The Original Curse (32 page)

Chase, remember, was throwing games right under the noses of his teammates and manager. Reporters covering the Reds that year, who
watched every game, sometimes expressed frustration with the team’s performance, but no accusations of crookedness were lodged until Mathewson finally suspended Chase. If Chase and the Reds could fool their beat reporters, average fans would be fooled, too. In
Eight Men Out
, Asinof explained that a fix could come from anywhere on the diamond: “Exploiting their own talents, bribed players learned to become adept at throwing games. A shortstop might twist his body to make a simple stop seem like a brilliant one, then make his throw a bare split second too late to get the runner. An outfielder might ‘short-leg’ a chase for a fly ball, then desperately dive for it, only to see it skid by him for extra bases. Such maneuvers were almost impossible for the baseball fan—even for the most sophisticated sportswriter—to detect.”
⁴

None of the games in the 1918 World Series were blowouts. None featured the horrible pitching performances and long strings of flubs by fielders that would be features of the blatantly crooked 1919 World Series. A much subtler fix was possible, one that fans, sportswriters, managers, or even teammates might not recognize as it was happening—indeed, one that might not be figured out, ever.

September 11, 1918, opened with an early frost in New England and disturbing news for Bostonians—or maybe disturbing, maybe not. The city’s Board of Health announced fears of a Spanish flu epidemic by direly warning that citizens should restrict such routine behaviors as spitting, riding in elevators, or sharing a drinking cup. Up on Corey Hill, the tent camp housing the sick was growing. But while acknowledgment of the presence of a serious and spreading sickness should have been cause for alarm, there was a nothing-to-see-here feel to the way that authorities were handling the Spanish flu reports. A doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital said there had not been an unusual number of cases of flu combined with suffocating pneumonia, the hallmark of the Spanish flu. The head of the local naval district said there were only about 160 cases, and “He is of the opinion that it’s just plain grippe, without any fancy Spanish influenza trimmings.”
⁵

He was wrong.

For the members of baseball’s National Commission the day opened in Boston with nasty hangovers, but, in a happy change for Johnson, Heydler, and Herrmann, it did not open with further harassment from the committee of players seeking to wring more money out of their
World Series shares. The players had given up on the commission. Instead, the player committee (now represented by Harry Hooper and Carl Mays for the Red Sox, Bill Killefer and Les Mann for the Cubs) met with more reasonable power brokers—their team owners. Both Charley Weeghman and Harry Frazee assured the players that the teams would try to find a way to increase their compensation, either by petitioning the other owners or by having the teams themselves fill in the monetary shortfall as much as possible. It’s likely that the players took these vague promises with due grains of salt. But it was, at least, something.

It was still chilly by 2:00
P.M
., 30 minutes before the start of Game 6. The crowd, anxious about whether the game would start or be called off by another player strike, was relieved to see both teams on the field in uniform. Not that there were many present. The cold, combined with the general disenchantment over the ugliness that had delayed Game 5, further depressed attendance. Only 15,238 showed for Game 6, the smallest World Series crowd since 1909. The public wanted to hurry the 1918 baseball season to its end, and, it seemed, so did the players. During warm-ups, according to the
Chicago Herald Examiner
, “The Red Sox took a horrible chance. They posed for a picture as champions of the world half an hour before play started.… Money worries and strike problems have escaped athletes to forget their natural superstitions. It must be due to the war.”
⁶
Thus the Red Sox virtually declared themselves champions while the World Series was still in play. The gambling fraternity was not so sure—the
Boston American
claimed that, even with a lead in the Series, odds of only ten to eight or ten to nine were being given on Boston.
⁷

The Red Sox had Carl Mays, whose underhanded pitches had been so baffling for the Cubs in Game 3, on the mound for Game 6. Chicago countered, of course, with a left-hander—Lefty Tyler, going on one day’s rest. Mays appeared to be in good form from the beginning. He usually had trouble only when his submarine shoots got too high in the strike zone, and on this day he was keeping his pitches low. Mays set down the first five Cubs hitters in order when, with two out in the second inning, Charley Pick looped a single off the inner part of his bat handle. Before Mays threw another pitch, though, he looked over at Pick at first, wheeled around, and flung the ball to McInnis. Pick was picked off easily.

