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Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside

by Christy Mathewson · English · Gutenberg #33291 · 359,816 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pitching in a Pinch; or, Baseball from the Inside

Author: Christy Mathewson

Author of introduction, etc.: John N. Wheeler


        
Release date: July 30, 2010 [eBook #33291]

Language: English

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PITCHING IN A PINCH




[Illustration: Christy Mathewson

Copyright by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio]




  PITCHING IN A PINCH

  OR BASEBALL FROM THE INSIDE


  BY CHRISTY MATHEWSON


  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
  JOHN N. WHEELER


  ILLUSTRATED


  GROSSET & DUNLAP
  PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

  Made in the United States of America




  COPYRIGHT, 1912
  BY CHRISTOPHER MATHEWSON

  This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers
  G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, NEW YORK AND LONDON

  The Knickerbocker Press, New York




INTRODUCTION


Introducing a reader to Christy Mathewson seems like a superfluous piece
of writing and a waste of white paper. Schoolboys of the last ten years
have been acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty's
pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington, because
George didn't play in the same League.

Perfectly good rational and normal citizens once deserted a reception to
the Governor of the State because Christy Mathewson was going to pitch
against the Chicago club. If the committee on arrangements wanted to make
the hour of the reception earlier, all right, but no one could be expected
to miss seeing Matty in the box against Chance and his Cubs for the sake
of greeting the Governor.

Besides being a national hero, Matty is one of the closest students of
baseball that ever came into the Big League. By players, he has long been
recognized as the greatest pitcher the game has produced. He has been
pitching in the Big Leagues for eleven years and winning games right
along.

His great pitching practically won the world's championship for the Giants
from the Philadelphia Athletics in 1905, and, six years later, he was
responsible for one of the two victories turned in by New York pitchers in
a world's series again with the Athletics.

At certain periods in his baseball career, he has pitched almost every day
after the rest of the staff had fallen down. When the Giants were making
their determined fight for the championship in 1908, the season that the
race was finally decided by a single game with the Cubs, he worked in nine
out of the last fifteen games in an effort to save his club from defeat.
And he won most of them. That has always been the beauty of his
pitching--his ability to win.

Matty was born in Factoryville, Pa., thirty-one years ago, and, after
going to Bucknell College, he began to play ball with the Norfolk club of
the Virginia League, but was soon bought by the New York Giants, where he
has remained ever since and is likely to stay for some time to come, if he
can continue to make himself as welcome as he has been so far. He was
only nineteen when he joined the club and was a headliner from the start.
Always he has been a student and something of a writer, having done
newspaper work from time to time during the big series. He has made a
careful study of the Big League batters. He has kept a sort of baseball
diary of his career, and, frequently, I have heard him relate unwritten
chapters of baseball history filled with the thrilling incidents of his
personal experience.

"Why don't you write a real book of the Big Leaguers?" I asked him one
day.

And he has done it. In this book he is telling the reader of the game as
it is played in the Big Leagues. As a college man, he is able to put his
impressions of the Big Leagues on paper graphically. It's as good as his
pitching and some exciting things have happened in the Big Leagues,
stories that never found their way into the newspapers. Matty has told
them. This is a true tale of Big Leaguers, their habits and their methods
of playing the game, written by one of them.

JOHN N. WHEELER.

NEW YORK, March, 1912.




CONTENTS


                                                              PAGE

     I--THE MOST DANGEROUS BATTERS I HAVE MET                    1

    II--"TAKE HIM OUT!"                                         21

   III--PITCHING IN A PINCH                                     54

    IV--BIG LEAGUE PITCHERS AND THEIR PECULIARITIES             74

     V--PLAYING THE GAME FROM THE BENCH                         93

    VI--COACHING--GOOD AND BAD                                 117

   VII--HONEST AND DISHONEST SIGN STEALING                     140

  VIII--UMPIRES AND CLOSE DECISIONS                            161

    IX--THE GAME THAT COST A PENNANT                           183

     X--WHEN THE TEAMS ARE IN SPRING TRAINING                  206

    XI--JINXES AND WHAT THEY MEAN TO A BALL-PLAYER             230

   XII--BASE RUNNERS AND HOW THEY HELP A PITCHER TO WIN        255

  XIII--NOTABLE INSTANCES WHERE THE "INSIDE" GAME HAS FAILED   381




Pitching in a Pinch




Pitching in a Pinch




I

The Most Dangerous Batters I Have Met

     _How "Joe" Tinker Changed Overnight from a Weakling at the Plate to
     the Worst Batter I Had to Face--"Fred" Clarke of Pittsburg cannot be
     Fooled by a Change of Pace, and "Hans" Wagner's Only "Groove" Is a
     Base on Balls--"Inside" Information on All the Great Batters._


I have often been asked to which batters I have found it hardest to pitch.

It is the general impression among baseball fans that Joseph Faversham
Tinker, the short-stop of the Chicago Cubs, is the worst man that I have
to face in the National League. Few realize that during his first two
years in the big show Joe Tinker looked like a cripple at the plate when I
was pitching. His "groove" was a slow curve over the outside corner, and I
fed him slow curves over that very outside corner with great regularity.
Then suddenly, overnight, he became from my point of view the most
dangerous batter in the League.

Tinker is a clever ball-player, and one day I struck him out three times
in succession with low curves over the outside corner. Instead of getting
disgusted with himself, he began to think and reason. He knew that I was
feeding him that low curve over the outside corner, and he started to look
for an antidote. He had always taken a short, choppy swing at the ball.
When he went to the clubhouse after the game in which he struck out three
times, he was very quiet, so I have been told. He was just putting on his
last sock when he clapped his hand to his leg and exclaimed:

"I've got it."

"Got what?" asked Johnny Evers, who happened to be sitting next to Tinker.

"Got the way to hit Matty, who had me looking as if I came from the home
for the blind out there to-day," answered Joe.

"I should say he did," replied Evers. "But if you've found a way to hit
him, why, I'm from away out in Missouri near the Ozark Mountains."

"Wait till he pitches again," said Tinker by way of conclusion, as he took
his diamond ring from the trainer and left the clubhouse.

It was a four-game series in Chicago, and I had struck Tinker out three
times in the first contest. McGraw decided that I should pitch the last
game as well. Two men were on the bases and two were out when Tinker came
to the bat for the first time in this battle, and the outfielders moved in
closer for him, as he had always been what is known as a "chop" hitter. I
immediately noticed something different about his style as he set himself
at the plate, and then it struck me that he was standing back in the box
and had a long bat. Before this he had always choked his bat short and
stood up close. Now I observed that he had his stick way down by the
handle.

Bresnahan was catching, and he signalled for the regular prescription for
Tinker. With a lot of confidence I handed him that old low curve. He
evidently expected it, for he stepped almost across the plate, and, with
that long bat, drove the ball to right field for two bases over the head
of George Browne, who was playing close up to the infield, scoring both
runs and eventually winning the game.

"I've got your number now, Matty!" he shouted at me as he drew up at
second base.

I admit that he has had it quite frequently since he switched his batting
style. Now the outfielders move back when Tinker comes to the plate, for,
if he connects, he hits "'em far" with that long bat. Ever since the day
he adopted the "pole" he has been a thorn in my side and has broken up
many a game. That old low curve is his favorite now, and he reaches for it
with the same cordiality as is displayed by an actor in reaching for his
pay envelope. The only thing to do is to keep them close and try to
outguess him, but Tinker is a hard man to beat at the game of wits.

Many a heady hitter in the Big League could give the signs to the opposing
pitcher, for he realizes what his weakness is and knows that a twirler is
going to pitch at it. But, try as hard as he will, he cannot often cover
up his "groove," as Tinker did, and so he continues to be easy for the
twirler who can put the ball where he wants it.

Fred Clarke, of Pittsburg, has always been a hard man for me to fool on
account of his batting form. A hitter of his type cannot be deceived by a
change of pace, because he stands up close to the plate, chokes his bat
short, and swings left-handed. When a pitcher cannot deceive a man with a
change of pace, he has to depend on curves. Let me digress briefly to
explain why a change of pace will not make the ball miss Clarke's bat. He
is naturally a left-field hitter, and likes the ball on the outside corner
of the plate. That means he swings at the ball late and makes most of his
drives to left field.

How is a batter fooled by a change of pace? A pitcher gives him a speedy
one and then piles a slow one right on top of it with the same motion. The
batter naturally thinks it is another fast ball and swings too soon--that
is, before the ball gets to him. But when a man like Clarke is at the bat
and a pitcher tries to work a change of pace, what is the result? He
naturally swings late and so hits a fast ball to left field. Then as the
slow one comes up to the plate, he strikes at it, granted he is deceived
by it, timing his swing as he would at a fast ball. If it had been a fast
ball, as he thought, he would have hit it to left field, being naturally a
late swinger. But on a slow one he swings clear around and pulls it to
right field twice as hard as he would have hit it to left field because
he has obtained that much more drive in the longer swing. Therefore, it is
a rule in the profession that no left-handed batter who hits late can be
deceived by a change of pace.

"Rube" Ellis, a left-handed hitter of the St. Louis Club, entered the
League and heard complimentary stories about my pitching. Ellis came up to
bat the first day that I pitched against him wondering if he would get
even a foul. He was new to me and I was looking for his "groove." I gave
him one over the outside corner, and he jabbed it to left field. The next
time, I thought to work the change of pace, and, swinging late, he hauled
the ball around to right field, and it nearly tore Fred Tenny's head off
en route over first base. Five hits out of five times at bat he made off
me that day, and, when he went to the clubhouse, he remarked to his team
mates in this wise:

"So that is the guy who has been burning up this League, huh? We've got
better 'n him in the coast circuit. He's just got the Indian sign on you.
That's all."

I did a little thinking about Ellis's hitting. He used a long bat and held
it down near the end and "poled 'em." He was naturally a left-field
hitter and, therefore, swung late at the ball. I concluded that fast ones
inside would do for Mr. Ellis, and the next time we met he got just those.
He has been getting them ever since and now, when he makes a hit off me,
he holds a celebration.

"Hans" Wagner, of Pittsburg, has always been a hard man for me, but in
that I have had nothing on a lot of other pitchers. He takes a long bat,
stands well back from the plate, and steps into the ball, poling it. He is
what is known in baseball as a free swinger, and there are not many free
swingers these days. This is what ailed the Giants' batting during the
world's series in 1911. They all attempted to become free swingers
overnight and were trying to knock the ball out of the lot, instead of
chopping it.

In the history of baseball there have not been more than fifteen or twenty
free swingers altogether, and they are the real natural hitters of the
game, the men with eyes nice enough and accurate enough to take a long
wallop at the ball. "Dan" Brouthers was one, and so was "Cap" Anson.
Sherwood Magee and "Hans" Wagner are contemporary free swingers. Men of
this type wield a heavy bat as if it were a toothpick and step back and
forth in the box, hitting the ball on any end of the plate. Sometimes it
is almost impossible to pass a man of this sort purposely, for a little
carelessness in getting the ball too close to the plate may result in his
stepping up and hitting it a mile. Pitchers have been searching for
Wagner's "groove" for years, and, if any one of them has located it, he
has his discovery copyrighted, for I never heard of it.

Only one pitcher, that I can recall, always had it on Wagner, and that man
was Arthur Raymond, sometimes called "Bugs." He seemed to upset the German
by his careless manner in the box and by his "kidding" tactics. I have
seen him make Wagner go after bad balls, a thing that "Hans" seldom can be
induced to do by other twirlers.

I remember well the first time I pitched against Wagner. Jack Warner was
catching, and I, young and new in the League, had spent a lot of time with
him, learning the weaknesses of the batters and being coached as to how to
treat them. Wagner loomed up at the bat in a pinch, and I could not
remember what Warner had said about his flaw. I walked out of the box to
confer with the catcher.

"What's his 'groove,' Jack?" I asked him.

"A base on balls," replied Warner, without cracking a smile.

That's always been Wagner's "groove."

There used to be a player on the Boston team named Claude Ritchey who "had
it on me" for some reason or other. He was a left-handed hitter and
naturally drove the ball to left field, so that I could not fool him with
a change of pace. He was always able to outguess me in a pinch and seemed
to know by intuition what was coming.

There has been for a long time an ardent follower of the Giants named Mrs.
Wilson, who raves wildly at a game, and is broken-hearted when the team
loses. The Giants were playing in Boston one day, and needed the game very
badly. It was back in 1905, at the time the club could cinch the pennant
by winning one contest, and the flag-assuring game is the hardest one to
win. Two men got on the bases in the ninth inning with the score tied and
no one out. The crowd was stamping its feet and hooting madly, trying to
rattle me. I heard Mrs. Wilson shrill loudly above the noise:

"Stick with them, Matty!"

Ritchey came up to the bat, and I passed him purposely, trying to get him
to strike at a bad ball. I wouldn't take a chance on letting him hit at a
good one. Mrs. Wilson thought I was losing my control, and unable to stand
it any longer she got up and walked out of the grounds. Then I fanned the
next two batters, and the last man hit a roller to Devlin and was thrown
out at first base. I was told afterwards that Mrs. Wilson stood outside
the ground, waiting to hear the crowd cheer, which would have told her it
was all over.

She lingered at the gate until the fourteenth inning, fearing to return
because she expected to see us routed. At last she heard a groan from the
home crowd when we won in the fourteenth. Still she would not believe that
I had weathered the storm and won the game that gave the Giants a pennant,
but waited to be assured by some of the spectators leaving the grounds
before she came around to congratulate us.

All batters who are good waiters, and will not hit at bad balls, are hard
to deceive, because it means a twirler has to lay the ball over, and then
the hitter always has the better chance. A pitcher will try to get a man
to hit at a bad ball before he will put it near the plate.

Many persons have asked me why I do not use my "fade-away" oftener when it
is so effective, and the only answer is that every time I throw the
"fade-away" it takes so much out of my arm. It is a very hard ball to
deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times in a game kills my arm, so I save
it for the pinches.

Many fans do not know what this ball really is. It is a slow curve pitched
with the motion of a fast ball. But most curve balls break away from a
right-handed batter a little. The fade-away breaks toward him.

Baker, of the Athletics, is one of the most dangerous hitters I have ever
faced, and we were not warned to look out for him before the 1911 world's
series, either. Certain friends of the Giants gave us some "inside"
information on the Athletics' hitters. Among others, the Cubs supplied us
with good tips, but no one spread the Baker alarm. I was told to watch out
for Collins as a dangerous man, one who was likely to break up a game any
time with a long drive.

I consider Baker one of the hardest, cleanest hitters I have ever faced,
and he drives the ball on a line to any field. The fielders cannot play
for him. He did not show up well in the first game of the world's series
because the Athletics thought they were getting our signs, and we crossed
Baker with two men on the bases in the third inning. He lost a chance to
be a hero right there.

The roughest deal that I got from Baker in the 1911 series was in the
third game, which was the second in New York. We had made one run and the
ninth inning rolled around with the Giants still leading, 1 to 0. The
first man at the bat grounded out and then Baker came up. I realized by
this time that he was a hard proposition, but figured that he could not
hit a low curve over the outside corner, as he is naturally a right-field
hitter. I got one ball and one strike on him and then delivered a ball
that was aimed to be a low curve over the outside corner. Baker refused to
swing at it, and Brennan, the umpire, called it a ball.

I thought that it caught the outside corner of the plate, and that Brennan
missed the strike. It put me in the hole with the count two balls and one
strike, and I had to lay the next one over very near the middle to keep
the count from being three and one. I pitched a curve ball that was meant
for the outside corner, but cut the plate better than I intended. Baker
stepped up into it and smashed it into the grand-stand in right field for
a home run, and there is the history of that famous wallop. This tied the
score.

A pitcher has two types of batters to face. One is the man who is always
thinking and guessing and waiting, trying to get the pitcher in the hole.
Evers, of the Cubs, is that sort. They tell me that "Ty" Cobb of Detroit
is the most highly developed of this type of hitter. I have never seen him
play. Then the other kind is the natural slugger, who does not wait for
anything, and who could not outguess a pitcher if he did. The brainy man
is the harder for a pitcher to face because he is a constant source of
worry.

There are two ways of fooling a batter. One is literally to "mix 'em up,"
and the other is to keep feeding him the same sort of a ball, but to
induce him to think that something else is coming. When a brainy man is at
the bat, he is always trying to figure out what to expect. If he knows,
then his chances of getting a hit are greatly increased. For instance, if
a batter has two balls and two strikes on him, he naturally concludes that
the pitcher will throw him a curve ball, and prepares for it. Big League
ball-players recognize only two kinds of pitched balls--the curve and the
straight one.

When a catcher in the Big League signals for a curved ball, he means a
drop, and, after handling a certain pitcher for a time, he gets to know
just how much the ball is going to curve. That is why the one catcher
receives for the same pitcher so regularly, because they get to work
together harmoniously. "Chief" Meyers, the big Indian catcher on the
Giants, understands my style so well that in some games he hardly has to
give a sign. But, oddly enough, he could never catch Raymond because he
did not like to handle the spit ball, a hard delivery to receive, and
Raymond and he could not get along together as a battery. They would cross
each other. But Arthur Wilson caught Raymond almost perfectly. This
explains the loss of effectiveness of many pitchers when a certain catcher
is laid up or out of the game.

"Cy" Seymour, formerly the outfielder of the Giants, was one of the
hardest batters I ever had to pitch against when he was with the
Cincinnati club and going at the top of his stride. He liked a curved
ball, and could hit it hard and far, and was always waiting for it. He was
very clever at out-guessing a pitcher and being able to conclude what was
coming. For a long time whenever I pitched against him I had "mixed 'em
up" literally, handing him first a fast ball and then a slow curve and so
on, trying to fool him in this way. But one day we were playing in
Cincinnati, and I decided to keep delivering the same kind of a ball, that
old fast one around his neck, and to try to induce him to believe that a
curve was coming. I pitched him nothing but fast ones that day, and he was
always waiting for a curve. The result was that I had him in the hole all
the time, and I struck him out three times. He has never gotten over it.
Only recently I saw Seymour, and he said:

"Matty, you are the only man that ever struck me out three times in the
same game."

He soon guessed, however, that I was not really mixing them up, and then I
had to switch my style again for him.

Some pitchers talk to batters a great deal, hoping to get their minds off
the game in this way, and thus be able to sneak strikes over. But I find
that talking to a batter disconcerts me almost as much as it does him, and
I seldom do it. Repartee is not my line anyway.

Bender talked to the Giant players all through that first game in the 1911
world's series, the one in which he wore the smile, probably because he
was a pitcher old in the game and several of the younger men on the New
York team acted as if they were nervous. Snodgrass and the Indian kept up
a running fire of small talk every time that the Giants' centre-fielder
came to the plate.

Snodgrass got hit by pitched balls twice, and this seemed to worry Bender.
When the New York centre-fielder came to the bat in the eighth inning, the
Indian showed his even teeth in the chronic grin and greeted Snodgrass in
this way:

"Look out, Freddie, you don't get hit this time."

Then Bender wound up and with all his speed drove the ball straight at
Snodgrass's head, and Bender had more speed in that first game than I ever
saw him use before. Snodgrass dodged, and the ball drove into Thomas's
glove. This pitching the first ball at the head of a batter is an old
trick of pitchers when they think a player intends to get hit purposely or
that he is crowding the plate.

"If you can't push 'em over better than that," retorted Snodgrass, "I
won't need to get hit. Let's see your fast one now."

"Try this one," suggested Bender, as he pitched another fast one that cut
the heart of the plate. Snodgrass swung and hit nothing but the air. The
old atmosphere was very much mauled by bats in that game anyway.

"You missed that one a mile, Freddie," chuckled the Indian, with his grin.

Snodgrass eventually struck out and then Bender broke into a laugh.

"You ain't a batter, Freddie," exclaimed the Indian, as he walked to the
bench. "You're a backstop. You can never get anywhere without being hit."

If a pitcher is going to talk to a batter, he must size up his man. An
irritable, nervous young player often will fall for the conversation, but
most seasoned hitters will not answer back. The Athletics, other than
Bender, will not talk in a game. We tried to get after them in the first
contest in 1911, and we could not get a rise out of one of them, except
when Snodgrass spiked Baker, and I want to say right here that this much
discussed incident was accidental. Baker was blocking Snodgrass out, and
the New York player had a perfect right to the base line.

