The Hardships of the Preliminary Practice in Limbering up Muscles and Reducing Weight for the Big Campaign—How a Ball Club is Whipped into Playing Shape—Trips to the South Not the Picnics they Seem to Be—The Battle of the Bushers to Stay in the Big Show—Making a Pitcher—Some Fun on the Side, including the Adventure of the Turkish Bath.
The Hardships of the Preliminary Practice in Limbering up Muscles and Reducing Weight for the Big Campaign—How a Ball Club is Whipped into Playing Shape—Trips to the South Not the Picnics they Seem to Be—The Battle of the Bushers to Stay in the Big Show—Making a Pitcher—Some Fun on the Side, including the Adventure of the Turkish Bath.
Springtraining! The words probably remind the reader of the sunny South and light exercise and good food and rubs and other luxuries, but the reader perhaps has never been with a Big League ball club when it is getting ready to go into a six months’ campaign.
All I can ever remember after a training trip is taking off and putting on a uniform, and running around the ball park under the inspiration of John McGraw, and he is some inspirer.
The heavier a man gets through the winter, the harder the routine work is for him, and a few years ago I almost broke down and cried out of sympathy for Otis Crandall, who arrived in camp very corpulent.
“What have you been doing this winter, Otie?” McGraw asked him after shaking hands in greeting, “appearing with a show as the stout lady? You’ll have to take a lot of that off.”
“Taking it off” meant running several miles every day so bundled up that the Indiana agriculturist looked like the pictures published of “Old Doc” Cook which showed him discovering the north pole. Ever since, Crandall’s spring training, like charity, has begun at home, and he takes exercise night and morning throughout the winter, so that when he comes into camp his weight will be somewhere near normal. In 1911 he had the best year of his career. He is the type of man who cannot afford to carry too much weight. He is stronger when he is slimmer.
In contrast to him is George Wiltse, who maps out a training course with the idea of adding several pounds, as he is better with all the real weight he can put on. By that I do not mean any fat.
George came whirling and spinning and waltzing and turkey-trotting and pirouetting across the field at Marlin Springs, Texas, the Giants’ spring training headquarters, one day in the spring of 1911, developing steps that would have ruled him off any cotillion floor in New York in the days of the ban on the grizzly bear and kindred dances. Suddenly he dove down with his left hand and reached as far as he could.
“What’s that one, George?” I yelled as he passed me.
“Getting ready to cover first base on a slow hit, Matty,” he replied, and was off on another series of hand springs that made him look more like a contortionist rehearsing for an act which he was going to take out for the “big time” than a ball-player getting ready for the season.
But perhaps some close followers of baseball statistics will recall a game that Wiltse took from the Cubs in 1911 by a wonderful one-hand reaching catch of a low throw to first base. Two Chicago runners were on the bags at the time and the loss of that throw would have meant that they both scored. Wiltse caught the ball, and it made the third out, and the Giants won the game.Thousands of fans applauded the catch, but the play was not the result of the exigencies of the moment. It was the outcome of forethought used months before.
Spectators at ball games who wonder at the marvellous fielding of Wiltse should watch him getting ready during the spring season at Marlin. He is a tireless worker, and when he is not pitching he is doing hand springs and other acrobatic acts to limber up all his muscles. It is torture then, but it pays in the end.
When I was a young fellow and read about the Big League clubs going South, I used to think what a grand life that must be. Riding in Pullmans, some pleasant exercise which did not entail the responsibility of a ball game, and plenty of food, with a little social recreation, were all parts of my dream. A young ball-player looks on his first spring training trip as a stage-struck young woman regards the theatre. She cannot wait for her first rehearsal, and she thinks only of the lobster suppers and the applause and the lights and the life, but nowhere in her dream is there a place for the raucous voice of the stage manager and the long jumps of “one night stands” with theloss of sleep and the poor meals and the cold dressing rooms. As actors begin to dread the drudgery of rehearsing, so do baseball men detest the drill of the spring training. The only thing that I can think of right away which is more tiresome and less interesting is signal practice with a college football team.
About the time that the sap starts up in the trees and the young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love and baseball, the big trek starts. Five hundred ball-players, attached more or less firmly to sixteen major league clubs, spread themselves out over the southern part of the United States, from Florida to California, and begin to prepare for the campaign that is to furnish the answer to that annual question, “Which is the best baseball club in the world?”
In the case of the Giants, McGraw, with a flock of youngsters, has already arrived when the older men begin to drift into camp. The youngsters, who have come from the bushes and realize that this is their one big chance to make good, to be a success or a failure in their chosen profession—in short, to become a Big Leaguer or go back to the bushes for good—have already beenworking for ten days and are in fair shape. They stare at the regulars as the veterans straggle in by twos and threes, and McGraw has a brief greeting for each. He could use a rubber stamp.
“How are you, Matty? What kind of shape are you in? Let’s see you in a uniform at nine o’clock to-morrow morning.”
When I first start South, for the spring trip, after shivering through a New York winter, I arouse myself to some enthusiasm over the prospect, but all this has evaporated after listening to that terse speech from McGraw, for I know what it means. Nothing looms on the horizon but the hardest five weeks’ grind in the world.
The next day the practice begins, and for the first time in five months, a uniform is donned. I usually start my work by limbering up slowly, and on the first day I do not pitch at all. With several other players, I help to form a large circle and the time is spent in throwing the ball at impossible and unreachable points in the anatomy. The man next to you shoots one away up over your head and the next one at your feet and off to the side while he is looking at the third man from you. This is great for limbering up, but the looseningis torture. After about fifteen minutes of that, the winter-logged player goes over on the bench and drops down exhausted. But does he stay there? Not if McGraw sees him, and he is one of the busiest watchers I have ever met.
