Playing the Game from the Bench
Behind Every Big League Ball Game there Is a Master Mind which Directs the Moves of the Players—How McGraw Won Two Pennants for the Giants from the “Bench” and Lost One by Giving the Players Too Much Liberty—The Methods of “Connie” Mack and Other Great Leaders
The bench! To many fans who see a hundred Big League ball games each season, this is a long, hooded structure from which the next batter emerges and where the players sit while their club is at bat. It is also the resort of the substitutes, manager, mascot and water cooler.
But to the ball player it is the headquarters. It is the place from which the orders come, and it is here that the battle is planned and from here the moves are executed. The manager sits here and pulls the wires, and his players obey him as if they were manikins.
“The batteries for to-day’s game,” says the umpire, “will be Sallee and Bresnahan for St. Louis; Wiltse and Meyers for New York.”
“Bunt,” says McGraw as his players scatter to take their positions on the field. He repeats the order when they come to the bat for the first inning, because he knows that Sallee has two weaknesses, one being that he cannot field bunts and the other that a great deal of activity in the box tires him out so that he weakens. A bunting game hits at both these flaws. As soon as Bresnahan observes the plan of battle, he arranges his players to meet the attack; draws in his third baseman, shifts the shortstop more down the line toward third base, and is on the alert himself to gather in slow rollers just in front of the plate. The idea is to give Sallee the minimum opportunity to get at the ball and reduce his fielding responsibilities to nothing or less. There is one thing about Sallee’s style known to every Big League manager. He is not half as effective with men on the bases, for he depends largely on his deceptive motion to fool the batters, and when he has to cut this down because runners are on the bases, his pitching ability evaporates.
After the old Polo Grounds had been burned down in the spring of 1911, we were playing St. Louis at American League Park one Saturday afternoon, and the final returns of the game were about 19 to 5 in our favor, as near as I can remember. We made thirteen runs in the first inning. Many spectators went away from the park talking about a slaughter and a runaway score and so on. That game was won in the very first inning when Sallee went into the box to pitch, and McGraw had murmured that mystic word “Bunt!”
The first batters bunted, bunted, bunted in monotonous succession. Sallee not yet in very good physical condition because it was early in the season, was stood upon his head by this form of attack. Bresnahan redraped his infield to try to stop this onslaught, and then McGraw switched.
“Hit it,” he directed the next batter.
A line drive whistled past Mowrey’s ears, the man who plays third base on the Cardinals. He was coming in to get a bunt. Another followed. The break had come. Bresnahan removed Sallee and put another pitcher into the box, but once a ball club starts to hit the ball, it is like a skidding automobile. It can’t be stopped. The Giants kept on and piled up a ridiculous and laughable score, which McGraw had made possible in the first inning by directing his men to bunt.
The Giants won the championship of the National League in 1904 and the New York fans gave the team credit for the victory. It was a club of young players, and McGraw realized this fact when he started his campaign. Every play that season was made from the bench, made by John McGraw through his agents, his manikins, who moved according to the wires which he pulled. And by the end of the summer his hands were badly calloused from pulling wires, but the Giants had the pennant.
When the batter was at the plate in a critical stage, he would stall and look to the “bench” for orders to discover whether to hit the ball out or lay it down, whether to try the hit and run, or wait for the base runner to attempt to steal. By stalling, I mean that he would tie his shoe or fix his belt, or find any little excuse to delay the game so that he could get a flash at the “bench” for orders. A shoe lace has played an important role in many a Big League battle, as I will try to show later on in this story. If it ever became the custom to wear button shoes, the game would have to be revised.
As the batter looked toward the bench, McGraw might reach for his handkerchief to blow his nose, and the batter knew it was up to him to hit the ball out. Some days in that season of 1904 I saw McGraw blow his nose during a game until it was red and sore on the end, and then another day, when he had a cold in his head, he had to do without his handkerchief because he wanted to play a bunting game. Until his cold got better, he had to switch to another system of signs.
During that season, each coacher would keep his eye on the bench for orders. Around McGraw revolved the game of the Giants. He was the game. And most of that summer he spent upon the bench, because from there he could get the best look at the diamond, and his observations were not confined to one place or to one base runner. He was able to discover whether an out-fielder was playing too close for a batter, or too far out, and rearrange the men. He could perhaps catch a sign from the opposing catcher and pass it along to the batter. And he won the pennant from the bench. He was seldom seen on the coaching lines that year.
