The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  “Hey!” the voice yelled. “Who committed the error on Engle?”

  The announcer scanned his papers, tried to decipher the strange-sounding name, then lifted his megaphone to the sky.

  “The center fielder,” he intoned. “Snodgrass.”

  Upon hearing that, one of the spectators fainted immediately, and it wasn’t until she was on her way to a downtown hospital that Adie Snodgrass came to, and whispered, “My poor boy.”

  Epilogue

  We hold no beef with what he’s done

  Nor classic “bone” he may have spun

  No booster for a man who’s down

  Who helped to lose the great game’s crown

  But from the throng with glaring glim

  Who curse what happened there, let him

  Who’s yet to make his first mistake

  Step up and pan him for the break …

  —GRANTLAND RICE, NEW YORK EVENING MAIL,

  OCTOBER 18, 1912

  ALL WAS FORGIVEN the next day in Boston. Everyone was friends again. At Faneuil Hall, the City of Boston put on the wildest celebration that anyone could remember, beginning with a parade, ending with Fitzgerald presenting keys to the city after making an impassioned valedictory praising the world champion Speed Boys.

  “I want you to be as quiet as possible,” he told the assembled masses, several hundred thousand of whom would take part in some segment of the downtown celebration that day. “Faneuil Hall is crowded as I never saw it before. We meet here to honor the team, which has worn the Boston uniform in the big cities of the country. It has won after the hardest of seasons and in the World Series then only in the tenth inning of the last game.”

  The crowd halted him here, cheering ever louder, drowning out even the loudest notes of one of the loudest orators of the day. Honey Fitz had to plead with them to simmer down so he could talk and get out of the way.

  “I am proud to have the honor to preside at this meeting to congratulate Manager Stahl. I am not here as Mayor of Boston but to thank the team in the name of the national game. I also want to say that the players are entitled to their share of the fifth game which is morally theirs.”

  With this, the crowd truly went ballistic, and the players did, too, and there was little doubt that when the next mayoral election rolled around in two years, there were at least twenty-three men who would vote a straight Democratic ticket.

  Jake Stahl took the stage.

  “This has been a stiff year for us,” he said. “I want to thank the Rooters for helping us, as they did. You all know what good they did for us.”

  The roar from the crowd said that they knew well, especially since the loudest cheers of all came from the temporarily lapsed Rooters themselves, now fully restored to the faith. That had been assured earlier in the morning when McAleer, chastened at the embarrassment that the greatest game in baseball’s history to that point had been witnessed by 17,000 empty seats, had issued a statement expressing abject contrition:

  “On behalf of the Boston American League Baseball Club, I desire to make an apology to the mayor of Boston and the Boston Rooters for the failure to secure the seats at the fourth game of the world’s series in Boston. We regret very much that this unfortunate affair should have occurred to mar what was on every respect the most sensational series of games ever played and we appreciate the splendid support and encouragement given the Red Sox in their efforts to bring Boston the championship of the world. A mistake was made in not holding the usual seats until game time but I can assure Mayor Fitzgerald and all the Royal Rooters it was unintentional.”

  Honey Fitz, on behalf of the Rooters and Red Sox fans across New England, accepted the owner’s apology, but with a caveat: “Mr. McAleer,” he said, “I urge you to re-consider raising ticket prices for next year’s Boston games at Fenway Park. I further urge you to make available a certain number of twenty-five-cent tickets at every home game so every citizen in Massachusetts and beyond who wants to see the Red Sox can see the Red Sox.”

  You had to give the mayor this: He was damn good at his job.

  The Giants’ disappointment was neutralized somewhat within minutes of the team train pulling out of Back Bay Station for the final time, for that is when National Commission secretary John E. Bruce walked over to McGraw’s seat and ripped a bank check out of his leather folder, payable to the manager in the amount of $59,028.68. The next day, Stahl would receive his own check in the amount of $88,543.02 and deposit it in his account in the State Street Trust Company. It would have probably upset Giants fans to know just how soothing that payment was to the ballplayers’ nerves, since so many of the people who watched these games, fretted over them, lived over them, died over them, had yet to get a good night’s sleep during the whole Series, while most of the Giants were asleep within thirty minutes of stepping on the train.

