The Original Curse

by Sean Deveney; Ken Rosenthal

  And Boston had Babe Ruth, who had just wrapped up one of the great offensive seasons in memory. He batted.300, led the league with 11 home runs, was third with 66 RBIs, and finished second in on-base percentage—despite playing just 95 games. Ruth had done pretty well as a pitcher too. He had some tough-luck losses but was 13–7, second in the AL in winning percentage, and posted an ERA of just 2.22. Ruth wasn’t necessarily Barrow’s best pitcher, but he was the most consistent and the only left-hander. Whether on the mound or at bat, it was certain that Ruth would have an impact on this World Series. Mitchell was blunt in assessing Ruth’s importance. “The Sox are a one-man team,” he said, “and his name is Ruth.”15

  Ruth, for his part, seemed more excited for baseball than at any other time in 1918. Long forgotten were the hand injuries he concocted to keep himself off the mound, as well as the early July mutiny and shipyard dickering. In part greased by Frazee’s checkbook, the Ruth-Barrow relationship had been going smoothly, and Ruth was ready to do whatever Barrow needed. “Why, I’d pitch the whole series, every game if they’d let me,” Ruth said. “I hope I don’t have to sit on the bench a single inning of the series.”16

  Of course, that did not stop Ruth from his usual slate of evening pursuits. Gene Fowler was a cub reporter for the New York American in 1918. In his book Skyline, Fowler recalled looking for his friend and fellow sports reporter Harry Hochstadter on the evening before Game 1. Fowler found Hochstadter, drunk, with wine agent “Doc” Krone, whose room was populated by “sports writers, gamblers and other students of human nature.” Ruth was there and lifted Hochstadter to a couch, telling him he should switch to beer. Fowler remarked that Ruth seemed “fresh as a cornflower, although he had taken aboard many helpings of the sauce.” Fowler asked Ruth if, given his condition, he would be ready to pitch the following afternoon: “The hale young man gave me a bone-rattling slap on the back. ‘I’ll pitch ’em all if they say the word!’ The Babe then announced that he was leaving us to keep a date with someone who wore skirts. On his way out he urged that Mr. Hochstadter be given a Christian burial.”17

  Most thought the Cubs had the Red Sox overmatched in the World Series, but one figure loomed large for Boston: Babe Ruth. (SPORTING NEWS)

  The morning of September 5 seemed to blow in from the north—cold wind and gray skies had some wondering whether Game 1 would be postponed again. This would not have been taken as bad news, because it would force the first three games to be played on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and the weekend dates figured to fatten up the coffers. But though the weather threatened, it never broke. When the gates of Comiskey Park opened at 10:30 A.M., hundreds of fans rushed into the bleachers and pavilion to claim the best seats, a World Series custom. But this was not a customary World Series. As the hours leading up to the 2:30 start time neared, with the sky darkening, thousands of seats remained vacant. There was one benefit to arriving early, though—batting practice. After limbering up some, Babe Ruth stepped to the plate, facing batting practice pitcher Walt Kinney, and smacked the first pitch he saw into the right-field bleachers, drawing a big ovation. As would be the case throughout Ruth’s career, neither sauce nor skirts affected him. Fowler wrote, “The all-night escapade at Doc Krone’s left me somewhat less effective than the Babe the next afternoon.”

  Though those who mingled at Krone’s might have known that Ruth would be the starting pitcher, for most it was still a mystery. Barrow was devious. He announced his starting lineup—which was printed in several papers on the day of the game—with Ruth in left field, batting fourth, and either Joe Bush or Carl Mays as his Game 1 starter. Mitchell, too, was coy about his pitching selection, but the consensus was that the Cubs were going with Hippo Vaughn. Just before game time, Barrow had both Ruth and Bush warming up and pulled a surprise by tabbing Ruth for the start. And another surprise: he took pressure off Ruth as a hitter by batting him ninth against Vaughn. This freed Ruth to focus on pitching. Barrow gambled by inserting light-hitting 35-year-old George Whiteman in the cleanup spot.

