The Old Ball Game (14 page)

McGraw was no crusader, either, but in 1901, when the color line in baseball was well established, Muggsy tried to sign an American Indian player, Chief Tokohama, for the Orioles. Only Chief Tokohama was no Indian. The White Stockings owner, Charles Comiskey, a dreadful human being whose parsimony would lead to his players fixing the 1919 World Series, blew the whistle on the Chief, revealing him to be an African-American bellhop whom McGraw had “fixed up with war paint and a bunch of feathers.” In 1923, when Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, was drawing attention to the Yankees, away from the Giants, McGraw found a fellow named Mose Solomon playing Class C ball in Kansas and introduced him to the Polo Grounds faithful as the “Rabbi of Swat.” Alas, the Rabbi lasted only two desultory games, failing to attract throngs of New York Hebrews.

And, of course, McGraw's greatest player and largest gate attraction was the Presbyterian farm boy, Mathewson. Neither would have become so famous without the other. No coach can succeed, no matter how intrinsically good, without a winning
team. Mathewson could have won for anybody, but that he had McGraw's Giants behind him, playing in New York, gave him all the more fame than he ever would have gained, say, had he honored that contract with Connie Mack's Athletics down in Philadelphia. Rather, both men found the moment—Mathewson arriving as professional baseball became more respectable, and McGraw taking charge as, likewise, the Irish were gaining a foothold in society.

Irish esteem increased all the more when the phonograph player began to move into homes and, starting in 1906, Americans began to listen to the great tenor, John McCormack, singing indigenous Irish ballads that had never before been heard in the general population—the likes of “The Lily of Killarney,” “The Wearing of the Green,” and “Kathleen Mavourneen.” McGraw was, not surprisingly, a sucker for Irish songs. Sunday nights, the McGraws enjoyed sing-alongs at home, with the host himself favoring “Break the News to Mother” and “Silver Threads among the Gold.” But as often as he would go out to dinner dances, to fine restaurants that featured dancing with dinner, Blanche could never get him up on the floor except for one song. Muggsy would dance with his lady only when the band played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

The cracker barrel, where those legendary cracker-barrel philosophers held court, was for all intents and purposes made instantly obsolescent in 1898. That was when Uneeda brought out a package of crackers that cost five cents. If you could buy your own crackers in a handy package, who needed a barrel to dig into?

Uneeda knew pricing. The nickel was king in America at this time. It was so common a currency that the dime was, often as not, called a “double nickel.” You didn't want to get stuck with a wooden nickel. The ultimate depth of worthlessness was a plugged nickel. What this country needed was a good five-cent cigar. At a time when laborers in New York made twenty cents an hour and a good meal would set you back fifteen cents, you could go into a saloon and, for a nickel, get a stein of beer and free bread, salami, pickled herring, and hard-boiled eggs for the asking. “
Barkeep, I'll have another beer
.” When the subway opened up, naturally a ride was pegged at a nickel. This was the same as for streetcars, which particularly crisscrossed Brooklyn, so the
players had to be nimble to negotiate streets to reach the ballpark: hence, the borough's team of Trolley Dodgers. The new movies not only charged a nickel, but were not called what they were, but what they cost: nickelodeons. A cuppa coffee cost a nickel. So did a soft drink. “
A Moxie, please
.” “
Surething, mister, that'll be a nickel
” Ice cream was a nickel. Likewise a Tootsie Roll.

Did Jack Norworth—who, as we know, had never seen a baseball game when he wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”—know that Cracker Jack cost a nickel when he threw it into his masterpiece just because he needed something to rhyme with
back
? (Otherwise, surely he would have written: “Buy me some peanuts and popcorn”—right?) Well, Cracker Jack, which had been introduced at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 by two German immigrant brothers, one of whom cried out “That's a crackerjack of an idea!”—indeed sold for a nickel (although sans any prize—they weren't included until 1912).

