The Old Ball Game (15 page)

Of course, Muggsy loved playing the villain. With the possible exception of, fifty years on, the Boston Celtics' Red Auerbach smugly lighting up a huge victory cigar, no American coach or manager ever succeeded in so antagonizing rival players and fans. He was unrepentant. He went out of his way. After the Giants won the World Series in 1905, he actually had
WORLD'S CHAMPIONS
stitched not only on his players' shirt fronts, but also on the huge yellow blankets thrown over the horses that pulled the tally-hos the Giants traveled in from their road hotels, where they dressed, to the ballparks.

Talk about asking for it.

In Brooklyn, at Washington Park, fans began to throw spears fashioned out of umbrella tips at the Giant outfielders. Outside the parks, thugs lay in wait for the hated New Yorks. In Philadelphia particularly, the Giants themselves had to stock up on rocks, the better to return the fire of angry fans who bombarded their carriages. In Pittsburgh, the journey from hotel to ballyard took the Giants past a large produce market, so that along with the usual complement of gravel and bricks that the citizens of the Steel City hurled at the Giants, the players also had to duck a
barrage of fruits and vegetables. Apparently, cost being no object when it came to attacking Muggsy McGraw's satanic team, even cantaloupes were employed as ammunition. On one occasion in Pittsburgh, a woman turned a strong hose on the Giants. McGraw only added fuel to the fire by urging his charges to, mockingly, scream out the names of the proprietors who were listed on the signs of stores. Often McGraw would wire ahead to the next city the Giants were visiting, requesting police protection, a publicized ploy, which, of course, only encouraged the need for more police protection. It all added to the fun, he chuckled, like “the spirit of skylarking college boys.”

Yet the antagonistic Giant spirit, it seems, occasionally caught up even the exemplary Mathewson. To the dismay of fans across the Republic who had already come to worship Matty for his sportsmanlike demeanor, a near riot at a game in Philadelphia in April of 1905 culminated with a rare show of aggression from Mathewson. In the melee, he was accused of knocking down a boy—a boy!—who was selling lemonade near the Giants' bench, splitting the lad's lip and loosening several of his teeth. A dismayed letter-writer to the
Sporting News
moaned that this sorry incident showed that it was impossible for anyone connected with McGraw to escape his evil ways, that the dreadful assault was “just to show that his association with the old Baltimore crowd had made a hoodlum out of [even Christy Mathewson].”

On the field, McGraw remained as cantankerous as ever. He was the laird of the realm. In 1905, Harry Pulliam, the National League president, suspended McGraw for fifteen games for brawling with the Pittsburgh manager, Fred Clarke, and screaming obscenities at the Pittsburgh owner, Barney Dreyfuss. McGraw always took a special ornery delight in tormenting Pulliam, whom he called “the boy president,” so he was especially pleased when he obtained an injunction in civil court against his suspension, and then was exonerated by the league's Board of Directors.

Then the next year, in the midst of the 1906 pennant race against Chicago, on August 6 at the Polo Grounds, McGraw protested a call by umpire James Johnstone so vociferously and profanely that he was evicted. Harry Steinfeldt, the Cubs third baseman, overheard the tirade and “reluctantly” wrote an account of the incident when Pulliam requested it. It's one of the more interesting documents on file at the Hall of Fame, Steinfeldt testifying that he heard McGraw call Johnstone “a damn dirty cock eating bastard, and a low-lived son-of-a-bitch of a yellow cur hound.” It provides us with the one verifiable account we have of the sort of language McGraw evidently regularly employed.

Steinfeldt also wrote that McGraw had added “that if he had anything to do with it, Johnstone would never come into the Polo Grounds again.” Sure enough, when Johnstone showed up to officiate the next day's game, he was barred at the gate. When the other umpire, Bob Emslie, heard this, he promptly departed the premises. McGraw then tried to talk Frank Chance, the so-called Peerless Leader of the Cubs, into having a substitute from each club umpire that day's contest. Chance would have none of that, and so, naturally, the game was forfeited to the Cubs.

