The Old Ball Game (5 page)

After a grand Opening Day parade up stately Charles Street, more than fifteen thousand packed into Union Park. It was the largest crowd ever in Baltimore, and with McGraw leading off and Keeler behind him, the Orioles ran the Giants silly that day and on the two that followed. “Just a lot of horseshoe luck,” Ward snorted. Other critics called it “sissy ball.” But McGraw and the Baltimoreans sensed the new dawn. “That one series made the Orioles,” McGraw would reminisce. Even the mayor was estatic. “We have always had the most beautiful women and the finest oysters in the world,” he exclaimed, “and now we have the best baseball club.” The grandest of babes, mollusks, and baseball— how much brighter could the sun shine on any one place in God's acreage?

McGraw was in his glory. “Little Mac at third was a whole team and a dog under the wagon,” the
Morning Herald
crowed. He was full of tricks and full of himself. “We were a cocky, swashbuckling crew, and we wanted everyone to know it,” he recalled. At that time, fouls did not count as strikes, and McGraw had the ability to foul almost any pitch off. Once, he wasted some poor pitcher's best stuff, binging twenty-four straight fouls. In 1930, when he was a fat old man of fifty-six, he picked up a bat in spring training one day and fouled off twenty-six straight pitches. Indeed, it was more because of McGraw than anyone else that the rule would eventually be changed and fouls would start being counted as strikes.

Since only one umpire worked a game, it was possible, simply, to get away with more shenanigans. McGraw's favorite trick, when he was playing third and a runner tagged up there, was to gently hook a finger into the runner's belt. When the fly was caught and the runner started to light out for home, McGraw would be literally holding him on the bag—but in such a fashion that the umpire couldn't see. (One runner, wise to the con, finally outwitted McGraw by quietly unbuckling his belt. McGraw slipped his finger into the belt, the runner took off, the belt unspooled, and there was McGraw standing on third with the opponent's belt in his hand.)

But so much of the Old Oriole spirit wasn't cute. McGraw and a lot of his teammates would put a beefsteak into their shoes to serve as softer innersoles, but it's also true that long before Ty Cobb became famous for it, McGraw would sharpen his spikes with, in his own bloodthirsty boast, “murderous intent.” He was loud and abusive, and although he looked back on it all as boys-will-be-boys—“we had more fun with the umpires than we do now,” he remembered sweetly—the feeling was not at all mutual.

Umpires were at once fearful of him and out to get him. Never mind players, McGraw would spike umpires. The
Sporting News
wailed: “To be aggressive does not mean to make the life of the umpire miserable and to disgust spectators.” After the ump kicked Muggsy out of a game in New York in '95, he grew even more obstreperous, so that the arbiter was obliged to call out the local constabulary to escort McGraw from the premises. The amazing thing is, too, that Muggsy was weak at the time, recovering from malaria. He was unrelenting. Trying to explain him, one umpire allowed that McGraw “eats gunpowder every morning and washes it down with warm blood.” In spring training one year, a Macon, Georgia, reporter, encountering McGraw for the first time, was absolutely stunned by what he witnessed: “A rough, unruly man, who is constantly playing dirty ball. He has the vilest tongue of any ball-player. . . . He adopts every low and
contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick.” Baltimore, which was not known as “Mob Town” for nothing, fed off Muggsy and his cronies. Young Hugh Fullerton, who would become perhaps the most distinguished sportswriter in the land, reported that the Baltimore park “reeked with obscenity and profanity.”

So, as glamorous as the Orioles were in their manly way, they soon felt a backlash. Old-time promoters like Chris Von der Ahe in St. Louis, who was known as “half-genius, half-buffoon,” thought that baseball had to be rowdy to succeed, but generally the mood was shifting. John Brush, who had unsuccessfully sought to buy the Giants but who now owned the Cincinnati Reds, actually proposed what was called a “purification plan” to try and make baseball more respectable. McGraw was so astounded by that heresy that, disconsolately, he groaned that if such genteel rules were instituted he might have to “abandon my profession entirely.”

