The Original Curse (11 page)

Two days later the Cubs hosted Grover Cleveland Alexander and Liberty Day at Weeghman Park. Alexander was bent on throwing his first no-hitter, but Hornsby got in the way with a hit in the first inning. Still, Aleck was brilliant, allowing two hits and two runs in a 3–2 win, the only home game he’d pitch that year. Chilly, wet weather kept attendance down to 6,000, but those who did show were raucous, storming the field after the final out. “[Alexander] went to the firing line amid a thunder of cheers,”
The Sporting News
reported, “was fairly smothered with flowers and … in a few hours was speeding on his way to join the Army with the plaudits of a cheering multitude ringing in his ears…. No man has made greater sacrifice than Grover Alexander.”
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Alexander’s draft tribulations registered with the rest of his team-mates, especially those who were also Class 1A. The draft hung like a fog, obscuring the future for nearly every player on every team. Killefer, for one, had been Class 4, because he was married and his wife did not work, but he was reclassified when it was found that he owned land and had earned enough as a ballplayer that his wife was not dependent on his present salary. Killefer was now Class 1A, expecting to be drafted. Backup catcher Rowdy Elliott, second baseman Pete Kilduff, and pitcher Harry Weaver could be drafted at any time. Youngsters Turner Barber, Bill McCabe, and Paul Carter also seemed likely to go. The day after Alexander’s debut in St. Louis, the lugubrious Cubs, “spent the day speculating what the team would look like after Uncle Sam gets through drafting men for his big-league
affair on the other side of the ocean. With the prospects of losing Alexander and Killefer, the star battery, along with Rowdy Elliott and Pete Kilduff, and the possibility of losing another man or two, it didn’t look bright for baseball on the north side in Chicago, but it does look bad for the Kaiser.”
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Alexander pitched 26 innings in 1918, and when the Cubs suited up for that year’s World Series he was an ocean away. But in a way he is an emblem for the misfortune—call it a curse—that defined that year’s North Siders. Alexander’s 1918 finale was an indication of how dominant a pitcher he was. But by June, Aleck had been whizzed through basic training (and gotten married), he had earned rank as a sergeant, and his unit, the 342nd Field Artillery of the 89th Division, had crossed the Atlantic.
²²
By the last week of July, he was at the front. He spent seven weeks in the teeth of German attacks, working heavy artillery and facing relentless bombardment.

When he came back to Chicago in 1919, Alexander wasn’t the same pitcher, relying more on finesse than on velocity. He wasn’t the same person either. The war had changed him. He described the incongruousness of being at the front and then on the mound: “For many weeks, we had been under fire in France, where there was nobody to see, no matter what we did. There were no cheers, although we might kill or be killed. And now all the people cheering for me when I stepped out and pitched the ball.”
²³
Exploding artillery rendered him deaf in his left ear. He likely suffered shell shock. In peak condition when he left, he returned subject to epileptic fits and with a serious drinking problem.

Alexander put together one great postwar year, earning the pitching Triple Crown with 27 wins, a 1.91 ERA, and 173 strikeouts for a subpar Cubs team in 1920, but in Chicago he wasn’t the pitcher Weeghman hoped he was buying when he laid out that chunk of his $250,000. Alexander managed to pitch until 1930, when he was 43 years old. His wife, Aimee, with whom he had a stormy but loving relationship, would divorce him twice. He could not hold a job because of his drinking, which became an embarrassing problem for baseball. “Certainly, having the man running loose around the country, drinking, carousing, pawning his belongings at every opportunity,
is not beneficial to the good name of baseball,” NL president Ford Frick wrote to Commissioner Landis in 1935.
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In 1939, unable to hold down a regular job during his time out of baseball, Alexander was inducted into the Hall of Fame. “They gave me a tablet up at the Cooperstown Hall of Fame,” Alexander said, “but I can’t eat any tablet.”
²⁵
The same year, he would get a job as a sideshow, telling baseball stories at a cheap flea circus in Times Square. “It is a sad picture for those inclined to be sentimental over the ex-heroes with which the field of sports is strewn, and all such had better stay away from Hubert’s Museum, Inc., where Old Pete is working these days,” one baseball writer noted.
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Alexander died in 1947, broke.