Sherwood Magee of the Philadelphia National League team is one of the
hardest batters that I ever have had to face, because he has a great eye,
and is of the type of free swingers who take a mad wallop at the ball, and
are always liable to break up a game with a long drive. Just once I talked
to him when he was at the bat, more because we were both worked up than
for any other reason, and he came out second best. It was while the Giants
were playing at American League Park in 1911 after the old Polo Grounds
had burned. Welchonce, who was the centre-fielder for the Phillies at the
time, hit a slow one down the first base line, and I ran over to field the
ball. I picked it up as the runner arrived and had no time to straighten
up to dodge him. So I struck out my shoulder and he ran into it. There was
no other way to make the play, but I guess it looked bad from the stand,
because Welchonce fell down.

Magee came up to bat next, threw his hat on the ground, and started to
call me names. He is bad when irritated--and tolerably easy to irritate,
as shown by the way in which he knocked down Finnegan, the umpire, last
season because their ideas on a strike differed slightly. I replied on
that occasion, but remembered to keep the ball away from the centre of the
plate. That is about all I did do, but he was more wrought up than I and
hit only a slow grounder to the infield. He was out by several feet. He
took a wild slide at the bag, however, feet first, in what looked like an
attempt to spike Merkle. We talked some more after that, but it has all
been forgotten now.

To be a successful pitcher in the Big League, a man must have the head and
the arm. When I first joined the Giants, I had what is known as the "old
round-house curve," which is no more than a big, slow outdrop. I had been
fooling them in the minor leagues with it, and I was somewhat chagrined
when George Davis, then the manager of the club, came to me and told me to
forget the curve, as it would be of no use. It was then that I began to
develop my drop ball.

A pitcher must watch all the time for any little unconscious motion before
he delivers the ball. If a base runner can guess just when he is going to
pitch, he can get a much better start. Drucke used to have a little motion
with his foot just before he pitched, of which he himself was entirely
unconscious, but the other clubs got on to it and stole bases on him
wildly. McGraw has since broken him of it.

The Athletics say that I make a motion peculiar to the fade-away. Some
spit-ball pitchers announce when they are going to throw a moist one by
looking at the ball as they dampen it. At other times, when they "stall,"
they do not look at the ball. The Big League batter is watching for all
these little things and, if a pitcher is not careful, he will find a lot
of men who are hard to pitch to. There are plenty anyway, and, as a man
grows older, this number increases season by season.




II

"Take Him Out"

     _Many a Pitcher's Heart has been Broken by the Cry from the Stands,
     "Take Him Out"--Russell Ford of the New York Yankees was Once Beaten
     by a Few Foolish Words Whispered into the Batter's Ear at a Critical
     Moment--Why "Rube" Marquard Failed for Two Years to be a Big
     Leaguer--The Art of Breaking a Pitcher into Fast Company._


A pitcher is in a tight game, and the batter makes a hit. Another follows
and some fan back in the stand cries in stentorian tones:

"Take him out!"

It is the dirge of baseball which has broken the hearts of pitchers ever
since the game began and will continue to do so as long as it lives.
Another fan takes up the shout, and another, and another, until it is a
chorus.

"Take him out! Take him out! Take him out!"

The pitcher has to grin, but that constant cry is wearing on nerves strung
to the breaking point. The crowd is against him, and the next batter hits,
and a run scores. The manager stops the game, beckons to the pitcher from
the bench, and he has to walk away from the box, facing the crowd--not the
team--which has beaten him. It is the psychology of baseball.

Some foolish words once whispered into the ear of a batter by a clever
manager in the crisis of one of the closest games ever played in baseball
turned the tide and unbalanced a pitcher who had been working like a
perfectly adjusted machine through seven terrific innings. That is also
the "psychology of pitching." The man wasn't beaten because he weakened,
because he lost his grip, because of any physical deficiency, but because
some foolish words--words that meant nothing, had nothing to do with the
game--had upset his mental attitude.

The game was the first one played between the Giants and the Yankees in
the post-season series of 1910, the batter was Bridwell, the manager was
John McGraw, and the pitcher, Russell Ford of the Yankees. The cast of
characters having been named, the story may now enter the block.

Spectators who recall the game will remember that the two clubs had been
battling through the early innings with neither team able to gain an
advantage, and the Giants came to bat for the eighth inning with the score
a tie. Ford was pitching perfectly with all the art of a master craftsman.
Each team had made one run. I was the first man up and started the eighth
inning with a single because Ford slackened up a little against me,
thinking that I was not dangerous. Devore beat out an infield hit, and
Doyle bunted and was safe, filling the bases. Then Ford went to work. He
struck out Snodgrass, and Hemphill caught Murray's fly far too near the
infield to permit me to try to score. It looked as if Ford were going to
get out of the hole when "Al" Bridwell, the former Giant shortstop, came
to the bat. Ford threw him two bad balls, and then McGraw ran out from the
bench, and, with an autocratic finger, held up the game while he whispered
into Bridwell's ear.

"Al" nodded knowingly, and the whole thing was a pantomime, a wordless
play, that made _Sumurun_ look like a bush-league production. Bridwell
stepped back into the batter's box, and McGraw returned to the bench. On
the next pitch, "Al" was hit in the leg and went to first base, forcing
the run that broke the tie across the plate. That run also broke Ford's
heart. And here is what McGraw whispered into the attentive ear of
Bridwell:

"How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al?"

John McGraw, the psychologist, baseball general and manager, had heard
opportunity knock. With his fingers on the pulse of the game, he had felt
the tenseness of the situation, and realized, all in the flash of an eye,
that Ford was wabbling and that anything would push him over. He stopped
the game and whispered into Bridwell's ear while Ford was feeling more and
more the intensity of the crisis. He had an opportunity to observe the
three men on the bases. He wondered what McGraw was whispering, what trick
was to be expected. Was he telling the batter to get hit? Yes, he must be.
Then he did just that--hit the batter, and lost the game.

Why can certain pitchers always beat certain clubs and why do they look
like bush leaguers against others? To be concrete, why can Brooklyn fight
Chicago so hard and look foolish playing against the Giants? Why can the
Yankees take game after game from Detroit and be easy picking for the
Cleveland club in most of their games? Why does Boston beat Marquard when
he can make the hard Philadelphia hitters look like blind men with bats in
their hands? Why could I beat Cincinnati game after game for two years
when the club was filled with hard hitters? It is the psychology of
baseball, the mental attitudes of the players, some intangible thing that
works on the mind. Managers are learning to use this subtle, indescribable
element which is such a factor.

The great question which confronts every Big League manager is how to
break a valuable young pitcher into the game. "Rube" Marquard came to the
Giants in the fall of 1908 out of the American Association heralded as a
world-beater, with a reputation that shimmered and shone. The newspapers
were crowded with stories of the man for whom McGraw had paid $11,000, who
had been standing them on their heads in the West, who had curves that
couldn't be touched, and was a bargain at the unheard-of price paid for
him.

"Rube" Marquard came to the Giants in a burst of glory and publicity when
the club was fighting for the pennant. McGraw was up against it for
pitchers at that time, and one win, turned in by a young pitcher, might
have resulted in the Giants winning the pennant as the season ended.

"Don't you think Marquard would win? Can't you put him in?" Mr. Brush, the
owner of the club, asked McGraw one day when he was discussing the
pitching situation with the manager.

"I don't know," answered McGraw. "If he wins his first time out in the Big
Leagues, he will be a world-beater, and, if he loses, it may cost us a
good pitcher." But Mr. Brush was insistent. Here a big price had been paid
for a pitcher with a record, and pitchers were what the club needed. The
newspapers declared that the fans should get a look at this "$11,000
beauty" in action. A double header was scheduled to be played with the
Cincinnati club in the month of September, in 1908, and the pitching staff
was gone. McGraw glanced over his collection of crippled and worked-out
twirlers. Then he saw "Rube" Marquard, big and fresh.

"Go in and pitch," he ordered after Marquard had warmed up.

McGraw always does things that way, makes up his mind about the most
important matters in a minute and then stands by his judgment. Marquard
went into the box, but he didn't pitch much. He has told me about it
since.

"When I saw that crowd, Matty," he said, "I didn't know where I was. It
looked so big to me, and they were all wondering what I was going to do,
and all thinking that McGraw had paid $11,000 for me, and now they were to
find out whether he had gotten stuck, whether he had picked up a gold
brick with the plating on it very thin. I was wondering, myself, whether I
would make good."

What Marquard did that day is a matter of record, public property, like
marriage and death notices. Kane, the little rightfielder on the
Cincinnati club, was the first man up, and, although he was one of the
smallest targets in the league, Marquard hit him. He promptly stole
second, which worried "Rube" some more. Up came Lobert, the man who broke
Marquard's heart.

"Now we'll see," said Lobert to "Rube," as he advanced to the plate,
"whether you're a busher." Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the
bow-legs, whacked out a triple to the far outfield and stopped at third
with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job's
goat.

"You're identified," said "Hans"; "you're a busher."

Some fan shouted the fatal "Take him out." Marquard was gone. Bescher
followed with another triple, and, after that, the official scorer got
writer's cramp trying to keep track of the hits and runs. The number of
hits, I don't think, ever was computed with any great amount of
exactitude. Marquard was taken out of the box in the fifth inning, and he
was two years recovering from the shock of that beating. McGraw had put
him into the game against his better judgment, and he paid for it dearly.

Marquard had to be nursed along on the bench finishing games, starting
only against easy clubs, and learning the ropes of the Big Leagues before
he was able to be a winning pitcher. McGraw was a long time realizing
on his investment. All Marquard needed was a victory, a decisive win, over
a strong club.


[Illustration: Photo by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio

Ty Cobb and Hans Wagner

"An American and National League star of the first magnitude. Fans of the
rival leagues never tire of discussing the relative merits of these two
great players. Both are always willing to take a chance, and seem to do
their best work when pressed hardest."]


The Giants played a disastrous series with the Philadelphia club early in
July, 1911, and lost four games straight. All the pitchers were shot to
pieces, and the Quakers seemed to be unbeatable. McGraw was at a loss for
a man to use in the fifth game. The weather was steaming hot, and the
players were dragged out, while the pitching staff had lost all its
starch. As McGraw's eye scanned his bedraggled talent, Marquard, reading
his thoughts, walked up to him.

"Give me a chance," he asked.

"Go in," answered McGraw, again making up his mind on the spur of the
moment. Marquard went into the game and made the Philadelphia batters,
whose averages had been growing corpulent on the pitching of the rest of
the staff, look foolish. There on that sweltering July afternoon, when
everything steamed in the blistering heat, a pitcher was being born again.
Marquard had found himself, and, for the rest of the season, he was
strongest against the Philadelphia team, for it had been that club which
restored his confidence.

There is a sequel to that old Lobert incident, too. In one of the last
series in Philadelphia, toward the end of the season, Marquard and Lobert
faced each other again. Said Marquard:

"Remember the time, you bow-legged Dutchman, when you asked me whether I
was a busher? Here is where I pay you back. This is the place where you
get a bad showing up."

And he fanned Lobert--whiff! whiff! whiff!--like that. He became the
greatest lefthander in the country, and would have been sooner, except for
the enormous price paid for him and the widespread publicity he received,
which caused him to be over-anxious to make good. It's the psychology of
the game.

"You can't hit what you don't see," says "Joe" Tinker of Marquard's
pitching. "When he throws his fast one, the only way you know it's past
you is because you hear the ball hit the catcher's glove."

Fred Clarke, of the Pittsburg club, was up against the same proposition
when he purchased "Marty" O'Toole for $22,500 in 1911. The newspapers of
the country were filled with figures and pictures of the real estate and
automobiles that could be bought with the same amount of money, lined up
alongside of pictures of O'Toole, as when the comparative strengths of the
navies of the world are shown by placing different sizes of battleships in
a row, or when the length of the _Lusitania_ is emphasized by printing a
picture of it balancing gracefully on its stern alongside the Singer
Building.

Clarke realized that he had all this publicity with which to contend, and
that it would do his expensive new piece of pitching bric-a-brac no good.
O'Toole, jerked out of a minor league where he had been pitching quietly,
along with his name in ten or a dozen papers, was suddenly a national
figure, measuring up in newspaper space with Roosevelt and Taft and J.
Johnson.

When O'Toole joined the Pirates near the end of the season, Clarke knew
down in his heart the club had no chance of winning the pennant with
Wagner hurt, although he still publicly declared he was in the race. He
did not risk jumping O'Toole right into the game as soon as he reported
and taking the chance of breaking his heart. Opposing players, if they
are up in the pennant hunt, are hard on a pitcher of this sort and would
lose no opportunity to mention the price paid for him and connect it
pointedly with his showing, if that showing was a little wobbly. Charity
begins at home, and stays there, in the Big Leagues. At least, I never saw
any of it on the ball fields, especially if the club is in the race, and
the only thing that stands between it and a victory is the ruining of a
$22,500 pitcher of a rival.

Clarke nursed O'Toole along on the bench for a couple of weeks until he
got to be thoroughly acclimated, and then he started him in a game against
Boston, the weakest club in the league, after he had sent for Kelly,
O'Toole's regular catcher, to inspire more confidence. O'Toole had an easy
time of it at his Big League debut, for the Boston players did not pick on
him any to speak of, as they were not a very hard bunch of pickers. The
Pittsburg team gave him a nice comfortable, cosy lead, and he was pitching
along ahead of the game all the way. In the fifth or sixth inning Clarke
slipped Gibson, the regular Pittsburg catcher, behind the bat, and O'Toole
had won his first game in the Big League before he knew it. He then
reasoned I have won here. I belong here. I can get along here. It isn't
much different from the crowd I came from, except for the name, and that's
nothing to get timid about if I can clean up as easily as I did to-day.

Fred Clarke, also a psychologist and baseball manager, had worked a
valuable pitcher into the League, and he had won his first game. If he had
started him against some club like the Giants, for instance, where he
would have had to face a big crowd and the conversation and spirit of
players who were after a pennant and hot after it, he might have lost and
his heart would have been broken. Successfully breaking into the game an
expensive pitcher, who has cost a club a large price, is one of the
hardest problems which confronts a manager. Now O'Toole is all right if he
has the pitching goods. He has taken his initial plunge, and all he has to
do is to make good next year. The psychology element is eliminated from
now on.

I have been told that Clarke was the most relieved man in seven counties
when O'Toole came through with that victory in Boston.

"I had in mind all the time," said Fred, "what happened to McGraw when he
was trying to introduce Marquard into the smart set, and I was afraid the
same thing would happen to me. I had a lot of confidence in the nerve of
that young fellow though, because he stood up well under fire the first
day he got into Pittsburg. One of those lady reporters was down to the
club offices to meet him the morning he got into town, and they always
kind of have me, an old campaigner, stepping away from the plate. She
pulled her pad and pencil on Marty first thing, before he had had a chance
to knock the dirt out of his cleats, and said:

"'Now tell me about yourself.'

"He stepped right into that one, instead of backing away.

"'What do you want me to tell?' he asks her.

"Then I knew he was all right. He was there with the 'come-back.'"

But the ideal way to break a star into the Big League is that which marked
the entrance of Grover Cleveland Alexander, of the Philadelphia club. The
Cincinnati club had had its eye on Alexander for some time, but "Tacks"
Ashenbach, the scout, now dead, had advised against him, declaring that he
would be no good against "regular batters." Philadelphia got him at the
waiver price and he was among the lot in the newspapers marked "Those who
also joined." He started out in 1911 and won two or three games before
anyone paid any attention to him. Then he kept on winning until one
manager was saying to another:

"That guy, Alexander, is a hard one to beat."

He had won ten or a dozen games before it was fully realized that he was a
star. Then he was so accustomed to the Big League he acted as if he had
been living in it all his life, and there was no getting on his nerves.
When he started, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. If he
didn't last, the newspapers wouldn't laugh at him, and the people wouldn't
say:

"$11,000, or $22,500, for a lemon." That's the dread of all ball players.

Such is the psychology of introducing promising pitchers into the Big
Leagues. The Alexander route is the ideal one, but it's hard to get stars
now without paying enormous prices for them. Philadelphia was lucky.

There is another element which enters into all forms of athletics. Tennis
players call it nervousness, and ball players, in the frankness of the
game, call it a "yellow streak." It is the inability to stand the gaff,
the weakening in the pinches. It is something ingrained in a man that
can't be cured. It is the desire to quit when the situation is serious. It
is different from stage fright, because a man may get over that, but a
"yellow streak" is always with him. When a new player breaks into the
League, he is put to the most severe test by the other men to see if he is
"yellow." If he is found wanting, he is hopeless in the Big League, for
the news will spread, and he will receive no quarter. It is the cardinal
sin in a ball player.

For some time after "Hans" Wagner's poor showing in the world's series of
1903, when the Pittsburg club was defeated for the World's Championship by
the Boston American League club, it was reported that he was "yellow."
This grieved the Dutchman deeply, for I don't know a ball player in either
league who would assay less quit to the ton than Wagner. He is always
there and always fighting. Wagner felt the inference which his team mates
drew very keenly. This was the real tragedy in Wagner's career.
Notwithstanding his stolid appearance, he is a sensitive player, and this
hurt him more than anything else in his life ever has.

When the Pittsburg club played Detroit in 1909 for the championship of the
world, many, even of Wagner's admirers, said, "The Dutchman will quit." It
was in this series he vindicated himself. His batting scored the majority
of the Pittsburg runs, and his fielding was little short of wonderful. He
was demonstrating his gameness. Many men would have quit under the
reflection. They would have been unable to withstand the criticism, but
not Wagner.

Many persons implied that John Murray, the rightfielder on the Giants, was
"yellow" at the conclusion of the 1911 world's series because, after
batting almost three hundred in the season, he did not get a hit in the
six games. But there isn't a man on the team gamer. He hasn't any nerves.
He's one of the sort of ball players who says:

"Well, now I've got my chew of tobacco in my mouth. Let her go."

There is an interesting bit of psychology connected with Wagner and the
spit-ball. It comes as near being Wagner's "groove" as any curve that has
found its way into the Big Leagues. This is explained by the fact that
the first time Wagner ever faced "Bugs" Raymond he didn't get a hit with
Arthur using the spitter. Consequently the report went around the circuit
that Wagner couldn't hit the spit-ball. He disproved this theory against
two or three spit-ball pitchers, but as long as Raymond remained in the
League he had it on the hard-hitting Dutchman.

"Here comes a 'spitter,' Hans. Look out for it," Raymond would warn
Wagner, with a wide grin, and then he would pop up a wet one.

"Guess I'll repeat on that dose, Hans; you didn't like that one."

And Wagner would get so worked up that he frequently struck out against
"Bugs" when the rest of his club was hitting the eccentric pitcher hard.
It was because he achieved the idea on the first day he couldn't hit the
spit-ball, and he wasn't able to rid his mind of the impression. Many fans
often wondered why Raymond had it on Wagner, the man whose only "groove"
is a base on balls. "Bugs" had the edge after that first day when Wagner
lost confidence in his ability to hit the spit-ball as served by Raymond.

In direct contrast to this loss of confidence on Wagner's part was the
incident attendant upon Arthur Devlin's debut into the Big League. He had
joined the club a youngster, in the season of 1904, and McGraw had not
counted upon him to play third base, having planned to plant Bresnahan at
that corner. But Bresnahan developed sciatic rheumatism early in the
season, and Devlin was put on the bag in the emergency with a great deal
of misgiving.

The first day he was in the game he came up to the bat with the bases
full. The Giants were playing Brooklyn at the Polo Grounds, and two men
had already struck out, with the team two runs behind. Devlin came out
from the bench.

"Who is this youthful-looking party?" one fan asked another, as they
scanned their score cards.

"Devlin, some busher, taking Bresnahan's place," another answered.

"Well, it's all off now," was the general verdict.

The crowd settled back, and one could feel the lassitude in the
atmosphere. But Devlin had his first chance to make good in a pinch. There
was no weariness in his manner. Poole, the Brooklyn pitcher, showing less
respect than he should have for the newcomer in baseball society, spilled
one over too near the middle, and Arthur drove out a home run, winning
the game. Those who had refused to place any confidence in him only a
moment before, were on their feet cheering wildly now. And Devlin played
third base for almost eight years after that, and none thought of
Bresnahan and his rheumatism until he began catching again. Devlin, after
that home run, was oozing confidence from every pore and burned up the
League with his batting for three years. He got the old confidence from
his start. The fans had expected nothing from him, and he had delivered.
He had gained everything. He had made the most dramatic play in baseball
on his first day, a home run with the bases full.

