The Old Ball Game Read online

  Contemporary accounts don’t explain what upset McGraw so. We only know that it was a decision at first base. He alone appears to have taken umbrage. Nobody could figure out why. “It was apparent that the decision was imminently correct,” the Times assured its readers. Umpire Terry finally had enough, though, and ejected McGraw, a dismissal, observed the Tribune, “that seemed to dishearten the other members of the St. Louis team.” Indeed, with McGraw expelled, the Giants garnered a rare victory, beating the Terrors 8–3. Only then, in defeat, did the losers appear to come to life again “when they applied uncalled for verbal abuse to the umpire.”

  So did Matty first encounter Muggsy. Probably, as he went back to his room at the Colonial Hotel on 125th Street, he wondered what possibly could have set McGraw off. But then, that’s the sort of thing Mathewson might have pondered often for the rest of his baseball life. Sometimes Muggsy just blew his top because that’s what Muggsy did. You never could be sure, though. Sometimes he would feign anger and get himself thrown out of a game early on so that he could go to the horse races. That might account for his actions on that particular Thursday, July 19, 1900. St. Louis was out of the pennant race, and the crowd at the Polo Grounds was a handful. The best umpires were on to his scam, though. One time in St. Louis when McGraw pretended to argue a call so vociferously as to get tossed so he could head over to the track, umpire Tim Hurst just smiled at him and said: “There ain’t a chance, Mac.” No matter how vile and animated Muggsy got with Hurst, the ump just grinned back. McGraw’s punishment was that he had to stay and play whether he liked it or not.

  Anyway, two weeks after the Polo Grounds ejection, the Giants played in St. Louis. Matty had been rocked again in Pittsburgh the week before, giving up six runs in the first inning he worked in relief. Then, in St. Louis on Saturday, August 4, Mathewson actually pitched to McGraw. Although it’s unclear from the box scores exactly when he relieved “Doughnut Bill” Carrick, he came on fairly early, and since McGraw got two hits in the game, at least one and maybe both came off the debutante. St. Louis won 9–8. If Mathewson had any consolation, he did get his first major league hit in this game, a triple. He was always a pretty fair-hitting pitcher.

  But unfortunately in 1900 he wasn’t much of a pitching pitcher. Manager Davis used him only three more times before the parsimonious Freedman sent Mathewson back to Norfolk so that the owner might get a refund on the deal. On the year with the Giants, Mathewson had no wins but three losses, giving up thirty-four hits, twenty walks, and thirty-two runs in thirty-four innings pitched. He grew terribly homesick living alone at the Colonial Hotel, and on the road nobody in either of the team’s two disputatious cliques seemed to have much time for the kid. By the end of the season Mathewson had decided that he was not good enough to make it in baseball. He considered a career in forestry or in the Presbyterian ministry, which is what his mother had in mind for him.

  McGraw, too, could hardly wait for the ’00 season to end. The Terrors finished tied for fifth, and as soon as the last game was played, McGraw and his advoirdupois partner were on the first train outta town, back to Baltimore, there again to greet their friends at the Diamond Café. As their railroad car crossed over the Mississippi River, Muggsy pulled down the window and he and Uncle Robbie chucked their St. Louis uniforms into the water. Already, McGraw had a pretty good idea of what other fish he would fry. By now he knew that there was going to be a second major league, titled the American, in 1901, and Baltimore was sure to get a franchise.

  Meanwhile, Connie Mack, owner and manager of the new Philadelphia team in the upstart league, had heard good things about the debutante Mathewson and offered him a contract of fifteen hundred dollars. Mathewson, growing bold, asked for fifty dollars more, which Mack sent him as a cash advance. For now, forestry and preaching were put on the back burner. However, it would take a year and a half and considerable machinations more before Matty and Muggsy would be back on the field at the Polo Grounds, this time together, there soon to set the world on its ear.

