The Old Ball Game (23 page)

In fact, though, once Muggsy agreed to let Matty call his own game, there's no evidence that they had any serious manager-player disputes. McGraw distanced himself from his players during the season, but he was Mathewson's bridge partner in spring training and, especially since Jane and Blanche were so close, it was hard for him ever to treat America's idol just like any other minion. Muggsy would never simply remove Mathewson if he were getting hit; it was sort of tacitly understood that Matty would take himself out. Besides, all friendship aside, Mathewson never gave McGraw any trouble, and as much as McGraw prized hardcase scufflers like himself, he had a certain envy for gentle types like Mathewson and Hughie Jennings. But Muggsy admired him even more for his spirit. “Matty has the greatest heart of any ballplayer I ever saw,” McGraw said. “I don't think there will ever be another
like him for ability, brains and courage.” And, at the end of the day, all sentiment aside, Matty was Muggsy's meal ticket. From 1905, when New York first played in a World Series, until 1911, the next time the Giants made it, only three other players stayed on the roster. Matty won for him. “What always amazed me,” Blanche said, “was how John could find the answer, the solution, to all his troubles, through victory.” Big Six meant victory.

When John Brush finally died after the 1912 season—“he was as tender as a dear girl,” McGraw said, using that curious analogy in his touching eulogy—McGraw assumed even more command of the Giants. He was drinking more, though, becoming more irascible, and each spring, in allergy season, his sinusitis—the upper respiratory problems that were aggravated ever after he was hit in the face by the ball that Dummy Taylor threw—grew worse and he more disagreeable. But his reputation only ascended. Not long after Brush was buried, McGraw took to vaudeville, playing fifteen weeks on the Keith Circuit. Mathewson had made a thousand dollars a week two years before. McGraw was paid triple that, making him the highest-paid performer in all of vaudeville. Imagine, if you will, Alex Rodriguez making more for a movie appearance than Tom Cruise.

Bozeman Bulger, the newspaperman who had written Matty's act, did the same for Muggsy. As opening night drew nigh, though, Bulger could not get McGraw to work on his lines. Muggsy finally took the trouble to memorize them just two nights before he opened, showed up at the Colonial Theatre five minutes before he went on, and knocked 'em dead without muffing a word. Dressed impeccably in a morning suit, McGraw told some anecdotes, professed to reveal “guarded secrets of inside baseball as perfected by the Giants,” and generally just played himself on a tour that wound all the way out to St. Louis. Sometimes he followed Odiva, the “Goldfish Lady.”

The next off-season, McGraw had even grander plans. He would travel around the world, seeing the sights and showing off the
grand American game to the heathens. He put a team together, but Mathewson wouldn't go. It was too long a time for Jane and him to be away from Christy Jr. Besides, Mathewson had terrible problems with seasickness, and the idea of crossing the Pacific seemed appalling. So, with a team of players and a battalion of McGraw steamer trunks, Muggsy and Blanche led the expedition across the North American continent and then on to Japan.

“Where Mr. Masson?” the disappointed Japanese inquired.

China was the next stop, then the Philippines and Hong Kong. The tour dipped down to Australia, then back up to India and Ceylon, and on to Egypt, where McGraw conducted a game at the Pyramids. In Rome, the McGraws were granted a private audience with Pope Pius X. Monte Carlo was next, then Paris, where McGraw dined out extensively for being known as the Little Napoleon. Naturally, he visited his namesake's tomb and announced: “I too met the Duke of Wellington, only his name was Connie Mack, instead of Arthur Wellesley.”

In London the Americans played a baseball game before thirty-five thousand baffled English spectators, a crowd that included King George. After a side trip to Ireland, the junket returned home on the
Lusitania
. It was estimated that the journey extended over thirty-eight thousand miles. The diamond wayfarers made it back just in time for spring training.

