I don’t know what he had, but he had a lot of it.—BOBBY MARKS, assistant football coach, on his legendary boss, Paul “Bear” Bryant
In May 1905 manager John McGraw and his New York Giants hosted the Pittsburgh Pirates for a four-game series. On May 19 McGraw got into an argument with an umpire, as he was wont to do, and accused the arbiter of being in the pocket of Barney Dreyfuss, the Pittsburgh owner. As McGraw saw it, Harry Pulliam, the league president who hired the umpires, was Dreyfuss’s friend and former employee. Dreyfuss was seated nearby and overheard the remarks. The next day McGraw got into another heated exchange and was kicked out of the game. On his way to the clubhouse, he ran into Dreyfuss, who was talking with some friends.
“Hey Barney!” McGraw shouted sarcastically and repeatedly, and when Dreyfuss could no longer ignore him he yelled, “Barney Dreyfuss bet $2,200 against $1,800 that the Pittsburgh club would beat us.” He followed up loudly and abusively that the Pittsburgh owner owed money to a bookie and was welshing on bets. According to one account, McGraw may have “caused aspersions upon the Jewish race,” all while using language that was “constantly full of profanity, vulgar words and epithets.” Dreyfuss was embarrassed by the public exchange and filed a formal complaint with the league. Pulliam, who had been crusading to clean up the game during his three years as president, suspended McGraw for fifteen days, while the league mildly rebuked Dreyfuss for engaging with a rival manager.
McGraw and John Brush, the Giants owner, took the league to court, where a judge ruled in favor of the Giants, overturning the suspension. John McGraw had long lived his life according to his own set of laws, and he certainly did not believe that anyone, including the president of the National League, had any power over him. And in this instance among many others, he proved to be correct.1
While Dreyfuss had for many years embodied the powerful and brilliant baseball owner, one of the first who had never played the game but learned it so thoroughly that he could build and lead a great team and organization, John McGraw was one of the last and most successful embodiments of a different sort, a veteran field manager who also performed the duties that would later be associated with a general manager. After his own great playing career, McGraw became not just a legendary manager but also a man who completely controlled the running of his team on and off the field. McGraw never owned more than a minority interest in the Giants, but his bosses let him run baseball operations without interference. McGraw often did his own scouting, made trades, signed contracts, and generally told his players how to play and how to act. His owners could be content to sit back and watch the pennants and profits pile up.
Pittsburgh’s Fred Clarke, talking years later about his own managerial style, which called for players learning the game well enough that they could make their own decisions on the field, said, “McGraw changed that in his early days with the Giants, when he began to run the whole game, and call every pitch, and every move of the batsman. That was a style peculiar to McGraw, one of the great managers. It is not a style fit for the whole of baseball, and I believe that dictation from the bench is the cause of so many players failing as managers in recent years. They have been brought up to lean on somebody else.”2 While Clarke was willing to take a backseat to all of the talented players on his team, John McGraw never took a backseat to anyone. McGraw was the New York Giants, who were one of the best teams in baseball for all of McGraw’s reign. Outside of New York they were baseball’s most hated team and McGraw the most hated manager.
Sportswriter Frank Graham described the feisty McGraw as “five feet, seven inches tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and slightly built. Restless, aggressive, and quick tempered, he would fight anybody—and frequently did.”3 McGraw played the bulk of his big-league career in the 1890s for the National League’s Baltimore Orioles. Just eighteen when he joined Baltimore (then part of the American Association) in 1891, he was one of the building blocks of a team that captured three straight NL pennants beginning in 1894. The Orioles were led by brilliant manager Ned Hanlon, who acquired several little-used players from around the league—including Hughie Jennings, Willie Keeler, and Joe Kelley—and turned them into topflight stars. Despite his young age, McGraw quickly became one of the leaders on a club known both for its innovative brilliance and for its rowdy lawlessness.
The Orioles of the era closely mirrored McGraw’s on-field personality. The team was known for its “inside baseball” and heady play. As we explored in Paths to Glory,4 the 1890s Orioles team has been credited with inventing or popularizing the hit-and-run, the pickoff, cutoff plays, and the suicide squeeze, among other strategic ploys. Although they may not have actually been first, the team certainly used these plays, often to great advantage. On the other hand, the Orioles would resort to almost any tactic to win, including hiding balls in the outfield, vicious verbal and physical intimidation of umpires and opposing players, cutting across the diamond from first to third when the umpire was not looking, and tripping or grabbing opposing base runners to slow them down. This brand of baseball—clever play combined with purposeful violence—would define McGraw’s teams throughout his managerial career.
In 1899 the owners of the Brooklyn and Baltimore teams formed a syndicate, and Hanlon and most of his best players moved to Brooklyn. The twenty-six-year-old McGraw stayed behind and was named manager of the gutted Orioles, earning acclaim for bringing his team in fourth despite the talent attenuation. After the season Baltimore was contracted as part of the NL reduction to eight teams, and McGraw ended up with St. Louis, as a player only, for the 1900 season.
In 1901 McGraw hooked up with Ban Johnson, who was in the process of turning his American League into a second major league. Johnson offered McGraw the stewardship and part ownership in the AL’s new Baltimore franchise. McGraw brought his team in fifth, but often clashed with league president Johnson over umpire abuse and general rowdyism. One of Johnson’s goals was to keep the NL hooliganism out of his league, making his selection of McGraw an odd one, and one ultimately doomed to fail.
