The Old Ball Game (9 page)

In the event, as soon as McGraw came to town, the Giants were accorded much greater and more enthusiastic coverage. After all, McGraw was, simply, news. Mathewson, as we shall see, was not so much news as he was a reliable feature, like the weather or the comic strips. He could do no wrong. As newspapers began to use players' first names, many of them, even as commonplace as “Jack,” say, or “Bill,” would be referred to, like that, in quotation marks. Mathewson's never was so adorned. It was almost as if “Matty” was a title. Here, for example, is a newspaper photo caption of the Giants' 1913 starters: “Tesreau, Matty, Marquard and Demaree.” And when Matty won, as he usually did, this was proof again that some good things you could count on—even in dog-eat-dog Noo Yawk. If Matty lost, it was an aberration that must be explained, invariably chalked up to bum luck or poor hitting or fielding by his ungrateful teammates. But somehow, Matty wasn't really news in the conventional sense. He was just Matty.

It was the custom at that time for major league teams to employ many of their off days picking up extra money playing local sandlot nines, and so it was that when McGraw first took over the Giants and sent Mathewson to the pitcher's box it was, of all things, against the Orange Athletic Club, over in New Jersey. That was July 22. Matty gave up a run to the amateurs in the very first inning, too, and while it is unclear how long McGraw used him, the Giants eventually prevailed 3–2, and McGraw was satisfied enough to give Matty a start two days later in Brooklyn. That was the real beginning of their beautiful friendship, as Mathewson shut out the home team 2–0 on a five-hitter. The
Sun
even proclaimed that “it was the most perplexing pitching snag the Brooklynites have struck this season.” Not only that, but now the
World
lauded the erstwhile sluggish Giants as “McGraw's hustlers.”

However, as nice as any victory and the team's shiny new image was, McGraw had already written off 1902. He spent much
of the balance of the season away from the team, scouting prospects and trade bait for 1903. The team managed to win only forty-eight games, finishing fifty-three and a half games behind the Pirates. Mathewson led the staff with fourteen victories, and although he lost seventeen games, he pitched eight shutouts and posted an earned run average of 2.11. On his off days, closely monitoring Iron Man McGinnity when he pitched, Matty even picked up a much better change-up. It would be another thirteen years before Mathewson would win less than twenty games or lose more games than he won in a season. Anyway, he was going home to Pennsylvania with hopes of convincing Jane to become his wife.

As for McGraw, he was especially pleased that, at the end of the season, John Brush, “the Hoosier Wanamaker,” unloaded his controlling interest in the Cincinnati Reds and bought the Giants from Freedman. Brush was a semi-invalid who walked with a cane, suffering as he was from rheumatism and some disease of the nervous system (that possibly had been caused by syphilis). He was not the easiest of men, but, of course, compared to Freedman he was a dreamboat. McGraw adored him. The fact that Brush despised Ban Johnson and his renegade American League only marginally less than did Muggsy bound the two men together stronger than any hoops of steel ever could. Ironically, it was Brush who had sought “purification” on the field a few years earlier, but now that he and McGraw were on the same team, he accommodated himself to Muggsy's rude antics. The only McGravian behavorial flaw that Brush never seems to have been able to turn a blind eye to was the manager's penchant for going out to the track and playing a few races before heading to the Polo Grounds for games that usually started at three-thirty or four.

McGraw was even a partner of Brush's of a sort, for when Freedman unloaded the team, Mrs. McGraw had purchased four shares of the Giants at $250 apiece. The McGraws were now happily partaking of New York nightlife. They were ensconced
in a suite at the Victoria Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-seventh Street, so high up they could barely hear the
cloppety-clop
of the horse-drawn carriages that still plied the street. Instead, the McGraws might hear the
putt-putt
sounds of the newfangled “devil wagons” that came to be called cars, or the grand new twenty-four-passenger double-decker buses that the Fifth Avenue Coach Company had started to run.

From the vantage of their parlor, though, the McGraws could watch the construction of a spectacular new skyscraper, the Flat-iron Building, rising twenty-one stories toward the heavens down on Twenty-third Street. On the street there, the sharpies would lollygag about outside the Flatiron, leering at the women walking by. There was plenty of opportunity. A third of the clerical workers in New York were now female; why, nineteenth-century shopgirls had become twentieth-century saleswomen. What the guys standing on the corner of Twenty-third and Broadway were waiting for were the by-products of the downdrafts common to the area. With a good gust, one that would blow up a skirt enough to reveal bare ankles, the fellas would all call out: “Twenty-three skidoo!”

