MR. MCGRAW

Kevin Baker

THEY CALLED HIM THE LITTLE NAPOLEON, AN ODDLY REDUNDANT nickname that was nonetheless apt. He led his teams with a passion that might—literally—leave your city razed to the ground before he was done. They called him Mickey Face and Muggsy, names that reflected the America in which he lived and the vast ethnic tides that swept across it. And they called him Mr. McGraw for the immeasurable respect they always had for him.

In the long history of baseball, there has been no one else like John Joseph McGraw. No other great player in the modern game went on to become a great manager. In addition, he was the outstanding scout, general manager, and part owner—all at the same time—during most of his thirty years with the New York Giants. No one else ever ran his team with so much calculation or was so given to uncontrollable rages—until the calculation, and the rages, became all but impossible to tell apart. No one ever got into so many fights, fistfights, with opponents, teammates, friends, fans, sportswriters, umpires. No one ever did so much for his players or rode them so hard and so unfairly. No one ever lived so close to scandal and disgrace for so long yet came away from it all so universally admired.

Ferociously loyal, he was capable of betrayal. Blunt to the point of rudeness, he could dissemble with the best of them. Able to do everything there was to do around a ballpark, simultaneously filling jobs that it would take an entire front office to do today, he played a key role in the blunders that eventually doomed his beloved team.

It is impossible to think that anyone like him would be allowed to walk around free—and unmedicated—today, much less manage a major-league baseball team. He had an anger problem. He had impulse control problems. He had an eating problem and a drinking problem. He liked to bet on anything that moved, and he consorted with gamblers and known underworld figures. All was forgiven, if it was not simply overlooked in the first place.

“The idea is to win,” he liked to say, and in the end he did, 2,763 times, more than all but one other man who ever managed. That man was Connie Mack, who also bested McGraw head to head in two of three World Series. Yet Mack himself offered the ultimate tribute: “There has been only one McGraw, and there has been only one manager—and his name [is] McGraw.”

 

IT IS EASY ENOUGH to trace where the demons came from. Throughout his life John McGraw was beset by freak injuries, illnesses, and personal tragedies. He lost most of one season to malaria, another to typhoid. In 1903, when he was not quite thirty, an errant throw flattened his nose, causing a nearly fatal hemorrhage and leaving him plagued by sinusitis for the rest of his life. Later he nearly lost a finger to infection, and he had all but ruined his legs before he was done playing.

His beloved first wife died of a burst appendix when he was twenty-six. Growing up in the little town of Truxton, New York, he lost his mother and four siblings within four days from a diphtheria epidemic when he was just eleven. His father, a Civil War veteran and track worker for the Elmira, Cortland and Northern Railroad, began to knock him around. When John was twelve, his father beat him so badly for the crime of breaking a window with a baseball that John ran away to an inn across the street that was run by a kindly widow.

There he stayed for the rest of his childhood, if one could call it that. He left school and supported himself as a “butcher boy” on his father’s road, peddling magazines, newspapers, and refreshments to the passengers. Throughout his life he was embarrassed by his lack of a formal education and did what he could to mitigate it. He took college courses in the off-season and became probably the only manager ever to be given a complete set of Shakespeare by his team. But always the resentment, the feelings of inferiority and abandonment remained. Later in life McGraw owned a series of terriers, each of which he named after his old home-town. At the end of the day he would rouse them with the cry “It’s Truxton against the world!”

He obtained another kind of education, playing ball while he waited out the train layover for the trip back. By the age of sixteen he was good enough to sign a professional contract with Olean of the New York–Penn League. In his very first game he had a single—and committed eight errors in ten chances, playing an unreasonable facsimile of third base. Released within a week, he managed to catch on with another minor-league team, and the following August he was brought up to the National League’s Baltimore Orioles, informing all who would listen, “I’m as good as they come.”

Typically, in his first major-league game McGraw made a run-scoring error but singled and scored what proved to be the winning run. Afterward he told reporters, “It’s nice. Just give me a little time and I have got ’em skinned to death.”

The man and the team were met. The Orioles of the 1890s became legendary for their hustle and savvy, their brawling and cursing, and their cheating. Their manager, “Foxy Ned” Hanlon, was credited with being one of the inventors of the inside game, a seismic leap forward in the evolution of baseball, in which players forced the action and did the little things necessary to win. The Orioles backed one another up on throws when they were in the field, and at bat they bunted, stole, and hit-and-ran with abandon.

They also assaulted other teams constantly with their spikes, fists, legs, bats, and an endless stream of obscenities. Playing at a time when only one umpire worked most games, they took shortcuts going from first to third, hid baseballs in the high grass of the outfield, tripped and kicked opposing players, and grabbed hold of their belts to slow them down. The Sporting News accused Baltimore of “playing the dirtiest ball ever seen in the country.”