But any cagey businessman could see that the world was tilting, that respectable women were starting to come out of their houses, and that the future of entertainment lay not with blood and sex but with a more broad-based family appeal. Why, even boxing had given up bare-knuckle fights and put gloves on the likes of John L. Sullivan, and when Teddy Roosevelt got into the White House and finished busting trusts and settling hostilities in the Far East, he called together representatives of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and all but ordered them to create new football rules that would prohibit the flower of the Ivy League from maiming one another for the amusement of carriage-trade crowds.

Then, too, once the cocky Orioles had been knocked off their perch, it became more difficult for the National League to excuse their roughhouse brand. Baltimore's reign essentially ended late in September of'97, when the Beaneaters came to town and took two out of three games. The series drew 57,000 cranks, with the final game packing in 25,375—what was surely the largest
baseball crowd in history. Boston won 19–10, as the
Baltimore Sun
lamented in language even more florid than was customary in such an embroidered age: “Let us drop a tear and go on, and let it be a hot and scalding tear, for verily Boston is hot stuff, and her beans are smoking. Let her light her bonfires and regild her State House dome and send forth some modern Paul Revere to ride and spread the news.”

So the Old Orioles had lost their control of the game. At the same time, popular entertainment was changing. A singer named Tony Pastor, famous for his renditions of such street hits as “The Strawberry Blonde” and “Lulu, The Beautiful Hebrew Girl,” had opened a theater uptown on Union Square in New York in 1885 that promised no blue material. A devout Catholic who dressed in an opera hat, with the kind of handlebar mustache that John McGraw so envied but could never grow, Pastor had created something that would be called vaudeville. It was an immediate hit. Soon, men named Albee and Keith took Pastor's idea onto the road—circuits—seeding family fare throughout America, in all the same places where Muggsy McGraw and his disciples had played baseball with meanness and crudity before crowds of coarse inebriates.

Keith's wife, Mary Catherine, posted rules backstage that left no room for misinterpretation: “You are hereby warned that your act must be free from all vulgarity and suggestiveness in words, action and costume. . . . Such words as Liar, Slob, Son-of-a-Gun, Devil, Sucker, Damn and all other words unfit for the ears of ladies and children . . . are prohibited under fine of instant discharge.” And it worked. Vaudeville took off like a rocket while baseball plateaued, as players proudly held on to their old image of hard-drinking, women-chasing rogues.

Eddie Cantor, the vaudeville star, recalled that when he was a boy and he did something mischievous, his grandmother would label him with the worst profession she could thing of: “Why, you, you ballplayer you.” And it wasn't as if baseball itself wasn't aware
of its dubious reputation. The
Spalding Guide
of 1889 bemoaned: “Saloon and brothel. . . are the two greatest obstacles in the way of success of the majority of professional players.”

Certainly, as Christy Mathewson finished up his studies at the local academy in Factoryville and began to prepare to matriculate at Bucknell, no one who knew the fine lad from that upstanding family of worthy American stock could expect that he would ever join the debased ranks of baseballists. Why, an infielder named Fred Tenney, who had graduated from Brown and come to the majors in 1894, was, for this, known as “the Soiled Collegian.” Walter Camp of Yale, who was sort of the godfather of football, had written thusly on the subject: “You don't need your boy 'hired' by anyone. If he plays, he plays as a gentleman, and not as a professional; he plays for victory, not for money; and whatever bruises he may have in the flesh, his heart is right, and he can look you in the eye, as a gentleman should.”

But luckily for young Matty—and, although he would never admit it, luckily for the unregenerate Muggsy, too—a baseball writer from Cincinnati named Byron Bancroft Johnson, who was fat, hard-drinking, and loosely principled—exactly the sort of fellow you would never expect to champion gentility—decided to depart journalism in order to take over the operation of a minor circuit, the Western League. One day, spending time at the Ten-Minute Club on Vine Street in Cincinnati, Johnson had an idea.

