BEFORE
BARTMAN, THERE WAS MERKLE
A hundred years later, it is still one of the
most controversial games played in American professional sports
— and still the only major league game ever decided by an
umpire alone in his hotel room, hours after the last pitch was
thrown. It set off one of the worst displays of sportsmanship
ever seen in New York City. Most amazing of all, it allowed the
Chicago Cubs to win the World Series, the last time they have
done so. Think Chuck Knoblauch meets Steve Bartman, and you will
have some idea of the immensity of Fred Merkle’s blunder.
Fred Merkle’s failure to run to second on
a teammate’s game-ending hit helped cost the Giants the
N.L. pennant in 1908.
On Wednesday, Sept. 23, 1908, the New York Giants
and the Cubs were embroiled in a 1-1 tie before 20,000 fans at
Harlem’s old Polo Grounds. It was a critical contest, the
Giants clinging to a one-game lead over Chicago. With two outs
in the bottom of the ninth and New York’s Moose McCormick
on first, Merkle, a 19-year-old rookie first baseman making his
first start, slammed a single into right field that sent McCormick
to third.
“At that, I could have gone to second easily,
but with one run needed to win and a man on third, I played it
safe,” Merkle remembered later. It was a decision that would
haunt him for the rest of his life.
Al Bridwell, the Giants’ shortstop, came
up next and lined a fastball over second base. McCormick scored
easily from third, and the Polo Grounds ushers opened the gates
and let the crowd race onto the field, just as they always did
when the game was over.
But was it? Johnny Evers did not think so, but
then Evers, nicknamed Crab, drove everyone crazy. The keystone
of the fabled double-play combination for the Cubs, Tinker to
Evers to Chance, Evers was a bundle of raw energy who stayed up
nights in his hotel room, eating one candy bar after another in
an effort to put weight on his 125-pound frame and poring over
the rulebook, trying to find anything that might give him an edge.
That September, he found it. Once the winning
run scored, the habit of all other base runners at the time was
to head for the clubhouse, whether or not they could be retired
by a force at the next base. This had been the custom for as long
as anyone could remember, but it was also a technical violation
of the rules.
When Pittsburgh ended a game against the Cubs
with a hit earlier that month, Evers grabbed the ball and stepped
on second base, insisting that the runner from first had never
touched the bag and, therefore, the winning run should not count.
The umpire Hank O’Day refused to rule in
Evers’s favor, because he had not seen whether or not the
runner touched second. But that night, O’Day searched Evers
out to tell him he was right. If he had touched second before
the runner did — and if that force play did result in the
last out of the inning — then it did not matter that the
runner had already crossed home plate. The inning was over, the
run did not count, and the game must continue.
Now, with the crowd milling exultantly across
the Polo Grounds, Evers saw Merkle wheel toward the Giants’
clubhouse in center field without touching second. Evers screamed
for the ball. The throw went over his head, landing near the Giants’
third-base coach Joe McGinnity, known as Iron Man. McGinnity,
apparently divining Evers’s intentions, picked up the ball
and hurled it toward the grandstand.
At least one Giant maintained that McGinnity’s
throw went right over the stands and out of the yard. The Cubs
claimed that one of their pitchers — Floyd Myron Kroh, who
was known as Kid — leapt into the seats, fought off six
or seven Giants fans for the baseball and threw it back to Evers.
The Crab stepped on second and appealed to the
umpire in charge, who happened to be O’Day. He, in turn,
took a look at the Giants fans still swarming around the field
and told Evers he would make his decision that night. At 10 p.m.,
back in the relative safety of his hotel room, he did: Merkle
was out. The game was still tied.
This infuriated everyone. The Cubs insisted that
the game should have been forfeited to them, because the Giants
had failed to clear the field to let the game continue —
a dubious argument because O’Day never ruled Merkle was
out until hours later. Giants Manager John McGraw insisted that
Kroh’s “mere touching of the ball rendered it dead,”
which overlooked that McGinnity, his own third-base coach, had
hurled the ball into the stands.
