John McGraw – Society for American Baseball Research (sabr.org)
20th century, but in 1927 Mack himself proclaimed, “There has been only one manager, and
his name is McGraw.”[1]
The pugnacious McGraw’s impact on the game, moreover, was
even greater than his record suggests.
As a player he helped develop “inside baseball,” which put a premium on
strategy and guile, and later managed the way he’d played, seeking out every
advantage for his Giants. Known as Mugsy
(a nickname he detested) and Little Napoleon (for his dictatorial methods),
McGraw administered harsh tongue lashings to his players and often fought with
umpires; he was ejected from 118 contests during his career, far more than any
other manager until Bobby Cox surpassed him in 2007. “McGraw eats gunpowder every morning for
breakfast and washes it down with warm blood,” said Giants coach Arlie
Latham.[2]
The oldest of eight children of Ellen (Comerfert) and John
McGraw, an Irish Immigrant who fought in the Civil War and later worked in
railroad maintenance, John Joseph McGraw was born in working-class poverty on
April 7, 1873, in the village of Truxton, New York, about 25 miles south of
Syracuse. During the winter of 1884-85 a
diphtheria epidemic claimed Ellen and three of her children, leaving John Sr.,
a heavy drinker, alone to raise Johnny and the other four survivors. One night in the fall of 1885, 12-year-old
Johnny received such a severe beating from his father that he moved across the
street to the Truxton House Inn, where a kindly widow named Mary Goddard took
him in and raised him along with her own two sons. Besides attending school, Johnny performed
chores around the hotel, delivered newspapers, and peddled candy, fruit, and
magazines out of a basket on the train from Cortland to Elmira. He used the money to buy new baseballs and
the Spalding guide, parts of which he memorized[3].
At 16 years old, Johnny McGraw stood barely 5 feet 7 and
weighed little more than 100 pounds, but that didn’t stop him from becoming the
star pitcher for the local Truxton Greys.
When Truxton’s manager, Bert Kenney, became part owner and
player-manager of the Olean franchise in the New York Penn League in 1890,
Johnny begged for and received a place on the team. In his first game on May 18, McGraw played
third base and made eight errors in 10 chances.
He was released after six games but caught on with Wellsville of the
Western New York League, batting .364 in 24 games[4].
One of his teammates was a former National Leaguer named Al
Lawson, who was organizing a winter tour of Cuba. McGraw went along and played shortstop for
the “American All-Stars.” On the way
home, Lawson’s team stopped in Gainesville, Florida, to play a spring training exhibition against the NL’s Cleveland Spiders.
McGraw collected three doubles in five at-bats, receiving national
publicity when the game story appeared in The Sporting News. From among the resulting offers he received
for the coming season, he chose Cedar Rapids of the Illinois-Iowa League and
batted .276 in 85 games as the club’s regular shortstop[5].
That August McGraw made his major-league debut with the
Baltimore Orioles of the American Association, filling in at various positions
and hitting .270 in 33 games. In 1892
the AA disbanded, and Baltimore was absorbed into the 12-team National
League. McGraw started the season as a utilityman but took over as the regular third baseman after Ned Hanlon
was appointed manager in midseason.
Under Hanlon’s tutelage, McGraw became the NL’s best leadoff hitter,
batting over .320 for nine straight years, twice leading the league in runs and
walks, and stealing 436 bases; his career on-base percentage of .466 ranks
behind only those of Ted Williams and Babe Ruth. McGraw choked up on the bat and swung with a
short, chopping motion that diminished his power, but he could place the ball
virtually anywhere he wanted. He also
wasn’t above cheating. “McGraw uses
every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a
play by a dirty trick,” wrote one reporter[6].
With players like Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Hughie
Jennings, Wilbert Robinson, Steve Brodie, Sadie McMahon, and Dan
Brouthers, most of whom remained associated with and often employed by
McGraw in later years, Hanlon’s Orioles won three consecutive pennants in
1894-96 and finished second in 1897-98.
Concerned about slumping attendance in Baltimore, Orioles owner Henry
Von der Horst tried to transfer most of his key personnel to Brooklyn in
1899, but McGraw and his friend Robinson refused to report, claiming business
interests that demanded their attention in Baltimore. Von der Horst reluctantly let them stay, and
the 26-year-old McGraw managed the Orioles to an 86-82 record and a surprising
fourth-place finish, 15 games behind Hanlon’s first-place Brooklyn Superbas[7].