Tyler was shaky to start. He retired Hooper and Dave Shean, but when Amos Strunk floated a fly ball to shallow left field, Charley Hollocher ran out from shortstop, bobbled the ball, and dropped it. Strunk was awarded a hit. But Tyler escaped damage when George Whiteman followed with a long fly to Dode Paskert. In the second, Tyler again retired the first two batters but walked Fred Thomas. Wally Schang hit a grounder to Hollocher, who fielded it and paused before flipping the ball to Pick at second base. Thomas was safe, and Hollocher would have been charged an error, except that Thomas overslid the bag, and Pick tagged him out. Tyler had gotten by without giving up a run, but the defense behind him was not inspiring much confidence.

That defense finally broke down in the third inning. Tyler walked Mays on four pitches, and Hooper moved Mays to second base with a sacrifice. Tyler walked Shean, and both Shean and Mays moved up on Strunk’s ground out. With two outs and runners on second and third, Whiteman came to bat. He sent a line drive to right field, and Tyler, sure he had escaped the jam, began walking to the dugout. But, as the
New York Times
reported: “Flack came running in to make an easy catch. He caught up to the rapidly descending ball and had it entirely surrounded by his hands. Tyler was offering thanksgiving for crawling out of a bad hole when the ball squeezed its way through Flack’s buttered digits. As the ball spilled in a puddle at Flack’s feet, both Mays and Shean were well along their way home before Flack’s alarm clock went off and woke him up.”
⁸
In the
Tribune
, I. E. Sanborn thought, perhaps, Flack had an excuse: “Max muffed it squarely, with only the fact that he was on the run and the sun was in his eyes to excuse him.”
⁹
To the
Boston American
, Flack seemed distraught: “It was a fearful muff and broke Flack’s stout heart, but it just naturally happened.”
¹⁰

The Red Sox led, 2–0, but in the top of the fourth inning Flack almost single-handedly cut the lead in half. He drove a single to right field and moved up on a ground out by Hollocher. Mann was hit by a pitch but was picked off by catcher Wally Schang. As Mays was walking Paskert, Flack broke for third and stole the base safely. Fred Merkle followed with a single, scoring Flack and putting the score at 2–1, Red Sox. Tyler continued to struggle with wildness, and the Cubs defense continued to look unsteady. In the fourth, the Red Sox beat out two infield hits, and Tyler walked another batter, but again, Tyler
avoided damage thanks to nice plays from his infielders. At the plate the Cubs did not even dent Mays. He did not allow a hit in the fifth, sixth, or seventh innings. In fact, as Mays zipped through the entire Chicago lineup, not one Cub knocked a ball out of the infield in any of those three innings—of the nine outs made, five came on harmless taps back to Mays.

That changed in the eighth, when Fred Mitchell made a last desperate attempt to salvage the Series. He pulled Deal for pinch hitter Turner Barber. Mays swooped into his delivery and sent a pitch down around Barber’s knees. Barber reached down and clubbed the pitch into left field. “Whiteman,” the
Hartford Courant
reported, “before the series hardly known to baseball fame, rushed in with the ball dropping faster and faster, grabbed the sphere below his ankles and took a clean somersault, the great momentum rolling him up on his feet again. He staggered dizzily, but with great elation, slammed the ball to Scott and the ball went flying around the infield as an expression of the joy of the Sox in such a remarkable catch.”
¹¹
The fans roared. Whiteman’s teammates went out to see if he was hurt. He waved them off at first, but after the next out was made Whiteman came off the field with an injured neck. Ruth took his place in left field. Yes, that’s right—Babe Ruth was a pinch fielder for George Whiteman.

