The Old Ball Game (20 page)

And, really, that was it. Mathewson's suspicions were realized in the third inning. Joe Tinker, who earlier in his career had enjoyed no success against Big Six, had then taken to hitting against him with a bigger bat. With that, he had become, as Hooks Wiltse said, “the only hitter I know of had a jinx on Matty.” And it was Tinker who made the hit that broke the game open. It was a triple over the center fielder's head. Fans of Matty made excuses that he had told the center fielder, Cy Seymour, to play back, but Mathewson said no, it was just a curve that didn't break. Even then, under normal circumstances, Seymour might have caught up with Tinker's hit, but he lost the ball in the mass of fans who had climbed on up the tower behind home plate. The Cubs scored all four of their runs in that inning. Mathewson was only surprised by “why it took them so long to hit me.”

Somehow he held on till the seventh, when McGraw took him out for a pinch hitter after the Giants loaded the bases against Three-Finger. Laughing Larry Doyle, who hit Brown well, was the pinch hitter, but he fouled out to the catcher, Johnny Kling, who cornered the pop-up even as a bottle tossed from the stands whizzed past his head. That was the Giants' last chance.

In the clubhouse, the smile was gone from Merkle's face. “It was my fault, boys,” he moaned. He went to McGraw and once again told him to get rid of him.

McGraw was never more stand-up. “Fire you?” Muggsy asked. “Why you're the kind of guy I've been lookin' for for many years. I could use a carload of you. Forget this season and come back next spring. The newspapers will have forgotten it all by then.”

And then he slipped away. Matty heard Merkle say: “He's a regular guy.”

The Cubs went on to beat the Tigers in the World Series. It would be the last time they were champions, ninety-six years on. And, of course, for Merkle, the newspapers—and everybody else—never did forget his lapse. Yet for all the abuse Merkle suffered for his boner, for all his life, McGraw was right: he was a tough kid. No matter how often he heard someone scream, “Hey, Merkle, touch second base,” he never packed it in. Merkle would play another sixteen hundred major league games, making a last at bat in 1926 when he was thirty-seven years old.

On the other hand, no one can be sure how much the ramifications of the end of the 1908 season affected Harry Pulliam. Surely, though, it was a great deal. He was a nervous man, fragile, something of an idealist, and the brutal criticism he endured for sticking up for his umpire obviously told on him. A few months later, in February, at the winter meeting of the National League, there were more disputes where Pulliam found himself in the crossfire. He suffered a breakdown. He returned to the job soon enough, but he seemed more detached and unsettled than ever.

In the middle of that season, on July 28, 1909, Pulliam took a room at the New York Athletic Club. He put on a fancy dressing gown, lay down, and blew his brains out. The “boy president” was thirty-nine years old.

The next year, George Dovey, owner of the Boston Braves and one of the three directors who ruled against the Giants in the
Merkle game, spoke with a writer from the
New York Tribune
named W. J. Macbeth. What he told Macbeth was in confidence, but some years later, after Dovey had died, Macbeth published what the owner had told him.

Dovey said that when he and Ebbets and Herrmann were wrestling with their decision, the affidavits were so completely in conflict that the three directors were “up a tree.” Then they came to Mathewson's sworn statement. Alone amongst his teammates, Matty told the truth. It cost him another victory and, as it turned out, it cost the Giants the pennant and a chance at the World's Championship. Still, he told the truth.

“Mathewson,” Dovey told Macbeth, “swore that Merkle did not touch second base. He said that he . . . embraced Fred when Bridwell's hit was delivered and ran shouting to the clubhouse after the Giant first sacker had run about halfway to the midway.”

Dovey then said: “We took all the other affidavits and threw them into the waste basket. Matty's word was good enough for us.”

So it was that Big Six didn't get to pitch in a World Series after a season where he had won his most games. Then, that winter of '08-'09, he went back to Factoryville. His kid brother Nicholas, who was nineteen years old, was home from college. The three surviving Mathewson brothers had all become pitchers. McGraw had given Henry, the middle brother, brief, unimpressive tryouts with the Giants, but Nicholas seemed to be closer in form to Matty. Hughie Jennings, McGraw's old Baltimore teammate who was managing Detroit, had even tendered Nicholas a contract offer, but he had decided to enroll at Lafayette College.