“They were mean, vicious, ready at any time to maim a rival player or an umpire if it helped their cause,” John Heydler, an umpire at the time and later the president of the National League, wrote. “The things they would say to an umpire were unbelievably vile, and they broke the spirits of some very fine men.”

Supposedly, McGraw was schooled in this game by Hanlon and his veterans. If so, this was the start of an amazing baseball lineage, extending over a hundred years, with Hanlon’s knowledge passed on from McGraw to his pupil, Casey Stengel, and from Stengel to his protégé, Billy Martin, under whom the old inside game came to be known as Billyball. And it was true, Hanlon must have been some kind of teacher, producing five pennant-winning managers from among his players.

Yet the suspicion lingers that John McGraw needed little instruction in this sort of baseball. He was already a star at twenty, and over the course of his career he hit .334, stole 436 bases, and scored 1,024 runs in just 1,099 games. To this day he holds the third best all-time career on-base percentage in major-league history. When it comes to getting on base, the primary aim in baseball, there is just Ted Williams, Babe Ruth—and John McGraw.

He could be brilliant. The modern player he resembled most closely was Pete Rose. Never a great fielder, McGraw, like Rose, played wherever he was needed and eventually made himself a passable third baseman. In the batter’s box he was in constant motion, fouling off pitch after pitch before blooping a single or driving a Baltimore chop into the hard ground in front of home plate, drawing a walk, or getting himself hit with a pitched ball.

Whatever he may have learned from Ned Hanlon, it seems unlikely he needed any tutelage in the sort of havoc the Orioles liked to let slip on a ballfield. In 1894, McGraw got into a fight with Boston’s Tommy Tucker that quickly escalated into a donnybrook involving both teams and many of the Boston fans. Before it was over, a fire in the right field bleachers had consumed the South End Grounds, the most elegant ballpark of the day, along with seventy thousand dollars’ worth of equipment, and 170 neighboring buildings. This was the force that was McGraw. Not even the Yankees ever burned Southie to the ground.

 

FIVE YEARS LATER HANLON had departed for greener pastures along with most of the Orioles’ stars. Muggsy, still just twenty-six, was put in charge of a floundering franchise. He started at third base, managed, and served as the team’s general manager and chief scout. That was too the same summer that his first wife died, leaving him devastated and unable to sleep for weeks. Nevertheless, he brought his team in a respectable fourth and had his greatest season, hitting .391, stealing 73 bases, and leading the league with 140 runs scored.

It was also the last time he played as many as a hundred games in a season. Only five-seven, with a playing weight that rarely exceeded 130 pounds, McGraw’s frenetic style of play left him exhausted by midseason, his legs aching from frequent spikings and other collisions on the base paths.

He was looking to move up, and now he learned to play the cutthroat world of turn-of-the-century baseball off the field as well as he did between the white lines. Two years after the National League had summarily disbanded its Baltimore franchise, he signed up to own, run, and manage a new Orioles team in the insurgent American League. Once there, to nobody’s great surprise, he soon fell out with AL president Ban Johnson, who had built his league around the idea of rejecting the very sort of “rowdyism” McGraw reveled in and making the ballpark safe for respectable middle-class crowds.

McGraw could be ruthless. When he became convinced that Johnson wanted to replace him, the boy from Truxton’s instincts for self-preservation—or his paranoia—kicked in. Sent by Johnson to New York to scout out the possibilities of placing an American League team in Manhattan, McGraw connived instead with the owners of the National League Giants. In 1902, they engineered a coup in which McGraw managed to sell his stake in the Orioles at a healthy profit, then skipped town with a lucrative new contract to manage the Giants—and with so many of the Orioles’ players that the team had to forfeit its next game.

Thanks to his maneuverings, major-league baseball was dead in Baltimore, and it did not return for more than fifty years. Baltimore was a city that McGraw had come to as a penniless teenager, it was where he had fallen in love and married, where he had opened a thriving café supported by his many fans, where he was one day to be interred. It was a city that had taken him to its heart and that he had professed to love. But on leaving it for New York, McGraw bragged only that he was now going to “the cornerstone of baseball” and that Johnson’s American League “is a loser and has been from the start.”

Orioles fans were devastated, a writer for the Baltimore Sun inveighing, “Loyalty and gratitude are words without any meaning to ballplayers and especially to McGraw.” The Sporting News compared McGraw to a terrorist, and wailed; “He was and is in the game for loot.” All McGraw would ever offer in response was the rationale that Johnson was trying “to ditch me at the end of the 1902 season. So I acted fast…. Someone would be left holding the bag, and I made up my mind it wouldn’t be me.”