Many fans wonder why, when the Giants get behind in a game, McGraw takes to the bench, after having been out on the coaching lines inning after inning while the club was holding its own or winning. Time and again I have heard him criticised for this by spectators and even by players on other clubs.
“McGraw is ‘yellow,’” players have said to me. “Just as soon as his club gets behind, he runs for cover.”
The crime of being “yellow” is the worst in the Big Leagues. It means that a man is afraid, that he lacks the nerve to face the music. But McGraw and “yellow” are as far apart as the poles, or Alpha and Omega, or Fifth Avenue and the Bowery, or any two widely separated and distant things. I have seen McGraw go on to ball fields where he is as welcome as a man with the black smallpox and face the crowd alone that, in the heat of its excitement, would like to tear him apart. I have seen him take all sorts of personal chances. He doesn’t know what fear is, and in his bright lexicon of baseball there is no such word as “fear.” His success is partly due to his indomitable courage.
There is a real reason for his going to the bench when the team gets behind. It is because this increases the club’s chances of winning. From the bench he can see the whole field, can note where his fielders are playing, can get a peek at the other bench, and perhaps pick up a tip as to what to expect. He can watch his own pitcher, or observe whether the opposing twirler drops his throwing arm as if weary. He is at the helm when “on the bench,” and, noting any flaw in the opposition, he is in a position to take advantage of it at a moment’s notice, or, catching some sign of faltering among his own men, he is immediately there to strengthen the weakness. Many a game he has pulled out of the fire by going back to the bench and watching. So the idea obtained by many spectators that he is quitting is the wrong one. He is only fighting harder.
The Giants were playing Pittsburg one day in the season of 1909, and Clarke and McGraw had been having a great guessing match. It was one of those give-and-take games with plenty of batting, with one club forging ahead and then the other. Clarke had saved the game for Pittsburg in the sixth inning by a shoe-string. Leifield had been pitching up to this point, and he wasn’t there or even in the neighborhood. But still the Pirates were leading by two runs, having previously knocked Ames out of the box. Doyle and McCormick made hits with no one out in our half of the sixth.
It looked like the “break,” and McGraw was urging his players on to even up the score, when Clarke suddenly took off his sun glasses in left field and stooped down to tie his shoe. When he removes his sun-glasses that is a sign for a pitcher to warm up in a hurry, and “Babe” Adams sprinted to the outfield with a catcher and began to heat up. Clarke took all of five minutes to tie that shoe, McGraw violently protesting against the delay in the meantime. Fred Clarke has been known to wear out a pair of shoe laces in one game tying and untying them. After the shoe was fixed up, he jogged slowly to the bench and took Leifield out of the box. In the interim, Adams had had an opportunity to warm up, and Clarke raised his arm and ordered him into the box. He fanned the next two men, and the last batter hit an easy roller to Wagner. We were still two runs to the bad after that promising start in the sixth, and Clarke, for the time being, had saved the game by a shoe string.
McGraw, who had been on the coaching lines up to this point, retired to the bench after that, and I heard one of those wise spectators, sitting just behind our coop, who could tell Mr. Rockefeller how to run his business but who spends his life working as a clerk at $18 a week, remark to a friend:
“It’s all off now. McGraw has laid down.”
Watching the game through eyes half shut and drawn to a focus, McGraw waited. In the seventh inning Clarke came to bat with two men on the bases. A hit would have won the game beyond any doubt. In a flash McGraw was on his feet and ran out to Meyers, catching. He stopped the game, and, with a wave of his arm, drew Harry McCormick, playing left field, in close to third base. The game went on, and Wiltse twisted a slow curve over the outside corner of the plate to Clarke, a left-handed hitter. He timed his swing and sent a low hit singing over third base. McCormick dashed in and caught the ball off his shoe tops. That made three outs. McGraw had saved our chances of victory right there, for had McCormick been playing where he originally intended before McGraw stopped the contest, the ball would have landed in unguarded territory and two runs would have been scored.
But McGraw had yet the game to win. As his team came to the bat for the seventh, he said:
“This fellow Adams is a youngster and liable to be nervous and wild. Wait.”