  TWO

  Looking back from a vantage point of twenty-five years, the historian Mark Sullivan noted “some minor distinctive institutions” that were evident at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States of America. These included: “a national holiday known as Thanksgiving, rocking-chairs, a greater fastidiousness about personal cleanliness as measured by the commonness of bathtubs . . . ice-water, pie, New Engand boiled dinner, chewing gum.” There was a Ping-Pong craze on at that time, and croquet was still all the rage, but Sullivan chose to mention two other games. One was poker, “a diversion . . . indigenous to this nation and containing definite elements of the interplay of psychology not found in ordinary card games.” The other was: “baseball, a game calling for unusually quick reactions intellectually, and prompt and easy co-operation muscularly.”

  In other words, Americans didn’t just play stuff, indoor or out; they were an ingenious folk who naturally favored games that required inordinate intelligence. This seemed to matter. It certainly did to McGraw, who was always going on about how much brainwork baseball needed (which also suggested, by extension, that a manager of such an intellectual enterprise had to be truly bright). Mathewson didn’t have to talk about it; he was universally known to be smart as a whip.

  Of course, all the cultural analyzing aside, the games that a people favor are those that they find the most fun. But baseball certainly did possess certain ingredients that had made it what everybody called it then: the American national sport. First of all, it was a team game, requiring that “prompt and easy co-operation muscularly.” As the Baltimore Morning Herald rhapsodized: “The fin de siecle players must possess a high order of brains, must be of correct habits, have plenty of ambition and be possessed of a certain docility and evenness of temperament such as will insure proper discipline and the frictionless working together of the whole team.”

  However, peculiar to most team games, baseball features a distinct individual subset, where every batter has a mano a mano confrontation with the pitcher—a turn at bat. This neatly satisfied both the unique American organizational talent—it wasn’t cowboys that settled the West, it was wagon trains—along with the role for that idealized American individual, the lone wolf.

  Moreover, at a time when most Americans labored at long, enervating hours, six days a week of ten-hour workdays, it helped, too, that baseball was not so physically demanding as the back-and-forth team sports. It is certainly no coincidence that at this time, American football, a mean, grueling diversion, was a game played for the most part—and at the highest level of proficiency—by college boys who otherwise were lifting nothing heavier than textbooks. Indeed, the sport was dominated by the wealthiest young gentlemen of all, from the Ivy League. These young gallants not only had the energy to engage in such a demanding activity, but they also could use football to show off, proving that they were every bit as tough as the working classes. Thus, while it is ironic, it is perfectly understandable why baseball, the softer (and, allegedly, more intellectual) game, became a professional entertainment while football, which is so much more gladitorial, remained essentially an amateur distraction, played primarily by students, for many more years.

  Baseball grew up largely in New York and Brooklyn (when it was a city unto itself) strictly as a middle-class amusement— white collar, as we would say today. Its popular increase was viewed as a Good Thing for America. Indeed, in some respects it wasn’t so much that Americans played as it was that Americans were improved by baseball—perhaps especially the immigrants and other lowlife who had to be educated in this new uplifting way of life on earth. Do-gooders from Jane Addams to the only contemporary American cardinal, James Gibbons of Baltimore, attributed qualities of spirit and cohesion to baseball. Playing it bound us and lifted us alike. Wrote Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, New York historians: “The spread of baseball, some thought, was a triumph of the civilizing process.” Baseball, like Emily Post later on, taught you how to behave
middle-class.

  Neither was baseball itself modest about its uplifting—and all-American—qualities. Wrote Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide in 1888: “It is very questionable whether there is any public sport in the civilized portion of the world so eminently fitted for the people it was made for as the American national game of base ball. In every respect it is an outdoor sport admirably adapted for our mercurial population. It is full of excitement, is quickly played, and it not only requires vigor of constitution and a healthy physique, but manly courage, steady nerve [and] plenty of pluck.”

  (And where did pluck go? It was such a wonderfully American quality of that time.)

