The Old Ball Game (12 page)

McGraw was as taken by Europe as he had been by Cuba. There would be more trips abroad for such a genuine world traveler. Muggsy was becoming something of a dandy, too, favoring a fancy stickpin in his tie, carrying a gold-headed cane, and wearing a medallion on his watch chain that Cardinal Gibbons himself had given him. Now, too, Muggsy added a Continental touch, arriving back in Baltimore decked out in gentleman's style from head to toe, in a silk top hat, custom-made boots, and a Prince Albert coat.

1896 Baltimore Scorecard

Muggsy McGraw was not just a collegian. He had become a man of the world. Eventually, in fact, it was he who would encourage the educated Mr. Mathewson to widen his own horizons and join him abroad, too.

The infirmities that would dog McGraw for the rest of his life first struck him in the '95 season, when he was only twenty-two years old. The diagnosis was malaria, and although he was forced to miss thirty-five games, he still hit .369 and the Orioles repeated as champions.

The next season was almost a complete loss, though. Indeed, he almost died of typhoid fever, which he contracted in spring training. He grew violently ill when the team stopped in Atlanta, but luckily, Arlie Pond, the medical student, realized the severity of McGraw's case and took him to a hospital. The team moved on north while McGraw remained in the hospital in Atlanta with a high fever that would not abate. It was June before he was allowed to leave the hospital, but by then his weight had dropped from a robust 155 down to 118. He still could not walk without crutches and was forced to continue his recuperation down the Chesapeake, at a resort hotel in Old Point Comfort, Virginia.

It was August before McGraw rejoined the team. While he was as cantankerous as ever—“His appearance put new life into the
team,” the
Baltimore Morning Herald
noted, adding: “There is only one McGraw, and he is a revelation”—his near-fatal disease brought him up short. As Burt Solomon, the Old Oriole historian, wrote: “There was nothing like a brush with death to show a man that some things are more precious than a game.” It was that fall when Muggsy led his teammates across the Atlantic, and upon his return he and Uncle Robbie got the Diamond Café up and running. More important, at some time in the latter part of '96, he began romancing Minnie Doyle, the twenty-year-old brunette daughter of a retired court clerk. Minnie may well have introduced herself to McGraw by sending him a letter with compressed flowers when he was convalescing.

In the event, he started calling on her sometime after he came back to Baltimore, and then, with his European travels behind him and his new business venture under way, Muggsy proposed to Minnie. They were married in downtown Baltimore on a frigid winter's day, February 3, 1897. McGraw chose Jennings as his best man, with the other Oriole stalwarts in attendance. Indeed, despite the freezing weather, it was SRO in the church, a real celebrity wedding. However, not a single member of McGraw's own family was at the ceremony. Nonetheless, when the happy couple went off to Niagara Falls on their honeymoon, they swung by Truxton, where Muggsy introduced his bride to his father. It was rare that he ever saw his old man, but at least the pain of the past was forgotten. McGraw was a man who famously carried grudges; notwithstanding, if he was never close to his father, neither did he hold him in enmity once he had left home and found his fortune.

He and Minnie returned to Baltimore, there to start a family, as the Orioles sought a fourth straight championship. Neither would come to pass. At least McGraw did not suffer any illness in '97, but he did endure two serious injuries, and however happy he was as a bridegroom, he was more nettlesome than ever around the diamond. Once, he and Keeler got into a clubhouse brawl
when both men were as naked as jaybirds (and Wee Willie, apparently, got the best of Muggsy). He gave no quarter to umpires whatsoever.

John Heydler would later become president of the National League but at this time was on the league's umpiring staff. It is hard to imagine how much umpires despised McGraw, but this is Heydler's woeful recollection: “The Orioles were mean, vicious, ready at any time to maim a rival player or an umpire if it helped their cause. The things they said to umpires were unbelievably vile, and they broke the spirits of some fine men. I've seen umpires bathe their feet by the hour after McGraw and others spiked them. . . . The lot of the umpires never was worse than in the years the Orioles were flying high.”

McGraw was the obvious choice to replace Hanlon in '99 as the Orioles manager, and he did an amazing job of keeping the depleted team in the pennant race. If he got too tough on the boys, Uncle Robbie would smooth things out. “Robbie was the sugar and I was the vinegar,” was how Muggsy explained it. He was always up to some new trick. Once, when he was coaching third in a close game against Brooklyn, he called over to the Superbas pitcher and asked to see the ball. Without thinking, the pitcher tossed the ball to McGraw, who simply stepped aside in the coacher's box and let the ball roll away as the Oriole base runner dashed into scoring position.

Perhaps the only off-putting part of the summer was Minnie's stomach pains. They came and went, and nobody seemed to know what to make of them. Then, on August 26, when the Orioles were in Louisville, Minnie's pain became so unbearable that doctors had to come to the house. They diagnosed appendicitis so acute that they dared not move her to a hospital, but surgeons from Johns Hopkins came to the house on St. Paul Street in order to remove the appendix there.

McGraw got the telegram in the midst of a doubleheader and took the first train back from Louisville. By the time he reached
Baltimore, the operation had gone smoothly and it appeared to be a success. Muggsy rushed to see her, there in the bed they shared. Alas, three nights later Minnie began to suffer with blood poisoning. McGraw sat with his wife by their bed all that night and into the next morning until finally Minnie Doyle McGraw slipped peacefully into death. She was twenty-two years old and was buried in her wedding gown.

The young widower McGraw did not come back to the team for another two weeks, and it was ten days after that before he put himself in a game. For the first time, people noticed that he had gray hairs. He wasn't yet thirty years old. He had lost his mother and four of his sisters and brothers, and now, after almost having died himself, he had lost his wife. All from disease.

