Free The Old Ball Game by Frank Deford

Connolly forfeited the game. Accordingly, two days later, Johnson suspended him again, whereupon McGraw hastened to New York and began secret discussions with Andrew Freedman. Publicly he called the American League “a loser,” Ban Johnson “a czar,” and, for good measure, he disparaged Connie Mack’s Athletics as “white elephants.”
    As Muggsy’s New York negotiations began to leak out, McGraw (still in his woe-is-me canine stage) lashed out even more at Johnson, saying: “I would be a fool to stay here and have a dog made of myself by a man who makes no pretense of investigating or giving a hearing to both sides.”
    Johnson replied with contempt, even denying McGraw animal status. “The muttering of an insignificant and vindictive wasp,” he snorted.
    That did it. McGraw was gone from Baltimore. He had loaned the Oriole franchise seven thousand dollars, and so he demanded that he either be reimbursed or released. “I acted fast,” he explained. “Someone would be left holding the bag, and I made up my mind that it wouldn’t be me. I simply protected myself as any business-man would.” And, most emphatically: “I did not jump.” That was very important to him. He maintained that position all his life. Even long after he died, his wife continued to argue that her husband had done nothing wrong in departing her Baltimore. “Baseball . . . is a business. It is a man’s world,” she wrote. “Perhaps a mother’s savage defense of her brood might be likened to a man’s battle to salvage wealth, position, power or whatever was in jeopardy at the time.”

    Mathewson, McGraw and “Iron Man” McGinnity
    McGraw himself also publicly declared: “I wish to assure Baltimore that in consideration of their kindness, I shall not tamper with any of the Baltimore Club’s players. I would not do that, because of my friendship for the people here, and because it would not be right.”
    Then, promptly, he took four players—including Iron Man McGinnity—with him to New York, so eviscerating the franchise that Baltimore had to forfeit a game. Good grief, he even seduced Tom Murphy, the canny groundskeeper, into taking his gardening magic to the Polo Grounds. The
New York Sun
flatly called theGiants “the Baltimorized New Yorks.” The
Sporting News
was no less distracted by McGraw’s claims, characterizing him as “the Aguinaldo of base ball.” Since Aguinaldo was a Filipino rebel who had been a special thorn in the American army’s side, that was pretty harsh stuff, in the modern range of naming someone the “Osama bin Laden of baseball.”
    Meanwhile, back in Mobtown, Ban Johnson invoked league rules and gleefully took over the Oriole franchise, which is what he had wanted to do all along. By next season, 1903, he would have a whole team of Baltimorized New Yorks in his own league. They would be called the Highlanders at first, but would become somewhat better known under their subsequent sobriquet, the Yankees.
    McGraw and Johnson never exchanged another word as long as they lived.
    The Giants were on a western swing when McGraw officially took over the club on July 17. He accepted an $11,000 contract, the highest in the sport to that time, topping his own record $10,000 salary with St. Louis. Promptly he cleaned house, cutting loose nine of the team’s twenty-three players. Freedman was apoplectic, since this meant having to eat $14,000 in salaries, but he had signed over authority to McGraw, and Muggsy unabashedly took charge. If there had been any doubt on Freedman’s part, this probably sealed his decision to get out of the baseball business. Tammany had been kicked out of power in the previous November’s election, and Freedman realized that he no longer possessed the authority to prohibit the construction of a new ballpark, which had previously been a key factor in