O’Day
was a highly respected arbiter, but this was not his best day.
Technically, he was right, but baseball had always evolved as
much by custom as by law. There was, for instance, nothing in
the rules that allowed catchers to block the plate, but they did
so with impunity. Now, without any warning, and after a private
conversation with a member of only one of the two teams, O’Day
had decided to erase a longstanding practice.
Nonetheless,
the National League’s board of directors stood by him. Merkle
was out. The game was still tied. If the Cubs and Giants were
tied at the end of the season, the game would have to be played
all over again.
That was,
of course, how it all worked out. On the afternoon of Oct. 8,
an enormous crowd engulfed the Polo Grounds, willing to do anything
to see a game that would decide the pennant. They teetered along
Coogan’s Bluff above the ballpark; climbed up on the grandstand
roof; perched on the elevated train viaduct out past left field.
One man fell to his death from the el; another fell from a telegraph
pole and broke his neck. A wedge of fans broke through a wooden
fence into the outfield and had to be pushed back by mounted police.
Later, they tried setting the fence on fire.
A second crowd
gathered down at Grand Central Station to jeer the Cubs as they
arrived after a 14-hour train ride. The Cubs players literally
shouldered their way into the park. Once inside, they were allotted
only 15 minutes of warm-ups, after which McGinnity came on the
field, ringing a bell and telling them their time was up.
Some accounts
at the time said McGinnity went right up to Frank Chance, the
Cubs’ manager and best player, cursing and spitting and
apparently trying to start a fight that would get Chance thrown
out of the game.
Nevertheless,
Chance and the Cubs kept their heads. The Giants fans set up a
perpetual roar, ringing cowbells and blowing trumpets. They went
wild when the great Christy Mathewson made his slow walk to the
mound from center field, but what they did not know was that Mathewson,
who had thrown 110 innings in September alone, had a dead arm.
The Cubs pushed across four runs early and held on behind their
own ace, Mordecai Brown, better known as Three Finger.
“From
the stands there was a steady roar of abuse,” Brown said
later. “I never heard anybody or any set of men called as
many foul names as the Giant fans called us that day.”
Foul names
might have been the least of their worries. The New York Journal
reported that Cubs catcher Johnny Kling, chasing a pop foul, had
to dodge “two beer bottles, a drinking glass and a derby
hat.”
The moment
Brown got the last out in the Cubs’ 4-2 victory, he and
his teammates ran as fast as they could to the center-field clubhouse.
They were
not fast enough. Pitcher Jack Pfiester was knifed in the shoulder,
and Chance was punched so hard in the throat that he sustained
broken cartilage. At least three other Cubs were struck, and the
police had to hold shut the clubhouse doors with guns drawn.
Chicago went
on to pummel the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, the last
time the Cubs won a world championship. And Merkle became “the
man who lost the pennant.” Soon, making any sort of blunder
was called a Merkle. He lost weight in the two weeks between his
blunder and the end of the season, and told reporters, “I
wished that a large, roomy and comfortable hole would open up
and swallow me.”
McGraw, however,
praised Merkle’s “gameness” and gave him a raise.
And Merkle stuck it out through a 14-year career and became known
as one of the smarter players in the sport. Still, he was never
allowed to get over his mistake that was not really a mistake.
When he died
at 67 in 1956, he was living in the back of a tackle shop in Daytona
Beach, Fla., trying to dodge reporters who just had to hear his
story one more time.
Bridwell later
told the author Lawrence Ritter that getting a hit that afternoon
was his only regret in baseball: “I wish I’d struck
out instead,” he said. “If I’d have done that,
then it would have spared Fred a lot of unfair humiliation.”
Yet he added:
“Didn’t get credit for that base hit. They decided
it was a forceout at second, instead of a single. Well, what can
you do? Those things happen.”
©
Copyright The
New York Times