It is not so surprising, then, that some years later, when Mathewson fell seriously ill, McGraw grew quickly disturbed, behaving even more erratically. This was near the end of spring training in 1906. Mathewson fell sick in Memphis with what at first appeared to be only a bad cold. Soon, however, his illness was diagnosed as diphtheria, although this alarming information seems to have been kept from the public; only oblique references to “his illness” were made in the press. His travail was closely followed, though,
MATTY WALKS
! headlined the
Evening World
on that occasion when at last he became ambulatory.

When Mathewson finally returned to the pitcher's box on May 5, attracting a huge midweek crowd of fifteen thousand on a miserably wet afternoon, the
Times
still attributed his absence of more than a month only to “a rather severe cold.” The throng, said the
Tribune
, “rose en masse to give him a standing ovation,” and Mathewson responded with a fairly good effort against the Beaneaters, or, as the
Herald
would have them, “the savants from the grove of Academe.” Matty gave up three runs and seven hits in seven innings, and left with a lead, but McGinnity blew it in relief. Nevertheless, said the
World
, “the great pitcher proved that he retained his grip on the hearts of New Yorkers.”

All along, though, McGraw was aware of the true nature of Matty's malady; he knew it was diphtheria from the moment it was diagnosed. Muggsy was beside himself. For much of that time, Matty had been quarantined. It was especially important to keep him away from Jane, who was pregnant. Telephones were in general use now, and McGraw stayed in constant touch with Matty and Jane and the doctors. It did not seem possible that it could happen to him again, that someone else he loved would be taken from him. His behavior grew more erratic than ever. His “constant bickering only brings discredit,” the
Tribune
chastised him. He was “overindulgent in conversation” with the umpires, regularly “calling [them] names from the bench” and making “useless objections.” They were not just incompetent; now they were
thieves
.

Thieves!
Harry Pulliam, the young National League president, grew angrier and more frustrated at each more egregious McGravian transgression. Muggsy was thrown out of more games, even drawing a three-game suspension. In Providence, for a mere exhibition game, about the time Mathewson was conclusively diagnosed with diphtheria, McGraw went completely haywire, taking the whole team off the field in protest over some ordinary decision. The furious spectators started to descend on the Giants, who were obliged to brandish their bats in defense. Finally the umpires prevailed on McGraw to finish the exhibition.

Muggsy had become a drinker by now. This time, when Matty was sick and maybe dying, was a time when too often he started drinking too much.

The 1890s, when John J. McGraw came to national prominence, were known not only as the Gay Nineties, but also the Electric Nineties, the Romantic Nineties, possibly even the Moulting Nineties. Together with the beginning of the twentieth century, the period was known as the Banquet Years, or the Mauve Decades (don't ask). The era began with the terrible economic Panic of'93, and the nation was bifurcated then as now by region, as underscored by William Jennings Bryan and his cross-of-gold theatrics. But once beyond the economic travails, as the century turned, Lord, did the country start busting its buttons.

The United States was, if gingerly, taking on the trappings of empire, managing that with the chips it took off the table from Spain. Then there was gold in Alaska, and soon enough a bull in the china shop in the White House. Perhaps nothing illustrated the rambunctious nature of the times more than the big hit of '98, the favorite of all the Spanish-American War bands: “They'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tb-Night.” It was a nation of
obstreperous strivers. “America, as yet, had no place for the idle rich, chiefly because there had been, as yet, no idle rich,” observed Mark Sullivan. The humorist Finley Peter Dunne, writing in an Irish accent as the famous Mr. Dooley, declared that “the crownin' wurruk iv our civilization—th' cash raygister.”

Still, America remained agrarian. As the new century began, 60 percent of Americans resided on farms or in small towns. Good grief, there were still two thousand individual farms in New York City, and as late as 1908 wild goats roamed Fifth Avenue, around 90th Street, just north of the magnificent mansions that lined the country's most famous boulevard.

But more and more Americans were moving to the cities—not only coming from the countryside, like McGraw and Mathewson, but also from abroad—turning them into (as the brand-new term suggested) “melting pots.” A new type of city dweller began to emerge. Among other things, since the six-day, sixty-hour-a-week work was growing shorter, there was more time for leisure—specifically for our purposes: more opportunity to attend baseball games. The boom in stadium attendance in the first decade of the new century probably had as much to do with more leisure opportunity as it did with any better brand of baseball.

Henry Adams described this fresh new urban American thusly: “[He was] a pushing, energetic, ingenious person, always awake and trying to get ahead of his neighbors . . . work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; he never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it.”

All of that—well, except for the business about not caring for the power—fit John J. McGraw to a tee. It is ironic that whereas Matty would become the first great American sports hero, Muggsy was much more representative of the rampant young American male of the Mauve Decades. Matty was the all-American boy grown up; Muggsy was the all-American striver (or, well, hustler). It wasn't just that he made a life out of baseball, out of a game;
he made sure to make a lot of money out of it, too. “From the start,” Blanche Sindall McGraw wrote, “I saw him as a young man of indestructible confidence, ever of visible optimism and hope, but not of the Pollyanna variety.”

She first met him a year after Minnie died, when he and Hughie Jennings—himself also already a widower—were invited by a friend to come by the Sindalls' fine house for a party. McGraw and Jennings were both out of mourning, Muggsy back from that one rare relaxing season in St. Louis, where he made a lot of money without expending much energy. Blanche's first impression was that the famous young man was “courteous and self-assured.” Well, away from the diamond, he usually did strike folks as a different breed of cat.