McGraw might not have approved. Curiously, he was always very old-fashioned, even somewhat puritanical, when it came to the fairer sex. Now, of course, his own better half, like most respectable women, was still in long skirts—their hems invariably dirtied as they walked the sidewalks of New York. After all, sanitation workers still had to deal with thousands of gallons of horse urine and thousands of tons of horse manure every day, East Side, West Side, all around town.

But things were beginning to change. With the new century, skirts that didn't reach quite all the way to the ground, called “rainy-daisies,” were starting to be accepted in fast company. Women were taking to exercise, riding the newfangled bicycles. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true . . .” And out in Brooklyn, Coney Island had a roller coaster and a Ferris wheel and new
amusement parks, and the beaches were thronged with women of all shapes and sizes in the newest risqué bathing costumes. Richard K. Fox, editor of the
Police Gazette
, the popular men's journal that thrived on three attractions—crime, sex, and boxing—offered this observation: “If a man is troubled with illusions concerning the female form divine, and wishes to be rid of those illusions, he should go to Coney Island and closely watch the thousands of women who bathe there every Sunday.”

Sunday baseball in New York, however, was still considered a sinful temptation for the workingman and would not be allowed for many more years. Matty's mother, Minerva, certainly subscribed to that view, and Matty listened to his mother.

So Fatso Ban Johnson got his wish. For the 1903 season he moved the Orioles to New York, thus, it turned out, setting the major leagues in stone with the same sixteen franchises for the next fifty years. Oh, with time a few nicknames would change, RIP: the Beaneaters, Superbas, Orphans, Perfectos, Terrors, Blues, and Highlanders. The latter earned their name because, with Tammany out of power, the American League was finally able to find a place to build a stadium—only the lone option was on the highest ground on Manhattan Island, in Washington Heights, in the far upper reaches of the borough. There was Hilltop Park, a simple wooden structure seating sixteen thousand, raised. It was pretty easy to fling up stadiums in those days (it was also pretty easy for them to either fall down or burn down).

What would become the New York Yankees franchise was purchased for eighteen thousand dollars, the new owners being William Devery, a corrupt former police commissioner, and Frank Farrell, who was known as “the poolroom czar.” Johnson was always ethically selective in putting his wholesome new league together.

McGraw eliminated the American League from his mind, content to enjoy the delights of the big city, build up the Giants' roster, and prepare to take his first New York team to spring training in Savannah. Mathewson had an even more memorable spring training, for it was his honeymoon. He and Jane were married at her parents' home in Lewisburg on March 5. The bride's family approved of Matty and liked him immensely, even if her father was dubious that his new son-in-law should attempt to “make a living playing a child's sport with a bunch of uneducated ruffians.”

But the wedding was the highlight of the Lewisburg social calendar, and immediately after the fancy reception, the bride and groom caught the Buffalo Flyer south as Matty's smirking groomsmen handed out leaflets at the depot, advertising the presence of the newlyweds on their wedding night. “He will be easily recognized by his boyish countenance and Apollo-like form,” the pamphlets advised the other wayfarers.

Before plighting their troth, though, Jane and Matty had agreed to something of a pre-nup. In the even-up deal, he consented to leave his Baptist upbringing and worship in Jane's Presbyterian church while, in return, she swore to give up her Democratic affiliation and join his Republican Party. Bully.

In Savannah, Jane was a notable figure at the De Soto Hotel, for it was unusual for players to bring their wives along. At some point another woman spied her there in the lobby, sizing her up cattily even if she would later write that it was “
not
a catty reaction.” And John McGraw did
not
do dirt to Baltimore. The observer was Blanche McGraw, Muggsy's wife of a year, who was Baltimore Catholic nouveau. Blanche found the Protestant country girl too “strait-laced . . . a Sunday-school teacher, which also made her suspect.” Not only that, but Blanche didn't care for the way that Jane was sneaking peeks back at her. She was certain that Jane, unadorned as she was pretty, was looking down on her for her sequins and jewelry, that she must be thinking that Blanche was a “hussy.”

