At the Old Ballgame (9 page)

How I Lost the 1915 World Series

Grover Cleveland Alexander

The World Series was a disappointment to me. It was
not so much the result, which went against my team, Philadelphia, but my own individual showing, which was so far from what I hoped it might be. Everyone knows by now that the Boston Red Sox beat us with four victories to our one, but I feel it might have been considerably different if I had lived up to expectation.

I have never yet given alibis and I am not going to begin now. But I would like to explain to my fans and friends why I think I failed in the series.

Let me begin with a day during the last month of the pennant race. It was Labor Day. We opened a crucial series with Brooklyn. The club was right on our heels and our manager Pat Moran and his boys felt, with good reason, that we must come out on the winning side of this encounter. I believe no one on our team even considered that we might not win a single contest. That is, of course, exactly what happened.

I was picked to pitch the opener. Moran depended a great deal upon winning that game. If we won, we'd have that one on ice and we'd be confident besides. It is my own feeling that Moran did not exaggerate the importance of winning that first game. I always feel that a visiting team should put its best foot forward. The home team has obvious advantages, and it is important for a visiting manager to balance those advantages as soon as he possibly can.

Larry Cheney was on the mound for the Brooks. He was lately acquired from the Cubs, and I detected an unusual determination on his part to justify the move that had brought him from Chicago.

Brooklyn scored one run off me in the first inning. After that the game settled down into one of those contests where neither team will budge an inch and the pitcher must work his heart out. Cheney, while wild, as is natural with spitball pitchers, was invincible. We could not make a single hit off him for six innings. In the seventh, he strained himself and was obliged to leave the box. It was then that our boys fell on the opposition and drove in three runs.

We began the eighth with a two-run lead. Moran felt that the game was won. I hoped it was myself when Jake Daubert went out on the first ball pitched. But then something happened. I have never been able to understand it, but in some way I strained my shoulder and the muscles in my back. I have the misfortune of getting a blister on my middle finger from throwing the ball. I remember I had a blister on that finger Labor Day, and it bothered me considerably. The ball player doesn't pay much attention to minor injuries, but try as he will a twirler can hardly get normal results from his pitching hand when his fingers are sore. I know that I unconsciously tried to humor that blistered finger. In doing so I brought the muscles of my shoulder into play in an unusual manner. Pitching a fast ball to the next man up, I strained my shoulder. I immediately felt it, and I couldn't seem to control the ball so well. When I put forth all my strength and tried to get the ball over the plate it would go outside. When I cut down a little on the stuff I was serving up, the Brooklyn batters would hit me.

I remember that I overhear a loud-voiced rooter in the stand when that inning began. The Brooklyn crowd seemed discouraged when we piled up those three runs. This particular rooter yelled out: “Never mind, boys. Go at Alexander. He's human like the rest of us.”

He was certainly right. I felt human enough when they started to pound me around the lot. And I felt extremely human when at the end of that inning they had scored five runs off my delivery and snatched away a game that I had considered as good as won.

It was a bitter blow to Moran—and that Brooklyn series never got any better. We lost all three games. The third defeat ended in an accident to our first-string catcher, Reindeer Bill Killefer. My own thoughts as to the prospects for the pennant were gloomy. I worked my best with Killefer. He understood me and knew how to handle my peculiarities. However, on that score my pessimism was unnecessary. Ed Burns, Killefer's replacement, did a fine job through the closing laps of the pennant race.

I didn't tell Moran that I wrenched my shoulder during the Labor Day game. I knew he had enough on his mind without thinking about me. I was lucky enough to pitch a one-hit game against the Braves that clinched the pennant. That gave me, momentarily, the feeling that the shoulder might not disrupt me through the most important games of my career—the World Series.

It has never been my disposition to worry about things, but if there was one time in my whole life when I wanted to be in best pitching form it was for those World Series games. I would willingly have given my share of the receipts to have been able to pitch my team to a championship of the world. That is my answer to the oft-repeated suggestion that we ball players think only of the money that there is in the game.

