The Original Curse (33 page)

The Cubs got back to Chicago late on the night of September 12, which meant that when they got up the next morning they had just three days to find essential employment or else be subject to immediate induction into the army. Some were already in Class 1A and were simply awaiting the draft call—Killefer, Hollocher, catcher Bob O’Farrell, and utility man Bill McCabe. Killefer, in fact, had been planning a five-day fishing trip after the Series, but when he arrived at Cubs park his draft notice was waiting for him. He would be expected to show up at Camp Custer in Michigan by September 17. Les Mann would return to his job with the YMCA. Merkle and Rollie Zeider claimed they were retiring from baseball and heading to their farms. Hippo Vaughn, too, had a farm in Texas. Chuck Wortman, Nick Carter, Charley Deal, and Charley Pick were slated to work and play ball for steel or shipyard companies. Two players who were scrambling
at the last moment to find essential employment were Max Flack and Phil Douglas. Flack eventually got a job working on road construction, and Douglas found work with Alabama Power in Birmingham.

The Red Sox, too, scattered. Hooper returned to his ranch in California, announcing that he would retire. Fred Thomas returned to the navy. Babe Ruth signed up with a shipyard, while Amos Strunk, Joe Bush, Heinie Wagner, Sam Agnew, and Walt Kinney weighed offers to do likewise. Mays was awaiting his draft call. Sam Jones went to work in an oil field out West. Whiteman found ground aviation work and would never play in the majors again. Wally Schang, Stuffy McInnis, and Everett Scott scrambled for jobs, and according to the
Boston American
, it was likely that Scott, McInnis, and Dave Shean would follow Hooper into retirement.
¹⁹
No one really knew what it was that they were retiring from anyway. “The players went their respective ways firmly convinced that baseball as a trade was a thing of the past,” the
Chicago Daily Journal
reported. “It is a difficult problem, for many of the ball players never have learned any trade or profession save that of ball playing and it leaves them in a rather helpless condition.”
²⁰

In the
Globe
, 34-year-old Eddie Martin—the wittiest of Boston’s beat reporters, successor to sportswriting legend Tim Murnane—wrote an article for the September 13 edition, detailing the post–World Series plans of the Red Sox. It was the last piece of work Martin would publish. He had taken some time off, but his vacation was interrupted when, on October 3, his wife, Delia, became ill with the flu. Then pneumonia. By the next morning, she was coughing violently as her lungs filled with fluid and she struggled to breathe. Martin did not leave her side, though, even as he began to cough and struggle to breathe himself. Delia died that morning, and Ed was taken to a hospital in the afternoon. He responded well to treatment at first but the next day was overwhelmed by pneumonia and died. Ed and Delia Martin were buried together at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, less than two miles from the Spanish flu tent camp on Corey Hill.

By the end of September, Spanish flu outbreaks had been reported in 26 states. One Massachusetts doctor, in late September, described the viciousness of the illness: “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men
die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and still keeping it up.”
²¹

On October 1, estimates had the number of Spanish flu cases in Massachusetts at 75,000, with 800 dead in Boston alone. In Europe, the Allies, reinforced by the Americans, were pushing the Germans farther and farther back. By October 5, Kaiser Wilhelm was sending telegrams to President Wilson asking for peace. Allied victory was finally declared on November 11, but across the country and across the world the Spanish flu continued to ravage whole populations. By the time the pandemic passed in 1919, about 500,000 had died in the United States—10 times the number of Americans killed on the war’s battlefields. Worldwide, the total dead has been estimated at 20 million to 30 million people, making it the single worst pandemic killer in recorded history.
²²