In 1902, still just twenty-nine, McGraw found himself in the middle of one of the key battles of the war between the two leagues. As recounted in the previous chapter, McGraw’s decision to bolt to the New York Giants led to the destruction of the Baltimore club, the creation of what would become the New York Yankees, and ownership changes for two NL teams. The Giants had been a bad team for several years, due mainly to the petty and destructive leadership of owner Andrew Freedman. But Freedman’s final act as owner—the hiring of John McGraw—put the team on its path to greatness.
The Giants were coming off a seventh-place finish in 1901 and wound up last in 1902 despite the midseason acquisition of several released Orioles, including two future Hall of Famers, Joe McGinnity and Roger Bresnahan, plus Jack Cronin and Dan McGann. McGraw’s restructuring of his roster, however, took effect quickly, and the team jumped all the way to second in 1903 and a pennant in 1904. The only member of the starting lineup left from the pre-McGraw days was catcher Jack Warner, but the strength of the early McGraw teams was the pitching of Christy Mathewson, whom he inherited, and McGinnity. McGraw also continually looked for tactical advantages within the game. He greatly expanded the practice of relief pitching: from 1903 to 1909 the Giants had 102 saves (as retroactively calculated), nearly twice as many as the second-ranked NL team (54).5 In the latter year McGraw also began using Doc Crandall as baseball’s first recognized relief ace.
Unlike Dreyfuss, Giants owner John Brush gave his manager complete authority over the design of his roster, a role that would fall to the general manager in the decades ahead. After McGraw captured the NL pennant in 1904, he and Brush refused to play the AL champion Boston Americans—McGraw hated Johnson from his time in the AL, and Brush was still angry that Johnson had put a franchise in New York. When the Giants repeated in 1905, they acceded and played the Philadelphia Athletics, beating them in five games. Over the next several years the NL was dominated by three clubs—Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York—who combined to win all thirteen pennants between 1901 and 1913 and often finished in the top three slots in the league. McGraw’s teams lost a few tight races while rebuilding, before breaking through for three consecutive pennants from 1911 through 1913. Other than the great Mathewson, McGraw rarely had superstars on his team; instead, he had an ever-changing group of players from whom he managed to wring two or three good years. The best position players on his 1911–13 teams were second baseman Larry Doyle and catcher Chief Meyers. When this Giants club began to slip, McGraw again restructured his team and won the flag with a different core in 1917. He rarely became attached to his players, even those he took pride in developing. When a player lost effectiveness, or McGraw felt they were about to, he replaced them. He dealt Doyle in 1916 after a strong 1915 season.
Brush and McGraw also succeeded in turning the Giants into baseball’s most valuable and successful franchise. From 1903 to 1917, McGraw’s Giants won six pennants, finished second five times, and regularly led the league in attendance. According to an article in McClure’s, “The Giants now constitute the most valuable baseball property in the country, being held at more than a million dollars not including the grounds, which are leased. Brush has made immense profits from the team, ranging from $100,000 to $300,000 or more annually.”6
In order to understand how McGraw built his teams, it is instructive to consider how he managed them. McGraw believed in aggressive, heady play. Leonard Koppett described seven ideas that McGraw learned from the great Ned Hanlon, manager of the Orioles. These ideas became McGraw’s “bible”:
1. Tactics can be employed to gain a small edge: the bunt, hit and run, steals, etc.
2. Conditioning and personal discipline are important [although McGraw employed notable exceptions].
3. The manager’s authority is absolute.
4. Aggressiveness is a primary asset.
5. Speed helps you win.
6. Deciding where and when a man should play is as important as his generalized abilities.
7. It’s us against them.7
McGraw worked hard to instill two distinct and, to a large extent, contradictory characteristics in his charges. On the one hand, he demanded absolute obedience and loyalty. McGraw felt any challenge to his authority would lead to the team losing its focus and drive, and he could be extremely unpleasant, abusive, and vindictive in trying to instill this single-mindedness. On the flip side, he also demanded a quickness of mind on the ball field. McGraw carried this need for intelligent ballplayers to its logical conclusion and spent the effort instilling, in the words of Koppett, “high morale and a sense of self-respect.”8 A player was required to learn the McGraw way to play, to play well, and to remain obedient; if he did all this, McGraw would show him loyalty and pay him well.
Many of McGraw’s longtime charges tolerated his abuse, and possibly even felt a certain affinity toward him, because they recognized his approach could lead to pennants, higher salaries, and their own improved performance. This faith was most evident in players McGraw signed at a young age as amateurs or from the Minors, players he could more easily mold. Because he did not become attached to players, he also did not play favorites. It may have rankled the veterans who had put up with him for so long, but McGraw was completely evenhanded when selecting his team. The players McGraw clashed with—like Edd Roush or Billy Southworth—generally had prior big-league experience or a strong independent or unconventional streak. Although McGraw recognized the value in some of these players, he often became frustrated and traded them away.
McGraw was extremely confident in his ability to recognize talent. Because of this conceit, and his desire to be able to mold his charges, McGraw often introduced players to the Major Leagues at an extremely young age and, if they performed well, made them regulars. After all, he had debuted in the Major Leagues at only eighteen and was a star soon thereafter. McGraw was willing to live with youthful mistakes as long as he recognized a full effort. The famous 1908 “Merkle Boner” was a base-running error made by a nineteen-year-old kid whom McGraw thereafter publicly and consistently defended. Table 2 lists several young players that debuted for McGraw. The final six are now members of baseball’s Hall of Fame.