The papers, unconsciously no doubt, added to the burden of my position. Many pitchers can work in great form when nothing in particular is at stake but crumple badly in a pinch. I do not believe I have ever faltered when I was asked to carry a heavy load, but it is human nature to feel responsibilities and to be weighted down by them. The papers spoke of Christy Mathewson and what he did in the famous series of 1905 (Matty pitched three shutouts). They said he won the series singlehanded. Some of my friends were good enough to predict equal success for me.

It is a fine thing to have friends who are confident in you, but I may say the responsibility of pitching in the World Series is enough in itself without the added consideration of living up to high expectations.

They said I was nervous in the first game. All right, I was. They hit me pretty hard, but that didn't worry me. There was a time when I used to burn up all my stuff on every ball pitched, but the pitcher grows wiser as he grows older. The fact that Boston was hitting me didn't worry me as long as I was able to keep the hits well scattered. What worried me most was the fact that our boys didn't seem to be able to hit Ernie Shore as much as the Red Sox were hitting me. At that, they only put their hits together in a single inning. They scored one run. However, I must admit in fairness that Shore had very hard luck and the breaks went badly against him. We won, 3–1.

The pitcher knows when he is not right. It is a miserable experience to know you are not at your best when you are facing a pennant winner and the world's championship is at stake.

That thought came to me with overwhelming force in the first contest, and I had to fight against it all through the series. Perhaps I allowed too much for it. As I look back upon the series now, I can criticize myself because at times I was too careful, too exact, too conscious of myself. When I am at my best I can get the ball to break as I want it to, instinctively, with little effort. And I can get my fast ball to sweep across the plate just where I tell it to go. The pitcher can always work best when he has to use the least thought and care. The more he tries to supplement tired muscles or aching joints by mental effort, the more he loses the edge he may have had on the opposition. I tried to foresee every contingency, to guard against every accident, because I was not right. Had I been in my best form, I would have given those things scarcely a second thought. I would have pitched the best I could and trusted the ability of my fielders.

Again, the pitcher in a World Series game has none of the assurance that he may have during the season. In the short series he has to do whatever he is going to do then or never at all. If a slip occurs it is too late to change it. He has one or two, or at the most three chances to deliver, and if he fails it is too late. During the season if he loses a game or two successive games it doesn't matter so much. He feels that he will have time later on to redeem himself and comforts himself with the thought that the best of them can't win all the time.

In my second game, and the game that was destined to be my last, I had hoped I might feel in perfect shape. It was the third game of the series, Boston had taken the second game 2–1.

We got off to an early lead with a run in the third, but Boston came back with a score in the fourth. From the fourth until the ninth Dutch Leonard and I were knotted in a pitcher's duel. I think I was pitching better than I did in the first game, but as fate would have it Leonard was pitching even better.

The crucial point for me came in the last of the ninth. With the potential winning run on base I elected to pitch to Duffy Lewis. My critics contend that I should have elected to pass Lewis, a .291 hitter in the regular season, and pitched instead to Larry Gardner, who had a season's mark in the neighborhood of .250. That thought occurred to me, too, but I decided to pitch to Lewis for several reasons. In the first place, he had been going great guns in the series, and I figured the percentages were bound to catch up with him. Besides, I had faced him in twelve games in a previous All-Star tour, and he had made only two hits off me. On one occasion I had struck him out for four straight times. Furthermore, I estimated Gardner as a far more dangerous man in a pinch.

All my reasons notwithstanding, I was wrong. It was Lewis' hit that won the game. However, had I passed Lewis and Gardner hit me safely, I'm sure these same critics would have leveled the same complaint. The ball player becomes accustomed to the second guess, in which the press writer seems to find a delight.

I have no desire to take anything away from the reputation of Duffy Lewis. He had a wonderful series. But regardless of the results, I still feel that I was right in pitching to him. It may have been the most disastrous decision of my career, but even in defeat my reason compels me to stick by it.

After my loss in the third game, I know our team felt down and out. That depression may very well have made the difference in the score of the fourth game, which Boston won, 2–1. It was Ernie Shore who won that one for Boston. It is an interesting note that he gave us seven hits in this game, which he won, compared to the five hits he gave us in the first game, which he lost.