  Barrow, it turned out, played his hand perfectly. On the mound, Ruth was shaky in the first inning, getting two outs before allowing singles to Les Mann and Dode Paskert. He walked Fred Merkle to load the bases, but Charley Pick lifted a harmless fly ball to Whiteman in left field, and the Cubs were stifled. In the third inning, Ruth got some help from the Red Sox’s defense, which was the best in baseball with a .971 fielding mark. After Max Flack singled, Charley Hollocher poked a bunt toward third, and Thomas was late to react. He hurried his throw to Stuffy McInnis, who reached around Hollocher to grab the throw for the out. It was a great play, which was no surprise—McInnis was the best first baseman in the AL and was a pioneer of using the oversize “claw” glove that all first basemen now wear. “Two out of three first basemen would have let that ball go and chased it to the stands,” Hugh Fullerton wrote. “But McInnis made the play perfectly and upset the game.”18

  Fullerton noticed something else about Game 1: Chicago shortstop Hollocher “was in the wrong position for almost every batter; allowed three balls to skim past him, which a shortstop who knew the habits of the batters probably would have grabbed.”19 That would prove costly in the fourth inning, with the game still scoreless. Dave Shean walked, and, with one out, Whiteman lined a single to left field. That put Shean on second, and to make matters worse, Hollocher and Charley Pick failed to keep Shean from taking a large lead at second base. McInnis hit a hard, one-hop single to Mann in left field, and Shean broke for home without stopping, sliding in just ahead of Mann’s throw. “Without his lead,” I. E. Sanborn reported in the Tribune, “Dave could not have counted.”20

  Ruth tottered on occasion, but he was able to focus in key situations—no matter how the Cubs tried to rattle him. Every time the Cubs were at bat, first-base coach Otto Knabe bombarded Ruth with insults and epithets (Red Sox coach Heinie Wagner did the same to Vaughn). Ruth seemed impervious to Knabe’s verbal jousts, though not because he was mentally tough, but because his hearing was fuzzy. According to the Boston Post, “Knabe picked Babe Ruth as his mark. In Game 1, he ‘rode’ the Boston southpaw through the full nine innings. Babe could not hear him. Teammates told him after the game, so Babe got dressed and went looking for Knabe, who had left.”21

  The Red Sox led, 1–0, though Ruth was having an awful day at the plate, going 0-for-3 with two mighty strikeouts. Still, the Cubs were very cautious with Ruth’s power. In the outfield, “The first time Ruth came to bat Max Flack simply turned about and marched about forty paces toward the right wall.”22 (Note Flack’s willingness to move far back with Ruth at the plate—that willingness would later change, with significant consequences.) On the mound, Ruth sailed through the rest of the game, allowing just six hits and holding on for the 1–0 win. Some reporters counted the tight pitching duel as the pinnacle of baseball excellence, but most noticed that the crowd seemed, overall, bored. Biplanes from the nearby war expo circled overhead, distracting attention from the game. The loudest cheer came during the traditional stretch in the seventh inning, when the band began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “The yawn was checked and heads were bared as the ball players turned quickly about and faced the music,” the New York Times reported. “First the song was taken up by a few, then others joined, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the very end that the onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.”23

  If the crowd was mostly quiet, it might have been because it was so sparse. Far from the hoped-for sellout crowd of 32,000 fans, the official attendance was just 19,274. Combined with the reduction in ticket prices, gate receipts were just $30,349, and the players’ share was $16,387.92—the gate had been $73,152 for the first game of the 1917 World Series, and the players’ share $39,502.08. There was no way this Series would reach Herrmann’s predicted $250,000 intake. No one quite noticed yet, but the checks for th
e players were shaping up to be much thinner than expected.

  FIFTEEN

  World Series, Games 2 and 3, Chicago

  SEPTEMBER 6–7, 1918

  Just across Michigan Avenue from the Congress Hotel, headquarters for press covering the World Series, the expansive fields of Chicago’s Grant Park had been transformed into replicas of the battlefields in Flanders, Verdun, and Cambrai. The previous month, a crew of soldiers back from the war had helped re-create battle sites as they would actually look at the front—complete with no-man’s-land, barbed wire, war planes, and miles of trenches. There was a display of war relics brought back from the Americans’ big victory at Chateau Thierry. There were concerts, parades, and speakers—ex–secretary of state William Jennings Bryan was among those who dropped in to give a speech. The big attraction, put on daily, was a battle reenactment done in a large amphitheater, showing soldiers going “over the top,” behind heavy fire; showing an advancing tank wiping out Germans; showing hand-to-hand combat and bayoneting; and showing the Red Cross picking up the bodies afterward. Thousands gathered in the amphitheater grandstand two hours before the shows started to watch the horrors of war play out by the lakefront.1 On Friday, September 6, the show drew 96,000 visitors.