Table 2. McGraw’s young players
|
Age |
Debut year |
Regular year |
|
|
Fred Merkle |
18 |
1907 |
1910 |
|
Larry Doyle |
20 |
1907 |
1908 |
|
George Kelly |
19 |
1915 |
1920 |
|
Ross Youngs |
20 |
1917 |
1918 |
|
Frankie Frisch |
21 |
1919 |
1920 |
|
Travis Jackson |
18 |
1922 |
1923 |
|
Fred Lindstrom |
18 |
1924 |
1925 |
|
Mel Ott |
17 |
1926 |
1928 |
Source: http://BaseballReference.com.
To illustrate McGraw’s team-building approach, in this chapter we explore the years after his club captured the 1917 pennant, when the Giants won ninety-eight games and topped the league in both runs and ERA. Despite the club’s gaudy statistics, McGraw realized that it was not built to last.
As McGraw set out to rebuild his pennant winner, he was operating in an environment well suited to his skills. During the late teens and early 1920s, the rules governing the Major League–Minor League draft favored the high Minors, giving them unprecedented control over their players and consequently driving up the price of top Minor Leaguers. Once a few top amateurs recognized that signing with a high Minor League team might be more restrictive of their career, McGraw utilized his network of scouts to sign several who might earlier have gone to a Minor League team, such as those identified in table 2. He also used his team’s financial advantage to purchase Minor Leaguers at their inflated prices.
The ownership of the Giants changed twice in the 1910s. John Brush, who had owned the club since 1903, died in late 1912. Control of the Giants then passed to Brush’s son-in-law Harry Hempstead, who had little experience as a baseball executive. He maintained a cordial relationship with McGraw, who had hoped to secure an executive role in the reorganization after Brush’s death. Hempstead enjoyed the prestige that came from running baseball’s premier franchise, although he never really warmed to the task.9 In early 1919 he sold a controlling interest to Charles Stoneham, a Manhattan stock trader.
Stoneham made his fortune operating what was known as a “bucket shop,” something of a cut-rate stockbrokerage that played fast and loose with both the rules and their investors’ money. Stoneham loved horse racing, had part ownership in a racetrack, and enjoyed gambling of all stripes. He cavorted with a number of New York’s more unsavory characters, including underworld financier Arnold Rothstein, who arranged the fix of the 1919 World Series. Stoneham generally let McGraw have his way on player transactions, kept him highly paid (he was in the midst of a five-year contract worth forty thousand dollars per year that would be bumped significantly upon expiration), and loaned him the money to buy into a minority ownership position.10
At the start of 1918 McGraw traded Buck Herzog to reacquire aging favorite Larry Doyle and also landed pitcher Jesse Barnes in the swap. Barnes became a mainstay of the Giant pitching staff for several years, winning a total of seventy-three games from 1919 through 1922.
The Barnes deal was one of several between the Giants and Boston Braves over the next few years. Although not as infamous as the Yankees’ pillaging of the Red Sox in this same period, the Giants acquired several stars from the Braves using a similar combination of cash and marginal ballplayers. This process accelerated when New Yorker George Washington Grant led a syndicate that purchased the Braves in 1919. Grant was a pal of both McGraw and Stoneham and, to the consternation of Boston’s NL baseball fans, frequently did the bidding of his New York friends. Although Grant denied it, Stoneham likely loaned Grant around one hundred thousand of the four-hundred-thousand-dollar purchase price.11
In a year heavily affected by the world war, the 1918 Giants fell to second place, ten and a half games behind the Chicago Cubs. In one bright spot, McGraw installed twenty-one-year-old outfielder Ross Youngs as the team’s regular right fielder. The Giants had acquired Youngs back in 1916 for a “fancy price,” on the recommendation of Dick Kinsella, one of baseball’s first full-time scouts.12 Kinsella had joined McGraw in 1907 and for the next couple of decades, with a few interruptions, remained McGraw’s key lieutenant in digging out prospects.13 The Giants optioned Youngs to Double-A Rochester and made him an outfielder. His .356 mark convinced McGraw the youngster was ready, and Youngs went on to become a Giants mainstay and one of the league’s top players.
Along with his willingness to play youngsters, McGraw had a habit of acquiring players with character issues. Years earlier he had coaxed a couple of good seasons out of two players with alcohol problems, Larry McLean and Bugs Raymond, though neither proved to be a long-term solution. In July 1918 McGraw purchased pitcher Fred Toney, a man with a rather unusual set of problems, from Cincinnati. After a dominant 1917 season (24-16, 2.20 ERA, with a ten-inning no-hitter), Toney was arrested for claiming his wife and children as dependents to escape the military draft, though he had not lived with them for three years. Although his trial resulted in a hung jury, his troubles were not over. He was subsequently arrested for violating the Mann Act by traveling with a young woman who was not his wife. Passed in 1910, the Mann Act was designed to prevent “white slavery” (the forced prostitution of women). Under the austere moral climate of the time, even noncommercial sex became subject to the act.
At the time of his sale to the Giants, Toney had a 6-10 record and was awaiting trial. The opportunistic McGraw saw a chance to buy low and received a strong second half from Toney. After the season Toney was found guilty and spent time in prison before rejoining the club on May 1, 1919. Toney subsequently turned in three excellent seasons for McGraw’s club.
McGraw picked up an even more troublesome player in 1919. Hal Chase, one of the era’s greatest defensive first basemen and one of baseball’s most nefarious crooks, had been suspended by Cincinnati during the 1918 season because Reds manager Christy Mathewson believed he was throwing games. At a hearing in January 1919 NL president John Heydler cleared Chase of any wrongdoing. Though there were several witnesses who testified to Chase’s malfeasance, the absence of Mathewson (he was in France with the American Expeditionary Force [AEF]), the ambiguity of the evidence, the effective advocacy of Chase’s three attorneys, and the lack of recent precedent in dealing with crooked players all combined to influence Heydler’s decision.