Nicholas had gotten homesick and said he had been feeling poorly, and so he had not gone back to school after Christmas. On January 15, he left Matty and his parents and went fishing. On his way back to the house, he gave the two nice pickerel he
caught to a family friend. He told the older neighbor that he had always paid him well when he cut their grass, so he wanted him to have the fish as a present.

A bit later, Matty went out to the barn. When he came back into the house, evenly, constraining himself, he told his parents: “I have awful news, but all of us have to remain calm.”

Matty had found his kid brother's body in the barn. Nicholas had written a hasty, incoherent note and then shot himself in the brain. That is why he had given the pickerel away.

Mathewson's 1908 season of extremes—majesty followed by disappointment, by defeat, by tragedy—faded into, simply, more excellence. He was 25–6 with a 1.14 ERA in 1909, then 27–9 and 1.89 in 1910. He kept winning at least twenty games a season thirteen years in a row, right on through 1914, when he was thirty-three, and then, just like that, his arm seemed to wear out overnight. But for all Matty's personal success, he in particular and McGraw and the Giants continued to be dogged by the most incredible bad luck. Starting with Merkle's lapse, fate seemed almost whimsical for the team.

The Giants, though, in good times and the few bad times, remained the crown jewel of baseball—“the most spectacular team,” the
Tribune
rhapsodized, “whose fame has been sung in every household from Father Fan to Jimmy and Johnny and the rest of the male brood, as they lugged to their breasts their first baseball bats.” In another vein, Harry Golden, famous for his
Only in America
, would reminisce: “The Giants represented the New York of the brass cuspidor—that old New York which was still a
man's world before the advent of the League of Women Voters; the days of swinging doors, of sawdust on the barroom floor and of rushing the growler.”

This, of course, was just the start of McGraw's world. He was also everywhere about town, escorting Blanche to the finest restaurants, to Rosie's, to Enrico and Paglieri's, to Mori's; to the theater and vaudeville. Always, he was driven about. Brush gave him a five-thousand-dollar car as a bonus after the 1908 season, and since Muggsy didn't drive, that necessitated hiring a chauffeur. He drank more and grew stouter, to “aldermanic proportions,” a friend noted. Muggsy polished his plate. “I always believe in shooting the works,” he said. “Can't stop once I start.” He was talking about eating on that occasion, but it could have referred to the way he attacked everything in life. Hoping to duplicate his success in Baltimore with the Diamond Café, he invested in two Manhattan pool halls. In one, at Herald Square, his partners were Tod Sloan, the famous jockey, who revolutionized race riding, and a gambler named Jack Doyle. For the other parlor, nearby, his fellow investor was Willie Hoppe, the pool champion, but Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who would fix the 1919 World Series, was a silent partner. Muggsy liked the company of gamblers. Unfortunately, both establishments lost money. Wildcat investments in mining stocks also disappeared. And, of course, regularly he would lose at playing the ponies. At casinos, he loved to gaily dispense twenty-five-dollar chips to all the ladies in his crowd. Florida real estate would be his last, worst gamble.

Moreover, he was the softest touch in town. He'd buy a suit for a down-and-out friend who had a job interview, hire busted old ballplayers for menial jobs around the Polo Grounds—including two sad old future Hall of Famers, Amos Rusie and Dan Brouthers—and always he was a sweetheart target for pals. Eddie Brannick, a Giant employee who was his confidant for many years, explained: “John really had a dual personality. He was a study in human nature. He was tough with tough people
and warm with soft ones.” Curiously, McGraw always meticulously noted all those loans he handed out into a little account book; but then he would never call in the debts owed him. He gave away tens of thousands of dollars in his lifetime. “I did wonder if the endless loans or gifts would drain his patience,” Blanche wrote, “but I'm happy to say they never did.”

After all, he was making big money, the highest salary in the game—right up until Babe Ruth and Judge Landis, the commissioner, passed him. In 1909, for example, the Giants paid McGraw $18,000, double what Mathewson played for. By 1916 it was $40,000, then fifty, topping out at seventy. He dressed as befitting a man of means, usually, for some reason, with a fleurde-lis pin on his tie. He made sure that Blanche was awash in jewelry. When the Federal League came into existence in 1914 as a major league rival to the established two big leagues, McGraw turned down a $100,000 offer without blinking—and that was hard cash in the bank.