“Here, Matty,” he will shout, “lead this squad three times around the park and be careful not to cut the corners.”
By the time that little formality is finished, a man’s tongue is hanging out and he goes to get a drink of water. The spring training is just one darned drink after another and still the player is always thirsty.
After three hours of practice, McGraw may say:
“All right, Matty. Go back to the hotel and get a bath and a rub and cut it out for to-day.”
Or he may remark:
“You’re looking heavy this year. Better take another little workout this afternoon.”
And so ends the first day. That night I flex the muscles in my salary wing and wonder to myself if it is going to beverysore. I get the answer next day. And what always makes me maddest is that the fans up North imagine that we are having some kind of a picnic in Marlin Springs,Texas. My idea of no setting for a pleasure party is Marlin Springs, Texas.
Photo by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio
Close Play at the Plate
This picture illustrates how easily the base runner, with his deceptive slide, can get away from the catcher, who has the ball waiting for him. It is always a hard decision for the umpire. Shown in the picture are, left to right, Conroy of Washington, Umpire Evans, and Catcher Land of Cleveland.
The morning of the second day is always a pleasant occasion. The muscles which have remained idle so long begin to rebel at the unaccustomed exercise, and the players are as pleasant as a flock of full-grown grizzly bears. I would not be a waiter for a ball club on a spring tour if they offered me a contract with a salary as large as J. P. Morgan’s income.
Each year the winter kinks seem to have settled into the muscles more permanently and are harder to iron out. Of course, there comes a last time for each one of us to go South, and every season I think, on the morning of the second day, when I try to work my muscles, that this one is my last.
The bushers lend variety to the life in a spring camp. Many of them try hard to “horn in” with the men who have made good as Big Leaguers. When a young player really seems to want to know something, any of the older men will gladly help him, but the trouble with most of them is that they think they are wonders when they arrive.
“How do you hold a curve?” a young fellow asked me last spring.
I showed him.
“Do you think Hans Wagner is as good as Ty Cobb?” he asked me next.
“Listen!” I answered. “Did you come down here to learn to play ball or with the idea that you are attending some sort of a conversational soiree?”
Many recruits think that, if they can get friendly with the veterans, they will be retained on account of their social standing, and I cannot “go” young ball-players who attempt to become the bootblacks for the old ones.
I have seen many a youngster ruin himself, even for playing in the minors, through his too vigorous efforts to make good under the large tent. He will come into camp, and the first day out put everything he has on the ball to show the manager “he’s got something.” The Giants had a young pitcher with them in 1911, named Nagle, who tried to pick up the pace, on the first day in camp, at which he had left off on the closing day of the previous year. He started to shoot the ball over to the batters with big, sharp breaking curves on it. He had not been South three days before he developed a sore arm that required a sling tohelp him carry it around, and he never was able to twirl again before he was shunted back into the lesser leagues.
But hope springs eternal in the breast of the bush leaguer in the spring, and many a young fellow, when he gets his send-off from the little, old home town, with the local band playing at the station, knows that the next time the populace of that place hears of him, it will be through seeing his name in the headlines of the New York papers. And then along about the middle of April, he comes sneaking back into the old burg, crestfallen and disappointed. There are a lot of humor and some pathos in a spring training trip. Many a busher I have seen go back who has tried hard to make good and just could not, and I have felt sorry for him. It is just like a man in any other business getting a chance at a better job than the one he is holding and not being big enough to fit it. It is the one time that opportunity has knocked, and most of the bush leaguers do not know the combination to open the door, and, as has been pointed out, opportunity was never charged with picking locks. Many are called in the spring, but few get past. Most of them are sincere youngfellows, too, trying to make good, and I have seen them work until their tongues were hanging out and the perspiration was starting all over them, only to hear McGraw say:
“I’m sorry, but you will have to go back again. I’ve let you out to Kankakee.”
“Steve Evans”, who now plays right field on the St. Louis club, was South with the Giants one season and worked hard to stick. But McGraw had a lot of young out-fielders, and some minor league magnate from Montreal came into camp one day who liked “Steve’s” action. McGraw started for the outfield where Evans was chasing flies and tried to get to “Steve,” but every time the manager approached him with the minor league man, Evans would rush for a ball on another corner of the field, and he became suddenly hard of hearing. Finally McGraw abandoned the chase and let another out-fielder go to Montreal, retaining Evans.
“Say, ‘Steve,’” said “Mac,” that night, “why didn’t you come, when I called you out on the field there this afternoon?”
“Because I could hear the rattle of the tin can you wanted to tie to me, all over the lot,” repliedEvans. And eventually, by that subtle dodging, he landed in the Big League under Bresnahan and has made good out there.
I believe that a pitcher by profession has the hardest time of any of the specialists who go into a spring camp. His work is of a more routine nature than that which attaches to any of the other branches of the baseball art. It is nothing but a steady grind.
The pitcher goes out each morning and gets a catcher with a big mitt and a loud voice and, with a couple of his fellow artists, starts to warm up with this slave-driver. The right sort of a catcher for spring rehearsing is never satisfied with anything you do. I never try to throw a curve for ten days at least after I get South, for a misplaced curve early in the season may give a man a sore arm for the greater part of the summer, and Big League clubs are not paying pitchers for wearing crippled whips.
After warming up for an hour or so, three or four pitchers throw slow ones to a batter and try to get the ball on the half bounce and compete as to the number of fumbles. This is great for limbering up.
