The Old Ball Game (4 page)

The Sons of Erin included some dandy ballplayers. The first major baseball celebrity was an Irish-American named Mike Kelly. He was, however, always called “King.” He was also christened “the $10,000 Beauty” because the Boston team, known as the Beaneaters (still, surely, the worst nickname in the annals of sport), paid that vast amount to the Chicago White Stockings in 1887 to purchase Kelly. He was thus in Boston at about the time John L. Sullivan became another Irish hero, as heavyweight champion. Sullivan, the Boston Strongboy, was something of a lout. Champion he might be but, for lack of a better word, he was fat. He wolfed down bourbon from beer steins, bellowing “I can lick any sonuvabitch in the house” in whatever saloon he stomped into.

King Kelly was no less a stranger to John Barleycorn, but he was a stylish dude, favoring London-tailored suits, a tall silk hat, jeweled ascot, and patent leather shoes “as sharply pointed as Italian dirks.” His Hub fans gave him a carriage drawn by two white horses so that he might ride to the park in proper style, and there they would cry out in unison:

Slide, Kelly, slide.
Slide, Kelly, slide.
Slide, Kelly, on your belly—
Slide, Kelly, slide.

The King did slide. He invented the hook slide. He could hit, too—.308 lifetime. He also was famous for ducking across the infield when the sole umpire's attention was diverted, going from first to third diagonally. Once, when he was sitting out a game with a hangover, a pop foul headed near the Beaneater bench. Seeing that the catcher could not reach the ball, Kelly stood up, screamed “Kelly now catching for Boston,” and caught the ball.
The startled umpire had to allow the ploy, for there had been nothing in the rule book to anticipate such an instant substitution (although a new rule was quickly inserted to close the King's loophole).

Kelly was so popular that other teams were afraid he was going to drag salaries up to insupportable levels, and so the league instituted a $2,000 salary cap. The King threatened to quit and become a music hall performer full-time, so the Beaneaters circumvented the new league rule by paying him the $2,000 maximum legal salary, but giving him an additional $3,000 for the use of his photograph in advertising. Alas, Kelly never could outrun liquor. He was ordered to take Turkish baths before every game to get the booze out of his system, but the fine, hard living caught up with him. King Kelly died in 1894, before his thirty-seventh birthday.

If Kelly was the image of the carousing Irish ballplayer, that model was, of course, hardly universal. The spare, ascetic Cornelius McGillicuddy, who as Connie Mack would become McGraw's greatest managerial rival, stood in stark contrast. “Voiceless Jim” O'Rourke was also every Irishman's hero. When it was proposed that he drop the “O” from his name so that he might better fit with a predominantly Protestant team, O'Rourke refused, declaiming: “I would rather die than give up my father's name. A million dollars would not tempt me.” And on he went to Yale Law School, to learn to bloviate full-time for a living.

But it was the Baltimore Orioles who were to make the most pronounced mark upon the game in the nineteenth century. They were Irish and played a roughhouse brand of baseball that split the game. As the young and innocent Christy Mathewson grew up in bucolic Factoryville, Pennsylvania, and then moved on to study nearby at Bucknell College, the fabulous tales of the Orioles, of Joe Kelley and Hughie Jennings and Wee Willie and Uncle Robbie and Muggsy McGraw, reached him and brought him great wonder.

John McGraw arrived in Baltimore on August 24, 1891. “Just get me out there and watch my smoke,” he advised the startled manager, who was expecting a somewhat more impressive package. McGraw was eighteen years old, and not only was he short, he weighed only 121 pounds. He had such short arms that when he came into some money, he began to have his suits tailored so that the sleeves would not hang down, foolishly, to his palms. The Orioles, who seemed “to have had more trouble with its players getting drunk than any other club,” were amused by the little busher just in from Iowa and, as he sat on the bench during his first game, they pushed him off. He came up off the ground wind-milling, ready to take on the whole kit and caboodle.