McGraw always liked Chase as a ballplayer and believed, as he always had, that he could get him to play. But by the end of the 1919 season, McGraw benched Chase due to his own suspicions and more damaging information uncovered by Heydler’s continuing investigation. Though not formally banned, Chase never again played in Major League Baseball.14
In July 1919 McGraw gambled again, sending outfielder Dave Robertson to the Cubs for Shufflin’ Phil Douglas, one of the biggest (six foot three, 190 pounds) and most intriguing players in the game. Douglas came from Cedartown, Georgia, and grew up in Tennessee. Playing semipro ball by the age of fourteen, he soon developed into a top-notch pitcher. His best pitch was the (then legal) spitball, but he also threw a fastball, curve, and changeup. Giants catcher Frank Snyder later called him “the best right-handed pitcher I ever caught.”15
Douglas was also a chronic alcoholic, a condition so severe that he often went AWOL from his team. He was never really able to accept the regimen of Major League life and its daily grind. “In his younger days in the south, in country-town baseball, Douglas pitched about once a week; between games he loafed, for the most part, and drunk corn whiskey,” John Lardner recounted.16 By the time McGraw acquired Douglas, he was twenty-nine years old and had already pitched for four different Major League teams. Typically, McGraw believed he could harness Douglas’s obvious talents. For a while, he did. In both 1920 and 1921 Douglas hurled more than two hundred innings and won fourteen and fifteen games, respectively.
A week after picking up Douglas, McGraw acquired Art Nehf, an untroubled pitcher, from the Braves for four players and about fifty thousand dollars. Late-season trades often aroused consternation during a pennant race—the Giants were just a game and a half behind first-place Cincinnati at the time of the deal—but the trading deadline of August 1 would remain for several more years. Only 8-9 with Boston, Nehf pitched well down the stretch for the Giants (9-2), although the Reds ended up pulling away in the race. Over the next five years Nehf won eighty-seven games as the anchor of the Giants staff and one of the National League’s top left-handers. With Nehf, Barnes, Toney, and Douglas, in less than two years McGraw had assembled one of the league’s better starting rotations without surrendering much value.
With the exception of Youngs, the regular 1919 position players were all twenty-nine or older. In July McGraw acquired catcher Frank Snyder from the St. Louis Cardinals for Ferdie Schupp, a once-great pitcher who had set the single-season record for lowest ERA in 1916, then finished 21-7 in 1917, but could not regain his effectiveness after the war. Snyder was twenty-five at the time of the deal and became the Giants’ best catcher since Chief Meyers was in his prime several years earlier.
More important, in the spring of 1919 McGraw held a tryout for a young infielder from Fordham University named Frankie Frisch, dubbed the Fordham Flash for his speed and overall athletic ability. Frisch, a three-sport star, had come recommended by Fordham coach Art Devlin, who had played for McGraw with the Giants. McGraw hoped to sign the youngster after his graduation, but first had to contend with Frisch’s father, a wealthy linen merchant who expected his son to follow him into the family business. The youngster chose baseball, signing for a relatively meager two-hundred-dollar bonus and four-hundred-dollar per month salary. Frisch did secure an atypical clause in his contract requiring the Giants to give him his unconditional release if he did not succeed in his first two years.17 The twenty-year-old Frisch played sparingly for a couple of months before earning regular playing time split between second and third bases over the last six weeks of the season. McGraw’s 1919 Giants had three promising young players in the lineup (Youngs, Snyder, and Frisch) and four talented pitchers (Toney, Barnes, Douglas, and Nehf).
In 1920 McGraw gave the first base job to George Kelly, who had had several trials with the Giants and Pirates since 1915. Still just twenty-four, the San Franciscan earned a starting role and kept it for seven years. Kelly was a great defensive first baseman, a decent hitter, and smart enough to figure out how to get along with McGraw: “McGraw was all business, not much of a sense of humor; he relied on discipline and smart baseball,” Kelly recalled. “You were expected to be watching, thinking, learning all the time.”18 But he also insisted on doing it his way. “You would never go up to him and say, ‘Well I thought . . . ,’ because he’d brush you off with, ‘You just go out and play. I’ll do the thinking.’ And he believed that, too!”19
The Giants played terribly at the start of the 1920 season and were just 18-25 on June 7. On that day McGraw dealt aging shortstop Art Fletcher to the Philadelphia Phillies for Dave Bancroft, the league’s best shortstop. Although the deal was announced as a straight-up trade, penurious Phillies owner William Baker actually received about a hundred thousand dollars from the Giants.20 Still just twenty-nine, Bancroft had starred as a rookie for the Phillies pennant winner back in 1915. After a couple more first-division finishes, Baker began selling off his stars, and by the early 1920s the Phillies were beginning a twenty-year run as one of the most hapless clubs in Major League history. In New York Bancroft anchored the shortstop position for the next four seasons.
Although the Giants played much better over the second half (50-27), they had to settle for their third consecutive second-place finish, this time trailing their bitter rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Giants were led by three twenty-game winners (Barnes, Toney, and Nehf) and by the breakthrough of Ross Youngs, who hit .351. But McGraw’s high tolerance for off-field problems, both for himself and for his team, reached new lows in 1920. The team had to deal with Douglas’s repeated absences and unreliability and more than its share of rumors about various team members fixing games. But there was more.
