Copyright by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio

PITCHING
IN A PINCH

OR
BASEBALL FROM THE INSIDE

BY

CHRISTY MATHEWSON

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
JOHN N. WHEELER

ILLUSTRATED

GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1912
BY
CHRISTOPHER MATHEWSON
This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

INTRODUCTION

Introducing a reader to Christy Mathewson seems like a superfluous piece of writing and a waste of white paper. Schoolboys of the last ten years have been acquainted with the exact figures which have made up Matty’s pitching record before they had ever heard of George Washington, because George didn’t play in the same League.

Perfectly good rational and normal citizens once deserted a reception to the Governor of the State because Christy Mathewson was going to pitch against the Chicago club. If the committee on arrangements wanted to make the hour of the reception earlier, all right, but no one could be expected to miss seeing Matty in the box against Chance and his Cubs for the sake of greeting the Governor.

Besides being a national hero, Matty is one of the closest students of baseball that ever came into the Big League. By players, he has long been recognized as the greatest pitcher the game has produced. He has been pitching in the Big Leagues for eleven years and winning games right along.

His great pitching practically won the world’s championship for the Giants from the Philadelphia Athletics in 1905, and, six years later, he was responsible for one of the two victories turned in by New York pitchers in a world’s series again with the Athletics.

At certain periods in his baseball career, he has pitched almost every day after the rest of the staff had fallen down. When the Giants were making their determined fight for the championship in 1908, the season that the race was finally decided by a single game with the Cubs, he worked in nine out of the last fifteen games in an effort to save his club from defeat. And he won most of them. That has always been the beauty of his pitching—his ability to win.

Matty was born in Factoryville, Pa., thirty-one years ago, and, after going to Bucknell College, he began to play ball with the Norfolk club of the Virginia League, but was soon bought by the New York Giants, where he has remained ever since and is likely to stay for some time to come, if he can continue to make himself as welcome as he has been so far. He was only nineteen when he joined the club and was a headliner from the start. Always he has been a student and something of a writer, having done newspaper work from time to time during the big series. He has made a careful study of the Big League batters. He has kept a sort of baseball diary of his career, and, frequently, I have heard him relate unwritten chapters of baseball history filled with the thrilling incidents of his personal experience.

“Why don’t you write a real book of the Big Leaguers?” I asked him one day.

And he has done it. In this book he is telling the reader of the game as it is played in the Big Leagues. As a college man, he is able to put his impressions of the Big Leagues on paper graphically. It’s as good as his pitching and some exciting things have happened in the Big Leagues, stories that never found their way into the newspapers. Matty has told them. This is a true tale of Big Leaguers, their habits and their methods of playing the game, written by one of them.

John N. Wheeler.

New York,
March, 1912.

CONTENTS

Pitching in a Pinch

I

The Most Dangerous Batters I Have Met

How “Joe” Tinker Changed Overnight from a Weakling at the Plate to the Worst Batter I Had to Face—“Fred” Clarke of Pittsburg cannot be Fooled by a Change of Pace, and “Hans” Wagner’s Only “Groove” Is a Base on Balls—“Inside” Information on All the Great Batters.

I have often been asked to which batters I have found it hardest to pitch.

It is the general impression among baseball fans that Joseph Faversham Tinker, the short-stop of the Chicago Cubs, is the worst man that I have to face in the National League. Few realize that during his first two years in the big show Joe Tinker looked like a cripple at the plate when I was pitching. His “groove” was a slow curve over the outside corner, and I fed him slow curves over that very outside corner with great regularity. Then suddenly, overnight, he became from my point of view the most dangerous batter in the League.

Tinker is a clever ball-player, and one day I struck him out three times in succession with low curves over the outside corner. Instead of getting disgusted with himself, he began to think and reason. He knew that I was feeding him that low curve over the outside corner, and he started to look for an antidote. He had always taken a short, choppy swing at the ball. When he went to the clubhouse after the game in which he struck out three times, he was very quiet, so I have been told. He was just putting on his last sock when he clapped his hand to his leg and exclaimed:

“I’ve got it.”

“Got what?” asked Johnny Evers, who happened to be sitting next to Tinker.

“Got the way to hit Matty, who had me looking as if I came from the home for the blind out there to-day,” answered Joe.

“I should say he did,” replied Evers. “But if you’ve found a way to hit him, why, I’m from away out in Missouri near the Ozark Mountains.”

“Wait till he pitches again,” said Tinker by way of conclusion, as he took his diamond ring from the trainer and left the clubhouse.

It was a four-game series in Chicago, and I had struck Tinker out three times in the first contest. McGraw decided that I should pitch the last game as well. Two men were on the bases and two were out when Tinker came to the bat for the first time in this battle, and the outfielders moved in closer for him, as he had always been what is known as a “chop” hitter. I immediately noticed something different about his style as he set himself at the plate, and then it struck me that he was standing back in the box and had a long bat. Before this he had always choked his bat short and stood up close. Now I observed that he had his stick way down by the handle.

Bresnahan was catching, and he signalled for the regular prescription for Tinker. With a lot of confidence I handed him that old low curve. He evidently expected it, for he stepped almost across the plate, and, with that long bat, drove the ball to right field for two bases over the head of George Browne, who was playing close up to the infield, scoring both runs and eventually winning the game.

“I’ve got your number now, Matty!” he shouted at me as he drew up at second base.

I admit that he has had it quite frequently since he switched his batting style. Now the outfielders move back when Tinker comes to the plate, for, if he connects, he hits “’em far” with that long bat. Ever since the day he adopted the “pole” he has been a thorn in my side and has broken up many a game. That old low curve is his favorite now, and he reaches for it with the same cordiality as is displayed by an actor in reaching for his pay envelope. The only thing to do is to keep them close and try to outguess him, but Tinker is a hard man to beat at the game of wits.

Many a heady hitter in the Big League could give the signs to the opposing pitcher, for he realizes what his weakness is and knows that a twirler is going to pitch at it. But, try as hard as he will, he cannot often cover up his “groove,” as Tinker did, and so he continues to be easy for the twirler who can put the ball where he wants it.

Fred Clarke, of Pittsburg, has always been a hard man for me to fool on account of his batting form. A hitter of his type cannot be deceived by a change of pace, because he stands up close to the plate, chokes his bat short, and swings left-handed. When a pitcher cannot deceive a man with a change of pace, he has to depend on curves. Let me digress briefly to explain why a change of pace will not make the ball miss Clarke’s bat. He is naturally a left-field hitter, and likes the ball on the outside corner of the plate. That means he swings at the ball late and makes most of his drives to left field.

How is a batter fooled by a change of pace? A pitcher gives him a speedy one and then piles a slow one right on top of it with the same motion. The batter naturally thinks it is another fast ball and swings too soon—that is, before the ball gets to him. But when a man like Clarke is at the bat and a pitcher tries to work a change of pace, what is the result? He naturally swings late and so hits a fast ball to left field. Then as the slow one comes up to the plate, he strikes at it, granted he is deceived by it, timing his swing as he would at a fast ball. If it had been a fast ball, as he thought, he would have hit it to left field, being naturally a late swinger. But on a slow one he swings clear around and pulls it to right field twice as hard as he would have hit it to left field because he has obtained that much more drive in the longer swing. Therefore, it is a rule in the profession that no left-handed batter who hits late can be deceived by a change of pace.

“Rube” Ellis, a left-handed hitter of the St. Louis Club, entered the League and heard complimentary stories about my pitching. Ellis came up to bat the first day that I pitched against him wondering if he would get even a foul. He was new to me and I was looking for his “groove.” I gave him one over the outside corner, and he jabbed it to left field. The next time, I thought to work the change of pace, and, swinging late, he hauled the ball around to right field, and it nearly tore Fred Tenny’s head off en route over first base. Five hits out of five times at bat he made off me that day, and, when he went to the clubhouse, he remarked to his team mates in this wise:

“So that is the guy who has been burning up this League, huh? We’ve got better ’n him in the coast circuit. He’s just got the Indian sign on you. That’s all.”

I did a little thinking about Ellis’s hitting. He used a long bat and held it down near the end and “poled ’em.” He was naturally a left-field hitter and, therefore, swung late at the ball. I concluded that fast ones inside would do for Mr. Ellis, and the next time we met he got just those. He has been getting them ever since and now, when he makes a hit off me, he holds a celebration.

“Hans” Wagner, of Pittsburg, has always been a hard man for me, but in that I have had nothing on a lot of other pitchers. He takes a long bat, stands well back from the plate, and steps into the ball, poling it. He is what is known in baseball as a free swinger, and there are not many free swingers these days. This is what ailed the Giants’ batting during the world’s series in 1911. They all attempted to become free swingers overnight and were trying to knock the ball out of the lot, instead of chopping it.