Then comes the only real enjoyment of the day. It is quick in passing, like a piece of great scenery viewed out of the window of a railroad coach going sixty miles an hour. Each afternoon the regulars play the Yannigans (the spring name of the second team) a game of six innings, and each pitcher has a chance to work about one inning. The batters are away off form and are missing the old round-house curve by two feet that they would hit out of the lot in mid-season. This makes you think for a few minutes that you are a good pitcher. But there is even a drawback to this brief bit of enjoyment, for the diamond at Marlin is skinned—that is, made of dirt, although it is billed as a grass infield, and the ball gets “wingy.” Little pieces of the cover are torn loose by contact with the rough dirt, and it is not at all like the hard, smooth, grass-stained ball that is prevalent around the circuit in mid-season. Grass seed has been planted on this infield, but so far, like a lot of bushers, it has failed to make good its promises.
After that game comes the inevitable run around the park which has been a headliner in spring training ever since the institution was discovered. A story is told of “Cap” Anson and his famousold White Stockings. According to the reports I have heard, training with the “Cap” when he was right was no bed of roses. After hours of practice, he would lead the men in long runs, and the better he felt, the longer the runs. One hot day, so the story goes, Anson was toiling around the park, with his usual determination, at the head of a string of steaming, sweating players, when “Bill” Dahlen, a clever man at finding an opening, discovered a loose board in the fence on the back stretch, pulled it off, and dived through the hole. On the next lap two more tired athletes followed him, and at last the whole squad was on the other side of the fence, watching their leader run on tirelessly. But “Cap” must have missed the “plunk, plunk” of the footsteps behind him, for he looked around and saw that his players were gone. He kept grimly on, alone, until he had finished, and then he pushed his red face through the hole in the fence and saw his men.
“Your turn now, boys,” he said, and while he sat in the grand-stand as the sole spectator, he made that crowd of unfortunate athletes run around the track twice as many times as he himself had done.
“Guess I won’t have to nail up that hole in the fence, boys,” “Cap” remarked when it was all over.
Speaking of the influence of catchers on pitchers during the training trip, there is the well-known case of Wilbert Robinson, the old catcher, and “Rube” Marquard, the great left-handed pitcher of the Giants. “Robbie” devoted himself almost entirely in the spring of 1911 to the training of the then erratic “Rube,” and he handed back to McGraw at the end of the rehearsal the man who turned out to be the premier pitcher of his League, according to the official figures, and figures are not in the habit of lying.
“Robbie” used to take Marquard off into some corner every day and talk to him for hours. Draw up close, for I am going to tell you the secret of how Marquard became a great pitcher and that, too, at just about the time the papers were mentioning him as the “$11,000 lemon,” and imploring McGraw to let him go to some club in exchange for a good capable bat boy.
“Now ‘Rube,’” would be “Robbie’s” first line in the daily lecture, “you’ve got to start on the first ball to get the batter. Always havesomething on him and never let him have anything on you. This is the prescription for a great pitcher.”
One of the worst habits of Marquard’s early days was to get a couple of strikes on a batter and then let up until he got himself “into a hole” and could not put the ball over. Robinson by his coaching gave him the confidence he lacked.
“‘Rube,’ you’ve got a lot of stuff to-day,” “Robbie” would advise, “but don’t try to get it all on the ball. Mix it with a little control, and it will make a great blend. Now, this guy is a high ball hitter. Let’s see you keep it low for him. He waits, so you will have to get it over.”
And out there in the hot Texas sun, with much advice and lots of patience, Wilbert Robinson was manufacturing a great pitcher out of the raw material. One of Marquard’s worst faults, when he first broke into the League, was that he did not know the batters and their grooves, and these weaknesses Robinson drilled into his head—not that a drill was required to insert the information. Robinson was the coacher, umpire, catcher and batter rolled into one, and as a result look at the “Rube.”
When Marquard began to wabble a littletoward the end of 1911 and to show some of his old shyness while the club was on its last trip West, Robinson hurried on to Chicago and worked with him for two days. The “Rube” had lost the first game of the series to the Cubs, but he turned around after Robinson joined us and beat them to death in the last contest.
Pitchers, old and young, are always trying for new curves in the spring practice, and out of the South, wafted over the wires by the fertile imaginations of the flotilla of correspondents, drift tales each spring of the “fish” ball and the new “hook” jump and the “stop” ball and many more eccentric curves which usually boil down to modifications of the old ones. I worked for two weeks once on a new, slow, spit ball that would wabble, but the trouble was that I could never tell just when or where it was going to wabble, and so at last I had to abandon it because I could not control it.
After sending out fake stories of new and wonderful curves for several years, at last the correspondents got a new one when the spit ball was first discovered by Stricklett, a Brooklyn pitcher, several seasons ago. One Chicago correspondentsent back to his paper a glowing tale of the wonderful new curve called the “spit ball,” which was obtained by the use of saliva, only to get a wire from his office which read:
“It’s all right to ‘fake’ about new curves, but when it comes to being vulgar about it, that’s going too far. Either drop that spit ball or mail us your resignation.”
The paper refused to print the story and a real new curve was born without its notice. As a matter of fact, Bowerman, the old Giant catcher, was throwing the spit ball for two or three years before it was discovered to be a pitching asset. He used to wet his fingers when catching, and as he threw to second base the ball would take all sorts of eccentric breaks which fooled the baseman, and none could explain why it did it until Stricklett came through with the spit ball.
Many good pitchers, who feel their arms begin to weaken, work on certain freak motions or forms of delivery to make themselves more effective or draw out their baseball life in the Big Leagues for a year or two. A story is told of “Matty” Kilroy, a left-hander, who lived for two years through the development of what he called the“Bazzazaz” balk, and it had the same effect on his pitching as administering oxygen often has on a patient who is almost dead.
