The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  Despite his attempts to regain favor with the citizens of Boston, James McAleer was as good as dead as the Red Sox’ principal owner. His relationship with Jake Stahl, never a good one, exploded in 1913 when the Red Sox got off to a slow start and McAleer couldn’t help himself from meddling. Then, in July, McAleer caught wind that Stahl was angling to replace him as the club president—not entirely stunning, since it was, after all, Stahl’s own father-in-law who’d helped to quietly put the Sox’ ownership group together. Feeling threatened, McAleer fired Stahl, who was more than happy to return to life as a banker. Ban Johnson, furious at McAleer’s impetuousness, decided then and there that he would find a new group to own the Sox, and soon he would steer the club toward Joseph Lannin. McAleer’s last years were lonely and unhappy, and on April 28, 1931, suffering from cancer, he was listening to a baseball game on the radio when a spasm of pain pushed him to the bathroom, where he loaded a pistol and shot himself dead at age sixty-nine. Stahl, his sparring partner, would live a prosperous, if sadly brief, life as a bank executive, dying of tuberculosis at age forty-three in 1922.

  Both team captains aspired to be big-league managers, but only Heinie Wagner would get that chance, and it was an unfortunate one: By 1930 the Red Sox were barely surviving as a franchise, years of mismanagement and bad baseball reducing the club to a shell of its former glories, and while Wagner still had great passion and energy for the game, the best he could do in one year at the helm was a 52–102 record and last place in the American League, some fifty games behind pennant-winning Philadelphia. And while Doyle remained a loyal Giant for more than twenty years after retiring as a player in 1920, managing farm clubs in Nashville and Toronto, he was passed over in favor of Bill Terry when McGraw finally retired in 1932, and by the time Terry retired Doyle was fifty-five years old and starting to suffer the effects of all those long-ago days and nights spent in the coal mines of rural Illinois. Within a year he had full-blown tuberculosis, and it was Jane Mathewson, Big Six’s widow, who suggested that Doyle move to Saranac Lake, Matty’s final home, to be treated at Trudeau, the same sanitarium where Mathewson had spent so many of his final days. Unlike his idol, however, Doyle was destined to live a long life, staying in Saranac Lake until his death at age eighty-eight in 1974.

  Fred Merkle never could outrun his slew of nicknames—“Bonehead,” “Leather Skull,” “Ivory Pate”—and, however unfairly, his failure to ignore Mathewson and catch Speaker’s ninth-inning pop-up in Game Eight only added to his sad legacy. Luck was just never much on Merkle’s side; in 1926, after finishing his playing career as a Yankee and spending a year as a coach, he was replaced by Art Fletcher—his old teammate, the shortstop who nearly blew Game Two of the ’12 Series all by himself with his malfunctioning glove—and so it was Fletcher, and not Merkle, who took part in ten World Series between 1926 and 1943 (and cashed the checks that went along with them), and it was Merkle who wound up suffering during the darkest days of the Depression, grinding jobs at the Works Progress Administration and, later, with a fishing manufacturer. Whenever newspapermen would approach to do where-are-they-now features, he would slam the door in their face, and it wasn’t until 1949 when he finally accepted an invitation to attend a Dodgers game at Ebbets Field that he started to loosen his grip on bitterness. Dodgers announcer Red Barber saw him crying during the game, and Merkle told him, “Past sins should be forgotten. I’ve been paying forty years.” He died seven years later, at age sixty-seven.

  Boston’s three unsung World Series heroes each enjoyed the spoils of their success completely and unabashedly. Olaf Henriksen joined a vaudeville troupe and never again had to worry about buying a meal inside the Boston city limits. Larry Gardner, who drove in the winning run with his sacrifice fly, admitted, “I was disappointed at first because I thought the ball was going out. But then when I saw Yerkes tag up, then score to end it, I realized it meant $4,024.68, just about double my earnings for the year. And that was just fine by me.” After his playing career he returned to his alma mater, the University of Vermont, and coached baseball for twenty years before becoming the school’s athletic director. When he died at eighty-nine in 1976, he left his body to the university’s Department of Anatomy, a proud Vermonter, quite literally, from cradle to grave. And while Hugh Bedient spent much of the 1912–1913 off-season feted from one part of western New York to the other, he always knew baseball wouldn’t sink its hooks into him forever. After his sparkling 20–9 rookie season, he turned in records of 15–14 and 8–12 with the Sox the next two years, then essentially played in his backyard when he jumped to the Buffalo Blues of the Federal League in 1915, going 16–18 for a sixth-place club and calling it quits at age twenty-five. He left with no regrets, with a scrapbook overflowing with clippings from that splendid 1912 season, and with regular appearances in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for his forty-two-strikeout performance against Corry all those years ago.

