The Old Ball Game (25 page)

And, here we go again. Home Run Baker hit a two-run homer as Chief Bender beat Marquard in the opener at the Polo Grounds.

Mathewson started the second game, the next day, at Shibe Park. He shut out the A's for nine innings. So too did Eddie Plank shut out the Giants. But for once Big Six caught a break. The Giants were playing terribly shorthanded because of injuries, and late in the game McGraw had to press Hooks Wiltse, a pitcher, into service as a first baseman. It had long been forgotten, but Wiltse's nickname had come, not from anything to do with pitching, but for his fielding prowess when he was a minor leaguer. It “looked like he had hooks for hands.” And sure enough, in the ninth inning, when Philadelphia put runners on second and third with no out, Wiltse saved Matty with two spectacular fielding plays.

Then Mathewson himself knocked in the winning run in the tenth inning, and the Giants evened the Series. Searching for new superlatives, the
Tribune
cried out to the heavens that now Mathewson was the “king, emperor and ruler of all baseball pitchers at home and in the dominion of the seas.” Shibe Park was in the ocean?

Oh well, by the time Matty took the mound again for the fifth game, Philadelphia had won twice more, and there were even rumors rampant that a depressed McGraw had committed suicide (by cyanide, hara-kiri, or leaping from a window, depending on the version).

The crowd at the Polo Grounds started screaming “Matty! Matty!” as soon as he appeared, but he had something of a shaky start. Baker hit a sacrifice fly, Larry Doyle made an error that let in a second run, and the A's built their lead to 3-0 in the third. After that, Big Six gave up only one more hit. But it didn't matter. “Once more the old master stood out like the Rock of Gibraltar,” the
Herald
explained, “but his teammates were like a lot of pebbles on a barren shore.” The Giants made only two hits off old Eddie Plank—and one of those was by Matty himself. “Well,” Muggsy said, “Matty could hold the A's, but he couldn't hold the Giants.”

Mathewson put down Philadelphia in the ninth, striking out the last batter. McGraw was going to pinch-hit for him, so Matty didn't bother going back to the dugout. He just jammed his glove into his back pocket and started trudging out to the clubhouse, beyond center field. It wasn't as tragic as the year before, losing the seventh game in extra innings, but this was the Polo Grounds, this was home, and this would be his Series valedictory. The people stood and applauded and called his name.

The
World
reporter wrote: “They should erect over Matty's grave some hundred years or so from now the epitaph that . . . ‘He done his damndest—angels could do no more.'”

As Mathewson reached the outfield, a batboy ran out from the dugout and threw a mackinaw round Matty's shoulders. He walked the rest of the way like that, never looking back, the vanquished warrior, cloaked, leaving the field. As the crowd watched, just before Big Six reached the clubhouse, the mackinaw fell loose from his shoulders and dropped to the ground, but he just kept walking, and then he disappeared from view.

The third straight World Series defeat surely rattled McGraw more than he let on, although it may have taken liquor to reveal the depth of his disappointment. At a good-bye party a few nights after the Series, he suddenly lit into Wilbert Robinson, his dear old pal. Uncle Robbie, coaching at third, had misread a sign from McGraw and sent Snodgrass on a steal. The runner was thrown out. McGraw loudly upbraided Robinson and then summarily fired him. “This is my party!” he screamed. “Get the hell outta here.” Robinson responded by tossing a glass of beer at Muggsy as he departed. The two Old Orioles did not speak to each other for another seventeen years.

As McGraw aged, however, it did not always take booze to set him off. In 1915, outside Braves Field in Boston, he not only tripped a loudmouth fan but cursed him, calling him a “yellow cur,” and then drew a pocketknife on the downed man before
those around him interceded. Never was McGraw more boorish than in 1917 when the Giants lost the World Series for their fourth straight time. The White Sox manager, Pants Rowland, came across the field and most graciously said: “Mr. McGraw, I'm sorry you had to be the one to lose.”

“Get away from me, you damned busher,” McGraw snapped.