“My old soup bone,” says Kilroy, “was so weak that I couldn’t break a pane of glass at fifty feet. So one winter I spent some time every day out in the back yard getting that balk motion down. I had a pretty fair balk motion when my arm was good, but I saw that it had to be better, so I put one stone in the yard for a home plate and another up against the fence for first base. Then I practised looking at the home plate stone and throwing at first base with a snap of the wrist and without moving my feet. It was stare steady at the batter, then the arm up to about my ear, and zip, with a twist of the wrist at first base, and you’ve got him!
“I got so I could throw ’em harder to the bag with that wrist wriggle than I could to the batter, and I had them stickin’ closer to the base for two years than a sixteen-year-old fellow does to his gal when they’ve just decided they would do for each other.”
As a rule McGraw takes charge of the batters and general team work at spring practice, and he isone of the busiest little persons in seven counties, for he says a lot depends on the start a club gets in a league race. He always wants the first jump because it is lots easier falling back than catching up.
After a week or so of practice, the team is divided up into two squads, and one goes to San Antonio and the other to Houston each Saturday and Sunday to play games. One of the older men takes charge of the younger players, and there is a lot of rivalry between the two teams to see which one will make the better record, I remember one year I was handling the youngsters, and we went to Houston to play the team there and just managed to nose out a victory. McGraw thought that for the next Saturday he had better strengthen the Yannigans up a bit, so he sent Roger Bresnahan along to play third base instead of Henderson, the young fellow we had the week before. Playing third base could not exactly have been called a habit with “Rog” at that time. He was still pretty fat, and bending over quick after grounders was not his regular line. He booted two or three and finally managed to lose the game for us. We sent McGraw the following telegram that night:
“John McGraw, manager of the Giants, San Antonio, Texas:
“Will trade Bresnahan for Henderson. Rush answer.”
McGraw does not like to have any of his clubs beaten by the minor leaguers, because the bushers are inclined to imitate pouter pigeons right away after beating the Big Leaguers.
The social side of a training trip consists of kicking about the grub, singing songs at night, and listening to the same old stories that creep out of the bushes on crutches year after year. Last spring the food got so bad that some of the newspaper men fixed up a fake story they said they were going to send to New York, displayed it to the proprietor, and he came through with beefsteak for three nights in succession, thus establishing a record and proving the power of the press. The trouble with the diet schedule on a spring trip is that almost invariably those hotels on the bush-league circuits serve dinner in the middle of the day, just when a ball-player does not feel like eating anything much. Then at night they have a pick-up supper when one’s stomach feels as if it thought a fellow’s throat had been cut.
The Giants had an umpire with them in the spring of 1911, named Hansell, who enlivened the long, weary, training season some. Like a lot of the recruits who thought that they were great ball-players, this Hansell firmly believed he was a great umpire. He used to try to put players who did not agree with his decisions out of the game and, of course, they would not go.
“Why don’t you have them arrested if they won’t leave?” McGraw asked him one day. “I would.”
So the next afternoon Hansell had a couple of the local constables out at the grounds and tried to have Devore pinched for kicking on a decision. “Josh” got sore and framed it up to have a camera man at the park the next day to take a moving picture of a mob scene, Hansell, the umpire, to be the hero and mobbed. Hansell fell for it until he saw all the boys picking up real clods and digging the dirt out of their spikes, and then he made a run for it and never came back. That is how we lost a great umpire.
“You boys made it look too realistic for him,” declared McGraw.
Hansell had a notion that he was a runner andoffered to bet Robinson, who is rather corpulent now, that he could beat him running across the field. Robinson took him, and walked home ahead of the umpire in the race.
“I don’t see where I get off on this deal,” complained McGraw when it was over. “I framed up this race for you two fellows, and then Hansell comes to me and borrows the ten to pay ‘Robbie.’”
Somebody fixed up a Turkish bath in the hotel one day by stuffing up the cracks in one of the bathrooms and turning the hot water into the tub and the steam into the radiator full blast.
Several towels were piled on the radiator and the players sat upon this swathed in blankets to take off weight. They entered the impromptu Turkish bath, wearing only the well-known smile. McGraw still maintains that it was “Bugs” Raymond who pulled out the towels when it came the manager’s turn to sit on the radiator, and, if he could have proved his case, Raymond would not have needed a doctor. It would have been time for the undertaker.
Finally comes the long wending of the way up North. “Bugs” Raymond always depends on hisfriends for his refreshments, and as he had few friends in Marlin in 1911, he got few drinks. But when we got to Dallas cocktails were served with the dinner and all the ball-players left them untouched, McGraw enforcing the old rule that lips that touch “licker” shall never moisten a spit ball for him. “Bugs” was missed after supper and some one found him out in the kitchen licking up all the discarded Martinis. That was the occasion of his first fine of the season, and after that, as “Bugs” himself admitted, “life for him was just one fine after another.”
At last, after the long junket through the South, on which all managers are Simon Legrees, is ended, comes a welcome day, when the new uniforms are donned and the band plays and “them woids” which constitute the sweetest music to the ears of a ball-player, roll off the tongue of the umpire:
“The batteries for to-day are Rucker and Bergen for Brooklyn, Marquard and Meyers for New York. Play ball!”
The season is on.
A Load of Empty Barrels, Hired by John McGraw, once Pulled the Giants out of a Losing Streak—The Child of Superstition Appears to the Ball-Player in Many Forms—Various Ways in which the Influence of the Jinx can be Overcome—The True Story of “Charley” Faust—The Necktie that Helped Win a Pennant.