 

IT NEVER WAS HIM. In New York the boy from Truxton was at last on a stage appropriate to his talents. The Giants, once the city’s darlings, were stumbling along in last place when he took the reins, and he was not able to move them out of the cellar before the season ended. (The beleaguered Orioles finished last too, making John McGraw, perhaps the greatest manager who ever was, also the only man to manage the last-place team in both the American and National leagues in the same year.) But fans who came to see McGraw’s first game, on July 19, 1902, noticed an immediate difference in their Giants. Watching the home team whip through their pregame warm-ups with unaccustomed zeal, a fan yelled out, “They’re awake!”

Indeed they were, and they remained awake for the next three decades. Over his twenty-nine full seasons at the helm, McGraw’s Giants finished first or second twenty-one times. He won three World Series and ten pennants and finished out of the first division only twice. It is a record that remains to this day unmatched in its consistency, one made all the more remarkable by the fact that he compiled it across distinctly different eras of baseball.

His teams won in the dead ball era of the early 1900s, which he loved, and in the lively ball era of Babe Ruth, which he detested. They won with pitching and by stealing bases and by hitting home runs. They won with raw rookies and grizzled veterans, with superstars and with no-names.

They did more than win. They became the sporting event in the greatest city in the country, breaking attendance records and building themselves the biggest, grandest stadium in the majors, at the Polo Grounds in upper Harlem. When the final bell rang, Wall Street brokers rushed uptown to see them in special trains. Broadway’s stars flocked there in carriages and plush new automobiles for the late-afternoon games, before hying it back downtown for that night’s performance. McGraw soon became their darling, a first-nighter and member of the show business Lambs Club; the friend of stars and powerful politicians and wealthy men.

He was, as baseball historian Steven Goldman wrote, “the father of all baseball managers, and all football coaches too…the master, ‘the czar,’ as he put it, of the New York Giants, the proudest team in professional baseball.”

How did he do it? Partly it was desire and pure cussedness. Grantland Rice thought that “McGraw’s very walk across the field in a hostile town was a challenge to the multitude.” He would fight anyone, anytime, even though he was almost comically bad at it. McGraw, in Damon Runyon’s description, “a café gladiator,” was even punched out once during a naked fistfight in the showers with his cheerful elfin teammate Wee Willie Keeler, after McGraw cursed Keeler for allegedly throwing to the wrong base.

It didn’t matter. At times he seemed driven by the Furies. During a game against a minor-league Chattanooga outfit while still a player-manager, McGraw held a runner by his belt to keep him from advancing on a flyball, spiked the opposing shortstop, and tagged a runner in the face, bloodying his nose. The week before, he had lit into the manager of a Savannah semipro team so furiously the man knocked him down. That was just spring training.

Fans and sportswriters in other cities loathed him. “He has the vilest tongue of any ball-player,” a New Orleans scribe once insisted after another exhibition game. “[H]e adopts every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick.” They chanted, “Hoodlum!,” “Tough!,” and “Dirty McGraw!” at him on the road. Even former Oriole teammate Joe Quinn admitted: “I often wonder how McGraw got away with some of the plays he made on and off the field.”

Nothing deterred him, especially when he was in a good pennant race. In 1905, his greatest year as a manager, McGraw “twisted the nose” of New York Evening World reporter Allen Sangree in a hotel lobby; got himself ejected from three consecutive games; started a brawl in Philadelphia that ended with fans stoning his team’s carriages as they fled from the ballpark; started a brawl in Pittsburgh that ended with another stoning and McGraw’s Giants holding off eighteen thousand enraged fans with their bats; and got thrown out of a game against the Pirates at the Polo Grounds, after which he climbed into the stands and led the Giants’ fans in taunting Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss as a gambler who welshed on his debts and paid off the umps. When league president Harry Pulliam called to chastise him, McGraw denounced him as “Dreyfuss’s employee” and went to court to get an injunction against any fine or suspension. Then, when the Giants had to return to Philly, McGraw saw to it that the players’ carriages were filled with rocks, so that they could return fire with the fans who had lined the streets to jeer and throw things at them on their way to the park.

That same season he told the legendary umpire Bill Klem, “I can lick any umpire in baseball, you know,” and threatened, “I’m going to get your job, you busher.” Umps, even the formidable Klem, into whose face he once hurled a glass of water when the umpire refused to let a suspended Giants player take the field, were a special target. McGraw fought with the umpires in ways that simply would not be tolerated today and that were unmatched even at the time.

He could be brutal. McGraw reportedly drove the saintly former Giants pitcher turned arbiter Timothy Keefe out of the game by calling him a drunk over and over again. He believed in using “judicious kicking” on umpires, and according to one sportswriter of the period, his harassment of the men in blue won his team as many as twenty-five games a year: “[T]he umpires have been afraid to decide against McGraw’s men, threatened as they are with physical violence and certainly subjected to foul language that the roughest rowdies in the Bowery would not make use of.”