  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  “We are professionals,” Christy Mathewson said during the Series. “The name of the game is to get paid, and paid a fair wage. Winning and losing is important. But money feeds our family.”

  Maybe the Christian Gentleman would have fit in during the next century far better than he—or anyone else—could ever have imagined.

  ———

  Mathewson would remain one of baseball’s most dominant talents for two more seasons, winning twenty-five more games in 1913 and twenty-four in 1914, but in that last year his ERA ballooned to 3.00, the worst since his six-game cameo as a rookie in 1900. By 1916, his arm all but ruined, McGraw agreed to trade his old friend to the Cincinnati Reds for a package of players that would include, ironically, Buck Herzog, who in 1914 had been named Cincinnati’s player-manager. But the Reds were sitting in seventh place in late July, and so Herzog received a double dose of bad news: Not only was he losing his job as the Reds’ skipper, he was going back to New York to play for McGraw, whom he loathed. But Mathewson, understanding McGraw was only going to leave the Polo Grounds’ manager’s office at gunpoint, eagerly accepted the trade, knowing he’d finally get a chance at running a club. And he did very well, too, elevating the Reds from seventh to fourth to third, to the point where they would make a successful run at the 1919 National League pennant.

  By then, however, Mathewson would be out of office and in uniform, having volunteered for the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service in August 1918, at the height of the Great War, and earning the rank of captain. It was yet another chapter in the fabled legend of Matty, who was just about to turn thirty-eight and could easily have avoided service without much criticism. It was a fateful decision. After arriving in France, Mathewson was assigned to examine ammunition dumps left behind by the Germans and while doing so was exposed to residual deposits of mustard gas. Already suffering from the flu, the encounter with the deadly poison weakened him greatly, and after he was discharged he would spend much of the rest of his life suffering from tuberculosis. Though he returned briefly to the Giants as a pitching coach, he would split his declining days at his home in Saranac Lake, New York, and at the Trudeau Sanitarium on the other side of the city before dying on October 7, 1925, at the age of forty-five.

  By then, his good friend McGraw had finally risen from a decade and a half of frustration to regain his reign as baseball’s preeminent manager. After losing a third straight World Series—the capital letters permanent now—in 1913 to the Athletics, McGraw oversaw a steep decline to last place in 1915 that nearly cost him his Polo Grounds fiefdom, yet by 1917 the Giants were back in the World Series (and losing a fourth straight Classic, this time to the White Sox) before finally, in 1921 and 1922, winning McGraw his second and third Series, both of them extra delicious as they came at the expense of the Yankees (still paying rent to the Giants at the Polo Grounds) and their newly acquired slugger, Babe Ruth.

  That was the final high point, however, in a career awash with them. By 1923, the Yankees built their own gleaming baseball palace on the other side of the Harlem River and defeated the Gian
ts in six games, and it was the start of both a literal and a lyrical takeover by the American League club, which would go on to win nineteen more championships in the next forty years, establishing the kind of dominant dynasty that McGraw tried, and failed, to build. McGraw grew embittered at this turn of events and also by Ruth’s emergence, which rendered his brand of “inside baseball” quaint and outdated. Within a few years he spitefully built a grandstand extension that was hardly needed to meet public demand, but did serve to blunt out the sight of Yankee Stadium sitting in the horizon beyond the Polo Grounds’ grandstand. He retired abruptly from the Giants on June 3, 1932, and took one final spasm of satisfaction in the fact that his announcement wound up dwarfing the news that Lou Gehrig of the hated Yankees had swatted four home runs the same day. Much as his wife had feared, though, without baseball McGraw found he had little to live for; he died less than twenty months later, on February 25, 1934, six weeks before his sixty-first birthday.

  By then, Tris Speaker had not only completed an extraordinary playing career, he’d finished what could well have been one of the greatest managerial careers, too, if not short-circuited by one terrible lapse of judgment.

  In 1914, Speaker had resisted the advances of the Federal League, the start-up that not only hoped to earn a place as the “third” major league but also allowed players to dream that they could finally earn a salary commensurate with their worth and their talent. Dozens of players jumped to the new league, which would barely last two seasons, but Speaker stayed in Boston thanks to a two-year contract awarded by new owner Joseph Lannin that paid him the lordly sum of $18,000 a year. Speaker rewarded Lannin’s faith by anchoring another Red Sox championship team in 1915, a five-game stomping of the Philadelphia Phillies.

  Lannin rewarded Speaker’s loyalty by cutting his salary in half for 1916.

  The Federal League was dead. Refugee players by the dozen were taking whatever they could get from their old teams (if they were welcome back at all), and there was no place for Speaker to play if he wasn’t willing to play for $9,000. That was also roughly what Lannin offered Speaker’s best friend, Joe Wood, but that was an entirely different circumstance.

  While Speaker had continued to blossom after 1912, Wood’s spectacular starship of a career began a rapid descent almost immediately. He’d feasted on his triumphs that year and also spent the winter allowing the thumb he’d hurt in the last inning of the last game to heal completely. By the time the Sox reconvened in Hot Springs, the smoke was back in Smoky Joe’s arm and he was ready for an encore.

  “Then,” he would recall some fifty years later, “it happened.”

  It was a routine play during pitchers’ fielding practice, the most basic and most mundane part of any spring training morning. He went to field a ground ball, slipped on wet grass, and fell square on the thumb. The same thumb. His pitching thumb. Attached to that meal-ticket arm. It was immediately encased in a cast, kept there for three weeks. Of course, it needed more time to heal; of course, the Sox couldn’t afford Wood such a luxury, and besides: Wood was barely twenty-three years old. He was young. Indestructible. Bulletproof.

  Finished.

  “I don’t know whether I tried to pitch too soon after that, or whether maybe something happened in my shoulder at the same time, but whatever it was, I never pitched again without a terrific amount of pain in my right shoulder,” he said years later. “Never again.”

  After winning those thirty-four games in 1912, Wood would win only thirty-six more the rest of his career. When he could lift his arm to throw he could still twirl magic, but sometimes he would have to take two weeks off in between starts. For the champion Sox of 1915 he somehow managed to grit his way to a 15–5 record and a career-best 1.49 ERA but he struck out only sixty-three in 157⅓ innings and he was in agony; he didn’t make one appearance in the World Series. And when Lannin decided to play hardball with him the next spring, Wood decided to go to Pennsylvania and leave baseball behind.

  Speaker, however, was going nowhere except to Cleveland, which is where Lannin traded him just before the start of the season. In Boston, the outrage was palpable, almost mutinous. In truth, in real time it far surpassed the level of indignation that another owner’s trade of another star would generate four and a half years later, when Harry Frazee famously sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. And while the Red Sox would survive without Speaker, winning two more titles in 1916 and 1918, Speaker would also gain a measure of revenge, surpassing a .380 average four different times, single-handedly elevating the Indians to a championship in 1920 when he had his most explosive season, a .388 average with 107 RBIs, 137 runs scored, and 214 hits. By then, he had also been named manager of the team and as such had lured back to the game his oldest and dearest friend, Joe Wood … as an outfielder. It was a triumphant reunion, and even if Wood never approached his past level of pitching greatness he would hit .283 in close to 2,000 major league at-bats. Wood would become a longtime baseball coach at Yale following his 1922 retirement, and would spend the rest of his life—and he lived to age ninety-five—hearing fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers tell their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren: “You see that old man over there? That was Smoky Joe Wood. He used to be the greatest pitcher who ever lived.”

  Speaker himself could easily have become one of the greatest managers who ever lived, such was his brain for the game and the respect he commanded from players who weren’t a fraction as accomplished as he. From 1919 to 1926 he managed 1,139 games and won 617 of them, a winning percentage of .543 that’s far higher than Connie Mack (.486), Casey Stengel (.508), Leo Durocher (.540), Tony La Russa (.534), and Tommy Lasorda (.526), to name just five managers who are either in the Hall of Fame or sure to wind up there. But in 1926 an old, embittered pitcher named Dutch Leonard all but drove a stake through that career by charging Speaker, Wood, and Ty Cobb with fixing a game late in the 1919 season.

