At the Old Ballgame Page 9

  Ever since that time we have carried our own boy with us, because a club with championship aspirations cannot afford to take a chance with those foreign artists handling the bats. They are likely to throw you down at any time.

  The Athletics have a funny superstition which is private or confined to their team as far as I know. When luck seems to be breaking against them in a game, they will take the bats and throw them wildly into the air and let them lie around in front of their bench, topsy-turvy. They call this changing the luck, but any other club would consider that it was the worst kind of a jinx. It is the same theory that card-players have about shuffling the deck vigorously to bring a different run of fortune. Then, if the luck changes, the Athletics throw the bats around some more to keep it. This act nearly cost them one of their best ball-players in the third game of the 1911 world’s series.

  The Philadelphia players had tossed their bats to break their run of luck, for the score was 1 to 0 against them, when Baker came up in the ninth inning. He cracked his now famous home run into the right-field bleachers, and the men on the bench hurled the bats wildly into the air. In jumping up and reaching for a bat to throw, Jack Barry, the shortstop, hit his head on the concrete roof of the structure and was stunned for a minute. He said that little black specks were floating in front of his eyes, but he gamely insisted on playing the contest out. “Connie” Mack was so worried over his condition that he sent Ira Thomas out on the field to inquire if he were all right, and this interrupted the game in the ninth inning. A lot of the spectators thought that Thomas was out there, bearing some secret message from “Connie” Mack. None knew that he was ascertaining the health of a player who had almost killed himself while killing a jinx.

  The Athletics, for two seasons, have carried with them on all their trips a combination bat boy and mascot who is a hunchback, and he outjinxed our champion jinx killer, Charley Faust, in the 1911 world’s series. A hunchback is regarded by ball-players as the best luck in the world. If a man can just touch that hump on the way to the plate, he is sure to get a hit, and any observant spectator will notice the Athletics’ hitters rubbing the hunchback boy before leaving the bench. So attached to this boy have the players become that they voted him half a share of the prize money last year after the world’s series. Lots of ball-players would tell you that he deserved it because he has won two world’s pennants for them.

  Another great piece of luck is for a ball-player to rub a colored kid’s head. I’ve walked along the street with ball-players and seen them stop a young negro and take off his hat and run their hands through his kinky hair. Then I’ve seen the same ball-player go out and get two or three hits that afternoon and play the game of his life. Again, it is the confidence inspired, coupled with the ability.

  Another old superstition among ball-players is that a load of empty barrels means base hits. If an athlete can just pass a flock of them on the way to the park, he is sure to step right along stride for stride with the three-hundred hitters that afternoon.

  McGraw once broke up a batting slump of the Giants with a load of empty barrels. That is why I maintain he is the greatest manager of them all. He takes advantage of the little things, even the superstitions of his men, and turns them to his account. He played this trick in one of the first years that he managed the New York club. The batting of all the players had slumped at the same time. None could hit, and the club was losing game after game as a result, because the easiest pitchers were making the best batters look foolish. One day Bowerman came into the clubhouse with a smile on his face for the first time in a week.

  “Saw a big load of empty barrels this afternoon, boys,” he announced, “and just watch me pickle the pill out there to-day.”

  Right at that point McGraw got an idea, as he frequently does. Bowerman went out that afternoon and made four hits out of a possible five. The next day three or four more of the players came into the park, carrying smiles and the announcement that fortunately they, too, had met a load of empty barrels. They, then all went out and regained their old batting strides, and we won that afternoon for the first time in a week. More saw a load of barrels the next day and started to bat. At last all the members of the team had met the barrels, and men with averages of .119 were threatening to chisel into the three-hundred set. With remarkable regularity the players were meeting loads of empty barrels on their way to the park, and, with remarkable regularity and a great deal of expedition, the pitchers of opposing clubs were being driven to the shower bath.