In the history of baseball there have not been more than fifteen or twenty free swingers altogether, and they are the real natural hitters of the game, the men with eyes nice enough and accurate enough to take a long wallop at the ball. “Dan” Brouthers was one, and so was “Cap” Anson. Sherwood Magee and “Hans” Wagner are contemporary free swingers. Men of this type wield a heavy bat as if it were a toothpick and step back and forth in the box, hitting the ball on any end of the plate. Sometimes it is almost impossible to pass a man of this sort purposely, for a little carelessness in getting the ball too close to the plate may result in his stepping up and hitting it a mile. Pitchers have been searching for Wagner’s “groove” for years, and, if any one of them has located it, he has his discovery copyrighted, for I never heard of it.

Only one pitcher, that I can recall, always had it on Wagner, and that man was Arthur Raymond, sometimes called “Bugs.” He seemed to upset the German by his careless manner in the box and by his “kidding” tactics. I have seen him make Wagner go after bad balls, a thing that “Hans” seldom can be induced to do by other twirlers.

I remember well the first time I pitched against Wagner. Jack Warner was catching, and I, young and new in the League, had spent a lot of time with him, learning the weaknesses of the batters and being coached as to how to treat them. Wagner loomed up at the bat in a pinch, and I could not remember what Warner had said about his flaw. I walked out of the box to confer with the catcher.

“What’s his ‘groove,’ Jack?” I asked him.

“A base on balls,” replied Warner, without cracking a smile.

That’s always been Wagner’s “groove.”

There used to be a player on the Boston team named Claude Ritchey who “had it on me” for some reason or other. He was a left-handed hitter and naturally drove the ball to left field, so that I could not fool him with a change of pace. He was always able to outguess me in a pinch and seemed to know by intuition what was coming.

There has been for a long time an ardent follower of the Giants named Mrs. Wilson, who raves wildly at a game, and is broken-hearted when the team loses. The Giants were playing in Boston one day, and needed the game very badly. It was back in 1905, at the time the club could cinch the pennant by winning one contest, and the flag-assuring game is the hardest one to win. Two men got on the bases in the ninth inning with the score tied and no one out. The crowd was stamping its feet and hooting madly, trying to rattle me. I heard Mrs. Wilson shrill loudly above the noise:

“Stick with them, Matty!”

Ritchey came up to the bat, and I passed him purposely, trying to get him to strike at a bad ball. I wouldn’t take a chance on letting him hit at a good one. Mrs. Wilson thought I was losing my control, and unable to stand it any longer she got up and walked out of the grounds. Then I fanned the next two batters, and the last man hit a roller to Devlin and was thrown out at first base. I was told afterwards that Mrs. Wilson stood outside the ground, waiting to hear the crowd cheer, which would have told her it was all over.

She lingered at the gate until the fourteenth inning, fearing to return because she expected to see us routed. At last she heard a groan from the home crowd when we won in the fourteenth. Still she would not believe that I had weathered the storm and won the game that gave the Giants a pennant, but waited to be assured by some of the spectators leaving the grounds before she came around to congratulate us.

All batters who are good waiters, and will not hit at bad balls, are hard to deceive, because it means a twirler has to lay the ball over, and then the hitter always has the better chance. A pitcher will try to get a man to hit at a bad ball before he will put it near the plate.

Many persons have asked me why I do not use my “fade-away” oftener when it is so effective, and the only answer is that every time I throw the “fade-away” it takes so much out of my arm. It is a very hard ball to deliver. Pitching it ten or twelve times in a game kills my arm, so I save it for the pinches.

Many fans do not know what this ball really is. It is a slow curve pitched with the motion of a fast ball. But most curve balls break away from a right-handed batter a little. The fade-away breaks toward him.

Baker, of the Athletics, is one of the most dangerous hitters I have ever faced, and we were not warned to look out for him before the 1911 world’s series, either. Certain friends of the Giants gave us some “inside” information on the Athletics’ hitters. Among others, the Cubs supplied us with good tips, but no one spread the Baker alarm. I was told to watch out for Collins as a dangerous man, one who was likely to break up a game any time with a long drive.

I consider Baker one of the hardest, cleanest hitters I have ever faced, and he drives the ball on a line to any field. The fielders cannot play for him. He did not show up well in the first game of the world’s series because the Athletics thought they were getting our signs, and we crossed Baker with two men on the bases in the third inning. He lost a chance to be a hero right there.

The roughest deal that I got from Baker in the 1911 series was in the third game, which was the second in New York. We had made one run and the ninth inning rolled around with the Giants still leading, 1 to 0. The first man at the bat grounded out and then Baker came up. I realized by this time that he was a hard proposition, but figured that he could not hit a low curve over the outside corner, as he is naturally a right-field hitter. I got one ball and one strike on him and then delivered a ball that was aimed to be a low curve over the outside corner. Baker refused to swing at it, and Brennan, the umpire, called it a ball.

I thought that it caught the outside corner of the plate, and that Brennan missed the strike. It put me in the hole with the count two balls and one strike, and I had to lay the next one over very near the middle to keep the count from being three and one. I pitched a curve ball that was meant for the outside corner, but cut the plate better than I intended. Baker stepped up into it and smashed it into the grand-stand in right field for a home run, and there is the history of that famous wallop. This tied the score.

A pitcher has two types of batters to face. One is the man who is always thinking and guessing and waiting, trying to get the pitcher in the hole. Evers, of the Cubs, is that sort. They tell me that “Ty” Cobb of Detroit is the most highly developed of this type of hitter. I have never seen him play. Then the other kind is the natural slugger, who does not wait for anything, and who could not outguess a pitcher if he did. The brainy man is the harder for a pitcher to face because he is a constant source of worry.

There are two ways of fooling a batter. One is literally to “mix ’em up,” and the other is to keep feeding him the same sort of a ball, but to induce him to think that something else is coming. When a brainy man is at the bat, he is always trying to figure out what to expect. If he knows, then his chances of getting a hit are greatly increased. For instance, if a batter has two balls and two strikes on him, he naturally concludes that the pitcher will throw him a curve ball, and prepares for it. Big League ball-players recognize only two kinds of pitched balls—the curve and the straight one.

When a catcher in the Big League signals for a curved ball, he means a drop, and, after handling a certain pitcher for a time, he gets to know just how much the ball is going to curve. That is why the one catcher receives for the same pitcher so regularly, because they get to work together harmoniously. “Chief” Meyers, the big Indian catcher on the Giants, understands my style so well that in some games he hardly has to give a sign. But, oddly enough, he could never catch Raymond because he did not like to handle the spit ball, a hard delivery to receive, and Raymond and he could not get along together as a battery. They would cross each other. But Arthur Wilson caught Raymond almost perfectly. This explains the loss of effectiveness of many pitchers when a certain catcher is laid up or out of the game.

“Cy” Seymour, formerly the outfielder of the Giants, was one of the hardest batters I ever had to pitch against when he was with the Cincinnati club and going at the top of his stride. He liked a curved ball, and could hit it hard and far, and was always waiting for it. He was very clever at out-guessing a pitcher and being able to conclude what was coming. For a long time whenever I pitched against him I had “mixed ’em up” literally, handing him first a fast ball and then a slow curve and so on, trying to fool him in this way. But one day we were playing in Cincinnati, and I decided to keep delivering the same kind of a ball, that old fast one around his neck, and to try to induce him to believe that a curve was coming. I pitched him nothing but fast ones that day, and he was always waiting for a curve. The result was that I had him in the hole all the time, and I struck him out three times. He has never gotten over it. Only recently I saw Seymour, and he said:

“Matty, you are the only man that ever struck me out three times in the same game.”

He soon guessed, however, that I was not really mixing them up, and then I had to switch my style again for him.

Some pitchers talk to batters a great deal, hoping to get their minds off the game in this way, and thus be able to sneak strikes over. But I find that talking to a batter disconcerts me almost as much as it does him, and I seldom do it. Repartee is not my line anyway.

Bender talked to the Giant players all through that first game in the 1911 world’s series, the one in which he wore the smile, probably because he was a pitcher old in the game and several of the younger men on the New York team acted as if they were nervous. Snodgrass and the Indian kept up a running fire of small talk every time that the Giants’ centre-fielder came to the plate.

Snodgrass got hit by pitched balls twice, and this seemed to worry Bender. When the New York centre-fielder came to the bat in the eighth inning, the Indian showed his even teeth in the chronic grin and greeted Snodgrass in this way:

“Look out, Freddie, you don’t get hit this time.”

Then Bender wound up and with all his speed drove the ball straight at Snodgrass’s head, and Bender had more speed in that first game than I ever saw him use before. Snodgrass dodged, and the ball drove into Thomas’s glove. This pitching the first ball at the head of a batter is an old trick of pitchers when they think a player intends to get hit purposely or that he is crowding the plate.

“If you can’t push ’em over better than that,” retorted Snodgrass, “I won’t need to get hit. Let’s see your fast one now.”

“Try this one,” suggested Bender, as he pitched another fast one that cut the heart of the plate. Snodgrass swung and hit nothing but the air. The old atmosphere was very much mauled by bats in that game anyway.

“You missed that one a mile, Freddie,” chuckled the Indian, with his grin.