If Mathewson was not quite so intrepid as McGraw, he remained a rock—apparently indestructible even as he moved into his thirties. He peaked with that magnificent season of '08, when he won thirty-seven games, but in season after season that followed he averaged around three hundred innings pitched, twenty-five wins, and under two earned runs a game. Even in his prime his fastball had not been what players call “heavy,” and so as speed diminished with age, he did not lose his best stuff. He still officiated quite well enough with the fadeaway and the curve, and, if anything, his control grew even more precise. In 1913 he went sixty-eight consecutive innings without giving up a base on balls.

“Chief” Meyers

Mathewson possessed the most supple arm, and early on he had learned how to preserve it. “There was no strain the way he threw,” Larry Doyle explained. “He just let loose that easy, country boy pitch of his.” All told, Big Six pitched 4,781 innings, and it is almost incidental that he struck out 2,502 hitters, because that was rarely his intent. Rather, his idea was to get by with as few pitches as possible per game.

What Mathewson sought above all was to put the ball precisely where he wanted it, fooling the batters rather than overpowering them. “Anytime you hit a ball hard off him, you never got another pitch in that spot again,” said Chief Meyers. It helped, of course, that Matty's supernatural mnemonic skills were such that he would never forget where he'd thrown a pitch that a batter had bested him on.

Mathewson believed control to be the single most important attribute for a pitcher—counting more than speed, variety, or guile (all of which he did possess in spades). Ring Lardner, who in the fashion common to that era liked to write in dialect—his most famous work being
You Know Me, Al
—wrote this about Big Six from an uneducated ballplayer's point of view:

“They's a flock o' pitchers that knows a batter's weakness and works accordin'. But they aint nobody in the world can stick a ball as near as where they want to stick it as he can. . . . I s'pose when he broke in he didn't have no more control than the rest of these here collegers. But the diff'rence between they and him was he seen what a good thing it was to have, and went out and got it.”

It was common for the Giants to journey up the Hudson just before their season opened to play an exhibition against the West Point Cadet team. One year up there the subject of control came up, and Matty—always delighted to respond when somebody would put their money where their mouth was—accepted 12-1 odds on $20 that he could not throw twenty pitches to exactly the same spot. Chief Meyers squatted, rested his catcher's mitt on one knee, and simply held it there while Mathewson toed the rubber and, twenty times in a row, hit the target squarely, then unashamedly pocketed $240 of the cadets' money.

As each season passed, though, as Mathewson realized that he must be nearing the end of his career, he was forced to understand that he would be denied what next he most wanted. That was to become the manager of the New York Giants. At least there was no tease; it was perfectly clear that McGraw wasn't going anywhere.

It is a paradox that, whatever the sport, the brightest players— those who would be expected to grow out of a mere game—are often those who never leave. The smart ones begin to see elements that lesser minds fail to perceive, and so they are challenged to move into managerial positions, to plumb new depths
of the game. At this time, too, it was more common for the best players to become managers. And, of course, Mathewson had studied at the foot of the master.

Also, his generation had grown up with the game as it had become something more than a game to America. When Mathewson had entered the sport, baseball was, as his father-in-law believed, a disreputable enterprise played by antediluvian ruffians. Stadiums were thrown up like circus tents, and franchises—even whole leagues—moved with the breezes. But now, the whole enterprise was as sturdy as the grand new ballyards, and more and more of the players were couth and educated. Bucknell? Why now, Bugs and Turkey Mike were gone, to be replaced by the baccalaureate likes of Harvard Eddie Grant.

It was a trade-off, though. These better-bred players didn't give Muggsy near as much trouble. Or near as much fun, either. “The men don't get out and fight for the games like they used to,” he muttered. “That's what's wrong with baseball.” Even presidents lent their prestige to the proceedings now, stadiums were rock-solid, and it had been a decade since a single franchise had been uprooted. The sixteen big league teams seemed to be as immutable as the Ten Commandments, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the thirteen stripes that flew over America's grand old game. Baseball had become downright hallowed.

