The Original Curse (25 page)

Mays was not a well-liked man, not by teammates who did not appreciate being berated after a bad play in the field and not by opponents who took offense at Mays’s aggressiveness and willingness to
throw inside at batters. But he was not a brute or a drunk or an all-hours carouser, like so many players around him. In a particularly insightful interview he did with
Baseball Magazine
in 1920, Mays revealed—even as he claimed it did not bother him—that he wrestled with the reasons he’d always been widely reviled. “I always have wondered why I have encountered this antipathy from so many people wherever I have been,” he said. “And I have never been able to explain it even to myself, though I have one or two theories on the subject.… I have been told I lack tact, which is probably true. But that is no crime.”
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Popularity aside, Mays was in his prime in 1918, just 26 years old. He was also unique. Mays was a submarine pitcher. He would rear back, drop his hand to his shoe top, and fire the ball up from the ground, his knuckles scraping the dirt. He did not have an overpowering fastball, but he was able to keep his pitches low and force ground balls. His delivery confounded hitters. “Carl slings the pill from his toes, has a weird looking wind-up and in action, looks like a cross between an octopus and a bowler,”
Baseball Magazine
wrote. “He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find, generally, until along about 5 o’clock, when the hitters get accustomed to it—and when the game is about over.”
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Mays had been off to a great start in 1918—he was 17–7 in late July—when the pressures of the season began wearing on him. After losing his third straight start on August 2, to the Indians, who were unexpectedly gaining ground on the Red Sox, it was clear that Mays was struggling. Reporter Burt Whitman wrote, “Carl unquestionably is more or less up in the air over his future path. He has been one of the most eagerly and persistently sought of big league pitchers by [the shipyard teams]. But he did not throw over his team. He said that he would stick through the season, or as long as he could, and that he would wait for the draft to get him, but would not dodge, neither would he duck. He expects to be inducted into the Army at any moment now.”
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By the time Mays took the mound in the second game of a doubleheader on August 10, he had finally broken through and won his previous start. But now, against the Yankees, the hard times were back. Mays gave up just one run in the first five innings, but after getting two out in the sixth, he lost focus and control. He walked a batter. Then he hit two others with pitches. This was not unusual—Mays’s
penchant for throwing inside caused him to finish first in hit batsmen in ’17 and second in 1918. With the bases loaded, the Yankees’ Jack Fournier knocked a Mays pitch for a two-run double, putting the Yankees up, 3–0. They’d win, 4–1, sweeping the doubleheader and knocking Boston’s lead over Cleveland down to two games. Barrow, ticked off, called for a morning practice before the Red Sox’s next game. “Any club that can’t put up a better brand of ball than the Red Sox did this afternoon needs all the practice they can get,” Barrow said. “So I ran the risk of offending our star players by telling them to report for duty Monday morning.”
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Monday didn’t go any better, even though the Red Sox were scheduled to face 30-year-old journeyman Hank Robinson, who hadn’t pitched in the majors since 1915 but was signed by the Yankees as a war fill-in. Robinson did have one thing going for him, though—he was left-handed, and Boston could not beat lefties. Sure enough, he beat the Red Sox, 2–1, with Babe Ruth on the mound. Umpire Billy Evans worked that series and would later comment, “Left handed pitching has made a lot of trouble for the Red Sox this year. With Ruth playing the outfield, it is made up entirely of left handed hitters—Ruth, Strunk and Hooper.… Considerable of the punch of the club is in the outfield, and as left handed pitching is not pleasing to them as right-handers, the club naturally suffers.”
¹⁰

Of course, it was brought to Evans’s attention that, should the Red Sox hold on and win the pennant, they would get a heavy dose of southpaw pitching in the World Series—the Cubs were tops in the NL, anchored by two lefties, Hippo Vaughn and Lefty Tyler. But three weeks after the extension granted by Baker, the World Series was
still
a mystery. There were rumors that Clark Griffith had used his political connections to ensure the War Department would accept the Series, but nothing had been decreed formally. Time was running short. Baseball was planning to run games until Labor Day, September 2, and start the World Series two days later—the logic, according to Griffith, being that players would have 10 days as a grace period to settle their affairs.

But, on August 13, the Red Sox got jolting news. Ruth, Strunk, and catcher Sam Agnew received notices from their draft boards informing them that they were to get useful work after September 1 or be immediately subject to the draft. Thus, if they showed up on September 4 for the opening of the World Series, they could be dragged
off the field and inducted into the army. This was shortly after the expected NL-champion Cubs had been talking about boycotting the World Series. Players wanted assurance—they wanted Baker’s written approval. Baseball was slow to ask for it.

Each day the Cubs and Red Sox put aside the uncertainty and kept playing. The Cubs went on a mid-August run of seven wins in eight games, removing any doubt about their pennant prospects. The Red Sox rallied, too, after the early August sweep by the Yankees. Boston took two of three over the White Sox and knocked some of the air out of the Indians’ pursuit by beating Cleveland twice in three games. Finally, on August 23, word came from Baker’s office: Yes, two teams of players could have till September 15 to play a World Series. The decision came 12 days before the scheduled starting date. The next day the Cubs swept a doubleheader from Brooklyn to clinch the National League pennant and secure their place in the Baker-approved championship.

The whole thing had a farcical quality. Nearly every nation in the civilized world was taking part in the most destructive war in history, basic American rights were being trampled, the economy was in flux, a battle between labor and management was simmering, another battle between radical workers and capitalism itself was raging, domestic terrorism was on the rise, a wave of hypermorality was gaining force, women were fighting for suffrage—but, for baseball, what mattered was whether extra time could be allotted for a cash-orgy World Series. “In one way, the present contention … is amusing,”
The Sporting News
wrote, “and, perhaps, when the war is over and all regain a normal attitude, we can have a good laugh over the commotion that has been caused over such a trivial thing as whether 50 ordinary—very ordinary—day laborers should have been permitted six or eight days of grace in quitting one job and taking up another.… The ridiculousness of the thing should have been pointed out before.”
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Baseball wasn’t very perceptive, though, when it came to perspective. The game kept plowing toward the finish line of a fairly miserable season, and those in baseball made what seemed to be important decisions. But few in the game grasped how insignificant those decisions were when compared with other happenings throughout the world. That was the strangest of realizations—no one really
needed
baseball. No matter what went on with the sport, the rest of the world just kept on going. And so, baseball men wrapped up their business,
as promised, in the waning weeks of August, while elsewhere life just kept happening, news just kept being made:

• One month after a difficult hernia surgery, the Reverend Billy Sunday received tough news—the War Department’s Priorities Committee ruled that his work was not essential and that he should not be given priority when it came to obtaining the materials necessary to build a tabernacle in Providence, Rhode Island, where he was scheduled to hold a revival in September.

• In mid-August, Mayor Big Bill Thompson’s wide-open administration allowed the problem of cabarets and brothels catering to soldiers to become so out of control that Judge Harry Fisher warned aldermen, “Chicago’s police department is in danger of being taken over by the government.”
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• Days later, the World Series schedule was approved by the National Commission. It would start with three games in Chicago, and the rest—four, maximum—at the home of the AL champ. The commission also considered changing World Series payouts to match war conditions. But it declined to act.

• On August 25, Babe Ruth’s father, George Ruth, took a family dispute outside the saloon he owned in Baltimore. He fought with his brother-in-law, who hit George, knocking him down. As the elder Ruth tried to get up—according to the brother-in-law—he fell back down and hit his head on the street. He fractured his skull and died, at age 45. On August 28, Babe Ruth stood by his father’s grave and cried.

• On the same day as George Ruth’s funeral, Cubs secretary Walter Craighead announced that the team had received enough requests for World Series reservations that the Chicago games would be moved south to Comiskey Park, which could hold 32,000 spectators, far more than Weeghman Park.

• Also on the 28th, according to the diary of one soldier, the 89th Division of the American army was training in DeMange, France, preparing to hike for a week to St.-Mihiel.
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There they would prepare for a crucial offensive in the dangerous Argonne Forest. Among the solders of the 89th was Grover Cleveland Alexander, who had earlier sent off a letter to friend and teammate Bill Killefer. “There are a lot of interesting things to write about the war,” Alexander wrote, “but we are not permitted to
say anything and we can’t even tell where we are, but maybe they’ll let me say we can hear the big guns booming on a still night.”
¹⁴

• On August 29, gamblers in New York announced that the Cubs were the World Series favorite, with the
Globe
reporting, “Percy Guard, a Curb betting commissioner, today was offering $10,000 to $9,000 that Chicago wins the World’s Baseball Series. Some small bets were made. Guard states there is plenty of Chicago money, but very little Boston.”
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• On August 30, manager Ed Barrow inserted Carl Mays for the second game of a doubleheader against Philadelphia, even though Mays had just pitched the first game and took an easy complete-game win, 12–1. Mays won the second game too, 4–0. They were his 20th and 21st wins of the year, earning him a $1,500 contract bonus. The next day, the Red Sox wrapped up the pennant, and Mays entered the World Series with renewed confidence. “Carl Mays no longer has the submarine delivery,” Whitman wrote in the
Boston Herald
. “Hereafter, it must be called an all-American, low-range barrage and nothing so suggestive of the Teutonic evil genius as that implied in the word, ‘submarine,’ must be used hereafter in reference to Blond Carl.”
¹⁶

• While Mays was pulling his iron-man feat, a sentencing decision was being handed down in the government’s criminal case against 100 members of the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had been so accommodating throughout the trial of the IWW, doled out onerous punishment to union chief Bill Haywood and 14 of his top deputies—20 years in the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, plus a fine of $20,000 each. Landis sentenced 33 others to 10 years in prison, including Ben Fletcher, the trial’s only black defendant. Afterward, Fletcher employed some gallows humor. “Judge Landis uses poor English,” he said. “His sentences are too long.”
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• On August 31, Dutch Leonard pitched a three-hit shutout for the Fore River shipyard team in the Bethlehem Steel League play-offs. He beat another left-hander, 43-year-old future Hall of Famer Eddie Plank.

• On September 1, writer I. E. Sanborn looked over the rubble of the 1918 baseball season and chose an apt phrase to wrap it up: “Slow curtain.”
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At the end of August, players in both leagues received official letters from their teams: They were fired. All contracts were void after September 2, and all players were, technically, unemployed. Multiyear contracts that extended beyond 1918 were simply torn up. The White Sox received their letters on August 23 in Philadelphia, just after the A’s had gotten theirs. A few players attempted to take their teams to court over the matter, without success. If baseball was played next year—Brooklyn Dodgers management thought baseball in 1919 was so unlikely that they agreed to let the government use Ebbets Field as a storage facility—it would be on much different terms, with lower salaries and, possibly, fewer players. In retrospect, we might think of baseball in the early 20th century as in its adolescence, but in late 1918 the game looked to be in its grave. “Baseball Collapse Due, War or No War,” was a headline in
The Sporting News
.
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Another, in the
Chicago American
, read: “Gate Receipts Ebb, Death of Game Near.”
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But it was difficult to worry about baseball’s death throes when a harsher, more significant kind of death was dominating newspapers—casualty lists that came rolling in from Europe. (As the
Tribune
predicted, newspapers did, indeed, print casualty lists in the same editions as baseball box scores, sometimes side by side.) From April 1918, when American troops got their first real taste of the war, through July, daily casualty lists only occasionally reached the low triple digits. On May 7, American casualties for the entire war passed the 5,000 mark. On June 26, casualties passed 10,000. As of July 31, casualties were 14,331, a modest total for a nation that declared war in 1917. American troops just hadn’t been doing much fighting.

In mid-July, though, the Germans began their fifth (and what would be their final) offensive—this was a continuation of the spring offensives designed to smash the Allied armies before the Americans were truly ready to fight. Those offensives had not been as successful as the Germans had hoped, however. Now, as American units were taking up positions on the front, the Germans tried one more push into France. It was their last hope—the Germans had dug deep into their reserves, drafting young boys and old men to send to the fight.
One French general, anticipating the coming assault, issued a statement to American and French troops, later released to the public. His message was plain. “Each man will have but one thought: Kill until they have had enough of it,” the order said.
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Thanks in large part to the Americans, the fifth German offensive was rebuffed, and the Allies soon began a counteroffensive.