  “I was going good and felt fine,” Bedient would explain to his local newspaper many years later. “I really can’t explain why I quit but I felt the strain of trying to produce every fourth day would be a little too much so I came home.”

  That was one end of the spectrum. On the other resided Duffy Lewis, proprieter of “Duffy’s Cliff,” one-third of the “Million-Dollar Outfield,” and likely the only man who saw Babe Ruth’s first major-league home run (on May 6, 1915, when Ruth was pitching and Lewis was playing for the Red Sox against the Yankees at the Polo Grounds) and his 714th and final home run (on May 25, 1935, with Ruth playing and Lewis coaching for the Boston Braves against the Pirates at Forbes Field). A year later, he became the team’s traveling secretary and stayed with the team for twenty-six years, following the franchise to Milwaukee. But he never severed ties with the Red Sox. In 1962, he attended a celebration of Fenway Park’s fiftieth birthday alongside most of the surviving members of the Speed Boys, and in 1975, the Red Sox asked Lewis, by then eighty-seven, to throw out the first ball on Opening Day to honor the team’s seventy-fifth season. Six months later, Lewis repeated that honor before Game Six of the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Some have tried to call that twelve-inning, 7–6 Red Sox victory the greatest game ever played.

  But Duffy Lewis and forty-four other members of the 1912 Red Sox and 1912 Giants would probably all beg to differ.

  Theodore Roosevelt would recover from his wounds, but his campaign never did get off the ground fully. Always at odds with the Bull Moosers, the Republicans in 1912—knowing they had zero hope of getting their own man, William Howard Taft, reelected—made it their mission to make sure Roosevelt wouldn’t be able to secure a third term, and at that they succeeded. Although taken together, Roosevelt and Taft would win 50.6 percent of the vote—far outpolling Woodrow Wilson’s popular tally by 1.3 million votes—it was an electoral landslide for the bespectacled governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton University, Wilson garnering 435 electoral votes to only eighty-eight for Roosevelt and a paltry eight for Taft, who would now be free to watch as many baseball games as his oversized heart desired. John Flammang Schrank, the man who shot Roosevelt, was quickly declared insane by doctors and would spend the remaining thirty-one years of his life at Central State Mental Hospital in Waupon, Wisconsin, forever proclaiming the justness of his cause trying to prevent a man from running for a third term in office. Ironically, he would live long enough to see Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore’s cousin, become the only man ever to secure a third term—and he would die less than fourteen months before he would win a fourth.

  In Boston, anyway, it is unlikely that any of the candidates could have beaten John Fitzgerald, who was at the peak of his powers that October of 1912, with his eye on ever-higher offices. But for all the friends Honey Fitz made along the way—notably Nuf Ced McGreevy, whose own business would thrive until the advent of Prohibition eight years later—he also accrued a substantial list of enemies, among them James Michael Curley, the upstart boss of the city’s South Side. Fitzgerald badly
wanted to serve another term as mayor starting in 1914, but Curley wanted the job, too, and wasn’t above going on the lecture circuit of Boston, weighing in on such matters as “Great Lovers: from Cleopatra to Tootles,” alluding to widespread (though unsubstantiated) rumors of a romance between Honey Fitz and a blond cigarette girl named Tootles Ryan. Before Curley could go through with that one, Honey Fitz withdrew.