  “Say,” asked “Billy” Gilbert, the old second baseman, of “Bill” Lauder, formerly the protector of the third corner, one day, “is one of that team of horses sorrel and the other white?”

  “Sure,” answered “Bill.”

  “Sure,” echoed McGraw. “I hired that load of empty barrels by the week to drive around and meet you fellows on the way to the park, and you don’t think I can afford to have them change horses every day, do you?

  Everybody had a good laugh and kept on swatting. McGraw asked for waivers on the load of empty barrels soon afterwards, but his scheme had stopped a batting slump and put the club’s hitters on their feet again. He plays to the little personal qualities and superstitions in the men to get the most out of them. And just seeing those barrels gave them the idea that they were bound to get the base hits, and they got them. Once more, the old confidence, hitched up with ability.

  What manager would have carried a Kansas farmer around the circuit with him besides McGraw? I refer to Charles Victor Faust of Marion, Kansas, the most famous jinx killer of them all. Faust first met the Giants in St. Louis on the next to the last trip the club made West in the season of 1911, when he wandered into the Planter’s Hotel one day, asked for McGraw and announced that a fortune teller of Marion had informed him he would be a great pitcher and that for $5 he could have a full reading. This pitching announcement piqued Charles, and he reached down into his jeans, dug out his last five, and passed it over. The fortune teller informed Faust that all he had to do to get into the headlines of the newspapers and to be a great pitcher was to join the New York Giants. He joined and, after he once joined, it would have taken the McNamaras in their best form to separate him from the said Giants.

  “Charley” came out to the ball park and amused himself warming up. Incidentally, the Giants did not lose a game while he was in the neighborhood. The night the club left for Chicago on that trip, he was down at the Union Station ready to go along.

  “Did you get your contract and transportation?” asked McGraw, as the lanky Kansan appeared.

  “No,” answered “Charley.”

  “Pshaw,” replied McGraw. “I left it for you with the clerk at the hotel. The train leaves in two minutes,” he continued, glancing at his watch. “If you can run the way you say you can, you can make it and be back in time to catch it.”

  It was the last we saw of “Charley” Faust for a time—galloping up the platform in his angular way with that contract and transportation in sight.

  “I’m almost sorry we left him,” remarked McGraw as “Charley” disappeared in the crowd. We played on around the circuit with indifferent luck and got back to New York with the pennant no more than a possibility, and rather a remote one at that. The first day we were in New York “Charley” Faust entered the clubhouse with several inches of dust and mud caked on him, for he had come all the way either by side-door special or blind baggage.

  “I’m here, all right,” he announced quietly, and started to climb into a uniform.

  “I see you are,” answered McGraw.

  “Charley” stuck around for two or three days, and we won. Then McGraw decided he would have to be dropped and ordered the man on the door of the clubhouse to bar this Kansas kid out. Faust broke down and cried that day, and we lost. After that he became a member of the club, and we won game after game until some busy newspaper man obtained a vaudeville engagement for him at a salary of
$100 a week. We lost three games the week he was absent from the grounds, and Faust saw at once he was not doing the right thing by the club, so, with a wave of his hand that would have gone with J. P. Morgan’s income, he passed up some lucrative vaudeville contracts, much to the disgust of the newspaper man, who was cutting the remuneration with him, and settled down to business. The club did not lose a game after that, and it was decided to take Faust West with us on the last and famous trip in 1911. Daily he had been bothering McGraw and Mr. Brush for his contract, for he wanted to pitch. The club paid him some money from time to time to meet his personal expenses.

  The Sunday night the club left for Boston, a vaudeville agent was at the Grand Central Station with a contract offering Faust $100 a week for five weeks, which “Charley” refused in order to stick with the club. It was the greatest trip away from home in the history of baseball. Starting with the pennant almost out of reach, the Giants won eighteen and lost four games. One contest that we dropped in St. Louis was when some of the newspaper correspondents on the trip kidnapped Faust and sat him on the St. Louis bench.

