by Frank Deford
Religion aside, the Giants were just a generally unattractive lot. Mrs. McGraw would call them “ne’er-do-wells, knockers, shirkers and loafers.” Mathewson, the young sportsman, was at sea in their company. After his spectacular 1901, he had gotten a substantial raise to thirty-five hundred dollars, but despite pitching a shutout before an overflow crowd in the opener, he couldn’t duplicate his previous year’s success. As the season wore on, some of the more jealous Giants turned on him. When the clueless erstwhile scribe, Fogel, was relieved of his managerial scepter in June, Heinie Smith took formal command, whereupon some of the regulars prevailed on the new manager to remove Mathewson from the rotation and play him in the field. Stationed at first base then, they would purposely make bad throws to him, in the dirt, off the bag. Soon the finest hurler of his generation was actually being referred to in the press as, “Christy Mathewson, the former pitcher.”
Christy’s yearbook photo, Bucknell, 1902
Meanwhile, McGraw’s situation in Baltimore was hardly better. Before the 1902 season even began, Turkey Mike Donlin, loaded to the gills, slugged a showgirl’s escort, and then when she pleaded, “Please don’t hit him,” Turkey Mike popped her too. He was arrested, tried, and imprisoned—and, over McGraw’s protests, he was also released by the Orioles. Such ungentle-manly behavior was not the image Ban Johnson had in mind for his league’s players. Furthermore, he ordered the umpires to put the screws to Muggsy. Soon McGraw was complaining that even if an opponent merely claimed that he was being held by the belt at third, the umpire would wave him home. Rumors began to heat up that McGraw simply couldn’t survive under Johnson’s thumb and would have to take leave of the decency-encrusted American League. Johnson fanned the flames by saying that McGraw would be traitorous if he deserted Baltimore, and, with his dander up, the Little Napoleon replied with a wonderful historical mix-and-match. “So, the Julius Caesar of the league calls me a Benedict Arnold, does he?” Muggsy harumphed.
Then in late May things came to a boil when McGraw was spiked in a game against Detroit, suffering a three-inch gash below his left knee. In a rage, Muggsy attacked the Tiger who had injured him, smashing his jaw, before being carried off the field. McGraw’s innocent bride looked on in shock. “It was the first outburst of his rage that I had seen, and it wasn’t easy to watch,” she recalled. It must have been a horribly bloody scene. Johnson suspended Muggsy for five days.
The next shoe dropped on June 28 in a game against Boston, which was being umpired by McGraw’s special bête noire, Tommy Connolly. After arguing with Connolly, who was standing between first and second, McGraw started back to the bench. He paused and, according to McGraw, only screamed back a warning: “Connolly, you’d better get out of the line. Somebody will jump you and spike you.” Maybe McGraw had somewhat embellished these remarks; maybe Connolly thought there was sufficient threat inherent within them. Whatever, he tossed McGraw out of the game.
Muggsy was livid. “I used no expletives. Nor did I do anything that would warrant my being sent to the clubhouse, yet Connolly, in a most insulting way, ordered me off the field,” he explained. “I made up my mind right there that I would no longer stand for being made a dog and refused to go.” So when McGraw continued to resist departing the diamond, Connolly forfeited the game. Accordingly, two days later, Johnson suspended him again, whereupon McGraw hastened to New York and began secret discussions with Andrew Freedman. Publicly he called the American League “a loser,” Ban Johnson “a czar,” and, for good measure, he disparaged Connie Mack’s Athletics as “white elephants.”
As Muggsy’s New York negotiations began to leak out, McGraw (still in his woe-is-me canine stage) lashed out even more at Johnson, saying: “I would be a fool to stay here and have a dog made of myself by a man who makes no pretense of investigating or giving a hearing to both sides.”
Johnson replied with contempt, even denying McGraw animal status. “The muttering of an insignificant and vindictive wasp,” he snorted.