When Fred Snodgrass first started playing as a regular with the Giants
about the middle of the season of 1910, he hit any ball pitched him hard
and had all the fans marvelling at his stick work. He believed that he
could hit anything and, as long as he retained that belief, he could.

But the Chalmers Automobile Company had offered a prize of one nice,
mild-mannered motor car to the batter in either league who finished the
season with the biggest average.

Snodgrass was batting over four hundred at one time and was ahead of them
all when suddenly the New York evening papers began to publish the daily
averages of the leaders for the automobile, boosting Snodgrass. It
suddenly struck Fred that he was a great batter and that to keep his place
in that daily standing he would have to make a hit every time he went to
the plate. These printed figures worried him. His batting fell off
miserably until, in the post season series with the Yankees, he gave one
of the worst exhibitions of any man on the team. The newspapers did it.

"They got me worrying about myself," he told me once. "I began to think
how close I was to the car and had a moving picture of myself driving it.
That settled it."

Many promising young players are broken in their first game in the Big
League by the ragging which they are forced to undergo at the hands of
veteran catchers. John Kling is a very bad man with youngsters, and
sometimes he can get on the nerves of older players in close games when
the nerves are strung tight. The purpose of a catcher in talking to a man
in this way is to distract his attention from batting, and once this is
accomplished he is gone. A favorite trick of a catcher is to say to a new
batter:

"Look out for this fellow. He's got a mean 'bean' ball, and he hasn't any
influence over it. There's a poor 'boob' in the hospital now that stopped
one with his head."

Then the catcher signs for the pitcher to throw the next one at the young
batter's head. If he pulls away, an unpardonable sin in baseball, the dose
is repeated.

"Yer almost had your foot in the water-pail over by the bench that time,"
says the catcher.

Bing! Up comes another "beaner." Then, after the catcher has sized the new
man up, he makes his report.

"He won't do. He's yellow."

And the players keep mercilessly after this shortcoming, this ingrained
fault which, unlike a mechanical error, cannot be corrected until the new
player is driven out of the League. Perhaps the catcher says:

"He's game, that guy. No scare to him."

After that he is let alone. It's the psychology of batting.

Once, when I first broke into the League, Jack Chesbro, then with
Pittsburg, threw a fast one up, and it went behind my head, although I
tried to dodge back. He had lots of speed in those days, too. It set me
wondering what would have happened if the ball had hit me. The more I
thought, the more it struck me that it would have greatly altered my face
had it gotten into the course of the ball. Ever afterwards, he had it on
me, and, for months, a fast one at the head had me backing away from the
plate.

In contrast to this experience of mine was the curing of "Josh" Devore,
the leftfielder of the Giants, of being bat shy against left-handers.
Devore has always been very weak at the bat with a southpaw in the box,
dragging his right foot away from the plate. This was particularly the
case against "Slim" Sallee, the tenuous southpaw of the St. Louis
Nationals. Finally McGraw, exasperated after "Josh" had struck out twice
in one day, said:

"That fellow hasn't got speed enough to bend a pane of glass at the home
plate throwing from the box, and you're pullin' away as if he was shooting
them out of a gun. It's a crime to let him beat you. Go up there the next
time and get hit, and see if he can hurt you. If you don't get hit,
you're fined $10."

Devore, who is as fond of $10 as the next one, went to the bat and took
one of Sallee's slants in a place where it would do the least damage. He
trotted to first base smiling.

"What'd I tell you?" asked McGraw, coaching. "Could he hurt you?"

"Say," replied "Josh," "I'd hire out to let them pitch baseballs at me if
none could throw harder than that guy."

Devore was cured of being bat shy when Sallee was pitching, right then and
there, and he has improved greatly against all left-handers ever since, so
much so that McGraw leaves him in the game now when a southpaw pitches,
instead of placing Beals Becker in left field as he used to. All Devore
needed was the confidence to stand up to the plate against them, to rid
his mind of the idea that, if once he got hit, he would leave the field
feet first. That slam in the slats which Sallee handed him supplied the
confidence.

When Devore was going to Philadelphia for the second game of the world's
series in the fall of 1911, the first one in the other town, he was
introduced to "Ty" Cobb, the Detroit out-fielder, by some newspaper man
on the train, and, as it was the first time Devore had ever met Cobb, he
sat down with him and they talked all the way over.

"Gee," said "Josh" to me, as we were getting off the train, "that fellow
Cobb knows a lot about batting. He told me some things about the American
League pitchers just now, and he didn't know he was doing it. I never let
on. But I just hope that fellow Plank works to-day, if they think that I
am weak against left-handers. Say, Matty, I could write a book about that
guy and his 'grooves' now, after buzzing Cobb, and the funny thing is he
didn't know he was telling me."

Plank pitched that day and fanned Devore four times out of a possible
four. "Josh" didn't even get a foul off him.

"Thought you knew all about that fellow," I said to Devore after the game.

"I've learned since that Cobb and he are pretty thick," replied "Josh,"
"and I guess 'Ty' was giving me a bad steer."

It was evident that Cobb had been filling "Josh" up with misinformation
that was working around in Devore's mind when he went to the plate to
face Plank, and, instead of being open to impressions, these wrong
opinions had already been planted and he was constantly trying to confirm
them. Plank was crossing him all the time, and, being naturally weak
against left-handers, this additional handicap made Devore look foolish.

In the well-worn words of Mr. Dooley, it has been my experience "to trust
your friends, but cut the cards." By that, I mean one ball player will
often come to another with a tip that he really thinks worth while, but
that avails nothing in the end. A man has to be a pretty smart ball player
to dispense accurate information about others, because the Big Leaguers
know their own "grooves" and are naturally trying to cover them up. Then a
batter may be weak against one pitcher on a certain kind of a ball, and
may whale the same sort of delivery, with a different twist to it, out of
the lot against another.

That was the experience I had with "Ed" Delehanty, the famous slugger of
the old Philadelphia National League team, who is now dead. During my
first year in the League several well-meaning advisers came to me and
said:

"Don't give 'Del' any high fast ones because, if you do, you will just
wear your fielders out worse than a George M. Cohan show does the chorus.
They will think they are in a Marathon race instead of a ball game."

Being young, I took this advice, and the first time I pitched against
Delehanty, I fed him curved balls. He hit these so far the first two times
he came to bat that one of the balls was never found, and everybody felt
like shaking hands with Van Haltren, the old Giant outfielder, when he
returned with the other, as if he had been away on a vacation some place.
In fact, I had been warned against giving any of this Philadelphia team of
sluggers high fast ones, and I had been delivering a diet of curves to all
of them which they were sending to the limits of the park and further,
with great regularity. At last, when Delehanty came to the bat for the
third time in the game, Van Haltren walked into the box from the outfield
and handed the ball to me, after he had just gone to the fence to get it.
Elmer Flick had hit it there.

"Matty," he pleaded, "for the love of Mike, slip this fellow a base on
balls and let me get my wind."

Instead I decided to switch my style, and I fed Delehanty high fast ones,
the dangerous dose, and he struck out then and later. He wasn't expecting
them and was so surprised that he couldn't hit the ball. Only two of the
six balls at which he struck were good ones. I found out afterwards that
the tradition about not delivering any high fast balls to the Philadelphia
hitters was the outgrowth of the old buzzer tipping service, established
in 1899, by which the batters were informed what to expect by Morgan
Murphy, located in the clubhouse with a pair of field-glasses and his
finger on a button which worked a buzzer under the third-base coaching
box. The coacher tipped the batter off what was coming and the
signal-stealing device had worked perfectly. The hitters had all waited
for the high fast ones in those days, as they can be hit easier if a man
knows that they are coming, and can also be hit farther.

But, after the buzzer had been discovered and the delivery of pitchers
could not be accurately forecast, this ability to hit high fast ones
vanished, but not the tradition. The result was that this Philadelphia
club was getting a steady diet of curves and hitting them hard, not
expecting anything else. When I first pitched against Delehanty, his
reputation as a hitter gave him a big edge on me. Therefore I was willing
to take any kind of advice calculated to help me, but eventually I had to
find out for myself. If I had taken a chance on mixing them up the first
time he faced me, I still doubt if he would have made those two long hits,
but it was his reputation working in my mind and the idea that he ate up
high fast balls that prevented me from taking the risk.

Each pitcher has to find out for himself what a man is going to hit. It's
all right to take advice at first, but, if this does not prove to be the
proper prescription, it's up to him to experiment and not continue to feed
him the sort of balls that he is hitting.

Reputations count for a great deal in the Big Leagues. Cobb has a record
as being a great base runner, and I believe that he steals ten bases a
season on this reputation. The catcher knows he is on the bag, realizes
that he is going to steal, fears him, hurries his throw, and, in his
anxiety, it goes bad. Cobb is safe, whereas, if he had been an ordinary
runner with no reputation, he would probably have been thrown out.
Pitchers who have made names for themselves in the Big Leagues, have a
much easier time winning as a consequence.

"All he's got to do is to throw his glove into the box to beat that club,"
is an old expression in baseball, which means that the opposing batters
fear the pitcher and that his reputation will carry him through if he has
nothing whatever on the ball.

Newspapers work on the mental attitude of Big League players. This has
been most marked in Cincinnati, and I believe that the local newspapers
have done as much as anything to keep a pennant away from that town. When
the team went south for the spring practice, the newspapers printed
glowing reports of the possibilities of the club winning the pennant, but,
when the club started to fall down in the race, they would knock the men,
and it would take the heart out of the players. Almost enough good players
have been let go by the Cincinnati team to make a world's championship
club. There are Donlin, Seymour, Steinfeldt, Lobert and many more. Ball
players inhale the accounts printed in the newspapers, and a correspondent
with a grouch has ruined the prospects of many a good player and club. The
New York newspapers, first by the great amount of publicity given to his
old record, and then by criticising him for not making a better showing,
had a great deal to do with Marquard failing to make good the first two
years he was in New York, as I have shown.

A smart manager in the Big League is always working to keep his valuable
stars in the right frame of mind. On the last western trip the Giants made
in the season of 1911, when they won the pennant by taking eighteen games
out of twenty-two games, McGraw refused to permit any of the men to play
cards. He realized that often the stakes ran high and that the losers
brooded over the money which they lost and were thinking of this rather
than the game when on the ball field. It hurt their playing, so there were
no cards. He also carried "Charley" Faust, the Kansas Jinx killer, along
to keep the players amused and because it was thought that he was good
luck. It helped their mental attitude.

The treatment of a new player when he first arrives is different now from
what it was in the old days. Once there was a time when the veteran looked
upon the recruit with suspicion and the feeling that he had come to take
his job and his bread and butter from him. If a young pitcher was put
into the box, the old catcher would do all that he could to irritate him,
and many times he would inform the batters of the other side what he was
going to throw.

"He's tryin' to horn my friend Bill out of a job," I have heard catchers
charge against a youngster.

This attitude drove many a star ball player back to the minors because he
couldn't make good under the adverse circumstances, but nothing of the
sort exists now. Each veteran does all that he can to help the youngster,
realizing that on the younger generation depends the success of the club,
and that no one makes any money by being on a loser. Travelling with a
tail-end ball club is the poorest pastime in the world. I would rather
ride in the first coach of a funeral procession.

The youngster is treated more courteously now when he first arrives. In
the old days, the veterans of the club sized up the recruit and treated
him like a stranger for days, which made him feel as if he were among
enemies instead of friends, and, as a result, it was much harder for him
to make good. Now all hands make him a companion from the start, unless
he shows signs of being unusually fresh.

There is a lot to baseball in the Big Leagues besides playing the game. No
man can have a "yellow streak" and last. He must not pay much attention to
his nerves or temperament. He must hide every flaw. It's all part of the
psychology of baseball. But the saddest words of all to a pitcher are
three--"Take Him Out."




III

Pitching in a Pinch

     _Many Pitchers Are Effective in a Big League Ball Game until that
     Heart-Breaking Moment Arrives Known as the "Pinch"--It Is then that
     the Man in the Box is Put to the Severest Test by the Coachers and
     the Players on the Bench--Victory or Defeat Hangs on his Work in that
     Inning--Famous "Pinches."_


In most Big League ball games, there comes an inning on which hangs
victory or defeat. Certain intellectual fans call it the crisis; college
professors, interested in the sport, have named it the psychological
moment; Big League managers mention it as the "break," and pitchers speak
of the "pinch."

This is the time when each team is straining every nerve either to win or
to prevent defeat. The players and spectators realize that the outcome of
the inning is of vital importance. And in most of these pinches, the real
burden falls on the pitcher. It is at this moment that he is "putting all
he has" on the ball, and simultaneously his opponents are doing everything
they can to disconcert him.

Managers wait for this break, and the shrewd league leader can often time
it. Frequently a certain style of play is adopted to lead up to the pinch,
then suddenly a slovenly mode of attack is changed, and the team comes on
with a rush in an effort to break up the game. That is the real test of a
pitcher. He must be able to live through these squalls.

Two evenly matched clubs have been playing through six innings with
neither team gaining any advantage. Let us say that they are the Giants
and the Chicago Cubs. Suddenly the Chicago pitcher begins to weaken in the
seventh. Spectators cannot perceive this, but McGraw, the Giants' manager,
has detected some crack. All has been quiet on the bench up to this
moment. Now the men begin to fling about sweaters and move around, one
going to the water cooler to get a drink, another picking up a bat or two
and flinging them in the air, while four or five prospective hitters are
lined up, swinging several sticks apiece, as if absolutely confident that
each will get his turn at the plate.

The two coachers on the side lines have become dancing dervishes, waving
sweaters and arms wildly, and shouting various words of discouragement to
the pitcher which are calculated to make his job as soft as a bed of
concrete. He has pitched three balls to the batter, and McGraw vehemently
protests to the umpire that the twirler is not keeping his foot on the
slab. The game is delayed while this is discussed at the pitcher's box and
the umpire brushes off the rubber strip with a whisk broom.

There is a kick against these tactics from the other bench, but the damage
has been done. The pitcher passes the batter, forgets what he ought to
throw to the next man, and cannot get the ball where he wants it. A base
hit follows. Then he is gone. The following batter triples, and, before
another pitcher can be warmed up, three or four runs are across the plate,
and the game is won. That explains why so many wise managers keep a
pitcher warming up when the man in the box is going strong.

It is in the pinch that the pitcher shows whether or not he is a Big
Leaguer. He must have something besides curves then. He needs a head, and
he has to use it. It is the acid test. That is the reason so many men, who
shine in the minor leagues, fail to make good in the majors. They cannot
stand the fire.

A young pitcher came to the Giants a few years ago. I won't mention his
name because he has been pitching good minor-league ball since. He was a
wonder with the bases empty, but let a man or two get on the sacks, and he
wouldn't know whether he was in a pitcher's box or learning aviation in
the Wright school, and he acted a lot more like an aviator in the crisis.
McGraw looked him over twice.

"He's got a spine like a charlotte russe," declared "Mac," after his
second peek, and he passed him back to the bushes.

Several other Big League managers, tempted by this man's brilliant record
in the minors, have tried him out since, but he has always gone back.
McGraw's judgment of the man was correct.

On the other hand, Otis Crandall came to the New York club a few years ago
a raw country boy from Indiana. I shall never forget how he looked the
first spring I saw him in Texas. The club had a large number of recruits
and was short of uniforms. He was among the last of the hopefuls to arrive
and there was no suit for him, so, in a pair of regular trousers with his
coat off, he began chasing flies in the outfield. His head hung down on
his chest, and, when not playing, a cigarette drooped out of the corner of
his mouth. But he turned out to be a very good fly chaser, and McGraw
admired his persistency.

"What are you?" McGraw asked him one day.

"A pitcher," replied Crandall. Two words constitute an oration for him.

"Let's see what you've got," said McGraw.

Crandall warmed up, and he didn't have much of anything besides a sweeping
outcurve and a good deal of speed. He looked less like a pitcher than any
of the spring crop, but McGraw saw something in him and kept him. The
result is he has turned out to be one of the most valuable men on the
club, because he is there in a pinch. He couldn't be disturbed if the
McNamaras tied a bomb to him, with a time fuse on it set for "at once." He
is the sort of pitcher who is best when things look darkest. I've heard
the crowd yelling, when he has been pitching on the enemy's ground, so
that a sixteen-inch gun couldn't have been heard if it had gone off in the
lot.

"That crowd was making some noise," I've said to Crandall after the
inning.

"Was it?" asked Otie. "I didn't notice it."

One day in 1911, he started a game in Philadelphia and three men got on
the bases with no one out, along about the fourth or fifth inning. He shut
them out without a run. It was the first game he had started for a long
while, his specialty having been to enter a contest, after some other
pitcher had gotten into trouble, with two or three men on the bases and
scarcely any one out. After he came to the bench with the threatening
inning behind him, he said to me:

"Matty, I didn't feel at home out there to-day until a lot of people got
on the bases. I'll be all right now." And he was. I believe that Crandall
is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most
valuable men to a team, for he can play any position and bats hard.
Besides being a great pinch pitcher, he can also hit in a crush, and won
many games for the Giants in 1911 that way.

Very often spectators think that a pitcher has lost his grip in a pinch,
when really he is playing inside baseball. A game with Chicago in Chicago
back in 1908 (not the famous contest that cost the Giants a championship;
I did not have any grip at all that day; but one earlier in the season)
best illustrates the point I want to bring out. Mordecai Brown and I were
having a pitchers' duel, and the Giants were in the lead by the score of 1
to 0 when the team took the field for the ninth inning.

It was one of those fragile games in which one run makes a lot of
difference, the sort that has a fringe of nervous prostration for the
spectators. Chance was up first in the ninth and he pushed a base hit to
right field. Steinfeldt followed with a triple that brought Chance home
and left the run which would win the game for the Cubs on third base. The
crowd was shouting like mad, thinking I was done. I looked at the hitters,
waiting to come up, and saw Hofman and Tinker swinging their bats in
anticipation. Both are dangerous men, but the silver lining was my second
look, which revealed to me Kling and Brown following Hofman and Tinker.

Without a second's hesitation, I decided to pass both Hofman and Tinker,
because the run on third base would win the game anyway if it scored, and
with three men on the bags instead of one, there would be a remote chance
for a triple play, besides making a force out at the plate possible.
Remember that no one was out at this time. Kling and Brown had always been
easy for me.

When I got two balls on Hofman, trying to make him hit at a bad one, the
throng stood up in the stand and tore splinters out of the floor with its
feet. And then I passed Hofman. The spectators misunderstood my motive.

"He's done. He's all in," shouted one man in a voice which was one of the
carrying, persistent, penetrating sort. The crowd took the cry up and
stamped its feet and cheered wildly.

Then I passed Tinker, a man, as I have said before, who has had a habit of
making trouble for me. The crowd quieted down somewhat, perhaps because it
was not possible for it to cheer any louder, but probably because the
spectators thought that now it would be only a matter of how many the Cubs
would win by. The bases were full, and no one was out.

But that wildly cheering crowd had worked me up to greater effort, and I
struck Kling out and then Brown followed him back to the bench for the
same reason. Just one batter stood between me and a tied score now. He was
John Evers, and the crowd having lost its chortle of victory, was begging
him to make the hit which would bring just one run over the plate. They
were surprised by my recuperation after having passed two men. Evers
lifted a gentle fly to left field and the three men were left on the
bases. The Giants eventually won that game in the eleventh inning by the
score of 4 to 1.

But that system doesn't always work. Often I have passed a man to get a
supposedly poor batter up and then had him bang out a base hit. My first
successful year in the National League was 1901, although I joined the
Giants in the middle of the season of 1900. The Boston club at that time
had a pitcher named "Kid" Nichols who was a great twirler. The first two
games I pitched against the Boston club were against this man, and I won
the first in Boston and the second in New York, the latter by the score of
2 to 1.

Both teams then went west for a three weeks' trip, and when the Giants
returned a series was scheduled with Boston at the Polo Grounds. There was
a good deal of speculation as to whether I would again beat the veteran
"Kid" Nichols, and the newspapers, discussing the promised pitching duel,
stirred up considerable enthusiasm over it. Of course, I, the youngster,
was eager to make it three straight over the veteran. Neither team had
scored at the beginning of the eighth inning. Boston runners got on second
and third bases with two out, and Fred Tenney, then playing first base on
the Boston club, was up at the bat. He had been hitting me hard that day,
and I decided to pass him and take a chance on "Dick" Cooley, the next
man, and a weak batter. So Tenney got his base on balls, and the sacks
were full.

