got to start on the first ball to get the batter. Always have something
on him and never let him have anything on you. This is the prescription
for a great pitcher."
One of the worst habits of Marquard's early days was to get a couple of
strikes on a batter and then let up until he got himself "into a hole" and
could not put the ball over. Robinson by his coaching gave him the
confidence he lacked.
"'Rube,' you've got a lot of stuff to-day," "Robbie" would advise, "but
don't try to get it all on the ball. Mix it with a little control, and it
will make a great blend. Now, this guy is a high ball hitter. Let's see
you keep it low for him. He waits, so you will have to get it over."
And out there in the hot Texas sun, with much advice and lots of patience,
Wilbert Robinson was manufacturing a great pitcher out of the raw
material. One of Marquard's worst faults, when he first broke into the
League, was that he did not know the batters and their grooves, and these
weaknesses Robinson drilled into his head--not that a drill was required
to insert the information. Robinson was the coacher, umpire, catcher and
batter rolled into one, and as a result look at the "Rube."
When Marquard began to wabble a little toward the end of 1911 and to show
some of his old shyness while the club was on its last trip West, Robinson
hurried on to Chicago and worked with him for two days. The "Rube" had
lost the first game of the series to the Cubs, but he turned around after
Robinson joined us and beat them to death in the last contest.
Pitchers, old and young, are always trying for new curves in the spring
practice, and out of the South, wafted over the wires by the fertile
imaginations of the flotilla of correspondents, drift tales each spring of
the "fish" ball and the new "hook" jump and the "stop" ball and many more
eccentric curves which usually boil down to modifications of the old ones.
I worked for two weeks once on a new, slow, spit ball that would wabble,
but the trouble was that I could never tell just when or where it was
going to wabble, and so at last I had to abandon it because I could not
control it.
After sending out fake stories of new and wonderful curves for several
years, at last the correspondents got a new one when the spit ball was
first discovered by Stricklett, a Brooklyn pitcher, several seasons ago.
One Chicago correspondent sent back to his paper a glowing tale of the
wonderful new curve called the "spit ball," which was obtained by the use
of saliva, only to get a wire from his office which read:
"It's all right to 'fake' about new curves, but when it comes to being
vulgar about it, that's going too far. Either drop that spit ball or mail
us your resignation."
The paper refused to print the story and a real new curve was born without
its notice. As a matter of fact, Bowerman, the old Giant catcher, was
throwing the spit ball for two or three years before it was discovered to
be a pitching asset. He used to wet his fingers when catching, and as he
threw to second base the ball would take all sorts of eccentric breaks
which fooled the baseman, and none could explain why it did it until
Stricklett came through with the spit ball.
Many good pitchers, who feel their arms begin to weaken, work on certain
freak motions or forms of delivery to make themselves more effective or
draw out their baseball life in the Big Leagues for a year or two. A story
is told of "Matty" Kilroy, a left-hander, who lived for two years through
the development of what he called the "Bazzazaz" balk, and it had the
same effect on his pitching as administering oxygen often has on a patient
who is almost dead.
"My old soup bone," says Kilroy, "was so weak that I couldn't break a pane
of glass at fifty feet. So one winter I spent some time every day out in
the back yard getting that balk motion down. I had a pretty fair balk
motion when my arm was good, but I saw that it had to be better, so I put
one stone in the yard for a home plate and another up against the fence
for first base. Then I practised looking at the home plate stone and
throwing at first base with a snap of the wrist and without moving my
feet. It was stare steady at the batter, then the arm up to about my ear,
and zip, with a twist of the wrist at first base, and you've got him!
"I got so I could throw 'em harder to the bag with that wrist wriggle than
I could to the batter, and I had them stickin' closer to the base for two
years than a sixteen-year-old fellow does to his gal when they've just
decided they would do for each other."
As a rule McGraw takes charge of the batters and general team work at
spring practice, and he is one of the busiest little persons in seven
counties, for he says a lot depends on the start a club gets in a league
race. He always wants the first jump because it is lots easier falling
back than catching up.
