The Old Ball Game (27 page)

Even allowing for McGraw's idiosyncratic taste in certain rapscallion players, Chase's ability to bamboozle him is perhaps the most baffling personnel mystery in McGraw's career. Or maybe it is just the ultimate proof of how beguiling Prince Hal really could be—that he could put that much over on that grand old student of men, Muggsy McGraw.

As for Mathewson, after he and Chase parted, forever, at the conclusion of the 1919 season, Mathewson went west to the World Series, where the White Sox were playing his old Cincinnati team. He sat alongside the esteemed Hugh Fullerton, of the
Chicago Herald and Examiner
. Rumors about the fix had already begun to spread. Ring Lardner, emboldened by whiskey, had swayed through the White Sox railroad car, singing (to the tune of “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles”), “I'm forever blowing ball games.” In the press box, Mathewson would take his pen and, on Fullerton's scorecard, circle all the plays he thought were funny. There were a number of them.

Luckily for baseball, the lively ball (and Babe Ruth in particular) came to the fore at this time, diverting attention from the shame of the Black Sox scandal. Meanwhile, McGraw's own presence grew somewhat paradoxical.

On the one hand, never had he been so personally imposing. Gene Fowler, the acerbic columnist, wrote: “There were two ‘Misters' on the New York scene in the 1920s, men who were always so addressed, Charles F. Murphy, leader of Tammany Hall, and John J. McGraw of the New York Giants.” Somehow he rebuilt the Giants into even more of a juggernaut than his teams of the early 1900s or the 1911–'12–'13 clubs had been. The Giants became the first major league team to win four consecutive pennants, from 1921 through 1924. Finally, too, McGraw broke his string of World Series losses, taking the championships of '21and'22.

McGraw and Babe Ruth, 1922 World Series.

Yet in the face of this success, the Giants were losing the city— and, in a real sense, the sport—to their heretofore poor municipal cousins, the Yankees. Once The Babe showed up in pinstripes in 1920, the whole of baseball was changed. He hit fifty-four home runs that year, more by himself than all but one entire team in the majors. Previously, while most New York newspapers had sent a reporter on the road with the Giants, the Yankees were usually covered by a single traveling pool reporter. Now, the press hopped on the bandwagon. Everyone wanted to read about the home run marvel, the “Sultan of Swat”; everybody wanted to see The Bambino for themselves. In 1920, as a tenant in the Polo Grounds, the Yankees became the first team in history to draw a million fans. McGraw's McGraw's team sold 360,000 fewer tickets, and the Little Napoleon seethed.

Even before that, when Sunday baseball was made legal in New York in 1919, the Giants wanted all the best dates for themselves and told the Yankees to find a new residence. McGraw savored the eviction, knowing that there was surely no real estate in Manhattan that could accommodate a new ballyard. When the Yankees announced that they would build their stadium out of Manhattan, in the Bronx hinterlands, Muggsy chortled: “They are going to Goatville, and before long they will be lost sight of.”

It didn't happen, of course. Ruth only hit more homers. Much as McGraw might have cringed at this new emphasis in his sport, though, he adjusted to the new strategic realities. The Giants very quickly became one of the top power-hitting teams in the league. Muggsy was no diamond Luddite. But that didn't mean he had to like the new order. A letter Ring Lardner wrote him probably expressed his own feelings as well as the writer's: “Baseball hasn't meant as much to me since the introduction of the TNT ball that robbed the game of the features I used to like best—features that gave you . . . and other really intelligent managers a deserved advantage . . . what I enjoyed in ‘the national pastime.'”

Of course, it was not just the new anti-McGraw style of play that upset McGraw. Ruth stole the Giants' thunder. In a very real way, too, Ruth replaced Mathewson as the nation's baseball idol. Once Matty had begun to decline, there really was no single figure to take his place. Cobb in particular was simply too ill tempered to be any sort of a national hero, and no other player had risen to popular heights until Ruth came along. Having himself been so adored, Mathewson probably understood the phenomenon and appreciated why The Babe was so appealing far more than McGraw could comprehend (or admit). “Ruth is what he is,” Matty said. “It is his temperament that makes him so valuable to baseball and so worthy of his salary. The mass of people on the bleachers care most for a man whom they can cheer today and jeer tomorrrow, and Ruth fits that picture.”