Two strikes were gathered on Cooley, one at which he swung and the other
called, and I was beginning to congratulate myself on my excellent
judgment, which was really counting my chickens while they were still in
the incubator. I attempted to slip a fast one over on Cooley and got the
ball a little too high. The result was that he stepped into it and made a
three base hit which eventually won the game by the score of 3 to 0. That
was once when passing a man to get a weak batter did not work.

I have always been against a twirler pitching himself out, when there is
no necessity for it, as so many youngsters do. They burn them through for
eight innings and then, when the pinch comes, something is lacking. A
pitcher must remember that there are eight other men in the game, drawing
more or less salary to stop balls hit at them, and he must have confidence
in them. Some pitchers will put all that they have on each ball. This is
foolish for two reasons.

In the first place, it exhausts the man physically and, when the pinch
comes, he has not the strength to last it out. But second and more
important, it shows the batters everything that he has, which is
senseless. A man should always hold something in reserve, a surprise to
spring when things get tight. If a pitcher has displayed his whole
assortment to the batters in the early part of the game and has used all
his speed and his fastest breaking curve, then, when the crisis comes, he
"hasn't anything" to fall back on.

Like all youngsters, I was eager to make a record during my first year in
the Big League, and in one of the first games I pitched against Cincinnati
I made the mistake of putting all that I had on every ball. We were
playing at the Polo Grounds, and the Giants had the visitors beaten 2 to
0, going into the last inning. I had been popping them through, trying to
strike out every hitter and had not held anything in reserve. The first
man to the bat in the ninth got a single, the next a two bagger, and by
the time they had stopped hitting me, the scorer had credited the
Cincinnati club with four runs, and we lost the game, 4 to 2.

I was very much down in the mouth over the defeat, after I had the game
apparently won, and George Davis, then the manager of the Giants, noticed
it in the clubhouse.

"Never mind, Matty," he said, "it was worth it. The game ought to teach
you not to pitch your head off when you don't need to."

It did. I have never forgotten that lesson. Many spectators wonder why a
pitcher does not work as hard as he can all through the game, instead of
just in the pinches. If he did, they argue, there would be no pinches. But
there would be, and, if the pitcher did not conserve his energy, the
pinches would usually go against him.

Sometimes bawling at a man in a pinch has the opposite effect from that
desired. Clarke Griffith, recently of Cincinnati, has a reputation in the
Big Leagues for being a bad man to upset a pitcher from the coacher's box.
Off the field he is one of the decentest fellows in the game, but, when
talking to a pitcher, he is very irritating. I was working in a game
against the Reds in Cincinnati one day, just after he had been made
manager of the club, and Griffith spent the afternoon and a lot of breath
trying to get me going. The Giants were ahead, 5 to 1, at the beginning of
the seventh. In the Cincinnati half of that inning, "Mike" Mitchell
tripled with the bases full and later tallied on an outfield fly which
tied the score. The effect this had on Griffith was much the same as that
of a lighted match on gasolene.

"Now, you big blond," he shouted at me, "we've got you at last."

I expected McGraw to take me out, as it looked in that inning as if I was
not right, but he did not, and I pitched along up to the ninth with the
score still tied and with Griffith, the carping critic, on the side
lines. We failed to count in our half, but the first Cincinnati batter got
on the bases, stole second, and went to third on a sacrifice. He was there
with one out.

"Here's where we get you," chortled Griffith. "This is the point at which
you receive a terrible showing up."

I tried to get the next batter to hit at bad balls, and he refused, so
that I lost him. I was afraid to lay the ball over the plate in this
crisis, as a hit or an outfield fly meant the game. Hoblitzell and
Mitchell, two of Griffith's heaviest batters, were scheduled to arrive at
the plate next.

"You ought to be up, Mike," yelled the Cincinnati manager at Mitchell, who
was swinging a couple of sticks preparatory to his turn at the bat. "Too
bad you won't get a lick, old man, because Hobby's going to break it up
right here."

Something he said irritated me, but, instead of worrying me, it made me
feel more like pitching. I seldom talk to a coacher, but I turned to
Griffith and said:

"I'll bring Mike up, and we'll see what he can do."

I deliberately passed Hoblitzell without even giving him a chance to hit
at a single ball. It wasn't to make a grand stand play I did this, but
because it was baseball. One run would win the game anyway, and, with more
men on the bases, there were more plays possible. Besides Hoblitzell is a
nasty hitter, and I thought that I had a better chance of making Mitchell
hit the ball on the ground, a desirable thing under the conditions.

"Now, Mike," urged Griffith, as Mitchell stepped up to the plate, "go as
far as you like. Blot up the bases, old boy. This blond is gone."

That sort of talk never bothers me. I had better luck with Mitchell than I
had hoped. He struck out. The next batter was easy, and the Giants won the
game in the tenth inning. According to the newspaper reports, I won
twenty-one or twenty-two games before Cincinnati beat me again, so it can
be seen that joshing in pinches is not effective against all pitchers. A
manager must judge the temperament of his victim. But Griffith has never
stopped trying to rag me. In 1911, when the Giants were west on their
final trip, I was warming up in Cincinnati before a game, and he was
batting out flies near me. He would talk to me between each ball he hit
to the outfield.

"Got anything to-day, Matty?" he asked. "Guess there ain't many games left
in you. You're getting old."

When I broke into the National League, the Brooklyn club had as bad a
bunch of men to bother a pitcher as I ever faced. The team had won the
championship in 1900, and naturally they were all pretty chesty. When I
first began to play in 1901, this crowd--Kelly, Jennings, Keeler and
Hanlon--got after me pretty strong. But I seemed to get pitching
nourishment out of their line of conversation and won a lot of games. At
last, so I have been told, Hanlon, who was the manager, said to his
conversational ball players:

"Lay off that Mathewson kid. Leave him alone. He likes the chatter you
fellows spill out there."

They did not bother me after that, but this bunch spoiled many a promising
young pitcher.

Speaking of sizing up the temperament of batters and pitchers in a pinch,
few persons realize that it was a little bit of carelessly placed
conversation belonging to "Chief" Bender, the Indian pitcher on the
Athletics, that did as much as anything to give the Giants the first game
in the 1911 world's series.

"Josh" Devore, the left-fielder on the New York team, is an in-and-out
batter, but he is a bulldog in a pinch and is more apt to make a hit in a
tight place than when the bases are empty. And he is quite as likely to
strike out. He is the type of ball player who cannot be rattled. With
"Chief" Myers on second base, the score tied, and two out, Devore came to
the bat in the seventh inning of the first game.

"Look at little 'Josh,'" said Bender, who had been talking to batters all
through the game.

Devore promptly got himself into the hole with two strikes and two balls
on him, but a little drawback like that never worries "Josh."

"I'm going to pitch you a curved ball over the outside corner," shouted
Bender as he wound up.

"I know it, Chief," replied "Josh," and he set himself to receive just
that sort of delivery.

Up came the predicted curve over the outside corner. "Josh" hit it to left
field for two bases, and brought home the winning run. Bender evidently
thought that, by telling Devore what he was actually going to pitch, he
would make him think he was going to cross him.

"I knew it would be a curve ball," Devore told me after the game. "With
two and two, he would be crazy to hand me anything else. When he made that
crack, I guessed that he was trying to cross me by telling the truth.
Before he spoke, I wasn't sure which corner he was going to put it over,
but he tipped me."

Some batters might have been fooled by those tactics. It was taking a
chance in a pinch, and Bender lost.

Very few of the fans who saw this first game of the 1911 world's series
realize that the "break" in that contest came in the fifth inning. The
score was tied, with runners on second and third bases with two out, when
"Eddie" Collins, the fast second baseman of the Athletics, and a dangerous
hitter, came to the bat. I realized that I was skating on thin ice and was
putting everything I had on the ball. Collins hit a slow one down the
first base line, about six feet inside the bag.

With the hit, I ran over to cover the base, and Merkle made for the ball,
but he had to get directly in my line of approach to field it. Collins,
steaming down the base line, realized that, if he could get the decision
at first on this hit, his team would probably win the game, as the two
other runners could score easily. In a flash, I was aware of this, too.

"I'll take it," yelled Merkle, as he stopped to pick up the ball.

Seeing Merkle and me in front of him, both heavy men, Collins knew that he
could not get past us standing up. When still ten or twelve feet from the
bag, he slid, hoping to take us unawares and thus avoid being touched. He
could then scramble to the bag. As soon as he jumped, I realized what he
hoped to do, and, fearing that Merkle would miss him, I grabbed the first
baseman and hurled him at Collins. It was an old-fashioned, football
shove, Merkle landing on Collins and touching him out. A great many of the
spectators believed that I had interfered with Merkle on the play. As a
matter of fact, I thought that it was the crisis of the game and knew
that, if Collins was not put out, we would probably lose. That football
shove was a brand new play to me in baseball, invented on the spur of the
second, but it worked.

In minor leagues, there are fewer games in which a "break" comes. It does
not develop in all Big League contests by any means. Sometimes one team
starts to win in the first inning and simply runs away from the other club
all the way. But in all close games the pinch shows up.

It happens in many contests in the major leagues because of the almost
perfect baseball played. Depending on his fielders, a manager can play for
this "break." And when the pinch comes, it is a case of the batter's nerve
against the pitcher's.




IV

Big League Pitchers and Their Peculiarities.

     _Nearly Every Pitcher in the Big Leagues Has Some Temperamental or
     Mechanical Flaw which he is Constantly Trying to Hide, and which
     Opposing Batters are always Endeavoring to Uncover--The Giants Drove
     Coveleski, the Man who Beat them out of a Pennant, Back to the Minor
     Leagues by Taunting him on One Sore Point--Weaknesses of Other
     Stars._


Like great artists in other fields of endeavor, many Big League pitchers
are temperamental. "Bugs" Raymond, "Rube" Waddell, "Slim" Sallee, and
"Wild Bill" Donovan are ready examples of the temperamental type. The
first three are the sort of men of whom the manager is never sure. He does
not know, when they come into the ball park, whether or not they are in
condition to work. They always carry with them a delightful atmosphere of
uncertainty.

In contrast to this eccentric group, there are those with certain
mechanical defects in their pitching of which opposing clubs take
advantage. Last comes the irritable, nervous box artist who must have
things just so, even down to the temperature, before he can work
satisfactorily.

"As delicate as prima donnas," says John McGraw of this variety.

He speaks of the man who loses his love for his art when his shirt is too
tight or a toe is sore. This style, perhaps, is the most difficult for a
manager to handle, unless it is the uncertain, eccentric sort.

As soon as a new pitcher breaks into the Big Leagues, seven clubs are
studying him with microscopic care to discover some flaw in his physical
style or a temperamental weakness on which his opponents can play.
Naturally, if the man has such a "groove," his team mates are endeavoring
to hide it, but it soon leaks out and becomes general gossip around the
circuit. Then the seven clubs start aiming at this flaw, and oftentimes
the result is that a promising young pitcher, because he has some one
definite weakness, goes back to the minors. A crack in the temperament is
the worst. Mechanical defects can usually be remedied when discovered.

Few baseball fans know that the Giants drove a man back to the minor
leagues who once pitched them out of a pennant. The club was tipped off to
a certain, unfortunate circumstance in the twirler's early life which left
a lasting impression on his mind. The players never let him forget this
when he was in a game, and it was like constantly hitting him on a boil.

Coveleski won three games for the Philadelphia National League club from
the Giants back in 1908, when one of these contests would have meant a
pennant to the New York club and possibly a world's championship. That was
the season the fight was decided in a single game with the Chicago Cubs
after the regular schedule had been played out. Coveleski was hailed as a
wonder for his performance.

Just after the season closed, "Tacks" Ashenbach, the scout for the
Cincinnati club, now dead, and formerly a manager in the league where
Coveleski got his start, came to McGraw and laughed behind his hand.

"Mac," he said, "I'm surprised you let that big Pole beat you out of a
championship. I can give you the prescription to use every time that he
starts working. All you have to do is to imitate a snare drum."

"What are you trying to do--kid me?" asked McGraw, for he was still
tolerably irritable over the outcome of the season.

"Try it," was Ashenbach's laconic reply.

The result was that the first game Coveleski started against the Giants
the next season, there was a chorus of "rat-a-tat-tats" from the bench,
with each of the coachers doing a "rat-a-tat-tat" solo, for we decided,
after due consideration, this was the way to imitate a snare drum. We
would have tried to imitate a calliope if we had thought that it would
have done any good against this pitcher.

"I'll hire a fife and drum corps if the tip is worth anything," declared
McGraw.

"Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!" came the chorus as Coveleski wound up to
pitch the first ball. It went wide of the plate.

"Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!" it was repeated all through the inning.
When Coveleski walked to the Philadelphia bench at the end of the first
round, after the Giants had made three runs off him, he looked over at us
and shouted:

"You think you're smart, don't you?"

"Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!" was the only reply. But now we knew we had
him. When a pitcher starts to talk back, it is a cinch that he is
irritated. So the deadly chorus was kept up in volleys, until the umpire
stopped us, and then it had to be in a broken fire, but always there was
the "Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!" When Coveleski looked at McGraw
coaching on third base, the manager made as if to beat a snare drum, and
as he glanced at Latham stationed at first, "Arlie" would reply with the
"rat-a-tat-tat."

The team on the bench sounded like a fife and drum corps without the
fifes, and Coveleski got no peace. In the fourth inning, after the game
had been hopelessly lost by the Philadelphia club, Coveleski was taken
out. We did not understand the reason for it, but we all knew that we had
found Coveleski's "groove" with that "rat-a-tat-tat" chorus. The man who
had beaten the New York club out of a pennant never won another game
against the Giants.

"Say," said McGraw to "Tacks" Ashenbach the next time the club was in
Cincinnati, "there are two things I want to ask you. First, why does that
'rat-a-tat-tat' thing get under Coveleski's skin so badly, and, second,
why didn't you mention it to us when he was beating the club out of a
championship last fall?"

"Never thought of it," asserted Ashenbach. "Just chanced to be telling
stories one day last winter about the old times in the Tri-State, when
that weakness of Coveleski's happened to pop into my mind. Thought maybe
he was cured."

"Cured!" echoed McGraw. "Only way he could be cured of that is to poison
him. But tip me. Why is it?"

"Well, this is the way I heard it," answered Ashenbach. "When he was a
coal miner back in Shamokin, Pennsylvania, he got stuck on some Jane who
was very fond of music. Everybody who was any one played in the Silver
Cornet Band down in Melodeon Hall on Thursday nights. The girl told
Coveleski that she couldn't see him with an X-ray unless he broke into the
band.

"'But I can't play any instrument,' said the Pole.

"'Well, get busy and learn, and don't show around here until you have,'
answered the girl.

"Now Coveleski had no talent for music, so he picked out the snare drum as
his victim and started practising regularly, getting some instruction from
the local bandmaster. After he had driven all the neighbors pretty nearly
crazy, the bandmaster said he would give him a show at the big annual
concert, when he tried to get all the pieces in his outfit that he could.
Things went all right until it was time for Coveleski to come along with a
little bit on the snare drum, and then he was nowhere in the neighborhood.
He didn't even swing at it. But later, when the leader waved for a solo
from the fiddle, Coveleski mistook it for his hit-and-run sign and came in
so strong on the snare drum that no one could identify the fiddle in the
mixup.

"The result was that the leader asked for waivers on old Coveleski very
promptly, and the girl was not long in following suit. That snare drum
incident has been the sore point in his makeup ever since."

"I wish I'd known it last fall about the first of September," declared
McGraw.

But the real snapper came later when the Cincinnati club was whipsawed on
the information. In a trade with Philadelphia, Griffith got Coveleski for
Cincinnati along with several other players. Each game he started against
us he got the old "rat-a-tat-tat." Griffith protested to the umpires, but
it is impossible to stop a thing of that sort even though the judges of
play did try.

The Pole did not finish another game against the Giants until his last in
the Big League. One day we were hitting him near and far, and the
"rat-a-tat-tat" chorus was only interrupted by the rattle of the bats
against the ball, when he looked in at the bench to see if Griffith wanted
to take him out, for it was about his usual leaving time.

"Stay in there and get it," shouted back Griff.

Coveleski did. He absorbed nineteen hits and seventeen runs at the hands
of the Giants, this man who had taken a championship of the National
League away from us.

That night Griffith asked for waivers on him, and he left the Big Leagues
for good. He was a good twirler, except for that one flaw, which cost him
his place in the big show. There is little mercy among professional ball
players when a game is at stake, especially if the man has taken a
championship away from a team by insisting upon working out of his turn,
so he can win games that will benefit his club not a scintilla.

Mordecai Brown, the great pitcher of the Chicago Cubs and the man who did
more than any other one player to bring four National League pennants and
two world's championships to that club, has a physical deformity which has
turned out to be an advantage. Many years ago, Brown lost most of the
first finger of his right hand in an argument with a feed cutter, said
finger being amputated at the second joint; while his third finger is
shorter than it should be, because a hot grounder carried part of it away
one day. In some strange way, Brown has achieved wonders with this
crippled hand. It is on account of the missing finger that he is called
"Three Fingered" Brown, and he is better known by that appellation than by
his real name.

Brown beat the Giants a hard game one day in 1911, pitching against me. He
had a big curve, lots of speed, and absolute control. The Giants could
not touch him. Next day McGraw was out warming up with Arthur Wilson, the
young catcher on the club.

"Wonder if he gets any new curve with that short first finger?" said
McGraw, and thereupon crooked his own initial digit and began trying to
throw the ball in different ways off it to see what the result would be.
Finally he decided:

"No, I guess he doesn't get anything extra with the abbreviated finger,
but that's lucky for you fellows, because, if I thought he did, I'd have a
surgeon out here to-morrow operating on the first fingers of each of you
pitchers."

Brown is my idea of the almost perfect pitcher He is always ready to work.
It is customary for most managers in the Big Leagues to say to a man on
the day he is slated to pitch:

"Well, how do you feel to-day? Want to work?"

Then if the twirler is not right, he has a chance to say so. But Brown
always replies:

"Yes, I'm ready."

He likes to pitch and is in chronic condition. It will usually be found at
the end of a season that he has taken part in more games than any other
pitcher in the country. He held the Chicago pitching staff together in
1911.

"Three Fingered" Brown is a finished pitcher in all departments of the
game. Besides being a great worker, he is a wonderful fielder and sure
death on bunts. He spends weeks in the spring preparing himself to field
short hits in the infield, and it is fatal to try to bunt against him. He
has perfected and used successfully for three years a play invented by
"Joe" McGinnity, the former Giant pitcher. This play is with men on first
and second bases and no one out or one out. The batter tries to sacrifice,
but instead of fielding the ball to first base, which would advance the
two base runners as intended, Brown makes the play to third and thus
forces out the man nearest the plate. This is usually successful unless
the bunt is laid down perfectly along the first base line, so that the
ball cannot be thrown to third base.

The Cubs have always claimed it was this play which broke the Detroit
club's heart in the world's series in 1908, and turned the tide so that
the Cubs took the championship. The American League team was leading in
the first game, and runners were on first and second bases, "Ty" Cobb
being on the middle sack. It was evident that the batter would try to
sacrifice. Brown walked over to Steinfeldt, playing third base, pulling
out a chew of tobacco as he went.

"No matter what this guy does or where he hits it, stick to your bag,"
ordered Brown.

Then he put the chew of tobacco in his mouth, a sign which augurs ill for
his opponents, and pitched a low one to the batter, a perfect ball to
bunt. He followed the pitch through and was on top of the plate as the
batter laid it down. The ball rolled slowly down the third base line until
Brown pounced on it. He whirled and drove the ball at Steinfeldt, getting
Cobb by a foot. That play carried Detroit off its feet, as a sudden
reversal often will a ball club, when things are apparently breaking for
it. Cobb, the Tigers' speed flash, had been caught at third base on an
attempted sacrifice, an unheard of play, and, from that point on, the
American Leaguers wilted, according to the stories of Chance and his men.