The eleven thousand fans who had traveled to the Polo Grounds were, of course, furious, so when Johnstone showed up the next day, he got perhaps the only standing ovation ever accorded an umpire in major league annals. The fans “cheered him until they were hoarse.” Writing in the
Washington Post
, J. T. Kelly described pretty much what the rest of the baseball world thought about Muggsy's “baby tactics” that so infuriated the paying customers. “McGraw can't fail but read the finger marks on the wall,” the columnist wrote. “Too long has McGraw abused the patience of the hoi polloi. . . . The trick was irretrievably rotten, and all the perfumes of Arabia will not nullify the stench. . . . McGraw has a host of admirers who gloried in his aggressive and
successful tactics. A scrappy, fighting leader is always admired, but when a manager stoops to a contemptible trick, such as Tuesday's black eye to the national sport, it is high time to call a halt.”

Using words like “blackguardism,” “jobbery,” and “bulldozing,” Pulliam suspended McGraw for three games. The president was so furious that he threatened to “quit professional baseball forever” if his decision should be overruled by the league's Board of Directors—as had his earlier ruling against McGraw. If this penalty improved Muggsy's behavior, however, no one was aware of it. Poor, bedraggled President Pulliam vowed to eradicate “the brand of sportsmanship known as ‘McGrawism.'” But who was listening? Muggsy seemed only to grow in stature, and in the eyes of his players, with each explosive episode. “There's only been one manager,” said Connie Mack, “and his name is John McGraw.”

Crowed, most famously, the infielder “Laughing Larry” Doyle: “It's great to be young and a Giant.”

The World Series of 1905 was the first that was officially set in place as a postseason event, anxiously anticipated by sports fans across the nation. The two leagues were at peace, accepted as equals, while the Giants were almost indisputably acclaimed the preeminent team in the majors. They had, after all, won 106 and 105 games in successive years; they drew the largest crowds, home and away, engendering the most passion; they represented the largest city in the country; they were managed by the most controversial and famous man in the game . . . and now, on top of all this, as the season progressed, Christy Mathewson began to emerge, definitively, as the most popular player. Perhaps never has an athlete had such a rendezvous with a championship. Certainly none has ever embraced fate so well. Two days before the Series began, the redoubtable Dan Patch, astounding the nation, broke his own record by pacing a mile in 1:55.2. Within a week Matty had exceeded even those equine heroics, to become the most celebrated creature in the land.

The World's Championship Series might have still been referred to modestly as the Inter-League Series by a few cautious observers who refused to be wrapped in the hype, but the wiser students caught on fairly quickly that here was a divertissement that captured America's fancy quite unlike anything else before. Ring Lardner got it. “The World Serious,” he would tab it.

Well, what else had there been? Oh, Barnum had rolled out his freaks and brought the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jenny Lind, to these innocent shores; Philadelphia had presented the U.S. Centennial; and then Chicago had the Columbian Exposition, which gave us the Ferris wheel, and Cracker Jack, too. And yes, even the presidential campaign of '92 had been sidetracked when, in New Orleans, the “Boston Strong Boy,” the Great John L. Sullivan, fought the “California Dude,” Gentleman Jim Corbett, a/k/a “Pompadour Jim.” Until that time, Western Union had never had such a night. As the
Boston Post
rhymed:

Lo! All the country held its breath
To hear the wired blows;
And strong men trembled pale as death,
When Corbett broke John's nose.
Oh! Sullivan the mighty fell—
The champion's fate was grim,
But as for Jimmy Corbett—well,
THERE ARE NO FLIES ON HIM!

Still, for all the attention that those two gladiators received in '92, the sweet science, so called, lacked the universal approval of the American national sport. Indeed, boxing was still outlawed in most of the forty-four states. The additional fact that, for goodness sake, it was just two Micks punching each other silly further diminished interest in many quarters of the Republic. But—aha!— the Series of ought-five had no flies on it. The handsome, elegant, educated Mathewson's rise to glory only added to the splendor.