The batters waited with the patience of Job. Each man let the first two balls pass him and made Adams pitch himself to the limit to every batter. It got on Adams’s nerves. In the ninth he passed a couple of men, and a hit tied the score. Clarke left him in the box, for he was short of pitchers. On the game went to ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, innings. The score was still tied and Wiltse was pitching like a machine. McGraw was on the bench, leaving the coaching to his lieutenants. The club was still waiting for the youngster to weaken. At last, in the thirteenth, after one man had been put out, the eye of McGraw saw Adams drop his pitching arm to his side as if tired. It was only a minute motion. None of the spectators saw it, none of the players.
“Now hit it, boys,” came the order from the “bench.” The style was switched, and the game won when three hits were rattled out. McGraw alone observed that sign of weakening and took advantage of it at the opportune time. He won the game from the bench. That is what makes him a great manager, observing the little things. Anyone can see the big ones. If he had been on the coaching lines, he would not have had as good an opportunity to study the young pitcher, for he would have had to devote his attention to the base runners. He might have missed this sign of wilting.
McGraw is always studying a pitcher, particularly a new one in the League. The St. Louis club had a young pitcher last fall, named Laudermilk, who was being tried out. He had a brother on the team. In his first game against the Giants, played in St. Louis, he held us to a few scattered hits and gave us a terrific battle, only losing the game because one of his fielders made a costly error behind him. The papers of St. Louis boosted him as another “Rube” Waddell. He was left-handed. McGraw laughed.
“All I want,” he said, “is another crack at that Buttermilk after what I learned about him this afternoon. He can’t control his curve, and all you fellows have got to do is wait for his fast one. He gave you that fight to-day because he had you all swinging at bad curve balls.”
Laudermilk made another appearance against the Giants later, and he made his disappearance in that game in the fourth inning, when only one was out to be exact, after we had scored five runs off him by waiting for his fast one, according to McGraw’s orders.
After winning the pennant in 1904 by sitting on the bench, keeping away from the coaching lines, and making every play himself, McGraw decided that his men were older and knew the game and that he would give them more rein in 1905. He appeared oftener on the coaching lines and attended more to the base runners than to the game as a whole. But in the crises he was the man who decided what was to be done. The club won the pennant that year and the world’s championship. The players got very chesty immediately thereafter, and the buttons on their vests had to be shifted back to make room for the new measure. They knew the game and had won two pennants, besides a championship of the world.
So in the season of 1906 McGraw started with a team of veterans, and it was predicted that he would repeat. But these men, who knew the game, were making decisions for themselves because McGraw was giving them more liberty. The runners went wild on the bases and tried things at the wrong stages. They lost game after game. At last, after a particularly disastrous defeat one day, McGraw called his men together in the clubhouse and addressed them in this wise:
“Because you fellows have won two championships and beaten the Athletics is no reason for you all to believe that you are fit to write a book on how to play baseball. You are just running wild on the bases. You might as well not have a manager. Now don’t any one try to pull anything without orders. We will begin all over again.”
But it is hard to teach old ball-players new tricks, and several fines had to be imposed before the orders were obeyed. The club did not win the championship that year.
When McGraw won the pennant in 1911, he did it with a club of youngsters, many of them playing through their first whole season as regulars in the company. There were Snodgrass and Devore and Fletcher and Marquard. Every time a batter went to the plate, he had definite orders from the “bench” as to what he was to attempt—whether to take two, or lay the ball down, or swing, or work the hit and run. Each time that a man shot out from first base like a catapulted figure and slid into second, he had been ordered by McGraw to try to steal. If players protested against his judgment, his invariable answer was:
“Do what I tell you, and I’ll take the blame for mistakes.”
One of McGraw’s laments is, “I wish I could be in three places at once.”
I never heard him say it with such a ring to the words as after Snodgrass was touched out in the third game of the 1911 world’s series, in the tenth inning, when his life might have meant victory in that game anyway. I have frequently referred to the incident in these stories, so most of my readers are familiar with the situation. Snodgrass was put out trying to get to third base on a short passed ball, after he had started back for second to recover some of the ground he had taken in too long a lead before the ball got to Lapp. McGraw’s face took on an expression of agony as if he were watching his dearest friend die.
