The Old Ball Game (13 page)

Blanche was only nineteen, almost a decade his junior. She had sable eyes and hair to match, was barely five feet tall, and what we knew then as “pleasingly plump.” It was the fashion; Lillian Russell, the grandest female star in show business, weighed in at a hefty 165. She just ate like a horse and tightened her corset. Blanche, like Jane Mathewson, was also a rare college girl for that time, attending St. Agnes College for Young Women.

But then, Blanche's father, James, was a prosperous businessman. Minnie Doyle's father had been only a dour government functionary, a widower, up in years. James Sindall was a vigorous self-made man who had started out selling stoves and then took out on his own as a contractor. The Sindalls lived in a house James Sindall had built himself; it was, as Baltimoreans are wont to say, “out” York Road, in the fashionable new Waverly area. McGraw was not only admiring of James Sindall, but even a little intimidated by him; the toughest ballplayer in the land took several months getting up the nerve to ask for Sindall's daughter's hand in marriage. But McGraw not only fell in love with Blanche, he adored the whole Sindall family. He'd never really been part of a big, happy family before, and had, as Blanche put it, “a gnawing hunger” for such a thing.

Indeed, for all that was going on in McGraw's life as 1900 passed into '01—as he became the linchpin for the new Baltimore franchise in the new American League—he courted Blanche leisurely. He brought her flowers regularly. They both loved to go to vaudeville and musicals downtown, and worshiped at St. Ann's together. The Sindalls were not Irish; they were of Dutch heritage, but they were staunch Roman Catholics. Blanche knew nothing of baseball when the romance began, but things were certainly progressing nicely by the spring. For Opening Day, the Orioles' first game in the new American League, with Ban Johnson throwing out the first ball himself, from all of Baltimore to pick from, it was the Sindall family that manager John McGraw chose to invite to sit in his box.

Now that the season had begun, McGraw's favorite escape from his baseball duties was to take out the Sindall family carriage, meandering through Druid Hill Park with Blanche by his side. It could not have been more innocent; they would stop for ice cream sodas. Curiously, McGraw always had Blanche hold the reins on the mare, Fanny. For whatever reason, in all his life, horses or cars, McGraw never liked to drive. It was just one of those things; he certainly wanted to run everything else. Mathewson on the other hand fancied cars as soon as they came into fashion and, to Jane's dismay, was even something of a daredevil behind the wheel. In 1912 he would be fined a hundred dollars for whipping along at thirty-one miles per hour in a car given him by his adoring fans. At the ballpark, it was Matty's signature to walk from the clubhouse to the diamond wearing an automobile driver's long white linen duster over his uniform.

McGraw, though, was at heart really something of an old-fashioned fellow. He never even took to moving pictures. For that matter, as he grew older, he wouldn't be very good at adapting to the new manner of ballplayers. As cagey as McGraw was, he was pretty set in his ways by the time he fell in love with Blanche. The way the world turned when the Orioles were riding high was
the way he liked it. We don't think that hard-boiled types can be sentimentalists, but McGraw put the lie to that stereotype. The meaner McGraw got, the sweeter the past seemed to him. And, if he didn't realize it then, the past essentially ended on January 8, 1902, when he married Blanche at St. Ann's.

It had been only five years, shy a month, since he had married Minnie, and many of the same players returned, principals in this wedding party, too (Wee Willie gave the couple silver oyster forks). Keeler and those other Old Oriole teammates standing up for McGraw could barely stifle their laughter, too, as the presiding priest, Father Cornelius Thomas, felt obliged to wrench baseball into his charge to the newlyweds.

“Let selfishness be no barrier to your happiness, but understand that each must give up much, renounce himself, that both may enjoy delightful fruit,” he began conventionally enough. But then: “For you know that it is the sacrifice hit that adds to the number of runs and wins in the game.”

And to McGraw (as his groomsmen snickered): “Lead her around the hard 'bases' of life until she reaches the 'home plate' of happiness. . . . The church 'signs' her over to you. You will not have trouble to 'manage' her.”