An umpire named Bill “Lord” Byron was a special target for Muggsy. Byron once threw McGraw out of three games in a single series. On another occasion McGraw rushed the umpire on the field, somehow grabbed his pocket watch, and stomped on it. The next day, though, he presented Byron with an even better watch. But Byron stuck in McGraw's craw, and in 1917, in Cincinnati, the day after Byron had thrown him out of yet another game, McGraw confronted the umpire outside the stadium, and after a bitter exchange he clocked Byron. McGraw was very nearly arrested for criminal assault on this occasion, but Mathewson acted as a mediator with the police and McGraw was allowed to leave town, suffering only baseball justice—a sixteen-day suspension and a stiff fine.

Mathewson never seems to have spoken critically on the record about McGraw's rude and even violent behavior. Surely it must have disturbed him, but somehow he accepted that truculence as an excusable outlet of Muggsy's great passion for victory. That wouldn't be unusual; many well-mannered people in sports are often so very generous in forgiving “competitors” the sort of egregiously aggressive behavior that would not otherwise be tolerated. Besides, Mathewson had seen so much of the good McGraw, and it seems that he somehow simply accepted the strange dichotomy in his friend.

Muggsy's generosity was well known, and the fact that he was so intelligent would also serve as a mitigating factor after he blew up. Frankie Frisch, the college man from Fordham, said: “McGraw was night and day off the field.” And: “I always thought he was sort of on the genius side.” No matter how crude and vicious he could be on the diamond, McGraw could never just be
dismissed as a brute. The wise baseball executive Branch Rickey, a sensitive, deeply religious man, even found that away from the ballpark, McGraw was “quiet-spoken, almost disarmingly so.”

Demon Rum might have been altering this demeanor, but for most of the many years that Mathewson served with McGraw on the Giants, Muggsy could be attractive company once he changed out of his flannels into mufti. So it was that the one time Matty publicly faulted his manager, it was strictly a professional assessment. Even then it came off in the nature of a backhanded compliment. This occurred late in the 1914 season, when Mathewson wrote an article for
Everybody's
magazine bluntly entitled: “Why We Lost Three World's Championships.”

The thesis of the piece was that McGraw was too much in control for the good of the players. “The club is McGraw. His dominant personality is everything,” Matty wrote. As a consequence, when the pressure of a World Series came down, “self-consciousness, overanxiety and nervousness weighed on our shoulders like the Old Man of The Sea.” In contrast, Mathewson wrote that the A's and Red Sox were loose and able to “stand on their own feet.” He even added that the 1905 Giants who did win the championship were a sturdier lot who “had baseball brains” and didn't have to depend on McGraw at that earlier time.

Having made the point, Mathewson quickly backpedaled and put down his teammates. He wrote that the Giants were “not of championship caliber. We have won the last three National League pennants solely because the club is McGraw.” He even called his fellows “a team of puppets worked from the bench by a string,” which was a pretty damning assessment. Perhaps realizing this, Matty concluded: “I sincerely hope no one will accuse me of poor sportsmanship. I have not squealed; only analyzed the situation from things that I know.”

How McGraw reacted, we don't know. He did not respond on the record—and, of course, however much Matty had taken
McGraw to task, he had put down the players even more so. Maybe the two men aired it out on vacation; it was later in that off-season that the McGraws and Mathewsons vacationed in Cuba together.

McGraw probably had more on his mind, anyway. The 1914 Giants had finished second, but lost to the Braves by ten and a half games. Perhaps he realized that his team that had won three straight pennants was unraveling. He himself was growing even more paranoid about the umpires. The Great War had broken out that August in Europe, and at one point the Little Napoleon even announced: “I feel like the Kaiser,” set upon by the Great Powers. “It's the league against New York,” he wailed. In one game, Bill Klem, exasperated at all the bitching, cleaned out the whole Giant bench. Mathewson, smirking, led a single-file march off the field. Not even bringing back Turkey Mike Donlin—who was broke and mourning the death to cancer of his young wife, Mabel Hite—helped.