Here again, McGraw himself encouraged the notion that it was all about winning and putting fannies in the seats. “The only road to popularity is to win. The man who loses gracefully loses easily,” he liked to say. “Sportsmanship and easygoing methods are all right, but it is the prospect of a hot fight that brings out the crowds.”

Yet the evidence suggests that McGraw often really was out of control, almost manic on the field. Christy Mathewson described his antics as manager in the third-base coaching box, where complete with a glove on his hand, he sometimes liked to survey the field: “McGraw leaps in the air, kicks his heels together, claps his mitt, shouts at the umpire, runs in and pats the next batter on the back, and says something to the pitcher….”

If his “judicious kicking” intimidated some umpires, it only made others his open enemies. While he was still playing and managing back in the American League, umpire Jack Sheridan watched Boston’s Bill Dineen hit McGraw five times in five at bats without letting him take his base, insisting that Muggsy had not tried to get out of the way of the ball. After being plunked for the fifth time, McGraw simply sat down in the batter’s box and refused to move until Sheridan ejected him. When the game ended a few minutes later, the fans predictably rushed the field, nearly mobbing the umpire.

This was not an anomaly. McGraw drew constant suspensions and almost every year saw at least one game when he worked himself into such a rage that he refused to leave the field even after being ejected, usually resulting in a forfeit by his team and a near riot by the fans. This was not particularly good for his club. McGraw just could not always help himself, a condition that became more and more obvious over the course of his career.

Always his sense of being wronged shone through. He protested vociferously whenever he was punished for even his most flagrant transgressions, insisting that umpires, league presidents, and opposing owners all had it in for him and his team. There was constantly present the abused boy who had been forced to go out in the world and fend for himself from the age of twelve.

 

THE ONLY REMEDY was control, control over everything to do with his domain, on the ballfield. “Players, to him, were little beyond automata who batted and ran bases as he pulled the strings,” F. C. Lane wrote in Baseball Magazine when McGraw finally retired. This was an exaggeration, but not much of one.

“I think we can win it all, if my brain holds out,” he liked to say, and he told his players, “Do what I tell you, and I’ll take the blame for mistakes.”

In this, much like Joe Torre on Steinbrenner’s Yankees, nearly a century later, he was the perfect manager for New York. He provided cover for his players from the city’s pack of rabid sportswriters, who tended to adore him and hung on his every colorful quote. Throughout his career he lost big games in exasperating, agonizing ways, and while this might leave him raving against umps, league presidents, opponents, and even his own coaches, John McGraw never took his biggest losses out on his players.

He lost the madcap 1908 pennant race when an umpire decided, on his own and without warning, to call the Giants’ rookie first baseman Fred Merkle out on an obscure baserunning rule that had not been enforced for decades. When Merkle sobbed afterward to McGraw, “Lose me, I’m the jinx,” Muggsy gave him a three-hundred-dollar raise, praised his “gameness…through all this abuse” in the press, and told him, “I could use a carload like you. Forget this season and come around next spring.”

He made Merkle his chief lieutenant on the bench and even a regular bridge partner. When Fred Snodgrass dropped an easy fly to help lose the 1912 World Series, McGraw gave him a thousand-dollar raise, telling reporters, “It could happen to anyone. If it hadn’t been for a lot that Snodgrass did, we wouldn’t have been playing in that game at all.”

In 1924, McGraw lost the seventh and decisive game of the World Series, the very last World Series game of his career, in twelve innings, after his veteran catcher tripped on his own mask while chasing a pop foul, and not one but two ground balls hit pebbles on a badly groomed Washington infield and skipped over the shoulder of the Giants’ third baseman. This might have been a bit much for any man. But when they got back to New York, Muggsy invited his players and their wives to a gala party at the Hotel Biltmore, where he himself led the singing, along with George M. Cohan and other Broadway stars.

“All I want to know is that they are honestly trying to do what I tell them,” he said of his Giants. “If they haven’t the ability it is my fault if I keep them.” He never punished them for physical mistakes: “I wouldn’t have a man on my team who doesn’t make errors. It shows he doesn’t go after the ball.”

Mental errors or, God forbid, disobedience were another matter. On at least two occasions, he fined players who hit game-winning home runs; both had been ordered to bunt. Chastisement could be even more severe, including fines and tirades that sometimes devolved into still more fistfights. But even then his players tended to respect him.

“I liked him, and I liked playing for him,” conceded Al Bridwell, who once knocked McGraw down the dugout steps after being on the receiving end of a particularly vituperative harangue. Frankie Frisch, the great second baseman, whom Muggsy derided almost ceaselessly as “cement head” and “dumb Dutchman” before trading him to St. Louis, still maintained, “I always thought McGraw was sort of on the genius side.”