Behind three games to one, our hopes were all but shattered. A great deal has been written about the fifth game. I was slated to pitch and, in fact, intended to pitch up till the last moment. I never wanted to pitch a game so much in my life. How I would have loved to beat Boston in that fifth game and put us back in the series!

But I knew when I started to warm up that I wasn't right. Once again I had to make a decision. I had to choose between my own instinctive desire to pitch and my knowledge that I was in no condition to properly represent my team. I decided to tell Moran how I felt. I must give him credit for taking this information without any great demonstration of disappointment.

“If you are not right, Alex,” he said, “the rest of us will have to carry it.”

Moran expressed a fine sentiment, but unfortunately it didn't work out so well. It was Mr. Lewis again who was our nemesis. He belted a lusty home run into the bleachers and Harry Hooper put the game on ice with his second home run of the contest. Again, it was a game decided in the ninth inning and Boston won, 5–4.

I do not wish to disparage the work of our pitchers, Jim Mayer and Jeptha Rixey. They did a fine job. Had the fates of the game been kinder in the ninth, they would have gained a deserved victory. But be that as it may, as long as I live I will always wonder how I might have fared had I pitched that fatal fifth game of the '15 series.

I shall always think of this series as a great personal disappointment. I was unable to live up to the expectations of my friends, and I didn't come through for my team. No matter what anyone else may say, I know the reason I lost the 1915 World Series was that I was not in the proper physical condition to give it my best.

The Crab

Gerald Beaumont

Not until the orchestra at 11:30, with a cheery
flourish from the clarinets, launched into a quaint little melody, did the Crab's expression of disapproval change. Then his eyes sought a velvet curtain stretched across one end of the room. The drapery parted to admit a slip of a girl in a pink dress who came gliding down between the tables, slim white arms swaying in rhythm with her song. The Crab, obeying a sentiment he did not try to analyze, eyed her just as he had done every night for a week.

Those at the tables who had been there before nudged newcomers and whispered, “Watch her smile—it's the whole show.”

It was a bright little tune—soothing as a lullaby. She sang the second chorus, looking straight at the Crab:

 

“Smile a-while, and I'll smile too,

What's the good of feeling blue?

Watch my lips—I'll show you how:

That's the way—you're smiling now!”

 

A spotlight from the balcony darted across the room and encompassed the girl and the man to whom she was singing. Amid general laughter and applause, the Crab squirmed, reddened and achieved a sheepish grin.

The singer passed to other tables, the light playing on her yellow hair and accentuating the slimness of her figure.

 

“I'm the Smile Girl, so folks say—

Seems like smiles all come my way.

Want to smile? I'll show you how:

That's the way—you're smiling now.”

 

People continued smiling and humming to the tuneful melody long after she had declined further encores. The Crab stared into the bottom of his empty glass. His face, was still very red. Her fingers had brushed the Crab's sleeve as lightly as a butterfly's wing but he was exalted by the contact.

Coast League fans said of Bill Crowley that if he ever learned to moderate his crabbing, the majors would one day be bidding for the greatest third baseman in history. He was chain lightning on his feet and could hit around .290 in any company. Moreover, he had perfect baseball hands, an arm of steel, and the runner was yet to wear spikes who could scare him into exposing even a corner of the bag if the play was close.

But Bill was a crab by instinct, preference and past performances. He was hard-boiled in the dye of discontent, steeped in irritability—a consistent, chronic, quarrelsome crab, operating apparently with malice aforethought and intent to commit mischief.

Naturally the fans rode him. It is human nature to poke sticks at a crab and turn it over on its back. In time, a crustacean becomes imbued with the idea that it was born to be tormented, hence it moves around with its claws alert for pointed sticks. That was the way with Bill Crowley, third-sacker extraordinary, and kicker plenipotentiary to the court of Brick McGovern, sorrel-topped manager of the Wolves. Looking for trouble, he found it everywhere.

At that, Bill the Crab was not without a certain justification. A third baseman has enough woes without being afflicted with boils on the back of his neck. Such ailments belong by the law of retribution to the outfield. The fact that little pink protuberances appeared every now and then due south from the Crab's collar button, where the afternoon sun could conveniently find them, was further proof that even Providence had joined in the general persecution.