Unfortunately, the 1915 season only turned uglier for both McGraw and Mathewson. The Giants plummeted to last place— the only time in Muggsy's career when a team he managed for a full season finished in last place. But even more unexpected was Matty's dismal performance. It was as if a switch had been turned off. In 1914 he had won twenty-four games, with five shutouts. His control was still pinpoint, his durability, at thirty-three, as remarkable as ever; once again he threw for more than three hundred innings. But in 1915 he experienced arm and back problems and won only eight games, losing fourteen. He came back the next year, as McGraw began to rebuild the Giants, but the arm that had pitched forty-seven hundred innings was wasted; Muggsy knew that Big Six was no more.

In July 1916, McGraw called up Garry Herrmann, the Cincinnati owner. It was well known that Herrmann had soured on his playing-manager, the former Giant, Buck Herzog. There were rumors, in fact, that the sinister Hal Chase, the Reds' first baseman,
was going to be asked to take over the club. To Herrmann's surprise and delight, McGraw offered up Mathewson as the new manager. It gave Matty the chance to manage that McGraw knew he would never get with the Giants. Matty agreed; even if he had to leave New York, Matty said Muggsy was “doing me a favor.” For Herzog, McGraw would give up two other players, as well, Edd Roush and Bill McKechnie. Herrmann jumped at the deal. Everybody was happy except possibly for Hal Chase.

Even as Matty's skills faded, he was still a hero to young men across the country. Matty on the cover of
The American Boy
, May 1916.

Mathewson cleaned out his locker and bid good-bye to McGraw. They'd been together for sixteen years, almost to the day. Matty started out of the clubhouse. No one said a word. Then he saw that a few of the Giants were dealing cards. So he
sat down, played one last hand, and without another word put down his cards, stood up, and left the New York Giants and Muggsy McGraw behind.

On the train to Cincinnati with Roush, Mathewson said: “I'll tell you something, Edd. You and Mac [McKechnie] have only been on the Giants a couple of months. It's just another ball club to you fellows. But I was with that team for sixteen years. That's a mighty long time. To me, the Giants are home. And leaving them like this, I feel the same as when I leave home in the spring.”

Ring Lardner wrote:

My eyes are very misty
As I pen these lines to Christy.
Oh my heart is full of heaviness today.
May the flowers ne'er wither, Matty
On your grave at Cincinnati
Which you've chosen for your final fadeaway.

In all the years her husband had managed, Blanche McGraw had never made an extended road trip with the team before, but when the Giants next swung west to Cincinnati, she came along so that she and Muggsy might visit with the Mathewsons. As it was, her husband was his usual baseball self—all business—and had no time for her, so Blanche and Jane just up and left the men. They took Christy Jr., who was nine years old, and the three of them headed off for an impromptu vacation in upstate New York.

McGraw was quickly rebuilding the Giants from the last-place disaster of the year before. The team at one point even won twenty-six games in a row, which is still the major league record, but it was a streaky club, and it finished fourth. The players wanted to give McGraw a present in commemoration of the great winning streak and decided to present him with a handsome collection of the works of Shakespeare—surely the most interesting
gift ever tendered to an American athletic coach by his players. But the Giants were out of the race by then, so McGraw had taken off to the racetrack at Laurel, near Baltimore. The players mailed him the Shakespeare set.

The joke in Cincinnati was that it had been the first city to have a professional team, in 1869, but unfortunately hadn't had one since. Mathewson wasn't able to change that reputation in 1916, when the Reds tied for the cellar (or tied for seventh place if you saw the glass as half full), but in 1917 he steered them to a fourth-place finish.

However satisfying that must have been to Matty, though, the year was a sad one. His brother Henry had contracted tuberculosis—the white plague. TB is an infectious disease that primarily affects the lungs. It had been the most common serious human infection, and it was often the leading cause of death in America and much of the world. In the nineteenth century, 14 percent of American deaths were attributed to TB. John Bunyan, the seventeenth-century author of
Pilgrim's Progress
, called it: The Captain of All These Men of Death. Before streptomycin and other modern drugs were available in the mid-twentieth century, there was nothing to fight TB but rest and fresh air. At best, recovery was only fifty-fifty.