He worked his men hard, and he had a hand in every detail of their preparation. McGraw had the first primitive spring training complex constructed in little Marlin, Texas, a town of no more than five thousand, where he hoped his players would be isolated from the usual diversions of ballplayers. Each day they walked the two miles from the hotel to the ballpark and back along the railroad tracks, but it was about more than just exercise.

“When you train under most managers, you merely get yourself in good physical condition,” claimed Rogers Hornsby, the great, ill-tempered slugger whom McGraw traded Frisch for and who wanted to steal Muggsy’s job. “When you train under McGraw, you learn baseball.”

On the field, McGraw innovated constantly, flashing signs from the bench by blowing his nose or using the sign language all his Giants learned when deaf pitcher Luther “Dummy” Taylor was on the team. He loved the game of the “dead ball” era best because of the premium it put on every run, the control it gave the manager in deciding when to bunt and steal and hit-and-run, the sort of ball he had come up on. But he understood any kind of baseball and adjusted easily to the lively ball introduced after 1919, much as he disliked it. McGraw conducted some of the earliest experiments in platooning hitters and employing full-time relief pitchers and replaced his speedsters with power hitters.

“A manager would look foolish not to play the game as it is, meet the new situation with new tactics,” he conceded. “[T]here is no use in sending men down on a long chance of stealing a bag when there is a better chance of a batter hitting for two bases, or, maybe, out of the lot.”

He won an unmatched four straight National League pennants at the start of the live ball era from 1921 to 1924. And once again he found a way to take the reins into his own hands, winning the 1921 and 1922 World Series, when he personally called every pitch that his hurlers threw to Babe Ruth.

Critics questioned such tactics, claiming that McGraw’s control was so complete it left his players unable to think for themselves in the midst of the action. Even Christy Mathewson, Mac’s golden boy, wrote (or allowed to be ghosted) an article attributing New York’s three consecutive World Series losses from 1911 to 1913 to how Muggsy made the Giants “a team of puppets worked from the bench by a string.”

Others disagreed. Fred Snodgrass insisted: “Most of the time we were on our own…we were supposed to know how to play baseball, and were expected to do the right thing at the right time.” Decades later McGraw’s players were still raving about him, in encomiums solicited for Lawrence S. Ritter’s oral history of the early game, The Glory of Their Times: “What a great man he was! The finest and grandest man I ever met!” “What a great man he was! We held him in high esteem. We respected him in every way.” “He was a fine man, Mr. McGraw was. I really liked him.” “It was really a lot of fun to play for McGraw.”

 

JOHN MCGRAW UNDERSTOOD BALLPLAYERS. He understood what their strengths were and where they should play. While his predecessor on the Giants experimented with Christy Mathewson at first base, McGraw immediately put him back on the mound and left him there. He did just the reverse with his Hall of Fame first baseman and successor Bill Terry almost thirty years later. He saw that Roger Bresnahan was a catcher. He kept Mel Ott with him when Ott was a seventeen-year-old rookie, personally converting him from a catcher to an outfielder and making him a great slugger.

He always recognized talent, no matter how raw or how young it was. No other man in the history of American professional sports—not just baseball but all sports—both discovered and then also developed so much outstanding talent as did John McGraw. Over twenty years into the job, deep in the 1920s, he was still signing and molding one top star after another: Frisch, Terry, Ott, George “Highpockets” Kelly, Fred Lindstrom, Irish Meusel, Ross Youngs, Hack Wilson, Carl Hubbell. It was all the more impressive considering that McGraw’s scouting work was done mostly by himself, on the fly, slipping away from the team when he could for a few days to look over a player that one of his many contacts around the country had written him about.

He tried to search in more exotic locales as well. Throughout the twenties McGraw, like the managers of the other New York teams, was eager to develop a Jewish star, and he signed, among others, the inimitable Moe Berg and the power-hitting outfielder Mose Solomon, quickly dubbed “the Rabbi of Swat” by the tabloids. (The rabbi, alas, had an iron glove and was soon sent down.)

Much more daringly, McGraw attempted to slip the superb black second baseman Charlie Grant onto the Baltimore roster during his sojourn in the American League, passing him off as an Indian called Chief Tokahoma. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey saw through the ruse, and McGraw was forced to leave Grant behind when spring training ended and the team came north. Muggsy had played a winter in Cuba, where he was affectionately called El mono amarillo (the yellow monkey), and he brought his Giants back repeatedly for spring training games against the likes of “the Black Diamond,” José Mendez, a splendid pitcher of color whom McGraw openly salivated over, saying he would pay fifty thousand dollars for his contract. He had no more luck with this than he had had with Grant. Baseball’s color line was too strong even for Muggsy to break.

 

MORE THAN SIMPLY drilling them in the fundamentals or writing in their names at the right positions, though, McGraw made his men feel like ballplayers. He saw to it that they were better cared for than any other players in the game, putting the Giants up in first-rate hotels during the regular season. He went so far as to redesign their uniforms, taking off the collars players had worn since the earliest days of the professional game. He dressed them all in black because, he claimed, he had “heard army officers say that the snappiest dressed outfit is usually made up of the best fighters.”

He was a master clubhouse psychologist, taking each man individually, getting what he could out of him. His most unlikely alliance was with his greatest star, Christy Mathewson, who seemed to be his polar opposite. Mathewson was the beau ideal of turn-of-the-century American sports, Frank Merriwell incarnate, a tall, clean-cut, clean-living college man, considered such an appropriate role model that his likeness was installed in a stained glass window at the new Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Yet Matty’s and Muggsy’s respect for each other was immediate and unshakable, founded on the intelligence with which they both approached the game. They and their wives got on so well that the two couples even shared an apartment for a couple of years, leaving Mathewson biographer Frank Deford to ask, incredulous, [D]id ever any other manager and star player in any sport room together with their wives?” Yet they did, in perfect harmony: the refined, college-educated, Protestant, Anglo, Republican Mathewsons and the rough-edged, self-made, Catholic, Irish, Democratic McGraws. But Matty, one of the greatest pitchers ever to play the game, was the least of his manager’s challenges.

“It was an important part of McGraw’s great capacity for leadership,” Heywood Broun wrote, “that he could take kids out of the coal mines and out of the wheat fields and make them walk and chatter and play ball with the look of eagles.”

This was a more important skill than it may seem today, back in an age when a player might move directly from an industrial team or even a sandlot to the majors. Yet there was another, less heartwarming side to guiding a ball club in the early years of the twentieth century, as Steven Goldman pointed out: “Just as often, though, it wasn’t coalminer kids who [sic] McGraw was trying to turn into eagles but hard-core alcoholics, gamblers, and thieves.” Baseball in the first decades of the twentieth century was still a marginal profession, like most entertainment enterprises in the United States, its players often men used to scraping by however they could, even on the wrong side of the law.

McGraw was always confident he could turn them around, to the point where it became an axiom: “If you have a bad actor, trade him to McGraw.” This meant out-of-control drunks, such as “Turkey Mike” Donlin, who might do anything when on a bender, including pulling a pistol on a crowded train or belting a popular actress in the face at the theater. It meant Arthur “Bugs” Raymond, a spitballing alcoholic, of whom it was said he need only breathe on the ball to make it wobble. Raymond was so desperate for money to drink with that he stole tips from tables in the team’s hotels. Sent out to the Polo Grounds’ distant bullpen to warm up, he was just as likely to keep going all the way out of the park and to a saloon across Eighth Avenue. McGraw tried to reform him through every method he knew how, sending Raymond to a sanatorium, sending his paycheck straight to his wife, even trying to administer an admonitory beating (and failing completely, with his usual comic ineffectiveness at fisticuffs).

There was another category of McGraw’s special cases. These were men accused of “laying down,” a broad term of the time that came to cause some confusion. A player who “laid down” might be one who was simply lazy or accused of not hustling, or he could be engaged in something considerably more sinister. Again and again McGraw hired on men whose careers were shadowed by accusations of fixing games, men such Buck Herzog, or Heinie Zimmerman, or Hal Chase, a flashy first baseman who was one of he shadiest characters ever to play the game. McGraw’s confidence that he could turn even these hard cases around devolved into a sort of hubris. He could not stop thieves from stealing any more than he could stop drunks from drinking, and his refusal to acknowledge this blotted the edges of his legacy and almost drew him into much deeper trouble.

For the 1919 season, McGraw went so far as to assemble a veritable rogues’ gallery of players, an all-star team of game fixers, chiselers, and petty criminals, a cast so extreme that it almost seemed as if he were setting a challenge for himself. The Giants’ roster included not only the notorious Chase but also an outfielder who was later banned from organized baseball for life for consorting with gamblers and taking part in a stolen-car ring; an infielder who would be blackballed by McGraw himself for his gambling connections; three future Hall of Famers who were accused but acquitted of trying to fix a game; two pitchers who were later banned from the game for the same offense; another pitcher who had shot and killed a hunting partner he supposedly mistook for a cougar; and still another pitcher who hung around with gamblers when he could but who had taken a breather from them the previous off-season, having spent most of it in jail for draft evasion and violating the Mann Act.

This team of scoundrels got off to a fast start, but everything came predictably apart down the stretch. The Giants finished a distant second, and Hal Chase spent the last half of September helping Arnold Rothstein fix the World Series. McGraw ended up before a Chicago grand jury, later admitting, “In my opinion Chase deliberately threw us down. I never was more deceived by a player than by Chase.”

 

YET THE FACT was that McGraw, like so many others in baseball at the time, was already well steeped in the sporting life. When he wasn’t at the ballpark, he spent most of his waking moments at the racetrack. He was known to have won four hundred dollars betting on his team to win the 1905 World Series, and around the same time he offered the manager of the Yankees a five-thousand-dollar “side bet” on an exhibition series between their two teams. He was actually arrested one off-season in the wide-open resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, after he and a friend, pitching coins in a hotel lobby, had skinned some suckers for twenty-three hundred dollars. At other times he owned a stake in a horse track and casino in Cuba and a pool hall in Herald Square with partners who included Rothstein himself.

Even for the time this was playing it close to the edge. McGraw made no secret of owning his pool hall. The culture of baseball was such that no one batted an eye, even though this meant that McGraw, along with every other pool hall operator in Manhattan, made a three-hundred-dollar payoff every month to his local police precinct. That was simply business.

Rothstein was another story. The biggest, most nefarious figure in the gambling world, bankroller of the mob, he was supposedly a silent partner in McGraw’s pool hall, but he made a very loud, very deliberate noise there over the course of two nights and one day in November 1909. Rothstein, an expert with the stick, took on an out-of-town ringer, a Philadelphia stockbroker named Jack Conway, in a pool-shooting contest that began at five in the evening on a Thursday and went on until four in the morning on the following Saturday, drawing mobs of sporting men off the street and running up dizzying amounts of action, until at last McGraw called a halt and packed both men off to a Turkish bath, growling, “I’ll have you dead on my hands. And if you don’t want to sleep, some of the rest of us do.”

It was an epic match, one that was talked about for years afterward and may have served as the inspiration for the game between Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason in The Hustler. It supposedly made Rothstein four thousand dollars, along with his reputation, and thereafter he was never far from McGraw’s orbit. It was Rothstein’s longtime lawyer Billy Fallon, “the Great Mouthpiece” (and the inspiration for the defense lawyer in Chicago), who defended McGraw after the worst scrap of his life. It was another Rothstein mark, the gambler and Wall Street bucket shop operator Charlie Stoneham, who came to own the Giants and made McGraw a major partner in the team.

There is no hint that McGraw ever bet against his own team. There is the curious fact that the Giants’ team physician tried to bribe the umpires before the tumultuous makeup of the Merkle game back in 1908, but McGraw was never connected to this effort, and at worst he may have been trying simply to steal back a game he felt he had been robbed of in the first place.

His greater sin was that he, along with almost all the rest of baseball, failed to see the corrosive effect that organized gambling had on the sport, even after the World Series was fixed practically under his nose. Hal Chase was dumped, but McGraw remained friends with Rothstein, who frequently shared the owner’s box at the Polo Grounds with Stoneham until Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis put an end to it for propriety’s sake.

McGraw also failed to see the gambler’s mentality that Stoneham brought to his team. The new owner treated Muggsy well, giving him the shares to become a partner, eventually upping his salary to an unheard-of seventy thousand dollars and thereby making him the second highest-paid man in baseball, after only Babe Ruth. But throughout the 1920s Stoneham also declared frequent dividends for himself and his investors, fellow sports like Rothstein, or Tammany clubhouse hacks. At the same time, the Yankees, who were sharing the Polo Grounds and paying the Giants a lucrative rent for the privilege, reinvested most of their profits back into their organization, outdrawing McGraw’s club and making themselves into an indomitable rival.

Stoneham’s response was a gangster’s play, ending the Yankees’ lease and forcing them to seek out and build their own stadium, way up in the Bronx. McGraw egged him on, eager to get out of his ballpark Babe Ruth, the man who had single-handedly ended the style of baseball Muggsy loved the most and whom he liked to call “the big monkey.”

“They are going to Goatville, and before long they will be lost sight of,” McGraw gloated when the Yankees left. What he and Stoneham had done was to force their rivals to build an enormous new state-of-the-art stadium in the middle of the fastest-growing, most middle-class borough in the city, a stadium they could also rent out for countless football games, boxing matches, and mass meetings, while no longer paying a fat rent to the Giants.

It was a colossal mistake, one that ensured the Giants’ long eclipse in the town they had once owned and their eventual exit to California. But McGraw did not seem to grasp it, just as he didn’t grasp how other teams were outflanking the Giants by systematically building farm systems of minor-league teams. He continued to rely on his own acumen and connections to identify and sign new talent, even as he aged and became less and less up to the rigors of running a major-league team both on and off the field, his judgment slowly clouding with the years.

Drinking clouded it more than ever. McGraw was often an intemperate, belligerent drunk. He made some of the worst mistakes of his life while in his cups, such as publicly blaming his loyal friend and coach Wilbert Robinson for losing a World Series. McGraw had been bosom buddies and business partners for years with “Uncle Robbie,” a rotund, amiable ex-teammate, whom McGraw had left holding the bag as acting manager when he abruptly departed from Baltimore with half the Orioles’ team.

When the franchise folded, Robinson had to go work for years as a butcher. Muggsy brought him back to baseball as a pitching and base coach, in which role he proved invaluable, but then fired him in the midst of a drunken party for supposedly messing up a steal sign during the Series. Robbie responded by emptying his glass of beer over McGraw’s head and walking out all the way to Brooklyn, where he managed the Dodgers and cost the Giants a couple of pennants. The two old friends did not talk again for another seventeen years.

During the disappointing 1920 campaign Muggsy came almost all the way apart. On one especially bibulous evening McGraw started a fistfight in the Lambs Club, then inexplicably slugged a fellow member who was helping him home, knocking the man to the sidewalk and fracturing his skull. Muggsy escaped trial only with the vigorous intervention of Billy Fallon, but his treasured ties to Broadway were ruptured for good. He was kicked out of the Lambs and retaliated by revoking all its Polo Grounds passes.

He could be intransigent. McGraw recovered some of his equilibrium and came back to have some of his finest seasons as a manager, but he seems to have learned nothing from the Lambs Club debacle. During a sordid lawsuit between his fellow Giants partners a few years later, the wife of one of them reported seeing Muggsy “so intoxicated that…he had to be carried to his room by players.” Asked if he had been conscious or unconscious at the time, she gave one of the great one-word answers in the history of American jurisprudence: “Semi.”

Increasingly, as the years slipped away and the Giants fell just short of winning again, McGraw became more and more impatient, leaving his team for days and even weeks at a time to play the ponies, and involving himself in a typical Florida land deal of the period that cost him much of his savings and nearly an indictment for mail fraud. Now he hastily dealt away players when they did not win him another pennant, including some of those who had been closest to his heart. Throughout his career the childless McGraw had adopted surrogate sons from among his ballplayers, including Frisch and a loquacious, bandy-legged outfielder who came to the Giants near the end of his playing career in the early 1920s.

Casey Stengel idolized McGraw, adopting many of his strategies, such as platooning, and even aping his mannerisms during his own long career as a manager. The bachelor Stengel often went back with McGraw to his apartment after a game, where the two champion spielers swapped baseball tales long into the night.

“What on earth they gabbed about I never learned…” McGraw’s remarkably indulgent second wife remembered. “Of course, it was just an excuse to stay up all night. They spent most of the time in the kitchen, because it was nearer the food. Casey liked to cook bacon and scrambled eggs, which he did two or three times a night, and John liked to eat them.”

Stengel, like Frankie Frisch, had his best years for McGraw. Yet when he thought he could do better, McGraw traded both men away—and after unfairly maligning Frisch to anybody who would listen. He could be callous.

 

AWAY FROM THE FIELD and a bar rail, he was better: a loving husband and “the kindliest, most generous and most sympathetic of men.” He was renowned as a soft touch for former teammates down on their luck, once giving away an estimated two thousand dollars in a single year. Branch Rickey found him “quiet spoken, almost disarmingly so” when out of uniform. His second wife remembered that he liked to simply sit and watch her close family interact; he had what she described as “a sort of gnawing hunger” to belong.

He could be gentle, as when he heard the news of Christy Mathewson’s tragic death from tuberculosis, at just forty-five. “I do not expect to see the likes of Matty again…” he told reporters. “Matty was my close friend. His passing is one of the great sorrows of my life. God rest his soul.” He had been just as sweet in his eulogy for Giants owner John T. Brush, the closest thing he ever had to a surrogate father, more than ten years before:

“He was as tender as a dear girl, as resourceful as a man in the fullest of grand health…. What a wonderful—what a beautiful character—was John T. Brush.”

The boy from Truxton had picked up a little erudition along the way, and his affection for Brush and Matty was repaid many times when he died, less than two years after finally retiring, in 1934: He was “far and away the greatest baseball manager of all time,” “He had a baseball mind that was in a class by itself,” and “He treated me as though I were his son and I have also looked on him as a second father…. I have lost the best friend I ever had” were some of the things his players said about him.

Yet the best tribute he ever received had come more than ten years before, at the pinnacle of his managing career, just after his Giants had swept the hated Yankees for McGraw’s last World Series win. A giddy crowd waited for him outside the Polo Grounds, eager just to touch him, patting his back and kissing his cheeks, stealing the hat from his head. McGraw thanked them, and then one elderly woman came forward to shake his hand, then told the others, “I can go home now. I’ve seen the greatest manager in baseball.”

He could be loved.