After a week or so of practice, the team is divided up into two squads,
and one goes to San Antonio and the other to Houston each Saturday and
Sunday to play games. One of the older men takes charge of the younger
players, and there is a lot of rivalry between the two teams to see which
one will make the better record, I remember one year I was handling the
youngsters, and we went to Houston to play the team there and just managed
to nose out a victory. McGraw thought that for the next Saturday he had
better strengthen the Yannigans up a bit, so he sent Roger Bresnahan along
to play third base instead of Henderson, the young fellow we had the week
before. Playing third base could not exactly have been called a habit with
"Rog" at that time. He was still pretty fat, and bending over quick after
grounders was not his regular line. He booted two or three and finally
managed to lose the game for us. We sent McGraw the following telegram
that night:
"John McGraw, manager of the Giants, San Antonio, Texas:
"Will trade Bresnahan for Henderson. Rush answer."
McGraw does not like to have any of his clubs beaten by the minor
leaguers, because the bushers are inclined to imitate pouter pigeons right
away after beating the Big Leaguers.
The social side of a training trip consists of kicking about the grub,
singing songs at night, and listening to the same old stories that creep
out of the bushes on crutches year after year. Last spring the food got so
bad that some of the newspaper men fixed up a fake story they said they
were going to send to New York, displayed it to the proprietor, and he
came through with beefsteak for three nights in succession, thus
establishing a record and proving the power of the press. The trouble with
the diet schedule on a spring trip is that almost invariably those hotels
on the bush-league circuits serve dinner in the middle of the day, just
when a ball-player does not feel like eating anything much. Then at night
they have a pick-up supper when one's stomach feels as if it thought a
fellow's throat had been cut.
The Giants had an umpire with them in the spring of 1911, named Hansell,
who enlivened the long, weary, training season some. Like a lot of the
recruits who thought that they were great ball-players, this Hansell
firmly believed he was a great umpire. He used to try to put players who
did not agree with his decisions out of the game and, of course, they
would not go.
"Why don't you have them arrested if they won't leave?" McGraw asked him
one day. "I would."
So the next afternoon Hansell had a couple of the local constables out at
the grounds and tried to have Devore pinched for kicking on a decision.
"Josh" got sore and framed it up to have a camera man at the park the next
day to take a moving picture of a mob scene, Hansell, the umpire, to be
the hero and mobbed. Hansell fell for it until he saw all the boys picking
up real clods and digging the dirt out of their spikes, and then he made a
run for it and never came back. That is how we lost a great umpire.
"You boys made it look too realistic for him," declared McGraw.
Hansell had a notion that he was a runner and offered to bet Robinson,
who is rather corpulent now, that he could beat him running across the
field. Robinson took him, and walked home ahead of the umpire in the race.
"I don't see where I get off on this deal," complained McGraw when it was
over. "I framed up this race for you two fellows, and then Hansell comes
to me and borrows the ten to pay 'Robbie.'"
Somebody fixed up a Turkish bath in the hotel one day by stuffing up the
cracks in one of the bathrooms and turning the hot water into the tub and
the steam into the radiator full blast.
Several towels were piled on the radiator and the players sat upon this
swathed in blankets to take off weight. They entered the impromptu Turkish
bath, wearing only the well-known smile. McGraw still maintains that it
was "Bugs" Raymond who pulled out the towels when it came the manager's
turn to sit on the radiator, and, if he could have proved his case,
Raymond would not have needed a doctor. It would have been time for the
undertaker.
Finally comes the long wending of the way up North. "Bugs" Raymond always
depends on his friends for his refreshments, and as he had few friends in
Marlin in 1911, he got few drinks. But when we got to Dallas cocktails
were served with the dinner and all the ball-players left them untouched,
McGraw enforcing the old rule that lips that touch "licker" shall never
moisten a spit ball for him. "Bugs" was missed after supper and some one
found him out in the kitchen licking up all the discarded Martinis. That
was the occasion of his first fine of the season, and after that, as
"Bugs" himself admitted, "life for him was just one fine after another."
At last, after the long junket through the South, on which all managers
are Simon Legrees, is ended, comes a welcome day, when the new uniforms
are donned and the band plays and "them woids" which constitute the
sweetest music to the ears of a ball-player, roll off the tongue of the
umpire:
"The batteries for to-day are Rucker and Bergen for Brooklyn, Marquard and
Meyers for New York. Play ball!"