So began McGraw's big league career. It would last, uninterrupted, for more than forty years. However, he began only somewhat more auspiciously on the field as on the bench, batting .270 for the season and making twenty-one errors in only ninety-eight chances. The next year offered little improvement, but the Orioles paid him only twelve hundred dollars and sometimes pressed
him into service as a ticket-taker, so he escaped, with pleadings, from being farmed out to Mobile. He was desperate to stay in Baltimore once he got there.

It wasn't just the baseball. For a small-town kid from upstate New York, Baltimore absolutely dazzled him. H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, was eleven years old when McGraw came to town, but later he had decided: “Baltimore, by 1890, was fast disintegrating, and so was civilization.” Mencken held no more regard for McGraw's occupation. “I hate all sports,” he once wrote, “as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.”

John McGraw, batting for the New York Giants.
The Polo Grounds are in the background.

But to the youthful McGraw, Baltimore and the Orioles were rapture. The city itself, sixth largest in the nation, approaching half a million souls, was a lively amalgamation, the border entrepôt between North and South. It was still a lot of Dixie. In 1894 a dark-complected outfielder named George Treadway was traded from the Orioles to Brooklyn because he was razzed so often from the stands, with mean shouts that he was a black man. Baltimore was at least somewhat cosmopolitan, though, and earthy, a sailor's town, offering the naughty delights of any port. It was also big on horse racing; here McGraw found the ponies he would bet the rest of his life. One-fourth of the population was German—naturally, the Orioles were owned by a German brewer, Harry von der Horst—but there was a substanial number of blacks and hillbillies, and, continuing Maryland's original designation as a Roman Catholic preserve, Baltimore was a most comfortable place for an Irish boy to find himself.

More important, perhaps, the Orioles' new manager, “Silent Ned” Hanlon, was cleaning house of the drunken old scruff-buckets, cleverly replacing them with young Irish players of the McGravian stripe. They were all a bit older than Muggsy, and although Hanlon was a superb manager, “foxy,” whom McGraw admired, and although his pal Uncle Robbie was a popular captain, the kid McGraw became the engine of the team. “Woe betide he who fails us!” Muggsy cried.

The three newcomers whom Hanlon cadged from other teams would all (like Hanlon and McGraw and Robinson) make the Hall of Fame. They were Hughie Jennings, Joe Kelley, and “Wee Willie” Keeler, and they all lived together at a boardinghouse to the north of town, on York Road. There, it seems, McGraw always appropriated the hammock. The residence was conveniently located about ten minutes from Union Park, where they worked
together, and perhaps a similar distance to St. Ann's Church, where they prayed together—often with Silent Ned Hanlon himself leading them to the pews. Later, when McGraw married, he and Uncle Robbie bought adjoining row houses downtown.

McGraw adored his closest teammates. When he wrote his memoirs after more than twenty years in New York with the Giants, it was still the Old Orioles whom he remembered most affectionately. “It is the only [ball club] that remains in spirit a team to this day,” he wrote. Well into the twentieth century, the Orioles would hold reunions, like high school and college classes do. For all that New York meant to McGraw, for all the years he lived there, it was Baltimore where he had come of age with his buddies, Baltimore where he would choose to be buried.

The closest of these pals was Hughie Jennings, a freckle-faced Pennsylvania coal miner who had suffered from malaria and was hitting .136, when Hanlon boosted him from Louisville in 1893. McGraw took it upon himself that off-season to correct Jennings's tendency to fall away from inside pitches in fear, “stepping in the bucket.” He achieved this by placing Jennings at bat indoors, his back up against a wall, so he simply couldn't bail out when McGraw pitched inside to him. It was, in a way, Muggsy's first managerial triumph. Jennings batted .335 the next season, went as high as .401 in '96, and retired .311 lifetime.

Joe Kelley, a left fielder, was one of Hanlon's earliest acquisitions, coming over from Pittsburgh in 1892. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, he was originally Joe
Kelly
, but added the “e” to foster the impression that he was lace-curtain. At five-feet-eleven, 190 pounds, Kelley was a big man for that era, but what most distinguished him was his looks—a sweet, almost cherubic handsome that left hearts aflutter wherever he played. He was not unaware of his beauty and often carried a small hand mirror into the outfield to check upon his appearance during lulls in the action.

