielder. But even the Great Matty could get rattled and now, after one brutal break and one extraordinary one, he sabotaged himself by walking Steve Yerkes, the least-potent, least-threatening bat in the entire Boston lineup. It was an unfortunate piece of timing. Now the Speed Boys had the tying and winning runs on base, and up to the plate walked Speaker, who was—McGraw’s words, remember?—“without doubt one of the greatest players of all time.” Of course, Speaker would be facing—everyone’s words—one of the greatest pitchers of all time, and even without the blessing of historical context, everyone was on their feet now—in Fenway, in Boston Common, in New York City, Newark, Los Angeles, Des Moines, Little Rock, everywhere. Speaker—who would hit .345 across twenty-two years (sixth all-time in major league baseball’s 139-year history through 2008), and collect 3,514 hits (fifth all-time)—had gone 2-for-5 in Game Two against Mathewson. Mathewson—373 career victories (third all-time) in seventeen seasons, a 2.13 lifetime ERA (eighth all-time)—had limited Speaker to just one single in three at-bats in Game Five, and a single and a walk in four plate appearances so far in Game Eight. So as Speaker walked to the plate, with the ballpark in an uproar and what seemed like the whole world peeking in from as many as 3,000 miles away, he dug his spikes in knowing he’d done quite well against his fellow immortal, going 4-for-11 with a walk, a nifty .363 average.

  Now they eyed each other warily. Mathewson took a long stride into the stretch, gathered the ball back into his glove at the waist, looked over his shoulder at Engle leading off second, spied quickly at Yerkes at first. And reached back across seven or eight years and uncorked the kind of fastball that used to regularly fly from his fingertips in his youth, one that only occasionally graced him with its presence now, at age thirty-two, one that started out around the hitter’s thighs and kept rising as it made its sixty-foot, six-inch way toward the hitter, upward to the belt, upward near the stomach, upward near the lettering, upward near the armpits.

  Speaker swung. Almost immediately, his heart sank. A hitter swings his bat thousands of times during a season, in games, in exhibitions, in batting practice. Instantly, the moment he hears the crack of ball against bat—the moment he feels it—he knows what he’s done. If he feels nothing at all, it means he’s connected with the sweet spot and that ball will be traveling a long, long way. If it collides with the lower half of the bat, start running, because it’s on the ground somewhere. If it hits the upper half, forget it: It’s going to be a lazy fly ball or a pop-up. And if you hit it on the wrong end of the bat, you can really forget it since it won’t even stay in fair territory.

  That’s where Tris Speaker’s bat hit Christy Mathewson’s fastball, and immediately there was a sad groan stretching over Fenway Park, because everyone could see that he’d popped the ball straight up over the right side of the infield, and with the wind swirling softly it easily drifted the ball into foul territory near first base.

  Where Fred Merkle, of all people, was waiting to catch it.

  Now, it is impossible to know exactly what was going through Christy Mathewson’s thoughts at this moment. He should have been greatly relieved; he’d done the heaviest lifting already. He’d induced a pop-up from the great Speaker. And he could see, because everyone could see, that Merkle had a bead on the ball. Still …

  Mathewson had been at the Polo Grounds that surreal day four years earlier when Merkle failed to touch second base. He’d seen how the criticisms and the heckling had affected the young player. More than anyone, he should have appreciated how hard Merkle had worked to overcome that gaffe. Still … it was Merkle out there, under the pop-up. Merkle of “Merkle’s Boner” …

  “CHIEF!” Mathewson suddenly blurted. “YOU TAKE IT, CHIEF!”

  Chief was Chief Meyers, the catcher, and in truth it was Meyers’s responsibility to select the man who should field, or catch, any ball in front of him. That’s what catchers did. And this catcher could see that it was Merkle’s ball all the way. But Meyers, like the rest of the Giants, was a Matty acolyte. What he said was law, on all matters. And so when Meyers heard his name, he made a quick stab for the ball. When Merkle heard Meyers’s name, he backed away.

  And the baseball fell, untouched, in the grass beyond the first-base line.

  As it lay there, the three Giants surrounding it could hardly believe it, could hardly bring themselves to touch it. John McGraw, in the dugout, said nothing; what could he say? His head hung limply on his shoulders and listened to his stomach growl. Fenway remained silent for half a heartbeat, then erupted in laughter and another wave of bombastic cheering, many of them no doubt thinking: Wasn’t it our team that was supposed to be on the take?

  And Tris Speaker, halfway down the first-base line, could contain himself no longer.

  “Well, Matty, you just called for the wrong man,” Speaker said, not bothering to hide either his relief or his resolve. “Now it’s gonna cost you the ballgame.”

  And on the very next pitch, this one a hanging Mathewson curveball that looked every bit like it was thrown by a man of thirty-two and not a kid of twenty-two, Speaker laced a single to right field, sending Engle home with the tying run, sending Yerkes to third with the would-be winning run, sending himself to second when Devore foolishly overthrew the cutoff man trying to nail Engle at the plate, and sending Fenway Park into a frenetic spasm of elation. It was all so impossible to believe. One more time, these teams were dead even, tied at three games apiece, tied at two runs apiece, with Steve Yerkes standing but ninety feet away with the run that would topple all of New England, send it upside down.