Then, too, McGraw's game was prospering, increasing in respectability. By 1910, as cities grew and mass transit improved— especially with electric streetcars—major league attendance had increased to an average of 4,969 per game. It would have been much higher, except that the Giants and several other clubs were still hamstrung by blue laws that prohibited playing games on Sunday, the one full day when the working populace was off. That year the national American sport also gained a further certification, when President William Howard Taft showed up for Opening Day for the Washington Senators.

Apparently it was spur-of-the-moment. The
Washington Post
had noted that morning that “the opening will not be attended by any ceremony.” But here to the ballyard came the portly president, with his secretary of state and an army general in tow, and thus, the
Post
declared, did there come about “the auspicious union of official Washington and baseballic Washington.” Taft did not disappoint, either. He had been a pitcher in his svelter salad
days. Reported the
Post:
“A mighty cheer swept across the crowd as President Taft showed such faultless delivery. . . . He did it with his good, trusty right arm, and the virgin sphere scudded across the diamond, true as a die to the pitcher's box, where Walter Johnson gathered it in.”

More important, perhaps, than even this White House seal of approval was a sweeping acknowledgment from the owners that their growing sport now deserved serious, permanent residences. In 1909 the A's moved into Shibe Park, the first baseball stadium to be built of steel and reinforced concrete. In the next six years, ten more such parks would be erected, including Wrigley Field, which stands yet today as a monument to the sustained futility of its inhabitants.

Then on the night after April 13, 1911, Opening Day, a huge fire took down the Polo Grounds. What to do? There was some talk of putting lights in Washington Park, the Dodgers' stadium situated hard by the Gowanus Canal, and playing Giant games there at night after the Dodgers cavorted in daylight. Such a revolutionary idea was abandoned, though, when, of all people, Andrew Freedman came to the aid of his old team. Freedman had become a small, minority part owner of the Highlanders, and he and his partners invited the Giants to share their American League field until a new Polo Grounds could be constructed.

And yes, from the ashes rose a palacial monument to baseball. The new steel-and-concrete Polo Grounds featured Italianate marble boxes around the upper deck, Roman-style pylons, a balustrade with American eagles and coats of arms of the National League teams, all under a cantilevered roof above that was bright blue, while gold banners fluttered in the breeze. Incredibly, this diamond masterwork was ready for the Giants on June 28, barely ten weeks after the conflagration. By the end of the season, when the Giants took on the Athletics in the World Series, the spectacular new Polo Grounds could accommodate thirty-eight thousand spectators, all with seats designated for their fannies. The
quaint days of overflow crowds standing on the field of play were all but gone. The new park was actually supposed to be called John Brush Stadium, but it was the same as when New York unsuccessfully tried to turn Sixth Avenue into the Avenue of the Americas. It was the Polo Grounds, and it stayed the Polo Grounds for more than another half century, until after the Giants had fled to San Francisco, until after the Mets had left for the new Shea Stadium, until even then, when they tore the dear old strange place down.

But now, in 1911, John J. McGraw had an edifice to match his own grandeur. “His very walk across the field is a challenge to the multitude,” Grantland Rice wrote. And, of course, Muggsy knew it. He could be insufferably domineering. Sammy Strang hit a home run once, but McGraw promptly fined him twenty-five dollars because he was supposed to bunt. “You do what I tell you, and I'll take the responsibility if we lose,” he informed his charges. Except perhaps for Mathewson, everybody else operated under his explicit orders. “I think we can win if my brains hold out,” Muggsy humbly declared.

Interestingly, Mathewson was coming to the conclusion that there might be more liability in this control than McGraw appreciated. For almost all his career, though, he kept this thought to himself. Maybe it was simply that Matty was otherwise awed by what the Little Napoleon could create just by the force of his personality. “McGraw leaps in the air,” Mathewson wrote, “kicks his heels together, claps his mitt, shouts at the umpire, runs in and pats the next batter on the back and says something to the pitcher. . . . The whole atmosphere inside the park is changed in a minute. . . . The little silent actor on the third-base coaching line is the cause of the change.” The Polo Grounds was as much his pulpit as his stage, he as much a spiritual force as a theatrical one.