However, if you too have been taken out to the ball game recently, you know of course that once you get in, you're a captive consumer, so everything costs more than on the outside. So it was then, too, at the Polo Grounds, that the vendors in black coats and white aprons charged double nickels for most of their wares—hot dogs, pieces of pie, beer, and, presumably, Cracker Jack. (Well, scorecards held the line at five cents.) Admission, too, did not come cheap. Box seats went for a buck twenty-five. General admission was half a dollar, and the cheapest bleacher seats were pegged at two bits. A large part of that distant territory was known as “Berkeville,” since so many Irish sat out there.

These heady prices would account for why so many spectators would seek the limited vantage afforded by Coogan's Bluff, which overlooked the stadium. The Polo Grounds itself, lying under Coogan's Bluff, was originally Coogan's Hollow, the farm and salt fields of James J. Coogan, who was the first borough president of Manhattan (and a failed mayoral candidate).

Question: When did they play polo at the Polo Grounds?

Answer: They never did.

Question: Really? Then why—

Answer: It's sort of like nowadays when so many people wear polo shirts, even though they have never played polo (including Ralph Lauren).

But, you see, there was an earlier real Polo Grounds, located around 110th Street, by the northern extremities of Central Park, where polo was indeed contested. This property was owned by James Gordon Bennett, the newspaper publisher. The original New York Metropolitans adapted the polo fields there as their diamond home from 1883 to 1885, and so too the Giants, who had been the Troy Haymakers when they moved to Manhattan in 1883. When the Giants then moved up to Coogan's Hollow in 1889, they more or less brought the Polo Grounds name along with them. (The same sort of thing happened with Madison Square Garden, which has kept its original connection to Madison Avenue long after it started moving about town.)

The wooden Polo Grounds had a capacity of about sixteen thousand, but from the very beginning, tucked there under Coogan's Bluff, it had a bizarre configuration—short down the foul lines, then slanting sharply out to a center field that reached up to five hundred feet away, where, beyond, the Giants had their home dressing quarters. It was in those far environs where Willie Mays would make his fabled catch of Vic Wertz's long fly ball in the '54 Series, just as the stadium's short foul lines were immortalized by Bobby Thomson's pop-fly home run to left to win the '51 pennant against the Dodgers. (These sorts of hits were called “Chinese home runs”—meaning cheap—in those less sensitive times.)

None of this geography much mattered back then, though, when there were so few home runs hit and just about everybody played what might be called Muggsy Ball. (Hilltop Park, where the Yankees first played, had even more antic dimensions of
365-542-400.) Besides, spacious center fields provided a place for the well-heeled cranks to park their carriages. In all ballyards in those days, overflow crowds were allowed into the outfield, roped off. Hits popped into this human efflux were marked as ground-rule doubles or triples; better to sell more tickets than to keep the game pristine. Why, the Giants could accommodate as many as another four or five thousand standees in the outfield.

Until the subway was opened in 1904, the cheapest, fastest way to get to the game was on the Sixth Avenue elevated line. The trains could only go up to twenty miles an hour, however, because any greater speed would cause the track's superstructure to shimmy something awful. Still, it was pretty convenient. When the subway came in, it did forty-five miles an hour, and a “baseball special” from Wall Street made only one intermediate stop, at Forty-second Street. If you didn't have to work that day, you could drift up the Harlem River by excursion boat. Or, if you were flush, you and some buddies could rent a horse-drawn coach. That cost a dollar for the first mile, forty cents each additional, and forty cents for each fifteen-minute waiting period. It's cheaper than it sounds, too, because there wasn't a lot of lollygagging in those days once the deep-throated man with the megaphone announced the lineups, so most games were comfortably completed in less than two hours. Since the games started at three-thirty or four, any crank cum fan could be home to his mutton dinner or standing with a foot on the bar rail at a very reasonable hour indeed.

(In fact, nobody ever knew, back then, how good they had it. When baseball juiced up the balls some in 1911, putting cork in the center, this helped the batters enough so that there were more hits, and a love-struck Ring Lardner, covering the games for a Chicago paper, wrote his fiancée: “It appears to be impossible to finish a game in less than two hours. It's bad enough now, but it's going to drive me crazy when it keeps me away from my home.” Could Lardner ever have imagined that his press box descendants would be held captive for
three
hours, even
more
?)