Snodgrass eventually struck out and then Bender broke into a laugh.

“You ain’t a batter, Freddie,” exclaimed the Indian, as he walked to the bench. “You’re a backstop. You can never get anywhere without being hit.”

If a pitcher is going to talk to a batter, he must size up his man. An irritable, nervous young player often will fall for the conversation, but most seasoned hitters will not answer back. The Athletics, other than Bender, will not talk in a game. We tried to get after them in the first contest in 1911, and we could not get a rise out of one of them, except when Snodgrass spiked Baker, and I want to say right here that this much discussed incident was accidental. Baker was blocking Snodgrass out, and the New York player had a perfect right to the base line.

Sherwood Magee of the Philadelphia National League team is one of the hardest batters that I ever have had to face, because he has a great eye, and is of the type of free swingers who take a mad wallop at the ball, and are always liable to break up a game with a long drive. Just once I talked to him when he was at the bat, more because we were both worked up than for any other reason, and he came out second best. It was while the Giants were playing at American League Park in 1911 after the old Polo Grounds had burned. Welchonce, who was the centre-fielder for the Phillies at the time, hit a slow one down the first base line, and I ran over to field the ball. I picked it up as the runner arrived and had no time to straighten up to dodge him. So I struck out my shoulder and he ran into it. There was no other way to make the play, but I guess it looked bad from the stand, because Welchonce fell down.

Magee came up to bat next, threw his hat on the ground, and started to call me names. He is bad when irritated—and tolerably easy to irritate, as shown by the way in which he knocked down Finnegan, the umpire, last season because their ideas on a strike differed slightly. I replied on that occasion, but remembered to keep the ball away from the centre of the plate. That is about all I did do, but he was more wrought up than I and hit only a slow grounder to the infield. He was out by several feet. He took a wild slide at the bag, however, feet first, in what looked like an attempt to spike Merkle. We talked some more after that, but it has all been forgotten now.

To be a successful pitcher in the Big League, a man must have the head and the arm. When I first joined the Giants, I had what is known as the “old round-house curve,” which is no more than a big, slow outdrop. I had been fooling them in the minor leagues with it, and I was somewhat chagrined when George Davis, then the manager of the club, came to me and told me to forget the curve, as it would be of no use. It was then that I began to develop my drop ball.

A pitcher must watch all the time for any little unconscious motion before he delivers the ball. If a base runner can guess just when he is going to pitch, he can get a much better start. Drucke used to have a little motion with his foot just before he pitched, of which he himself was entirely unconscious, but the other clubs got on to it and stole bases on him wildly. McGraw has since broken him of it.

The Athletics say that I make a motion peculiar to the fade-away. Some spit-ball pitchers announce when they are going to throw a moist one by looking at the ball as they dampen it. At other times, when they “stall,” they do not look at the ball. The Big League batter is watching for all these little things and, if a pitcher is not careful, he will find a lot of men who are hard to pitch to. There are plenty anyway, and, as a man grows older, this number increases season by season.

II

“Take Him Out”

Many a Pitcher’s Heart has been Broken by the Cry from the Stands, “Take Him Out”—Russell Ford of the New York Yankees was Once Beaten by a Few Foolish Words Whispered into the Batter’s Ear at a Critical Moment—Why “Rube” Marquard Failed for Two Years to be a Big Leaguer—The Art of Breaking a Pitcher into Fast Company.

A pitcher is in a tight game, and the batter makes a hit. Another follows and some fan back in the stand cries in stentorian tones:

“Take him out!”

It is the dirge of baseball which has broken the hearts of pitchers ever since the game began and will continue to do so as long as it lives. Another fan takes up the shout, and another, and another, until it is a chorus.

“Take him out! Take him out! Take him out!”

The pitcher has to grin, but that constant cry is wearing on nerves strung to the breaking point. The crowd is against him, and the next batter hits, and a run scores. The manager stops the game, beckons to the pitcher from the bench, and he has to walk away from the box, facing the crowd—not the team—which has beaten him. It is the psychology of baseball.

Some foolish words once whispered into the ear of a batter by a clever manager in the crisis of one of the closest games ever played in baseball turned the tide and unbalanced a pitcher who had been working like a perfectly adjusted machine through seven terrific innings. That is also the “psychology of pitching.” The man wasn’t beaten because he weakened, because he lost his grip, because of any physical deficiency, but because some foolish words—words that meant nothing, had nothing to do with the game—had upset his mental attitude.

The game was the first one played between the Giants and the Yankees in the post-season series of 1910, the batter was Bridwell, the manager was John McGraw, and the pitcher, Russell Ford of the Yankees. The cast of characters having been named, the story may now enter the block.

Spectators who recall the game will remember that the two clubs had been battling through the early innings with neither team able to gain an advantage, and the Giants came to bat for the eighth inning with the score a tie. Ford was pitching perfectly with all the art of a master craftsman. Each team had made one run. I was the first man up and started the eighth inning with a single because Ford slackened up a little against me, thinking that I was not dangerous. Devore beat out an infield hit, and Doyle bunted and was safe, filling the bases. Then Ford went to work. He struck out Snodgrass, and Hemphill caught Murray’s fly far too near the infield to permit me to try to score. It looked as if Ford were going to get out of the hole when “Al” Bridwell, the former Giant shortstop, came to the bat. Ford threw him two bad balls, and then McGraw ran out from the bench, and, with an autocratic finger, held up the game while he whispered into Bridwell’s ear.

“Al” nodded knowingly, and the whole thing was a pantomime, a wordless play, that made Sumurun look like a bush-league production. Bridwell stepped back into the batter’s box, and McGraw returned to the bench. On the next pitch, “Al” was hit in the leg and went to first base, forcing the run that broke the tie across the plate. That run also broke Ford’s heart. And here is what McGraw whispered into the attentive ear of Bridwell:

“How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al?”

John McGraw, the psychologist, baseball general and manager, had heard opportunity knock. With his fingers on the pulse of the game, he had felt the tenseness of the situation, and realized, all in the flash of an eye, that Ford was wabbling and that anything would push him over. He stopped the game and whispered into Bridwell’s ear while Ford was feeling more and more the intensity of the crisis. He had an opportunity to observe the three men on the bases. He wondered what McGraw was whispering, what trick was to be expected. Was he telling the batter to get hit? Yes, he must be. Then he did just that—hit the batter, and lost the game.

Why can certain pitchers always beat certain clubs and why do they look like bush leaguers against others? To be concrete, why can Brooklyn fight Chicago so hard and look foolish playing against the Giants? Why can the Yankees take game after game from Detroit and be easy picking for the Cleveland club in most of their games? Why does Boston beat Marquard when he can make the hard Philadelphia hitters look like blind men with bats in their hands? Why could I beat Cincinnati game after game for two years when the club was filled with hard hitters? It is the psychology of baseball, the mental attitudes of the players, some intangible thing that works on the mind. Managers are learning to use this subtle, indescribable element which is such a factor.

The great question which confronts every Big League manager is how to break a valuable young pitcher into the game. “Rube” Marquard came to the Giants in the fall of 1908 out of the American Association heralded as a world-beater, with a reputation that shimmered and shone. The newspapers were crowded with stories of the man for whom McGraw had paid $11,000, who had been standing them on their heads in the West, who had curves that couldn’t be touched, and was a bargain at the unheard-of price paid for him.

“Rube” Marquard came to the Giants in a burst of glory and publicity when the club was fighting for the pennant. McGraw was up against it for pitchers at that time, and one win, turned in by a young pitcher, might have resulted in the Giants winning the pennant as the season ended.

“Don’t you think Marquard would win? Can’t you put him in?” Mr. Brush, the owner of the club, asked McGraw one day when he was discussing the pitching situation with the manager.

“I don’t know,” answered McGraw. “If he wins his first time out in the Big Leagues, he will be a world-beater, and, if he loses, it may cost us a good pitcher.” But Mr. Brush was insistent. Here a big price had been paid for a pitcher with a record, and pitchers were what the club needed. The newspapers declared that the fans should get a look at this “$11,000 beauty” in action. A double header was scheduled to be played with the Cincinnati club in the month of September, in 1908, and the pitching staff was gone. McGraw glanced over his collection of crippled and worked-out twirlers. Then he saw “Rube” Marquard, big and fresh.

“Go in and pitch,” he ordered after Marquard had warmed up.

McGraw always does things that way, makes up his mind about the most important matters in a minute and then stands by his judgment. Marquard went into the box, but he didn’t pitch much. He has told me about it since.

“When I saw that crowd, Matty,” he said, “I didn’t know where I was. It looked so big to me, and they were all wondering what I was going to do, and all thinking that McGraw had paid $11,000 for me, and now they were to find out whether he had gotten stuck, whether he had picked up a gold brick with the plating on it very thin. I was wondering, myself, whether I would make good.”

What Marquard did that day is a matter of record, public property, like marriage and death notices. Kane, the little rightfielder on the Cincinnati club, was the first man up, and, although he was one of the smallest targets in the league, Marquard hit him. He promptly stole second, which worried “Rube” some more. Up came Lobert, the man who broke Marquard’s heart.

