The Old Ball Game (10 page)

“Pitching was my first love,” McGraw wrote in his memoirs. “To me, it is the most fascinating art in the world. It really is an art, too—not merely science.” While he gave tips on technique to Mathewson—at this time, in 1903, for example, helping him improve the change-up he had picked up from Iron Man McGinnity—where he and Matty had their meeting of their minds was in that art of pitching. Location—the placement of pitches. And: mixing 'em up.

McGraw was amazed at how advanced a strategist young Mathewson was. Always there have been big, strong kids who are fireballers, capable of just flinging the horsehide past batters—and so too Mathewson. But almost from the start, Matty was also a thinking pitcher. In this one obvious way, the two different men were twinned. While McGraw called most pitches from the bench, early on he began to allow Mathewson the privilege of choosing his own pitches. Why, soon Muggsy paid him the ultimate compliment, actually comparing Matty to himself. “It is rare,” he humbly declared, “that a man like Christy Mathewson comes along who could remember like me.”

That 1903 season would be magnificent for the Giants. McGraw took the worst team in the majors and added thirty-six victories. Only Pittsburgh and the Boston team in the American League posted better records. Just like that, too, the Giants became fashionable, the talk of the town. Crowds of up to thirty thousand began to show up for the biggest games, with hundreds—thousands?—more who would scamper up to watch from Coogan's Bluff, which overlooked the park (even if the choicest positions up there allowed but a limited vantage of the diamond).

Matty won thirty games while McGinnity won thirty-one. They were the first two pitchers since the National League got rid of its weak sisters and went with eight competitive clubs to win thirty. Three times that year McGinnity won doubleheaders, and he threw 434 innings, but as indefatigable as he was, curiously, the Iron Man had not earned his moniker for his endurance. Rather, before Muggsy discovered him and brought him to Baltimore in '99 at the advanced baseball age of twenty-eight, McGinnity had toiled at an iron foundry in Oklahoma.

If Iron Man won one more game than Matty, though, the younger man had, overall, a more impressive record. McGinnity lost twenty games, Mathewson only thirteen. Mathewson also had a slightly better earned run average—2.26 to 2.43—and a much better strikeout-to-walks ratio. Mathewson fanned 267 batters in 366 innings, to lead the league. Already he was the big favorite with the New York cranks—and he knew it, too. Like McGraw, he had a great sense of awareness; unlike McGraw, he had a sense of proportion to match. For all Mathewson's becoming modesty, he always understood how good he was—and how popular. McGraw's biographer, Charles C. Alexander, wrote that Matty was “an aloof, rather swell-headed young man, fully cognizant that he was the big attraction.” Indeed, that he could hold himself apart from the hurly-burly might have made him appear somewhat stuck-up, but in time that very quality took on another perception, that he was indeed a special character and not one of the crowd.

Rube Marquard, a Hall of Famer himself, who would assume Iron Joe McGinnity's role as the number two Giant pitcher, summed up his teammate this way: “Matty never thought he was better than anybody else. It was just the way he carried himself. . . . But it was okay because, what the hell, when you came to it, Matty
was
different.”

Now, in 1903, happily married, secure with his manager and a winning team, Mathewson was definitely already beginning to develop into what he would become soon enough: the first real full-blooded American sports idol. Indeed, even by now, after just one season with McGraw's hustlers, Mathewson was well on his way to canonization. Perhaps at this point, only one other American athlete exceeded his popularity. And that wasn't even a human being; it was a horse: the great Dan Patch.

He was a light bay who stood more than sixteen and a half hands, with a heart that, in death, was revealed to be twice the size of a normal standardbred's. On October 12,1903, Dan Patch paced a mile in 1:56 ½ seconds, a figure that would seem as astounding to savvy horse-conscious Americans at that time as sixty home runs would to baseball fans a generation later. Dan Patch traveled in his own private railway car and would routinely draw thirty to forty thousand fans when he raced. He would nod to his many fans and pose for cameras, and he was a marketing bonanza. The Dan Patch name was attached to watches, padlocks, sleds, and collars—even stoves and automobiles. There was even a dance named after him: the Dan Patch two-step. He was beloved of Americans. Only Matty would surpass him.