Living together their first full season with the Giants, 1903, McGraw and Mathewson would, midday, bid Blanche and Jane good-bye and hie to the park. Notwithstanding Muggsy getting clobbered by the ball Dummy Taylor threw, it was a glorious time for them both. Mathewson won thirty games for the first time, age twenty-three. McGraw was just thirty, but he only embellished his managerial reputation, taking the Giants from the '02 cellar, with forty-eight wins, to second place behind the redoubtable Pittsburgh nine, with eighty-four victories. Overnight the city's attitude about the Giants changed.

Despite the fact that the Giants couldn't catch the Pirates, McGraw (and John Brush, the new owner) began to envision a lucrative postseason exhibition series against Pittsburgh—Senior Circuit number one vs. Senior Circuit number two. But instead, to McGraw's horror, Barney Dreyfuss, the Pirates' owner, opted to play against Ban Johnson's upstart champions, the Boston Americans, in what was termed “the championship of the United States.” To make matters worse, not only did Pittsburgh lower itself to consort with the American League, but Boston won the best-of-nine showdown, five-to-three.

This made McGraw look all the more foolish the next year when, as early as July, with the Giants winging toward the National League pennant, Muggsy began to make declarations that he had no intention of meeting the American League champions should the Giants win. “I know the American League and its methods,” he orated. “I ought to, for I paid for my knowledge. . . . They still have my money. . . . No one, not even my bitterest enemy ever accused me of being a fool.”

Brush backed him to the hilt. “There is nothing in the constitution or playing rules of the National League, which requires the victorious club to submit its championship honors to a contest with a victorious club in a minor league,” he declared.

Hardly another soul, however, agreed with the Giants' owner and manager. Mostly they were lambasted, simply, as “cowards”—all
the more so as they were putting up the best record in either league. McGraw's team won 106 games, finishing 13 games ahead of the Cubs. Mathewson went 33-12 with a 2.03 earned run average, but even he had to take a backseat this year to the Iron Man, for McGinnity had his best season, going 35-8, 1.61. Dummy Taylor won 21 games and southpaw Hooks Wiltse 13, so the starting rotation won all but four of the 106 victories between them. McGraw had always been leery of left-handed pitchers, but now that more and more left-handed batters were coming into baseball, he saw the advantage of countering them with left-handed pitchers. And wouldn't you know it? Around the middle of the season, to add punch to his outfield, McGraw got Turkey Mike Donlin back, from Cincinnati, where he'd worn out his welcome by drinking and fighting. Donlin was soon even more of a presence in New York nightlife than McGraw. Lock up the showgirls!

The Giants' refusal to play the American League winner took on even more opprobrium because no less than the Highlanders were making a run at the American League pennant. McGraw's old Baltimore buddy, Wee Willie Keeler, was the Highlanders' top hitter, and a spitballer named Jack Chesbro, who had kangarooed out of the National League, won forty-one games (still the modern record). In the event, the Highlanders finished a game and a half behind Boston and wouldn't do so well again until they were the Yankees, with Babe Ruth, in 1920, but the possibility of playing—and losing to!—the nouveau Manhattan opposition—the Old Oriole franchise itself—obviously gnawed at McGraw.

He protested that he was only taking the high road. “We are not a lot of grafters looking for box-office receipts at the expense of our club,” he brayed sanctimoniously. Nobody fell for that hooey, least of all his players, who were furious that they were being cheated out of a terrific payday. Under McGraw's urging, Brush had, for his heroes, built a new state-of-the-art twentieth-century locker room, complete with electricity and steam heat,
but the players knew that Brush was cleaning up off their popularity. Indeed, the Giants, with the Polo Grounds capacity expanded to twenty-four thousand, drew an incredible season's attendance of half a million, giving Brush a profit of one hundred thousand dollars—an unheard-of figure at that time.

But despite all the criticism, the Giants refused to play Boston. Brush, however, didn't possess McGraw's thick skin, and during the off-season he relented for the future, chairing the commission that laid out rules for what would, in 1905 and thereafter, first be known as the World's Championship Series, and then the World's Series, and then the World Series, and then the Series between the two major league pennant winners. Effectively, that was the last clause in the peace pact between the leagues. Only John J. McGraw continued to carry a grudge.