It is Brown's perfect control that has permitted catchers like Kling and
Archer to make such great records as throwers. This pitcher can afford to
waste a ball--that is, pitch out so the batter cannot hit it, but putting
the catcher in a perfect position to throw--and then he knows he can get
the next one over. A catcher's efficiency as a thrower depends largely on
the pitcher's ability to have good enough control of the ball to be able
to pitch out when it is necessary. Brown helps a catcher by the way in
which he watches the bases, not permitting the runners to take any lead on
him. All around, I think that he is one of the most finished pitchers of
the game.

Russell Ford, of the New York American League club, has a hard pitching
motion because he seems to throw a spit ball with a jerk. He cannot pitch
more than one good game in four or five days. McGraw had detected this
weakness from watching the Highlanders play before the post-season series
in 1910, and took advantage of it.

"If Ford pitches to-day," said McGraw to his team in the clubhouse before
the first game, "wait everything out to the last minute. Make him pitch
every ball you can."

McGraw knew that the strain on Ford's arm would get him along toward the
end of the game. In the eighth inning the score was tied when Devore came
to the bat. No crack in Ford was perceptible to the rest of us, but McGraw
must have detected some slight sign of weakening. He stopped "Josh" on the
way to the plate and ordered:

"Now go ahead and get him."

By the time the inning was over, the Giants had made four runs, and
eventually won the game by the score of 5 to 1. McGraw just played for
this flaw in Ford's pitching, and hung his whole plan of battle on the
chance of it showing.

"Old Cy" Young has the absolutely perfect pitching motion. When he jumped
from the National League to the Boston American League club some years
ago, during the war times, many National League players thought that he
was through.

"What," said Fred Clarke, the manager of the Pittsburg club, "you American
Leaguers letting that old boy make good in your set? Why, he was done when
he jumped the National. He'd lost his speed."

"But you ought to see his curve ball," answered "Bill" Dineen, then
pitching for the Boston Americans.

"Curve ball," echoed Clarke. "He never had any curve that it didn't take a
microscope to find. He depended on his speed."

"Well, he's got one now," replied Dineen.

Clarke had a chance to look at the curve ball later, for, with Dineen,
Young did a lot toward winning the world's championship for Boston from
Pittsburg in 1903. The old pitcher was wise enough to realize, when he
began to lose his speed, that he would have to develop a curve ball or go
back to the minors, and he set to work and produced a peach. He is still
pitching--for the National League now--and he will win a lot of games yet.
When he came back in 1911, the American Leaguers said:

"What, going to let that old man in your show again? He's done."

Maybe he will yet figure in another world's championship. One never can
tell. Anyway, he has taken a couple of falls out of Pittsburg just for
good luck since he came back to the National League.

Some pitchers depend largely on their motions to fool batters. "Motion
pitchers" they might be called. Such an elaborate wind-up is developed
that it is hard for a hitter to tell when and from where the ball is
coming. "Slim" Sallee of the St. Louis Nationals hasn't any curve to
mention and he lacks speed, but he wins a lot of ball games on his motion.

"It's a crime," says McGraw, "to let a fellow like that beat you. Why, he
has so little on the ball that it looks like one of those Salome dancers
when it comes up to the plate, and actually makes me blush."

But Sallee will take a long wind-up and shoot one off his shoe tops and
another from his shoulder while he is facing second base. He has good
control, has catalogued the weaknesses of the batters, and can work the
corners. With this capital, he was winning ball games for the Cardinals in
1911 until he fell off the water wagon. He is different from Raymond in
that respect. When he is on the vehicle, he is on it, and, when he is off,
he is distinctly a pedestrian.

The way the Giants try to beat Sallee is to get men on the bases, because
then he has to cut down his motion or they will run wild on him. As soon
as a runner gets on the bag with Sallee pitching, he tries to steal to
make "Slim" reduce that long winding motion which is his greatest asset.
But Sallee won several games from the Giants last season because we could
not get enough men on the bases to beat him. He only gave us four or five
hits per contest.

For a long time, "Josh" Devore, the Giants' left-fielder, was "plate shy"
with left-handers--that is, he stepped away--and all the pitchers in the
League soon learned of this and started shooting the first ball, a fast
one, at his head to increase his natural timidity. Sallee, in particular,
had him scared.

"Stand up there," said McGraw to "Josh" one day when Sallee was pitching,
"and let him hit you. He hasn't speed enough to hurt you."

"Josh" did, got hit, and found out that what McGraw said was true. It
cured him of being afraid of Sallee.

As getting men on the bases decreases Sallee's effectiveness, even if he
is a left-hander, so it increases the efficiency of "Lefty" Leifield of
Pittsburg. The Giants never regard Sallee as a left-hander with men on the
bases. Most southpaws can keep a runner close to the bag because they are
facing first base when in a position to pitch, but Sallee cannot. On the
other hand, Leifield uses almost exactly the same motion to throw to first
base as to pitch to the batter. These two are so nearly alike that he can
change his mind after he starts and throw to the other place.

He keeps men hugging the bag, and it is next to impossible to steal bases
on him. If he gets his arm so far forward in pitching to the batter that
he cannot throw to the base, he can see a man start and pitch out so the
catcher has a fine chance to get the runner at second. If the signal is
for a curved ball, he can make it a high curve, and the catcher is in
position to throw. Leifield has been working this combination pitch either
to first base or the plate for years, and the motion for each is so
similar that even the umpires cannot detect it and never call a balk on
him.

A busher broke into the League with the Giants one fall and was batting
against Pittsburg. There was a man on first base and Leifield started to
pitch to the plate, saw by a quick glance that the runner was taking too
large a lead, and threw to first. The youngster swung at the ball and
started to run it out. Every one laughed.

"What were you trying to do?" asked McGraw.

"I hit the ball," protested the bush leaguer. That is how perfect
Leifield's motion is with men on the bases. But most of his effectiveness
resides in that crafty motion.

Many New York fans will remember "Dummy" Taylor, the deaf and dumb pitcher
of the Giants. He won ball games for the last two years he was with the
club on his peculiar, whirling motion, but as soon as men got on the bases
and he had to cut it down, McGraw would take him out. That swing and his
irresistible good nature are still winning games in the International
League, which used to be the Eastern.

So if a pitcher expects to be a successful Big Leaguer, he must guard
against eccentricities of temperament and mechanical motion. As I have
said, Drucke of the Giants for a long time had a little movement with his
foot which indicated to the runner when he was going to pitch, and they
stole bases wildly on him. But McGraw soon discovered that something was
wrong and corrected it. The armor of a Big Leaguer must be impenetrable,
for there are seven clubs always looking for flaws in the manufacture, and
"every little movement has a meaning of its own."




V

Playing the Game from the Bench

     _Behind Every Big League Ball Game there Is a Master Mind which
     Directs the Moves of the Players--How McGraw Won Two Pennants for the
     Giants from the "Bench" and Lost One by Giving the Players Too Much
     Liberty--The Methods of "Connie" Mack and Other Great Leaders_


The bench! To many fans who see a hundred Big League ball games each
season, this is a long, hooded structure from which the next batter
emerges and where the players sit while their club is at bat. It is also
the resort of the substitutes, manager, mascot and water cooler.

But to the ball player it is the headquarters. It is the place from which
the orders come, and it is here that the battle is planned and from here
the moves are executed. The manager sits here and pulls the wires, and
his players obey him as if they were manikins.

"The batteries for to-day's game," says the umpire, "will be Sallee and
Bresnahan for St. Louis; Wiltse and Meyers for New York."

"Bunt," says McGraw as his players scatter to take their positions on the
field. He repeats the order when they come to the bat for the first
inning, because he knows that Sallee has two weaknesses, one being that he
cannot field bunts and the other that a great deal of activity in the box
tires him out so that he weakens. A bunting game hits at both these flaws.
As soon as Bresnahan observes the plan of battle, he arranges his players
to meet the attack; draws in his third baseman, shifts the shortstop more
down the line toward third base, and is on the alert himself to gather in
slow rollers just in front of the plate. The idea is to give Sallee the
minimum opportunity to get at the ball and reduce his fielding
responsibilities to nothing or less. There is one thing about Sallee's
style known to every Big League manager. He is not half as effective with
men on the bases, for he depends largely on his deceptive motion to fool
the batters, and when he has to cut this down because runners are on the
bases, his pitching ability evaporates.

After the old Polo Grounds had been burned down in the spring of 1911, we
were playing St. Louis at American League Park one Saturday afternoon, and
the final returns of the game were about 19 to 5 in our favor, as near as
I can remember. We made thirteen runs in the first inning. Many spectators
went away from the park talking about a slaughter and a runaway score and
so on. That game was won in the very first inning when Sallee went into
the box to pitch, and McGraw had murmured that mystic word "Bunt!"

The first batters bunted, bunted, bunted in monotonous succession. Sallee
not yet in very good physical condition because it was early in the
season, was stood upon his head by this form of attack. Bresnahan redraped
his infield to try to stop this onslaught, and then McGraw switched.

"Hit it," he directed the next batter.

A line drive whistled past Mowrey's ears, the man who plays third base on
the Cardinals. He was coming in to get a bunt. Another followed. The break
had come. Bresnahan removed Sallee and put another pitcher into the box,
but once a ball club starts to hit the ball, it is like a skidding
automobile. It can't be stopped. The Giants kept on and piled up a
ridiculous and laughable score, which McGraw had made possible in the
first inning by directing his men to bunt.

The Giants won the championship of the National League in 1904 and the New
York fans gave the team credit for the victory. It was a club of young
players, and McGraw realized this fact when he started his campaign. Every
play that season was made from the bench, made by John McGraw through his
agents, his manikins, who moved according to the wires which he pulled.
And by the end of the summer his hands were badly calloused from pulling
wires, but the Giants had the pennant.

When the batter was at the plate in a critical stage, he would stall and
look to the "bench" for orders to discover whether to hit the ball out or
lay it down, whether to try the hit and run, or wait for the base runner
to attempt to steal. By stalling, I mean that he would tie his shoe or fix
his belt, or find any little excuse to delay the game so that he could get
a flash at the "bench" for orders. A shoe lace has played an important
role in many a Big League battle, as I will try to show later on in this
story. If it ever became the custom to wear button shoes, the game would
have to be revised.

As the batter looked toward the bench, McGraw might reach for his
handkerchief to blow his nose, and the batter knew it was up to him to hit
the ball out. Some days in that season of 1904 I saw McGraw blow his nose
during a game until it was red and sore on the end, and then another day,
when he had a cold in his head, he had to do without his handkerchief
because he wanted to play a bunting game. Until his cold got better, he
had to switch to another system of signs.

During that season, each coacher would keep his eye on the bench for
orders. Around McGraw revolved the game of the Giants. He was the game.
And most of that summer he spent upon the bench, because from there he
could get the best look at the diamond, and his observations were not
confined to one place or to one base runner. He was able to discover
whether an out-fielder was playing too close for a batter, or too far
out, and rearrange the men. He could perhaps catch a sign from the
opposing catcher and pass it along to the batter. And he won the pennant
from the bench. He was seldom seen on the coaching lines that year.

Many fans wonder why, when the Giants get behind in a game, McGraw takes
to the bench, after having been out on the coaching lines inning after
inning while the club was holding its own or winning. Time and again I
have heard him criticised for this by spectators and even by players on
other clubs.

"McGraw is 'yellow,'" players have said to me. "Just as soon as his club
gets behind, he runs for cover."

The crime of being "yellow" is the worst in the Big Leagues. It means that
a man is afraid, that he lacks the nerve to face the music. But McGraw and
"yellow" are as far apart as the poles, or Alpha and Omega, or Fifth
Avenue and the Bowery, or any two widely separated and distant things. I
have seen McGraw go on to ball fields where he is as welcome as a man with
the black smallpox and face the crowd alone that, in the heat of its
excitement, would like to tear him apart. I have seen him take all sorts
of personal chances. He doesn't know what fear is, and in his bright
lexicon of baseball there is no such word as "fear." His success is partly
due to his indomitable courage.

There is a real reason for his going to the bench when the team gets
behind. It is because this increases the club's chances of winning. From
the bench he can see the whole field, can note where his fielders are
playing, can get a peek at the other bench, and perhaps pick up a tip as
to what to expect. He can watch his own pitcher, or observe whether the
opposing twirler drops his throwing arm as if weary. He is at the helm
when "on the bench," and, noting any flaw in the opposition, he is in a
position to take advantage of it at a moment's notice, or, catching some
sign of faltering among his own men, he is immediately there to strengthen
the weakness. Many a game he has pulled out of the fire by going back to
the bench and watching. So the idea obtained by many spectators that he is
quitting is the wrong one. He is only fighting harder.

The Giants were playing Pittsburg one day in the season of 1909, and
Clarke and McGraw had been having a great guessing match. It was one of
those give-and-take games with plenty of batting, with one club forging
ahead and then the other. Clarke had saved the game for Pittsburg in the
sixth inning by a shoe-string. Leifield had been pitching up to this
point, and he wasn't there or even in the neighborhood. But still the
Pirates were leading by two runs, having previously knocked Ames out of
the box. Doyle and McCormick made hits with no one out in our half of the
sixth.

It looked like the "break," and McGraw was urging his players on to even
up the score, when Clarke suddenly took off his sun glasses in left field
and stooped down to tie his shoe. When he removes his sun-glasses that is
a sign for a pitcher to warm up in a hurry, and "Babe" Adams sprinted to
the outfield with a catcher and began to heat up. Clarke took all of five
minutes to tie that shoe, McGraw violently protesting against the delay in
the meantime. Fred Clarke has been known to wear out a pair of shoe laces
in one game tying and untying them. After the shoe was fixed up, he jogged
slowly to the bench and took Leifield out of the box. In the interim,
Adams had had an opportunity to warm up, and Clarke raised his arm and
ordered him into the box. He fanned the next two men, and the last batter
hit an easy roller to Wagner. We were still two runs to the bad after that
promising start in the sixth, and Clarke, for the time being, had saved
the game by a shoe string.

McGraw, who had been on the coaching lines up to this point, retired to
the bench after that, and I heard one of those wise spectators, sitting
just behind our coop, who could tell Mr. Rockefeller how to run his
business but who spends his life working as a clerk at $18 a week, remark
to a friend:

"It's all off now. McGraw has laid down."

Watching the game through eyes half shut and drawn to a focus, McGraw
waited. In the seventh inning Clarke came to bat with two men on the
bases. A hit would have won the game beyond any doubt. In a flash McGraw
was on his feet and ran out to Meyers, catching. He stopped the game, and,
with a wave of his arm, drew Harry McCormick, playing left field, in close
to third base. The game went on, and Wiltse twisted a slow curve over the
outside corner of the plate to Clarke, a left-handed hitter. He timed his
swing and sent a low hit singing over third base. McCormick dashed in and
caught the ball off his shoe tops. That made three outs. McGraw had saved
our chances of victory right there, for had McCormick been playing where
he originally intended before McGraw stopped the contest, the ball would
have landed in unguarded territory and two runs would have been scored.

But McGraw had yet the game to win. As his team came to the bat for the
seventh, he said:

"This fellow Adams is a youngster and liable to be nervous and wild.
Wait."

The batters waited with the patience of Job. Each man let the first two
balls pass him and made Adams pitch himself to the limit to every batter.
It got on Adams's nerves. In the ninth he passed a couple of men, and a
hit tied the score. Clarke left him in the box, for he was short of
pitchers. On the game went to ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, innings. The
score was still tied and Wiltse was pitching like a machine. McGraw was on
the bench, leaving the coaching to his lieutenants. The club was still
waiting for the youngster to weaken. At last, in the thirteenth, after one
man had been put out, the eye of McGraw saw Adams drop his pitching arm to
his side as if tired. It was only a minute motion. None of the spectators
saw it, none of the players.

"Now hit it, boys," came the order from the "bench." The style was
switched, and the game won when three hits were rattled out. McGraw alone
observed that sign of weakening and took advantage of it at the opportune
time. He won the game from the bench. That is what makes him a great
manager, observing the little things. Anyone can see the big ones. If he
had been on the coaching lines, he would not have had as good an
opportunity to study the young pitcher, for he would have had to devote
his attention to the base runners. He might have missed this sign of
wilting.

McGraw is always studying a pitcher, particularly a new one in the League.
The St. Louis club had a young pitcher last fall, named Laudermilk, who
was being tried out. He had a brother on the team. In his first game
against the Giants, played in St. Louis, he held us to a few scattered
hits and gave us a terrific battle, only losing the game because one of
his fielders made a costly error behind him. The papers of St. Louis
boosted him as another "Rube" Waddell. He was left-handed. McGraw laughed.

"All I want," he said, "is another crack at that Buttermilk after what I
learned about him this afternoon. He can't control his curve, and all you
fellows have got to do is wait for his fast one. He gave you that fight
to-day because he had you all swinging at bad curve balls."

Laudermilk made another appearance against the Giants later, and he made
his disappearance in that game in the fourth inning, when only one was out
to be exact, after we had scored five runs off him by waiting for his fast
one, according to McGraw's orders.

After winning the pennant in 1904 by sitting on the bench, keeping away
from the coaching lines, and making every play himself, McGraw decided
that his men were older and knew the game and that he would give them more
rein in 1905. He appeared oftener on the coaching lines and attended more
to the base runners than to the game as a whole. But in the crises he was
the man who decided what was to be done. The club won the pennant that
year and the world's championship. The players got very chesty immediately
thereafter, and the buttons on their vests had to be shifted back to make
room for the new measure. They knew the game and had won two pennants,
besides a championship of the world.

So in the season of 1906 McGraw started with a team of veterans, and it
was predicted that he would repeat. But these men, who knew the game, were
making decisions for themselves because McGraw was giving them more
liberty. The runners went wild on the bases and tried things at the wrong
stages. They lost game after game. At last, after a particularly
disastrous defeat one day, McGraw called his men together in the clubhouse
and addressed them in this wise:

"Because you fellows have won two championships and beaten the Athletics
is no reason for you all to believe that you are fit to write a book on
how to play baseball. You are just running wild on the bases. You might as
well not have a manager. Now don't any one try to pull anything without
orders. We will begin all over again."

But it is hard to teach old ball-players new tricks, and several fines
had to be imposed before the orders were obeyed. The club did not win the
championship that year.

When McGraw won the pennant in 1911, he did it with a club of youngsters,
many of them playing through their first whole season as regulars in the
company. There were Snodgrass and Devore and Fletcher and Marquard. Every
time a batter went to the plate, he had definite orders from the "bench"
as to what he was to attempt--whether to take two, or lay the ball down,
or swing, or work the hit and run. Each time that a man shot out from
first base like a catapulted figure and slid into second, he had been
ordered by McGraw to try to steal. If players protested against his
judgment, his invariable answer was:

"Do what I tell you, and I'll take the blame for mistakes."

One of McGraw's laments is, "I wish I could be in three places at once."

I never heard him say it with such a ring to the words as after Snodgrass
was touched out in the third game of the 1911 world's series, in the tenth
inning, when his life might have meant victory in that game anyway. I
have frequently referred to the incident in these stories, so most of my
readers are familiar with the situation. Snodgrass was put out trying to
get to third base on a short passed ball, after he had started back for
second to recover some of the ground he had taken in too long a lead
before the ball got to Lapp. McGraw's face took on an expression of agony
as if he were watching his dearest friend die.

"If I could only have been there!" he said. "I wish I could be in three
places at once."

He meant the bench, the first base coaching line, and the third base line.
At this particular time he was giving the batters orders from the bench.
It was one of those incidents which come up in a ball game and have to be
decided in the drawing of a breath, so that a manager cannot give orders
unless he is right on the spot.

It is my opinion that it is a big advantage to a team to have the manager
on the bench rather than in the game. Frank Chance of the Chicago Cubs is
a great leader, but I think he would be a greater one if he could find one
of his mechanical ability to play first base, and he could sit on the
bench as the director general. He is occupied with the duties of his
position and often little things get by him. I believe that we beat the
Cubs in two games in 1909 because Chance was playing first base instead of
directing the game from the bench.

In the first contest Ames was pitching and Schlei catching. Now, Schlei
was no three hundred hitter, but he was a good man in a pinch and looked
like Wagner when compared to Ames as a swatter. Schlei came up to the bat
with men on second and third bases, two out, and a chance to win or put us
ahead if he could make a hit. The first time it happened, McGraw unfolded
his arms and relaxed, which is a sign that he is conceding something for
the time being.

"No use," he said. "All those runners are going to waste. We'll have to
make another try in the next inning. They will surely pass Schlei to take
a chance on Ames."