Nevertheless Blanche grew curious, and although she decided that she could not ask him about the bride herself, she did finally bring herself to casually inquire of Muggsy about the newlywed young right-hander. “Looks like he can pitch with his head as well as his arm,” he replied.

Of course, Blanche didn't mean that. She didn't mean
baseball.
She wanted to find out what sort of a fellow the lovely brunette's husband was. But she should have known what sort of an answer to expect. This was how Blanche assessed her husband: “Life without baseball had very little meaning to him. It was his meat, drink, dream, his blood and breath, his very reason for existence.” So it fell to Blanche McGraw to approach Jane Mathewson, and one day soon thereafter in the lobby of the De Soto, she ventured to introduce herself.

Although there might not have been as much apparent difference between the two wives as between the two husbands, there did not, either, appear to be much common ground between the two women. But, in fact, they hit it off right away, and while the men practiced their craft at Forsyth Park, the women chatted and laughed, took tea together, and wandered about Savannah, shopping and sight-seeing, enjoying the warm Dixie air. By the time the Giants prepared to head north, Blanche and Jane not only were friends, but they had brought their husbands closer together.

Matty, of course, had always admired Muggsy. Now he grew to like him. Muggsy liked Matty, too. Of course, everybody did. McGraw must have been jealous of the tall and handsome and popular Mathewson. Of course, everybody else always was. But Muggsy also was impressed by Mathewson's sharp mind. McGraw, the high school dropout, could, slyly, often be more taken with a player's brain than with his talent. Blanche, though, also respected Mathewson's intellect. “He had an unusual mind, a quick mind, and the stubbornness of a person with a trained mind,” she would say.

Muggsy was now thirty years old, almost eight years older than Mathewson. In baseball years, this was a lifetime. Not only that, but McGraw was an old thirty. As a matter of fact, his career as an active player was altogether ended here, one day in Savannah, when his right knee buckled on him during a workout. McGraw was odd; he never seemed to have had any in-between, going almost overnight from being a beardless Katzenjammer Kid to a paunchy dead ringer for W. C. Fields. By 1903 he'd already done some considerable living, too. Mathewson, by comparison, was downright callow. He was polite, McGraw pugnacious; Protestant to his Catholic; a country mouse to the city slicker Muggsy had become; pitcher to his batter; player to his manager; tall to his short; sportsman to his mucker. There seemed to be absolutely nothing that would match John J. McGraw with Christopher Mathewson.

But notwithstanding, so it was that before they returned north, the two couples agreed to live together back in New York. The four of them rented a ground-floor apartment for fifty dollars a month on the Upper West Side, at Columbus and Eighty-fifth Street, convenient to an el station on the line to the Polo Grounds. The way they worked it out was, Muggsy paid for the rent and the gas, and Matty paid for the food.

The arrangement turned out just fine, too. Blanche explained: “Jane and I led normal lives. We fed the men and left them alone to talk their baseball. Their happiness was our cause.” Soon the two men made some financial investments together, too. This odd quartet—did ever any other manager and star player in any sport room together with their wives?—grew even closer in companionship and trust.

And always, McGraw and Mathewson talked the game of baseball. This was years before pitching coaches came into the sport, so even though Muggsy had never been a pitcher, Mathewson listened to him about his craft. It was also true that McGraw was not unintelligent on the subject. (In counterpoint, one recalls Jim
Palmer telling his manager, the latter-day McGraw, Earl Weaver: “Earl, all you know about pitching is that you could never hit it.”) When McGraw had first started playing baseball, as a child, he had been a pitcher. In fact, one time, when he was a candy butcher on a railroad and two passengers got into an argument about whether a baseball could truly curve, little Muggsy entered the discussion on behalf of the pro-curve gentleman. When the two riders struck a ten-dollar bet, the conductor bade the engineer stop the train. The passengers disembarked, and there, in a field by the side of the tracks, young McGraw found two stakes and set them up. He was never without a baseball, and so he stood back and pitched his ball, demonstratively swerving it around the stakes. Also, before the assembled returned to the train, for his effort he demanded and received one of the ten dollars that the winner of the bet had taken.