The Old Ball Game

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Authors: Frank Deford
keeping the American League out of New York. It was bad enough that Brooklyn had a franchise to rival his Giants, but now another competitor loomed in Manhattan.
    The team was just as shook up at McGraw’s hovering presence as was the owner. “The New-Yorks are suffering from nervousnessin anticipation of the coming of manager McGraw,” wrote the
World’s
baseball reporter. “It is said that some of the men are dissipating, which accounts for the miserable play of the team.”
    Mathewson himself was back at the pitcher’s rubber, having played his last game at first base on July 1, but when Muggsy’s purge began, a rumor started flying that McGraw was going to offload Matty to St. Louis. Wrote the
Tribune:
“It is said that Mathewson, the pitcher [at least he was no longer ’the former pitcher’], may be allowed to go, as it is believed that he and McGraw are not on the best of terms.” Matty allowed as how that was all news to him, but given the two men’s contrasting personalities, it is certainly understandable that there was an assumption that he couldn’t tolerate his new manager. As for McGraw, he never so much as contemplated getting rid of Mathewson. On the contrary, he called Matty’s brief exile from pitching “sheer insanity,” adding that “any man who did that should be locked up.”
    And then the Baltimorized Giants returned from their western road swing to the Polo Grounds, and, essentially, baseball began for real in the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York. For his first game as Giants’ manager on Saturday, July 19, 1902, McGraw started the redoubtable McGinnity. After a succession of handfuls for crowds, suddenly a throng of sixteen thousand materialized, almost filling the park. McGraw placed himself at shortstop and went one-for-three. “It is impossible for the aggressive little baseball expert to keep out of the game,” the
Times
noted, and the other papers, which had been lacerating the Giants for years, suddenly were in his thrall. Even though the Giants lost 4–3, there was, it seems, overnight, a whole new spirit discernible from the press box. “The old-time Baltimore ginger infused by McGraw held out to the end,” the
World
cheered. The other hard-boiled diamond journalists joined the joyful chorus.
    McGraw always understood how to work the press. Sports pages had begun to flourish back in the 1880s shortly before McGraw came into the game, and so he sort of grew up withthem. He knew how to reel out just enough of the skinny to convince the writers that they were his confidants; also, he trusted them with selected inside tidbits. “I have never known a baseball reporter to violate a secret,” he declared near the end of his career. Indeed, one time in spring training, when his irresponsible pitcher Bugs Raymond appeared to have broken his promise and fallen off the water wagon, McGraw convened a secret jury of writers to deliver a verdict on the matter. They did. They adjudged Raymond guilty but, co-opted by being inducted into the Giants’ judicial process, none of them wrote a word about Bugs’s fall from grace.
    Before McGraw came to New York, of course, Freedman had made sure that the Giants endured the worst possible press from the score or so papers in town. Worse, the Giants could be almost ignored. At that time, when athletic professionalism was still not altogether accepted, it was not uncommon for the papers to devote almost as much space to college baseball games as to the pros. College football was heavily reported in the autumn, although on a regular basis, horse racing got the biggest play of all; in the upscale broadsheets, there was also extended coverage of regattas. The new sport of auto racing spilled over into both the society pages, to report on the swells in attendance, and the news pages, where speed and death (or the threat thereof) has always commanded a broad

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