Then Overall, who was pitching, whistled a strike over the plate and
McGraw's body tightened and the old lines around the mouth appeared. Here
was a chance yet.

"They're going to let him hit," he cried joyfully.

Schlei made a base hit on the next pitch and scored both men. Almost the
same thing happened later on in the season with men on second and third
bases, and Raymond, another featherweight hitter, pitching. It struck me
as being an oversight on the part of Chance on both occasions, probably
because he was so busy with his own position and watching the players on
the field that he didn't notice the pitcher was the next batter. He let
Schlei hit each time, which probably cost him two games.

The Giants were playing St. Louis at the Polo Grounds in 1910, and I was
pitching against Harmon. I held the Cardinals to one hit up to the ninth
inning, and we had the game won by the score of 1 to 0, when their first
batter in the ninth walked. Then, after two had been put out, another
scratched a hit. It looked as if we still had the game won, since only one
man was left to be put out and the runners were on first and second bases.
Mowrey, the red-headed third baseman, came to the bat.

"Murray's playing too near centre field for this fellow," remarked McGraw
to some of the players on the bench.

Hardly had he said it when Mowrey shoved a long fly to right field, which
soared away toward the stand. Murray started to run with the ball. For a
minute it looked as if he were going to get there, and then it just tipped
his outstretched hands as it fell to the ground. It amounted to a
three-base hit and won the game for the Cardinals by the score of 2 to 1.

"I knew it," said McGraw, one of whose many roles is as a prophet of evil.
"Didn't I call the turn? I ought to have gone out there and stopped the
game and moved Murray over. I blame myself for that hit."

That was a game in which the St. Louis batters made three hits and won it.
It isn't the number of hits, so much as when they come, that wins ball
games.

Frequently, McGraw will stop a game--bring it to a dead standstill--by
walking out from the bench as the pitcher is about to wind up.

"Stop it a minute, Meyers," he will shout. "Pull Snodgrass in a little bit
for this fellow."

The man interested in statistics would be surprised at how many times
little moves of this sort have saved games. But for the McGraw system to
be effective, he must have working for him a set of players who are
taking the old look around for orders all the time. He has a way of
inducing the men to keep their heads up which has worked very well. If a
player has been slow or has not taken all the distance McGraw believes is
possible on a hit, he often finds $10 less in his pay envelope at the end
of the month. And the conversation on the bench at times, when men have
made errors of omission, would not fit into any Sunday-school room.

During a game for the most part, McGraw is silent, concentrating his
attention on the game, and the players talk in low tones, as if in church,
discussing the progress of the contest. But let a player make a bad break,
and McGraw delivers a talk to him that would have to be written on
asbestos paper.

Arthur Wilson was coaching at third base in one of the games in a series
played in Philadelphia the first part of September, 1911. There were
barely enough pitchers to go around at the time, and McGraw was very
careful to take advantage of every little point, so that nothing would be
wasted. He feels that if a game is lost because the other side is better,
there is some excuse, but if it goes because some one's head should be
used for furniture instead of thinking baseball, it is like losing money
that might have been spent. Fletcher was on second base when Meyers came
to bat. The Indian pushed the ball to right field along the line. Fletcher
came steaming around third base and could have rolled home safely, but
Wilson, misjudging the hit, rushed out, tackled him, and threw him back on
the bag. Even the plodding Meyers reached second on the hit and McGraw was
boiling. He promptly sent a coacher out to relieve Wilson, and his oratory
to the young catcher would have made a Billingsgate fishwife sore. We
eventually won the game, but at this time there was only a difference of
something like one, and it would have been a big relief to have seen that
run which Wilson interrupted across the plate.

McGraw is always on Devore's hip because he often feels that this
brilliant young player does not get as much out of his natural ability as
he might. He is frequently listless, and, often, after a good hit, he will
feel satisfied with himself and fan out a couple of times. So McGraw does
all that he can to discourage this self-satisfaction. "Josh" is a great
man in a pinch, for he hangs on like a bulldog, and instead of getting
nervous, works the harder. If the reader will consult past history, he
will note that it was a pinch hit by Devore which won the first
world-series game, and one of his wallops, combined with a timely bingle
by Crandall, was largely instrumental in bringing the second victory to
the Giants. McGraw has made Devore the ball-player that he is by skilful
handling.

The Giants were having a nip and tuck game with the Cubs in the early part
of last summer, when Devore came to the bat in one of those pinches and
shot a three bagger over third base which won the game. As he slid into
third and picked himself up, feeling like more or less of a hero because
the crowd was announcing this fact to him by prolonged cheers, McGraw
said:

"Gee, you're a lucky guy. I wish I had your luck. You were shot full of
horseshoes to get that one. When I saw you shut your eyes, I never thought
you would hit it."

This was like pricking a bubble, and "Josh's" chest returned to its normal
measure.

Marquard is another man whom McGraw constantly subjects to a
conversational massage. Devore and Marquard room together on the road,
and they got to talking about their suite at the hotel during a close game
in Philadelphia one day. It annoys McGraw to hear his men discussing
off-stage subjects during a critical contest, because it not only
distracts their attention, but his and that of the other players.

"Ain't that room of ours a dandy, Rube?" asked Devore.

"Best in the lot," replied Marquard.

"It's got five windows and swell furniture," said Devore.

"Solid mahogany," said McGraw, who apparently had been paying no attention
to the conversation. "That is, judging by some of the plays I have seen
you two pull. Now can the conversation."

Devore went down into Cuba with the Giants, carrying quite a bank roll
from the world's series, and the idea that he was on a picnic. He started
a personally conducted tour of Havana on his first night there and we lost
the game the next day, "Josh" overlooking several swell opportunities to
make hits in pinches. In fact he didn't even get a foul.

"You are fined $25," said McGraw to him after the game.

"You can't fine me," said Devore. "I'm not under contract."

"Then you take the next boat home," replied the manager. "I didn't come
down here to let a lot of coffee-colored Cubans show me up. You've got to
either play ball or go home."

Devore made four hits the next day.

In giving his signs from the bench to the players, McGraw depends on a
gesture or catch word. When "Dummy" Taylor, the deaf and dumb twirler, was
with the club, all the players learned the deaf and dumb language. This
medium was used for signing for a time, until smart ball players, like
Evers and Leach, took up the study of it and became so proficient they
could converse fluently on their fingers. But they were also great
"listeners," and we didn't discover for some time that this was how they
were getting our signs. Thereafter we only used the language for social
purposes.

Evers and McGraw got into a conversation one day in the deaf and dumb
language at long range and "Johnny" Evers threw a finger out of joint
replying to McGraw in a brilliant flash of repartee.

Every successful manager is a distinct type. Each plays the game from the
bench. "Connie" Mack gives his men more liberty than most. Chance rules
for the most part with an iron hand. Bresnahan is ever spurring his men
on. Chance changes his seat on the bench, and there is a double steal.
"Connie" Mack uncrosses his legs, and the hit and run is tried.

Most managers transmit their signs by movements or words. Jennings is
supposed to have hidden in his jumble of jibes some catch words.

The manager on the bench must know just when to change pitchers. He has to
decide the exact time to send in a substitute hitter, when to install
another base runner. All these decisions must be made in the "batting" of
an eye. It takes quick and accurate judgment, and the successful manager
must be right usually. That's playing the game from the bench.




VI

Coaching Good and Bad

     _Coaching is Divided into Three Parts: Offensive, Defensive, and the
     Use of Crowds to Rattle Players--Why McGraw Developed Scientific
     Coaching--The Important Role a Coacher Plays in the Crisis of a Big
     League Ball Game when, on his Orders, Hangs Victory or Defeat._


Critical moments occur in every close ball game, when coaching may win or
lose it. "That wasn't the stage for you to try to score," yelled John
McGraw, the manager of the Giants, at "Josh" Devore, as the New York
left-fielder attempted to count from second base on a short hit to left
field, with no one out and the team one run behind in a game with the
Pirates one day in 1911, when every contest might mean the winning or
losing of the pennant.

"First time in my life I was ever thrown out trying to score from second
on a base hit to the outfield," answered Devore, "and besides the coacher
sent me in."

"I don't care," replied McGraw, "that was a two out play."

As a matter of fact, one of the younger players on the team was coaching
at third base at the time and made an error of judgment in sending Devore
home, of which an older head would not have been guilty. And the Pirates
beat us by just that one run the coacher sacrificed. The next batter came
through with an outfield fly which would have scored Devore from third
base easily.

Probably no more wily general ever crouched on the coaching line at third
base than John McGraw. His judgment in holding runners or urging them on
to score is almost uncanny. Governed by no set rules himself, he has
formulated a list of regulations for his players which might be called the
"McGraw Coaching Curriculum." He has favorite expressions, such as "there
are stages" and "that was a two out play," which mean certain chances are
to be taken by a coacher at one point in a contest, while to attempt such
a play under other circumstances would be nothing short of foolhardy.

With the development of baseball, coaching has advanced until it is now an
exact science. For many years the two men who stood at first and third
bases were stationed there merely to bullyrag and abuse the pitchers,
often using language that was a disgrace to a ball field. When they were
not busy with this part of their art, they handed helpful hints to the
runners as to where the ball was and whether the second baseman was
concealing it under his shirt (a favorite trick of the old days), while
the pitcher pretended to prepare to deliver it. But as rules were made
which strictly forbade the use of indecent language to a pitcher, and as
the old school of clowns passed, coaching developed into a science, and
the sentries stationed at first and third bases found themselves occupying
important jobs.

For some time McGraw frowned down upon scientific coaching, until its
value was forcibly brought home to him one day by an incident that
occurred at the Polo Grounds, and since then he has developed it until his
knowledge of advising base runners is the pinnacle of scientific
coaching.

A few years ago, the Giants were having a nip and tuck struggle one day,
when Harry McCormick, then the left-fielder, came to the plate and knocked
the ball to the old centre-field ropes. He sped around the bases, and when
he reached third, it looked as if he could roll home ahead of the ball.
"Cy" Seymour was coaching and surprised everybody by rushing out and
tackling McCormick, throwing him down and trying to force him back to
third base. But big McCormick got the best of the struggle, scrambled to
his feet, and finally scored after overcoming the obstacle that Seymour
made. That run won the game.

"What was the matter with you, Cy?" asked McGraw as Seymour came to the
bench after he had almost lost the game by his poor coaching.

"The sun got in my eyes, and I couldn't see the ball," replied Seymour.

"You'd better wear smoked glasses the next time you go out to coach,"
replied the manager. The batter was hitting the ball due east, and the
game was being played in the afternoon, so Seymour had no alibi. From the
moment "Cy" made that mistake, McGraw realized the value of scientific
coaching, which means making the most of every hit in a game.

I have always held that a good actor with a knowledge of baseball would
make a good coacher, because it is the acting that impresses a base
runner, not the talking. More often than not, the conversation of a
coacher, be it ever so brilliant, is not audible above the screeching of
the crowd at critical moments. And I believe that McGraw is a great actor,
at least of the baseball school.

The cheering of the immense crowds which attend ball games, if it can be
organized, is a potent factor in winning or losing them. McGraw gets the
most out of a throng by his clever acting. Did any patron of the Polo
Grounds ever see him turn to the stands or make any pretence that he was
paying attention to the spectators? Does he ever play to the gallery? Yet
it is admitted that he can do more with a crowd, make it more malleable,
than any other man in baseball to-day.

The attitude of the spectators makes a lot of difference to a ball club. A
lackadaisical, half-interested crowd often results in the team playing
slovenly ball, while a lively throng can inject ginger into the men and
put the whole club on its toes. McGraw is skilled in getting the most out
of the spectators without letting them know that he is doing it.

Did you ever watch the little manager crouching, immovable, at third base
with a mitt on his hand, when the New York club goes to bat in the seventh
inning two runs behind? The first hitter gets a base on balls. McGraw
leaps into the air, kicks his heels together, claps his mitt, shouts at
the umpire, runs in and pats the next batter on the back, and says
something to the pitcher. The crowd gets it cue, wakes up and leaps into
the air, kicking its heels together. The whole atmosphere inside the park
is changed in a minute, and the air is bristling with enthusiasm. The
other coacher, at first base, is waving his hands and running up and down
the line, while the men on the bench have apparently gained new hope. They
are moving about restlessly, and the next two hitters are swinging their
bats in anticipation with a vigor which augurs ill for the pitcher. The
game has found Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth, and the little, silent
actor on the third base coaching line is the cause of the change.

"Nick" Altrock, the old pitcher on the Chicago White Sox, was one of the
most skilful men at handling a crowd that the game has ever developed. As
a pitcher, Altrock was largely instrumental in bringing a world's
championship to the American League team in 1906, and, as a coacher, after
his Big League pitching days were nearly done, he won many a game by his
work on the lines in pinches. Baseball has produced several comedians,
some with questionable ratings as humorists. There is "Germany" Schaefer
of the Washington team, and there were "Rube" Waddell, "Bugs" Raymond and
others, but "Nick" Altrock could give the best that the game has brought
out in the way of comic-supplement players a terrible battle for the
honors.

At the old south side park in Chicago, I have seen him go to the lines
with a catcher's mitt and a first-baseman's glove on his hands and lead
the untrained mob as skilfully as one of those pompadoured young men with
a megaphone does the undergraduates at a college football game.

My experience as a pitcher has been that it is not the steady, unbroken
flood of howling and yelling, with the incessant pounding of feet, that
gets on the nerves of a ball-player, but the broken, rhythmical waves of
sound or the constant reiteration of one expression. A man gets accustomed
to the steady cheering. It becomes a part of the game and his
surroundings, as much as the stands and the crowd itself are, and he does
not know that it is there. Let the coacher be clever enough to induce a
crowd to repeat over and over just one sentence such as "Get a hit," "Get
a hit," and it wears on the steadiest nerves. Nick Altrock had his
baseball chorus trained so that, by a certain motion of the arm, he could
get the crowd to do this at the right moment.

But the science of latter-day coaching means much more than using the
crowd. All coaching, like all Gaul and four or five other things, is
divided into three parts, defensive coaching, offensive coaching and the
use of the crowd. Offensive coaching means the handling of base runners,
and requires quick and accurate judgment. The defensive sort is the advice
that one player on the field gives another as to where to throw the ball,
who shall take a hit, and how the base runner is coming into the bag.
There is a sub-division of defensive coaching which might be called the
illegitimate brand. It is giving "phoney" advice to a base runner by the
fielders of the other side that may lead him, in the excitement of the
moment, to make a foolish play. This style has developed largely in the
Big Leagues in the last three or four years.

Offensive coaching, in my opinion, is the most important. For a man to be
a good coacher he must be trained for the work. The best coachers are the
seasoned players, the veterans of the game. A man must know the throwing
ability of each outfielder on the opposing club, he must be familiar with
the speed of the base runner whom he is handling, and he must be so
closely acquainted with the game as a whole that he knows the stages at
which to try a certain play and the circumstances under which the same
attempt would be foolish. Above all things, he must be a quick thinker.

Watch McGraw on the coaching lines some day. As he crouches, he picks up a
pebble and throws it out of his way, and two base runners start a double
steal. "Hughie" Jennings emits his famous "Ee-Yaah!" and the third
baseman creeps in, expecting Cobb to bunt with a man on first base and no
one out. The hitter pushes the ball on a line past the third baseman. The
next time Jennings shrieks his famous war-cry, it has a different
intonation, and the batter bunts.

"Bill" Dahlen of the Brooklyn club shouts, "Watch his foot," and the base
runner starts while the batter smashes the ball on a hit and run play.
Again the pitcher hears that "Watch his foot." He "wastes one," so that
the batter will not get a chance at the ball and turns to first base. He
is surprised to find the runner anchored there. Nothing has happened. So
it will be seen that the offensive coacher controls the situation and
directs the plays, usually taking his orders from the manager, if the boss
himself is not on the lines.

In 1911 the Giants led the National League by a good margin in stealing
bases, and to this speed many critics attributed the fact that the
championship was won by the club. I can safely say that every base which
was pilfered by a New York runner was stolen by the direct order of
McGraw, except in the few games from which he was absent. Then his
lieutenants followed his system as closely as any one can pursue the
involved and intricate style that he alone understands. If it was the base
running of the Giants that won the pennant for the club, then it was the
coaching of McGraw, employing the speed of his men and his opportunities,
which brought the championship to New York.

The first thing that every manager teaches his players now is to obey
absolutely the orders of the coacher, and then he selects able men to give
the advice. The brain of McGraw is behind each game the Giants play, and
he plans every move, most of the hitters going to the plate with definite
instructions from him as to what to try to do. In order to make this
system efficient, absolute discipline must be assured. If a player has
other ideas than McGraw as to what should be done, "Mac's" invariable
answer to him is:

"You do what I tell you, and I'll take the responsibility if we lose."

For two months at the end of 1911, McGraw would not let either "Josh"
Devore or John Murray swing at a first ball pitched to them. Murray did
this one day, after he had been ordered not to, and he was promptly fined
$10 and sat down on the bench, while Becker played right field. Many fans
doubtless recall the substitution of Becker, but could not understand the
move.

Murray and Devore are what are known in baseball as "first-ball hitters."
That is, they invariably hit at the first one delivered. They watch a
pitcher wind up and swing their bats involuntarily, as a man blinks his
eyes when he sees a blow started. It is probably due to slight
nervousness. The result was that the news of this weakness spread rapidly
around the circuit by the underground routes of baseball, and every
pitcher in the League was handing Devore and Murray a bad ball on the
first one. Of course, each would miss it or else make a dinky little hit.
They were always "in the hole," which means that the pitcher had the
advantage in the count. McGraw became exasperated after Devore had fanned
out three times one day by getting bad starts, hitting at the first ball.

"After this," said McGraw to both Murray and Devore in the clubhouse, "if
either of you moves his bat off his shoulder at a first ball, even if it
cuts the plate, you will be fined $10 and sat down."

Murray forgot the next day, saw the pitcher wind up, and swung his bat at
the first one. He spent the rest of the month on the bench. But Devore's
hitting improved at once because all the pitchers, expecting him to swing
at the first one, were surprised to find him "taking it" and, as it was
usually bad, he had the pitcher constantly "in the hole," instead of being
at a disadvantage himself. For this reason he was able to guess more
accurately what the pitcher was going to throw, and his hitting
consequently improved. So did Murray's after he had served his term on the
bench. The right-fielder hit well up to the world's series and then he
just struck a slump that any player is liable to encounter. But so
dependent is McGraw's system on absolute discipline for its success that
he dispensed with the services of a good player for a month to preserve
his style.

In contrast, "Connie" Mack, the manager of the Athletics, and by many
declared to be the greatest leader in the country (although each private,
of course, is true to his own general), lets his players use their own
judgment largely. He seldom gives a batter a direct order unless the pinch
is very stringent.

The most difficult position to fill as a coacher is at third base, the
critical corner. There a man's judgment must be lightning fast and always
accurate. He encourages runners with his voice, but his orders are given
primarily with his hands, because often the noise made by the crowd drowns
out the shouted instructions. Last, he must be prepared to handle all
sorts of base running.

On nearly every ball club, there are some players who are known in the
frank parlance of the profession as "hog wild runners."

The expression means that these players are bitten by a sort of "bug"
which causes them to lose their heads when once they get on the bases.
They cannot be stopped, oftentimes fighting with a coacher to go on to the
next base, when it is easy to see that if the attempt is made, the runner
is doomed.

New York fans have often seen McGraw dash out into the line at third base,
tackle Murray, and throw him back on the bag. He is a "hog wild" runner,
and with him on the bases, the duties of a coacher become more arduous. He
will insist on scoring if he is not stopped or does not drop dead.

Some youngster was coaching on third base in a game with Boston in the
summer of 1911 and the Giants had a comfortable lead of several runs.
Murray was on second when the batter hit clearly and sharply to left
field. Murray started, and, with his usual intensity of purpose, rounded
third base at top speed, bound to score. The ball was already on the way
home when Murray, about ten feet from the bag, tripped and fell. He
scrambled safely back to the cushion on all fours. There was nothing else
to do.

"This is his third year with me," laughed McGraw on the bench, "and that's
the first time he has ever failed to try to score from second base on a
hit unless he was tackled."

All ball clubs have certain "must" motions which are as strictly observed
as danger signals on a railroad. A coacher's hand upraised will stop a
base runner as abruptly as the uplifted white glove of a traffic policeman
halts a row of automobiles. A wave of the arm will start a runner going at
top speed again.