  On that same afternoon, at Weeghman Park on the North Side, Medill McCormick—an Illinois congressman whose family owned the Tribune—was giving a speech. Five days later he would face Chicago mayor William Hale Thompson in the Illinois Republican Party’s senatorial primary election. Unlike Thompson, McCormick was decidedly pro war. “Like the other democracies engaged in the battle for freedom, we face a foreign foe,” he said in his speech, “and like them … we face at home the faint-hearted, the pacifists, the defeatists, the I.W.W. and the Copperheads, the American Bolshevik, who, if they had their own way, would make of America what they have made of Russia.”2 McCormick’s speech packed the stadium, drawing 20,000 loyal GOPers. (He would win the Senate seat but committed suicide when he wasn’t renominated in 1924.)

  As if the paltry gate receipts for Game 1 of the World Series weren’t bad enough, the large crowds that were gathering around Chicago provided yet another round of insult-and-injury for the Cubs and baseball in general. While the teams took batting practice before Game 2, it was clear that, despite pleasant 65-degree temperatures, the crowd was shaping up to be virtually the same as it had been the previous day—and, indeed, it would be 20,040. Baseball’s peak event, its big national showcase, was being outdrawn nearly five to one by a war reenactment. The Cubs had abandoned Weeghman Park for Comiskey’s bigger seating capacity, but, ironically, the North Side field was packed and raucous for a political speech, while the stands for the World Series remained more than one-third empty.

  Those who did show up at Comiskey were, at least, livelier from the outset of Game 2. There was no question who would be taking the mound for the Cubs: Lefty Tyler, who figured to be tough on the Red Sox. Boston had struggled with left-handers all season, but it was the crafty, soft-tossing type that really seemed to puzzle them. Vaughn was a left-hander with a great curveball, but he leaned on his fastball, and the Red Sox were better at handling fastballs (though there could be no complaints about how Vaughn pitched in the 1–0 Game 1 loss). Tyler, too, had a pretty good fastball, but his other pitches were his strengths. “Tyler has the ‘soft stuff,’ by that is meant the slow ball, the tantalizing curves, the change of pace,” Bill Bailey wrote. “He has speed, but isn’t compelled to rely on it.… The Red Sox are murder on speed, but they certainly do have their troubles with soft stuff.”3 Tyler had some extra incentive to cop a World Series victory. Though he had been a member of the 1914 champion Boston Braves, he had not gotten a win in the Series, having come out in the 11th inning of Game 3, which the Braves won in the 12th.

  Opposing Tyler, fittingly, was “Bullet Joe” Bush, who also had some 1914 World Series demons to exorcise. Bush was with the Philadelphia A’s in ’14 and actually started Game 3 against Tyler in that Series. It was Bush’s own error on a throw to first that lost the game in the 12th inning—Cubs outfielder Les Mann, then with the Braves, scored the winning run from second base. The 1918 season was the best of Bush’s career, as he greatly improved his control and cut down on his walks after the trade out of Philadelphia. He struggled late in the season and finished 15–15. Still, some felt that, with six years of experience behind him (the most on the Red Sox’s young staff), Bush was Barrow’s ace, and he got the Game 2 call. One player who did not get such a call, though, was Ruth. With Tyler on the mound, and with the right-handed Whiteman having fared well in Game 1, Barrow opted to give Whiteman another crack in left field.

  Tyler looked nervous in the game’s early going. Harry Hooper led off, and Tyler missed the corner of the plate on three straight pitches before throwing a strike. But Hooper took the next pitch for a ball and went to first base with a walk. Tyler got two strikes on the next batter, Dave Shean, and Hooper called for a hit-and-run. Shean struck out, though, leaving Hooper scurrying toward second base with the strong arm of Cubs catcher Bill Killefer ready to throw him out. So Shean leaned out over the plate after his strikeout to block Killefer. Shean and Killefer tussled, and Killefer’s throw sailed over second base. Hooper was called out because of interference, while Shean and Killefer had some dirty looks for each other. The tone of the game was set. It was going to get physical.

  That incident, combined with the goat getting of coaches Heinie Wagner and Otto Knabe that marked Game 1, had everyone agitated. The Red Sox, though, were further aggravated by the events of the second inning. Boston got the first two runners on against Tyler but failed to score. The Cubs, though, got a walk from Fred Merkle, a bunt hit from Charley Pick, and a double from Killefer to score Merkle and give the Cubs a 1–0 lead. Tyler followed Killefer and rocketed a single over second base, scoring Pick and Killefer and staking the Cubs to a three-run lead.