The Giants had purchased outfielder Benny Kauff back in 1916 after the collapse of the Federal League. Kauff had been the FL’s biggest star, leading the circuit in batting average and stolen bases in both years of the league’s Major League seasons. Somewhat surprisingly, McGraw liked the fast-living, flashy-dressing Kauff, and he had tried unsuccessfully to get him to jump to the Giants in April 1915 before the league’s demise. The off-season peace settlement allowed the Federals to dispose of their player contracts, and Newark owner Harry Sinclair sold Kauff to the Giants for thirty-five thousand dollars.
The trouble began in December 1919 when Kauff, an early automobile enthusiast with a small vehicle sales business, was arrested and indicted for auto theft. He played the entire 1920 season with the trial pending. Meanwhile, late in the season Kauff was called to testify in front of the Chicago grand jury investigating baseball game fixing. Kauff told the jury that he had been offered money in late 1919 by teammate Heinie Zimmerman to help lose games. Fred Toney also testified that he had also been approached by Zimmerman. The next day McGraw testified that while he had tossed Zimmerman and Chase off his club, Kauff was innocent of any wrongdoing. In March 1921 Zimmerman struck back by claiming in an affidavit that he was actually carrying an offer from a gambler to Kauff, who may have been more interested than he had acknowledged. McGraw continued to defend Kauff.21
Commissioner Kenesaw Landis did not share McGraw’s confidence and declared Kauff ineligible in April 1921, just before the start of his car theft trial. During the trial two of Kauff’s employees claimed that they and Kauff stole a car, sold it for eighteen hundred dollars, and split the proceeds. Kauff maintained he had bought the car and resold it but that when he was notified it was stolen returned the money. He added that he was the victim of employees who were running an auto theft ring without his knowledge. Kauff’s defense produced several character witnesses, including McGraw. The jury found Kauff not guilty after a short deliberation. Not surprisingly, the acquittal had no effect on Landis’s decision. Kauff challenged his suspension in court and received a temporary injunction that would reinstate him. On appeal, however, Landis’s suspension was upheld, and Kauff never played organized baseball again.
In 1920 McGraw had another off-field distraction—this one of his own making. The bizarre series of events surrounding a midseason fracas at New York’s Lambs Club testifies to the complexity of McGraw’s character, how the self-discipline he preached to his players was missing from his own life, and how he rarely suffered any serious consequences for his self-destructive behavior.
After losing to the Chicago Cubs on Saturday, August 7, the Giants remained in fourth place in the NL with a record of 53-46, three games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers. After the ball game McGraw went out on the town with some friends. Although Prohibition had recently become the law of the land, McGraw and his society pals—he was popular with the Wall Street and Broadway crowds—had no intention of giving up alcohol or the associated nightlife.22 Late in the evening the group reasoned that it was still too early to call it a night and stopped by the Lambs, a prestigious theatrical club on West Forty-Fourth Street in which McGraw was a member. Although the quarrelsome McGraw had been suspended from the Lambs three months earlier for fighting, in his intoxicated state he thought nothing of walking in.
Several fellow members welcomed McGraw and his small party. After drinking all night, around six in the morning a brawl broke out with McGraw at the center. James Slavin, a well-known comedian, helped break up the fight and pile the beaten McGraw into a cab. When they arrived at McGraw’s apartment, Slavin tried to help McGraw to the door of his building. The next anybody knew, Slavin was lying unconscious with two missing teeth, a cut lip, a damaged tongue, bruises on his face, and a fracture at the base of his skull, obviously thrashed by McGraw but without witnesses. Conscious but still delirious a couple of days later, Slavin could not remember what had happened, and the police concluded that Slavin must have simply fallen down and hurt himself. He remained hospitalized for two months.
Meanwhile, McGraw holed up in his apartment with two black eyes, lacerations of the scalp, bruises on his face, and a possible concussion. He sneaked down to the Polo Grounds to put coach Johnny Evers in charge of the Giants and let the team know he would be unavailable for some time. He did not appear on the bench that day but hid out in the clubhouse. Back at his apartment, he refused to admit anyone connected with law enforcement. When a representative of the Prohibition enforcement office came by, McGraw refused to see him. The assistant district attorney (DA) received little better treatment, complaining that the door had been slammed in his face.
In the heat of a pennant race with the Giants very much alive, McGraw was unavailable to his club and ignoring law enforcement in a high-profile case. McGraw finally gave a statement to the DA on August 14, six days after the incident, acknowledging that he was drunk at the Lambs and would not have fought otherwise. That same night McGraw sneaked out of town to join the Giants in Chicago. The Giants managed a 7-4 record while their manager was hiding and remained two and a half games behind Brooklyn.
The investigation into McGraw’s altercation with Slavin, along with the liquor charge against the Lambs Club, died out because no witness would testify under oath about a situation during which they had been drinking. Nevertheless, on October 29 McGraw was indicted for illegal possession of a bottle of whiskey. His attorney managed to delay the trial until May 1921, when a jury acquitted McGraw in less than five minutes.
Incredibly, McGraw had spent the final two months of the 1920 season and the start of the off-season in the midst of legal wrangling due largely to his own poor judgment. Of all the remarkable aspects of John McGraw, perhaps nothing is more remarkable than that he lived this wild lifestyle—staying up all night drinking and fighting, dealing with all of the legal fallout from his own actions—and still found time to build a great team, a team on the verge of dominating the National League.