  Another day in St. Louis the game had gone eleven innings, and the Cardinals needed one run to win. They had several incipient scores on the bases and “Rube” Marquard, in the box, was apparently going up in the air. Only one was out. Faust was warming up far in the suburbs when, under orders from McGraw, I ran out and sent him to the bench, for that was the place from which his charm seemed to be the most potent. “Charley” came loping to the bench as fast as his long legs would transport him and St. Louis did n’t score and we won the game. It was as nice a piece of pinch mascoting as I ever saw.

  The first two games that “Charley” really lost were in Chicago. And all through the trip, he reiterated his weird prophecies that “the Giants with Manager McGraw were goin’ ta win.” The players believed in him, and none would have let him go if it had been necessary to support him out of their own pockets. And we did win.

  “Charley,” with his monologue and great good humor, kept the players in high spirits throughout the journey, and the feeling prevailed that we couldn’t lose with him along. He was advertised all over the circuit, and spectators were going to the ball park to see Faust and Wagner. “Charley” admitted that he could fan out Hans because he had learned how to pitch out there in Kansas by correspondence school and had read of “Hans’s” weakness in a book. His one “groove” was massages and manicures. He would go into the barber shop with any member of the team who happened to be getting shaved and take a massage and manicure for the purpose of sociability, as a man takes a drink. He easily was the record holder for the manicure Marathon, hanging up the figures of five in one day in St. Louis. He also liked pie for breakfast, dinner and super, and a small half before retiring.

  But, alas! “Charley” lost in the world’s series. He couldn’t make good. And a jinx killer never comes back. He is gone. And his expansive smile and bump-the-bumps slide are gone with him. That is, McGraw hopes he is gone. But he was a wonder while he had it. And he did a great deal toward giving the players confidence. With him on the bench, they thought they could n’t lose, and they could n’t. It has long been a superstition among ball-players that when a “bug” joins a club, it will win a championship, and the Giants believed it when “Charley” Faust arrived. Did “Charley” Faust win the championship for the Giants?

  Another time-honored superstition among ball-players is that no one must say to a pitcher as he goes to the box for the eighth inning:

  “Come on, now. Only six more men.”

  Or for the ninth:

  “Pitch hard, now. Only three left.”

  Ames says that he lost a game in St. Louis once because McGraw forgot himself and urged him to pitch hard because only three remained to be put out. Those three batters raised the mischief with Ames’s prospects; he was knocked out of the box in that last inning, and we lost the game. That was before the days of the wonder necktie.

  Ames won the third game played in Chicago on the last trip West. Coming into the ninth inning, he had the Cubs beaten, when McGraw began:

  “Come on, ‘Red,’ only—”

  “Nix, Mac,” cut in Ames, “for the love of Mike, be reasonable.”

  And then he won the game. But the chances are that if McGraw had got that “only three more” out, he would have lost, because it would have been working on his strained nerves.

  One Down, 713 to Go

  Damon Runyon

  There is not enough of Hughy High to make one good-sized hero for our story this morning, and so we add to him Luther Cook and thus compile a sufficient subject. Hughy and Luther, bunched together, make something to talk about. They assisted this community in taking a notable decision over the municipality of Boston, Mass., yesterday afternoon.

  The shades of the thirteenth inning were falling fast up at the Polo Grounds, and the Wild Yanks and the Boston Red Sox, champs-presumptive of the Amur-r-r-ick-kin League, as Ban Johnson calls it, were clustered in a tie. The count was three all, with Will Evans, the gesticulator, eagerly scanning the horizon for evidence of nightfall, when Hughy and Luther amalgamated and broke up the pastime, the final tally being 4 to 3 in favor of the grand old Empire State.

  In our own garrulous way we shall now endeavor to tell you just how it happened, omitting only such details as we deem unfit for publication.