  McGraw was shaken, and never bothered to send anyone to the bullpen, just in case. He did wave four fingers in the air, ordering Mathewson to intentionally walk Duffy Lewis, loading the bases, setting up a force at any base or a double play that could help Matty weasel out of this most unpleasant pickle he was in.

  Now all eyes turned to Larry Gardner, the third baseman whose shattered little finger had nearly caused him to miss the series. Gardner understood that, with only one out, he was a man with many options: He could win the game with a clean base hit, of course. He could win it with a slow roller, assuming he beat a double-throw relay to first. He could win it with a long fly ball to the outfield. He could win it if Matty uncorked a wild pitch, or if an unnerved Chief Meyers let one get past him for a passed ball. He could win it by getting hit by a pitch, or by letting four balls go by him. A hitter with options was a hell of a dangerous man.

  He watched ball one sail by him.

  He watched ball two cruise past him.

  Fenway was an asylum now, and it was obvious that even Mathewson had been affected by it. He had no choice: He had to throw a strike. He did, right at the knees: Gardner swung and missed. The din died down for a few heartbeats. The next pitch was another fastball, shaving the inside corner thigh-high.

  My God, Gardner thought. Right where I like it.

  The left-handed Gardner turned on the pitch, pulled it, lofted it
high and deep toward right field, and as soon as he hit it Mathewson started walking off the mound. Matty knew it was staying in the ballpark, but he also knew that Devore, in right, could place the ball in a cannon after catching it and it wouldn’t make a difference. Devore tried, circling under it, getting a running start once the ball fell in his glove.

  But it didn’t matter. At third base, Yerkes had his left foot on the base, his head was focused on home plate, and he waited for Clyde Engle—now coaching third—to tell him when to go.

  Engle listened for the thud of ball hitting glove.

  “GO!” he screamed.

  And off Yerkes went, and here came Gardner’s throw, and it never had a chance. Jake Stahl, the triumphant manager who was waiting on deck and standing behind the plate, shot both hands in the air, alerting Yerkes that he wouldn’t have to slide and so he didn’t, sprinting right past Chief Meyers, whose eyes were glued to the plate, making sure Yerkes’s spikes touched it. They did.

  It was over. It was official. It took roughly six seconds for the news to reach Boston Common and Boston’s Newspaper Row, and when it did, when everybody learned about Boston 3, New York 2, there was an immediate celebration the likes of which the city had never seen before. As it was, most of the city’s workers had knocked off early in order to join in these communal gatherings, so when the word finally arrived that Yerkes had crossed the plate, there rose a yell from tens of thousands of people gathered near the public scoreboards, from the people in the street, in the windows, in stores and doorways along the row. The yell told the story. Men danced and waved and shook hands and slapped one another on the back. Women cried.

  The Royal Rooters, scattered to the wind, all knew instinctively to gather anew at McGreevy’s saloon, where they spent the rest of the night and a few hours of the next morning enjoying some let-bygones-be-bygones revelry, making plans to attend the next day’s celebration at Faneuil Hall in force, using Nuf Ced’s spittoon whenever the name McAleer entered the conversation, and buying round after round in honor of Snodgrass.

  Snodgrass. What could you say about him? What could you say to him? The center fielder knew that he might be in for a long day—and a long life, for that matter—when Sox fans gratefully, gleefully chanted his name as he walked off the field, lost in his own suffocating misery. His teammates weren’t sure what to do. Most of them would admit later, in the angry haze of aftermath, they wanted to walk up to him and say, “How could you drop that ball? A first-grader could catch that ball!” But to a man, all of them showed restraint, overcome with compassion when they saw tears flowing down his cheeks, his body racked with agony.

  “After the game,” Jeff Tesreau would recall, “Snodgrass came to the bench and picked up his blazer. He did not speak to anyone but acted as if he were a criminal, and then he walked off the field alone.”

  Later, Tesreau and Josh Devore were climbing into a taxi on their way to the train station when they noticed a forlorn, solitary figure: Snodgrass.

  “Snow!” Tesreau yelled. “Ride with us!”

  He hesitated, and then Devore grabbed him by the lapel of his coat and dragged him into the backseat. There they sat, in silence, none of the three men knowing exactly what should be said. Then, with the hotel in sight, in a voice barely audible over the hum of the cab’s engine, Snodgrass finally broke the icy silence:

  “Boys,” he said, “I lost the championship for you.”

  Neither Devore nor Tesreau knew how to respond to that.

  “Because he really had,” Tesreau later explained. “And there was no use in trying to deny it. Ten chances to one he will read some similar comments in the papers in the morning if he cares to read them. So we just naturally kept quiet and if silence means assent Snodgrass knew that we admitted he had lost it. Two or three times Josh started to break out and tell him so, because he was terribly sore over it, but he took one look at Snodgrass and quit. He was the most dejected looking person I ever saw.”

