The Original Curse (28 page)

On that same afternoon, at Weeghman Park on the North Side, Medill McCormick—an Illinois congressman whose family owned the
Tribune
—was giving a speech. Five days later he would face Chicago
mayor William Hale Thompson in the Illinois Republican Party’s senatorial primary election. Unlike Thompson, McCormick was decidedly pro war. “Like the other democracies engaged in the battle for freedom, we face a foreign foe,” he said in his speech, “and like them … we face at home the faint-hearted, the pacifists, the defeatists, the I.W.W. and the Copperheads, the American Bolshevik, who, if they had their own way, would make of America what they have made of Russia.”
²
McCormick’s speech packed the stadium, drawing 20,000 loyal GOPers. (He would win the Senate seat but committed suicide when he wasn’t renominated in 1924.)

As if the paltry gate receipts for Game 1 of the World Series weren’t bad enough, the large crowds that were gathering around Chicago provided yet another round of insult-and-injury for the Cubs and baseball in general. While the teams took batting practice before Game 2, it was clear that, despite pleasant 65-degree temperatures, the crowd was shaping up to be virtually the same as it had been the previous day—and, indeed, it would be 20,040. Baseball’s peak event, its big national showcase, was being outdrawn nearly five to one by a war reenactment. The Cubs had abandoned Weeghman Park for Comiskey’s bigger seating capacity, but, ironically, the North Side field was packed and raucous for a political speech, while the stands for the World Series remained more than one-third empty.

Those who did show up at Comiskey were, at least, livelier from the outset of Game 2. There was no question who would be taking the mound for the Cubs: Lefty Tyler, who figured to be tough on the Red Sox. Boston had struggled with left-handers all season, but it was the crafty, soft-tossing type that really seemed to puzzle them. Vaughn was a left-hander with a great curveball, but he leaned on his fastball, and the Red Sox were better at handling fastballs (though there could be no complaints about how Vaughn pitched in the 1–0 Game 1 loss). Tyler, too, had a pretty good fastball, but his other pitches were his strengths. “Tyler has the ‘soft stuff,’ by that is meant the slow ball, the tantalizing curves, the change of pace,” Bill Bailey wrote. “He has speed, but isn’t compelled to rely on it.… The Red Sox are murder on speed, but they certainly do have their troubles with soft stuff.”
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Tyler had some extra incentive to cop a World Series victory. Though he had been a member of the 1914 champion Boston Braves, he had not gotten a win in the Series, having come out in the 11th inning of Game 3, which the Braves won in the 12th.

Opposing Tyler, fittingly, was “Bullet Joe” Bush, who also had some 1914 World Series demons to exorcise. Bush was with the Philadelphia A’s in ’14 and actually started Game 3 against Tyler in that Series. It was Bush’s own error on a throw to first that lost the game in the 12th inning—Cubs outfielder Les Mann, then with the Braves, scored the winning run from second base. The 1918 season was the best of Bush’s career, as he greatly improved his control and cut down on his walks after the trade out of Philadelphia. He struggled late in the season and finished 15–15. Still, some felt that, with six years of experience behind him (the most on the Red Sox’s young staff), Bush was Barrow’s ace, and he got the Game 2 call. One player who did not get such a call, though, was Ruth. With Tyler on the mound, and with the right-handed Whiteman having fared well in Game 1, Barrow opted to give Whiteman another crack in left field.

Tyler looked nervous in the game’s early going. Harry Hooper led off, and Tyler missed the corner of the plate on three straight pitches before throwing a strike. But Hooper took the next pitch for a ball and went to first base with a walk. Tyler got two strikes on the next batter, Dave Shean, and Hooper called for a hit-and-run. Shean struck out, though, leaving Hooper scurrying toward second base with the strong arm of Cubs catcher Bill Killefer ready to throw him out. So Shean leaned out over the plate after his strikeout to block Killefer. Shean and Killefer tussled, and Killefer’s throw sailed over second base. Hooper was called out because of interference, while Shean and Killefer had some dirty looks for each other. The tone of the game was set. It was going to get physical.