And Muggsy didn't. He ran the marriage as he did his ball club, calling all the pitches. Blanche was his most ardent defender; she trusted him implicitly. Even though he was promiscuous with loans and given to making atrocious investments, Mrs. McGraw did not complain. “I never knew the exact nature of John McGraw's financial philosophy, and I never worried about it,” she blithely explained. “He gave me everything I ever asked for or failed to ask for. I wanted for nothing, and so I never questioned his income or what he did with it.”

It was only a few months into their marriage when the Oriole franchise began to founder, when Muggsy began to look for a way out of Baltimore, secretly taking trains up to New York to meet with Andrew Freedman. If McGraw let on that he might be taking
Blanche away from the city where she had resided all her life, he didn't tell her much. “My job was faith,” is how Blanche described the situation. Then, when McGraw did take her in tow to New York, she looked upon it as a grand adventure. Like her new husband, Blanche adapted quickly to the bustle and delights of the big town.

Much would be made of the fact that Babe Ruth and the Yankees were so perfect a match for the New York of the Roaring Twenties, but it's just as accurate to say that it was only appropriate that Muggsy and Matty gave Gotham baseball glory when they did. Turn-of-the-century New York was exploding. It had, it seemed, everything else but a winning baseball club, and once Brooklyn and the other boroughs were consolidated with Manhattan, the city's population soared to almost three and a half million. Only London in all the world was larger, but more tellingly: New York used four times the electricity that London did. The gaslights were going out all over.

Ground-breaking for the city's first subway line, which would run from city hall, near the bottom of Manhattan Island, all the way up to 145th Street—felicitously for the Giants, not that far from the Polo Grounds—took place in March 1900. “Fifteen minutes to Harlem!” was the somewhat optimistic boast; but hey, it really would take only twenty-six. It was a wondrous advance for New Yorkers. Looking back, one historian would write: “Only Armistice Day, V-E Day, V-J Day and the return of Charles Lindbergh . . . produced as enthusiastic an explosion of public joy.” But then, even before the subway had opened for business on October 27,1904, the aboveground railroads in New York were already carrying more passengers than all the other steam trains in both North and South America. Cars were rapidly replacing horses. In 1895 there were perhaps 300 automobiles in New York; a decade later there were 78,000. If you had to get outta town, the 20th Century Limited averaged forty-nine miles per hour and could deposit you in Chicago in twenty hours. If you
were a letter, you could get to San Francisco in four days. Longdistance could put you through to Omaha. President Roosevelt sent a telegraph message clear 'round the world in 1903.

New York had the largest hotel in the world—the Waldorf-Astoria—1,100 rooms, 765 baths. It had the tallest building—an amazing twenty-nine stories high, soaring above Park Row. The Metropolitan Opera had opened in 1887, Carnegie Hall in '91, and the Bronx Zoo in '99. Construction on the New York Public Library would begin in 1902, about the time the McGraws got off the train from Baltimore and checked into the Victoria Hotel. Macy's also opened in '02, bringing the best shopping area farther uptown from the “Ladies' Mile,” which had topped out at Twenty-third Street. New theaters were springing up, too, and Longacre Square became Times Square in 1904 (the first New Year's ball dropped in 1908). Also, there were twenty-five thousand prostitutes (“It costs a dollar, and I've got a room”).

The poor and disenfranchised poured in from abroad, making New York a city more variegated in its human splendor than any ever on earth. In the first decade of the twentieth century, almost a million immigrants a year came in. On April 11,1903, just a few days before the Giants began their first full season under McGraw, a record ten thousand newcomers arrived at Ellis Island on that one day. Many would remain in New York, which was now 37 percent foreign-born (and another 38 percent of the residents had at least one foreign-born parent). Jacob Riis, the reformer, noted: “A map of the city, colored to designate minorities, would show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra and more colors than any rainbow.”