  Tesreau was correct, of course. At that very moment, the knights of the nation’s typewriter keyboards had already begun a vicious assault on Snodgrass, conveniently overlooking Mathewson’s equally costly blunder two hitters later—or, more conveniently, blaming old piñata Merkle for the drop. Within five minutes of the end of the game, the sportswriters already had a nickname for it—“Snodgrass’ $30,000 Muff”—commemorating the total difference between winner’s share and loser’s share that was, to be precise, $29,514.34. (A further irony: It cost each individual Giant $1,458.22—which, in 2008 dollars, would amount to exactly $30,958.11.)

  The lead paragraph in the next day’s New York Times, written without a byline by Harry Cross, would reflect much of the coverage:

  Write in the pages of world’s series baseball history the name of Snodgrass. Write it large and black. Not as a hero; truly not. Put him rather with Merkle, who was in such a hurry that he gave away a National League championship. Snodgrass was in such a hurry that he gave away a world championship. It was because of Snodgrass’ generous muff of an easy fly in the tenth inning that the decisive game of the world’s series went to the Boston Red Sox this afternoon by a score of 3 to 2, instead of to the New York Giants by a score of 2 to 1 …

  Anger was not the foremost emotion for every scribe, though. As he typed out close to two hundred inches of copy for the New York Globe, Sid Mercer occasionally had to pause because he was weeping uncontrollably. On the bench, Wilbert Robinson slumped, virtually paralyzed, unable to move for half an hour. In a field box, fat Harry Sparrow, McGraw’s friend and bodyguard, reacted the same way, and so did many of McGraw’s Broadway friends, just staring blankly into space, hurting for their friend, knowing how much a second World Series would mean to him.

  McGraw himself, as was his wont, was remarkably upbeat, his disappointment subservient to his belief that—much as a fictional manager named Jimmy Dugan would say on a movie screen eight decades later—there was no crying in baseball, that there was no shame in losing to a great baseball team in the tenth inning of the eighth game of the World Series. His first priority was to seek out Mathewson, who had been magnificent all afternoon, and all Series long, pitching to an ERA of 0.94 across twenty-eight and two-thirds innings even though he would take an 0–2 record away from his week’s work. Mathewson’s eyes were red and moist, but they were tears of exhaustion rather than sadness. McGraw, his own heart breaking, wrapped Mathewson with both arms, then shook his hand firmly.

  “I never seen a gamer pitcher than you, son,” McGraw rasped. “You’re the greatest boxman that the world’s ever seen, I wish I had ten more just like you. It’s a bad day for the Giants, but it’s a wondrous one for you.” And in a classy showing of sportsmanship, the Boston fans took two minutes from their celebration to agree with McGraw: As Matty slowly pulled his sweater on, they roared their approval and offered up three cheers for the great pitcher. Later, after getting showered and dressed (and playing a few hands of therapeutic bridge in the clubhouse), Matty emerged to find Sox fans lined up to pump his hand and wish him well as he walked to the taxi stand outside Fenway.

  By then, McGraw had already found more trouble than he bargained for. Sprinting across the field to shake hands with Stahl, a Boston fan ran into McGraw and almost tipped him into the bench pit. McGraw turned and delivered a straight left, knocking the fan into the pit instead. By the time he reached the Sox’ manager his hand was bleeding, and Stahl had to chuckle at the sight even as he was touched by McGraw’s words: “I want to congratulate you and the Boston team on this victory,” he said. “It was a tough battle and all the credit that goes to the victor belongs to you and your team.”

  “Thank you, Mr. McGraw,” Stahl said. Somewhere in the past eight days, he’d lost the stomach to call the man Muggsy.

  The Sox were euphoric; all the old quarrels were forgotten, all the lingering bitterness. Wood sought out O’Brien, shook his hand, asked for forgiveness for being quick-tempered; O’Brien told him to forget it, and invited him a
nd Speaker to come see him sing an Irish tenor solo at the National Theater in six days. Wood said they’d be honored to attend, and they did. Carrigan and Cady shook hands, burying their bitterness. Speaker, Yerkes, and Engle, three of the primary figures in the tenth-inning rally, were detained on the field and kept from the celebrating by a bevy of women fans who left the stands to plant kisses on their cheeks; none seemed to mind.

  And while other Royal Rooters offered their own salutes and tributes off-campus, the biggest Rooter of all entered the clubhouse, his cheeks crimson with triumph, announced officially a civic party the next day at Faneuil Hall while all but falling over himself to gush loudly and proudly in the midst of his most-favored constituents: “I want to congratulate each and every member of this team for the grand victory scored today,” John Fitzgerald roared. “It is a remarkable achievement when one considers that Boston, one-sixth the population of New York, has had the unflinching backing of its citizens. Tomorrow I hope to be able to show what the city thinks of you.”

  There would be plenty of time for that. Everyone loves a winner.

  It’s hard to be on the other side. Daniel Connon finally conceded as much, after Yerkes’s run was posted on the Newark Evening News scoreboard, when he walked two blocks to a nearby hospital and had doctors examine him. They decided his heart was sound, but his nerves seemed frayed.

  Three thousand miles away, just after the final score was posted, someone in the crowd yelled at the man with the megaphone working the Los Angeles Times scoreboard.