“If I could only have been there!” he said. “I wish I could be in three places at once.”
He meant the bench, the first base coaching line, and the third base line. At this particular time he was giving the batters orders from the bench. It was one of those incidents which come up in a ball game and have to be decided in the drawing of a breath, so that a manager cannot give orders unless he is right on the spot.
It is my opinion that it is a big advantage to a team to have the manager on the bench rather than in the game. Frank Chance of the Chicago Cubs is a great leader, but I think he would be a greater one if he could find one of his mechanical ability to play first base, and he could sit on the bench as the director general. He is occupied with the duties of his position and often little things get by him. I believe that we beat the Cubs in two games in 1909 because Chance was playing first base instead of directing the game from the bench.
In the first contest Ames was pitching and Schlei catching. Now, Schlei was no three hundred hitter, but he was a good man in a pinch and looked like Wagner when compared to Ames as a swatter. Schlei came up to the bat with men on second and third bases, two out, and a chance to win or put us ahead if he could make a hit. The first time it happened, McGraw unfolded his arms and relaxed, which is a sign that he is conceding something for the time being.
“No use,” he said. “All those runners are going to waste. We’ll have to make another try in the next inning. They will surely pass Schlei to take a chance on Ames.”
Then Overall, who was pitching, whistled a strike over the plate and McGraw’s body tightened and the old lines around the mouth appeared. Here was a chance yet.
“They’re going to let him hit,” he cried joyfully.
Schlei made a base hit on the next pitch and scored both men. Almost the same thing happened later on in the season with men on second and third bases, and Raymond, another featherweight hitter, pitching. It struck me as being an oversight on the part of Chance on both occasions, probably because he was so busy with his own position and watching the players on the field that he didn’t notice the pitcher was the next batter. He let Schlei hit each time, which probably cost him two games.
The Giants were playing St. Louis at the Polo Grounds in 1910, and I was pitching against Harmon. I held the Cardinals to one hit up to the ninth inning, and we had the game won by the score of 1 to 0, when their first batter in the ninth walked. Then, after two had been put out, another scratched a hit. It looked as if we still had the game won, since only one man was left to be put out and the runners were on first and second bases. Mowrey, the red-headed third baseman, came to the bat.
“Murray’s playing too near centre field for this fellow,” remarked McGraw to some of the players on the bench.
Hardly had he said it when Mowrey shoved a long fly to right field, which soared away toward the stand. Murray started to run with the ball. For a minute it looked as if he were going to get there, and then it just tipped his outstretched hands as it fell to the ground. It amounted to a three-base hit and won the game for the Cardinals by the score of 2 to 1.
“I knew it,” said McGraw, one of whose many rôles is as a prophet of evil. “Didn’t I call the turn? I ought to have gone out there and stopped the game and moved Murray over. I blame myself for that hit.”
That was a game in which the St. Louis batters made three hits and won it. It isn’t the number of hits, so much as when they come, that wins ball games.
Frequently, McGraw will stop a game—bring it to a dead standstill—by walking out from the bench as the pitcher is about to wind up.
“Stop it a minute, Meyers,” he will shout. “Pull Snodgrass in a little bit for this fellow.”
The man interested in statistics would be surprised at how many times little moves of this sort have saved games. But for the McGraw system to be effective, he must have working for him a set of players who are taking the old look around for orders all the time. He has a way of inducing the men to keep their heads up which has worked very well. If a player has been slow or has not taken all the distance McGraw believes is possible on a hit, he often finds $10 less in his pay envelope at the end of the month. And the conversation on the bench at times, when men have made errors of omission, would not fit into any Sunday-school room.
During a game for the most part, McGraw is silent, concentrating his attention on the game, and the players talk in low tones, as if in church, discussing the progress of the contest. But let a player make a bad break, and McGraw delivers a talk to him that would have to be written on asbestos paper.
