Chick Gandil had been batting around.300 for nine seasons. He had the strongest hands of any first baseman in either league. “The only first baseman who doesn’t need a glove,” one writer said of him.
When, in the face of fast-rising attendance, Comiskey cut players’ salaries, Gandil was ready to throw in that glove.
Gandil
Riding the Western rails since boyhood
Between copper camp and lumber camp
Fighting weight one hundred and ninety-seven pounds
Copper-mine boilermaker, border boxer,
Semi-pro ballplayer
A big-handed boy taking his ease in Western bars
Who’d once fought with a broken jaw
In a hundred-and-fifty-dollar winner-take-all bordertown brawl
Yet had fought on and taken the hundred-fifty:
He could still feel the welded break
Like a copper thread running his jaw.
“He has the best first-baseman’s hands in the business”
Ring Lardner wrote of him.
He didn’t mention the blackleg gambler’s fingers.
Nor the Westerner’s pure gall:
Everyone knew that Chick Gandil
Had the nerve of a government mule.
Yet strangely lost that nerve among the tinhorn sporty-O’s
Of the Eastern hotel lobbies.
J.J. Sport Sullivan looked like the biggest man in Boston to Chick.
J.J. paid for the whiskey and the women
J.J. paid for the good cigars
J.J. said “Chick, I want you to meet George M. Cohan:
“Mr. Cohan, meet Mr. Gandil. Mr. Gandil, meet Mr. Cohan.”
J.J. said, “Chick, I want you to meet Harry Sinclair.
“Mr. Sinclair, meet Mr. Gandil. Mr. Gandil, Meet Mr. Sinclair.”
And when all J.J. required
To get Mr. Sinclair down for a ten thousand-dollar wager,
Was Mr. Sinclair’s word
Gandil rubbed the welded break in his jaw
Recalling the chintzy forty-five dollars per man
“Token of appreciation”
The White Sox had assessed themselves—
For four Detroit pitchers who’d whipped Boston
Three successive end-of-the-season games.
Thus bringing the 1917 pennant to Mr. Comiskey’s park.
It came to Chick Gandil then
That the word of some men was good.
Like Mr. Sinclair’s.
And the word of other men was no good at all.
Like Mr. Comiskey’s.
The old man had promised the team individual bonuses
If they brought him a pennant that year.
Yet he hadn’t himself shown up at the clubhouse celebration
When they’d won it for him.
Instead he’d sent the little man—whose name was Grabiner—
With a case of champagne.
“Here’s your bonus,” the little man had explained.
Cheating was wrong only if you didn’t own a baseball park.
That much was plain.
And it hadn’t even been good champagne.
And every man in the clubhouse knew, while drinking it
That the “token of appreciation”
Hadn’t been for the Tiger pitchers beating Boston.
It had been payment for four games they’d thrown to Chicago.
Collins—simon-pure Eddie—hadn’t liked it.
He hadn’t liked it at all.
But when Gandil told Risberg to collect forty-five dollars per man
And to collect from Collins first
Collins had paid up; so the others had followed.
Until Risberg confronted Weaver.
“Count me out,’’ Weaver told Risberg.
Gandil had to count Weaver out:
The only man who didn’t go along with the 1917 fix.
The Swede was a hard guy:
He wasn’t that hard to Buck Weaver.
Weaver
The sportswriters had named him “Error-A-Day-Weaver”
When he’d first come west from softcoal country
And his hitting had been even softer.
Kid Gleason developed him into a.300 hitter
By switching him at the plate
And into the finest fielding third-baseman in either league.
His habit of grinning, while inching up on a batter
So unnerved Ty Cobb that he refused to bunt against Weaver:
The only third-baseman whose throw Cobb couldn’t out-run.
Buck could wear a pitcher down, foul after foul after foul
Till the man blew sky-high.
A joyous boy, all heart and hard-trying
A territorial animal
Who guarded the spiked sand around third like his life.
And wound up coaching a girl’s softball team
With no heart left in him at all.
Risberg
He was a rangy San Franciscan who took to fighting as easily as to baseball; and occasionally confused these crafts. At Oakland he’d protested a third strike simply by stepping up to an umpire and knocking him cold with a short chop to the jaw. “Call that a third strike,” he’d commented while other umpires were trying to bring the umpire around. And walked back to his dugout.
He had prescience. He’d begin moving to his left with the pitch, knock down a drive through the middle and cut the runner down with a peg only hands of iron could handle.
Gandil had the iron hands.
Swede Risberg would have looked dazzling anywhere; except playing beside Eddie Collins. Everything Risberg did, Collins did with more flash. When Risberg singled, Collins doubled. When Risberg doubled, Collins doubled and stole third.
Himself a grammar-school dropout and strictly a boy for the girls and the booze, it hurt to be outplayed by a college graduate who didn’t drink, smoke or chew. What hurt even more was getting less than $3,000 for making the same plays the graduate was being paid $14,500 to make.
The team was divided. The wild boys weren’t talking to the stay-in-shape boys; the stay-in-shapers weren’t speaking to them. The wild boys were Risberg, Gandil, Felsch and McMullin. The stay-in-shapers were Collins, Faber, Schalk and Kerr. Cicotte, Williams and Weaver drank with the wild boys yet stayed in shape; and still talked to the Collins faction. Joe Jackson talked to anybody who’d talk to him.
Yet there wasn’t a hole in that infield. That infield came together as if it had been seamed. On the diamond they were brothers.
Felsch
Oscar Felsch must have known, in the womb, that being alive was going to be fun. For he came forth looking for it. And it was even more fun than he’d been expecting: everything was fun!
At school he made the teachers happy the day he dropped out. It made Hap happy to leave school. And it made the girls and fellows at the factory happy to have Hap. Factories, Hap saw right off, were fun.
What was most fun of all was baseball. Getting paid to play it made it even more fun than that. When a White Sox scout spotted him shagging flies on a Milwaikee sandlot, and asked Felsch if he’d like to come to Chicago, Hap decided that that might be fun, too.
There was no use, Kid Gleason found, trying to teach Hap anything. What he was taught he’d forget the next day. On the other hand, there was nothing he had to learn. He was a natural hitter, a natural fielder, a natural runner and could throw with any man in the league. The only thing that kept him from being among such classically great outfielders as Cobb, Speaker and Hooper, was that they played for the season. Hap played for the day.
The fans came out early just to watch Happy Felsch shag pregame flies. He got so much fun out of playing so hard that Comiskey deducted the fun from his salary.
After the scandal he shagged flies on Milwaukee sandlots, opened a bar and raised six kids.
Shagging flies was fun. Having kids was fun. Running a bar was fun. When barflies heckled him about the
series, he understood the boys were just having a little fun.
Yet, if they kept at him too long, he’d stop them.
“I was jobbed,” he’d tell them at last. They’d shut up then.
For they knew then that, for Hap Felsch, all the fun was finally done.
* * *
Cicotte
Eddie Cicotte, the French-Canadian family-man, was a worrier. He worried about the debt still owed on his Michigan farm. He worried about sending his daughters to a reputable college. But mostly he worried because he’d been pitching winning baseball for fourteen years and yet had nothing to fall back on should his knuckle-ball fail him for a single season. He worried because one bad season would drop him back into the bushes, pitching for whoever would have him. He was thirty-five years old and all he could do was throw a knuckle-ball better than anyone else in the world.
Williams
Claude Williams was a Missourian who kept his grievance to himself. He also kept a book in his head on every batter in the league. He could figure a batter’s weakness, or his strength, by pitching to him only once: after that he went to the book in his head whenever the man came up again.
He never hurried a pitch. Off the diamond he was quiet and introspective. On the mound he became unaware of anybody else in the world but the batter, the catcher behind him, and himself. He worked so deliberately, and so methodically, that it was not unusual for him to pitch a full nine innings without giving a single walk.
What Williams had was a curve that might break as slowly and hesitatingly as a child’s balloon—or might come in like a streak of light with a vicious twist to its tail. If you tried waiting him out you’d be called out on strikes.
He’d won 23 games in 1917 and was now getting $3,000.
Yet, as a man who kept his grievance to himself, he kept his fears to himself as well.
Jackson
Joseph Jefferson Jackson was an illiterate son of an illiterate share-cropper, earning thirty-five dollars a month in a South Carolina cotton mill. When its management discovered, when Joe was thirteen, that nobody could get him out on a baseball diamond, he was raised to seventy-five dollars; and didn’t have to do anything but play baseball.
A small girl handed him a hairpin “for good luck’’ before a game and he had a good day. Since then he’d never gone out on a diamond without a hairpin in his hip pocket. If he saw a hairpin and failed to pick it up he’d go hitless: Jackson believed that.
He’d light a candle in a dark room and stare at the flame, one eye shut, until the eye went blind. Then he’d stare with the other eye. This improved his batting eye: Jackson believed that, too.
Why he felt he had to sharpen his vision nobody knew. They still couldn’t get him out. He’d hit.408 in his first full season, in 1911, and had been hitting near that ever since.
When Connie Mack paid $350.00 for his contract, to see what he looked like in Philadelphia, he slipped off the train at Richmond and went back to Greenville. He was afraid of leaving his family.
Mack instructed a coach to go down there and bring back the whole tribe. This time Jackson got all the way to the ball park and got to bat twice. He got two hits. Then it began to rain.
It rained for two days. When it stopped raining Joe was gone again; family and all. His teammates had been heckling him because he could neither read nor write. Jackson had no defenses.
Mack farmed him out to Savannah, where he met his wife. She got him back to Philadelphia.
One day, in Detroit, he lined out a terrific drive and came into third standing up.
“Hey! Jackson!” a fan challenged him loudly, “Can you spell ‘cat’?”
“Hey! Mister!” Jackson shouted back just as loudly, “Can you spell ‘shit’?” Joe Jackson was getting sophisticated.
Yet never so sophisticated that he could play baseball badly for a price. When he fielded a ball he couldn’t shortleg it. When he went to bat he had to hit. His peg came in with express-train speed dead-center across the plate. He was death on runners who thought they could score from second on a grass-cutting single.
His flaw was fear. He saw himself as an ignorant rube among erudite, city-wise Northerners. If he wasn’t a dummy, how was it that he was the only one on the team who couldn’t read or write?
He got along with Lefty Williams because Williams, too, was a Southerner.
Had it not been for baseball, Joseph Jefferson Jackson would never have gotten more out of life than Brandon Mill, South Carolina, could offer a cotton-mill hand. He would never have left town.
And came to wish to God he never had.
Gleason
He’d been a major-leaguer, first as a pitcher, then as a second-baseman, for twenty years: a well-balanced man and a well-balanced manager, who sympathized with his players’ dissatisfaction. He had himself stayed out of organized baseball for a year because of a salary dispute with Comiskey.
Yet, when the players threatened to strike in the summer of 1919, he got them onto the field. He’d talk to Comiskey himself about getting them bonuses, he assured them. But when Comiskey had anyone by the short hairs, he held till the hairs bled. He refused even to discuss salaries with his manager.
Gleason smelled the fix— yet had no way of knowing it wasn’t a fixed fix. Boston gamblers had suckered New York bettors, in 1912, by leaking word that Tammany Hall had rigged the series for the Giants to beat the Red Sox. The ploy worked so well that the odds tilted to the Giants. New York bettors didn’t even catch on, when they were paying off, that the men they were paying were the very ones who’d spread the phoney rumors on which they’d wagered.
Burns and Maharg
Sleepy Bill Burns had two unique gifts: he could drop off to sleep at will and he could wake up finding he’d been traded. He’d dozed through four major league seasons on benches at Cincinnati, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit. Every time he woke up he found he’d been traded again. And always congratulated his new manager at having gotten his team a bargain.
After losing 55 games while winning 27, managers didn’t want him even in exchange for players of which they wanted badly to be rid. Sleepy Bill went off to tell everyone in Texas how he’d won 27 games in the big leagues.
He made a fast killing in oil at Ranger, Texas. And returned to Cincinnati, his pockets stuffed with leases, to tell his old teammates how he’d hit oil. They let him pitch batting practice. Then he left to tell everyone in New York how good he’d looked in pitching practice.
Burns was the kind of clown who’d have trouble finding his own way out of an outhouse unless somebody opened the door. But when somebody did, Burns would be standing there with an armful of fresh roses.
The man who opened the outhouse door for him was no prize package himself. He may have been the “Peaches” Graham who’d caught major-league ball in the National League for ten years, and had been Grover Cleveland Alexander’s roommate. Or he may have been the Bill Graham whose major-league career consisted of scabbing, for a single game, during the Detroit Tigers’ strike of 1912. The Tiger management had had to put a full team on the field, to sustain its franchise. Somebody named Graham was available.
Following this distinguished service to organized baseball, Graham felt he’d gone about as far as a man could in baseball, and turned to boxing. Somebody explained to him that, if he spelled “Graham” backwards, the name would become “Maharg.” It was as “Billy Maharg” that he’d fought, as a middleweight around Philadelphia. Buffs paid to watch him taking punishment.
When Bill Burns phoned him from New York, he was happy to run up there to see an old friend now in the bucks.
He found Burns with Gandil and Cicotte at the Ansonia, and gathered that the series was for sale for a hundred grand.
Burns asked Maharg if he had a Philadelphia connection big enough to swing it.
The boys in Philly advised Maharg to proposition The Big Bankroll.
McMullin
McMullin? How did a utility infielder get
in here? Who was going to bribe a player who wasn’t going to play?
Because he was behind a set of lockers when Cicotte and The Swede, assuming they were alone, were sounding one another out on Gandil’s notion of blowing a couple games for a payoff. McMullin materialized and said he’d like to help blow a game or two, too. How he’d manage that from the bench he didn’t have to explain; because The Swede counted him in.
McMullin was the Swede’s bar-buddy. The Swede never counted a bar-buddy out.
McMullin not only counted himself in, but became as active in the operation as though he’d conceived the fix himself.
The Big Bankroll
Abraham Rothstein was a just man. He adjudicated a garment industry dispute so justly that, at a dinner honoring him, the Governor of the state, Alfred E. Smith, described him as Abe the Just.
Abe the Just had one son who was also just. He prayed for another. Be careful of what you pray for lest it be granted. What Abe got was Arnold.
Arnold contained a dybbuk with dollar signs for eyes. American dollars. What Arnold wanted Arnold got. What Arnold wanted was cash:All of it.
When Abe the Just emptied his pockets on shabbas, in order to stand purified in the presence of his God, twelve-year-old Arnold borrowed the cash, organized a crap game, loaned the losers his profits at usurious rates—and had the original cash back on Papa’s table before the old man got back from the temple. Arnold was something else.
By the time he was sixteen he was booking bets out of John McGraw’s poolroom. McGraw knew that nobody could beat Arnold. Not the way Arnold booked.
A Brooklyn bookie once phoned to ask Arnold if he could handle a thousand-dollar bet. Arnold didn’t turn the bet down. He didn’t take it either. He strung it. He told the bookie he’d get back to him but he didn’t get back. And made sure the bookie didn’t get back to him.
If the horse ran out he hadn’t covered it. If the horse won, he had.
The horse won: the bookie owed him a grand. The bookie argued that the bet hadn’t been confirmed. Arnold sent Monk Eastman to settle the argument.
The bookie didn’t argue with Monk. Nobody argued with Monk. Monk didn’t even exist on an arguable level. Whether he existed on any human level at all was doubtful. All Monk knew was that when Arnold sent him for money, he brought money back to Arnold.
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