It was this season when Matty eclipsed all the competition. At the age of twenty-four, he was 31-9 with thirty-one complete games, eight shutouts, and an earned run average of 1.28. His control was such that he handed out only about two walks every nine innings while also leading the league in strikeouts. He tossed his second no-hitter in June in Chicago. This year, no pitcher in either league—not his teammate the Iron Man nor his uptown spit-ball rival Jack Chesbro—approached him. With the wider plate and the changed rules that counted fouls as strikes, pitchers generally dominated. Moreover, pitchers, like Mathewson, were simply getting taller and stronger; Matty himself was six-feet-two, 195. Really, the bountiful hitting statistics of the Gay Nineties did not reappear again until the ball was hopped up for the Roaring Twenties. Pitchers were the glamour-pusses of this era.

Mathewson, in fine form

Certainly, it also helped Mathewson's popular stature that there was no great offensive player who was a matinee idol. McGraw's Old Oriole teammates were over the hill. The contemporary batter with the highest lifetime average in the game, .346, Ed Delahanty, had died under mysterious circumstances in the middle of the 1903 season, when somehow—almost surely in his cups—he was put off a train and then fell off a bridge at Niagara Falls and drowned. In 1905, Ty Cobb was a rookie hitting .240. Tris Speaker and “Shoeless Joe” Jackson had yet to arrive in the majors. Larry Lajoie and Honus Wagner were the two most established hitting superstars, and while they were well liked within the game, both were ethnic minorities and not very marketable. Larry was French-Canadian, the ungainly Honus of German heritage.

McGraw went to his grave maintaining that Wagner was the best player he ever saw. Of course, there might have been an ulterior motive in this declaration. It always galled McGraw that Babe Ruth—a Baltimore boy, no less—would come to New York and steal the Giants' thunder. “Why shouldn't we pitch to Ruth?” McGraw asked with false bravado in 1921, when the Giants first faced the Yankees in a World Series. “We've pitched to better hitters in the National League.”

As for Cobb, he and McGraw were probably too much of the same pugnacious temperament ever to be able to appreciate each other, but as it was, they truly found each other despicable. Indeed, Mathewson may have been the only rival the misanthropic Cobb ever liked. “Matty was a hero of mine,” the “Georgia Peach” said. “He was truly magnificent in every way—no other phrase fits.” But McGraw? After Cobb took on one of McGraw's players, Buck Herzog, in a hotel fight, pummeling Herzog near to a pulp, McGraw sought out Cobb. Perhaps luckily for McGraw, who was fat and out of shape by this time, Cobb only called him a “mucker,” threatening to kill him if he were younger. Only years later when a mutual friend was dying did McGraw and Cobb
deign to make up out of tribute to the old player they both loved. The player on his deathbed would be, of course, Mathewson.

Wagner, a shortstop who would scoop up great globs of dirt with his giant hands as he gobbled up grounders, was an absolutely magnificent player, a .327 hitter lifetime, the only infielder to make the first class of the Hall of Fame—with Mathewson, Cobb, Ruth, and Walter Johnson. But he was an unattractive fellow, jug-eared and heavy-set, and though Wagner spoke unaccented English, he was never really thought of as a mainstream figure. Like so many German-Americans, he was called “Dutch” (from “Deutsch”) and was known as the “Flying Dutchman,” and remained more of a German immigrant hero. It would be another generation before a player of German descent—the one named George Herman Ruth—could qualify as a full-fledged American idol.

So Mathewson came to achieve unsurpassed popularity, and for the Giants' first Series game, McGraw naturally chose him as his starter. Back then, when the two teams playing were geographically close, a coin was flipped to determine who got the inaugural honor, and then home games were simply alternated (although rainouts could change this routine somewhat). In 1905, Philadelphia won the flip. Rather than spend the night on the road, though, the Giants preferred to commute, taking the train down in the morning, then returning to their hearths and homes immediately following each away game.