It seemed 1918 would be a breakthrough year for Lefty Tyler. He was only 28, had gone 19–8 in 33 starts, and finished with an ERA of 2.00, a career best and second in the National League behind Hippo Vaughn. But when Tyler reported to spring training the following year, he had developed soreness in his shoulder. He tried to pitch through it, but every time he took the mound his arm suffered. He made his last appearance of the season on June 24, amid fears that Tyler was suffering from neuritis. The Cubs sent him to the Mayo Clinic, where Tyler was “given as thorough an examination as man was ever given. The institute doctors were advised not to spare any expense in diagnosing his case. They did not. They took every test used and known in the establishment, and when they finished they pronounced Tyler a perfect specimen in everything except his teeth, and to them they attributed his trouble.”
²³

The Mayo diagnosis: Tyler’s bum choppers were causing a poisoning of his blood, and he needed to have all his teeth removed except two. Alas, it was no help. His arm trouble continued, and he posted an 11–12 record in 1920. In July 1921, Tyler was 3–2 when—at just 31 years old—the Cubs released him, citing the failure of his shoulder to respond to treatment. Tyler played with the Rochester Red Wings in 1922, after which, he retired.

“What the war, the war department, the players, and the club owners did to professional baseball in this a.d. 1918 was plenty,” wrote I. E. Sanborn on December 29 in the
Tribune
. “For a time it looked as if the sport would be listed officially on the casualty record of the year as, ‘died of wounds,’ but the present verdict seemed to be, ‘wounded, degree undetermined.’”
¹

Baseball was wounded. But not dead. With the armistice in Europe ending the war in November 1918, baseball did return in 1919. So did Harry Hooper and Fred Merkle and Stuffy McInnis—of all the Cubs and Red Sox World Series players who claimed they were retiring, only Rollie Zeider did not come back. Predictions of professional baseball’s demise proved premature. Even with a shortened, 140-game schedule, attendance skyrocketed in 1919, as a record 6.53 million fans went out to see ball games. That off-season, stinging from the losses of 1918, owners conspired to keep the salaries of returning players low, but still, after an entire year of being slammed as slackers and a World Series marred by an ugly haggle over money, 1919 marked the restoration of the big-league ballplayer’s status as a hero in America.

In the eyes of baseball’s overseers, though, the status of players involved in the 1918 World Series remained low. Ban Johnson had, before Game 5, promised Hooper that the National Commission would not retaliate against the players for their World Series strike, but just before Christmas of 1918 members of the Red Sox
received letters from John Heydler—the players would not be given the traditional emblems that were awarded to World Series champions because of, as Heydler wrote, “the disgraceful actions of the ball players during the series.”
²
Heydler was apparently acting without Johnson’s knowledge. In December 1920, George White-man wrote to Johnson about the emblems. The following February, Johnson wrote to Herrmann: “It is still my firm conviction that [Whiteman] should be awarded an emblem.… He is entitled to an emblem and will treasure it because of his only identification with a World’s championship contest.”
³
But Whiteman never would get his emblem. For more than seven decades, Red Sox players petitioned baseball’s commissioners for the emblems, with no luck. It wasn’t until 1993 that major-league baseball finally acknowledged the mistake and gave out 1918 World Series emblems to the heirs of Red Sox players.

But emblems were not going to do Harry Frazee much good either way. The 1918 season had not paid off the way he expected, and it’s likely that the 1919 boom in attendance came too late to help his bottom line. In the summer of ’19, he began what would become a long selling-off of talent to the Yankees, sending Carl Mays (who was boycotting the team) to New York for two players and $40,000. From there the descent of the Red Sox came quickly and hit its nadir with the sale of Babe Ruth. Frazee finally sold the team in 1923.

That made Frazee a bit luckier than Lucky Charley Weeghman. His paltry finances couldn’t even keep him in baseball through the end of the 1918 calendar year. Having sold out his stock to William Wrigley, Weeghman left the team in December. Fred Mitchell took over as president, keeping his role as manager too. Throughout 1918, it had looked like the Cubs and Red Sox—once the war was over—had bright futures, with pennant-winning teams expected to be bolstered by the return of players like Grover Cleveland Alexander for the Cubs and Duffy Lewis and Dutch Leonard for the Red Sox. But those futures were not so bright after all. The Cubs finished third in 1919 and would not win another pennant for 11 years. The Red Sox finished sixth and would not win a pennant until 1946.

