The Old Ball Game (24 page)

The Giants were down three games to one now, but Marquard won again, 5–2, at the Polo Grounds, and back at Fenway the Giants routed Wood and tied the Series with an 11–4 win. McGraw snarled: “The Red Sox cracked and broke today.” And predictably, the rumors flew that the Sox had given away the last two games so that the Series would go the limit and both franchises would profit with the extra gates.

Rube Marquard

The game, however, was not nearly so interesting as the events that surrounded it. The Red Sox management, in some fit of idiocy, sold most of the Royal Rooters' regular seats out from under them, catering to rich, new Johnny-come-lately VIP fans. As a consequence the Rooters marched about before the game, stormed the bleachers, and after the game showed their displeasure by rooting for the visitors. “Three cheers for John McGraw and his ball club!” they chanted as the Giant supporters happily waved their blue pennants in joyous surprise.

Not only that, but Boston had won the coin flip, giving the Sox the home field for the deciding game, but the Rooters boycotted the game. Moreover, they were joined in their stayaway strike by many other furious Bostonians, who were sympathetic to how the Royal Rooters had been mistreated. As a consequence, only 17,034 showed up at Fenway, and 1,500 of those had come up on trains from New York. Meanwhile, down in Manhattan, perhaps a hundred thousand or more spilled into the streets to follow the action on the huge scoreboards.

This day, October 16, was a gloomy one, and Mathewson seemed a match for the weather. He was gaunt and withdrawn. One reporter wrote: “As he sat in the corridor of his hotel this morning, it could be seen that he had little left to give. The skin was drawn tightly over the bone on his jaw and chin, and in his hollowed cheeks the furrows of recent years were startling in their depth.” The old-timer was all of thirty-two years.

Yet despite Mathewson's dreadful aspect, once the game started, the Sox were “helpless in the face of his speed and elusive fadeaway.” The Giants managed a run in the third, and although they squandered several other chances, Big Six took that 1–0 shutout into the seventh. A single and a rare base on balls here gave Boston its first real chance, though, so with two outs, manager Jake Stahl pinch-hit for his starter, Hugh Bedient. The batter he chose was a very ordinary left-handed hitting outfielder named Olaf Henriksen. He had been born in Denmark, but naturally everybody in baseball called him “Swede.” Henriksen managed only 487 at bats in seven seasons in the majors, hitting a modest .269. But here, swinging late on a curve, “the confounded son of Thor that he is” (wrote the
World
), slapped the ball down the left-field line. The ball hit the third base sack and bounded far enough away into foul territory to bring home Boston's first run. Fred Snodgrass in center made a nice running catch to end the inning, but now it was 1–1.

Despite the fact that the Giants had routed Smokey Joe Wood the day before, Manager Stahl now called for him in relief. He was a different pitcher this day, however, and New York could not score. For the first time, a deciding game went into extra innings. But then in the New York tenth, the Giants got to Wood. There was poetic justice, too, that none other than Fred Merkle drove in the run that put New York ahead 2–1. Surely this heroic single would erase the memory of his infamous boner. It was only fair.

And so did Mathewson head out boldly for the bottom of the tenth. “Is Mathewson apprehensive as he walks to the box?” asked the
Times
. And it answered: “He is not. And the confidence that was his when the blood of youth ran strong in his supple muscle is his now.”

Fred Merkle

To lead off, as a pinch hitter for Wood, Stahl sent up Clyde Engle, a weak-hitting utilityman. So began the most upside-down inning, where the weak were strong, the strong weak— even if the luck all went to Boston. Down two strikes in the count, Engle lifted an easy high fly to left-center. Snodgrass moved over a couple of steps. “The globe plumped squarely into the Californian's glove,” the
Herald
wrote. “It also plumped promptly to the sward.” Engle pulled into first. Snodgrass was a fine fielder. No one, least of all Mathewson, could believe it. Uncharacteristically, Matty would “swing his gloved hand in a gesture that is eloquent of his wrath.”

In a movie theater in Los Angeles, where the game was being played out by telegraph, Snodgrass's mother fainted dead away with the report of her son's error.

McGraw came out of the dugout. “Stick to 'em, Matty. Stick to 'em,” he shouted.

Next up, Harry Hooper. Rattled, Mathewson threw him his pitch and Hooper drove it deep to center. This time, out by the wall, Snodgrass made a terrific catch. Engle went to second. The batter now was Steve Yerkes, a light-hitting second baseman. Unbelievably, Matty, who had walked only three batters in the twenty-eight and a third innings he'd worked in the Series, walked Yerkes on four pitches. This brought Tris Speaker, the “Grey Eagle,” to the plate. Speaker hit .383 on the year. He was as considerable a threat as Yerkes had been hardly any. So what happened? Speaker swung at Matty's first pitch and popped a weak little foul fly over toward Merkle, who was playing first.

Accounts differ. Some say Merkle simply froze. Some say he moved to make the catch exactly as he should have. Whichever, and for whatever reason, Mathewson, running toward the play himself, screamed: “Chief! Chief!” That meant that Chief Meyers, the catcher, should catch the ball. Now, for sure, Merkle
stopped in his tracks. Meyers lunged but didn't even get his mitt on the ball.

