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.”