“Now we’ll see,” said Lobert to “Rube,” as he advanced to the plate, “whether you’re a busher.” Then Lobert, the tantalizing Teuton with the bow-legs, whacked out a triple to the far outfield and stopped at third with a mocking smile on his face which would have gotten the late Job’s goat.

“You’re identified,” said “Hans”; “you’re a busher.”

Some fan shouted the fatal “Take him out.” Marquard was gone. Bescher followed with another triple, and, after that, the official scorer got writer’s cramp trying to keep track of the hits and runs. The number of hits, I don’t think, ever was computed with any great amount of exactitude. Marquard was taken out of the box in the fifth inning, and he was two years recovering from the shock of that beating. McGraw had put him into the game against his better judgment, and he paid for it dearly.

Marquard had to be nursed along on the bench finishing games, starting only against easy clubs, and learning the ropes of the Big Leagues before he was able to be a winning pitcher. McGraw was a long time realizing on his investment. All Marquard needed was a victory, a decisive win, over a strong club.

Photo by L. Van Oeyen, Cleveland, Ohio

Ty Cobb and Hans Wagner

“An American and National League star of the first magnitude. Fans of the rival leagues never tire of discussing the relative merits of these two great players. Both are always willing to take a chance, and seem to do their best work when pressed hardest.”

The Giants played a disastrous series with the Philadelphia club early in July, 1911, and lost four games straight. All the pitchers were shot to pieces, and the Quakers seemed to be unbeatable. McGraw was at a loss for a man to use in the fifth game. The weather was steaming hot, and the players were dragged out, while the pitching staff had lost all its starch. As McGraw’s eye scanned his bedraggled talent, Marquard, reading his thoughts, walked up to him.

“Give me a chance,” he asked.

“Go in,” answered McGraw, again making up his mind on the spur of the moment. Marquard went into the game and made the Philadelphia batters, whose averages had been growing corpulent on the pitching of the rest of the staff, look foolish. There on that sweltering July afternoon, when everything steamed in the blistering heat, a pitcher was being born again. Marquard had found himself, and, for the rest of the season, he was strongest against the Philadelphia team, for it had been that club which restored his confidence.

There is a sequel to that old Lobert incident, too. In one of the last series in Philadelphia, toward the end of the season, Marquard and Lobert faced each other again. Said Marquard:

“Remember the time, you bow-legged Dutchman, when you asked me whether I was a busher? Here is where I pay you back. This is the place where you get a bad showing up.”

And he fanned Lobert—whiff! whiff! whiff!—like that. He became the greatest lefthander in the country, and would have been sooner, except for the enormous price paid for him and the widespread publicity he received, which caused him to be over-anxious to make good. It’s the psychology of the game.

“You can’t hit what you don’t see,” says “Joe” Tinker of Marquard’s pitching. “When he throws his fast one, the only way you know it’s past you is because you hear the ball hit the catcher’s glove.”

Fred Clarke, of the Pittsburg club, was up against the same proposition when he purchased “Marty” O’Toole for $22,500 in 1911. The newspapers of the country were filled with figures and pictures of the real estate and automobiles that could be bought with the same amount of money, lined up alongside of pictures of O’Toole, as when the comparative strengths of the navies of the world are shown by placing different sizes of battleships in a row, or when the length of the Lusitania is emphasized by printing a picture of it balancing gracefully on its stern alongside the Singer Building.

Clarke realized that he had all this publicity with which to contend, and that it would do his expensive new piece of pitching bric-à-brac no good. O’Toole, jerked out of a minor league where he had been pitching quietly, along with his name in ten or a dozen papers, was suddenly a national figure, measuring up in newspaper space with Roosevelt and Taft and J. Johnson.

When O’Toole joined the Pirates near the end of the season, Clarke knew down in his heart the club had no chance of winning the pennant with Wagner hurt, although he still publicly declared he was in the race. He did not risk jumping O’Toole right into the game as soon as he reported and taking the chance of breaking his heart. Opposing players, if they are up in the pennant hunt, are hard on a pitcher of this sort and would lose no opportunity to mention the price paid for him and connect it pointedly with his showing, if that showing was a little wobbly. Charity begins at home, and stays there, in the Big Leagues. At least, I never saw any of it on the ball fields, especially if the club is in the race, and the only thing that stands between it and a victory is the ruining of a $22,500 pitcher of a rival.

Clarke nursed O’Toole along on the bench for a couple of weeks until he got to be thoroughly acclimated, and then he started him in a game against Boston, the weakest club in the league, after he had sent for Kelly, O’Toole’s regular catcher, to inspire more confidence. O’Toole had an easy time of it at his Big League début, for the Boston players did not pick on him any to speak of, as they were not a very hard bunch of pickers. The Pittsburg team gave him a nice comfortable, cosy lead, and he was pitching along ahead of the game all the way. In the fifth or sixth inning Clarke slipped Gibson, the regular Pittsburg catcher, behind the bat, and O’Toole had won his first game in the Big League before he knew it. He then reasoned I have won here. I belong here. I can get along here. It isn’t much different from the crowd I came from, except for the name, and that’s nothing to get timid about if I can clean up as easily as I did to-day.

Fred Clarke, also a psychologist and baseball manager, had worked a valuable pitcher into the League, and he had won his first game. If he had started him against some club like the Giants, for instance, where he would have had to face a big crowd and the conversation and spirit of players who were after a pennant and hot after it, he might have lost and his heart would have been broken. Successfully breaking into the game an expensive pitcher, who has cost a club a large price, is one of the hardest problems which confronts a manager. Now O’Toole is all right if he has the pitching goods. He has taken his initial plunge, and all he has to do is to make good next year. The psychology element is eliminated from now on.

I have been told that Clarke was the most relieved man in seven counties when O’Toole came through with that victory in Boston.

“I had in mind all the time,” said Fred, “what happened to McGraw when he was trying to introduce Marquard into the smart set, and I was afraid the same thing would happen to me. I had a lot of confidence in the nerve of that young fellow though, because he stood up well under fire the first day he got into Pittsburg. One of those lady reporters was down to the club offices to meet him the morning he got into town, and they always kind of have me, an old campaigner, stepping away from the plate. She pulled her pad and pencil on Marty first thing, before he had had a chance to knock the dirt out of his cleats, and said:

“‘Now tell me about yourself.’

“He stepped right into that one, instead of backing away.

“‘What do you want me to tell?’ he asks her.

“Then I knew he was all right. He was there with the ‘come-back.’”

But the ideal way to break a star into the Big League is that which marked the entrance of Grover Cleveland Alexander, of the Philadelphia club. The Cincinnati club had had its eye on Alexander for some time, but “Tacks” Ashenbach, the scout, now dead, had advised against him, declaring that he would be no good against “regular batters.” Philadelphia got him at the waiver price and he was among the lot in the newspapers marked “Those who also joined.” He started out in 1911 and won two or three games before anyone paid any attention to him. Then he kept on winning until one manager was saying to another:

“That guy, Alexander, is a hard one to beat.”

He had won ten or a dozen games before it was fully realized that he was a star. Then he was so accustomed to the Big League he acted as if he had been living in it all his life, and there was no getting on his nerves. When he started, he had everything to gain and nothing to lose. If he didn’t last, the newspapers wouldn’t laugh at him, and the people wouldn’t say:

“$11,000, or $22,500, for a lemon.” That’s the dread of all ball players.

Such is the psychology of introducing promising pitchers into the Big Leagues. The Alexander route is the ideal one, but it’s hard to get stars now without paying enormous prices for them. Philadelphia was lucky.

There is another element which enters into all forms of athletics. Tennis players call it nervousness, and ball players, in the frankness of the game, call it a “yellow streak.” It is the inability to stand the gaff, the weakening in the pinches. It is something ingrained in a man that can’t be cured. It is the desire to quit when the situation is serious. It is different from stage fright, because a man may get over that, but a “yellow streak” is always with him. When a new player breaks into the League, he is put to the most severe test by the other men to see if he is “yellow.” If he is found wanting, he is hopeless in the Big League, for the news will spread, and he will receive no quarter. It is the cardinal sin in a ball player.

For some time after “Hans” Wagner’s poor showing in the world’s series of 1903, when the Pittsburg club was defeated for the World’s Championship by the Boston American League club, it was reported that he was “yellow.” This grieved the Dutchman deeply, for I don’t know a ball player in either league who would assay less quit to the ton than Wagner. He is always there and always fighting. Wagner felt the inference which his team mates drew very keenly. This was the real tragedy in Wagner’s career. Notwithstanding his stolid appearance, he is a sensitive player, and this hurt him more than anything else in his life ever has.

When the Pittsburg club played Detroit in 1909 for the championship of the world, many, even of Wagner’s admirers, said, “The Dutchman will quit.” It was in this series he vindicated himself. His batting scored the majority of the Pittsburg runs, and his fielding was little short of wonderful. He was demonstrating his gameness. Many men would have quit under the reflection. They would have been unable to withstand the criticism, but not Wagner.