There was, however, still one hangover from the old days, an impurity. Fans could get into gambling pools for as little as double nickels a week. You could bet the number of runs, wins, whatever your fancy. A lot of newspapers printed odds. Everybody was betting the national sport, and everybody winked at the fact that maybe some players could be enticed to play a losing game. After all, for all of baseball's success, players weren't making great salaries. Trapped by the reserve clause, they needed off-season jobs just to get by. There was so much temptation. It was instructive that when people realized that Larry Doyle hadn't touched home plate in the fifth game of the '11 Series but no
A's protested, the immediate and natural suspicion was that there must be a fix to it.

It was funny. Everybody was always wondering, but nobody wanted to believe what everybody was wondering. It was, in fact, very much indeed the way it would be at the end of the century, when steroids entered what had become known by then as “the national pastime.”

In particular, starting not long after he entered the majors in 1905, a brilliant-fielding first baseman named Hal Chase was regularly rumored to be “laying down.” But then, Prince Hal was a charming sort. The McGraws lived for a time at the Washington Inn at Amsterdam and 157th Street, and in 1908 Chase, playing for the Yankees then, was a neighbor in the building. McGraw took a real liking to him, and despite the buzz, Chase was made playing manager of the Yankees in 1910. The fox was running the henhouse.

Baseball was simply doing too well for anybody to stop the parade. Why, at some point it even became associated with apple pie.

The 1912 Series—Giants–Red Sox—came on with such excitement that it eclipsed the hoopla that had made the 1911 Series seem the ultimate. Scalpers were getting $125 for box seats. Three hundred reporters from as far away as San Francisco came to cover the games. The line to obtain cheap seats at the Polo Grounds was longer than ever. Intrepid journalists even uncovered a female encamped midst the male throng. She was dubbed “the mysterious woman in blue” before she was finally revealed just to be one Jennie Smith of Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn. A large new electric scoreboard was set up in Times Square itself, and it attracted so many fans during the games that traffic had to be diverted. It was the same sort of mess at Herald Square.

Down from Boston for the first game came a band of loyal Beantown fans known as the Royal Rooters. They had been led, dating back to the nineteenth century, even before there was an American League, by a saloon-keeper named Nuf Ced McGreevey—his moniker derived from his habit of certifying a
statement with the words “enough said” and then a well-placed spit into the cuspidor. Dressed in red, complete with a large band that played a theme song named “Tessie” and boasting a hundred thousand dollars in betting money, the Royal Rooters descended on Manhattan, where they paraded the enemy turf by torchlight.

The next afternoon before a packed house at the Polo Grounds, the Royal Rooters came on with a snake dance and a cakewalk as the famous Boston mayor John Fitzgerald—“Honey Fitz”— bellowed through a green megaphone. The
Herald
noted, archly, that the mayor “did nothing to attract attention outside of running about the field until they had to hold him in his seat.”

Once again McGraw designed new uniforms for the Series, eschewing last year's black and instead dressing his charges in sparkling white outfits with a distinct violet trim. Then, in a decision that displeased Mathewson, McGraw held him (and Marquard) out in order to allow a rookie spitballer, Jeff Tesreau, the chance to start before the home folks. The ploy didn't work; Tesreau couldn't hold a lead and the ecstatic Royal Rooters went home with a 4–3 victory for the Sox ace, “Smokey Joe” Wood.

At Fenway Park the next afternoon, Mathewson was not particularly sharp, and, in concert, the Giants' defense made five errors, costing six unearned runs; after eleven innings, in “the gathering darkness,” the game was called, a 6–6 tie. Marquard won the 2–1 makeup game the next afternoon, but when the Series returned to New York, Smoky Joe won 3–1. Back in Boston, Mathewson gave up only five hits and two earned runs, but lost 2–1. He didn't allow a base runner after the third inning, and in the sixth, Chief Meyers told McGraw: “I never saw him have more.” But to no avail. Ever since Home Run Baker had hit that four-furlong drive, it was as if Matty was snakebit in the Series.