No infielder or outfielder ever threw the ball right to the Crab. It was either too low, or too high, or too late, or on his “meat” hand. There wasn't a scorer on the circuit who knew the definition of a base hit. The only time the umpires were ever on top of the play was when Bill was the runner, and then they had their thumbs in the air before he even hit the dirt.

Under such circumstances there was nothing for the Crab to do but register his emphatic disapproval. This he invariably accomplished by slamming his glove on the ground and advancing on the umpire stiff-legged after the manner of a terrier approaching a strange dog. Had there been hair on the back of his neck, it would have bristled.

The arbiters of the diamond took no chances with the Crab. They waved five fingers at him when he took the first step, and held up both hands when he took the second. If that didn't hold him, they promptly bestowed the Order of the Tin Can by waving the right arm in the general direction of the shower baths. This meant in all a fine of twenty dollars and the familiar line in the sporting extras:

 

CROWLEY THROWN OUT

FOR CRABBING

 

In the last game of the season, the Crab distinguished himself by clouting a home run in the first inning with the bases full, but before the contest was over he was led from the park by two policemen, having planted his cleats on the sensitive toes of Umpire Bull Feeney and thereby precipitated the worst riot of the year.

McGovern, astute pilot of a club which had won two pennants, clung to the Crab in the forlorn hope that time and patience might work one of those miracles of the diamond which are within the memory of most veteran managers.

Had any one told the red-headed campaigner that he would yet live to see the day when the Crab would be a spineless thing of milk and water, pulling away from a runner's spikes, flinching under the taunts of the bleachers, accepting meekly the adverse decisions of the men in blue, he would have grinned tolerantly. The Crab might mellow a little with advancing years, but lose his fighting spirit? Not in this world!

It was in the spring of the following year when the team came straggling into camp for the annual conditioning process, and all but the Crab and one or two others had reported, that the Wolves were subjected to a severe jolt.

Rube Ferguson who had an eye for the dramatic waited until the gang was at morning batting practice. Then he broke the astounding news.

“The Crab's got himself a wife.”

The Wolves laughed.

“
All
right,” said Ferguson, “
all
right—you fellows know it all; I'm a liar. The Crab's been married three months. I stood up with him. What's more, you fellows know the girl.”

He took advantage of the general paralysis that followed this announcement to sneak up to the plate out of turn. He was still in there swinging when they came to life and rushed him. News is news, but a man's turn at bat, especially after an idle winter, is an inalienable right. Rube clung to his club.

“Three more cuts at the old apple,” he bargained, “and I tell you who she is.”

They fell back grumbling. Ferguson's last drive screamed into left field and whacked against the fence. Grinning contentedly he surrendered his bat and took his place at the end of the waiting line.

“Not so bad—I could have gone into third on that baby standing up. Trouble with you fellows is you're growing old. Now I—”

Brick McGovern raised a club menacingly.

“Who'd the Crab marry?”

“Keep your shirt on,” advised Ferguson. “I'm coming to that. It was the blond at Steve's place.”

“Not the Smile Girl?” The quick objection sprang from a dozen lips. “Not the little queen who sings—not the entertainer?”

Ferguson beamed happily. He had his sensation.

“You said it,” he told them. “The Smile Girl is now Mrs. Crab. She married Bill because the whole world was picking on him and it wasn't right. Ain't that a dame for you?

They were inexpressibly shocked. The Smile Girl—daintiest wisp of cheer in the city—married to the Crab—surliest lump of gloom in baseball. The thing seemed incredible and yet—that was just the sort of girl she was—gravitating toward any one who was in distress. They swore in awed undertones.

“What a bonehead play,” sighed Boots Purnell, “what a Joe McGee! Imagine
any
one, let alone the Smile Girl, trying to live with the Crab! Give her an error—oh, give her six!” He made his sorrowful way to the plate, moaning over the appalling blunder.