Many persons implied that John Murray, the rightfielder on the Giants, was “yellow” at the conclusion of the 1911 world’s series because, after batting almost three hundred in the season, he did not get a hit in the six games. But there isn’t a man on the team gamer. He hasn’t any nerves. He’s one of the sort of ball players who says:

“Well, now I’ve got my chew of tobacco in my mouth. Let her go.”

There is an interesting bit of psychology connected with Wagner and the spit-ball. It comes as near being Wagner’s “groove” as any curve that has found its way into the Big Leagues. This is explained by the fact that the first time Wagner ever faced “Bugs” Raymond he didn’t get a hit with Arthur using the spitter. Consequently the report went around the circuit that Wagner couldn’t hit the spit-ball. He disproved this theory against two or three spit-ball pitchers, but as long as Raymond remained in the League he had it on the hard-hitting Dutchman.

“Here comes a ‘spitter,’ Hans. Look out for it,” Raymond would warn Wagner, with a wide grin, and then he would pop up a wet one.

“Guess I’ll repeat on that dose, Hans; you didn’t like that one.”

And Wagner would get so worked up that he frequently struck out against “Bugs” when the rest of his club was hitting the eccentric pitcher hard. It was because he achieved the idea on the first day he couldn’t hit the spit-ball, and he wasn’t able to rid his mind of the impression. Many fans often wondered why Raymond had it on Wagner, the man whose only “groove” is a base on balls. “Bugs” had the edge after that first day when Wagner lost confidence in his ability to hit the spit-ball as served by Raymond.

In direct contrast to this loss of confidence on Wagner’s part was the incident attendant upon Arthur Devlin’s début into the Big League. He had joined the club a youngster, in the season of 1904, and McGraw had not counted upon him to play third base, having planned to plant Bresnahan at that corner. But Bresnahan developed sciatic rheumatism early in the season, and Devlin was put on the bag in the emergency with a great deal of misgiving.

The first day he was in the game he came up to the bat with the bases full. The Giants were playing Brooklyn at the Polo Grounds, and two men had already struck out, with the team two runs behind. Devlin came out from the bench.

“Who is this youthful-looking party?” one fan asked another, as they scanned their score cards.

“Devlin, some busher, taking Bresnahan’s place,” another answered.

“Well, it’s all off now,” was the general verdict.

The crowd settled back, and one could feel the lassitude in the atmosphere. But Devlin had his first chance to make good in a pinch. There was no weariness in his manner. Poole, the Brooklyn pitcher, showing less respect than he should have for the newcomer in baseball society, spilled one over too near the middle, and Arthur drove out a home run, winning the game. Those who had refused to place any confidence in him only a moment before, were on their feet cheering wildly now. And Devlin played third base for almost eight years after that, and none thought of Bresnahan and his rheumatism until he began catching again. Devlin, after that home run, was oozing confidence from every pore and burned up the League with his batting for three years. He got the old confidence from his start. The fans had expected nothing from him, and he had delivered. He had gained everything. He had made the most dramatic play in baseball on his first day, a home run with the bases full.

When Fred Snodgrass first started playing as a regular with the Giants about the middle of the season of 1910, he hit any ball pitched him hard and had all the fans marvelling at his stick work. He believed that he could hit anything and, as long as he retained that belief, he could.

But the Chalmers Automobile Company had offered a prize of one nice, mild-mannered motor car to the batter in either league who finished the season with the biggest average.

Snodgrass was batting over four hundred at one time and was ahead of them all when suddenly the New York evening papers began to publish the daily averages of the leaders for the automobile, boosting Snodgrass. It suddenly struck Fred that he was a great batter and that to keep his place in that daily standing he would have to make a hit every time he went to the plate. These printed figures worried him. His batting fell off miserably until, in the post season series with the Yankees, he gave one of the worst exhibitions of any man on the team. The newspapers did it.

“They got me worrying about myself,” he told me once. “I began to think how close I was to the car and had a moving picture of myself driving it. That settled it.”

Many promising young players are broken in their first game in the Big League by the ragging which they are forced to undergo at the hands of veteran catchers. John Kling is a very bad man with youngsters, and sometimes he can get on the nerves of older players in close games when the nerves are strung tight. The purpose of a catcher in talking to a man in this way is to distract his attention from batting, and once this is accomplished he is gone. A favorite trick of a catcher is to say to a new batter:

“Look out for this fellow. He’s got a mean ‘bean’ ball, and he hasn’t any influence over it. There’s a poor ‘boob’ in the hospital now that stopped one with his head.”

Then the catcher signs for the pitcher to throw the next one at the young batter’s head. If he pulls away, an unpardonable sin in baseball, the dose is repeated.

“Yer almost had your foot in the water-pail over by the bench that time,” says the catcher.

Bing! Up comes another “beaner.” Then, after the catcher has sized the new man up, he makes his report.

“He won’t do. He’s yellow.”

And the players keep mercilessly after this shortcoming, this ingrained fault which, unlike a mechanical error, cannot be corrected until the new player is driven out of the League. Perhaps the catcher says:

“He’s game, that guy. No scare to him.”

After that he is let alone. It’s the psychology of batting.

Once, when I first broke into the League, Jack Chesbro, then with Pittsburg, threw a fast one up, and it went behind my head, although I tried to dodge back. He had lots of speed in those days, too. It set me wondering what would have happened if the ball had hit me. The more I thought, the more it struck me that it would have greatly altered my face had it gotten into the course of the ball. Ever afterwards, he had it on me, and, for months, a fast one at the head had me backing away from the plate.

In contrast to this experience of mine was the curing of “Josh” Devore, the leftfielder of the Giants, of being bat shy against left-handers. Devore has always been very weak at the bat with a southpaw in the box, dragging his right foot away from the plate. This was particularly the case against “Slim” Sallee, the tenuous southpaw of the St. Louis Nationals. Finally McGraw, exasperated after “Josh” had struck out twice in one day, said:

“That fellow hasn’t got speed enough to bend a pane of glass at the home plate throwing from the box, and you’re pullin’ away as if he was shooting them out of a gun. It’s a crime to let him beat you. Go up there the next time and get hit, and see if he can hurt you. If you don’t get hit, you’re fined $10.”

Devore, who is as fond of $10 as the next one, went to the bat and took one of Sallee’s slants in a place where it would do the least damage. He trotted to first base smiling.

“What’d I tell you?” asked McGraw, coaching. “Could he hurt you?”

“Say,” replied “Josh,” “I’d hire out to let them pitch baseballs at me if none could throw harder than that guy.”

Devore was cured of being bat shy when Sallee was pitching, right then and there, and he has improved greatly against all left-handers ever since, so much so that McGraw leaves him in the game now when a southpaw pitches, instead of placing Beals Becker in left field as he used to. All Devore needed was the confidence to stand up to the plate against them, to rid his mind of the idea that, if once he got hit, he would leave the field feet first. That slam in the slats which Sallee handed him supplied the confidence.

When Devore was going to Philadelphia for the second game of the world’s series in the fall of 1911, the first one in the other town, he was introduced to “Ty” Cobb, the Detroit out-fielder, by some newspaper man on the train, and, as it was the first time Devore had ever met Cobb, he sat down with him and they talked all the way over.

“Gee,” said “Josh” to me, as we were getting off the train, “that fellow Cobb knows a lot about batting. He told me some things about the American League pitchers just now, and he didn’t know he was doing it. I never let on. But I just hope that fellow Plank works to-day, if they think that I am weak against left-handers. Say, Matty, I could write a book about that guy and his ‘grooves’ now, after buzzing Cobb, and the funny thing is he didn’t know he was telling me.”

Plank pitched that day and fanned Devore four times out of a possible four. “Josh” didn’t even get a foul off him.

“Thought you knew all about that fellow,” I said to Devore after the game.

“I’ve learned since that Cobb and he are pretty thick,” replied “Josh,” “and I guess ‘Ty’ was giving me a bad steer.”

It was evident that Cobb had been filling “Josh” up with misinformation that was working around in Devore’s mind when he went to the plate to face Plank, and, instead of being open to impressions, these wrong opinions had already been planted and he was constantly trying to confirm them. Plank was crossing him all the time, and, being naturally weak against left-handers, this additional handicap made Devore look foolish.

In the well-worn words of Mr. Dooley, it has been my experience “to trust your friends, but cut the cards.” By that, I mean one ball player will often come to another with a tip that he really thinks worth while, but that avails nothing in the end. A man has to be a pretty smart ball player to dispense accurate information about others, because the Big Leaguers know their own “grooves” and are naturally trying to cover them up. Then a batter may be weak against one pitcher on a certain kind of a ball, and may whale the same sort of delivery, with a different twist to it, out of the lot against another.

That was the experience I had with “Ed” Delehanty, the famous slugger of the old Philadelphia National League team, who is now dead. During my first year in the League several well-meaning advisers came to me and said:

“Don’t give ‘Del’ any high fast ones because, if you do, you will just wear your fielders out worse than a George M. Cohan show does the chorus. They will think they are in a Marathon race instead of a ball game.”