The season is on.
XI
Jinxes and What They Mean to a Ball-Player
_A Load of Empty Barrels, Hired by John McGraw, once Pulled the
Giants out of a Losing Streak--The Child of Superstition Appears to
the Ball-Player in Many Forms--Various Ways in which the Influence of
the Jinx can be Overcome--The True Story of "Charley" Faust--The
Necktie that Helped Win a Pennant._
A friend of mine, who took a different fork in the road when we left
college from the one that I have followed, was walking down Broadway in
New York with me one morning after I had joined the Giants, and we passed
a cross-eyed man. I grabbed off my hat and spat in it. It was a new hat,
too. "What's the matter with you, Matty?" he asked, surprised.
"Spit in your hat quick and kill that jinx," I answered, not thinking for
the minute, and he followed my example.
I forgot to mention, when I said he took another fork in the road, that he
had become a pitcher, too, but of a different kind. He had turned out to
be sort of a conversational pitcher, for he was a minister, and, as luck
would have it, on the morning we met that cross-eyed man he was wearing a
silk hat. I was shocked, pained, and mortified when I saw what I had made
him do. But he was the right sort, and wanted to go through with the thing
according to the standards of the professional man with whom he happened
to be at the time.
"What's the idea?" he asked as he replaced his hat.
"Worst jinx in the world to see a cross-eyed man," I replied. "But I hope
I didn't hurt your silk hat," I quickly apologized.
"Not at all. But how about these ball-players who masticate the weed? Do
they kill jinxes, too?" he wanted to know. And I had to admit that they
were the main exterminators of the jinx.
"Then," he went on, "I'm glad that the percentage of wearers of cross eyes
is small."
I have just looked into one of my favorite works for that word "jinx," and
found it not. My search was in Webster's dictionary. But any ball-player
can give a definition of it with his hands tied behind him--that is, any
one except "Arlie" Latham, and, with his hands bound, he is deaf and dumb.
A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ball-player, and the
members of the profession have built up a series of lucky and unlucky
omens that should be catalogued. And besides the common or garden variety
of jinxes, many stars have a series of private or pet and trained ones
that are more malignant in their forms than those which come out in the
open.
A jinx is the child of superstition, and ball-players are among the most
superstitious persons in the world, notwithstanding all this conversation
lately about educated men breaking into the game and paying no attention
whatever to the good and bad omens. College men are coming into both the
leagues, more of them each year, and they are doing their share to make
the game better and the class of men higher, but they fall the hardest for
the jinxes. And I don't know as it is anything to be ashamed of at that.
A really true, on-the-level, honest-to-jiminy jinx can do all sorts of
mean things to a professional ball-player. I have seen it make a bad
pitcher out of a good one, and a blind batter out of a three-hundred
hitter, and I have seen it make a ball club, composed of educated men,
carry a Kansas farmer, with two or three screws rattling loose in his
dome, around the circuit because he came as a prophet and said that he was
accompanied by Miss Fickle Fortune. And that is almost a jinx record.
Jinx and Miss Fickle Fortune never go around together. And ball-players
are always trying to kill this jinx, for, once he joins the club, all hope
is gone. He dies hard, and many a good hat has been ruined in an effort to
destroy him, as I have said before, because the wearer happened to be
chewing tobacco when the jinx dropped around. But what's a new hat against
a losing streak or a batting slump?
Luck is a combination of confidence and getting the breaks. Ball-players
get no breaks without confidence in themselves, and lucky omens inspire
this confidence. On the other hand, unlucky signs take it away. The lucky
man is the one who hits the nail on the head and not his fingers, and the
ability to swat the nail on its receptive end is a combination of
self-confidence and an aptitude for hammering. Good ball-playing is the
combination of self-confidence and the ability to play.