After three consecutive second-place finishes, most observers felt the Giants had a good chance to win in 1921. The pitching staff was both solid and deep. To the top four McGraw added Rosy Ryan, signed in 1919 and optioned for two sensational seasons to the International League (IL). Ryan had often been accused of illegally doctoring the baseball but never got caught. To throw his trick pitch legally, Ryan appeared to dig his thumbnail into the seam of the ball to get it to move unpredictably.
McGraw was happy with three-fourths of his infield: Kelly at first base, Bancroft at shortstop, and Frisch, who had played out of position at third base in 1920 while aging favorite Larry Doyle held down second. Doyle was released after the season, and McGraw purchased third baseman Goldie Rapp from St. Paul of the American Association for fifteen thousand dollars. The catching position was manned by a platoon of Snyder and Earl Smith. Ross Youngs starred in right field, and steadfast George Burns, the lone holdover from the 1917 pennant winner, played left. Without Kauff, McGraw tried Eddie Brown and Curt Walker in center field to start the year.
Though the Giants played well early, it had become clear that Rapp was not the answer at third base. In Cincinnati Heinie Groh, whom McGraw coveted, was holding out for a better contract. McGraw offered the Reds one hundred thousand dollars and three players for their disgruntled star. Groh was willing to sign for a salary of ten thousand dollars with the Giants, rather than the twelve thousand dollars he was demanding from Garry Herrmann, and the Reds were more than happy to make the deal.23
Commissioner Landis scuttled this rosy scenario by ruling that Groh must finish the season for Cincinnati. Although players had occasionally forced trades this way, Groh’s case caused protests from other clubs, and Landis ruled that it would be detrimental to the sport if “by the hold-out process a situation may be created disqualifying a player from giving his best service to a public that for years has generously supported that player.”24
Denied his first choice, on July 1 McGraw sent Rapp and two other players to Philadelphia for second baseman Johnny Rawlings and outfielder Casey Stengel. For the rest of the 1921 season, McGraw shifted Frisch back to third and installed Rawlings at second.
In late July, with the Giants running second behind the Pirates, McGraw acquired Philadelphia’s star left fielder Irish Meusel, surrendering thirty thousand dollars and two players. Phillies owner William Baker had been gutting his ball club; at the time of the trade they stood 25-62, and Meusel was one of the few stars left from what had been a fine team before the war. To make room for Meusel, McGraw shifted Burns to center field.
While not prohibited, late-season deals involving contenders were understandably frowned upon. To shield himself from the ire of his fellow magnates, Baker charged Meusel with “indifferent” playing and claimed he had suspended Meusel several days before the trade. Suitably riled, Landis investigated and determined that Meusel had not been suspended or accused of malingering by his manager; Baker had fabricated the story. Nevertheless, Landis allowed the deal to stand, leading to a fracturing of his relationship with Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the league-leading Pirates. After a controversial late-season trade a year later involving third baseman Joe Dugan and the New York Yankees, the magnates moved the in-season trade deadline back to June 15.25
The day after the Meusel trade was announced, the city of Pittsburgh got some measure of revenge. On July 26 a deputy sheriff arrested the manager in his Pittsburgh hotel room. A man named George Duffy accused McGraw of attacking him and knocking him unconscious back in June, when he had gone to a drunken McGraw’s assistance. Although the complaint was a civil matter, the court required that McGraw post a three-thousand-dollar bond to ensure he would return in the fall for the trial. Duffy was suing for twenty thousand dollars, claiming he had been confined to his home under the care of a physician for a week and had still not fully recovered. No settlement amount was ever announced, but McGraw biographer Charles Alexander estimated it at five thousand dollars.26
At the time of the Meusel trade the Giants stood four games back of the Pirates. By August 23 the Giants had dropped to seven and a half games back, with the Pirates coming to New York for a five-game series. The two teams did not particularly like each other, and the Pirates were acting as if they had already clinched the pennant.27 The Giants swept the five-game series and took over first place a few weeks later. In a particularly maddening sidelight for Pirate fans, Meusel keyed the sweep by going 8 for 16 with 4 extra-base hits. The Giants ended up winning the NL by four games, their first pennant since 1917 and McGraw’s seventh in nineteen years in New York. Besides the typically great starting pitching, Frankie Frisch had his first big year (.341, 17 triples, 49 steals), Youngs hit .327, and Kelly drove in 122 and socked a league-leading 23 home runs.
The 1921 World Series pitted the Giants against the New York Yankees, who won their first-ever pennant behind the slugging of Babe Ruth and a great pitching staff. Because the Yankees also called the Polo Grounds their home park (they rented it from the Giants), the games would all be played there. Phil Douglas started the first game for the Giants and Nehf the second, but the Giants were shut out in both. The club quickly rebounded, winning five of the final six games to take the Series—McGraw’s first since 1905—five games to three.
In December 1921 McGraw turned his attention back to Heinie Groh, whom he soon landed in exchange for Burns, journeyman catcher Mike Gonzalez, and about a hundred thousand dollars. For many years baseball’s top third baseman, Groh gave McGraw three years of solid service. Although Groh was a fine player, paying one hundred thousand dollars for a thirty-two-year-old third baseman was a luxury that no other NL club could afford.
That same off-season McGraw purchased Jimmy O’Connell from the San Francisco Seals for seventy-five thousand dollars—the highest price yet paid for a Minor League player. McGraw viewed O’Connell as a long-term center-field solution but agreed to leave him in San Francisco for the 1922 season. After briefly trying rookie Ralph Shinners in center, McGraw ultimately platooned Casey Stengel and Bill Cunningham. Despite tremendous hype, O’Connell never panned out as hoped and was later implicated in a game-fixing scandal.