The catch capped the brief brush with glory for Whiteman, the slightly paunchy, 35-year-old Barrow purchasee. Whiteman hadn’t done much of note during the season. He hadn’t done much of note throughout his career, spent mostly in the minors. He had been called up to the Red Sox in 1907 with Tris Speaker, but while Speaker went on to become a Hall of Famer, Whiteman played just four games and went back to the minors. He resurfaced in 1913, at age 30, when he played 13 games with the Yankees. Now the catch on Barber’s liner sealed Whiteman’s status as World Series hero. He hit .250, with a .348 on-base percentage, scored two runs, knocked in another, and, in Game 6, hit the liner that was muffed by Flack for two Red Sox runs. “He was the active principal in all four of the Red Sox victories,” Hugh Fullerton wrote, “got on base more times and in more ways than any other player; made the decisive plays and [in Game 6] he capped the climax.”
¹²
All of this was fitting. Not only did Whiteman’s performance shred Mitchell’s plan to limit Ruth’s impact on the Series, but, as one Cub said, “[Whiteman] wouldn’t even be in the league but for the war.”
¹³
The baseball season had been dominated by war, and here
the star of the World Series was a player whose very presence in the big leagues was owed entirely to the fact that the war had drained the Red Sox of all other options.

Any notion of a Cubs comeback ended with Whiteman’s catch. Mays got two pop outs to finish the eighth and two more pop flies to start the ninth. With two out in the final inning, Mann sent a roller to Shean, who flipped the ball to McInnis at first base. The game, the Series, and the 1918 season were over. The Red Sox were World Series champions for the fifth time—the most of any team. But the players, uncertain of the proper reaction, simply headed for the locker room. The fans filed out. “Baseball’s valedictory this afternoon should have been played to the weary strains of Chopin’s Funeral March,” the
Times
commented. “The smallest gathering that ever saw the national game’s most imposing event sat silently about, and watched Boston win and Chicago lose. There was no wild demonstration of joy when the last man went out, and Stuffy McInnis, with the ball in his hand, led the scramble of the players to the clubhouse. No hero was proclaimed, no player got a ride on anyone’s shoulders, no star was patted on the back or madly cheered to a niche in baseball’s temple of fame. The finish was as uneventful as the last moment of a double-header in Brooklyn.”
¹⁴

Indeed, the funeral theme was widely reiterated in reports about the ’18 World Series. “This World Series is probably the last which will be played in some time,” wrote Sherman Duffy in the
Chicago Daily Journal
. “It seems certain that baseball as it now exists is gone. It has been losing its hold because of intense commercialism into which it had fallen. Its shameful deathbed display was the finishing touch.”
¹⁵
As the
Courant
noted, “Taps for professional baseball for the duration of the war sounded at Fenway Park today.”
¹⁶
Wrote Sanborn: “Professional baseball is dead.”
¹⁷

That night, the Cubs met at Boston’s South Station and boarded the train that would take them back to Chicago. Team president Charley Weeghman had to rush, after the game, to a Boston board to register for the draft, which would expand to include ages 18 to 45 the next day. Weeghman still made the train. Some Cubs stayed east. Otto Knabe went back home to Philadelphia. Lefty Tyler went to his Massachusetts farm. Reserve catcher Tommy Clarke, who had appeared in one game all season, went off to his home in New York.
For those going to Chicago, it was a long ride. No one, apart from Hippo Vaughn and Lefty Tyler, had performed particularly well. As a team, the Cubs hit .210, after batting .265 during the season. Pick was the top hitter, at .389, followed by Merkle (.278) and Flack (.263). Hollocher, after amassing the most hits in the National League, batted just .190. Paskert, too, hit .190. Killefer hit .118. The pitchers had been brilliant, holding the Red Sox to a .189 average and just nine runs in the six games, but the defense cracked at all the wrong times, and the baserunning mistakes were devastating. The Cubs were second in the league in stolen bases in the regular season, but in the Series they stole just three—they were picked off four times and caught stealing five times. “In the wake of the scrappy [Red Sox], there is a trail of Chicago’s shattered hopes, sleepy base running, silly errors and sillier bases on balls,” the
New York Times
wrote.
¹⁸

Aboard the train, Killefer and Mitchell went into a private conference to decide how to divide the losers’ share of the gate receipts. The pool was a shallow one, just $13,641.64. Killefer and Mitchell set aside $1,000—$300 to be given to the team trainer and $700 to be divided among Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rowdy Elliott, Pete Kilduff, Tom Daly, and Vic Aldridge, the Cubs players who were in the service. The rest of the money was divided into 22 shares, with Speed Martin and Tommy Clarke splitting a share. Each share was $574.62. The Red Sox did better—$1,108.45 each—but considering that players opened the Series expecting $2,000 and $1,400, there was sharp disappointment when the totals were officially settled.