The Original Curse (22 page)

In 1918, suspicions around Chase oozed into plain sight. If Costello’s testimony is to be believed, the failed July 25 fix was not an isolated incident. Magee and Chase were also planning a game-fixing spree during Cincinnati’s August trip to New York and Brooklyn. Everyone seemed to know something was odd about the Reds, but none dared call them crooked. “The Reds … can beat anything in
the whole league if they wish to go in and do their best,”
The Sporting News
wrote. “In every defeat, the Reds looked stronger than their conquerors, and it was infuriating to the fans to see games dubbed away by blunders mixed with pop flies and failure to take advantage of the hits.… They blunder so often and so maddeningly!”
¹⁵

It was especially maddening for manager Christy Mathewson, a legendary pitcher and one of baseball’s best-liked figures. He knew about the game fixing. “We all knew,” Roush would later recall. “But Matty, he wouldn’t do anything about it.”
¹⁶
Matty certainly knew about Chase in 1917. That summer, pitcher Jimmy Ring approached Mathewson and told him that Chase had offered him a bribe to throw a game. Ring turned him down, but when the Reds wound up losing, Chase still paid Ring. After Ring told Mathewson his story, though, the manager did exactly what was expected of him: nothing.

We’ll never know the full extent of gambling that took place in baseball before the 1919 Black Sox, because there was such a culture of silence on the subject among players, among owners, and among managers. But something was different for Mathewson in August 1918, something that made him break with tradition. His job seemed to be in danger—an on-field fight between Magee and Greasy Neale on August 5 in Brooklyn seemed to confirm the feeling that Mathewson had lost control of the team. In addition, Matty had been under pressure all year to go to France with the YMCA to teach soldiers baseball, but he had consistently ducked the issue.

Finally, Mathewson decided to join the army as an officer with the chemical warfare division. He would leave at the end of August, and he’d leave the Reds behind. Mathewson was only 37, so it could have been that he wanted to rescue his reputation before he left and show that the Reds’ problems were not his fault. Or perhaps the prospect of going to war gave him some sort of psychological liberation. But, on August 6, Mathewson did something unusual for a manager—he suspended Chase for “indifferent playing,” a common euphemism for throwing games.

Even without Ring’s accusation, it would have been obvious to any manager that Chase was up to no good. According to
The Sporting News
, “Prince Hal’s fielding lapses, more frequent this year than formerly, have exasperated the other players.… These mishaps have hurt the team’s chances and caused more or less friction between Chase and the pitchers.”
TSN
also pointed out, “In the East recently
things got so bad that opposing players would yell at him, ‘Well, Hal, what are the odds today?’”
¹⁷
Mathewson collected testimony against Chase from Ring, Heinie Groh, Neale, Mike Regan, and Sherry Magee (no relation to Lee). Giants pitcher Pol Perritt testified that Chase had approached him, asking him to throw a game.
That
was bold—attempting to collude with an opposing pitcher on a fix. Giants manager John McGraw confirmed that Perritt told him about the conversation with Chase. McGraw did, however, add that if Chase were exonerated of the charges, McGraw wanted him on the Giants.

When Chase’s case was heard in January 1919, he did beat the charges. NL president John Heydler (who took over after Tener’s resignation) found that, with Mathewson in France and unable to testify, there was insufficient evidence to support Chase’s banishment. Chase was reinstated and signed by McGraw that spring.

Chase was crooked, and his case shows pretty clearly that baseball had a gambling problem in 1918—and well before. Chase is often cited as an inspiration for the Black Sox scandal, because, as the logic goes, players who watched the NL whitewash Chase’s suspension felt safer doing some of their own game fixing. But Chase was not the only gambler in baseball in 1918. He was just the only one who got caught. It’s likely that there were other Hal Chases who managed to stay out of the spotlight. Chase was, like most, driven by the dollar. But he was more willing than most to bend his morals in the name of finances. Shortly before his death, Chase (who always maintained he never bet against his own team) said in an interview with
The Sporting News
:

I wasn’t satisfied with what the club owners paid me. Like others, I had to have a bet on the side and we used to bet with the other team and the gamblers who sat in the boxes. It was easy to get a bet. Sometimes collections were hard to make. Players would pass out IOUs and often be in debt for their entire salaries. That wasn’t a healthy condition. Once the evil started, there was no stopping it and the club owners were not strong enough to cope with the evil.
¹⁸

As Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella wrote in their Hal Chase biography,
The Black Prince of Baseball
, “For all the glamour attached to his profession, Chase never lost sight of the fact that ballplayers were hired help whose contracted pay was as much a brief security
against the day they were jettisoned as it was an acknowledgment of their present usefulness.… For Chase, baseball and money were inseparable.”
¹⁹

With inflation putting unprecedented pressure on the money players did have, and with the sport expected to fall dormant the following season, baseball and money had never seemed so inseparable as they were in 1918. Not just for Hal Chase. For all players.

It was hot at the Polo Grounds. It had been hot all week, hot all summer, hot in every city across the country. The mercury was tapping 91 in New York, which would have been bad enough, but the humidity was awful, worse, even, than anything Charley had felt back home in St. Louis, where they knew something about humidity. The game hadn’t even started, and Charley’s uniform was nearly soaked with sweat. He must have lost 10 pounds in perspiration just walking through the city this afternoon, and a skinny fellow like Charley Hollocher didn’t really have 10 pounds to lose. It was so hot and humid that in midtown Manhattan he had seen lines of men, five deep in spots and winding around whole city blocks, waiting just to get into the bathhouse. He had heard that almost a half million people were on their way to Coney Island’s beaches today.
¹
Charley couldn’t imagine any island able to jam half a million people on the beach alone. There weren’t any islands like that in St. Louis or even in Chicago.

No place was comfortable. The few Cubs who had ventured to sit in the stagnant dugout were crowded around the watercooler. Charley’s other teammates were all back in the clubhouse trying to stay cool. It wasn’t Charley’s place to go and knock the older players out of the watercooler spots, and he didn’t feel comfortable staying in the clubhouse. The game would be starting soon, and Charley had to get his arm warmed up. He was supposed to be out on the field, practicing,
working. But here he was standing around, practically alone, being broiled by the sun.

Still, heat and all, Charley was just where he wanted to be. Playing ball, in the big leagues. That was the good life for a young man, his father had always told him. Ballplayer, a real living. The kind of work other men looked up to. Charley had always felt there was some envy in his father’s tone when he spoke that way, as if he wished he were the ballplayer, as if maybe Charley didn’t appreciate the opportunity as much as he should. Charley could understand. His father—Jacob Hollocher—had grown up on a farm near St. Louis, and from the time he could stand, Jacob was helping his stern German father in the field. When Charley’s father was still just a kid, he left the farm and went to work for his older brother, Joseph, in a dry-goods store in Bonhomme Township. Then Charley’s dad settled into the life insurance game as a young man and, well, he had been at it for more than 20 years now.
²
Life insurance was good, solid work, Jacob would say. But there was no excitement, no pep. When Jacob Hollocher would tell his son he wanted him to be a ballplayer, Charley knew what he was really saying: don’t be an insurance broker.

It was easy advice to follow, because baseball came naturally to Charley. His father would push him to practice, but going all the way back to his days at Central High, it was as if Charley did not need practice. His hitting was something he had worked on, cutting down his swing, making consistent contact, from his first pro games at Keokuk in 1915, right through all 200 games he’d played in the previous year with Portland in the PCL. Charley’s talent was there. It was just that sometimes his brain seemed to interfere. Charley had a tendency to put too much pressure on himself, and when he did that he would bungle and dub. He had done it at Keokuk, had done it in his first stop as a pinch hitter in Portland. But he hadn’t done that here in his first year in the big leagues. He was free and easy in Chicago—so free and easy that the rest of the team, even the older guys like Merkle and Paskert, seemed to take after him.

So his father’s message had sunk in. Charley loved his job. Milton had gotten the message, too, but Charley always knew his little brother was impatient. Milt wanted to play ball, in the big leagues, but he wanted it
immediately
. He had followed Charley to the minors that spring and played 28 games out in Spokane. But Milton pretty quickly got an itch for some real adventure and decided to go to war, even though he was only 19 and not even eligible for the draft. But that was Milt. Impatient. He quit baseball, hurried himself into a marriage, and, just like that, got a new line of work: he signed up with the marines. He had been writing to Charley from Parris Island, telling him about the life and work of a soldier.
³
Charley read the letters with great interest. He had been placed in Class 1A, so, soon enough, he’d give up his job as a ballplayer and become a soldier himself. Probably would not be much different from his job now, anyway. At games throughout the season, it seemed players were always surrounded by soldiers.

From left, Fred Merkle, Rollie Zeider, Charley Hollocher, and Charley Deal stand in front of the Cubs dugout. Though Hollocher was far younger than most of his teammates, he seemed to set a positive tone for the Cubs. (C
HICAGO
H
ISTORY
M
USEUM
)

Charley, leaning on the dugout rail, waved to one of the jackies sitting in a box. “How was the cigar?” Charley asked. The other day, Charley had won a prize from the jackies on hand for Sailors Day. The player who got the first hit, it was announced, won a box of cigars. It was an awkward presentation. Charley had hit an inside-the-park
home run, hustling all the way. He was winded. The last thing anyone would want, panting and sweating under a hot sun, was a batch of cigars, and all the gratitude Charley could muster was a breathless “Thank you.” Besides, Charley didn’t touch tobacco. He didn’t meddle in the stuff other men on the team did—smoking, drinking, chewing tobacco, playing poker and craps, staying out until dawn. So Charley had opened the cigars and passed them out to the sailors in the crowd. He’d gotten a warm ovation for his efforts.
⁴

Now one of the sailors he’d met was back. “Oh, it was a fine cigar,” the jackie said. “You should have at least kept one for yourself. Don’t tell me you never smoke.”

“No, it’s true,” Holly said. “Never smoke. No booze, either. Something about it. I don’t quite know. Things like that give me these strange stomach pains.”

Charley shrugged and patted his stomach, smiling up at the jackie.

July had been a funk for the Cubs. They’d gone 18–14, their worst month of the season. They were tired. They were unsure about the future. They’d lost their momentum. Throughout the month several Cubs who had been performing far above their abilities slumped their way back to more pedestrian numbers. On July 4, Fred Merkle was hitting .347, Dode Paskert was hitting .320, and Leslie Mann was hitting .317. All three were among the National League leaders. Just three weeks later, though, Merkle was down to .310, Paskert was at .296, and Mann fell to .281. Hendrix, after an 11–3 start, went 2–3 in his next five outings. Douglas evened out too—his record dropped from 5–1 to 8–4.

But, through it all, Hollocher never stopped hitting. He hit .376 in April. At the end of May he was at .324. End of June: .310. And while it seemed that every other Cub was free-falling through July, Hollocher actually bumped up his average to .312, among the best in baseball. For the Cubs, this was a pleasant surprise. Hollocher had shown hitting potential in the minor leagues and in spring training, but it was his fine fielding, not his bat, that seemed to secure his future. He had batted just .229 in his first minor-league season, with Keokuk in ’15. He improved to .289 for Rock Island the next year and was at .276 for Portland in ’17. When he reached Chicago, though, he simply seemed
to find hits. He was one of the hardest batters in the league to strike out, and he excelled as the number-two hitter in Chicago’s lineup, behind leadoff man Max Flack.