“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.