  It was the wrong thing to stand accused of in that rigid law-and-order baseball time. Baseball had a commissioner named Kenesaw Mountain Landis, an old federal judge brought into office by terrified owners in the wake of the 1919 World Series, won by Christy Mathewson’s old Reds team, thrown by the Chicago White Sox, and masterminded by John McGraw’s (and Beansie Rosenthal’s) old business partner, Arnold Rothstein. Eight of the Sox players who’d been accused (and acquitted) of fixing the Series were unceremoniously banned from the game for life by Landis, whose zero-tolerance policy led directly to the creation of Rule Twenty-one, which clearly spelled out the consequences of gambling on the sport and would, beginning in 1927, hang inside every clubhouse in every stadium forever. Leonard, angry with Cobb (by then managing the Tigers) for allegedly running him out of baseball, and with Speaker (an old teammate on the Red Sox for three seasons) for not picking him up after Cobb had released him, said he had possession of letters from Wood and Cobb that implicated themselves (and Speaker, by proxy) of fixing a game on the last day of that same, fateful 1919 season.

  It seems that on the afternoon of September 24, 1919, Leonard and Cobb of the Tigers met under the stands at Detroit’s Navin Field to “talk baseball” with Wood and Speaker of the Indians. There, Cobb talked about how much he wanted his team to finish “in the money,” which meant climbing into third place. And a win the next day over Cleveland (which had already clinched second-place money) would all but ensure that. Speaker, according to Leonard, told Cobb he “needn’t worry about tomorrow’s game. You’ll win tomorrow.” And the Tigers did win the game, 9–5, and did finish in third place. And, according to Leonard, the other three at the meeting had all benefited from this arrangement by placing calls to bookies—though not as many as they’d hoped.

  When the charges were leaked to the public, Cobb and Speaker were both immediately dismissed from their jobs. They were spared any kind of Black Sox–level punishment mainly because Leonard refused to appear at hearings in January of 1927, forcing Landis to clear them (and Wood). But while Speaker would manage in
the minor leagues for two years with Newark, and while he’d become a part owner of the American Association, a top Triple-A-level minor league for a while, he was done with the major leagues for good.

  However, because Landis has spared him from baseball’s blacklist, Speaker was able to secure an important measure of immortality that four other participants in the 1912 World Series enjoyed. In 1936, Christy Mathewson had been selected as one of six original inductees into the newly chartered National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. A year later, he would be joined by John McGraw and by Tris Speaker; it would take another thirty-four years, but in 1971 both Harry Hooper and Rube Marquard joined them in Cooperstown and, happily, both men were still alive. Marquard, at eighty-four, spent much of his post-baseball life working the pari-mutuel windows at racetracks in New York and Baltimore (which would no doubt have made his beloved manager, McGraw the horse lover, beam with as much pride as if he’d tossed a two-hitter), while Hooper, at eighty-three, was appointed the Postmaster of Capitola, California, by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 and served in that capacity for twenty-four years.

  On the eve of his induction, Marquard sat with a reporter and said, “Those eight games in 1912 were as good as it gets, as good as baseball gets. They wanted to beat us so bad, you could see it in their eyes. We wanted to beat them so bad that it still hurts me to think of us coming up short. But those were …”

  He paused, emotion catching his voice.

  “Those were glorious times, glorious times. I wish we could gather everyone together and play a game number nine tomorrow.…”

  Unlike his manager, Giants owner John T. Brush would never see his beloved Giants win another world championship. Immediately after the series, Brush caused something of a firestorm when he refused to hand over to the National League the one-quarter of the $147,028.85 in profits that was part of the standard league agreement. “I cannot understand what Brush’s contention is,” Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss said, “but perhaps he’ll explain at the December meeting.” He never got the chance. Weakened terribly, his doctors urged him to take a train to Pasadena, where the warm weather might restore his strength, but in the early-morning hours of November 26 he died near Seeburger, Missouri. He was sixty-seven years old.