Cursed fortune found two other Cubs who joined the colors in ’18. Elliott enlisted in the navy in May and would play only one more big-league season. He bounced through minor-league gigs until, on February 12, 1934, at age 43, he (possibly drunk) fell from an apartment window and later died from the injuries. A collection was taken up by friends to keep Elliott, who was penniless, from being buried in a potter’s field.
²⁷

Kilduff joined the navy shortly after Elliott and played three big-league seasons after the war. He was traded to Brooklyn for Lee Magee in 1919, a deal that was cursed for the Cubs in its own way (as we will see). Brooklyn won a pennant with Kilduff at second, but the Dodgers sent him to the Reds. They tried, but failed, to find a taker for Kilduff and shipped him to the Pacific Coast League. Kilduff had agreed to be the manager for Alexandria (Louisiana) in the Cotton States League when, on February 14, 1930, he died on the operating table while having his appendix removed. He was only 36 years old.

Harry Weaver was on the mound, tall and skinny, all elbows and knees. Max settled into his crouch in right field, glove on his knee, absentmindedly scanning the crowd at Weeghman Park. Another weekend date and another bout of bad weather, which had kept the crowd down to about 6,000. Poor Charley Weeghman. The ticket sellers just could not get a break.

But, hey, Max thought, none of us are getting breaks these days. Once spring training was over and the season got under way, Max fell ill, terribly ill. Some kind of flu, but worse than any flu he’d had before. His temperature shot up over 100, for days on end, and his cough was violent.
¹
The bug finally passed, and once Max got his strength together, he was able to get back out on the field, and just in time. Max knew the Cubs had paid a handsome sum—$15,000—to get Turner Barber from the Baltimore club, and Max was afraid that if he stayed out too long, Barber would push him right out of a job.

And then what? Max had some training, as a stove maker, but God help him, he did not want to go back to making stoves. His father had worked at the courthouse back home in Belleville, Illinois, and his brother, Jack, had followed him there. Jack was the janitor, and everyone in the place loved him. He was a tenor, and one thing that could be counted on in the Belleville courthouse was the sound of Jack’s
crooning voice belting out the latest popular numbers.
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Max could hear Jack singing that sweet, sad song he liked so much:

Joan of Arc, they’re calling you,

From each trench, they’re calling you.

Far through the haze comes the sweet Marseillaise.

Can’t you hear it calling, too?

The lyrics were tinged with sad coincidence—the song, about the war in France, was a favorite of Jack’s. And now Jack was preparing to head to war himself. In a few days, he’d leave for Jefferson Barracks. Max could picture it, the employees of the courthouse gathering around, holding a party for his brother, presenting him with a commemorative watch.
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Aleck had gotten a watch. So had Rowdy Elliott. Now Jack. One group that was surely not complaining about the war, Max thought, was the watchmakers. If Pershing gets a million men, that’s a million farewell watches.

Max. Mex. Flack. Flach. They called him Max Flack. Back home, his name was Mex Flach. When Max finally got the chance to play pro baseball, he was so excited for the chance that he didn’t bother to make certain that they got his name right. They could have called him Otto von Bismarck for all he cared. Max remembered his mother sending him a newspaper clipping, from the
Belleville News-Democrat
, saying, “On scorecards and in the newspaper, Mex’s last name will be distorted to read something like, ‘Flack,’ but Mex … has never taken pains to correct it in his two years of professional baseball.”
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And why would he correct them? Max was never quite sure he belonged in baseball, never really felt he was all that good a player. He was not going to complain about a minor mangling of his name. He had snuck in through baseball’s back door and probably never would have been in the big leagues if not for the chance he got with Chicago’s Federal League team in 1914. He hit .314 (fourth in the league) for the Whales in 1915 and was the hero of the season when he knocked a winning double in front of a massive crowd—there were 34,000 on hand, including Mayor Thompson—in the final game of the season, which won the ChiFeds the pennant by one percentage point. But that was the Feds, and honestly, that was not major-league-quality baseball. With the Cubs over the past two years, Max had been somewhat over his head, with averages of .258 and .248.

Max was determined not to go back to Belleville and make stoves, though. His wife, Stella, had just given birth to his first child, Raymond, and Max wanted to provide for his young family. His baseball salary allowed that. He would do anything to provide a good living for them.
Anything
. He had gone to Fred Mitchell and asked him how he could improve, how he could secure his position with the team. Mitchell was blunt, told him he was not much of a hitter, but that if he crouched down more, he could squeeze the pitcher’s strike zone, draw more walks, and get on base more, where he could use his speed to steal bases. Max was just five-foot-seven, which was an advantage. He took Mitchell’s advice to heart, and Mitchell rewarded him by putting him in the leadoff spot.