A Load of Empty Barrels, Hired by John McGraw, once Pulled the Giants out of a Losing Streak—The Child of Superstition Appears to the Ball-Player in Many Forms—Various Ways in which the Influence of the Jinx can be Overcome—The True Story of “Charley” Faust—The Necktie that Helped Win a Pennant.
A friendof mine, who took a different fork in the road when we left college from the one that I have followed, was walking down Broadway in New York with me one morning after I had joined the Giants, and we passed a cross-eyed man. I grabbed off my hat and spat in it. It was a new hat, too. “What’s the matter with you, Matty?” he asked, surprised.
“Spit in your hat quick and kill that jinx,”I answered, not thinking for the minute, and he followed my example.
I forgot to mention, when I said he took another fork in the road, that he had become a pitcher, too, but of a different kind. He had turned out to be sort of a conversational pitcher, for he was a minister, and, as luck would have it, on the morning we met that cross-eyed man he was wearing a silk hat. I was shocked, pained, and mortified when I saw what I had made him do. But he was the right sort, and wanted to go through with the thing according to the standards of the professional man with whom he happened to be at the time.
“What’s the idea?” he asked as he replaced his hat.
“Worst jinx in the world to see a cross-eyed man,” I replied. “But I hope I didn’t hurt your silk hat,” I quickly apologized.
“Not at all. But how about these ball-players who masticate the weed? Do they kill jinxes, too?” he wanted to know. And I had to admit that they were the main exterminators of the jinx.
“Then,” he went on, “I’m glad that the percentage of wearers of cross eyes is small.”
I have just looked into one of my favorite works for that word “jinx,” and found it not. My search was in Webster’s dictionary. But any ball-player can give a definition of it with his hands tied behind him—that is, any one except “Arlie” Latham, and, with his hands bound, he is deaf and dumb. A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ball-player, and the members of the profession have built up a series of lucky and unlucky omens that should be catalogued. And besides the common or garden variety of jinxes, many stars have a series of private or pet and trained ones that are more malignant in their forms than those which come out in the open.
A jinx is the child of superstition, and ball-players are among the most superstitious persons in the world, notwithstanding all this conversation lately about educated men breaking into the game and paying no attention whatever to the good and bad omens. College men are coming into both the leagues, more of them each year, and they are doing their share to make the game better and the class of men higher, but they fall the hardest for the jinxes. And I don’t know as it is anything to be ashamed of at that.
A really true, on-the-level, honest-to-jiminy jinx can do all sorts of mean things to a professional ball-player. I have seen it make a bad pitcher out of a good one, and a blind batter out of a three-hundred hitter, and I have seen it make a ball club, composed of educated men, carry a Kansas farmer, with two or three screws rattling loose in his dome, around the circuit because he came as a prophet and said that he was accompanied by Miss Fickle Fortune. And that is almost a jinx record.
Jinx and Miss Fickle Fortune never go around together. And ball-players are always trying to kill this jinx, for, once he joins the club, all hope is gone. He dies hard, and many a good hat has been ruined in an effort to destroy him, as I have said before, because the wearer happened to be chewing tobacco when the jinx dropped around. But what’s a new hat against a losing streak or a batting slump?
Luck is a combination of confidence and getting the breaks. Ball-players get no breaks without confidence in themselves, and lucky omens inspire this confidence. On the other hand, unlucky signs take it away. The lucky man is the one whohits the nail on the head and not his fingers, and the ability to swat the nail on its receptive end is a combination of self-confidence and an aptitude for hammering. Good ball-playing is the combination of self-confidence and the ability to play.
The next is “Red” Ames, although designated as “Leon” by his family when a very small boy before he began to play ball. (He is still called “Leon” in the winter.) Ames is of Warren, Ohio, and the Giants, and he is said to hold the Marathon record for being the most unlucky pitcher that ever lived, and I agree with the sayers. For several seasons, Ames couldn’t seem to win a ball game, no matter how well he pitched. In 1909, “Red” twirled a game on the opening day of the season against Brooklyn that was the work of a master. For nine innings he held his opponents hitless, only to have them win in the thirteenth. Time and again Ames has pitched brilliantly, to be finally beaten by a small score, because one of the men behind him made an error at a critical moment, or because the team could not give him any runs by which to win. No wonder the newspapers began to speak of Ames as the “hoodoo” pitcher and the man “who couldn’t win.”
There was a cross-eyed fellow who lived between Ames and the Polo Grounds, and “Red” used to make a detour of several blocks en route to the park to be sure to miss him in case he should be out walking. But one day in 1911, when it was his turn to pitch, he bumped into that cross-eyed man and, in spite of the fact that he did his duty by his hat and got three or four small boys to help him out, he failed to last two innings. When it came time to go West on the final trip of the 1911 season, Ames was badly discouraged.
“I don’t see any use in taking me along, Mac,” he said to McGraw a few days before we left. “The club can’t win with me pitching if the other guys don’t even get a foul.”
The first stop was in Boston, and on the day we arrived it rained. In the mail that day, addressed to Leon Ames, came a necktie and a four-leaf clover from a prominent actress, wishing Ames good luck. The directions were inside the envelope. The four-leaf clover, if the charm were to work, must be worn on both the uniform and street clothes, and the necktie was to be worn with the street clothes and concealed in the uniform, if that necktie could be concealedanywhere. It would have done for a headlight and made Joseph’s coat of many colors look like a mourning garment.