The next is "Red" Ames, although designated as "Leon" by his family when a
very small boy before he began to play ball. (He is still called "Leon" in
the winter.) Ames is of Warren, Ohio, and the Giants, and he is said to
hold the Marathon record for being the most unlucky pitcher that ever
lived, and I agree with the sayers. For several seasons, Ames couldn't
seem to win a ball game, no matter how well he pitched. In 1909, "Red"
twirled a game on the opening day of the season against Brooklyn that was
the work of a master. For nine innings he held his opponents hitless, only
to have them win in the thirteenth. Time and again Ames has pitched
brilliantly, to be finally beaten by a small score, because one of the men
behind him made an error at a critical moment, or because the team could
not give him any runs by which to win. No wonder the newspapers began to
speak of Ames as the "hoodoo" pitcher and the man "who couldn't win."
There was a cross-eyed fellow who lived between Ames and the Polo Grounds,
and "Red" used to make a detour of several blocks en route to the park to
be sure to miss him in case he should be out walking. But one day in 1911,
when it was his turn to pitch, he bumped into that cross-eyed man and, in
spite of the fact that he did his duty by his hat and got three or four
small boys to help him out, he failed to last two innings. When it came
time to go West on the final trip of the 1911 season, Ames was badly
discouraged.
"I don't see any use in taking me along, Mac," he said to McGraw a few
days before we left. "The club can't win with me pitching if the other
guys don't even get a foul."
The first stop was in Boston, and on the day we arrived it rained. In the
mail that day, addressed to Leon Ames, came a necktie and a four-leaf
clover from a prominent actress, wishing Ames good luck. The directions
were inside the envelope. The four-leaf clover, if the charm were to work,
must be worn on both the uniform and street clothes, and the necktie was
to be worn with the street clothes and concealed in the uniform, if that
necktie could be concealed anywhere. It would have done for a headlight
and made Joseph's coat of many colors look like a mourning garment.
"Might as well wish good luck to a guy on the way to the morgue," murmured
Ames as he surveyed the layout, but he manfully put on the necktie, taking
his first dose of the prescription, as directed, at once, and he tucked
the four-leaf clover away carefully in his wallet.
"You've got your work cut out for you, old boy," he remarked to the charm
as he put it away, "but I'd wear you if you were a horseshoe."
The first day that Ames pitched in Boston he won, and won in a stroll.
"The necktie," he explained that night at dinner, and pointed to the
three-sheet, colored-supplement affair he was wearing around his collar,
"I don't change her until I lose."
_And he didn't lose a game on that trip._ Once he almost did, when he was
taken out in the sixth inning, and a batter put in for him, but the Giants
finally pulled out the victory and he got the credit for it. He swept
through the West unbeatable, letting down Pittsburg with two or three
hits, cleaning up in St. Louis, and finally breaking our losing streak in
Chicago after two games had gone against us. And all the time he wore that
spectrum around his collar for a necktie. As it frayed with the wear and
tear, more colors began to show, although I didn't think it possible. If
he had had occasion to put on his evening clothes, I believe that tie
would have gone with it.
For my part, I would almost rather have lost a game and changed the
necktie, since it gave one the feeling all the time that he was carrying
it around with him because he had had the wrong end of an election bet, or
something of the sort. But not Ames! He was a game guy. He stuck with the
necktie, and it stuck with him, and the combination kept right on winning
ball games. Maybe he didn't mind it because he could not see it himself,
unless he looked in a mirror, but it was rough on the rest of the team,
except that we needed the games the necktie won, to take the pennant.
Columns were printed in the newspapers about that necktie, and it became
the most famous scarf in the world. Ames used to sleep with it under his
pillow alongside of his bank roll, and he didn't lose another game until
the very end of the season, when he dropped one against Brooklyn.
"I don't hardly lay that up against the tie," he said afterwards. "You
see, Mac put all those youngsters into it, and I didn't get any support."
Analyzing is a distasteful pastime to me, but let's see what it was that
made Ames win. Was it the necktie? Perhaps not. But some sliver of
confidence, which resulted from that first game when he was dressed up in
the scarf and the four-leaf clover, got stuck in his mind. And after that
the rest was easy.