Now Max pulled his hat hard over his forehead—his wife always joked that the cap made him look like a little boy selling pink sheets. He smiled and then reminded himself to focus. He was in the middle of a game after all. He was surrounded by Cubs rooters. But he was alone, his head crowded. Mex. Max. Flach. Flack. He absentmindedly watched Weaver on the mound. Wait, how many outs? There’s two on. Two out? Top of the third. Who’s up? Al Wickland. Wickland can’t hit. Weaver pitching. Move in. Too late. Wickland popped a fly ball toward Mex.
Focus
. He started late but ran in and had time to position himself under it. And. Off his glove. Mex muffed it. Two runs scored. The Cubs went on to lose the game, 6–4.

Max was usually so sure on fly balls.
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Even without Grover Cleveland Alexander, even in the face of terrible early weather, and even with Flack’s unfortunate muff that lost a game to the Braves, the Cubs had a very good start to 1918. Rather than sulking over the loss of Aleck, the team seemed energized. Starting with the home opener, and including Aleck’s farewell game, the Cubs won nine in a row. Losing Alexander, it turned out, did not crush their pitching staff. Left-hander Jim Vaughn—called, “Hippo” because of his massive figure and awkward gait—had come into his own since joining the Cubs in 1913 and entered 1918 with an 86–54 record over the five previous seasons. Catcher Bill Killefer would go so far as to call Vaughn an equal of Alexander. “I think Vaughn is as great a left hander as Alexander is a right hander, and I do not say that with any intention of boosting Vaughn undeservingly,” Killefer said. “Of course, their styles are different. Alex was a sidearm thrower
and Jim delivers his assortment overhanded. As to the speed and the curves of the two, there is no difference. Vaughn is remarkably fast and has as sharp a breaking curve as Alex. The only shade Alexander has is in control.”
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Lefty Tyler, meanwhile, was not far behind Vaughn. He was a “crossfire” pitcher—he threw from one extreme end of the mound and brought his arm across his body. He had control problems early in his career (he walked 109 batters in 165 innings as a rookie with the Boston Braves) but blossomed when Mitchell became Boston’s pitching coach. He was 17–9 with a 2.02 ERA in 1916, but when Mitchell left to take the Cubs job in 1917, Tyler fell to 14–12. Now that he was again with Mitchell, though, Tyler was back in form. Spitballer Claude Hendrix, too, was thriving. Hendrix had one good season with Pittsburgh, going 24–9 in 1912, and had been a star with Chicago’s Federal League team, posting a record of 29–10 in 1914. But he slipped to 16–15, and it seemed Hendrix just didn’t have big-league stuff—he was 18–28 in ’16 and ’17 combined. Still, Hendrix had good control. With the Cubs’ solid defense and the addition of a smart catcher in Killefer, Hendrix figured to benefit. (Indeed, ’18 proved to be one of Hendrix’s best seasons.)

The Cubs were not winning with just pitching—they were jelling into a very good offensive team, able to win a slugfest as well as a pitchers’ duel. On May 2, they beat the Reds, 12–8, and won again the next day, 9–8, with a thrilling four-run rally in the bottom of the ninth. The offense produced 4.8 runs per game in the first 20 games, impressive for a team that had averaged just 3.5 runs in 1917. When the Cubs won in Pittsburgh, 6–2, on May 9, the
Tribune
noted, “It was one of the strongest offensive games yet played by the new Cubs and rather opened the eyes of local fans who haven’t been accustomed to such rough treatment from Chicago.”
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Flack was solid in the leadoff spot, but it was the hitter behind him—new kid Charley Hollocher—who deserved, and got, credit for the team’s early offensive output. But like Flack, many Cubs simply started better than expected at the plate. Left fielder Les Mann hit .316 in his first 117 at bats. In center, 36-year-old Dode Paskert hit .299. In the spring, some wondered whether first baseman Fred Merkle, though only 29, was washed up. Merkle ended such talk when he came out slugging, and
Tribune
writer James Crusinberry jokingly began calling him “Mr. Muscle Merkle.” By late May, Mr. Muscle was one of the league’s top hitters, batting .351 and ably filling the role of cleanup man. The
Chicago American
said of him, “His fielding improved and his hitting went over the .300 mark and he again looked upon the affairs of life with a cheerful countenance.”
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