  Four years later, Fitzgerald won back his old seat in the U.S. House of Representatives by 238 votes, but a challenge and subsequent investigation uncovered that numerous Fitzgerald votes came from falsely registered voters who didn’t live in the district, or were in the military, or were, in some cases, not living at all. There were charges of voter intimidation and other fun methods of electioneering, and his term would last exactly 231 days before he was unseated by the House and replaced by his opponent, Peter F. Tague. Far from disgraced, Fitzgerald would regularly mount ill-fated runs for governor or senator over the coming decades, including a final one, in 1942, at age seventy-nine, in which he ran merely to make life difficult for one of his oldest political nemeses, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr. In 1946, it was an indefatigable Honey Fitz who plotted out much of the main strategy (and shook most of the important hands) that helped secure a congressional seat for his twenty-nine-year-old grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. At the victory celebration, Honey Fitz danced an Irish jig, sang “Sweet Adeline”—always a favorite of the Royal Rooters—and predicted that his grandson would one day be president of the United States. He would not live to see that, dying at age eighty-seven on October 2, 1950, but you have to believe he was smiling somewhere in November of 1952 when Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., for a U.S. Senate seat. And he must have really wanted to sing a few verses of “Tessie” eight years later when Kennedy fulfilled his grandfather’s vision by winning the White House and defeating a Republican ticket headed by Richard Nixon and balanced out by … yes, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

  Nuf Ced.

  Despite the mounting evidence against him, Charles Becker believed in the power of the badge, and thus believed no self-respecting jury of honest New Yorkers would ever dare convict him of killing Beansie Rosenthal. Oh, they might well believe he did it—but they were more likely to congratulate him for ridding the earth of one more scummy gambler than convict him for it. Before the jury went out, he told the reporter from the World: “I have no fear of what will happen.” And he told the reporter from the Journal: “What happened was supposed to happen. There was no crime in it. None whatsoever. I will walk out of here when the jury comes back. You’ll see.”

  But when the jury did come back three minutes before midnight on the evening of Thursday, October 24, they had a surprise for the fallen policeman. After a deliberation of just nine hours and thirty-seven minutes, jury foreman Harold B. Skinner pronounced the verdict to the charge of murder in the first degree:

  “We find the defendant guilty as charged in the indictment.”

  With a mandatory sentence of death by electrocution.

  All during the trial Becker had exhibited an air of confidence bordering on contempt for the whole process, as if disbelieving that this rogues’ gallery of nicknames and yellow sheets could possibly sway twelve reasonable men away from his title, his authority, and his badge. Now, as all twelve men were polled and all came back with votes of guilty, Becker was transformed before the gallery and the eyes of fifty journalists to just another skell who couldn’t buy off a jury: His legs weakened, his face paled, he could control neither his muscles nor his bowels. He would recover only slightly as he was dragged from the courtroom, blowing kisses at his wife, who was overcome with grief. “At last,” said Charles Whitman, the ambitious district attorney, “the monster can sleep where he deserves to be for the rest of his short life.”

  The story didn’t end here, of course. Though Judge Goff sentenced Becker five days later to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair on December 12, just six weeks after the verdict, Becker’s appeals process took well over a year to play out, and when it did, the verdict was overturned on February 24, 1914, the Court of Appeals criticizing both Goff’s perceived pro-prosecution conduct and his handling of basic criminal procedure; in essence, Goff had become America’s first celebrity judge, and the appellate was none too pleased. In the meantime, all of Becker’s colorfully monikered accomplices—Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis, Lefty Louie, and Gyp the Blood—were found guilty and condemned to death, and as they were led to the gallows early in the morning of April 13, 1914, Dago Frank threw something of a red herring at the public, issuing his final statement as a breathing human being: “So far as I know, Becker had nothing to do with the case. It was a gambler’s fight. I told some lies on the stand to prove an alibi for the rest of the boys.”

  Undeterred, Whitman forged forward with his case even more forcefully than before. His earlier victory had greased him an all-but-certain path to a much higher office, but if he wanted to complete that journey he would need to make the conviction stick this time, and the odds were against him: Never before in the history of New York City had a man whose guilty murder verdict was overturned been reconvicted of the same crime. Bald Jack Rose was again the star witness. Judge Goff was replaced by Judge Samuel Seabury, thought by prosecutors to be a “defendant’s judge,” though he was also a crusader against corruption by such public trusts as the police department. This time, the trial took sixteen days and the result was the same: Guilty. Becker’s date with Sparky the electric chair was scheduled for July 16. But, again, Becker’s attorneys clogged the system with more appeals, more pleas, more attempts to spare the lieutenant the fate of dozens of common crooks he’d put away himself through the years. But by July 30, 1915, all those appeals were exhausted, and Becker’s last hope was that the governor of New York would take mercy on his soul and commute his death sentence to life instead.

  But Governor Charles Whitman was not inclined to uncap his pen.

  So at 5:30 A.M., with Becker dressed all in black, his trousers slit up the sides, he took the grim walk down death row. While dozens of reporters jotted down his every breath and every motion, he was quickly strapped into the chair before issuing his final words: “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.” A signal was given. A switch was thrown. Two thousand volts of electricity crackled into Becker’s body. When that failed to kill him, a second jolt of two thousand volts was applied, and then a third. It took eight minutes for the grim task to be completed, and for decades advocates who wished to abolish the death penalty would cite Charles Becker’s awful demise as one of their chief pieces of testimony.

  His bitter widow ordered a headstone on which were listed Becker’s vital statistics (July 26, 1870–July 30, 1915) and another message, etched in stone:

  MURDERED BY GOVERNOR WHITMAN.

  The police department ordered her to take it off. She did.

  Unlike his old teammate, Fred Merkle, Fred Snodgrass never allowed his defining baseball moment to consume him in anger or bitterness. Though the fans of the day could be just as cruel as fans of today, though media of the day could be just as vicious, and opponents (to say nothing of teammates) just as biting, Snodgrass was confident enough in his own talents and comfortable enough in his own skin that even the prospect of seeing his name attached to something like “The $30,000 Muff” for the next sixty-two years only made him smile, never made his blood boil, always simply amazed him at the power of the American public to remember missteps and misdeeds.

  As crushed as he was in the hours after the dropped fly, it simply wasn’t in Snodgrass’s nature to wallow in self-pity. By the next day, as he gathered with his teammates to pick up their checks, the players decided to sign a baseball for Eddie Brannick, the Giants’ courtly assistant secretary. Snodgrass’s full autograph read: “Fred ‘$1,400’ Snodgrass,” referring to the approximate amount he cost himself and each of his teammates. A few days later, after arriving in Los Angeles and consoling his poor mother, Snodgrass opened his door to local newsmen an
d offered no excuse: “I was frozen to the marrow when I muffed the fly. I didn’t seem to be able to hold the ball. It just dropped out of the glove and that was all there was to it.”

  Part of Snodgrass’s recovery, no doubt, can be credited to John McGraw, whose reputation as a win-at-all-costs megalomaniac belied the compassionate, forgiving soul that better represented who Muggsy really was. To the press in the weeks after the muff, he said of Snodgrass: “I have no complaint to make. I do not censure a player for muffing a fly ball. The loss meant more to me than anybody except myself knows. But I am not complaining. It’s the luck of the national game.” Then he repeated to the scribes a vow he’d already made to Snodgrass: Not only would he not hold the muff against him, he intended to raise Snodgrass’s salary by $1,000; a few months later, when a contract arrived at Snodgrass’s home, he saw that his manager had made good on that promise.

  Snodgrass enjoyed as prosperous a post-baseball life as any ballplayer of the time could have asked for. He played four more full years with the Giants and the Boston Braves before retiring at age twenty-eight with a lifetime .275 average. The fact that he ended his career in Boston was one of the wonderfully quirky accidents baseball sometimes provides, especially given what happened one September day in 1914, two years after the muff, a year before he was traded. The Braves were in the middle of a miracle push from last place to first place, but the Giants had their number that day, especially Snodgrass. Late in the game, a Brave started lobbing a baseball to himself and then dropping it, mocking Snodgrass, and the frustrated crowd lapped it up. Snodgrass responded by thumbing his nose at the crowd as he walked out to center field; by the time he arrived, he realized he wasn’t alone out there. A man had walked out of the stands, followed him all the way, then identified himself as James M. Curley—the newly elected mayor of Boston. Curley demanded Snodgrass’s ejection. Bill Klem, who by now was laughing uncontrollably, told the mayor to forget it and get back to the stands before he got Klem’s thumb. Snodgrass loved telling that story.