Frank Chance, the manager of the Cubs, has a funny superstition which is
of the personal sort. Most ball-players have a natural prejudice against
the number "13" in any form, but particularly when attached to a Pullman
berth. But Chance always insists, whenever possible, that he have "lower
13." He says that if he can just crawl in under that number he is sure of
a good night's rest, a safe journey, and a victory the next day. He has
been in two or three minor railroad accidents, and he declares that all
these occurred when he was sleeping on some other shelf besides "lower
13." He can usually satisfy his hobby, too, for most travellers steer
clear of the berth.
McGraw believes a stateroom brings him good luck, or at least he always
insists on having one when he can get it.
"Chance can have 'lower 13,'" says "Mac," "but give me a stateroom for
luck."
Most ball-players nowadays treat the superstitions of the game as jokes,
probably because they are a little ashamed to acknowledge their
weaknesses, but away down underneath they observe the proprieties of the
ritual. Why, even I won't warm up with the third baseman while I am
waiting for the catcher to get on his mask and the rest of his
paraphernalia. Once, when I first broke in with the Giants, I warmed up
with the third baseman between innings and in the next round they hit me
hard and knocked me out of the box. Since then I have had an uncommon
prejudice against the practice, and I hate to hear a man even mention it.
Devlin knows of my weakness and never suggests it when he is playing the
bag, but occasionally a new performer will drill into the box score at
third base and yell:
"Come on, Matty! Warm up here while you're waiting."
It gets me. I'll pitch to the first baseman or a substitute catcher to
keep warm, but I would rather freeze to death than heat up with the third
baseman. That is one of my pet jinxes.
And speaking of Arthur Devlin, he has a few hand-raised jinxes of his own,
too. For instance, he never likes to hear a player hum a tune on the
bench, because he thinks it will keep him from getting a base hit. He
nearly beat a youngster to death one day when he kept on humming after
Devlin had told him to stop.
"Cut that out, Caruso," yelled Arthur, as the recruit started his melody.
"You are killing base hits."
The busher continued with his air until Devlin tried another form of
persuasion.
Arthur also has a favorite seat on the bench which he believes is luckier
than the rest, and he insists on sitting in just that one place.
But the worst blow Devlin ever had was when some young lady admirer of his
in his palmy days, who unfortunately wore her eyes crossed, insisted on
sitting behind third base for each game, so as to be near him. Arthur
noticed her one day and, after that, it was all off. He hit the worst
slump of his career. For a while no one could understand it, but at last
he confessed to McGraw.
"Mac," he said one night in the club-house, "it's that jinx. Have you
noticed her? She sits behind the bag every day, and she has got me going.
She has sure slid the casters under me. I wish we could bar her out, or
poison her, or shoot her, or chloroform her, or kill her in some nice,
mild way because, if it isn't done, this League is going to lose a
ball-player. How can you expect a guy to play with that overlooking him
every afternoon?"
McGraw took Devlin out of the game for a time after that, and the
newspapers printed several yards about the cross-eyed jinx who had ruined
the Giants' third baseman.
With the infield weakened by the loss of Devlin, the club began to lose
with great regularity. But one day the jinxess was missing and she never
came back. She must have read in the newspapers what she was doing to
Devlin, her hero, and quit the national pastime or moved to another part
of the stand. With this weight off his shoulders, Arthur went back into
the game and played like mad.
"If she'd stuck much longer," declared McGraw, joyous in his rejuvenated
third baseman, "I would have had her eyes operated on and straightened.
This club couldn't afford to keep on losing ball games because you are
such a Romeo, Arthur, that even the cross-eyed ones fall for you."
Ball-players are very superstitious about the bats. Did you ever notice
how the clubs are all laid out in a neat, even row before the bench and
are scrupulously kept that way by the bat boy? If one of the sticks by any
chance gets crossed, all the players will shout:
"Uncross the bats! Uncross the bats!"
It's as bad as discovering a three-alarm fire in an excelsior factory.
Don't believe it? Then listen to what happened to the Giants once because
a careless bat boy neglected his duty. The team was playing in Cincinnati
in the season of 1906 when one of the bats got crossed through the
carelessness of the boy. What was the result? "Mike" Donlin, the star
slugger of the team, slid into third base and came up with a broken
ankle.
Ever since that time we have carried our own boy with us, because a club
with championship aspirations cannot afford to take a chance with those
foreign artists handling the bats. They are likely to throw you down at
any time.