Rube Ferguson's rich tenor sounded the opening lines of the Smile Girl's own song:

 

“Smiling puts the blues to flight;

Smiling makes each wrong come right—”

 

They joined mechanically in the chorus but they did not smile.

Pee-Wee Patterson, midget second baseman, expressed what was in every one's mind:

“If anyone can tame the Crab, it's Goldilocks—but I'm betting she slips him his release by June. I wonder will he bring her to camp with him?”

The Crab settled this point himself the following day by showing up—alone and unchastened. He invited no questions and they forbore to offer any. He was as truculent and peevish as ever. The food was the bunk; someone had the room that he was entitled to; the bushers were too thick for comfort; the weather was “hell,” and the new trainer didn't know a “charley horse” from a last year's bunion.

“The Crab's going to have a good year,” observed Pee-wee, “twenty bucks says she gives him the gate by the first of June. Who wants it?”

Rube Ferguson whistled thoughtfully.

“If Brick will advance it to me I'll see you,” he hazarded. “Some Janes are bears for punishment and the Crab ain't so worse. He made her quit her job and he staked her to a set of furniture and a flat. My wife says they're stuck on one another.”

Pee-wee snorted. “Flypaper wouldn't stick to Bill after the first ten minutes.” He raised his voice a little in imitation of Bull Feeney addressing the grandstand: “Batt'ries for today's game,” he croaked, “the Smile Girl and the Crab. Bon soir, bye-bye, good night.”

The Rube grinned. “Sure is a rummy battery,” he agreed ruefully, “but the bet stands.” He departed in search of McGovern and a piece of the bankroll.

Those of the Wolves who had not already met the Smile Girl, and they were mostly the rookies, learned to know her in the final days of the training season when the Wolves sought their home grounds for the polishing-up process.

She was enough of a child to want to accompany the Crab to the ball park for even the morning workouts and to say pretty things to each one individually. The Crab accomplished the introductions awkwardly, but it was evident that he was very proud of her and that she was very much in love with him.

“Some guys have all the luck,” lamented Boots Purnell. “If she ever benches the Crab, I'll be the first one to apply for his job.”

At the opening game of the season, the Smile Girl's pink dress and picture hat were conspicuous in the front row of the grandstand just back of third base. Pink for happiness, she always said.

Rube Ferguson confided an important discovery to Brick McGovern and others between innings as they sat in the Wolf dugout.

“The Crab's keeping one eye on the batter and the other on his wife. I don't think he knows there's anybody else in the park. They've got a set of signals. Every time the Crab starts to splutter, she gives him the tip to lay off the rough stuff, and he chokes it back. Pee-wee, you lose!”

The diminutive second-sacker did not reply at once. He was searching wildly for his favorite stick. At length he found it and trotted off for his turn at the plate. He was back shortly, insisting loudly that the “last one was over his head.”

“Now about the Crab,” he confided to Rube, “everything's coming his way, get me? Wait until we hit the road for a while and the hot weather comes and the ace-in-the-hole boys get to working on him, then we'll see.”

The Wolves, always a slow team to round to form because of the many veterans on the roster, trailed along in the second division and swung north in fifth place for their first extended road trip.

Gradually it became apparent to all that Peewee Patterson had called the turn on the Crab. He was plainly settling back into his old surly ways, snarling at the umpires, grumbling over the work of the pitchers, and demanding angrily that McGovern get someone behind the bat who didn't have a broken arm—this of Billy Hopper who could handcuff nine third basemen out of ten.

They were on the road four weeks and the Crab's batting average climbed steadily while his temper grew hourly worse. This was characteristic. He seemed able to vent considerable of his spite on the inoffensive leather. It was the nerves of his teammates that suffered.

“What did I tell you?” demanded Patterson, “now when we hit the home grounds next week—the Crab will get the panning of his life and the Smile Girl will break her heart over it. I tell you I'm calling the play!”

Brick McGovern and Rube Ferguson regarded their comrade-at-arms soberly. They felt that he spoke the truth.

“Well,” commented Rube, “you can't bench a man that's hitting over .300 just to spare his wife's feelings.” And with that understanding, the Crab was retained in the clean-up role.