It was called the Ten-Minute Club because if you didn't order a new drink every ten minutes, you had to leave. So here it was, at the Ten-Minute Club, that Ban Johnson ordered another whiskey and began to think seriously about decency.

While McGraw was playing his last years at Baltimore—split by the season's sojourn in St. Louis—Mathewson was going to college. This was a time when only about 6 percent of the 76 million Americans had graduated from high school. Indeed, in New York, children as young as twelve were allowed to work if they attended merely eighty days of school a year. Many boys didn't bother with even that tacit minimum. They were everywhere—guttersnipes, the proper folk called them—trying to subsist as newsboys and street arabs. In such a society, a college man was someone invariably privileged and always special.

Mathewson's college tenure, however, was simply brilliant. We can understand better why he got so down on himself when he didn't immediately prosper with the Giants in '00, because he had enjoyed nothing but easy success in college. Indeed, from the minute Matty showed up at Bucknell in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and put on his blue freshman beanie in the fall of'98, he did everything, it seems, and all of it well. It was not just sports and his studies, where he earned such marks as 96 in analytic chemistry
and German, 94 in Tacitus, and 93 in Horace. He played in the band, sang in the glee club, acted in the dramatic society, participated in the Latin Philosophical, wrote poetry, served on the Junior Ball Committee, was chosen as class historian, and (naturally) made the Leadership Society and was elected class president.

Bucknell University Football Team, circa 1900.
Christy in middle row, left, standing.

Of course, he starred on the baseball team, but he also jumped center for the basketball varsity and was best known for his football exploits. In fact, Matty professed to enjoy football more than baseball. He was called “the infant phenomenon,” or “Rubber Leg,” playing fullback and kicking field goals—at a time when a field goal counted five points, almost as much as a touchdown. Apparently he had the same pinpoint control with his right leg on the gridiron as he did with his right arm on the diamond. After he kicked a forty-eight yarder from an acute angle against
Army, Walter Camp himself gave Mathewson his benediction, declaring that he was “the greatest drop-kicker in intercollegiate competition.”

Thus was Christy Mathewson already the beau ideal in the making, the first all-American boy—or, perhaps more accurately, he was the first flesh-and-blood all-American boy. The honor realistically belonged to a slightly older contemporary, Frank Merriwell of Fardale Academy and then Yale, who was the fictional creation of a hack writer named Gilbert Patten.

For a sixty-dollar payday, Patten conjured up Merriwell in 1896 for the
Tip Top Weekly
—what was called a dime novel. Patten dreamed of being a serious author but was never able to pull that off, at least in some part because he could not manage to write sex with any facility. But Frank was chaste, so that was no problem. So, writing as Burt L. Standish (other Patten noms de plume included Stanton L. Burt, Harry Dangrefield, Julian St. Dare, and Wyoming Will), Patten created young Frank, putting him on the playing fields of Fardale. The author chose the name thusly: Frank, for earnestness and candor; Merry, for disposition; Well, for health and vitality. He envisioned his character as “a new style . . . more in touch with the times.” Specifically, Frank Merriwell would be the country's first sports idol. “I saw the opportunity to feature all kinds of athletic sports, with baseball predominating,” he would write.

Unfortunately for Patten, Merriwell was more of a success than he ever could have imagined. Like Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan were to become for their authors, Merriwell became an albatross to Patten. He moved him up from the fictional Fardale to the real Yale; he dreamed up an ambidextrous younger brother; he put Frank in this sport and that one, brought in new villains and cliffs to hang from. But on and on went cheerful Frank, from one improbable success to another. Patten would churn out his stories for twenty years until 1916, when the nickelodeon finally put the dime novel out of business and poor
Patten out of his misery. For most weeks, all that time, he would spend four days of every week creating a new Merriwell story. Then, relieved, he would spend two days unsuccessfully struggling with sexless adult fiction, finally resting from his labors on the seventh, only to start the process all over again the next week. Frank Merriwell sold 500 million copies before his demise (although he would be resurrected in comic strips, movies, and, as late as 1946–49, as an NBC radio hero).