  When Wagner trotted to the third-base coaching box between the second and third innings, Knabe apparently let fly with a zinger that finally did get Wagner’s goat. Wagner approached the Cubs dugout, where Knabe suggested they could go under the grandstand to settle the matter. “Wagner not only went,” the Chicago Herald Examiner’s Charles Dryden reported. “He grabbed Otto by the arm and dragged him along through the dugout.” This was an unwise decision for Wagner. Knabe had not played at all that season and, out of shape, was thicker than usual. “A guy might as well try to wrestle a depth bomb,” Dryden cracked.4 The fight took place out of public view, and the details are contested (Wagner would later claim that he was punched by multiple Cubs, who said they merely tried to break up the scuffle), but some of the Red Sox charged across the field to the Cubs dugout. By the time they got there, though, the umpires had taken notice and the fracas had been defused. “Report has it that it was a Cubs’ day all around and that Wagner got only second money in the scrap,” according to The Sporting News. “At any rate, he emerged from the dugout with his uniform torn and plastered with mud, indicating he had been the under dog in a rough and tumble.”5 Thereafter, a policeman was stationed outside the dugouts.

  Given a lead, Tyler settled in. He allowed a walk to start the third but gave up just one hit in the next four innings. He got into a jam in the eighth after Wally Schang singled off Hollocher’s glove. With one out, Hooper hit a line drive to right field, and Schang took the turn at second base, heading for third. But Flack got there quickly, and, “throwing on a line with deadly accuracy, caught [Schang] far away from the base. It was a disheartening out for Boston.”6 It was typical of Flack, though, who was one of the better right fielders in the National League. The Red Sox rallied anyway, starting the ninth inning by rattling Tyler with back-to-back triples from Amos Strunk and Whiteman (yes, him again). But Tyler got Stuffy McInnis to hit a harmless grounder back to the mound, and Barrow followed with an odd choice—rather than Ruth, he sent pitcher Jean Dubuc, who was one for six at bat all season, to pinch-hit. Barrow was waiting to use Ruth in the pitcher
’s spot, but that was two batters away. Sure enough, Dubuc worked Tyler with a series of foul balls but struck out on a very wide curveball. Schang then popped out, while Ruth stood watching from the on-deck circle. The Cubs won, 3–1, and evened the Series.

  The Cubs and Red Sox put up just five runs in the first two games of the World Series, and if the trend toward low scoring kept up, managerial decisions were going to be important. Two decisions by Barrow had already played a big role—his decision to use Whiteman in the cleanup spot helped win Game 1, and his decision to hold off on using Ruth as pinch hitter helped lose Game 2. Mitchell, for his part, also had made a big decision, though it had nothing to do with the World Series. He was 40 years old, owned an apple orchard in Stow, Massachusetts, and had a three-year-old daughter with his young wife, Mabel. In less than a week, on September 12, the War Department would expand the draft registration requirement to ages 18 to 45, but given his status as a father and a farmer, Mitchell was virtually assured of being exempt from war service. Still, he announced after Game 2 that he’d signed up to join the army’s quartermaster corps in Chicago and would take the exam immediately after the World Series.

  Cubs manager Fred Mitchell’s diligent adherence to “percentage” baseball put him well ahead of his time. (CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM)

  But before then, Mitchell had another big decision to make. He had to pick a pitcher for Game 3, and though he played his choice close to the vest, it’s likely he knew what he’d do all along. Most of the “dope artists”—that class of reporter, led by Hugh Fullerton, who analyzed players and statistics scientifically to predict the Series—pegged 20-game winner Claude Hendrix as the Game 3 starter. But Mitchell was different, ahead of his time. Of course, Mitchell could not know this back in September 1918, but, in 2003, a book called Moneyball would revolutionize the way fans, media, and executives saw baseball. Moneyball described the strict adherence of one team, the Oakland A’s, to well-defined statistical principles applied to all aspects of the game, big and small. Baseball decisions—from scouting and drafting players to deciding when to steal and how to arrange the defense for a specific batter—had mostly been left to the gut feelings and biases of old-timers. But the A’s analyzed all decisions mathematically. This, too, was Mitchell’s approach. His methods were more rudimentary, but still, he was the Moneyball manager of his era.