Being young, I took this advice, and the first time I pitched against Delehanty, I fed him curved balls. He hit these so far the first two times he came to bat that one of the balls was never found, and everybody felt like shaking hands with Van Haltren, the old Giant outfielder, when he returned with the other, as if he had been away on a vacation some place. In fact, I had been warned against giving any of this Philadelphia team of sluggers high fast ones, and I had been delivering a diet of curves to all of them which they were sending to the limits of the park and further, with great regularity. At last, when Delehanty came to the bat for the third time in the game, Van Haltren walked into the box from the outfield and handed the ball to me, after he had just gone to the fence to get it. Elmer Flick had hit it there.

“Matty,” he pleaded, “for the love of Mike, slip this fellow a base on balls and let me get my wind.”

Instead I decided to switch my style, and I fed Delehanty high fast ones, the dangerous dose, and he struck out then and later. He wasn’t expecting them and was so surprised that he couldn’t hit the ball. Only two of the six balls at which he struck were good ones. I found out afterwards that the tradition about not delivering any high fast balls to the Philadelphia hitters was the outgrowth of the old buzzer tipping service, established in 1899, by which the batters were informed what to expect by Morgan Murphy, located in the clubhouse with a pair of field-glasses and his finger on a button which worked a buzzer under the third-base coaching box. The coacher tipped the batter off what was coming and the signal-stealing device had worked perfectly. The hitters had all waited for the high fast ones in those days, as they can be hit easier if a man knows that they are coming, and can also be hit farther.

But, after the buzzer had been discovered and the delivery of pitchers could not be accurately forecast, this ability to hit high fast ones vanished, but not the tradition. The result was that this Philadelphia club was getting a steady diet of curves and hitting them hard, not expecting anything else. When I first pitched against Delehanty, his reputation as a hitter gave him a big edge on me. Therefore I was willing to take any kind of advice calculated to help me, but eventually I had to find out for myself. If I had taken a chance on mixing them up the first time he faced me, I still doubt if he would have made those two long hits, but it was his reputation working in my mind and the idea that he ate up high fast balls that prevented me from taking the risk.

Each pitcher has to find out for himself what a man is going to hit. It’s all right to take advice at first, but, if this does not prove to be the proper prescription, it’s up to him to experiment and not continue to feed him the sort of balls that he is hitting.

Reputations count for a great deal in the Big Leagues. Cobb has a record as being a great base runner, and I believe that he steals ten bases a season on this reputation. The catcher knows he is on the bag, realizes that he is going to steal, fears him, hurries his throw, and, in his anxiety, it goes bad. Cobb is safe, whereas, if he had been an ordinary runner with no reputation, he would probably have been thrown out. Pitchers who have made names for themselves in the Big Leagues, have a much easier time winning as a consequence.

“All he’s got to do is to throw his glove into the box to beat that club,” is an old expression in baseball, which means that the opposing batters fear the pitcher and that his reputation will carry him through if he has nothing whatever on the ball.

Newspapers work on the mental attitude of Big League players. This has been most marked in Cincinnati, and I believe that the local newspapers have done as much as anything to keep a pennant away from that town. When the team went south for the spring practice, the newspapers printed glowing reports of the possibilities of the club winning the pennant, but, when the club started to fall down in the race, they would knock the men, and it would take the heart out of the players. Almost enough good players have been let go by the Cincinnati team to make a world’s championship club. There are Donlin, Seymour, Steinfeldt, Lobert and many more. Ball players inhale the accounts printed in the newspapers, and a correspondent with a grouch has ruined the prospects of many a good player and club. The New York newspapers, first by the great amount of publicity given to his old record, and then by criticising him for not making a better showing, had a great deal to do with Marquard failing to make good the first two years he was in New York, as I have shown.

A smart manager in the Big League is always working to keep his valuable stars in the right frame of mind. On the last western trip the Giants made in the season of 1911, when they won the pennant by taking eighteen games out of twenty-two games, McGraw refused to permit any of the men to play cards. He realized that often the stakes ran high and that the losers brooded over the money which they lost and were thinking of this rather than the game when on the ball field. It hurt their playing, so there were no cards. He also carried “Charley” Faust, the Kansas Jinx killer, along to keep the players amused and because it was thought that he was good luck. It helped their mental attitude.

The treatment of a new player when he first arrives is different now from what it was in the old days. Once there was a time when the veteran looked upon the recruit with suspicion and the feeling that he had come to take his job and his bread and butter from him. If a young pitcher was put into the box, the old catcher would do all that he could to irritate him, and many times he would inform the batters of the other side what he was going to throw.

“He’s tryin’ to horn my friend Bill out of a job,” I have heard catchers charge against a youngster.

This attitude drove many a star ball player back to the minors because he couldn’t make good under the adverse circumstances, but nothing of the sort exists now. Each veteran does all that he can to help the youngster, realizing that on the younger generation depends the success of the club, and that no one makes any money by being on a loser. Travelling with a tail-end ball club is the poorest pastime in the world. I would rather ride in the first coach of a funeral procession.

The youngster is treated more courteously now when he first arrives. In the old days, the veterans of the club sized up the recruit and treated him like a stranger for days, which made him feel as if he were among enemies instead of friends, and, as a result, it was much harder for him to make good. Now all hands make him a companion from the start, unless he shows signs of being unusually fresh.

There is a lot to baseball in the Big Leagues besides playing the game. No man can have a “yellow streak” and last. He must not pay much attention to his nerves or temperament. He must hide every flaw. It’s all part of the psychology of baseball. But the saddest words of all to a pitcher are three—“Take Him Out.”

III

Pitching in a Pinch

Many Pitchers Are Effective in a Big League Ball Game until that Heart-Breaking Moment Arrives Known as the “Pinch”—It Is then that the Man in the Box is Put to the Severest Test by the Coachers and the Players on the Bench—Victory or Defeat Hangs on his Work in that Inning—Famous “Pinches.”

In most Big League ball games, there comes an inning on which hangs victory or defeat. Certain intellectual fans call it the crisis; college professors, interested in the sport, have named it the psychological moment; Big League managers mention it as the “break,” and pitchers speak of the “pinch.”

This is the time when each team is straining every nerve either to win or to prevent defeat. The players and spectators realize that the outcome of the inning is of vital importance. And in most of these pinches, the real burden falls on the pitcher. It is at this moment that he is “putting all he has” on the ball, and simultaneously his opponents are doing everything they can to disconcert him.

Managers wait for this break, and the shrewd league leader can often time it. Frequently a certain style of play is adopted to lead up to the pinch, then suddenly a slovenly mode of attack is changed, and the team comes on with a rush in an effort to break up the game. That is the real test of a pitcher. He must be able to live through these squalls.

Two evenly matched clubs have been playing through six innings with neither team gaining any advantage. Let us say that they are the Giants and the Chicago Cubs. Suddenly the Chicago pitcher begins to weaken in the seventh. Spectators cannot perceive this, but McGraw, the Giants’ manager, has detected some crack. All has been quiet on the bench up to this moment. Now the men begin to fling about sweaters and move around, one going to the water cooler to get a drink, another picking up a bat or two and flinging them in the air, while four or five prospective hitters are lined up, swinging several sticks apiece, as if absolutely confident that each will get his turn at the plate.

The two coachers on the side lines have become dancing dervishes, waving sweaters and arms wildly, and shouting various words of discouragement to the pitcher which are calculated to make his job as soft as a bed of concrete. He has pitched three balls to the batter, and McGraw vehemently protests to the umpire that the twirler is not keeping his foot on the slab. The game is delayed while this is discussed at the pitcher’s box and the umpire brushes off the rubber strip with a whisk broom.

There is a kick against these tactics from the other bench, but the damage has been done. The pitcher passes the batter, forgets what he ought to throw to the next man, and cannot get the ball where he wants it. A base hit follows. Then he is gone. The following batter triples, and, before another pitcher can be warmed up, three or four runs are across the plate, and the game is won. That explains why so many wise managers keep a pitcher warming up when the man in the box is going strong.

It is in the pinch that the pitcher shows whether or not he is a Big Leaguer. He must have something besides curves then. He needs a head, and he has to use it. It is the acid test. That is the reason so many men, who shine in the minor leagues, fail to make good in the majors. They cannot stand the fire.

A young pitcher came to the Giants a few years ago. I won’t mention his name because he has been pitching good minor-league ball since. He was a wonder with the bases empty, but let a man or two get on the sacks, and he wouldn’t know whether he was in a pitcher’s box or learning aviation in the Wright school, and he acted a lot more like an aviator in the crisis. McGraw looked him over twice.

“He’s got a spine like a charlotte russe,” declared “Mac,” after his second peek, and he passed him back to the bushes.

Several other Big League managers, tempted by this man’s brilliant record in the minors, have tried him out since, but he has always gone back. McGraw’s judgment of the man was correct.

