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.”