It was also the case that Ruth's national popularity developed at a time that came to be called the Golden Age of Sport. The Sultan of Swat was only the brightest sports star in the American heavens. Sportswriters had never been better at yodeling their
chansons de geste
, lifting athletes in several sports to new positions of heroism. Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight champion, and Red Grange, the running back, became celebrated national figures. Big Bill Tilden in tennis and Bobby Jones in golf were the first champions in those two country club sports to become, as the term put it, household names. Even a polo player, Tommy Hitchcock, became reasonably well known. If Muggsy had no place in this pantheon of playing gods, he still remained by far the most famous manager. In his lifetime only Knute Rockne, the football coach at Notre Dame, would begin to approach his celebrity. When the
New Yorker
chose him for its first sports profile, McGraw was lionized as more than just a manager. The magazine wrote: “He is the incarnation of the American national sport. . . . There is no man in baseball more coldly, cruelly commercial than John J. McGraw, manager and magnate, and no man more selflessly engrossed in the game for the game's sake than Muggsy McGraw, baseball artist.”

Alas, personally he was deteriorating. His health, especially in the spring when allergies affected his sinusitis, was more dicey all the time. Blanche always felt that he never really recovered from the effects of being hit by Dummy Taylor's throw from the outfield in 1903. He would sit in the dugout in his street clothes, sweating through his Cuban shirt, sneezing and coughing. Sometimes, even blood would flow from his nose. Occasionally he became so sick that he would remove himself from the dugout and manage the team by telephone from the clubhouse. His weight had continued to rise, though, and he had taken on a potbelly, or what was more decorously known then as a “corporation.” He weighed as much as two hundred pounds (and remember, he was only five-feet-seven). He also drank more and more to excess. His
hair turned white. He didn't reach his fiftieth birthday till 1923, but he looked a decade older.

As the 1920s rolled by, though, if ever he pondered quitting, his health would pick up by the end of the season, and he would be raring to go come spring training. He simply could not bear to tear himself away from the game.
Life without baseball had little meaning for him
. . . . So in 1924 he and Charles Comiskey, the “Old Roman,” owner of the White Sox, decided that it was time again to present baseball to the deprived English, show the Crown what it had been missing. As a baseball evangelist, then, Muggsy led another foreign tour. Unfortunately, the British were still no more inclined to cozy up to baseball than Americans were to cricket or soccer. George Bernard Shaw wrote a story about how frightfully boring it was. But Shaw also had a long meeting with Muggsy—oh, to have been a fly on the wall—and was perfectly beguiled by him. Shaw had, he said, “at last discovered the real and authentic Most Remarkable Man in America.”

Muggsy and Blanche then went on to Paris, where they set up headquarters at the Grand Hotel, making forays hither and yon, returning to entertain at their grand salon.

Yet as attractive as McGraw could still be with the likes of Shaw, he could, increasingly, also be a mean drunk. He knew that himself. Was he drunk? he was asked after one dreadful dustup. “I must've been, because I never fight unless I'm drunk,” he replied. That was not altogether accurate, but it did get to the heart of his problem. He was becoming the stereotype of what he had always railed against: the red-faced Mick rummy.

Some of the incidents were more than embarrassing. They were brutal. Once in Pittsburgh after a game, already plastered, he arrived back at his hotel suite. He took umbrage at some remark that an invited guest made and, without warning, pummeled him so badly that the man was forced to bed for several days. On another occasion, the Lambs Club suspended his membership for fighting with an actor. Some time later, coming home
from the Lambs Club after a night of boozing and another fracas there, McGraw, for some unknown reason, slugged the very friend who was helping him to his door. The man suffered a skull fracture when he fell to the sidewalk. This time McGraw was expelled from the club. There always seemed to be some embarrassing skirmish; Muggsy was probably lucky that he wasn't hauled into court.