On the other hand, Otis Crandall came to the New York club a few years ago a raw country boy from Indiana. I shall never forget how he looked the first spring I saw him in Texas. The club had a large number of recruits and was short of uniforms. He was among the last of the hopefuls to arrive and there was no suit for him, so, in a pair of regular trousers with his coat off, he began chasing flies in the outfield. His head hung down on his chest, and, when not playing, a cigarette drooped out of the corner of his mouth. But he turned out to be a very good fly chaser, and McGraw admired his persistency.

“What are you?” McGraw asked him one day.

“A pitcher,” replied Crandall. Two words constitute an oration for him.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” said McGraw.

Crandall warmed up, and he didn’t have much of anything besides a sweeping outcurve and a good deal of speed. He looked less like a pitcher than any of the spring crop, but McGraw saw something in him and kept him. The result is he has turned out to be one of the most valuable men on the club, because he is there in a pinch. He couldn’t be disturbed if the McNamaras tied a bomb to him, with a time fuse on it set for “at once.” He is the sort of pitcher who is best when things look darkest. I’ve heard the crowd yelling, when he has been pitching on the enemy’s ground, so that a sixteen-inch gun couldn’t have been heard if it had gone off in the lot.

“That crowd was making some noise,” I’ve said to Crandall after the inning.

“Was it?” asked Otie. “I didn’t notice it.”

One day in 1911, he started a game in Philadelphia and three men got on the bases with no one out, along about the fourth or fifth inning. He shut them out without a run. It was the first game he had started for a long while, his specialty having been to enter a contest, after some other pitcher had gotten into trouble, with two or three men on the bases and scarcely any one out. After he came to the bench with the threatening inning behind him, he said to me:

“Matty, I didn’t feel at home out there to-day until a lot of people got on the bases. I’ll be all right now.” And he was. I believe that Crandall is the best pitcher in a pinch in the National League and one of the most valuable men to a team, for he can play any position and bats hard. Besides being a great pinch pitcher, he can also hit in a crush, and won many games for the Giants in 1911 that way.

Very often spectators think that a pitcher has lost his grip in a pinch, when really he is playing inside baseball. A game with Chicago in Chicago back in 1908 (not the famous contest that cost the Giants a championship; I did not have any grip at all that day; but one earlier in the season) best illustrates the point I want to bring out. Mordecai Brown and I were having a pitchers’ duel, and the Giants were in the lead by the score of 1 to 0 when the team took the field for the ninth inning.

It was one of those fragile games in which one run makes a lot of difference, the sort that has a fringe of nervous prostration for the spectators. Chance was up first in the ninth and he pushed a base hit to right field. Steinfeldt followed with a triple that brought Chance home and left the run which would win the game for the Cubs on third base. The crowd was shouting like mad, thinking I was done. I looked at the hitters, waiting to come up, and saw Hofman and Tinker swinging their bats in anticipation. Both are dangerous men, but the silver lining was my second look, which revealed to me Kling and Brown following Hofman and Tinker.

Without a second’s hesitation, I decided to pass both Hofman and Tinker, because the run on third base would win the game anyway if it scored, and with three men on the bags instead of one, there would be a remote chance for a triple play, besides making a force out at the plate possible. Remember that no one was out at this time. Kling and Brown had always been easy for me.

When I got two balls on Hofman, trying to make him hit at a bad one, the throng stood up in the stand and tore splinters out of the floor with its feet. And then I passed Hofman. The spectators misunderstood my motive.

“He’s done. He’s all in,” shouted one man in a voice which was one of the carrying, persistent, penetrating sort. The crowd took the cry up and stamped its feet and cheered wildly.

Then I passed Tinker, a man, as I have said before, who has had a habit of making trouble for me. The crowd quieted down somewhat, perhaps because it was not possible for it to cheer any louder, but probably because the spectators thought that now it would be only a matter of how many the Cubs would win by. The bases were full, and no one was out.

But that wildly cheering crowd had worked me up to greater effort, and I struck Kling out and then Brown followed him back to the bench for the same reason. Just one batter stood between me and a tied score now. He was John Evers, and the crowd having lost its chortle of victory, was begging him to make the hit which would bring just one run over the plate. They were surprised by my recuperation after having passed two men. Evers lifted a gentle fly to left field and the three men were left on the bases. The Giants eventually won that game in the eleventh inning by the score of 4 to 1.

But that system doesn’t always work. Often I have passed a man to get a supposedly poor batter up and then had him bang out a base hit. My first successful year in the National League was 1901, although I joined the Giants in the middle of the season of 1900. The Boston club at that time had a pitcher named “Kid” Nichols who was a great twirler. The first two games I pitched against the Boston club were against this man, and I won the first in Boston and the second in New York, the latter by the score of 2 to 1.

Both teams then went west for a three weeks’ trip, and when the Giants returned a series was scheduled with Boston at the Polo Grounds. There was a good deal of speculation as to whether I would again beat the veteran “Kid” Nichols, and the newspapers, discussing the promised pitching duel, stirred up considerable enthusiasm over it. Of course, I, the youngster, was eager to make it three straight over the veteran. Neither team had scored at the beginning of the eighth inning. Boston runners got on second and third bases with two out, and Fred Tenney, then playing first base on the Boston club, was up at the bat. He had been hitting me hard that day, and I decided to pass him and take a chance on “Dick” Cooley, the next man, and a weak batter. So Tenney got his base on balls, and the sacks were full.

Two strikes were gathered on Cooley, one at which he swung and the other called, and I was beginning to congratulate myself on my excellent judgment, which was really counting my chickens while they were still in the incubator. I attempted to slip a fast one over on Cooley and got the ball a little too high. The result was that he stepped into it and made a three base hit which eventually won the game by the score of 3 to 0. That was once when passing a man to get a weak batter did not work.

I have always been against a twirler pitching himself out, when there is no necessity for it, as so many youngsters do. They burn them through for eight innings and then, when the pinch comes, something is lacking. A pitcher must remember that there are eight other men in the game, drawing more or less salary to stop balls hit at them, and he must have confidence in them. Some pitchers will put all that they have on each ball. This is foolish for two reasons.

In the first place, it exhausts the man physically and, when the pinch comes, he has not the strength to last it out. But second and more important, it shows the batters everything that he has, which is senseless. A man should always hold something in reserve, a surprise to spring when things get tight. If a pitcher has displayed his whole assortment to the batters in the early part of the game and has used all his speed and his fastest breaking curve, then, when the crisis comes, he “hasn’t anything” to fall back on.

Like all youngsters, I was eager to make a record during my first year in the Big League, and in one of the first games I pitched against Cincinnati I made the mistake of putting all that I had on every ball. We were playing at the Polo Grounds, and the Giants had the visitors beaten 2 to 0, going into the last inning. I had been popping them through, trying to strike out every hitter and had not held anything in reserve. The first man to the bat in the ninth got a single, the next a two bagger, and by the time they had stopped hitting me, the scorer had credited the Cincinnati club with four runs, and we lost the game, 4 to 2.

I was very much down in the mouth over the defeat, after I had the game apparently won, and George Davis, then the manager of the Giants, noticed it in the clubhouse.

“Never mind, Matty,” he said, “it was worth it. The game ought to teach you not to pitch your head off when you don’t need to.”

It did. I have never forgotten that lesson. Many spectators wonder why a pitcher does not work as hard as he can all through the game, instead of just in the pinches. If he did, they argue, there would be no pinches. But there would be, and, if the pitcher did not conserve his energy, the pinches would usually go against him.

Sometimes bawling at a man in a pinch has the opposite effect from that desired. Clarke Griffith, recently of Cincinnati, has a reputation in the Big Leagues for being a bad man to upset a pitcher from the coacher’s box. Off the field he is one of the decentest fellows in the game, but, when talking to a pitcher, he is very irritating. I was working in a game against the Reds in Cincinnati one day, just after he had been made manager of the club, and Griffith spent the afternoon and a lot of breath trying to get me going. The Giants were ahead, 5 to 1, at the beginning of the seventh. In the Cincinnati half of that inning, “Mike” Mitchell tripled with the bases full and later tallied on an outfield fly which tied the score. The effect this had on Griffith was much the same as that of a lighted match on gasolene.

“Now, you big blond,” he shouted at me, “we’ve got you at last.”

I expected McGraw to take me out, as it looked in that inning as if I was not right, but he did not, and I pitched along up to the ninth with the score still tied and with Griffith, the carping critic, on the side lines. We failed to count in our half, but the first Cincinnati batter got on the bases, stole second, and went to third on a sacrifice. He was there with one out.

“Here’s where we get you,” chortled Griffith. “This is the point at which you receive a terrible showing up.”

I tried to get the next batter to hit at bad balls, and he refused, so that I lost him. I was afraid to lay the ball over the plate in this crisis, as a hit or an outfield fly meant the game. Hoblitzell and Mitchell, two of Griffith’s heaviest batters, were scheduled to arrive at the plate next.