Although the Giants posted this spectacular turnaround success in 1903, and all credit fairly went to McGraw, he suffered a terrible personal setback early in the season. The Giants' number three starter was a deaf-mute named Dummy Taylor. In these more blunt times, where language was not so (as we say now) appropriate, all deaf-mutes in baseball were immediately tabbed
Dummy (just as all Native Americans automatically became “Chief”). In one of the strangest of all baseball coincidences, in 1901, Mathewson's first full season in the majors, the Giants actually had three deaf-mutes on their pitching staff—George Leitner, Billy Deegan, and Taylor. All, naturally, were called Dummy. By '03 only Taylor remained in New York; he was a fine pitcher. Also, since McGraw was never one to miss an opportunity, he liked having Taylor around on the bench when he wasn't starting in order that he might holler at the opponent's pitcher. Dummy Taylor emitted some kind of rattling shriek that could, apparently, be considerably disconcerting if you were about to deliver a pitch.

Taylor was in the outfield at the Polo Grounds, shagging flies, before the third game of the 1903 season. McGraw was near home plate, slapping grounders to his infielders. Taylor threw a ball back to the diamond that slammed into McGraw's face. He never saw it coming and went down as if he had been shot. The ball broke McGraw's nose, severing cartilage, and it also ruptured a blood vessel inside his throat. That caused the most incredible flood, the blood spurting out of both his nose and his mouth. Poor Dummy Taylor was beside himself while the other Giants looked on in shock at their fallen leader. McGraw was rushed to a hospital, where his nose was stuffed with cotton. At last the bleeding was stemmed, and he actually returned to the Polo Grounds late in the game.

Dummy Taylor

The hemorrhaging soon returned, however. Indeed, the blow would affect McGraw's sinuses and cause debilitating upper respiratory infections for the rest of his life. But at that moment the Giants were scheduled to begin a road trip in Philadelphia, and, naturally, Muggsy prepared to leave town with his team. Blanche, however, put her foot down, telling her husband that she would not let him go unless she accompanied him. Reluctantly, McGraw finally agreed, but with one proviso: Matty must stay behind in New York. McGraw's reasoning was simply that he felt concern for Jane Mathewson, that, with Blanche in Philadelphia, she would be left alone in their large, new apartment in the strange, big city. McGraw mandated that Matty must stay with his young bride even though it meant that his star pitcher would miss his turn to start in Philadelphia.

Nobody had ever before heard of such a concession on the diamond from the likes of Muggsy McGraw. And it having to do with a woman! “Only one per cent of ballplayers are leaders of men,” he declared once. “The other ninety-nine per cent are followers of women.” And a bride! Here is the wives' tale he offered on that subject: “Very few ball players are ever as valuable to a team the first year they are married as they are before or after.”

But then, he had begun to truly love the Mathewsons, as they were learning to love him. Growing up, McGraw had never had
much of a family life—certainly not a happy one—and he had already had a childless marriage before he married Blanche. Probably he sensed by now that he must be sterile, that he could never sire a son of his own. His relationship with Mathewson was always so strange, and their ages were too close for McGraw to pose as a father figure, but Matty had already become, in some fashion, his boy, his kid brother—or maybe just his alter ego, the man Muggsy would have been if he had only been blessed, as a child, with books and looks and love.

No two boys could have had more different upbringings than Muggsy and Matty. Growing up, their only shared experience was as successful young ballplayers. Whereas Mathewson was raised comfortably in a sweet, settled home life, McGraw's dismal family experience of poverty and death seems more appropriate to Ireland itself, whence his father John left to escape poverty and death, than to the United States.