That did it. McGraw was gone from Baltimore. He had loaned the Oriole franchise seven thousand dollars, and so he demanded that he either be reimbursed or released. “I acted fast,” he explained. “Someone would be left holding the bag, and I made up my mind that it wouldn’t be me. I simply protected myself as any business-man would.” And, most emphatically: “I did not jump.” That was very important to him. He maintained that position all his life. Even long after he died, his wife continued to argue that her husband had done nothing wrong in departing her Baltimore. “Baseball . . . is a business. It is a man’s world,” she wrote. “Perhaps a mother’s savage defense of her brood might be likened to a man’s battle to salvage wealth, position, power or whatever was in jeopardy at the time.”
Mathewson, McGraw and “Iron Man” McGinnity
McGraw himself also publicly declared: “I wish to assure Baltimore that in consideration of their kindness, I shall not tamper with any of the Baltimore Club’s players. I would not do that, because of my friendship for the people here, and because it would not be right.”
Then, promptly, he took four players—including Iron Man McGinnity—with him to New York, so eviscerating the franchise that Baltimore had to forfeit a game. Good grief, he even seduced Tom Murphy, the canny groundskeeper, into taking his gardening magic to the Polo Grounds. The New York Sun flatly called the Giants “the Baltimorized New Yorks.” The Sporting News was no less distracted by McGraw’s claims, characterizing him as “the Aguinaldo of base ball.” Since Aguinaldo was a Filipino rebel who had been a special thorn in the American army’s side, that was pretty harsh stuff, in the modern range of naming someone the “Osama bin Laden of baseball.”
Meanwhile, back in Mobtown, Ban Johnson invoked league rules and gleefully took over the Oriole franchise, which is what he had wanted to do all along. By next season, 1903, he would have a whole team of Baltimorized New Yorks in his own league. They would be called the Highlanders at first, but would become somewhat better known under their subsequent sobriquet, the Yankees.
McGraw and Johnson never exchanged another word as long as they lived.
The Giants were on a western swing when McGraw officially took over the club on July 17. He accepted an $11,000 contract, the highest in the sport to that time, topping his own record $10,000 salary with St. Louis. Promptly he cleaned house, cutting loose nine of the team’s twenty-three players. Freedman was apoplectic, since this meant having to eat $14,000 in salaries, but he had signed over authority to McGraw, and Muggsy unabashedly took charge. If there had been any doubt on Freedman’s part, this probably sealed his decision to get out of the baseball business. Tammany had been kicked out of power in the previous November’s election, and Freedman realized that he no longer possessed the authority to prohibit the construction of a new ballpark, which had previously been a key factor in keeping the American League out of New York. It was bad enough that Brooklyn had a franchise to rival his Giants, but now another competitor loomed in Manhattan.
The team was just as shook up at McGraw’s hovering presence as was the owner. “The New-Yorks are suffering from nervousness in anticipation of the coming of manager McGraw,” wrote the World’s baseball reporter. “It is said that some of the men are dissipating, which accounts for the miserable play of the team.”
Mathewson himself was back at the pitcher’s rubber, having played his last game at first base on July 1, but when Muggsy’s purge began, a rumor started flying that McGraw was going to offload Matty to St. Louis. Wrote the Tribune: “It is said that Mathewson, the pitcher [at least he was no longer ’the former pitcher’], may be allowed to go, as it is believed that he and McGraw are not on the best of terms.” Matty allowed as how that was all news to him, but given the two men’s contrasting personalities, it is certainly understandable that there was an assumption that he couldn’t tolerate his new manager. As for McGraw, he never so much as contemplated getting rid of Mathewson. On the contrary, he called Matty’s brief exile from pitching “shee
r insanity,” adding that “any man who did that should be locked up.”
And then the Baltimorized Giants returned from their western road swing to the Polo Grounds, and, essentially, baseball began for real in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. For his first game as Giants’ manager on Saturday, July 19, 1902, McGraw started the redoubtable McGinnity. After a succession of handfuls for crowds, suddenly a throng of sixteen thousand materialized, almost filling the park. McGraw placed himself at shortstop and went one-for-three. “It is impossible for the aggressive little baseball expert to keep out of the game,” the Times noted, and the other papers, which had been lacerating the Giants for years, suddenly were in his thrall. Even though the Giants lost 4–3, there was, it seems, overnight, a whole new spirit discernible from the press box. “The old-time Baltimore ginger infused by McGraw held out to the end,” the World cheered. The other hard-boiled diamond journalists joined the joyful chorus.