“Might as well wish good luck to a guy on the way to the morgue,” murmured Ames as he surveyed the layout, but he manfully put on the necktie, taking his first dose of the prescription, as directed, at once, and he tucked the four-leaf clover away carefully in his wallet.
“You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy,” he remarked to the charm as he put it away, “but I’d wear you if you were a horseshoe.”
The first day that Ames pitched in Boston he won, and won in a stroll.
“The necktie,” he explained that night at dinner, and pointed to the three-sheet, colored-supplement affair he was wearing around his collar, “I don’t change her until I lose.”
And he didn’t lose a game on that trip.Once he almost did, when he was taken out in the sixth inning, and a batter put in for him, but the Giants finally pulled out the victory and he got the credit for it. He swept through the West unbeatable, letting down Pittsburg with two or three hits, cleaning up in St. Louis, and finallybreaking our losing streak in Chicago after two games had gone against us. And all the time he wore that spectrum around his collar for a necktie. As it frayed with the wear and tear, more colors began to show, although I didn’t think it possible. If he had had occasion to put on his evening clothes, I believe that tie would have gone with it.
For my part, I would almost rather have lost a game and changed the necktie, since it gave one the feeling all the time that he was carrying it around with him because he had had the wrong end of an election bet, or something of the sort. But not Ames! He was a game guy. He stuck with the necktie, and it stuck with him, and the combination kept right on winning ball games. Maybe he didn’t mind it because he could not see it himself, unless he looked in a mirror, but it was rough on the rest of the team, except that we needed the games the necktie won, to take the pennant.
Columns were printed in the newspapers about that necktie, and it became the most famous scarf in the world. Ames used to sleep with it under his pillow alongside of his bank roll, and he didn’tlose another game until the very end of the season, when he dropped one against Brooklyn.
“I don’t hardly lay that up against the tie,” he said afterwards. “You see, Mac put all those youngsters into it, and I didn’t get any support.”
Analyzing is a distasteful pastime to me, but let’s see what it was that made Ames win. Was it the necktie? Perhaps not. But some sliver of confidence, which resulted from that first game when he was dressed up in the scarf and the four-leaf clover, got stuck in his mind. And after that the rest was easy.
Frank Chance, the manager of the Cubs, has a funny superstition which is of the personal sort. Most ball-players have a natural prejudice against the number “13” in any form, but particularly when attached to a Pullman berth. But Chance always insists, whenever possible, that he have “lower 13.” He says that if he can just crawl in under that number he is sure of a good night’s rest, a safe journey, and a victory the next day. He has been in two or three minor railroad accidents, and he declares that all these occurred when he was sleeping on some other shelf besides “lower 13.” He can usually satisfy his hobby,too, for most travellers steer clear of the berth.
McGraw believes a stateroom brings him good luck, or at least he always insists on having one when he can get it.
“Chance can have ‘lower 13,’” says “Mac,” “but give me a stateroom for luck.”
Most ball-players nowadays treat the superstitions of the game as jokes, probably because they are a little ashamed to acknowledge their weaknesses, but away down underneath they observe the proprieties of the ritual. Why, even I won’t warm up with the third baseman while I am waiting for the catcher to get on his mask and the rest of his paraphernalia. Once, when I first broke in with the Giants, I warmed up with the third baseman between innings and in the next round they hit me hard and knocked me out of the box. Since then I have had an uncommon prejudice against the practice, and I hate to hear a man even mention it. Devlin knows of my weakness and never suggests it when he is playing the bag, but occasionally a new performer will drill into the box score at third base and yell:
“Come on, Matty! Warm up here while you’re waiting.”
It gets me. I’ll pitch to the first baseman or a substitute catcher to keep warm, but I would rather freeze to death than heat up with the third baseman. That is one of my pet jinxes.
And speaking of Arthur Devlin, he has a few hand-raised jinxes of his own, too. For instance, he never likes to hear a player hum a tune on the bench, because he thinks it will keep him from getting a base hit. He nearly beat a youngster to death one day when he kept on humming after Devlin had told him to stop.
“Cut that out, Caruso,” yelled Arthur, as the recruit started his melody. “You are killing base hits.”
The busher continued with his air until Devlin tried another form of persuasion.
Arthur also has a favorite seat on the bench which he believes is luckier than the rest, and he insists on sitting in just that one place.
But the worst blow Devlin ever had was when some young lady admirer of his in his palmy days, who unfortunately wore her eyes crossed, insisted on sitting behind third base for each game, so asto be near him. Arthur noticed her one day and, after that, it was all off. He hit the worst slump of his career. For a while no one could understand it, but at last he confessed to McGraw.
“Mac,” he said one night in the club-house, “it’s that jinx. Have you noticed her? She sits behind the bag every day, and she has got me going. She has sure slid the casters under me. I wish we could bar her out, or poison her, or shoot her, or chloroform her, or kill her in some nice, mild way because, if it isn’t done, this League is going to lose a ball-player. How can you expect a guy to play with that overlooking him every afternoon?”
McGraw took Devlin out of the game for a time after that, and the newspapers printed several yards about the cross-eyed jinx who had ruined the Giants’ third baseman.
With the infield weakened by the loss of Devlin, the club began to lose with great regularity. But one day the jinxess was missing and she never came back. She must have read in the newspapers what she was doing to Devlin, her hero, and quit the national pastime or moved to another part of the stand. With this weight off his shoulders,Arthur went back into the game and played like mad.
“If she’d stuck much longer,” declared McGraw, joyous in his rejuvenated third baseman, “I would have had her eyes operated on and straightened. This club couldn’t afford to keep on losing ball games because you are such a Romeo, Arthur, that even the cross-eyed ones fall for you.”