The Giants led the 1922 pennant race for most of the summer, despite dealing with more off-field drama. McGraw had kept a rein on Phil Douglas for a few years by hiring detectives to follow him around, though the pitcher gave them the slip on occasion. In 1922 McGraw asked scout Jesse Burkett to keep an eye on his pitcher. Burkett began rooming with Douglas, a situation that surely pleased neither. Burkett’s nickname during his playing days had been “the Crab,” a moniker that was well earned. Douglas was in the middle of his best season in 1922 (11-4 with a league-leading 2.63 ERA) when things finally unraveled permanently.
After pitching a game against the Pirates on July 30, Douglas disappeared on another drinking binge. The police tracked him down two days later and on McGraw’s orders transported Douglas to a sanitarium. Douglas claimed that the police had threatened force and that he was given “knockout stuff” in the sanitarium and held against his wishes. He was finally released August 5. In his addled state Douglas sent a letter to his friend Les Mann, an outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. He told Mann that he did not want McGraw to win the pennant and offered instead to leave the team if Mann gave him some money. As baseball was still going through a gambling panic in the wake of the Black Sox revelations, Mann reported the situation to his team, who turned the letter over to baseball commissioner Landis. Not surprisingly, Douglas was banned forever from organized baseball. When McGraw claimed that “without exception he was the dirtiest player I have ever seen,” he was obviously letting his anger get the better of him—he had been around many more flagrant game-fixers.28 But McGraw had reason to be angry. He did not need another scandal, especially one that cost him one of his better pitchers upon whom he had spent years of effort.
While this was going on, and with the Cardinals right on the Giants’ heels, McGraw packaged a fading Toney, two other players, and one hundred thousand dollars to the always-accommodating Braves for twenty-six-year-old hurler Hugh McQuillan. Although he had yet to record a winning record in a full season with the weak Braves, McQuillan had pitched more than two hundred innings in both 1920 and 1921 and would be a solid contributor over the next several years. On August 1 McGraw took a flier on Jack Scott, a former Braves hurler who (as a member of the Reds) had retired back in April with a sore arm. Scott finished the year 8-2 and threw a four-hit shutout in the World Series. He went on to several more excellent seasons as a valuable swingman for McGraw.29
As accomplished as McGraw was in developing young players, none of the phenoms in table 2 were pitchers. Although he had purchased future Hall of Fame hurler Rube Marquard in 1908 for a then-record eleven thousand dollars, his great 1920s teams featured veteran pitchers that he picked up from other teams. “Much as I admire McGraw’s great abilities,” said Art Nehf, “I am convinced that his system does not tend to develop star pitchers.”30 He added:
[The] system is hard for a pitcher not merely because he is called upon to obey orders exactly all the time and is expected to pitch an uncommon number of curves, which are hard on the arm, but there is also the mental side which is harder still. McGraw does not confine his efforts to bossing the details of the ball game. He rides his players individually and collectively, particularly when things are not going well. This results in a mental strain that really gets upon a players nerves. . . . There is little room for the individual on his pitching staff. The player is merged in the welfare of the club.31
New York went on to capture the 1922 flag by seven games over the Reds. The Giants again had a well-balanced offense, with six regulars (Snyder, Kelly, Frisch, Bancroft, Youngs, and Meusel) and the center-field platoon all hitting .320 or better. In the World Series the Giants again met the Yankees, this time in a best-of-seven affair. The Giants won the title four games to zero, though there was one tie. The big story was the poor hitting of Babe Ruth (.118). As with 1921, a narrative formed that Ruth’s power game was no match for the smarter inside baseball of John McGraw. McGraw had his third Series title, but Ruth would be heard from shortly.
Though McGraw seemed to have enough on his hands leading his team to its second consecutive championship and living the life of a New York celebrity, he always found time to scout for players who would someday replace the ones winning for him today. During the 1922 season he signed three who would make a name for themselves: Bill Terry, a semipro first baseman from Memphis; Travis Jackson, an eighteen-year-old shortstop playing for Little Rock in the Southern League; and third baseman Fred Lindstrom, a sixteen-year-old amateur from Chicago. Terry was twenty-three, had a good job at Standard Oil, a wife, a young son, and a mature appreciation of his situation. McGraw wanted to farm Terry out to Toledo, but Terry agreed only after being assured his salary would be the same as originally negotiated.32 Jackson played three games in 1922 but became a key reserve the next season. Lindstrom joined the Giants in 1924 and starred soon after. In both of the latter two cases, McGraw was not afraid to give teenagers key roles on his teams.
McGraw’s Giants also won pennants in 1923 and 1924, making them the only NL team ever to win four consecutive league titles. The 1923 team was largely unchanged, save for the addition of Jack Bentley, a pitcher–first baseman that McGraw purchased from the International League Baltimore Orioles for sixty-five thousand dollars. When Barnes failed early in the season, Bentley took his place in the rotation. The best players on the 1923 club were again Frisch (.348) and Youngs (.336). For the third straight year the Giants faced off in the World Series with the Yankees, who had left the Polo Grounds for their own new stadium in the Bronx. This time the Yankees finally bested the Giants, winning their first championship, four games to two, with Ruth hitting three home runs in the Series.
On a scouting trip near the end of the 1923 season, McGraw discovered Hack Wilson playing for Portsmouth of the Virginia League. Wilson took over as the Giants’ center fielder in 1924 and had a fine rookie season (.295 with 41 extra-base hits in just 107 games). The other change to the 1924 lineup was the ascension of shortstop Jackson. Late in the year McGraw found playing time for both Lindstrom and Terry, with Lindstrom often replacing Groh and Terry forcing Kelly to the outfield to get another left-handed bat in the lineup. McGraw’s integration of all of this young talent while successfully defending his league title was typical for the great skipper.
The 1924 Giants were led again by Frisch and Youngs and a great year from George Kelly (.324 and a league-leading 136 runs batted in). One of the team’s best pitchers turned out to be twenty-seven-year-old Virgil Barnes, brother of Jesse, who had toiled mostly in relief over the past couple of years. The team played well all year despite missing its manager for much of May and June after McGraw fell off a high curb in Chicago, badly injuring his knee.33 He returned on July 8 with the Giants five games up. With McGraw back in the dugout, the Giants held off Brooklyn to win the pennant by a game and a half, before losing a thrilling seven-game World Series to the upstart Washington Senators. In the final game the Giants were victimized by two bad-hop singles past Lindstrom—one in a game-tying rally in the eighth and the other ending the game in the twelfth. The great McGraw, still just fifty-one years old, would never again win a pennant.
Much of John McGraw’s success could be attributed to his genius and force of personality. He had a knack for recognizing good ballplayers, signing future stars at young ages, and rarely making bad trades or being without a competent player at a position. McGraw could usually compel his charges to bend to his will, somehow without causing them to freeze from the pressure. McGraw’s drive, along with his high-level connections, also helped him avoid the consequences of his often odious behavior. While this helps explain his success, genius remains elusive.
McGraw did have one significant organizational advantage over the majority of his competitors: the Giants were the league’s most profitable franchise, and throughout the early 1920s, before he ran into legal difficulties, Charles Stoneham let McGraw reinvest most of the profits in the Giants. McGraw also created another organizational advantage: he had one of baseball’s first full-time scouts, Dick Kinsella, uncovering talent throughout the country.
McGraw managed the Giants for seven more seasons before retiring in mid-1932 due to poor health. The 1924 core included a group of young players—among the major contributors only Groh was older than thirty-one, and the Giants had his replacement (Lindstrom) ready to go. McGraw also continued to discover young players. In 1925 he brought up pitcher Freddie Fitzsimmons from Indianapolis. Later in the decade he secured Hall of Famers Carl Hubbell—recommended by Kinsella—and Mel Ott, probably the two best players McGraw ever found. McGraw signed Ott as a sixteen-year-old and made him a regular at nineteen in 1928. McGraw purchased Hubbell and his famous screwball out of the Texas League for forty thousand dollars in midseason 1928 and immediately inserted him into the Giants rotation. With all this young talent, why did his team stop winning pennants?
In the late teens and early twenties McGraw had done a great job building a pitching staff that won four pennants, but these pitchers (Toney, Douglas, Nehf, McQuillan, and others) were all three- or four-year solutions. This was well and good, but it meant that McGraw had to find pitchers like this almost every year, and he spent the rest of the decade a pitcher or two short. Finding someone like Carl Hubbell, someone who could contribute at a high level for a decade or more, would have helped considerably a few years earlier.
The offense also fell off after 1924. After leading the league in runs (twice by large margins) during three of the four pennant-winning years, the Giants topped the league only once between 1925 and 1930. The biggest blow was the tragic kidney disorder suffered by Ross Youngs, which ended his career in 1926 and his life a year later. Youngs was the best hitter on the pennant-winning teams and obviously not easily replaceable. The Giants also lost Hack Wilson due to a procedural blunder. When Wilson went through an off year in 1925, McGraw intended to option him to Toledo, thus preserving the Giants’ rights to the player. Due to a clerical error, however, the Giants failed to maintain control. After the season the Cubs drafted Wilson, and he went on to several years of stardom in Chicago. George Kelly later made the Hall of Fame based on his fine contributions to the four pennants. His selection is often criticized because these four years represent most of his quality seasons, and his days of contributing were over by 1926, when he was just thirty.
The Giants’ falloff might also be attributed to some off-field distractions that robbed much of McGraw’s focus. First, he had been living with sinusitis and its associated complications for many years, and McGraw was now feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Moreover, by the mid-1920s McGraw’s life was brimming with other interests. Right after the 1924 World Series, McGraw and Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey took a number of players on a hastily organized baseball tour of Europe, much like the one the pair had organized in 1913. This much less successful trip lasted nearly seven weeks and cost McGraw around twenty thousand dollars. McGraw also lost close to a hundred thousand dollars on a Florida real estate venture called “Pennant Park.” McGraw spent many hours on the new venture to the exclusion of baseball matters. New York Times reporter John Kieran later remarked, “Some of his old spirit died away in the collapse of the Florida land boom.”34
While McGraw found several excellent young players in the late 1920s and picked up future Hall of Famers Rogers Hornsby and Burleigh Grimes in 1927, he could not quite get his squad over the hump. When Hornsby and Grimes were rashly dealt away at the end of the season, mostly at the insistence of Stoneham, it testified to McGraw’s waning emotional energy.35
That he was also becoming increasingly cantankerous, perhaps due to his health problems, and uncommunicative with an increasingly mature brand of ballplayer did not help, either. Moreover, by the mid- to late 1920s the baseball enterprise had grown too big and too complex for just one man, no matter how driven and brilliant, to run a team on and off the field.
But at his peak, and with the money to back him up, no one was ever better than McGraw in finding good young players, integrating them onto his roster, and surrounding them with accomplished veterans. He might not have had the topflight stars that Barney Dreyfuss had, but he had an astonishing ability to get the best out of his charges. His ten NL pennants, and eleven second-place finishes, attest to his skills as a builder and leader of teams.