The Original Curse (9 page)

Miserable travel conditions notwithstanding, there were some positive aspects to the Cubs’ stint in California. Already, it appeared that 21-year-old shortstop Charley Hollocher—who stood just five-foot-seven
and weighed about 150 pounds—would make good. Hollocher showed terrific bat control and plate discipline, nearly impossible to strike out. He was also quick, with good footwork in the field. This was a relief for Mitchell, who worried about his infield.
The Sporting News
wrote, “Too much boosting has been the handicap that many a likely youngster coming up to the majors has found his undoing, but Charley Hollocher, the new shortstop of the Chicago Cubs, gamely faces the barrier and believes he can make the jump, however high the bar has been set…. He is a mite of a fellow physically, but bold with the bat and shifty as a rabbit in the field.”
¹⁷
In the course of spring training alone, the
Daily News
ran two feature stories on Hollocher and his St. Louis background. By the second week in April, James Crusinberry wrote that it was “Little Charley Hollocher, the boy shortstop of the Cubs, upon whom hinges the success or failure for the Chicago team this year.”
¹⁸

Another travel problem struck the Cubs on their way back to Chicago. On April 4, they were late leaving California on their way to Deming, New Mexico, and were delayed further when their train died because the engine ran out of water outside Yuma, Arizona. By the time they finally got to Deming, near the Mexican border, they still had to head about 40 miles north to the copper mine at Santa Rita (a town so small it no longer exists) in cars. The ride took two hours. According to the
Daily News
, “Traveling Secretary John Seys has a few more gray hairs trying to get the club to its destination.”
¹⁹
Once in Santa Rita, the Cubs were slated to play the mining company team, headed by former journeyman pitcher “Sleepy” Bill Burns. Because the Cubs arrived late, they could not get back to Deming and spent the night at the mining companies’ dormitories. It wasn’t all bad. Burns was pleased to be among big-league friends. The Cubs “were given an excellent wild turkey dinner, at which Bill Burns … was the host. Burns killed the birds himself.”
²⁰

Let’s pause to remember exactly who Bill Burns would become—one of the central characters in the World Series scandal that turned the 1919 White Sox into the Black Sox. Burns and his partner, Billy Maharg, helped orchestrate the plot to throw the series and attempted to have the venture backed by gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein. After Rothstein ostensibly turned him down, Burns was approached by Rothstein’s right-hand man, ex-boxer Abe Attell, who promised he’d get Rothstein to finance the fix after all. Burns and the Sox players
proceeded with the scam. When the grand jury began investigating the 1919 World Series, Burns turned state’s evidence.

But here was Burns, 18 months ahead of the Black Sox plot, hosting dinner for one of the favorites to represent the National League in the 1918 World Series. That’s no crime, of course, but there are Burns-related dots that are interesting to connect. In an interview given to
Eight Men Out
author Eliot Asinof, Abe Attell pointed out that Burns was no stranger to fixes. Before Game 3 of the 1919 World Series, Attell said he was visited by Burns, who warned him about Dickie Kerr, that day’s starting pitcher. Kerr was not part of the Black Sox fix. Here’s what Attell (who, it should be noted, had only a loose association with the truth) said Burns advised when it came to betting against Kerr: “I’m an old-time ballplayer and we’ve been behind pitchers and tried to lose a game and he pitched such a good game, the players couldn’t toss it off.”
²¹

Burns himself claimed to have bet heavily against Kerr and lost. Either way, we can assume Burns had been involved in game fixing during his career. And we know he played with several members of the Cubs, including Alexander and Bill Killefer in Philadelphia in 1911. Those two were dubbed “crooked” by Phillies owner William Baker, according to Grabiner’s diary, and were sold because of it. (Maharg, too, had connections here. It appears he was sort of an honorary Phillie. In 1916, at age 35, he played one game for the Phillies and was photographed as the team’s assistant trainer.
²²
) Burns played with Cubs coach Otto Knabe in Philadelphia, too, and according to Grabiner’s diary Knabe was no stranger to baseball gambling either.