Something like 800,000 Germans were in the city, most clustered in downtown Manhattan in what was called Kleindeutschland. There were 275,000 Irish, 220,000 Italians, 60,000 blacks, and perhaps 700,000 Jews from all nations. The German Jews, looking down their noses at their spiritual cousins from eastern Europe, had started calling them “kikes,” from the many names
that ended in
ki.
But then, most stage comedy was ethnic; so too the humorous newspaper columns. Everybody got by, laughing at everybody else. Everybody else's sister in every other minority was a slut. Everybody but the Jews drank too much. And every mother's son took up baseball, tossing whatever would pass for a ball over and around the two thousand pushcarts that filled the slum streets, peddling clothing, household goods, and (mostly spoiled) produce. When the price of a standard block of ice was doubled to sixty cents, it created a huge furor, far greater than any fuss made nowadays about higher gasoline prices. The summer heat was unbearable; going up to the Polo Grounds was like escaping to Maine. Even then, the players' heavy flannel uniforms might gain as much as eight or ten pounds of sweat during a game.

Manhattan was straining at its limits. That plot of land on a hill way uptown—where Columbia Presbyterian Hospital is now located—was virtually the only place on the whole island that the owners of the new American League franchise could find in 1903 to build their ballyard. Downtown, a million and a half people were crowded together on the Lower East Side, 500,000 of those in one square mile, the densest human habitation in the world. It was estimated that two-thirds of Manhattan residents were jammed into six-story tenements—mostly known as “dumbbells”—which held 150 people apiece. The local anthem, “The Sidewalks of New York,” written in '94 by a blind buck-and-wing dancer named Charles Lawler, tried to make romantic of what was nearly intolerable: “East side, west side, all around the town . . . we would sing and waltz,/While the ‘ginnie' played the organ on the sidewalks of New York.”

When Blanche and Muggsy first arrived, he would go to work at the Polo Grounds (on the days he didn't go to the racetrack first) by taking a horse-drawn hack, moseying up through Central Park and into Harlem. At that time the area was mostly middle-class Irish and German with some Jews, but speculation
in new housing exceeded demand when the city's first subway line was built up that way, so the building owners were forced to sell to anybody they could. That was how the African-American migration to Harlem began.

Ah, and Muggsy's own folk. The Irish were starting to move up the scale. For so long they had performed much of the dirty, unskilled work, building up New York—tunneling that first subway, for example. The joke was that an Irishman turned down a higher-paying job as a diver because he couldn't spit on his hands before he began that work. But with the new immigrants coming from southern and eastern Europe, the Irish finally had someone below them in the pecking order. They became the foremen, bossing Italians about. Onstage, many of the Pat-and-Mike jokes became Abie-and-Sol jokes. As early as 1890, a third of the city's teachers were Irish women, and that stereotypical Irish cop was, it seems, walking every beat, chomping on free apples. “
Good marnin
'
to ya, officer
.” “
Ah, and the same ta you, Mrs. O'Flaherty
.”

Not only that but, of course, the Irish began to accumulate power, moving up from street gangs, taking a conspicuous place in Tammany Hall. For national prominence, though, the first Irish mark was in sports. The heavyweight title seemed to absolutely belong to a Son of Erin: Paddy Ryan, the Great John L., Gentleman Jim Corbett, Bob Fitzgibbons, James J. Jeffries. But if Gentleman Jim, anyway, was a social cut above (it was he who introduced the highfalutin term “solar plexus” into boxing), the so-called sweet science, then as now, was more of a déclassé divertissement, and for all that baseballists were supposed to be drunkards, whoremongers, and unreliable reprobates, the game—
the game
!—was becoming nearly sacred, the American national sport. “Because baseball was the country's most popular sport, closely linked to the image of a rural Protestant nation,” wrote one New York Irish historian, “Irish players came to represent American adaptability, and their skills in this arena gave them a
more acceptable persona than boxing prowess.” In other words, for all that the Irish put into baseball, they took more out.

As early as 1890, when one Bill McGunnigle managed the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, the Irish had a leadership beachhead in New York baseball. Foxy Ned Hanlon would, of course, guide Brooklyn (now the Superbas) to the National League pennants of'99 and '00. But when McGraw grasped the Giant reins in '02, quickly establishing front-office hegemony to go with his field command, Irish pride reached new heights. Soon enough, with the possible exception of his good pal George M. Cohan, John J. McGraw would become the most famous Irish-American in the land. His Giants teams were not nearly so Irish as had been his Orioles. McGraw would hire any scoundrel he thought could help him win; he was forever bringing back Turkey Mike Donlin. But the Irish imprint on the Giants was strong.