Ball-players are very superstitious about the bats. Did you ever notice how the clubs are all laid out in a neat, even row before the bench and are scrupulously kept that way by the bat boy? If one of the sticks by any chance gets crossed, all the players will shout:
“Uncross the bats! Uncross the bats!”
It’s as bad as discovering a three-alarm fire in an excelsior factory. Don’t believe it? Then listen to what happened to the Giants once because a careless bat boy neglected his duty. The team was playing in Cincinnati in the season of 1906 when one of the bats got crossed through the carelessness of the boy. What was the result? “Mike” Donlin, the star slugger of the team, slid into third base and came up with a broken ankle.
Ever since that time we have carried our own boy with us, because a club with championship aspirations cannot afford to take a chance with those foreign artists handling the bats. They are likely to throw you down at any time.
The Athletics have a funny superstition which is private or confined to their team as far as I know. When luck seems to be breaking against them in a game, they will take the bats and throw them wildly into the air and let them lie around in front of their bench, topsy-turvy. They call this changing the luck, but any other club would consider that it was the worst kind of a jinx. It is the same theory that card-players have about shuffling the deck vigorously to bring a different run of fortune. Then, if the luck changes, the Athletics throw the bats around some more to keep it. This act nearly cost them one of their best ball-players in the third game of the 1911 world’s series.
The Philadelphia players had tossed their bats to break their run of luck, for the score was 1 to 0 against them, when Baker came up in the ninth inning. He cracked his now famous home run into the right-field bleachers, and the men on thebench hurled the bats wildly into the air. In jumping up and reaching for a bat to throw, Jack Barry, the shortstop, hit his head on the concrete roof of the structure and was stunned for a minute. He said that little black specks were floating in front of his eyes, but he gamely insisted on playing the contest out. “Connie” Mack was so worried over his condition that he sent Ira Thomas out on the field to inquire if he were all right, and this interrupted the game in the ninth inning. A lot of the spectators thought that Thomas was out there, bearing some secret message from “Connie” Mack. None knew that he was ascertaining the health of a player who had almost killed himself while killing a jinx.
The Athletics, for two seasons, have carried with them on all their trips a combination bat boy and mascot who is a hunchback, and he outjinxed our champion jinx killer, Charley Faust, in the 1911 world’s series. A hunchback is regarded by ball-players as the best luck in the world. If a man can just touch that hump on the way to the plate, he is sure to get a hit, and any observant spectator will notice the Athletics’ hitters rubbing the hunchback boy before leaving the bench.So attached to this boy have the players become that they voted him half a share of the prize money last year after the world’s series. Lots of ball-players would tell you that he deserved it because he has won two world’s pennants for them.
Another great piece of luck is for a ball-player to rub a colored kid’s head. I’ve walked along the street with ball-players and seen them stop a young negro and take off his hat and run their hands through his kinky hair. Then I’ve seen the same ball-player go out and get two or three hits that afternoon and play the game of his life. Again, it is the confidence inspired, coupled with the ability.
Another old superstition among ball-players is that a load of empty barrels means base hits. If an athlete can just pass a flock of them on the way to the park, he is sure to step right along stride for stride with the three-hundred hitters that afternoon.
McGraw once broke up a batting slump of the Giants with a load of empty barrels. That is why I maintain he is the greatest manager of them all. He takes advantage of the little things, even the superstitions of his men, and turns them to hisaccount. He played this trick in one of the first years that he managed the New York club. The batting of all the players had slumped at the same time. None could hit, and the club was losing game after game as a result, because the easiest pitchers were making the best batters look foolish. One day Bowerman came into the clubhouse with a smile on his face for the first time in a week.
“Saw a big load of empty barrels this afternoon, boys,” he announced, “and just watch me pickle the pill out there to-day.”
Right at that point McGraw got an idea, as he frequently does. Bowerman went out that afternoon and made four hits out of a possible five. The next day three or four more of the players came into the park, carrying smiles and the announcement that fortunately they, too, had met a load of empty barrels. They, then, all went out and regained their old batting strides, and we won that afternoon for the first time in a week. More saw a load of barrels the next day and started to bat. At last all the members of the team had met the barrels, and men with averages of .119 were threatening to chisel into the three-hundredset. With remarkable regularity the players were meeting loads of empty barrels on their way to the park, and, with remarkable regularity and a great deal of expedition, the pitchers of opposing clubs were being driven to the shower bath.
“Say,” asked “Billy” Gilbert, the old second baseman, of “Bill” Lauder, formerly the protector of the third corner, one day, “is one of that team of horses sorrel and the other white?”
“Sure,” answered “Bill.”
“Sure,” echoed McGraw. “I hired that load of empty barrels by the week to drive around and meet you fellows on the way to the park, and you don’t think I can afford to have them change horses every day, do you?”
Everybody had a good laugh and kept on swatting. McGraw asked for waivers on the load of empty barrels soon afterwards, but his scheme had stopped a batting slump and put the club’s hitters on their feet again. He plays to the little personal qualities and superstitions in the men to get the most out of them. And just seeing those barrels gave them the idea that they were bound to get the base hits, and they got them. Once more, the old confidence, hitched up with ability.
What manager would have carried a Kansas farmer around the circuit with him besides McGraw? I refer to Charles Victor Faust of Marion, Kansas, the most famous jinx killer of them all. Faust first met the Giants in St. Louis on the next to the last trip the club made West in the season of 1911, when he wandered into the Planter’s Hotel one day, asked for McGraw and announced that a fortune teller of Marion had informed him he would be a great pitcher and that for $5 he could have a full reading. This pitching announcement piqued Charles, and he reached down into his jeans, dug out his last five, and passed it over. The fortune teller informed Faust that all he had to do to get into the headlines of the newspapers and to be a great pitcher was to join the New York Giants. He joined, and, after he once joined, it would have taken the McNamaras in their best form to separate him from the said Giants.