All of this is not to say that the Cubs and Burns sat down to plot a throwing of the 1918 World Series then and there, while chomping on drumsticks and white meat. But it’s a lot of dots. Gamblers were never far from players. If some Cubs got a notion to dabble in game fixing, it would not be hard to find those who could make it profitable.

After the interlude with Burns’s turkeys, the Cubs continued their crawl back to the Midwest. Opening Day in St. Louis, on April 16, was the ultimate destination. Each stop was punctuated by games played at war camps before crowds of soldiers in drab uniforms—the “Khaki League” tour. They faced Burns’s Santa Rita team at Camp Cody in Deming, and, before the game, the Cubs watched a group of about 20,000 soldiers perform in a review parade. Then it was off to Houston on April 9, to play the Texas League’s Buffaloes for the
benefit of the Camp Logan soldiers, and to Waco, to play the Navigators at Camp MacArthur. The Cubs were in Dallas on the 11th and began their journey north from there.

As spring training wound down, there was added poignancy to the presence of soldiers. In March, German forces began a major offensive on the Western Front, and, rather quickly, the war turned in the Germans’ favor. Leaders in Britain and France wanted more American troops, and the United States would pluck those troops out of the crowds of boys at the Khaki League games. They could be cheering stars like Alexander now and be headed for the front a week later. And it could work both ways. Stars like Alexander could be in a baseball uniform now and be in a khaki uniform a week later.

Given their geographic proximity to the White Sox, maybe it should not be astonishing that so many Cubs were sucked into the orbit of the 1919 World Series scandal. According to Harry Grabiner’s diary, “Knabe who intended betting on the White Sox was told by catcher Killefer (of Cubs) to lay off as the White Sox had been gotten to. Rumors are that games were thrown during 1919 season by … Hendrix, Killefer, Cubs.”
²³
That means, at least according to rumors of the day, that Killefer and Knabe were aware of the fix. And that Killefer may have been up to no good himself.

Cubs secretary John O. Seys—who had such a rough go of things getting the team to California and back in the spring of 1918—certainly was aware of the fix. In July 1921, he was called to testify about his involvement with bets placed on the 1919 World Series. Seys said he met up with Attell in Cincinnati, and, “He told me he was betting on Cincinnati. That was on the first day of the series. [Gambler] Louis Levi was with Attell. He was betting on [Cincinnati]. As we went down an elevator in one building, Attell bet $600 to $500 Cincinnati would win the first game, the second game and the series. I held the stakes.”
²⁴

Seys’s involvement with Attell and Levi did not affect his career, though. He remained one of the most respected executives in the Cubs organization until his death in 1938.

C
HICAGO
, A
PRIL
26, 1918

Well, that was it, Aleck thought. Maybe he’d be on a mound again at some point, but who knew when? He’d gotten off a train from Elba, Nebraska, just that morning, shown up at the North Side park intent on throwing a no-hit game for the first time in his life, but dammit, that knocker Hornsby got him. Aleck’s right arm was hurling unlike ever before, his speedball jumping, his fadeaway showing great break. But that little sonovabitch Hornsby was a puzzle, standing half a mile from the plate the way he did, and sure enough, Hornsby lammed one of Aleck’s best pitches to the left field wall in the first. So long and farewell, no-hitter.
¹

Still, he’d beaten the Cardinals, 3–2, on a two-hitter on Grover Cleveland Alexander and Liberty Day, which should have been a fine send-off for the Cub bugs. They’d leapt the fence—hundreds of them—onto the North Side park field after the game, practically tailing Aleck all the way to the shower. They were still there when he emerged from the clubhouse, forcing him to take refuge in Charley Weeghman’s office. His first and only start of 1918 in front of the home fans, and the old right arm had given them quite a memory. But Aleck knew how his mind worked. He would spend the entire train ride back home to Elba considering where he could have better
located that pitch to Hornsby, he would spend every idle moment at Camp Funston replaying the sound of Hornsby’s bat smashing his fastball, and if he ever did make it to the front, he’d see Hornsby’s mug on every Hun he took down.

