The Original Curse (26 page)

“It is now a battle to the death,” the
Chicago American
reported. And there was death—and casualty. On August 4, 285 American casualties were reported, the most in a single day, pushing the total past 15,000. The next day, another gruesome record was set: 716 casualties. And the next day: 965. And the next: 1,104. One soldier wrote, in a letter, “Last night, I witnessed a truly pitiful sight—the burying of our boys. The sight of our comrades being laid away for their final rest, garbed in a U.S. uniform, makes one’s blood run cold.”
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From the time the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, until August 5, 1918—a span of 486 days—a little more than 15,000 American casualties were reported. But in just one week, August 5–12, the total number of casualties swelled to 20,363. Meanwhile, the War Department pushed a bill to expand the army, making all men ages 18–45 draft eligible. Another registration was to be held September 12.

In the United States, another kind of death was lurking on the periphery. On August 14, the
New York Times
reported that officers of a Norwegian liner claimed a virulent illness that had been thriving in Europe—Spanish influenza—had killed four passengers during the ship’s voyage across the Atlantic to New York. One doctor who treated other sick passengers, though, said that the immediate cause of death wasn’t influenza but bronchial pneumonia.
²³
They were both right.

Carl Mays wasn’t particularly well liked before the Yankees settled in to play the Indians at the Polo Grounds on August 16, 1920. After that game, though, he would become one of baseball’s most despised players.

In the fifth inning, Mays—pitching for the Yankees after leaving the Red Sox in a controversial 1919 trade—faced popular Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman. Mays went into his submarine delivery and flung a fastball high and inside. Chapman, according to Mays, froze.
The ball hit Chapman near the left temple, producing a loud thud that caused spectators to gasp and turn away. Chapman’s skull was fractured. He was taken, unconscious, to St. Lawrence Hospital, where doctors attempted surgery. He died early the next morning and remains the only big-league player to be killed by a pitched ball.

Mays, long considered a beanball pitcher by opponents, was immediately reviled. Players on several teams organized a boycott against him, suggesting opponents simply refuse to play when he pitched. The boycott never came to fruition, but the sentiment was clear—no one liked Mays, and the incident would forever stick with him. “The unfortunate death of Ray Chapman is a thing that I do not like to discuss,” he said in the 1920 interview with
Baseball Magazine
. “It is a recollection of the most unpleasant kind which I shall carry with me as long as I live. It is an episode which I shall always regret more than anything that has ever happened to me, and yet I can look into my own conscience and feel absolved from all personal guilt in this affair. The most amazing thing about it was the fact that some people seem to think I did this thing deliberately. If you wish to believe that a man is a premeditated murderer, there is nothing to prevent it. Every man is the master of his own thoughts. I cannot prevent it, however much I may regret it, if people entertain any such idea of me.”
²⁴

There would be more controversy for Mays. According to writer Fred Lieb, Mays may have been involved in a scheme to fix the 1921 World Series. During that series, Lieb was told that Mays had been paid a hefty sum to throw a game to the Giants. Lieb took the story to Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who investigated but could find no evidence against Mays. Still, suspicion lingered, and Yankees owner T. L. Huston later confirmed to Lieb that Mays—and others—had thrown the World Series in ’21 and ’22. This probably helps explain why Miller Huggins, manager of those Yankees teams, said he’d kick Mays if he found him in the gutter.

Despite five 20-win seasons, a 207–126 record, and a career ERA of 2.92, Carl Mays is not in baseball’s Hall of Fame.

It was just after 3:00
P.M
., and the Federal Building in Chicago’s downtown Loop was bustling. As he had for the past 26 years, Edwin Kolkow, a 76-year-old veteran of the Civil War, was working in the general delivery room. Outside, by the building’s Adams Street entry-way, two mail clerks, William O’Meara and William Wheeler, were just leaving after finishing their shifts—O’Meara was a few steps ahead of Wheeler, who had taken extra time to tidy up before he punched out. Up the steps, toward O’Meara and Wheeler, bounded J. B. Ladd, a 22-year-old jackie who served as a messenger for the navy intelligence department in the Edison Building across the street. Down on Adams Street, Ella Miehlke, who had celebrated her 21st birthday the previous night, was stepping off a streetcar with her sister, Emma, heading toward the steps. Just in front of them was the Reverend Joseph E. Phelan of Holy Name Cathedral. Across the street, a horse was hitched to an express wagon, awaiting its driver. Big Bill Haywood, convicted IWW secretary, was on the eighth floor of the Federal Building, dictating to his secretary, while his lawyers were discussing a heated meeting they’d just had with federal attorney Frank Nebeker, who was blocking the appeal of Haywood’s guilty verdict.
¹

Just a few blocks away, suite 1136 of the Congress Hotel was well appointed, thanks to
Chicago American
writer Bill Bailey (that was a stock pen name—Bailey was actually Bill Veeck, future president
of the Chicago Cubs). Bailey had been named host for the mass of press expected in town to cover the World Series, but rail restrictions, plus a general lack of interest, kept the flow of visitors to the press suite down to a trickle. To look busy, Bailey would occasionally rush out of the suite, take a walk around the block, and return, breathing heavily. Most reporters were done for the day—Game 1, scheduled for September 4, had been postponed till the next day because of a steady rain. Other media members were killing time at the hotel bar or were hanging out in the room of National Commission head Garry Herrmann. It was a World Series tradition that Herrmann would bring along a trunkload of fine deli meats. This time, he also brought some rare Patagonia tripe and, of course, liquid refreshment.
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Down at 23rd Street and Michigan Avenue, about two miles south of the Congress, the Red Sox were lingering around the Metropole Hotel. Some had gone to the movies. Some were catching up on war news. Some were playing poker—including pitcher Sam Jones, who cleaned up $44 and declared he was all for another rainout the following day.
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A little farther south of that, at 35th and Shields, a canvas tarp covered the infield at the White Sox park on the South Side. This was to have been the site of the Game 1, but instead there was only a flock of sheep,
⁴
which White Sox owner Charles Comiskey kept at the park to keep the grass well trimmed, lazily grazing in the outfield.

Up in the Loop, the clock in the Federal Building read 3:10 when an agitated man in a tan raincoat holding a cigar box with a string dangling from the side began pacing inside the rotunda. He slid over to the radiator near the Adams Street entry. He dropped the cigar box with a thud and, looking around, kicked it under the radiator. Then he hurried out.

And then. Boom.

The cigar box exploded, filling the rotunda with flames and thick black smoke, ripping an enormous hole in the Federal Building wall. The blast was so powerful that, across the street, workers in the Marquette Building and the Edison Building were thrown from their chairs. The windows of both buildings shattered, and chunks of plate glass rained onto the street below. The wall separating the rotunda from the general delivery room buckled under the force of the blast and came crashing down onto Edwin Kolkow, killing him almost instantly. William O’Meara leapt forward, but just behind him the force of the explosion shattered the bones of William Wheeler, whose
body fell to the ground, lifeless. A chunk of the wall tore into J. B. Ladd, sending him hard to the pavement, as pieces of his blue naval uniform scattered over Adams Street. Father Phelan rushed to his side and asked his name, but Ladd—whose mother was on her way to visit him from Kansas—could not breathe and only mouthed the words. Phelan, kneeling, administered last rites as Ladd died. Ella Miehlke was crushed so badly under a pile of debris that she could be identified only by her watch, which contained a picture of her and the young sailor to whom she was engaged. Across Adams Street, the horse, its flank cut open by a shard of glass, lay dead on its side, still hitched to its post.

Flames and screams filled the rotunda. Outside, broken glass from surrounding buildings continued to fall. Piles of debris and pools of blood littered Adams Street. The wail of fire engines echoed off the buildings. One pedestrian looked at the damage and said flatly, “Someone did a good job.” The crowd outside the building grabbed the man and beat him.

Interest in the 1918 World Series was lacking. The previous year, when the White Sox played the Giants at Comiskey Park, the Series had garnered unprecedented attention—the White Sox had turned away 300,000 requests for reserved tickets, despite the fact that the commission always jacked up ticket prices for the World Series. To get a box seat in Chicago for the 1917 World Series, a fan had to buy tickets to all three games, at $15 total. The Series was so highly anticipated, though, that scalpers were getting $50 for box seats, and fans descending on Chicago from all over the Midwest—and as far away as Florida, Nevada, and California—paid willingly. Bleacher tickets sold on the day of the game were in such demand that hundreds of fans braved cold and rain to stand in line overnight. The three games in Chicago drew more than 90,000 fans, and the receipts for the entire Series topped $425,000.

In the closing days of August 1918, and into September, Cubs business manager Walter Craighead, harboring dreams of a 1917-type rush, reported a steady stream of ticket requests. When it looked like all 17,000 reserved seats would be claimed, Craighead announced that 15,000 tickets would be sold on game day, and he estimated that 30,000 fans would be in attendance for the first game. On the afternoon of September 4, Herrmann predicted the World Series would
generate $25,000 for war charities (the commission had decreed that 10 percent of the receipts would go to charities), which meant Herrmann foresaw the Series bringing in $250,000. But to the veteran writers covering the Series, that seemed like a stretch. Hugh Fullerton noted that “interest is lukewarm in all parts of the city.”
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Sherman Duffy of the
Chicago Daily Journal
reported that, far from being the all-consuming affair that the ’17 Series had been, he’d been given a taste of the general apathy toward this year’s Series when he sat down at a bar with a Cleveland reporter. “The barkeeper … was moved to ask when it started.”
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The mildness of the interest was confirmed on the rainy morning of Game 1. Not only was there no overnight line, but at 6:00
A.M
. just 50 people were waiting for bleacher seats.

Even if fans turned out in good numbers, it was difficult to see how the Series would turn out the $250,000 that Herrmann predicted. Hoping to do a bit of public good, the National Commission decided to give fans a break and charge only regular-season prices. Three-game box seat packages that had gone for $15 in ’17 were sold at $9 in ’18. Grandstand seats were just $1.50, and bleacher tickets could be had for $.50. This would, obviously, cut into the Series gate receipts. That wasn’t too much of a concern for the players, though, because—as they understood it—the new rule governing the division of World Series money, passed the previous winter, set the player shares at $2,000 for the winners and $1,400 for the losers, with the rest of the players’ portion of the income to be divided by the second-, third-, and fourth-place teams in each league. Players did not give a second thought to the notices slid under their hotel room doors before Game 1, reminding them that, per National Commission rules, they were entitled to split 55.5 percent (which included a 10 percent war charity donation) of the gate receipts for the first four games of the Series.

The lack of enthusiasm in Chicago was predictable. Few saw the Red Sox and Cubs as legitimate champions—instead, they were viewed as the two teams fortunate enough to have survived the attrition caused by the draft, enlistments, and shipyard dodgers. The defending champs of each league, the White Sox and Giants, at full strength, would have been likely to repeat in 1918, even if the Red Sox and Cubs had been at full strength too. In New York, gamblers felt strongly enough that the Cubs were illegitimate that many of those who had bet on the Giants to win the pennant “don’t want to pay, have instructed the stakeholders not to pay and there is a merry row
ahead.”
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Paul Shannon of the
Boston Post
wrote, “While never before, since the American League entered Boston, has so weak a team won the league pennant … it must be remembered that this is baseball’s leanest year, that ever-changing conditions forced the adoption of continual experiments in an effort to recruit the waning strength.”
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Though 1918 marked the beginning of the end of Ban Johnson’s dictatorial grip on the American League, he should be credited for foreseeing what a mess the season would become. He was right in suggesting that unless a limited number of players could be granted exemptions (a statement that drew anti-Johnson outrage), the game ought to shut down. In the
Tribune
, I. E. Sanborn wrote, “[Johnson] counseled all winter a shorter season, to end by Labor day at latest, and a general curtailment to meet the coming storm. He was overruled by his narrow visioned club owners. If they had listened the present fiasco would have been avoided.”
⁹
An article in
The Sporting News
echoed that sentiment: “Johnson’s statement at that time—November last—now shows he was far ahead of most of the people connected with baseball in his estimates of what would happen to the game and even his suggestions that the gates not be opened in 1918 do not now seem to have been so far from good judgment.”
¹⁰
There are many worthy criticisms when it comes to Johnson, but his handling of the war is not one of them.