Although his last pennant came in 1924, his teams thereafter almost always remained competitive. Most of them finished second or third. Still, the American League had indisputably become more glamorous than the senior circuit. If it wasn't the Yankees on top, it was McGraw's old rival, Connie Mack, who had brought the A's back to preeminence. McGraw was making seventy thousand dollars a year, but he was sicker now and strictly second fiddle to the team in Goatville that had become, proudly, the Bronx Bombers.

McGraw had also morphed into more of a grouch. The modern players were less accepting of his imperial manner, and he in turn had less patience for them. Each year, he decided, they became paler imitations of the noble gods from Olympus who had played the game for the Old Orioles. It is revealing that when his old foe, Ban Johnson, died in 1927, McGraw suddenly had praise for him: “Johnson was a great fighter and organizer.” But, of course, his old enemy had been of McGraw's sturdy generation. He made up with Uncle Robbie. The Little Napoleon had even developed the unfortunate habit of often referring to himself, lordly, in the third person. To himself and baseball he seemed nearly eternal. “I'm sort of a permanent fixture,” he mused once in 1930, “like home plate and the flag pole.”

In retrospect, McGraw probably should have packed it in after the World Series in 1924—his record fourth in a row. His Giants had whipped the upstart Yankees in '21 and '22, but then in '23, when the Yankees had moved into their new stadium, they turned the tables on the Giants. Ruth hit three
home runs. The next year, Washington edged the Yankees in the American League and then beat the Giants in seven games, winning the last in extra innings—just as the Giants had lost the first extra-inning deciding game to the Red Sox with Matty on the mound in 1912.

On the train coming back to New York, McGraw left Blanche and walked back to the car where the team was sitting. There, he put on a brave face, giving a classic chin-up speech. “Hard luck boys,” McGraw said. “Don't you care. What's one championship more or less? We've won plenty, and we'll win plenty more. Don't fret about it.”

Then he returned to the car ahead, took his seat next to Blanche, laid his head on her shoulder, and began to cry in great gulping sobs.

Life without baseball had little meaning for him
. . . .

In 1931 the Giants finished second again, and Muggsy grew sicker. His blood pressure was too high and he was diagnosed with prostatitis. The next year, as always, the spring brought more sinus suffering, and now the prostate troubled him, too. He had to miss a lot of games. Besides, the team was losing; the Giants fell into the cellar. Even Muggsy must have known that nobody was listening to him anymore. After a contract dispute, he hadn't even spoken to his best player, Bill Terry, all season.

On June 2, 1932, in his thirtieth season of managing the New York Giants, on a day when the game was called by rain again, John J. McGraw summoned Terry to his office and asked him if he'd like his job. When he got home, Blanche said: “What are you doing home so early? Was the game called off again?”

Muggsy shook his head. “I quit,” he explained to his wife. As with most things, he had not bothered to discuss the most important decision in his life with her. Muggsy was always in charge of Muggsy.

Remarkably, his sinuses cleared up almost right away and he had a wonderful time with Blanche in August, going to the races at Saratoga. That winter they went back to Cuba again.

But the pain was increasing, the malignancy starting to spread. That 1933 season, though, of all things, Bill Terry's Giants won the World Series. It was difficult for McGraw, but he attended all five games, two at the Polo Grounds and three in Washington. The last game of baseball he saw, the New York Giants won the World Championship on a home run in extra innings.

The winter was ever harder for him. On February 16, he went into the hospital, and on the twenty-fourth he fell, mercifully, into a coma. Bess Cregar, Matty's sister, arrived that evening in bitterly cold weather to sit with Blanche and comfort her. Muggsy died the next morning. He seemed so old; it seemed that he had been around forever. But in fact he was still a month shy of his sixty-first birthday.