Aleck turned up his collar as he waited to cross LaSalle Street. It was cold and damp. After the game, he’d had time only for a bit of supper before his train left. He didn’t even bother to take his gear out of his locker. It was all still there—shoes, glove, all of it. He wasn’t much of speech giver, but he’d given his teammates a few parting words that he’d come up with on the way to the park. He told them he didn’t know if he’d be back to play ball, but if he didn’t make it back (and he didn’t have to spell out what that would mean), then he’d make those Huns dig a lot of holes before they got him.
²
The boys got a chuckle out of that. It was an odd thing to say because Aleck really could not imagine himself across the ocean shooting at Germans. He supposed it was not much different from shooting birds along the banks of the Loup River back home, except that the duck blind was a trench and you wore combat boots instead of hip waders. That, plus gas attacks. Aleck had done a lot of hunting, but he hadn’t hunted any species of duck that threw chlorine bombs.

Aleck looked down at his watch, his new watch, a gift from the Cubs. Only a month or so earlier he was planning on buying watches for all his fellow Cubs after he and Wrigley had finally worked out his bonus in the room at the Hotel Green in Pasadena. Mitchell had talked him out of the watches, which was a good thing, because now that he was heading into the army and a $30-per-month paycheck,
³
he needed to give his mother all the money he could. And Aimee—Aleck was going to marry Aimee Arrants before he left for France, and $30 wasn’t going to do it. Back in March he had been ready to buy watches for teammates he barely knew, and now he was scrambling to provide for his fiancée. Wrigley and Weeghman, though, said they’d help out. Aleck appreciated that.

What a spring. First Aleck was sky-high in Pasadena, eating fresh oranges on Bill Wrigley’s grove, smacking golf balls around the plushest fairways he’d ever seen, counting his bonus money in his head. Then Wrigley was driving Aleck around southern California, to the country club, over to Douglas Fairbanks’s place to take photos. There he was, old Dode (as Ma and Pa used to call him) from Nebraska, giving a movie star like Doug Fairbanks a nudge and a wink over his Mary Pickford fling.
⁴
Aleck knew married ballplayers who had girls on the sly, but leave it to Doug to have Mary Pickford as his side gal!

Grover Cleveland Alexander wound up spending more time in a khaki uniform than a Cubs uniform in 1918. This photo shows Alexander on his way back to America, in 1919. (N
ATIONAL
B
ASEBALL
H
ALL OF
F
AME
L
IBRARY
, C
OOPERSTOWN
, N.Y.)

And then. George died. March 22. His brother George died, and with Pop dead more than a year now, poor Ma couldn’t be consoled. Aleck thought the Howard County draft board would be swayed by his brother’s death and grant him a draft exemption. But the board was firm—no exemption—and it was off to Camp Funston. Two weeks
earlier he was playing in front of Khaki League soldiers. Now he’d be in khaki himself. From shouldering the willow to shouldering the musket. What a spring.

Things had been so busy, going back to the house in Nebraska, seeing Aimee, then to St. Louis and Cincinnati and Chicago with the Cubs, arranging for Ma’s well-being, taking care of the billiard parlor back home. Aleck hadn’t allowed himself to indulge in comforting thoughts. But now, his baseball season over, his mind wandered. He allowed himself to think that—who knows?—maybe the war would end before he got to the front. Maybe Kaiser Bill would finally give up. Aleck didn’t think himself a coward. But he didn’t think himself a fool either. He really did not want to go to this fight. That was the funny thing about the war. All these men puffing their chests about how much they wanted to get to war and kill Germans, but most of them crossing their fingers for an exemption. Maybe the young ones, with nothing to lose, were excited. But Aleck had plenty to lose. Men were dying over there. Men were being injured and broken. Aleck wanted to stay and comfort Ma, to marry Aimee, to hunt and fish on the banks of the Loup River, forever. And pitch. He wanted to pitch more than anything.