That should have been the third out, the game, and the championship. Two flies to Snodgrass, a pop foul to Merkle. Instead, there was only one down and two men on, and as Mathewson crossed back to the mound, Speaker called out: “Matty, that play'll cost you the Series.”

Sure enough, on the very next pitch, Speaker hit Mathewson's curve for a single, bringing in the tying run—Yerkes to third, Speaker to second on the throw in. Mathewson made the percentage move next, walking Duffy Lewis to set up a force play at any base, but it was for naught. Larry Gardner flied out deep enough to right for Yerkes to tag up and score with ease.

In the press box, a tough baseball writer, Steve Mercer of the
New York Globe
, looked down on Matty standing there forlornly, and began to cry unashamedly.

Ring Lardner started to type his lead for the
Chicago Tribune
. It read:

“Boston, Mass., Oct. 16—Just after Steve Yerkes had crossed the plate with the run that gave Boston's Red Sox the world's championship in the tenth inning of the deciding game of the greatest series ever played for the big title, while the thousands made temporary crazy by a triumph entirely unexpected, yelled, screamed, stamped their feet, smashed hats and hugged one another, there was seen one of the saddest sights in the history of a sport that is a wonderful picture of joy and gloom. It was the spectacle of a man, old as baseball players are reckoned, walking from the middle of the field to the New York players' bench with bowed head and drooping shoulders, with tears streaming from his eyes, a man on whom his team's fortunes had been staked and lost, a man who would have proven his clear title to the test reposed in him if his mates had stood by him in the supreme test. The man was Christy Mathewson.

“Beaten 3 to 2 by a club he would have conquered if he had been given the support deserved by his wonderful pitching, Matty tonight is greater in the eyes of the New York public than ever before. Even the joy-mad population of Boston confesses that his should have been the victory and his the praise.”

McGraw, always ready to defend his players, did not blame Snodgrass for the loss. “It could happen to anyone,” he said. “If it hadn't been for a lot Snodgrass did, we wouldn't have been playing in that game at all.” Just as he had given Merkle a raise after '08, so now would he do the same for Snodgrass. Neither did Mathewson put the onus on his center fielder. He wrote: “I blame Meyers and Merkle for failing to catch Speaker's foul far more than I do Snodgrass for his error.” But for most everybody else, almost from the moment Snodgrass let that ball tumble to the sward, he had cost the Giants the championship. Nobody much ever even credited Snodgrass for the terrific catch he made in deep center on Hooper's ball just after he'd dropped Engle's.

Fred Snodgrass

After the game, Snodgrass picked up his sweater, avoided speaking to anyone, and, according to Jeff Tesreau, “acted as if he was a criminal.” Riding in the taxi going back to the hotel with Tesreau and Josh Devore, he began to cry and then moaned: “Boys, I lost the championship for you.” Neither of the other two players protested because, as Tesreau said, without pity, “He really had, and there was no use trying to deny it.”

The press was just as hard on him. The
Tribune's
lead, for example, bordered on the cruel: “The name of Fred Snodgrass is on the lips of the baseball world to-night, for almost alone and unaided he gave the championship of the world to the Boston Red Sox. . . . [The error] will give the New York centre fielder something to think about when the wind is whistling through the eaves and the wood fire is crackling this winter.” (Never mind that Snodgrass lived in Southern California.)

Typical headlines the next morning read:
SOX CHAMPIONS ON MUFFED FLY
or
A
$29,495
MUFF BEATS GIANTS IN WORLD'S SERIES
.

Over time, the figure was rounded off to thirty thousand dollars—that being the total difference between the winning and losing team shares. The word “muff” became as attached to Snodgrass as “boner” had been to Merkle.

Snodgrass was twenty-four years old in that World Series. He was a better-than-average major leaguer, batting as high as .321 in one season. He was slim and handsome, well liked—his teammates called him “Snow”—and he played four more years in the majors before leaving baseball and going back to California.
There, he had a most distinguished career, both as a businessman and a rancher. He was even elected mayor of Oxnard, California. He lived a good long life, sixty-two more years after that World Series. When he died, this was the headline to his obituary in the
New York Times:
FRED SNODGRASS
, 86,
DEAD; BALLPLAYER MUFFED
1912
FLY
.

Some years before, Mathewson had said: “You can learn little from victory. You can learn everything from defeat.” Nineteen thirteen only added to his world of knowledge. Once again the Giants won the National League with ease. Once again, they lost in the World Series.

The Philadelphia Athletics were the opposition again, and the excitement in both cities was cresting as high as ever before. The crush for tickets, the scalping; on Wall Street particularly, there seemed to be an increase in the money wagered. The automobile had, by now, assumed control of the streets, and for five dollars (six dollars below Twenty-third Street), a cab would take you up to the Polo Grounds and wait there to bring you back after the game. Along with the customary play-by-play screens around the city, film technology had been advanced to a point where movies of the game could be seen at various Loew's theaters only three hours after the game had ended.