  Of course, why it was that baseball and football caught on in the Republic instead of cricket and soccer is one of America’s more enduring sweet mysteries. Unfortunately, de Tocqueville had passed on by then, so we can’t ever be sure. The simplest explanation has to do with proficiency. Baseball and football (and later basketball) require more dexterous skill. There are no 6-4-3 double plays in cricket, and the most adroit soccer player in the World Cup can’t do with his feet what a run-of-the-mill junior high football or basketball player can manage with his hands. Proficiency mattered so to a nation on the make.

  On the other hand, probably the most intriguing thing about baseball’s success is that the sport depends primarily on eyesight. The greatest athletes in the world in terms of speed, strength, and dexterity aren’t worth a hill of beans on the diamond if they lack hand-eye coordination. John McGraw signed Jim Thorpe for the Giants, and he was a bust precisely because he couldn’t hit a ball that curved—never mind all the other stuff he could do better than anybody else on earth. Although pitchers do not require the same level of ocular acumen as hitters, spotting a pitch— control—is crucial. It’s art. Mathewson, who was also a fabulous football player, understood very well. “A pitcher is not a ballplayer,” he declared.

  But for whatever reasons, baseball caught on in America. Cricket had had its chances, too. The first cricket club in New York was founded in 1839, while the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club didn’t begin playing games at Madison and Twenty-seventh Street until three years later. And cricket maintained something of a following even into the twentieth century. Perhaps it tells us more about how little the first World Series mattered, when Boston played Pittsburgh in 1903, but notwithstanding, in the New York Times, the newspaper of record, the first game of the first Series was simply listed under a roundup headline that read: YESTERDAY’S BASEBALL GAMES, while the larger headline on that same sports page concerned a match on Staten Island, which was: ENGLISH CRICKETERS WIN.

  Surely, too, something of the popularity of baseball (and football) had to do with the fact that, whatever their English antecedents, they were indigenous American games. Curiously, the favored individual spectator sports that caught on in the latter part of the nineteenth century—horse racing, boxing, tennis, golf, and track—had all more or less been transported from the British Isles and were quickly accepted here. But, by golly, we needed our own team games. Soccer aficionados in particular, of course, have never gotten over the fact that their sport is number one virtually everywhere in the world except in the U.S., but the fact is that it just never caught the fancy of Americans. Of course, it is an article of faith every year that next year America will redeem itself and catch up with the universal taste and embrace soccer as a spectator worship, ’SOCKER’ FOOTBALL GROWS IN FAVOR headlined a story in the New York Herald during the 1905 World Series. Such a story might have been run, wistfully, every October since then.

  But baseball was the team game that began to rule. Early on, Union troops spread the sport during the Civil War, and afterward, whether in the farmlands or in the great cities that began to explode with the industrial revolution, baseball became the American game of the American dream. Especially for any minority boy seeking inclusion, baseball was the key to membership. As late as 1923, in one of the dandiest paeans to fellowship extant, the Sporting News (which was always called “the Bible of baseball”) warmly boasted this scripture: “The Mick, the Sheeny, the Wop, the Dutch and the Chink, the Indian, the Jap or the so-called Anglo-Saxon—his nationality is never a matter of moment if he can pitch, hit or field.”

  (Of course, notably lacking from that friendly roster is the African-American, who had been excluded from “organized” baseball by 1880. As vulgar and common as the Sporting News’ ethnic references might be, it is worth noting that even two years later, in 1925, the New Yorker, that bible of sophistication, wrote that when McGraw got rid of a popular player, he had “sold [him] down the river like any common field nigger.”)

  So baseball embraced and even elevated its participants, and it provided common amusement for the citizenry. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first professional team (although staffed with many New Yorkers), and soon thereafter, in the 1870s, leagues began to bloom. So much of baseball’s unique heritage developed so quickly: trades of players, the reserve clause, player unions and strikes, major leagues and minor leagues, large markets and small markets. Beer made an early alliance with baseball, especially in cities with considerable German populations, where the brewery barons caught on quickly that games played in the sunshine made the ideal place to sell their suds to the cranks sitting in the hot bleachers (so named, of course, because the hot sun bleached the wood).

  Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh all had franchises backed by beer money, and Christian Frederick Wilhelm Von der Ahe, known as “Der Boss President,” owner of the St. Louis Brown Stockings, was so far ahead of his time that he had largely been forgotten when Bill Veeck came along many decades later to put a new shine on Von der Ahe’s ideas. In order to increase crowds and sell beer, Der Boss President offered fireworks, oompah bands, merry-go-rounds, water slides, horse races, Wild West shows, special trolley cars, a stadium club, ladies’ sections, and, of course, a biergarten. Only bobblehead dolls avoided Der Boss President’s prescience.

  But baseball, then as now, was always struggling not to screw up a good thing. It seems amazing now, at a time when all leagues the world over feature a postseason that almost seems as inclusive and enduring as the regular season itself, but the idea of playoffs and divisions pretty much eluded the owners. Not only that, but as late as 1899, the National League—then the only major league—had twelve teams. As a consequence, there was one winner and eleven losers, many of whom were eliminated from serious consideration by the holiday at the end of May, then called Decoration Day.

  The Cleveland Spiders of 1899 are often cited for their spectacular ineptitude, finishing eighty-four games behind the Brooklyn Superbas, with a 20–134 record, but inglorious losers were the order of the decade. Moreover, some teams had no long-term hope whatsoever because of what was called “syndicate baseball,” wherein one owner owned two teams. He would stock one of his two teams with most of the best players, so essentially what developed was a situation where some of the so-called major league teams were really minor league farm clubs. Even for the better teams that had nothing to point to at the end of the season, it’s rather amazing that interest and attendance held up as well as it did.

  Baseball also suffered two blows it had no control over in the 1890s. The financial panic of’93 and the Spanish-American War of ’98 both kept down the crowds and threatened the lives of whole franchises. On a sustaining basis, though, the decline of Andrew Freedman’s Giants from mediocrity to embarrassment hurt all of professional baseball, because with a laughingstock of a team in the nation’s biggest city, the sport lacked the national spotlight that only McGraw and Mathewson would finally bring to it at the dawn of the new century.

  Freedman had purchased the Giants for forty-eight thousand dollars in 1895, right after the club finished second, trailing only McGraw and the Orioles. An Indianapolis department store magnate, John Brush—“the Hoosier Wanamaker” he was called—had also sought to purchase the Giants. Freedman attacked Brush in the bar of
the Fifth Avenue Hotel before a friend of Brush stepped in and walloped Freedman. Nonetheless, he got the team and soon alienated everybody. He did not help his press relations by punching out a Times reporter and regularly barring his many and sundry newspaper critics from the ballpark. Freedman was good-looking. Also: cheap, impulsive, and disagreeable—“utterly lacking in tact”—but he was prominent in Tammany and quick to blame his friendlessness on anti-Semitism.

  One time in 1898 at the Polo Grounds, a former Giant named Ducky Holmes, then playing for the Orioles, got into some dispute with a member of the home team and, as a final fillip, screamed: “At least I’m not working for a sheeny anymore.” Freedman heard the slur and went berserk, and when the umpire wouldn’t punish Holmes for his outburst, the Giant owner ordered his team off the field, forfeiting. The truth of the matter, though, was that when it came to Andrew Freedman, the animating emotion was not anti-Semitism but anti-Freedmanism. Jews didn’t like him any better than anybody else, and he was so generally despised that that antipathy was transposed upon the whole Giant franchise.

  The fact is, what prejudice there was in baseball as the nineteenth century wound down was generally directed against the Irish. They predominated on the diamond and, in fact, had been prominently involved in the sport since its earliest years. In 1858 the Waspy Knickerbockers had consented to play a series against an Irish team from Brooklyn called Po Reilly’s, and crowds of thousands had showed up despite a fifty-cent admission fee. Over time, “The Sons of Erin,” as the Sporting News invariably called them, had come to play so large a role in professional baseball that there developed the same sort of backlash against the Irish in baseball as, say, was directed at blacks in the 1970s when they began to dominate the National Basketball Association. Well into the 1890s, probably up to 40 percent of major league players were of Irish descent.