Wee Willie Keeler came to the Orioles in 1894 from Brooklyn, his hometown. He was as sweet as he was tiny. When he died in 1921, the first of the Old Orioles to pass on, age fifty, McGraw was so overcome, looking at his little friend lying there in the casket, that he started bawling so loud that Joe Kelley was obliged to come into the room and roughly pull him away. Keeler claimed to be five-feet, four-and-one-half inches tall, but he did pack 140 pounds. In context, Wee Willie wasn't as wee as he sounds, though, inasmuch as the average ballplayer of this era wasn't much more than five-nine. In the event, Wee Willie made the most of his size, choking up his teeny thirty-inch wand, and then, in his own memorable description: “Keep your eye clear and hit 'em where they ain't.” In 1897, when he batted .424, he made hits in his first forty-four games, a record that stood till Joe DiMaggio memorably topped it in 1941.

But it wasn't just that all the Birds could hit. What distinguished the Old Orioles was their camaraderie and clever hijinks. They didn't revolutionize the game, but they surely renovated it. They were tricksters. In fact, their most important partner in crime wasn't the manager, Hanlon, or another player, but the groundskeeper, one Tom Murphy. Working with McGraw and the others, out in front of the plate he mixed dirt with a clay burnt hard. The Orioles would then swing down on the pitch so that the batted ball would hit the concrete-like ground and carom high into the air. By the time the ball came down, the batter would be on first. To this day, that is called the “Baltimore chop.”

Murphy also doctored the foul lines between home plate and first or third, slanting them, so that bunts would stay fair. To help the speedy young Birds, the path to first base was canted slightly downhill. Since it was common for pitchers then to reach down off the mound for some dirt to soil their sweaty hands, Murphy larded the dirt in that area with soap chips. Opposing pitchers
would suddenly find the spheroid mysteriously slipping from their grasp.

Keeler's right-field bailiwick was the wild kingdom. The field out there sloped down to the fence, so that Wee Willie, playing deep, could sometimes barely be seen from home plate. He negotiated the territory in damp, ankle-deep weeds and grass, where it was possible for him to hide extra balls that could be retrieved and tossed in should the legitimate ball in play get beyond his grasp.

It was, apparently, these Orioles who first designed the strategy of having the pitcher cover first when a ground ball took the first baseman wide of the bag. No one is quite sure who dreamed up the hit-and-run, whereby the runner on first would break for second as if to attempt a steal, drawing the second baseman to the bag, thus leaving a large hole for the batter to slap a pitch through to right field. Some claim that the ploy originated with the Beaneaters in the '80s—very possibly dreamed up by King Kelly himself.

If they did not invent the hit-and-run, though, the Orioles are fairly credited with establishing it as a regular stratagem. McGraw, never afraid to heap credit upon himself, put it this way years later: “If I may be permitted to say so, Keeler and I practically revolutionized the style of hitting to advance the runner, a form of attack that had never been given much attention up to 1894.” In particular, the opening series of that season against the Giants not only established the hit-and-run, but was the inspiration that lifted the Orioles toward glory. This was the moment they found themselves, when they understood all that they were. Starting at this point, Baltimore would win three straight pennants (and then twice finish a close second).

The Giants were then, in the pre-Freedman days, a respectable franchise, favored to win the National League that year of '94 under their manager, John Montgomery Ward. For all the scoundrels and ignoramuses populating baseball then, it also included
many characters more fascinating than the incurious plastic figurines who inhabit professional sport today. Ward had been a terrific pitcher, and then, when his arm went bad, he became a shortstop while picking up a law degree at Columbia. He led a players' revolt, was elected president of the new union, the “Brotherhood,” and actually started a new league that was a socialist cooperative. But as bright as John Montgomery Ward was, he didn't know what hit him and his Giants when they came to Baltimore to start the '94 season.