Arthur Wilson was coaching at third base in one of the games in a series played in Philadelphia the first part of September, 1911. There were barely enough pitchers to go around at the time, and McGraw was very careful to take advantage of every little point, so that nothing would be wasted. He feels that if a game is lost because the other side is better, there is some excuse, but if it goes because some one’s head should be used for furniture instead of thinking baseball, it is like losing money that might have been spent. Fletcher was on second base when Meyers came to bat. The Indian pushed the ball to right field along the line. Fletcher came steaming around third base and could have rolled home safely, but Wilson, misjudging the hit, rushed out, tackled him, and threw him back on the bag. Even the plodding Meyers reached second on the hit and McGraw was boiling. He promptly sent a coacher out to relieve Wilson, and his oratory to the young catcher would have made a Billingsgate fishwife sore. We eventually won the game, but at this time there was only a difference of something like one, and it would have been a big relief to have seen that run which Wilson interrupted across the plate.
McGraw is always on Devore’s hip because he often feels that this brilliant young player does not get as much out of his natural ability as he might. He is frequently listless, and, often, after a good hit, he will feel satisfied with himself and fan out a couple of times. So McGraw does all that he can to discourage this self-satisfaction. “Josh” is a great man in a pinch, for he hangs on like a bulldog, and instead of getting nervous, works the harder. If the reader will consult past history, he will note that it was a pinch hit by Devore which won the first world-series game, and one of his wallops, combined with a timely bingle by Crandall, was largely instrumental in bringing the second victory to the Giants. McGraw has made Devore the ball-player that he is by skilful handling.
The Giants were having a nip and tuck game with the Cubs in the early part of last summer, when Devore came to the bat in one of those pinches and shot a three bagger over third base which won the game. As he slid into third and picked himself up, feeling like more or less of a hero because the crowd was announcing this fact to him by prolonged cheers, McGraw said:
“Gee, you’re a lucky guy. I wish I had your luck. You were shot full of horseshoes to get that one. When I saw you shut your eyes, I never thought you would hit it.”
This was like pricking a bubble, and “Josh’s” chest returned to its normal measure.
Marquard is another man whom McGraw constantly subjects to a conversational massage. Devore and Marquard room together on the road, and they got to talking about their suite at the hotel during a close game in Philadelphia one day. It annoys McGraw to hear his men discussing off-stage subjects during a critical contest, because it not only distracts their attention, but his and that of the other players.
“Ain’t that room of ours a dandy, Rube?” asked Devore.
“Best in the lot,” replied Marquard.
“It’s got five windows and swell furniture,” said Devore.
“Solid mahogany,” said McGraw, who apparently had been paying no attention to the conversation. “That is, judging by some of the plays I have seen you two pull. Now can the conversation.”
Devore went down into Cuba with the Giants, carrying quite a bank roll from the world’s series, and the idea that he was on a picnic. He started a personally conducted tour of Havana on his first night there and we lost the game the next day, “Josh” overlooking several swell opportunities to make hits in pinches. In fact he didn’t even get a foul.
“You are fined $25,” said McGraw to him after the game.
“You can’t fine me,” said Devore. “I’m not under contract.”
“Then you take the next boat home,” replied the manager. “I didn’t come down here to let a lot of coffee-colored Cubans show me up. You’ve got to either play ball or go home.”
Devore made four hits the next day.
In giving his signs from the bench to the players, McGraw depends on a gesture or catch word. When “Dummy” Taylor, the deaf and dumb twirler, was with the club, all the players learned the deaf and dumb language. This medium was used for signing for a time, until smart ball players, like Evers and Leach, took up the study of it and became so proficient they could converse fluently on their fingers. But they were also great “listeners,” and we didn’t discover for some time that this was how they were getting our signs. Thereafter we only used the language for social purposes.
Evers and McGraw got into a conversation one day in the deaf and dumb language at long range and “Johnny” Evers threw a finger out of joint replying to McGraw in a brilliant flash of repartee.
Every successful manager is a distinct type. Each plays the game from the bench. “Connie” Mack gives his men more liberty than most. Chance rules for the most part with an iron hand. Bresnahan is ever spurring his men on. Chance changes his seat on the bench, and there is a double steal. “Connie” Mack uncrosses his legs, and the hit and run is tried.
Most managers transmit their signs by movements or words. Jennings is supposed to have hidden in his jumble of jibes some catch words.
The manager on the bench must know just when to change pitchers. He has to decide the exact time to send in a substitute hitter, when to install another base runner. All these decisions must be made in the “batting” of an eye. It takes quick and accurate judgment, and the successful manager must be right usually. That’s playing the game from the bench.