McGraw always understood how to work the press. Sports pages had begun to flourish back in the 1880s shortly before McGraw came into the game, and so he sort of grew up with them. He knew how to reel out just enough of the skinny to convince the writers that they were his confidants; also, he trusted them with selected inside tidbits. “I have never known a baseball reporter to violate a secret,” he declared near the end of his career. Indeed, one time in spring training, when his irresponsible pitcher Bugs Raymond appeared to have broken his promise and fallen off the water wagon, McGraw convened a secret jury of writers to deliver a verdict on the matter. They did. They adjudged Raymond guilty but, co-opted by being inducted into the Giants’ judicial process, none of them wrote a word about Bugs’s fall from grace.
Before McGraw came to New York, of course, Freedman had made sure that the Giants endured the worst possible press from the score or so papers in town. Worse, the Giants could be almost ignored. At that time, when athletic professionalism was still not altogether accepted, it was not uncommon for the papers to devote almost as much space to college baseball games as to the pros. College football was heavily reported in the autumn, although on a regular basis, horse racing got the biggest play of all; in the upscale broadsheets, there was also extended coverage of regattas. The new sport of auto racing spilled over into both the society pages, to report on the swells in attendance, and the news pages, where speed and death (or the threat thereof) has always commanded a broad audience. But major league baseball was a staple, even if the coverage was often captious and dismissive, and usually written in so rococo a style that, looking back, the critic Jonathan Yardley observed: “The sports pages seemed to be a bad dream by Sir Walter Scott.”
The newspaper custom bothered to identify the players only by their last names. By the same token, the writers themselves were almost never given bylines. (The most famous was Bat Masterson, the old gunslinger, who had decamped to New York earlier in ’02, having hung up his six-shooters to become both a deputy U.S. marshal, as appointed by Teddy Roosevelt, and a sports columnist with the Morning Telegram. Masterson’s sports specialty was boxing, though.)
In the event, as soon as McGraw came to town, the Giants were accorded much greater and more enthusiastic coverage. After all, McGraw was, simply, news. Mathewson, as we shall see, was not so much news as he was a reliable feature, like the weather or the comic strips. He could do no wrong. As newspapers began to use players’ first names, many of them, even as commonplace as “Jack,” say, or “Bill,” would be referred to, like that, in quotation marks. Mathewson’s never was so adorned. It was almost as if “Matty” was a title. Here, for example, is a newspaper photo caption of the Giants’ 1913 starters: “Tesreau, Matty, Marquard and Demaree.” And when Matty won, as he usually did, this was proof again that some good things you could count on—even in dog-eat-dog Noo Yawk. If Matty lost, it was an aberration that must be explained, invariably chalked up to bum luck or poor hitting or fielding by his ungrateful teammates. But somehow, Matty wasn’t really news in the conventional sense. He was just Matty.
It was the custom at that time for major league teams to employ many of their off days picking up extra money playing local sandlot nines, and so it was that when McGraw first took over the Giants and sent Mathewson to the pitcher’s box it was, of all things, against the Orange Athletic Club, over in New Jersey. That was July 22. Matty gave up a run to the amateurs in the very first inning, too, and while it is unclear how long McGraw used him, the Giants eventually prevailed 3–2, and McGraw was satisfied enough to give Matty a start two days later in Brooklyn. That was the real beginning of their beautiful friendship, as Mathewson shut out the home team 2–0 on a five-hitter. The Sun even proclaimed that “it was the most perplexing pitching snag the Brooklynites have struck this season.” Not only that, but now the World lauded the erstwhile sluggish Giants as “McGraw’s hustlers.”
However, as nice as any victory and the team’s shiny new image was, McGraw had already written off 1902. He spent much of the balance of the season away from the team, scouting prospects and trade bait for 1903. The team managed to win only forty-eight games, finishing fifty-three and a half games behind the Pirates. Mathewson led the staff with fourteen victories, and although he lost seventeen games, he pitched eight shutouts and posted an earned run average of 2.11. On his off days, closely monitoring Iron Man McGinnity when he pitched, Matty even picked up a much better change-up. It would be another thirteen years before Mathewson would win less than twenty games or lose more games than he won in a season. Anyway, he was going home to Pennsylvania with hopes of convincing Jane to become his wife.
As for McGraw, he was especially pleased that, at the end of the season, John Brush, “the Hoosier Wanamaker,” unloaded his controlling interest in the Cincinnati Reds and bought the Giants from Freedman. Brush was a semi-invalid who walked with a cane, suffering as he was from rheumatism and some disease of the nervous system (that possibly had been caused by syphilis). He was not the easiest of men, but, of course, compared to Freedman he was a dreamboat. McGraw adored him. The fact that Brush despised Ban Johnson and his renegade American League only marginally less than did Muggsy bound the two men together stronger than any hoops of steel ever could. Ironically, it was Brush who had sought “purification” on the field a few years earlier, but now that he and McGraw were on the same team, he accommodated himself to Muggsy’s rude antics. The only McGravian behavorial flaw that Brush never seems to have been able to turn a blind eye to was the manager’s penchant for going out to the track and playing a few races before heading to the Polo Grounds for games that usually started at three-thirty or four.
McGraw was even a partner of Brush’s of a sort, for when Freedman unloaded the team, Mrs. McGraw had purchased four shares of the Giants at $250 apiece. The McGraws were now happily partaking of New York nightlife. They were ensconced in a suite at the Victoria Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, so high up they could barely hear the cloppety-clop of the horse-drawn carriages that still plied the street. Instead, the McGraws might hear the putt-putt sounds of the newfangled “devil wagons” that came to be called cars, or the grand new twenty-four-passenger double-decker buses that the Fifth Avenue Coach Company had started to run.
From the vantage of their parlor, though, the McGraws could watch the construction of a spectacular new skyscraper, the Flat-iron Building, rising twenty-one stories toward the heavens down on Twenty-third Street. On the street there, the sharpies would lollygag about outside the Flatiron, leering at the women walking by. There was plenty of opportunity. A third of the clerical workers in New York were now female; why, nineteenth-century shopgirls had become twentieth-century saleswomen. What the guys standing on the corner of Twenty-third and Broadway were waiting for were the by-products of the downdrafts common to the area. With a good gust, one that would blow up a skirt enough to reveal bare ankles, the fellas would all call out: “Twenty-three skidoo!”
McGraw might not have approved. Curiously, he was always very old-fashioned, e
ven somewhat puritanical, when it came to the fairer sex. Now, of course, his own better half, like most respectable women, was still in long skirts—their hems invariably dirtied as they walked the sidewalks of New York. After all, sanitation workers still had to deal with thousands of gallons of horse urine and thousands of tons of horse manure every day, East Side, West Side, all around town.
But things were beginning to change. With the new century, skirts that didn’t reach quite all the way to the ground, called “rainy-daisies,” were starting to be accepted in fast company. Women were taking to exercise, riding the newfangled bicycles. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true . . .” And out in Brooklyn, Coney Island had a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel and new amusement parks, and the beaches were thronged with women of all shapes and sizes in the newest risqué bathing costumes. Richard K. Fox, editor of the Police Gazette, the popular men’s journal that thrived on three attractions—crime, sex, and boxing—offered this observation: “If a man is troubled with illusions concerning the female form divine, and wishes to be rid of those illusions, he should go to Coney Island and closely watch the thousands of women who bathe there every Sunday.”
Sunday baseball in New York, however, was still considered a sinful temptation for the workingman and would not be allowed for many more years. Matty’s mother, Minerva, certainly subscribed to that view, and Matty listened to his mother.