  Hughy High, small, but efficient, opened that thirteenth with a single to centre. Walter Pipp struck out, Hughy High stole second. Luther Cook singled over Heine Wagner’s head, just out of Heine Wagner’s reach and mid the mad mumble of the multitude. Hughy High came tumbling in across the h.p. with the winning run. How was that for High?

  Having described the most important incident of the game, we now feel constrained to warn the compositors to clear away all obstructions below, and to either side, so we can run right on down this column, and over into the next, in telling about the goings-on prior to the moment mentioned, beginning with that hour in the ninth when we boys tied ’er up.

  Luther Cook figured in that, too. One was out in the ninth, when George Ruth struck Luther with a pitched baseball. George pitched the baseball left-handed, and by giving it the body-follow-through, he succeeded in raising a tumor on Luther’s shoulder. Cap’n Roger Peckinpaugh subsided without a struggle, while Luther tarried at first, rubbing his wounded torso, and glaring at George Ruth. That made two out, and it looked as this story would have to open with sighs, when Luther Boone—but by all means a separate paragraph for Luther.

  Luther Boone doubled to right, a solid, smacking, soulful double that knocked the bleacherites back on the butt of their spines from the crouch that precedes the rush for the exits, and which scored Luther Cook with the tying tally.

  A moment later Luther Boone went on to third, when George Ruth made a bad throw trying to catch him off second, but Leslie Nunamaker could not bring him in, and the game passed on into extra innings and to the big punch in the story as outlined above.

  Well, it was quite a pastime. Everybody said it was a great game to win. Everybody was so delighted that they almost forgot about Dominick Mullaney, who was cast for the character of the bad guy in this tale. Not that we intend to make Dominick out, because you know the size of Dominick. The day that we blacken the character of Dominick is the day after Dominick leaves town, and gets well beyond the confines of this newspaper’s circulation.

  In the seventh inning, with we ’uns needing a run to tie, Luther Cook singled. Peckinpaugh was duly expunged, and Boon hit the right field wall with a blow which put cook [sic] on third. The ball hopped back off the razor-backed sign in [sic] right into Hooper’s hands, and Hooper threw to first, instead of second, as Boone anticipated.

  Boone had taken “that old turn” after hitting first, in accordance with the advice of all the coachers, and was several feet off the bag when Hoblitzel got the ball. Dominick said he was out, and the ral
ly bogged down right there.

  The crowd discussed Dominick in audible tones on account of that decision, and some thought it might be a good thing to assassinate him at once, but no action was taken on account of Dominick’s size, and the presence of Ban Johnson.

  We have been wondering ever since the season opened why Wild Bill Donovan has been keeping little Jack Warhop warmed up down there in right field, and the reason developed yesterday. It was for the purpose of having Jack pitch this game, and Jack pitched very well indeed while he was pitching, proving the efficacy of warming-up.

  In the eighth inning, Charles Mullen batted for Jack, but nothing came of it, as Mike McNally, the Sox’s new third baser, and the noisiest man in the whole world, next to Baumgartner, the Phil pitcher, made a smashing play on Charley’s drive. Fritz Maisel got an infield hit that inning, stole second, moved to third on Carrigan’s bad throw, and scored on Hartzell’s out.

  Cyrus Pieh finished the game for the Yanks, and this story would be wholly incomplete without an eulogy of Cyrus. Tall, thin and very interesting, Cyrus would have a column all to himself did space permit. He compiled a masterly finish. Pieh had the crust, as you might say, to use a slow curve on some of the sluggers of the Sox, and he made them appear mighty futile and inefficient.

  In the eleventh he gathered up Scott’s slow roller and made a two-base bad chuck to Pipp. Then he fanned McNally. Henricksen, who once broke up a world’s series pastime on Chris Mathewson—long and long ago, that seems—batted for Cyrus Pieh any time he feels that way about it.

  Henricksen singled and Scott took third, Henricksen moving to second on the throw in. Then Cyrus Pieh fanned Ruth and Hooper. How was that for Pieh?