Free Pinstripe Empire by Marty Appel

danced atop their dugout to “Dixie” and “Old Black Joe.”
    It would be Chesbro, of course, well rested now with a full day off, taking on Dinneen. So enchanted were the fans with Chesbro’s season that the game would be halted as he came to bat in the third inning, when fans from his hometown of North Adams presented him with a fur-lined overcoat.
    New York scored two in the fifth for the delirious faithful, but Boston tied it in the seventh. They went to the ninth tied 2–2.
    In an inning for the ages, Boston’s Lou Criger beat out an infield single and was sacrificed to second by Dinneen. On a grounder to Elberfeld at short, Criger somehow sneaked past the ball and got to third. And so withtwo out and Criger dancing off third, Freddie Parent at bat, and the count 2 and 2, Chesbro took the sign from his catcher, Red Kleinow, and delivered. The ball sailed over Kleinow’s head and went all the way to the backstop, ninety-one feet behind him. Criger scored standing up and the crowd groaned, then fell silent. Forty-one victories in a season, but a horrific wild pitch in the final inning on the final day had given Boston a 3–2 lead.
    In the last of the ninth, Dougherty struck out with runners on first and second and the game was over, making the second game, a 1–0 New York win, meaningless.
    Sportswriter Mark Roth later told people he saw Chesbro “crying like a baby” on the Highlanders bench after the inning ended, while the Bostons danced in front of their dugout.
    “How did I make the wild pitch?” Chesbro told the
Boston Post
in January. “How does any pitcher make one? I used a spitball, but the spitball had nothing to do with it. I simply put too much force into the throw. Dinneen had been using the spitball and had made the ball rather slippery. I am not blaming Dinneen, however. I put too much force into the ball and that’s all. It hit the grand stand and it’s a long story of what happened. We lost the pennant.”
    Boston won it by eight percentage points. Had New York won both of those final games, they would have won by six percentage points. There were no plans to replay New York’s four tie games. (It did complicate the understanding of the standings for fans of both teams, who argued all week over what was needed to win.)
    Chesbro’s wild pitch was played over and over in people’s minds and discussed for years. Could Kleinow have caught it? Was their some superhuman effort that could have kept the ball from sailing out of range? As years passed, some indeed felt it might even have been a passed ball.
    Almost forty years later, writer Fred Lieb ran into Kid Elberfeld and asked what he thought. He’d been at shortstop.
    Said the Tabasco Kid, “That ball rode so far over Kleinow’s head that he couldn’t have caught it standing on a stepladder.”
    “They said it was a wild pitch, and I’ll let it go at that,” said Chesbro years later. “But I think the ball might have been caught.”
    In 1938, Griffith, attending the Winter Meetings in New Orleans, told the press that he always thought it was a passed ball. “Kleinow … was the man who blew the championship,” he said. “[He] had been out celebratingthe night before. His vision was none too keen and he missed the pitch that would have given New York its first American League pennant.”
    Like Babe Ruth’s “called-shot home run” in the 1932 World Series, it would be seen differently by every eyewitness and be one of the most debated moments in Yankee history, so long as people who lived through it remained.
    It was certainly the most exciting moment of the Yankees’ first seventeen seasons, even if it didn’t work out for them. Boston had maintained bragging rights and would again fly the pennant. But the beginning of a great rivalry was born.
    The final attendance for New York was reported as 438,919, fourth in the league, and more than double the 1903 total. The Giants led all of baseball with 609,826, an increase of