Baltimore might have done even better had another tragedy
not befallen its manager. In late August
McGraw’s wife, Mary (Minnie), died from a ruptured appendix; a grieving John
missed much of September. The Orioles
disbanded when the NL contracted to eight teams in 1900 and, after again
refusing to report to Brooklyn, McGraw was sold to the St. Louis Cardinals
along with Robinson. Agreeing to go only
when the reverse clause was removed from his contract, he signed for a salary
of $10,000 – the highest in baseball history – and hit .344 in 99 games[8].
In 1901 McGraw returned to Baltimore as manager and part
owner of that city’s franchise in Ban Johnson’s new American
League. Throughout that season and the
next, he and Johnson quarreled constantly – the latter habitually supported his
umpires in their frequent disputes with McGraw, and tension also existed over
McGraw’s interest in the team’s ownership.
Johnson finally suspended McGraw indefinitely in July 1902, and at that
point, the temperamental manager jumped back to the NL as player-manager of the
New York Giants, even though he’d recently married a Baltimore woman, Blanche
Sindall. One of his first acts in New York
was to release nine players, despite the protests of Giants owner Andrew
Freedman. McGraw also brought six
key players with him, including pitcher Joe McGinnity, catcher Roger
Bresnahan, and first baseman Dan McGann. The Giants finished last that season but rose
to second in 1903, even though MrGraw’s much-injured knee finally gave out for
good during spring training that year, effectively ending his career as a
player[9].
In 1904 the Giants became NL champions, finishing with a
won-lost record of 106-47, 13 games ahead of the Chicago Cubs. McGraw and new Giants owner John T. Brush
so detested Ban Johnson and his league that they refused to play the Boston
Americans in what would’ve been the second World Series. After winning again in 1905, however, they agreed to play the
AL-champion Philadelphia Athletics. New
York triumphed in four out of the five games, three of them shutouts by Christy
Mathewson. McGraw led the Giants to
pennants again in 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1917, but lost the World Series each
year. His regular-season success was due
to his knack for evaluating and acquiring players who fit into his system,
which stressed good pitching, sound defense, and aggressive baserunning. McGraw bought, sold, and traded players more
than his counterparts, grooming prospects for years before letting them play
regularly. He also was an innovator,
using pinch-runners, pinch-hitters, and relief pitchers more than other
managers[10].
Many commentators believed that McGraw’s lack of World
Series success was due to his strong performance for players who fit his
system. The Giants were generally
considered less talented than other top teams – they were a second-class team
with a first-class manager, claimed the Cubs’ Johnny Evers. Until left fielder Ross Youngs entered
the league in 1917, catcher Roger Bresnahan was McGraw’s only Deadball Era
position player who eventually made the Hall of Fame. McGraw’s teams also had trouble reacting to
events on the field. They sometimes made
mental errors in big games, as though they didn’t know what to do or were
paralyzed at the thought of how the Old Man might react if they lost. After New
York’s 1913 World Series defeat by the Athletics, even the usually loyal
Mathewson blamed McGraw for the team’s setbacks in an article ghostwritten
under his name in Everybody’s Magazine.
The Giants said the article, was a “team of puppets being manipulated
from the bench on a string.”[11]
McGraw’s fiery personality made him fascinating to
contemporaries outside sports. Gamblers show business people, and politicians were drawn to him. As his celebrity grew, McGraw became
increasingly involved in various, sometimes questionable off-field
activities. He ventured into vaudeville
for 15 weeks in 1912, appearing in such acts as “Odiva the Goldfish Lady.” For a while, McGraw owned a poolroom in
Manhattan with a gambler Arnold Rothstein, who later became the principal
financial backer of the 1919 World Series fix, and he sometimes spent winters
in Cuba, where he and Giants owner Charles Stoneham owned a share of a
racetrack and casino. When Stoneham
bought the Giants in 1919, McGraw became vice president of the club and
minority owner. Between 1912 and 1923 he
helped resolve various ownership crises of the Boston Braves – which usually
paid off in trades that helped New York more than Boston. Fatefully, McGraw also was instrumental in
Col. Jacob Ruppert’s purchase of the Yankees and the decision to allow
that team to share the Polo Grounds when the Giants were on the
road[12].
In 1920 Babe Ruth arrived to play for the lowly
Yankees. The team’s attendance soared as
Ruth began hitting home runs out of the Polo Grounds, prompting an enraged
McGraw to instruct Stoneham to evict their upstart tenants. In what was widely viewed as a battle between
Inside Baseball and the new Power Game, McGraw had the consolation of beating
the Yankees in the World Series of 1921-22 (“I signaled for every ball that was
pitched to Ruth during the last World Series,” he gloated). The tide turned for good in 1923, however,
when the Yankees crushed the Giants, four games to two, for their first world
championship, with Ruth clouting three home runs. In 1924 the Giants won a record fourth
consecutive NL pennant but lost another World Series, this time to the
Washington Nationals. As the years
passed, McGraw evolved with the game.
