“Charley” stuck around for two or three days, and we won. Then McGraw decided he would have to be dropped and ordered the man on the door of the clubhouse to bar this Kansas kid out. Faust broke down and cried that day, and we lost. After that he became a member of the club, and we won game after game until some busy newspaper man obtained a vaudeville engagement for him at a salary of $100 a week. We lost three games the week he was absent from the grounds, and Faust saw at once he was not doing the right thing by the club, so, with a wave of his hand that would have gone with J. P. Morgan’s income, he passed up some lucrative vaudeville contracts, much to the disgust of the newspaper man, who was cutting the remuneration with him, and settled down to business. The club did not lose a game after that, and it was decided to take Faust West with us on the last and famous trip in 1911. Daily he had been bothering McGraw and Mr. Brush for his contract, for he wanted to pitch. The club paid him some money from time to time to meet his personal expenses.
The Sunday night the club left for Boston, a vaudeville agent was at the Grand Central Station with a contract offering Faust $100 a week for five weeks, which “Charley” refused in order to stick with the club. It was the greatest trip away from home in the history of baseball. Starting with the pennant almost out of reach, the Giants won eighteen and lost four games. One contest that we dropped in St. Louis was when some of the newspaper correspondents on the trip kidnapped Faust and sat him on the St. Louis bench.
Another day in St. Louis the game had gone eleven innings, and the Cardinals needed one run to win. They had several incipient scores on the bases and “Rube” Marquard, in the box, was apparently going up in the air. Only one was out. Faust was warming up far in the suburbs when, under orders from McGraw, I ran out and sent him to the bench, for that was the place from which his charm seemed to be the most potent. “Charley” came loping to the bench as fast as his long legs would transport him and St. Louis didn’t score and we won the game. It was as nice a piece of pinch mascoting as I ever saw.
The first two games that “Charley” really lost were in Chicago. And all through the trip, he reiterated his weird prophecies that “the Giants with Manager McGraw were goin’ ta win.” The players believed in him, and none would have let him go if it had been necessary to support him out of their own pockets. And we did win.
“Charley,” with his monologue and great good humor, kept the players in high spirits throughout the journey, and the feeling prevailed that we couldn’t lose with him along. He was advertised all over the circuit, and spectators were going to the ball park to see Faust and Wagner. “Charley” admitted that he could fan out Hans because he had learned how to pitch out there in Kansas by correspondence school and had read of “Hans’s” weakness in a book. His one “groove” was massages and manicures. He would go into the barber shop with any member of the team who happened to be getting shaved and take a massage and manicure for the purposes of sociability, as a man takes a drink. He easily was the record holder for the manicure Marathon, hanging up the figures of five in one day in St. Louis. He also liked pie for breakfast, dinner and supper, and a small half before retiring.
But, alas! “Charley” lost in the world’s series. He couldn’t make good. And a jinx killer never comes back. He is gone. And his expansive smile and bump-the-bumps slide are gone with him. That is, McGraw hopes he is gone. But he was a wonder while he had it. And he did a great deal toward giving the players confidence. With him on the bench, they thought they couldn’t lose, and they couldn’t. It has long been a superstition among ball-players that when a “bug” joins a club, it will win a championship, and the Giants believed it when “Charley” Faust arrived. Did “Charley” Faust win the championship for the Giants?
Another time-honored superstition among ball-players is that no one must say to a pitcher as he goes to the box for the eighth inning:
“Come on, now. Only six more men.”
Or for the ninth: