The Original Curse (31 page)

The Cubs did not dwell long on their Game 4 misfortune. Almost as the game ended, the attention of the players turned back to money. They still wanted $2,000 and $1,400 but would be willing to compromise at $1,500 and $1,000. “In the wake of this third and what amounts to the decisive defeat of the World Series, the Chicago Cubs were not only a disconsolate but a highly disgruntled force last evening,” the
Boston Post
reported. “The subject of a much-depleted monetary reward for engaging in the classic disturbs them mightily. Threats to strike and refuse to play today’s game were uttered, and were uttered freely. This, unless the National Commission guarantees at least $1,000 to each player of the losing club.”
¹⁰
The players wanted to meet with the commission immediately. But the players were, again, put off, and, according to the
Post
, a player-commission meeting was scheduled for 10:00
A.M
.—four and a half hours before Game 5—at the Copley Plaza Hotel.

Finally, the players got their meeting with the commission. It was brief. Johnson, Heydler, and Herrmann again hid behind their inability to change the rule on payouts without a full vote of team owners. Even as the players presented different options for compromise, the commission would not budge. The matter would be considered, the players were told, but there would be no final answer until after Game 5 was played. The players could see they were being stalled—and that if the Red Sox won Game 5, it would not matter. The Series would be over, the game would be shut down for the duration of the war, and the players would be without contracts and without leverage. The player representatives returned to Fenway, angry. The commission, pleased at having defused the situation, celebrated. And when Ban Johnson and Garry Herrmann celebrated, there was almost always some libation 80 proof or stronger involved.

At the park, the teams gathered in the Red Sox locker room underneath the Fenway Park stands. They reached a consensus. If the commission wanted to stall, that was fine. The players would stall too. They would not play until the commission gave them a guarantee on money. If the commission refused, the players would ask that their shares be donated to the Red Cross and go home. But while this revolt was brewing beneath the grandstand, up in the park itself, glorious
late-summer weather combined with the possibility of a Red Sox championship attracted a sizable crowd. By 2:00
P.M
., nearly 25,000 fans had settled in. But with the game set to start in 30 minutes, something wasn’t right. There was no batting practice. There were no players. Mann, in street clothes, had quickly popped onto the field for a word with Walter Craighead. But that was it. Both teams had remained in their locker rooms. They were on strike.

Just after 1:00
P.M
., Johnson, Heydler, and Herrmann got word of trouble. They were not well equipped for trouble at the moment. They were drunk. They likely continued to drink, even after hearing about the player strike—they did not show up at Fenway until 2:35
P.M
., according to the
Boston American
’s Nick Flatley. Upon arriving, Johnson’s speech, according to the
Herald Examiner
, was “replete with repetitions, bubbles and strange Oriental spices.”
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The commissioners gathered in the tight umpires’ quarters. They were joined by Hooper and Mann, while a horde of writers and fans tried to see what was happening. The players, again, made their cases. But after sizing up the condition that Johnson, Heydler, and Herrmann were in, they could see it was no use. Herrmann spoke first, rambling about how much he’d done for baseball. Johnson began to sob and pushed Herrmann aside. Flatley marked down his speech: “I went to Washington,” he said, grandly thumping his own chest for emphasis and directing his speech to Hooper, “and had the stamp of approval put on this World’s Series. I made it possible. I did. I made it possible, Harry. I had the stamp of approval put on the World’s Series, Harry. I did it, Harry. I did it.”
¹²

Herrmann then spoke up again. “Let’s arbitrary this matter, Mister Johnson,” he said. According to Flatley, “Then [Herrmann] launched forth into a brilliant exposition of the history of baseball’s governing board. Expert reporters took notes for a while, then quit, befuddled.” Hooper later recalled that Johnson, “came over to me [and said], ‘Harry, you know I love you. Go out and play the game.’ He put his arm around my neck and wept on my shoulder, repeating, ‘I love you. For the honor and glory of the American League, go out and play.’ Heydler never opened his mouth. It was apparent we had no one to talk to.”
¹³
The Cubs and Red Sox had little choice. They’d have to play and hope that the commission would give them another hearing when they sobered up. Before agreeing to take the field, though, Hooper said he insisted that the commission assure the players they would not be punished for the strike. Johnson agreed.

Outside, fans were restless. The Fenway band was ripping off numbers as quickly as possible, and several mounted policemen positioned themselves around the perimeter of the field to quell any thoughts of riotous demonstrations. Fans again began to cheer when the contingent of wounded soldiers entered, this time even more dramatically—three of the wounded, unable to navigate the Fenway stairs, were carried to their seats by their brethren. “The crowd outside burst into an immense roar of approval as the wounded soldiers and sailors came into the ball park,” the
Herald
reported. “These mighty heroes of the real game must have made everyone within hearing of that tribute think a mite.”
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Finally, ex-mayor John Fitzgerald, who had witnessed the negotiations in the umpires’ room, took hold of a megaphone and announced to the crowd that the strike had been settled and the players would go forward with Game 5 “for the good of the game and the public.”
¹⁵
At 3:30, an hour late, the Cubs and Red Sox took the field.

When Game 5 finally got under way, play was snappy. Sam Jones took the mound for the Red Sox, and Mitchell trotted out Vaughn again. The Cubs whacked Jones freely, collecting seven hits and five walks, scoring three runs. They threatened constantly throughout the game, putting runners in scoring position in five of the nine innings. Boston’s hitters, meanwhile, barely touched Vaughn, and when they did, the rally was quickly scotched with a double play. Only twice did the Red Sox move a runner to second base. Three times a Red Sox rally was cut short by a double play. The Cubs won easily, 3–0.

But, remember, the Cubs had to win. The teams were still trying to gain some concession on players’ shares, and if the Red Sox had won, the commission would have no reason to give up anything.

Phil Douglas, the pitcher who threw away Game 4 for the Cubs, was an alcoholic. He had grown up in the South, and his youth was marked by three prominent features—day labor, baseball, and corn whiskey. By the time he came to the Cubs as a 25-year-old in 1915, three organizations (the White Sox, Reds, and Dodgers) had been enticed enough by Douglas’s talent to sign him, but repulsed enough by his personal habits to let him go. Douglas was prone to taking what he called “vacations,” a euphemism for benders. Even as a big-leaguer, he tended to drink away his earnings. Before the 1918 season, it was
written that Douglas “lives down in Tennessee on a farm so poor that a rabbit passing through has to carry his rations.”
¹⁶
Though he was a solid pitcher for the Cubs, his drinking was a problem. Manager Fred Mitchell would later say of Douglas, “There was no harm in that fellow. He didn’t fight with the boys, or burn down houses. It was just that I never knew where the hell he was, or if he was fit to work.”
¹⁷

Mitchell and the Cubs finally gave up on Douglas in 1919, sending him to the master of the reclamation project, John McGraw.

McGraw treated Douglas harshly, keeping him under near-constant surveillance. But he got the most out of Douglas, who went 14–10 in 1920 and 15–10 in 1921. Douglas was 11–4 in 1922 and having his best year when he slipped away from McGraw’s operatives and went on a drinking binge. When Douglas was found, he was tossed in the West End Sanitarium, where he was forced to stay for five days. He was released in early August and, shortly thereafter—perhaps still in a posttreatment haze—Douglas wrote a letter to ex-Cubs teammate Les Mann, who had moved on to the Cardinals.

In the letter, Douglas told Mann he could not stand to pitch for McGraw anymore. If he stayed with the Giants, Douglas feared, he would help McGraw win the pennant. He didn’t want that. “So you see the fellows,” Douglas wrote to Mann, “and if you want to send a man over here with the goods, and I will leave for home on the next train, send him to my house so nobody will know, and send him at night.” At the time, the Cardinals and Giants were tied for the National League lead, and Douglas presumed that, without him, the Giants would lose the race to the Cardinals (he was, in the end, wrong on that count). Mann immediately gave the letter to his manager, Branch Rickey, who turned over the letter to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Landis went to the Giants’ team hotel, met with McGraw, and decided to ban Douglas from baseball. The
New York Times
called Douglas a “pitiful figure as he said good-bye to the other Giant players.”
¹⁸
On seeing Landis, Douglas asked, plaintively, “Is this all true, Judge, that I am through with baseball?”

“Yes, Douglas, it is,” Landis said, visibly saddened.

“Do you mean that I can never play baseball again?” Douglas asked again.

“Yes, Phil, I am afraid that that is just what it means.”

Douglas is usually portrayed as a sympathetic figure who had no real intention of getting involved in a payoff scheme with Mann and the Cardinals. Rather, he is usually seen as a victim of McGraw’s tyranny and the disease of alcoholism. But McGraw certainly did not see him that way and indicated that Douglas’s crookedness went beyond the Mann letter. “We have the absolute goods on Douglas,” McGraw said. “We have the letter written in his own handwriting. We have overheard some of his telephone conversations. He admits the charge, and now he is a disgraced ball player, just as crooked as the players who threw the 1919 World’s Series.… It will be a fine thing for the sport—this exposure of another ‘shady’ player.”
¹⁹

In 1952, Douglas, 30 years out of baseball and wheelchair-bound, died at age 62, after his third stroke.

One thing that’s clear about baseball from the years up to and including the 1919 Black Sox scandal is this: it was not difficult to throw a game. Perhaps Ban Johnson could sell the public on the notion that pulling off a fix of a baseball game would be harder than drawing water from an empty well, but those in the game knew better—and, in retrospect, so do we. The actions of Hal Chase and Lee Magee show that, in 1918, setting up a fixed game was as simple as walking into a pool hall and filling out a check. It wasn’t necessary to have the whole team on board. Chase, apparently, tried to fix games on his own. And, if John McGraw was right in what he told Fred Lieb about the 1917 World Series—McGraw said that second baseman Buck Herzog “sold him out” by playing out of position—then something as simple as an infielder intentionally shading too far one way could have been enough to throw a whole World Series. A fix did not require the unified action of an entire team. One reason the Black Sox were exposed was that their attempt at a fix was audacious, indiscreet, and widely known among players throughout the league and gamblers throughout the country, so that it was only a matter of time before
someone
started spilling the conspiracy’s secrets. Fixes did not have to be that way.

As for the mechanics of fixing a game, they weren’t very difficult. “It’s easy,” Cicotte said in his Black Sox testimony. “Just a slight hesitation on the player’s part will let a man get on base or make a run.
I did it by not putting a thing on the ball. You could have read the trade mark on it by the way I lobbed it over the plate. A baby could have hit ’em.… Then, in one of the games, the first, I think, there was a man on first and the Reds batter hit a slow grounder to me. I could have made a double play out of it without any trouble at all. But I was slow—slow enough to prevent the double play, period. It did not necessarily look crooked on my part. It is hard to tell when a game is on the square and when it is not. A player can make a crooked error that will look on the square as easy as he can make a square one. Sometimes the square ones look crooked.”
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When he was testifying about Chase in 1918, Reds manager Christy Mathewson described the methods he’d seen Chase use to throw games: “I mean such plays as momentary hesitation in handling bunts and then throwing too late to get any runner; getting his feet crossed and catching balls thrown slightly wide, thereby having to try for his catch with one hand and resulting in a muff; playing ground hits, that he could have easily got in front of with one hand, so that the opposing batter got credit for a base hit; going after balls hit almost directly at the second baseman, which compelled our pitcher to make running catches at first base of long, hard throws, frequently thrown by Chase wide of the bag, or starting in for bunts that the pitcher could easily handle, then stopping, leaving first base uncovered. In some of these games, his failure, while at bat, to either hit or bunt the ball in attempting the squeeze play or the hit-and-run play, caused me to order the discontinuance of these plays.”
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Reds outfielder Edd Roush commented that, even when Chase was trying to lose, he made it look good—when Chase was suspended for indifferent playing, his batting average didn’t look very indifferent. He was hitting .301, 12th best in the National League. (Magee, too, was batting .301.) A player could put up very good individual numbers while intentionally kicking away games. “If he wanted to win, you couldn’t throw that ball where he couldn’t come up with it,” Roush told interviewer Lawrence Ritter. “But if he didn’t want to win, he would get over to that bag, he’d always cover that bag late.… Course, he was slick at it. Now, I hit ahead of Chase in the batting order, I hit third, he hit fourth. In a ball game he’d lose, he might have three base hits in it.”
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