“Charley” came out to the ball park and amused himself warming up. Incidentally, the Giants did not lose a game while he was in the neighborhood. The night the club left for Chicago on that trip, he was down at the Union Station ready to go along.
“Did you get your contract and transportation?” asked McGraw, as the lanky Kansan appeared.
“No,” answered “Charley.”
“Pshaw,” replied McGraw. “I left it for you with the clerk at the hotel. The train leaves in two minutes,” he continued, glancing at his watch. “If you can run the way you say you can, you can make it and be back in time to catch it.”
It was the last we saw of “Charley” Faust for a time—galloping up the platform in his angular way with that contract and transportation in sight.
“I’m almost sorry we left him,” remarked McGraw as “Charley” disappeared in the crowd. We played on around the circuit with indifferent luck and got back to New York with the pennant no more than a possibility, and rather a remote one at that. The first day we were in New York “Charley” Faust entered the clubhouse with several inches of dust and mud caked on him, for he had come all the way either by side-door special or blind baggage.
“I’m here, all right,” he announced quietly, and started to climb into a uniform.
“I see you are,” answered McGraw.
“Charley” stuck around for two or three days, and we won. Then McGraw decided he would have to be dropped and ordered the man on the door of the clubhouse to bar this Kansas kid out. Faust broke down and cried that day, and we lost. After that he became a member of the club, and we won game after game until some busy newspaper man obtained a vaudeville engagement for him at a salary of $100 a week. We lost three games the week he was absent from the grounds, and Faust saw at once he was not doing the right thing by the club, so, with a wave of his hand that would have gone with J. P. Morgan’s income, he passed up some lucrative vaudeville contracts, much to the disgust of the newspaper man, who was cutting the remuneration with him, and settled down to business. The club did not lose a game after that, and it was decided to take Faust West with us on the last and famous trip in 1911. Daily he had been bothering McGraw and Mr. Brush for his contract, for he wanted to pitch. The club paid him some money from time to time to meet his personal expenses.
The Sunday night the club left for Boston, a vaudeville agent was at the Grand Central Stationwith a contract offering Faust $100 a week for five weeks, which “Charley” refused in order to stick with the club. It was the greatest trip away from home in the history of baseball. Starting with the pennant almost out of reach, the Giants won eighteen and lost four games. One contest that we dropped in St. Louis was when some of the newspaper correspondents on the trip kidnapped Faust and sat him on the St. Louis bench.
Another day in St. Louis the game had gone eleven innings, and the Cardinals needed one run to win. They had several incipient scores on the bases and “Rube” Marquard, in the box, was apparently going up in the air. Only one was out. Faust was warming up far in the suburbs when, under orders from McGraw, I ran out and sent him to the bench, for that was the place from which his charm seemed to be the most potent. “Charley” came loping to the bench as fast as his long legs would transport him and St. Louis didn’t score and we won the game. It was as nice a piece of pinch mascoting as I ever saw.
The first two games that “Charley” really lost were in Chicago. And all through the trip, hereiterated his weird prophecies that “the Giants with Manager McGraw were goin’ ta win.” The players believed in him, and none would have let him go if it had been necessary to support him out of their own pockets. And we did win.
“Charley,” with his monologue and great good humor, kept the players in high spirits throughout the journey, and the feeling prevailed that we couldn’t lose with him along. He was advertised all over the circuit, and spectators were going to the ball park to see Faust and Wagner. “Charley” admitted that he could fan out Hans because he had learned how to pitch out there in Kansas by correspondence school and had read of “Hans’s” weakness in a book. His one “groove” was massages and manicures. He would go into the barber shop with any member of the team who happened to be getting shaved and take a massage and manicure for the purposes of sociability, as a man takes a drink. He easily was the record holder for the manicure Marathon, hanging up the figures of five in one day in St. Louis. He also liked pie for breakfast, dinner and supper, and a small half before retiring.
But, alas! “Charley” lost in the world’sseries. He couldn’t make good. And a jinx killer never comes back. He is gone. And his expansive smile and bump-the-bumps slide are gone with him. That is, McGraw hopes he is gone. But he was a wonder while he had it. And he did a great deal toward giving the players confidence. With him on the bench, they thought they couldn’t lose, and they couldn’t. It has long been a superstition among ball-players that when a “bug” joins a club, it will win a championship, and the Giants believed it when “Charley” Faust arrived. Did “Charley” Faust win the championship for the Giants?
Another time-honored superstition among ball-players is that no one must say to a pitcher as he goes to the box for the eighth inning:
“Come on, now. Only six more men.”
Or for the ninth:
“Pitch hard, now. Only three left.”
Ames says that he lost a game in St. Louis once because McGraw forgot himself and urged him to pitch hard because only three remained to be put out. Those three batters raised the mischief with Ames’s prospects; he was knocked outof the box in that last inning, and we lost the game. That was before the days of the wonder necktie.
Ames won the third game played in Chicago on the last trip West. Coming into the ninth inning, he had the Cubs beaten, when McGraw began:
“Come on, ‘Red,’ only——”
“Nix, Mac,” cut in Ames, “for the love of Mike, be reasonable.”
And then he won the game. But the chances are that if McGraw had got that “only three more” out, he would have lost, because it would have been working on his strained nerves.