Not much is known of that older John McGraw's first years in America, except that he emigrated around 1856 and, during the Civil War, was drafted into the Union Army—a circumstance that many of his Irish brethren protested with riots. Why should they do the fighting in a war in which they had no real interest, where in fact they would be dying so that black men should be freed to compete with them for jobs? John McGraw also took a wife, probably shortly after being mustered out, probably in New York City, but she died giving birth to their first child, a daughter, and, so, with the baby girl, Anna, he headed upstate, settling in the village of Truxton, in Cortland
County, then about an hour and a half's time south of Syracuse. It was there that he met and wed Ellen Comerford, who gave birth to their first child, a boy, who was John Joseph McGraw, born April 7, 1873.

The elder John McGraw was not an ignorant man. He had had many years of schooling in the Catholic schools of his native Ireland and sought work as a teacher. Although he was never close to his eldest son, we can imagine that he spoke highly about education to young Johnny; also, surely, he bewailed his fate that he himself could not find honest work at a school, but had to settle for laboring on the railroad. He was, it seems, a good man, who did his best by what became a brood of children. But also he was dull and dark and unimaginative. Certainly, like so many immigrant parents, he could not understand how his son could be so taken by a
game.

Johnny McGraw, though, was absolutely captivated by baseball. He paid ten cents for a copy of
Our Boys Base Ball Rules
and became as much an authority about the game as he was a prodigy. He was a responsible kid, though, an altar boy who took odd jobs about town. Later he worked as a paperboy for the
Elmira Telegraph
and then as a butcher boy on his father's railroad, the Elmira, Cortland & Northern. There, days, he walked the aisles hawking snacks and magazines. Always, though—as we know from that episode where he earned his first professional dollar, pitching a curveball for the edification of train passengers—always Johnny carried his baseball with him. His first one cost a dollar, which he sent away to Spalding for. Other baseball expenses, earning even more of his father's ire, came when John Sr. had to pony up for windows broken on account of his son's slugging.

There was never enough money, always another mouth to nurse and feed. Ellen gave birth most years, the eighth arriving when Johnny was himself yet only eleven, in January of '85. Shortly after this last child was born, though, Ellen took deathly ill. It was very fast: diphtheria—or “black diphtheria” as it was
often called then, when it was a scourge. Terribly infectious, highly contagious, a disease affecting the upper respiratory tract, diphtheria was all the more devastating in that it especially took down children. Ellen died in two days. Then Anna, the oldest, her stepchild. Three more of the McGraw babies fell after that.

Johnny was the oldest now in a motherless family. Three other small children and a newborn baby were left for the father to somehow tend to. In the world we like to imagine, the ghastly tragedy would have drawn the father and his eldest son together. It didn't. Ellen had been the connecting tissue. Now she was gone, the house was gripped in despair and malnourishment, and so, come the spring, Johnny's baseball became even more a bone of contention. Most everyone in Truxton would hear it: the incessant thudding of a Spalding pounding against the wall of a shed—Johnny McGraw, pitching, day after day. Later that year the boy broke another window, and his father could stand it no more. Erupting in a fury, he grabbed his son and, as the other children looked on in horror, it seemed as if he would beat him to death.

Somehow Johnny wrestled free from his father's grasp and departed the house, gone for good. He found refuge at the town's small hotel, where the proprietress took him in, giving him his keep in return for the chores she assigned him. He did remain in school, but like so many disadvantaged but athletic American teenagers who would follow his example ever since, he tended to his sport more than to his books. A dirt-poor, uneducated Irish kid living in the sticks—early on Muggsy must have seen his main chance.

How a boy with short arms who weighed barely a hundred pounds could pitch with any authority—how he could throw a curveball! — we don't know. But Johnny McGraw could. He taught himself that. In those days, almost every town in America had its own team and, it seems, residency was often winked at
as a requirement of participation. Certainly it was by the summer of '89 when the hamlet of East Homer, nearby to Truxton, needed a pitcher. Johnny was approached. He drove a hard bargain: five bucks and round-trip transportation. So he was taken over from Truxton in a carriage, and he won the game, departing a hero from East Homer. After that, there was never any doubt what career path McGraw would follow, and the next spring, when he heard about a new minor league, the New York–Pennsylvania, he talked his way onto the team at Olean for forty dollars a month.