That incident, combined with the goat getting of coaches Heinie Wagner and Otto Knabe that marked Game 1, had everyone agitated. The Red Sox, though, were further aggravated by the events of the second inning. Boston got the first two runners on against Tyler but failed to score. The Cubs, though, got a walk from Fred Merkle, a bunt hit from Charley Pick, and a double from Killefer to score Merkle and give the Cubs a 1–0 lead. Tyler followed Killefer and rocketed a single over second base, scoring Pick and Killefer and staking the Cubs to a three-run lead.

When Wagner trotted to the third-base coaching box between the second and third innings, Knabe apparently let fly with a zinger that finally did get Wagner’s goat. Wagner approached the Cubs dugout, where Knabe suggested they could go under the grandstand to settle
the matter. “Wagner not only went,” the
Chicago Herald Examiner
’s Charles Dryden reported. “He grabbed Otto by the arm and dragged him along through the dugout.” This was an unwise decision for Wagner. Knabe had not played at all that season and, out of shape, was thicker than usual. “A guy might as well try to wrestle a depth bomb,” Dryden cracked.
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The fight took place out of public view, and the details are contested (Wagner would later claim that he was punched by multiple Cubs, who said they merely tried to break up the scuffle), but some of the Red Sox charged across the field to the Cubs dugout. By the time they got there, though, the umpires had taken notice and the fracas had been defused. “Report has it that it was a Cubs’ day all around and that Wagner got only second money in the scrap,” according to
The Sporting News
. “At any rate, he emerged from the dugout with his uniform torn and plastered with mud, indicating he had been the under dog in a rough and tumble.”
⁵
Thereafter, a policeman was stationed outside the dugouts.

Given a lead, Tyler settled in. He allowed a walk to start the third but gave up just one hit in the next four innings. He got into a jam in the eighth after Wally Schang singled off Hollocher’s glove. With one out, Hooper hit a line drive to right field, and Schang took the turn at second base, heading for third. But Flack got there quickly, and, “throwing on a line with deadly accuracy, caught [Schang] far away from the base. It was a disheartening out for Boston.”
⁶
It was typical of Flack, though, who was one of the better right fielders in the National League. The Red Sox rallied anyway, starting the ninth inning by rattling Tyler with back-to-back triples from Amos Strunk and Whiteman (yes, him again). But Tyler got Stuffy McInnis to hit a harmless grounder back to the mound, and Barrow followed with an odd choice—rather than Ruth, he sent pitcher Jean Dubuc, who was one for six at bat all season, to pinch-hit. Barrow was waiting to use Ruth in the pitcher’s spot, but that was two batters away. Sure enough, Dubuc worked Tyler with a series of foul balls but struck out on a very wide curveball. Schang then popped out, while Ruth stood watching from the on-deck circle. The Cubs won, 3–1, and evened the Series.

The Cubs and Red Sox put up just five runs in the first two games of the World Series, and if the trend toward low scoring kept up, managerial decisions were going to be important. Two decisions by Barrow had already played a big role—his decision to use Whiteman in the cleanup spot helped win Game 1, and his decision to hold off on using Ruth as pinch hitter helped lose Game 2. Mitchell, for his part, also had made a big decision, though it had nothing to do with the World Series. He was 40 years old, owned an apple orchard in Stow, Massachusetts, and had a three-year-old daughter with his young wife, Mabel. In less than a week, on September 12, the War Department would expand the draft registration requirement to ages 18 to 45, but
given his status as a father and a farmer, Mitchell was virtually assured of being exempt from war service. Still, he announced after Game 2 that he’d signed up to join the army’s quartermaster corps in Chicago and would take the exam immediately after the World Series.

Cubs manager Fred Mitchell’s diligent adherence to “percentage” baseball put him well ahead of his time. (C
HICAGO
H
ISTORY
M
USEUM
)

But before then, Mitchell had another big decision to make. He had to pick a pitcher for Game 3, and though he played his choice close to the vest, it’s likely he knew what he’d do all along. Most of the “dope artists”—that class of reporter, led by Hugh Fullerton, who analyzed players and statistics scientifically to predict the Series—pegged 20-game winner Claude Hendrix as the Game 3 starter. But Mitchell was different, ahead of his time. Of course, Mitchell could not know this back in September 1918, but, in 2003, a book called
Moneyball
would revolutionize the way fans, media, and executives saw baseball.
Moneyball
described the strict adherence of one team, the Oakland A’s, to well-defined statistical principles applied to all aspects of the game, big and small. Baseball decisions—from scouting and drafting players to deciding when to steal and how to arrange the defense for a specific batter—had mostly been left to the gut feelings and biases of old-timers. But the A’s analyzed all decisions mathematically. This, too, was Mitchell’s approach. His methods were more rudimentary, but still, he was the
Moneyball
manager of his era.

“[Mitchell] has employed a system of percentages in his attack and defense, and indications are he has installed the system well into the mind of each one of his players,” James Crusinberry wrote in the
Tribune
. “There are managers in baseball who play ‘hunches’ and there are others who yield to sentiment and some who play favorites and perhaps some who simply trust to luck or main force, but Fred Mitchell sticks to the system of percentages, no matter what happens.… Mitchell will always know whether the percentages favor success in doing a thing one way or whether they favor his doing it some other way.”
⁷

The percentages were undoubtedly in favor of surprising everyone and bringing back Hippo Vaughn for Game 3, even on one day’s rest, rather than using either of his right-handers. Spitballer Phil Douglas had a good ERA (2.13), but after an 8–2 start, he had lost seven of his most recent nine decisions. Hendrix, at 20–7, had a very good season, leading the league in winning percentage, but Mitchell could see Hendrix’s numbers for what they were: the product of luck. Hendrix’s
2.78 ERA was slightly higher than the league average. He allowed 229 hits in 233 innings, an average of 0.98 hits per inning. The league average was 0.93. Hendrix was just an average pitcher who was lucky enough to play for the team that led the league in runs and won him some games he should have lost. There also was a report that “Claude complained of a sore arm yesterday, and unless the wing had entirely recovered in the just-before-the-battle warmup, Shuffling Phil Douglas was to hurl.”
⁸

Even if his arm was strong, putting Hendrix on the mound meant Barrow would insert the left-handed Ruth in left field, and Mitchell did not need to look at the percentages to know that Boston was much more difficult to handle with Ruth in the batting order. A fatigued ace left-hander—like Vaughn—with no Ruth was a better choice than a well-rested, average right-hander like Hendrix facing a lineup anchored by Ruth. Mitchell might have been overly cautious with Ruth, who had not homered since July and hit just .259 over the last five weeks of the season. But Mitchell had seen batting practice. He was not afraid to announce that he had no intention of messing with the Babe. “A right hander would have had Ruth coming up to hit,” Mitchell said, “and if he got hold of one, good night. He is a wonderful natural ballplayer, and nobody I’ve seen takes the cut at a ball he does. He is liable to knock any kind of pitch anywhere.”
⁹

As the 2:30 start time for Game 3 approached on September 7, temperatures were comfortable, but the sky was overcast. Still, things at Comiskey Park were looking generally brighter. A flock of “dipper girls” strolled the stands collecting donations for the soldiers’ tobacco fund, “to keep our boys in smokes over there.”
¹⁰
The girls likely took in a good amount, because for the first time in the Series the ticket business was brisk. It helped that it was a Saturday, the only weekend game on the World Series schedule—and it was on the schedule only because of the Game 1 postponement. Many questioned why the National Commission did not juggle the schedule to ensure that both a Saturday and a Sunday game, always the biggest draws, could be played in Chicago. (Boston’s blue laws did not permit baseball on Sundays.) It also helped that the Cubs had shown some life and evened the Series, bolstering the enthusiasm of the locals. The 20,040 fans at Game 2 had been a slight improvement on Game 1, but the pool of money generated by that crowd actually
decreased
(the players’
pool was $16,198.38), as fans passed on the more expensive boxes to sit in the cheap seats. But the crowd filing in for Game 3 looked more like a World Series crowd, with 27,054 fans showing up.