And neither team would win a championship until the Red Sox finally broke through in 2004. The Cubs, of course, still had not won a World Series through 2008, which means that after the 1918 World Series the teams combined to play 186 seasons (that’s 86 years for the
Red Sox and 100-and-counting years for the Cubs) without winning it all. This almost impossible reality, as baseball fans know, caused backers of both teams to indulge in the notion that their teams were cursed—that because Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, Boston was doomed to failure for 86 years and that, because the Cubs booted a goat from a 1945 World Series game, the North Siders have been wandering in baseball infamy for all these decades.

But doesn’t the assignment of these disparate curses to the Cubs and Red Sox overlook the obvious?
The two teams played each other in a World Series and fell into inexplicable funks immediately after
. The Red Sox sold Ruth after the 1919 season. But take a look at their ’19 record, with Ruth still in the fold: 66–71, which landed them in sixth place. The Red Sox went from World Series champs to near the bottom of the league in one season. If the franchise was cursed, that curse settled in immediately after the 1918 season, even before the Ruth sale. Heck, baseball even refused to recognize the Red Sox’s win with World Series emblems—the curse, it seems, had settled in by Christmas of ’18. And if it’s the billy goat curse that has kept the Cubs down all these years, how can we explain their failure to win a championship in the years before 1945? The Cubs played 37 championship-free seasons before the billy goat curse was allegedly uttered. There is something unsatisfactory about the timing of both curses. There must be a different curse, an original curse, one that began when the Red Sox and Cubs played against each other for the only time in the 20th century, a curse spawned when the two franchises bought their way to pennants during the worst complete baseball season in history, a curse that not only crippled the two teams on the field but seeped into the lives of the players off the field.

Perhaps the 1918 World Series—which probably should not have been played in the first place—was fixed; perhaps everyone around baseball, including Eddie Cicotte and Harry Grabiner, knew it; and perhaps the 1919 Black Sox were inspired by it. Now
that
would be cause for a curse.

There is an interesting letter, dated May 13, 1924, in the Hall of Fame file of outfielder Les Mann. At the time, Mann was having a contract dispute with Reds owner Garry Herrmann. In the letter, Mann writes, “I have protected your game and my game on three occasions. The last episode, the ‘Douglas case’ was my last and one that proved to me that my mind, being diseased towards base ball professionally was not unwarranted. I have never gambled on the club in cards or other wise. I always was against it and that placed me in wrong on every club. The ‘Douglas case’ was a frame to get me, I really believed.”
⁴

After 1918, Cubs pitchers (from left) Lefty Tyler, Hippo Vaughn, Phil Douglas, and Claude Hendrix would all take strange downward turns. Tyler injured his shoulder, and Vaughn was forced out of baseball, while Douglas and Hendrix got caught up in separate gambling scandals. (C
HICAGO
H
ISTORY
M
USEUM
)

Oh, to have Mann explain what he meant!

It was Mann who turned over the letter that Phil Douglas sent in 1922, the letter in which Douglas promised to quit playing for John McGraw in exchange for “the goods.” That letter got Douglas banned from baseball. History portrays Douglas as a tragic figure, a patsy done in by the evil of alcohol and the even bigger evil of McGraw. This view is pervasive thanks in large part to a sympathetic article that appeared in the
New Yorker
four years after Douglas’s death and an even more sympathetic book,
One Last Round for the Shuffler
, that appeared in 1979. But it doesn’t sound like Mann thought too highly of Douglas—he seems to think Douglas was trying to frame him. But for what? For something involving Mann’s opposition to gambling, which, “placed me in wrong on every club”? And what did Mann
mean by protecting baseball “on three occasions”? One, and what he called the last, was the Douglas situation. What about the other two, which apparently came earlier?