Early in his career, his teams emphasized the stolen base, but as the
long ball began to dominate baseball, McGraw – despite his personal dislike of
the home run – adapted to the change.
For the rest of the decade and the early 1930s, the Giants fielded some
fine teams but were never good enough to win.
Plagued by health problems, McGraw resigned on June 3, 1932[13].
McGraw made his last major public appearance at Comiskey
Park in July 1933, managing the National League against Connie Mack’s
American Leaguers in baseball’s first All-Star Game. He was 60 years old when he died at his home
in New Rochelle, New York. On February 25, 1934, of prostate cancer and uremia
– but mostly, according to one reporter, because he was no longer top dog. He was buried in New Cathedral Cemetery in Baltimore,
near several of his old Orioles teammates, as well as his first wife,
Mary. McGraw was inducted into the
National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.
Blanche McGraw inherited her husband’s stock in the Giants and carried
on his memory, often attending games with Mathewson’s widow, her most tragic
time, at least to the New York newspapers, was on that September day in 1957
when the Giants played their final game at the Polo Grounds before leaving
for San Francisco. She said the move
would have broken John’s heart.
Nonetheless, she was present at Seals Stadium in April 1958 at the
team’s first game on the West Coast, and again when Candlestick Park opened two
years later. Blanche McGraw died on
November 5, 1962, only a few weeks after attending the New York games of the
Giants-Yankees World Series[14].
An earlier version of this biography was published in “Deadball Stars of the National League” (Potomac Books, 2004), edited by Tom Simon. It also appeared in “From Spring Training to Screen Test: Baseball Players Turned Actors“ (SABR, 2018), edited by Rob Edelman and Bill Nowlin.
Sources:
Articles:
1. Lamb, Bill. “A History of the New York Giants
Franchise,” Outside the Lines, SABR
Business of Baseball Committee, Vol. 22, No. 2,
Fall 2016.
2. Lamb, Bill. “Manhattan Field,” SABR BioProject.
3. Mathewson, Christy. “Why We Lost Three Worlds
Championships,” Everybody’s Magazine,
vol. XXXI, July-December 1914: 537-547.
Books:
1. Graham, Frank. The New York Giants: An
Informal History of a Great Baseball Club
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2002).
2. Glueckstein, Fred. The ’27 Yankees (Xlibris
Corporation, July 26, 2005).
3. Greenberg, Eric Rolfe. The Celebrant
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983).
4. Hynd, Noel. The Giants of the Polo Grounds:
The Glorious Times of Baseball’s New
York Giants (Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1995).
5. Klein, Maury. Stealing Games: How John
McGraw Transformed Baseball With the
1911 New York Giants (New York: Bloomsbury
Press, 2016).
6. Mansch, Larry D. Rube Marquard: The Life
and Times of a Baseball Hall of Famer
(Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland &
Co., 1998).
7. Mathewson, Christy. (Introduction by Eric
Rolfe Greenberg). Pitching in a Pinch
or Baseball From the Inside (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press 1994).
8. McGraw, John J. My Thirty Years in Baseball
(Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press (reprint of a book published
in 1923).
9. Robinson, Ray. Matty: An American Hero
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993).
10. Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Golden Age
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971).
11. Smith, Robert. Baseball: The Game, the Men
Who Have Played It, and its Place in
American Life (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1947).
12. Stark, Benton. The Year They Called Off the
World Series: A True Story (Garden City,
New York: Avery Publishing Group, 1991).
Newspapers and Magazines:
Baseball Magazine, New York Herald, New York Times, Sporting Life, The Sporting News.
Notes::
1. https://baseballhall.org/hof/mcgraw-john. In
2021, Tony La Russa surpassed McGraw
with his 2,764th victory.
2. thejeopardyfan.com/2016/06/june-1-1932-john-
mcgraws-final-mlb-game-as-new-york
-giants-manager.html.
3. John McGraw file, Giamatti Research Library,
National Baseball Hall of Fame.accessed
September 3, 2017.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. espn.go.com/page2/s/list/cheaters/ballplayers.
html.
7. John McGraw file.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. leaptoad.com/rain delay/matty/whywelost.shtml.
Christy Mathewson, “Why We Lost Three World’s
Championships,” Everybody’s Magazine,
vol XXXI, July-December 1914: 537-547.
12. John McGraw file.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
Full Name: John Joseph McGraw.
Born: April 7, 1873, at Truxton, NY (USA).
Died: February 25, 1934, at New Rochelle, NY (USA).
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