Many times a quick-witted ball-player wins a game for his club by his snap
judgment. Again McGraw is the master of that. He took a game from the
Cubs in 1911, because, always alert for flaws in the opposition, he
noticed the centre-fielder drop his arm after getting set to throw the
ball home. Devore was on second base, and one run was needed to win the
game. Doyle hit sharply to centre field, and Devore, coming from second,
started to slow up as he rounded third. Hofman, the Chicago
centre-fielder, perceiving this slackening of pace, dropped his arm.
McGraw noticed this, and, with a wave of his arm, notified Devore to go
home. With two strides he was at top speed again, and Hofman, taken by
surprise, threw badly.

The run scored which won the game.

The pastime of bullyragging the pitcher by the coachers has lost its
popularity recently. The wily coacher must first judge the temperament of
a pitcher before he dares to undertake to get on his nerves. Clarke
Griffith, formerly the manager of Cincinnati, has a reputation for being
able to ruin young pitchers just attempting to establish themselves in the
Big League. Time and again he has forced youngsters back to the minors by
his constant cry of "Watch his foot" or "He's going to waste this one."


[Illustration: Photo by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio

Baker out at the plate trying to stretch a triple into a home run. This
picture shows Catcher Easterly of Cleveland waiting with the ball to touch
Baker. The home-run hero of the Athletics is shown in the picture starting
the fall-away slide in an effort to get away from Easterly. Harry Davis is
approaching the plate, and Jack Sheridan is awaiting the outcome at the
plate.]


The rules are very strict now about talking to pitchers, but, if a
complaint is made, Griffith declares that he was warning the batter that
it was to be a pitchout, which is perfectly legitimate. The rules permit
the coacher to talk to the batter and the base runners.

Griffith caught a Tartar in Grover Cleveland Alexander, the sensational
pitcher of the Philadelphia club. It was at his first appearance in
Cincinnati that the young fellow got into the hole with several men on the
bases, and "Mike" Mitchell coming up to the bat.

"Now here is where we get a look at the 'yellow,'" yelled Griffith at
Alexander.

The young pitcher walked over toward third base.

"I'm going to make that big boob up at the bat there show such a 'yellow
streak' that you won't be able to see any white," declared Alexander, and
then he struck Mitchell out. Griffith had tried the wrong tactics.

A story is told of Fred Clarke and "Rube" Waddell, the eccentric twirler.
Waddell was once one of the best pitchers in the business when he could
concentrate his attention on his work, but his mind wandered easily.

"Now pay no attention to Clarke," warned his manager before the game.

Clarke tried everything from cajolery to abuse on Waddell with no effect,
because the eccentric "Rube" had been tipped to fight shy of the Pittsburg
manager. Suddenly Clarke became friendly and walked with Waddell between
innings, chatting on trivial matters. At last he said:

"Why don't you come out on my ranch in Kansas and hunt after the season,
George? I've got a dog out there you might train."

"What kind of a dog?" asked Waddell at once interested.

"Just a pup," replied Clarke, "and you can have him if he takes a fancy to
you."

"They all do," replied Waddell. "He's as good as mine."

The next inning the big left-hander was still thinking of that dog, and
the Pirates made five runs.

In many instances defensive coaching is as important as the offensive
brand, which simply indorses the old axiom that any chain is only as
strong as its weakest link or any ball club is only as efficient as its
most deficient department. When Roger Bresnahan was on the Giants, he was
one of those aggressive players who are always coaching the other fielders
and holding a team together, a type so much desired by a manager. If a
slow roller was hit between the pitcher's box and third base, I could
always hear "Rog" yelling, "You take it, Matty," or, "Artie, Artie,"
meaning Devlin, the third baseman. He was in a position to see which man
would be better able to make the play, and he gave this helpful advice.
His coaching saved many a game for the Giants in the old days. "Al"
Bridwell, the former shortstop, was of the same type, and, if you have
ever attended a ball game at the Polo Grounds, you have doubtless heard
him in his shrill, piercing voice, shouting:

"I've got it! I've got it!" or, "You take it!"

This style of coaching saves ball-players from accidents, and accidents
have lost many a pennant. I have always held that it was a lack of the
proper coaching that sent "Cy" Seymour, formerly the Giant centre-fielder,
out of the Big Leagues and back to the minors. Both Murray and he
attempted to catch the same fly in the season of 1909 and came into
collision. Seymour went down on the field, but later got up and played
the game out. However, he hurt his leg so badly that it never regained its
strength.

Then there is that other style of defensive coaching which is the shouting
of misleading advice by the fielders to the base runners. Collins and
Barry, the second baseman and shortstop on the Athletics, worked a clever
trick in one of the games of the 1911 world's series which illustrates my
point. The play is as old as the one in which the second baseman hides the
ball under his shirt so as to catch a man asleep off first base, but often
the old ones are the more effective.

Doyle was on first base in one of the contests played in Philadelphia, and
the batter lifted a short foul fly to Baker, playing third base. The crowd
roared and the coacher's voice was drowned by the volume of sound. "Eddie"
Collins ran to cover second base, and Barry scrabbled his hand along the
dirt as if preparing to field a ground ball.

"Throw it here! Throw it here!" yelled Collins, and Doyle, thinking that
they were trying for a force play, increased his efforts to reach second.
Baker caught the fly, and Larry was doubled up at first base so far that
he looked foolish. Yet it really was not his fault. The safest thing for a
base runner to do under those circumstances is to get one glimpse of the
coacher's motions and then he can tell whether to go back or to go on.

"Johnnie" Kling, the old catcher of the Chicago Cubs, used to work a
clever piece of defensive coaching with John Evers, the second baseman.
This was tried on young players and usually was successful. The victim was
picked out before the game, and the play depended upon him arriving at
second base. Once there the schemers worked it as follows:

When the "busher" was found taking a large lead, Evers would dash to the
bag and Kling would make a bluff to throw the ball, but hold it. The
runner naturally scampered for the base. Then, seeing that Kling had not
thrown, he would start to walk away from it again.

"If the Jew had thrown that time, he would have had you," Evers would
carelessly hurl over his shoulder at the intended victim. The man usually
turned for a fatal second to reply. Tinker, who was playing shortstop,
rushed in from behind, Kling whipped the ball to the bag, and the man,
caught off his guard, was tagged out. The play was really made before the
game, when the victim was selected.

It was this same Evers-Kling combination that turned the tide in the first
inning of the most famous game ever played in baseball, the extra one
between the Giants and the Cubs in the season of 1908. The Chicago club
was nervous in the first inning. Tenney was hit by a pitched ball, and
Herzog walked. It looked as if Pfeister, the Chicago pitcher, was losing
his grip. Bresnahan struck out, and Kling, always alert, dropped the third
strike, but conveniently at his feet. Thinking that here was an
opportunity the crowd roared. Evers, playing deep, almost behind Herzog,
shouted, "Go on!"

Herzog took the bait in the excitement of the moment and ran--and was
nipped many yards from first base.

There are many tricks to the coacher's trade, both offensive and
defensive, and it is the quickest-witted man who is the best coacher. The
sentry at first yells as the pitcher winds up, "There he goes!" imitating
the first baseman as nearly as possible, in the hope that the twirler
will waste one by pitching out and thus give the batter an advantage. The
coacher on third base will shout at the runner on a short hit to the
outfield, "Take your turn!" in the dim hope that the fielder, seeing the
man rounding third, will throw the ball home, and the hitter can thus make
an extra base. And the job of coaching is no sinecure. McGraw has told me
after directing a hard game that he is as tired as if he had played.




VII

Honest and Dishonest Sign Stealing

     _Everything Fair in Baseball except the Dishonest Stealing of
     Signals--The National Game More a Contest of the Wits than Most
     Onlookers Imagine._


When the Philadelphia Athletics unexpectedly defeated the Chicago Cubs in
the world's series of 1910, the National League players cried that their
signals had been stolen by the American League team, and that, because
Connie Mack's batters knew what to expect, they had won the championship.

But were the owners or any member of the Philadelphia club arrested
charged with grand larceny in stealing the baseball championship of the
world? No. Was there any murmur against the methods of Connie Mack's men?
No, again. By a strange kink in the ethics of baseball John Kling, the
Chicago catcher, was blamed by the other players on the defeated team for
the signs being stolen. They charged that he had been careless in covering
his signals and that the enemy's coachers, particularly Topsy Hartsell, a
clever man at it, had seen them from the lines. This was really the cause
of Kling leaving the Cubs and going to Boston in 1911.

After the games were over and the series was lost, many of the players,
and especially the pitchers, would hardly speak to Kling, the man who had
as much as any one else to do with the Cubs winning four championships,
and the man who by his great throwing had made the reputations of a lot of
their pitchers. But the players were sore because they had lost the series
and lost the extra money which many of them had counted as their own
before the games started, and they looked around for some one to blame and
found Kling. One of the pitchers complained after he had lost a game:

"Can't expect a guy to win with his catcher giving the signs so the
coachers can read 'em and tip the batters."

"And you can't expect a catcher to win a game for you if you haven't got
anything on the ball," replied Kling, for he is quick tempered and cannot
stand reflections on his ability. But the pitcher's chance remark had
given the other players an excuse for fixing the blame, and it was put on
Kling.

I honestly do not believe that Kling was in any way responsible for the
rout of the proud Cubs. The Chicago pitchers were away off form in the
series and could not control the ball, thus getting themselves "into the
hole" all the time. Shrewd Connie Mack soon realized this and ordered his
batters to wait everything out, to make the twirlers throw every ball
possible. The result was that, with the pitcher continually in the hole,
the batters were guessing what was coming and frequently guessing right,
as any smart hitter could under the circumstances. This made it look as if
the Athletics were getting the Cubs' signals.

"Why, I changed signs every three innings, Matty," Kling told me
afterwards in discussing the charge. "Some of the boys said that I gave
the old bended-knee sign for a curve ball. Well, did you ever find
anything to improve on the old ones? That's why they are old."

But the Cubs still point the finger of scorn at Kling, for it hurts to
lose. I know it, I have lost myself. Even though the Athletics are charged
with stealing the signs whether they did or not, it is no smirch on the
character of the club, for they stole honestly--which sounds like a
paradox.

"You have such jolly funny morals in this bally country," declared an
Englishman I once met. "You steal and rob in baseball and yet you call it
fair. Now in cricket we give our opponents every advantage, don't cher
know, and after the game we are all jolly good fellows at tea together."

This brings us down to the ethics of signal stealing. Each game has its
own recognized standards of fairness. For instance, no tricks are
tolerated in tennis, yet the baseball manager who can devise some scheme
by which he disconcerts his opponents is considered a great leader. I was
about to say that all is fair in love, war, and baseball, but will modify
that too comprehensive statement by saying all is fair in love, war, and
baseball except stealing signals dishonestly, which listens like another
paradox. Therefore, I shall divide the subject of signal stealing into
half portions, the honest and the dishonest halves, and, since we are
dealing in paradoxes, take up the latter first.

Dishonest signal stealing might be defined as obtaining information by
artificial aids. The honest methods are those requiring cleverness of eye,
mind, and hand without outside assistance. One of the most flagrant and
for a time successful pieces of signal stealing occurred in Philadelphia
several years ago.

Opposing players can usually tell when the batsman is getting the signs,
because he steps up and sets himself for a curve with so much confidence.
During the season of 1899 the report went around the circuit that the
Philadelphia club was stealing signals, because the batters were popping
them all on the nose, but no one was able to discover the transmitter. The
coachers were closely watched and it was evident that these sentinels were
not getting the signs.

It was while the Washington club, then in the National League, was playing
Philadelphia that there came a rainy morning which made the field very
wet, and for a long time it was doubtful whether a game could be played
in the afternoon, but the Washington club insisted on it and overruled the
protests of the Phillies. Arlie Latham, now the coacher on the Giants',
was playing third base for the Senators at the time. He has told me often
since how he discovered the device by which the signs were being stolen.
He repeated the story to me recently when I asked him for the facts to use
in this book.

"There was a big puddle in the third base coaching box that day," said
Latham. "And it was in the third inning that I noticed Cupid Childs, the
Philadelphia second baseman, coaching. He stood with one foot in the
puddle and never budged it, although the water came up to his shoe-laces.
He usually jumped around when on the lines, and this stillness surprised
me.

"'Better go get your rubbers if you are goin' to keep that trilby there,'
I said to him. 'Charley horse and the rheumatism have no terrors for you.'

"But he kept his foot planted in the puddle just the same, and first thing
the batter cracked out a base hit.

"'So that's where you're gettin' the signs?' I said to him, not guessing
that it really was. Then he started to jump around and we got the next
two batters out right quick, there being a big slump in the Philadelphia
hitting as soon as he took his foot out of that puddle.

"When the Washington club went to bat I hiked out to the third base line
and started to coach, putting my foot into the puddle as near the place
where Childs had had his as I could.

"'Here's where we get a few signs,' I yelled, 'and I ain't afraid of
Charley horse, either.'

"I looked over at the Philadelphia bench, and there were all the extra
players sitting with their caps pulled down over their eyes, so that I
couldn't see their faces. The fielders all looked the other way. Then I
knew I was on a warm scent.

"When the Washington players started back for the field I told Tommy
Corcoran that I thought they must be getting the signs from the third base
coaching box, although I hadn't been able to feel anything there. He went
over and started pawing around in the dirt and water with his spikes and
fingers. Pretty soon he dug up a square chunk of wood with a buzzer on the
under side of it.

"'That ought to help their hitting a little,' he remarked as he kept on
pulling. Up came a wire, and when he started to pull on it he found that
it was buried about an inch under the soil and ran across the outfield. He
kept right on coiling it up and following it, like a hound on a scent, the
Philadelphia players being very busy all this time and nervous like a
busher at his debut into Big League society. One of the substitutes
started to run for the clubhouse, but I stopped him.

"Tommy was galloping by this time across the outfield and all the time
pulling up this wire. It led straight to the clubhouse, and there sitting
where he could get a good view of the catcher's signs with a pair of
field-glasses was Morgan Murphy. The wire led right to him.

"'What cher doin'?' asked Tommy.

"'Watchin' the game,' replied Murphy.

"'Couldn't you see it easier from the bench than lookin' through those
peepers from here? And why are you connected up with this machine?'
inquired Tommy, showin' him the chunk of wood with the buzzer attached.

"'I guess you've got the goods,' Murphy answered with a laugh, and all the
newspapers laughed at it then, too. But the batting averages of the
Philadelphia players took an awful slump after that.

"'Why didn't they tip me?' asked Murphy as he put aside his field-glasses
and went to the bench and watched the rest of the game from there. And we
later won that contest, our first victory of the series, which was no
discredit to us, since it was like gamblin' against loaded dice,"
concluded "Arlie."

The newspapers may have laughed at the incident in those days, but since
that time the National Commission has intimated that if there was ever a
recurrence of such tactics, the club caught using them would be subjected
to a heavy fine and possibly expulsion from the League. So much have
baseball standards improved.

The incident is a great illustration of the unfair method of obtaining
signs. Since then, there have come from time to time reports of teams
taking signals by mechanical devices. The Athletics once declared that the
American League team in New York had a man stationed behind the fence in
centre field with a pair of glasses and that he shifted a line in the
score board slightly, so as to tip off the batters, but this charge was
never confirmed. It was said a short time ago that the Athletics
themselves had a spy located in a house outside their grounds and that he
tipped the batters by raising and lowering an awning a trifle. When the
Giants went to Philadelphia in 1911 for the first game of the world's
series in the enemy's camp, I kept watching the windows of the houses just
outside of the park for suspicious movements, but could discover none.
Once in Pittsburg I thought that the Pirates were getting the Giants'
signals and I kept my eyes glued to the score board in centre field,
throughout one whole series, to see if any of the figures moved or changed
positions, as that seemed to be the only place from which a batter could
be tipped. But I never discovered anything wrong.

There are many fair ways to steal the signs of the enemy, so many that the
smart ball-player is always kept on the alert by them. Baseball geniuses,
some almost magicians, are constantly looking for new schemes to find out
what the catcher is telling the pitcher, what the batter is tipping the
base runner to, or what the coacher's instructions are. The Athletics have
a great reputation as being a club able to get the other team's signs if
they are obtainable. This is their record all around the American League
circuit.

Personally I do not believe that Connie Mack's players steal as much
information as they get the credit for, but the reputation itself, if they
never get a sign, is valuable. If a prizefighter is supposed to have a
haymaking punch in his left hand, the other fellow is going to be
constantly looking out for that left. If the players on a club have great
reputations as signal stealers, their opponents are going to be on their
guard all the time, which gives the team with the reputation just that
much advantage. If a pitcher has a reputation, he has the percentage on
the batter. Therefore, this gossip about the signal-stealing ability of
the Athletics has added to their natural strength.

"Bill," I said to Dahlen, the Brooklyn manager, one day toward the end of
the season of 1911, when the Giants were playing their schedule out after
the pennant was sure, "see if you can get the Chief's signs."

Dahlen coached on first base and then went to third, always looking for
Meyers's signals. Pretty soon he came to me.

"I can see them a little bit, Matty," he reported.

"Chief," I said to Meyers that night as I buttonholed him in the
clubhouse, "you've got to be careful to cover up your signs in the Big
Series. The Athletics have a reputation of being pretty slick at getting
them. And to make sure we will arrange a set of signs that I can give if
we think they are 'hep' to yours."

So right there Meyers and I fixed up a code of signals that I could give
to him, the Chief always to use some himself which would be "phoney" of
course, and might have the desirable effect of "crossing them."

In the first championship game at the Polo Grounds, Topsy Hartsell was out
on the coaching lines looking for signals, and the Chief started giving
the real ones until Davis stepped into a curve ball and cracked it to left
field for a single, scoring the only run made by the Athletics. Right here
Meyers stopped, and I began transmitting the private information, although
the Chief continued to pass out signals that meant nothing. The Athletics
were getting the Indian's and could not understand why the answers seemed
invariably to be wrong, for a couple of them struck out swinging at bad
balls, and one batter narrowly avoided being hit by a fast one when
apparently he had been tipped off to a curve and was set ready to swing at
it. They did not discover that I was behind the signals, although to make
this method successful the catcher must be a clever man. If he makes it
too obvious that his signals are "phoney" and are meant to be seen, then
the other club will look around for the source of the real ones. Meyers
carefully concealed his misleading wig-wags beneath his chest protector,
under his glove and behind his knee, as any good catcher does his real
signs, so they would not look at my head.

Many persons argue: if a man sees the signs, what good does it do him if
he does not know what they mean? It is easy for a smart ball-player to
deduce the answers, because there are only three real signs passed between
a pitcher and catcher, the sign for the fast one, for the curve ball and
for the pitchout. If a coacher sees a catcher open his hand behind his
glove and then watches the pitcher throw a fast one, he is likely to guess
that the open palm says "Fast one."

After a coacher has stolen the desired information, he must be clever to
pass it along to the batter without the other club being aware that he is
doing it. He may straighten up to tell the batter a curve ball is coming,
and bend over to forecast a fast one, and turn his back as a neutral
signal, meaning that he does not know what is coming. If a coacher is
smart enough to pass the meanings to the batter without the other team
getting on, he may go through the entire season as a transmitter of
information. To steal signs fairly requires quickness of mind, eye and
action. Few players can do it successfully. Perhaps that is why it is
considered fair.

If a team is going to make a success of signal stealing it must get every
sign that is given, for an occasional crumb of information picked up at
random is worse than none at all. First, it is dangerous. A batter, tipped
off that a curved ball is coming, steps up to the plate and is surprised
to meet a fast one, which often he has not time to dodge. Many a good
ball-player has been injured in this way, and an accident to a star has
cost more than one pennant.

"Joe" Kelley, formerly manager of the Reds, was coaching in Cincinnati one
day several years ago, and "Eagle Eye Jake" Beckley, the old first
baseman and a chronic three hundred hitter, was at the bat. I had been
feeding him low drops and Kelley, on the third base line, thought he was
getting the signals that Jack Warner, the Giant catcher in a former cast
of characters, was giving. I saw Kelley apparently pass some information
to Beckley, and the latter stepped almost across the plate ready for a
curve. He encountered a high, fast one, close in, and he encountered it
with that part of him between his neck and hat band. "Eagle Eye" was
unconscious for two days after that and in the hospital several weeks.
When he got back into the game he said to me one day:

"Why didn't you throw me that curve, Matty, that 'Joe' tipped me to?"

"Were you tipped off?" I asked. "Then it was 'Joe's' error, not mine."

"Say," he answered, "if I ever take another sign from a coacher I hope the
ball kills me."

"It probably will," I replied. "That one nearly did."

It is one of the risks of signal stealing. Beckley had received the wrong
information and I felt no qualms at hitting him, for it was not a wild
pitch but a misinterpreted signal which had put him out of the game. His
manager, not I, was to blame. For this reason many nervous players refuse
to accept any information from a coacher, even if the coacher thinks he
knows what is going to be pitched, because they do not dare take the risk
of getting hit by a fast one, against which they have little protection if
set for a curve. On this account few National League clubs attempt to
steal signs as a part of the regular team work, but many individuals make
a practice of it for their own benefit and for the benefit of the batter,
if he is not of the timid type.

As soon as a runner gets on second base he is in an excellent position to
see the hands of the catcher, and it is then that the man behind the bat
is doing all that he can cover up. Jack Warner, the old Giant, used
sometimes to give his signals with his mouth in this emergency, because
they were visible from the pitcher's box, but not from second base. The
thieves were looking at his hands for them. In the National League, Leach,
Clarke, Wagner, Bresnahan, Evers, Tinker and a few more of the sort are
dangerous to have on second. Wagner will get on the middle sack and watch
the catcher until he thinks that he has discovered the pitchout sign,
which means a ball is to be wasted in the hope that a base runner can be
caught. Wagner takes a big lead, and the catcher, tempted, gives the
"office" to waste one, thinking to nail "Hans" off second. The Dutchman
sees it, and instead of running back to second dashes for third. He starts
as the catcher lets go of the ball to throw to second and can usually make
the extra base.

Many coachers, who do not attempt to get the signs for fast and curved
balls, study the catcher to get his pitchout sign, because once this is
recognized it gives the team at the bat a great advantage. If a coacher
sees the catcher give the pitchout signal he can stop the runner from
trying to steal and the pitcher has wasted a ball and is "in the hole."
Then if his control is uncertain the result is likely to be disastrous.

Several players in the National League are always trying to get the
batter's signs. Bresnahan, the manager and catcher of the St. Louis club,
devotes half his time and energy to looking for the wireless code employed
by batter and base runner. If he can discover the hit and run sign, then
he is able to order a pitchout and catch the man who has started to run in
response to it several feet at second base. He is a genius at getting this
information.

Once late in 1911, when the New York club was in St. Louis on the last
trip West, I came up to the bat with Fletcher on first base. I rubbed the
end of my stick with my hand and Roger exclaimed:

"Why, that's your old hit and run, Matty! What are you trying to do, kid
me?"

"I forgot you knew it, Rog," I answered, "but it goes."

He thought I was attempting to cross him and did not order a pitchout. The
sign had been given intentionally. I hit the ball and had the laugh on
him. If a catcher can get a pitchout on a hit and run sign he upsets the
other team greatly. Take a fast man on first base and the batter signs him
that he is going to hit the next ball. The runner gets his start and the
ball comes up so wide that the batter could not half reach it with a
ten-foot bat. The runner is caught easily at second base and it makes him
look foolish. That is why so many catchers devote time to looking for
this signal. It is a great fruit bearer.

Many of the extra players on the bench are always on the alert for the hit
and run sign. This is a typical situation:

The Giants were playing the Pittsburg club one day in 1911. Byrne was on
first base. Fred Clarke was at bat and Byrne started for second while
Clarke hit the ball to right field, Byrne reaching third base on the play.

"What did he do?" asked Ames.

"Did you get it, Matty?" inquired Wiltse.

"No," I answered. "Did you?"

"I think he tapped his bat on the plate," replied Wiltse. The next time
Clarke came up we were all looking to see if he tapped his bat on the
plate. Byrne was again on first base. The Pirates' manager fixed his cap,
he stepped back out of the box and knocked the dirt out of his cleats, and
he did two or three other natural things before the pitch, but nothing
happened. Then he tapped his bat on the plate.

"Make him put them over, Chief," yelled Wiltse which, translated, meant,
"Order a pitch-out, Chief. He just gave Byrne the hit and run sign."

Meyers signed for a pitchout, and Byrne was caught ten feet from second.
Wiltse on the bench had really nailed the base runner. As soon as a sign
is discovered it is communicated to the other players, and they are always
watching for it, but try to conceal the fact that they recognize it,
because, as soon as a batter discovers that his messages are being read,
he changes his code.

From these few facts about signals and sign stealing some idea of the
battle of wits that is going on between two ball clubs in a game may be
obtained. That is why so few men without brains last in the Big Leagues
nowadays. A young fellow broke in with the Giants a few years ago and was
very anxious to make good. He was playing shortstop.

"Watch for the catcher's signs and then shift," McGraw told him one day.
It is well known in baseball that a right-handed hitter will naturally
push a curve over the outside corner of the plate toward right field and
over the inside he will pull it around toward third base. But this
youngster was overanxious and would shift before the pitcher started to
deliver the ball. Some smart player on another club noticed this and
tipped the batters off to watch the youngster for the signs. When he
shifted toward second base the batter set himself for a ball over the
outside corner. For a long time McGraw could not understand how the other
teams were getting the Giants' signs, especially as it was on our home
grounds. At last he saw the new infielder shift one day and the batter
prepare for an inside ball.

"Say," he said to the player, rushing on the field after he had stopped
the pitcher, "do you know you are telegraphing the signs to the batters by
moving around before the pitcher throws the ball?"

Bill Dahlen, formerly a shortstop on the Giants, used to shift, but he was
clever enough to wait until the pitcher had started his motion, when it
was too late for the batter to look at him.

Ball-players are always looking to steal some sign so that they may
"cross" the enemy. In the language of the Big Leagues it is "signs," never
"signals." And in conclusion I reiterate my former sentiments that all is
fair in love, war and baseball except stealing signs dishonestly.




VIII

Umpires and Close Decisions

     _Ball-players and Umpires are Regarded by the Fans as Natural
     Enemies, and the Fans Are about Right--Types of Arbiters and how the
     Players Treat them--"Silk" O'Loughlin, "Hank" O'Day, "Tim" Hurst,
     "Bob" Emslie, and Others, and Close Ones they have Called--Also Some
     Narrow Escapes which have Followed._


When the Giants were swinging through the West in 1911 on the final trip,
the club played three games in Pittsburg, with the pennant at that time
only a possibility more or less remote. The Pirates still had a chance,
and they were fighting hard for every game, especially as they were
playing on their home grounds.

The first contest of the series was on Saturday afternoon before a crowd
that packed the gigantic stands which surrounded Forbes Field. The throng
wanted to see the Pirates win because they were the Pirates, and the
Giants beaten because they were the Giants, and were sticking their heads
up above the other clubs in the race. I always think of the horse show
when I play in Pittsburg, for they have the diamond horse-shoe of boxes
there, you know. No; I'm wrong--it's at the Metropolitan Opera House they
have the diamond horse-shoe. Any way, the diamond horse-shoe of boxes was
doing business at Forbes Field that Saturday afternoon.

This story is going to be about umpires, but the reader who has never seen
the Forbes Field folks must get the atmosphere before I let the yarn into
the block. Once, on a bright, sunny day there, I muffed fly after fly
because the glint of Sol's rays on the diamonds blinded me. Always now I
wear smoked glasses. "Josh" Devore is so afraid that he will lose social
caste when he goes to Pittsburg that he gets his finger-nails manicured
before he will appear on the field. And the lady who treated him one day
polished them to such an ultimate glossiness that the sun flashed on them,
and he dropped two flies in left field.

"Look here, Josh," warned McGraw after the game, "I hire you to play ball
and not to lead cotillions. Get some pumice stone and rub it on your
finger-nails and cut out those John Drew manicures after this."

This crowd is worse after umpires than the residents of the bleachers. The
game on that Saturday worked out into a pitchers' battle between Marty
O'Toole, the expensive exponent of the spit ball, and "Rube" Marquard, the
great left-hander. Half of "Who's Who in Pittsburg" had already split
white gloves applauding when, along about the fourth or fifth inning, Fred
Clarke got as far as third base with one out. The score was nothing for
either side as yet, and of such a delicate nature was the contest that one
run was likely to decide it.

"Hans" Wagner, the peerless, and the pride of Pittsburg, was at the bat.
He pushed a long fly to Murray in right field, and John caught it and
threw the ball home. Clarke and the ball arrived almost simultaneously.
There was a slide, a jumble of players, and a small cloud of dust blew
away from the home plate.

"Ye're out!" bawled Mr. Brennan, the umpire, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder with a conclusiveness that forbade argument. Clarke jumped up and
stretched his hands four feet apart, for he recognizes no conclusiveness
when "one is called against him."

"Safe! that much!" he shouted in Brennan's ear, showing him the four-foot
margin with his hands.

There was a roar from the diamond horse-shoe that, if it could have been
canned and put on a phonograph, would have made any one his fortune
because it could have been turned on to accompany moving pictures of lions
and other wild beasts to make them realistic.

"Say," said Clarke to Brennan, "I know a pickpocket who looks honest
compared to you, and I'd rather trust my watch to a second-story worker."

Brennan was dusting off the plate and paid no attention to him. But Clarke
continued to snap and bark at the umpire as he brushed himself off,
referring with feeling to Mr. Brennan's immediate family, and weaving into
his talk a sketch of the umpire's ancestors, for Clarke is a great master
of the English language as fed to umpires.

"Mr. Clarke," said Brennan, turning at last, "you were out. Now beat it to
the bench before you beat it to the clubhouse."

Clarke went grumbling and all the afternoon was after Brennan for the
decision, his wrath increasing because the Pirates lost the game finally,
although they would not have won it had they been given that decision. And
the crowd was roaring at Brennan, too, throughout the remainder of the
contest, asking him pointed questions about his habits and what his
regular business was.

It takes a man with nerve to make a decision like that--one that could be
called either way because it was so close--and to make it as he sees it,
which happened in this particular case to be against the home team.

Many times have I, in the excitement of the moment, protested against the
decision of an umpire, but fundamentally I know that the umpires are
honest and are doing their best, as all ball-players are. The umpires make
mistakes and the players make errors. Many arbiters have told me that when
they are working they seldom know what inning it is or how many are out,
and sometimes, in their efforts to concentrate their minds on their
decisions, they say they even forget what clubs are playing and which is
the home team.

The future of the game depends on the umpire, for his honesty must not be
questioned. If there is a breath of suspicion against a man, he is
immediately let go, because constant repetition of such a charge would
result in baseball going the way of horse racing and some other sports. No
scandal can creep in where the umpire is concerned, for the very
popularity of baseball depends on its honesty.

"The only good umpire is a dead umpire," McGraw has declared many times
when he has been disgruntled over some decision.

"I think they're all dead ones in this League," replied Devore one day,
"considering the decisions that they are handing me down there at second
base. Why, I had that bag by three feet and he called me out."

Many baseball fans look upon an umpire as a sort of necessary evil to the
luxury of baseball, like the odor that follows an automobile.

"Kill him! He hasn't got any friends!" is an expression shouted from the
stands time and again during a game.

But I know differently. I have seen umpires with friends. It is true that
most ball-players regard umpires as their natural enemies, as a boy does a
school teacher. But "Bill" Klem has friends because I have seen him with
them, and besides he has a constant companion, which is a calabash pipe.
And "Billy" Evans of the American League has lots of friends. And most all
of the umpires have some one who will speak to them when they are off the
field.

These men in blue travel by themselves, live at obscure hotels apart from
those at which the teams stop, and slip into the ball parks unobtrusively
just before game time. They never make friends with ball-players off the
field for fear that there might be a hint of scandal. Seldom do they take
the same train with a club unless it cannot be avoided. "Hank" O'Day, the
veteran of the National League staff, and Brennan took the same train out
of Chicago with the Giants in the fall of 1911 because we stopped in
Pittsburg for one game, and they had to be there to umpire. It was the
only available means of transportation. But they stayed by themselves in
another Pullman until some one told them "Charley" Faust, the official
jinx-killer of the Giants, was doing his stunt. Then they both came back
into the Giants' car and for the first time in my life I saw "Hank" O'Day
laugh. His face acted as if it wasn't accustomed to the exercise and broke
all in funny new wrinkles, like a glove when you put it on for the first
time.

There are several types of umpires, and ball-players are always studying
the species to find out the best way to treat each man to get the most out
of him. There are autocrats and stubborn ones and good fellows and
weak-kneed ones, almost as many kinds as there are human beings. The
autocrat of the umpire world is "Silk" O'Loughlin, now appearing with a
rival show.

"There are no close plays," says "Silk." "A man is always out or safe, or
it is a ball or a strike, and the umpire, if he is a good man and knows
his business, is always right. For instance, I am always right."

He refuses to let the players discuss a decision with him, maintaining
that there is never any room for argument. If a man makes any talk with
him, it is quick to the shower bath. "Silk" has a voice of which he is
proud and declares that he shares the honors with Caruso and that it is
only his profession as an umpire that keeps him off the grand-opera
circuit. I have heard a lot of American League ball-players say at various
times that they wished he was on the grand-opera circuit or some more
calorific circuit, but they were mostly prejudiced at those moments by
some sentiments which "Silk" had just voiced in an official capacity.

As is well known in baseball, "Silk" is the inventor of "Strike Tuh!" and
the creased trousers for umpires. I have heard American League players
declare that they are afraid to slide when "Silk" is close down over a
play for fear they will bump up against his trousers and cut themselves.
He is one of the kind of umpires who can go through a game on the hottest
summer day, running about the bases, and still keep his collar unwilted.
At the end he will look as if he were dressed for an afternoon tea.

Always he wears on his right hand, which is his salary or decision wing, a
large diamond that sparkles in the sunlight every time he calls a man
out. Many American League players assert that he would rather call a man
out than safe, so that he can shimmer his "cracked ice," but again they
are usually influenced by circumstances. Such is "Silk," well named.

Corresponding to him in the National League is "Billy" Klem. He always
wears a Norfolk jacket because he thinks it more stylish, and perhaps it
is, and he refuses to don a wind pad. Ever notice him working behind the
bat? But I am going to let you in on a secret. That chest is not all his
own. Beneath his jacket he carries his armor, a protector, and under his
trousers' legs are shin guards. He insists that all players call him "Mr."
He says that he thinks maybe soon his name will be in the social register.

"Larry" Doyle thought that he had received the raw end of a decision at
second base one day. He ran down to first, where Klem had retreated after
he passed his judgment.

"Say, 'Bill,'" exploded "Larry," "that man didn't touch the bag--didn't
come within six feet of it."

"Say, Doyle," replied Klem, "when you talk to me call me 'Mr. Klem.'"

"But, Mr. Klem--" amended "Larry."

Klem hurriedly drew a line with his foot as Doyle approached him
menacingly.

"But if you come over that line, you're out of the game, Mr. Doyle," he
threatened.

"All right," answered "Larry," letting his pugilistic attitude evaporate
before the abruptness of Klem as the mist does before the classic noonday
sun, "but, Mr. Klem, I only wanted to ask you if that clock in centre
field is right by your watch, because I know everything about you is
right."

"Larry" went back, grinning and considering that he had put one over on
Klem--Mr. Klem.

For a long time "Johnny" Evers of the Chicago club declared that Klem owed
him $5 on a bet he had lost to the second baseman and had neglected to
pay. Now John, when he was right, could make almost any umpirical goat
leap from crag to crag and do somersaults en route. He kept pestering Klem
about that measly $5 bet, not in an obtrusive way, you understand, but by
such delicate methods as holding up five fingers when Klem glanced down on
the coaching lines where he was stationed, or by writing a large "5" in
the dirt at the home plate with the butt of his bat as he came up when
Klem was umpiring on balls and strikes, or by counting slowly and casually
up to five and stopping with an abruptness that could not be misconstrued.

One day John let his temper get away from him and bawled Klem out in his
most approved fashion.

"Here's your five, Mr. Evers," said Klem, handing him a five dollar bill,
"and now you are fined $25."

"And it was worth it," answered Evers, "to bawl you out."

Next comes the O'Day type, and there is only one of them, "Hank." He is
the stubborn kind--or perhaps _was_ the stubborn kind, would be better, as
he is now a manager. He is bull-headed. If a manager gets after him for a
decision, he is likely to go up in the air and, not meaning to do it, call
close ones against the club that has made the kick, for it must be
remembered that umpires are only "poor weak mortals after all." O'Day has
to be handled with shock absorbers. McGraw tries to do it, but shock
absorbers do not fit him well, and the first thing that usually occurs is
a row.

"Let me do the kicking, boys," McGraw always warns his players before a
contest that O'Day is going to umpire. He does not want to see any of his
men put out of the game.

"Bill" Dahlen always got on O'Day's nerves by calling him "Henry." For
some reason, O'Day does not like the name, and "Bill" Dahlen discovered
long ago the most irritating inflection to give it so that it would rasp
on O'Day's ears. He does not mind "Hank" and is not a "Mister" umpire. But
every time Dahlen would call O'Day "Henry" it was the cold shower and the
civilian's clothes for his.

Dahlen was playing in St. Louis many years ago when the race track was
right opposite the ball park. "Bill" had a preference in one of the later
races one day and was anxious to get across the street and make a little
bet. He had obtained a leave of absence on two preceding days by calling
O'Day "Henry" and had lost money on the horses he had selected as fleet of
foot. But this last time he had a "sure thing" and was banking on some
positive information which had been slipped to him by a friend of the
friend of the man who owned the winner, and "Bill" wanted to be there.
Along about the fifth inning, "Bill" figured that it was time for him to
get a start, so he walked up to O'Day and said:

"Henry, do you know who won the first race?"

"No, and you won't either, Mr. Dahlen," answered "Hank." "You are fined
$25, and you stay here and play the game out."

Some one had tipped "Hank" off. And the saddest part of the story is that
"Bill's" horse walked home, and he could not get a bet down on him.

"First time it ever failed to work," groaned "Bill" in the hotel that
night, "and I said 'Henry' in my meanest way, too."

Most clubs try to keep an umpire from feeling hostile toward the team
because, even if he means to see a play right, he is likely to call a
close one against his enemies, not intending to be dishonest. It would
simply mean that you would not get any close ones from him, and the close
ones count. Some umpires can be reasoned with, and a good fair protest
will often make a man think perhaps he has called it wrong, and he will
give you the edge on the next decision. A player must understand an umpire
to know how to approach him to the best advantage. O'Day cannot be
reasoned with. It is as dangerous to argue with him as it is to try to
ascertain how much gasoline is in the tank of an automobile by sticking
down the lighted end of a cigar or a cigarette.

Emslie will listen to a reasonable argument. He is one of the finest
umpires that ever broke into the League, I think. He is a good fellow. Far
be it from me to be disloyal to my manager, for I think that he is the
greatest that ever won a pennant, but Emslie put one over on McGraw in
1911 when it was being said that Emslie was getting so old he could not
see a play.

"I'll bet," said McGraw to him one day after he had called one against the
Giants, "that I can put a baseball and an orange on second base, and you
can't tell the difference standing at the home plate, Bob."

Emslie made no reply right then, but when the eye test for umpires was
established by Mr. Lynch, the president of the League, "Bob" passed it at
the head of the list and then turned around and went up to Chatham in
Ontario, Canada, and made a high score with the rifle in a shooting match
up there. After he had done that, he was umpiring at the Polo Grounds one
day.

"Want to take me on for a shooting go, John?" he asked McGraw as he passed
him.

"No, Bob, you're all right. I give it to you," answered McGraw, who had
long forgotten his slur on Emslie's eyesight.

Emslie is the sort of umpire who rules by the bond of good fellowship
rather than by the voice of authority. "Old Bob" has one "groove" and it
is a personal matter about which he is very sensitive. He is under cover.
It is no secret, or I would not give way on him. But that luxuriant growth
of hair, apparent, comes off at night like his collar and necktie. It used
to be quite the fad in the League to "josh" "Bob" about his wig, but that
pastime has sort of died out now because he has proven himself to be such
a good fellow.

I had to laugh to myself, and not boisterously, in the season of 1911 when
Mr. Lynch appointed "Jack" Doyle, formerly a first baseman and a
hot-headed player, an umpire and scheduled him to work with Emslie. I
remembered the time several seasons ago when Doyle took offence at one of
"Bob's" decisions and wr

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