“You ought to be up, Mike,” yelled the Cincinnati manager at Mitchell, who was swinging a couple of sticks preparatory to his turn at the bat. “Too bad you won’t get a lick, old man, because Hobby’s going to break it up right here.”

Something he said irritated me, but, instead of worrying me, it made me feel more like pitching. I seldom talk to a coacher, but I turned to Griffith and said:

“I’ll bring Mike up, and we’ll see what he can do.”

I deliberately passed Hoblitzell without even giving him a chance to hit at a single ball. It wasn’t to make a grand stand play I did this, but because it was baseball. One run would win the game anyway, and, with more men on the bases, there were more plays possible. Besides Hoblitzell is a nasty hitter, and I thought that I had a better chance of making Mitchell hit the ball on the ground, a desirable thing under the conditions.

“Now, Mike,” urged Griffith, as Mitchell stepped up to the plate, “go as far as you like. Blot up the bases, old boy. This blond is gone.”

That sort of talk never bothers me. I had better luck with Mitchell than I had hoped. He struck out. The next batter was easy, and the Giants won the game in the tenth inning. According to the newspaper reports, I won twenty-one or twenty-two games before Cincinnati beat me again, so it can be seen that joshing in pinches is not effective against all pitchers. A manager must judge the temperament of his victim. But Griffith has never stopped trying to rag me. In 1911, when the Giants were west on their final trip, I was warming up in Cincinnati before a game, and he was batting out flies near me. He would talk to me between each ball he hit to the outfield.

“Got anything to-day, Matty?” he asked. “Guess there ain’t many games left in you. You’re getting old.”

When I broke into the National League, the Brooklyn club had as bad a bunch of men to bother a pitcher as I ever faced. The team had won the championship in 1900, and naturally they were all pretty chesty. When I first began to play in 1901, this crowd—Kelly, Jennings, Keeler and Hanlon—got after me pretty strong. But I seemed to get pitching nourishment out of their line of conversation and won a lot of games. At last, so I have been told, Hanlon, who was the manager, said to his conversational ball players:

“Lay off that Mathewson kid. Leave him alone. He likes the chatter you fellows spill out there.”

They did not bother me after that, but this bunch spoiled many a promising young pitcher.

Speaking of sizing up the temperament of batters and pitchers in a pinch, few persons realize that it was a little bit of carelessly placed conversation belonging to “Chief” Bender, the Indian pitcher on the Athletics, that did as much as anything to give the Giants the first game in the 1911 world’s series.

“Josh” Devore, the left-fielder on the New York team, is an in-and-out batter, but he is a bulldog in a pinch and is more apt to make a hit in a tight place than when the bases are empty. And he is quite as likely to strike out. He is the type of ball player who cannot be rattled. With “Chief” Myers on second base, the score tied, and two out, Devore came to the bat in the seventh inning of the first game.

“Look at little ‘Josh,’” said Bender, who had been talking to batters all through the game.

Devore promptly got himself into the hole with two strikes and two balls on him, but a little drawback like that never worries “Josh.”

“I’m going to pitch you a curved ball over the outside corner,” shouted Bender as he wound up.

“I know it, Chief,” replied “Josh,” and he set himself to receive just that sort of delivery.

Up came the predicted curve over the outside corner. “Josh” hit it to left field for two bases, and brought home the winning run. Bender evidently thought that, by telling Devore what he was actually going to pitch, he would make him think he was going to cross him.

“I knew it would be a curve ball,” Devore told me after the game. “With two and two, he would be crazy to hand me anything else. When he made that crack, I guessed that he was trying to cross me by telling the truth. Before he spoke, I wasn’t sure which corner he was going to put it over, but he tipped me.”

Some batters might have been fooled by those tactics. It was taking a chance in a pinch, and Bender lost.

Very few of the fans who saw this first game of the 1911 world’s series realize that the “break” in that contest came in the fifth inning. The score was tied, with runners on second and third bases with two out, when “Eddie” Collins, the fast second baseman of the Athletics, and a dangerous hitter, came to the bat. I realized that I was skating on thin ice and was putting everything I had on the ball. Collins hit a slow one down the first base line, about six feet inside the bag.

With the hit, I ran over to cover the base, and Merkle made for the ball, but he had to get directly in my line of approach to field it. Collins, steaming down the base line, realized that, if he could get the decision at first on this hit, his team would probably win the game, as the two other runners could score easily. In a flash, I was aware of this, too.

“I’ll take it,” yelled Merkle, as he stopped to pick up the ball.

Seeing Merkle and me in front of him, both heavy men, Collins knew that he could not get past us standing up. When still ten or twelve feet from the bag, he slid, hoping to take us unawares and thus avoid being touched. He could then scramble to the bag. As soon as he jumped, I realized what he hoped to do, and, fearing that Merkle would miss him, I grabbed the first baseman and hurled him at Collins. It was an old-fashioned, football shove, Merkle landing on Collins and touching him out. A great many of the spectators believed that I had interfered with Merkle on the play. As a matter of fact, I thought that it was the crisis of the game and knew that, if Collins was not put out, we would probably lose. That football shove was a brand new play to me in baseball, invented on the spur of the second, but it worked.

In minor leagues, there are fewer games in which a “break” comes. It does not develop in all Big League contests by any means. Sometimes one team starts to win in the first inning and simply runs away from the other club all the way. But in all close games the pinch shows up.

It happens in many contests in the major leagues because of the almost perfect baseball played. Depending on his fielders, a manager can play for this “break.” And when the pinch comes, it is a case of the batter’s nerve against the pitcher’s.

IV

Big League Pitchers and Their Peculiarities.

Nearly Every Pitcher in the Big Leagues Has Some Temperamental or Mechanical Flaw which he is Constantly Trying to Hide, and which Opposing Batters are always Endeavoring to Uncover—The Giants Drove Coveleski, the Man who Beat them out of a Pennant, Back to the Minor Leagues by Taunting him on One Sore Point—Weaknesses of Other Stars.

Like great artists in other fields of endeavor, many Big League pitchers are temperamental. “Bugs” Raymond, “Rube” Waddell, “Slim” Sallee, and “Wild Bill” Donovan are ready examples of the temperamental type. The first three are the sort of men of whom the manager is never sure. He does not know, when they come into the ball park, whether or not they are in condition to work. They always carry with them a delightful atmosphere of uncertainty.

In contrast to this eccentric group, there are those with certain mechanical defects in their pitching of which opposing clubs take advantage. Last comes the irritable, nervous box artist who must have things just so, even down to the temperature, before he can work satisfactorily.

“As delicate as prima donnas,” says John McGraw of this variety.

He speaks of the man who loses his love for his art when his shirt is too tight or a toe is sore. This style, perhaps, is the most difficult for a manager to handle, unless it is the uncertain, eccentric sort.

As soon as a new pitcher breaks into the Big Leagues, seven clubs are studying him with microscopic care to discover some flaw in his physical style or a temperamental weakness on which his opponents can play. Naturally, if the man has such a “groove,” his team mates are endeavoring to hide it, but it soon leaks out and becomes general gossip around the circuit. Then the seven clubs start aiming at this flaw, and oftentimes the result is that a promising young pitcher, because he has some one definite weakness, goes back to the minors. A crack in the temperament is the worst. Mechanical defects can usually be remedied when discovered.

Few baseball fans know that the Giants drove a man back to the minor leagues who once pitched them out of a pennant. The club was tipped off to a certain, unfortunate circumstance in the twirler’s early life which left a lasting impression on his mind. The players never let him forget this when he was in a game, and it was like constantly hitting him on a boil.

Coveleski won three games for the Philadelphia National League club from the Giants back in 1908, when one of these contests would have meant a pennant to the New York club and possibly a world’s championship. That was the season the fight was decided in a single game with the Chicago Cubs after the regular schedule had been played out. Coveleski was hailed as a wonder for his performance.

Just after the season closed, “Tacks” Ashenbach, the scout for the Cincinnati club, now dead, and formerly a manager in the league where Coveleski got his start, came to McGraw and laughed behind his hand.

“Mac,” he said, “I’m surprised you let that big Pole beat you out of a championship. I can give you the prescription to use every time that he starts working. All you have to do is to imitate a snare drum.”

“What are you trying to do—kid me?” asked McGraw, for he was still tolerably irritable over the outcome of the season.

“Try it,” was Ashenbach’s laconic reply.

The result was that the first game Coveleski started against the Giants the next season, there was a chorus of “rat-a-tat-tats” from the bench, with each of the coachers doing a “rat-a-tat-tat” solo, for we decided, after due consideration, this was the way to imitate a snare drum. We would have tried to imitate a calliope if we had thought that it would have done any good against this pitcher.

“I’ll hire a fife and drum corps if the tip is worth anything,” declared McGraw.

“Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!” came the chorus as Coveleski wound up to pitch the first ball. It went wide of the plate.

“Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!” it was repeated all through the inning. When Coveleski walked to the Philadelphia bench at the end of the first round, after the Giants had made three runs off him, he looked over at us and shouted: