Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other
periodicals. He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe
and the United States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning
magazine Attenzione and was editorial director of the
East-West Network, overseeing a dozen in-flight magazines and
the PBS organ Dial. Don's latest book, Nullo,
is now available.
In
January 1910, baseball pitching great Christy Mathewson did
what his mentor John McGraw had told him not to do --- focus
on his pool table skills. McGraw had been averse to his Giants
star picking up a cue because he knew only too well that Mathewson’s
intense competitiveness was matched by a penchant for betting
on anything --- dice, cards, checkers, horses, name it. For
the New York manager his “good son” was better off
away from pool rooms, especially those he himself owned, because
they attracted, among others, professional gamblers of the Arnold
Rothstein stripe. What McGraw had not counted on was Mathewson’s
extended exposure to his “wild son,” Yankees first
baseman Hal Chase.
The
setting was a bizarre barnstorming trip that Mathewson and Chase
took to upstate New York and Canada for a series of indoor baseball
games in local armories. For Mathewson, the trip alone was an
act of defiance against McGraw and the Giants, who had wanted
him to abstain from all athletic activities in the offseason.
But in Albany, Troy, Ogdensburg, and other stops on the itinerary,
the righthander didn’t miss an opportunity to declare
that crossing a New York City street was more perilous than
any overtime athletics. At each of the stopoffs as well, he
became an eager pool pupil for Chase, described by Willie Hoppe
as the best non-professional the billiards champion had ever
shot against.
The
consequences of the Chase tutorials were both personal and professional,
short-range and long-range. Most immediately, New York sportswriters
began dropping hints at Mathewson’s growing talents at
the table; a typical observation in the weekly Sporting Life
was that “Christy Mathewson has added pool and billiards
to the games he excels in.” More influentially
for the history of baseball, Mathewson’s continued inability
to beat his teacher thickened an air of competition between
the pair that hung heavily over the national pastime’s
biggest scandal eight years later, in 1918.
In
good part because baseball owners were seeking military draft
exemptions for players during World War I, the word had gone
out that there was to be no public relations mud in the water,
specifically relating to the far-from-rare practice of players
throwing games. This called for a lot of intestinal fortitude
from Mathewson, by now retired as a pitcher and the manager
of Cincinnati; for more than a year, he had been watching Chase
and other Reds doing a lot of whispering in the locker room
and then making suspicious errors and base running blunders
on the field. It was hardly a secret in the clubhouse any more
than in the press box that Chase had been spending most of his
hours away from the diamond with gamblers in pool halls and
at poker tables, trying to recoup at the former what he had
lost at the latter and not bridging the gap, mainly because
of his weakness for trying to fill inside straights.
Mathewson
added the last vegetable to the bubbling stew when, in spring
training in 1918, he proposed that Chase and pitcher Mike Regan
play him and sportswriter Jack Ryder in a season-long bridge
tournament. There were several problems with this, the most
conspicuous being that neither Chase nor Regan knew much more
than the general rules of bridge. But reversing the teacher-student
roles that had been in effect during the 1910 barnstorming trip,
Mathewson refused even to allow the knowledgeable Ryder to team
up with one of the players, insisting Chase and Regan sit as
a tandem paying as they (presumably) learned.
If
Chase regretted his pool lessons in Ogdensburg, he didn’t
let on. Instead, the first baseman known as The Prince devised
a royal countermove of his own --- using an ever-present cigar
for a series of signals with Regan that allowed them to keep
their heads above water for most of the season. That seemed
to leave everybody relatively happy until August, when Regan
received his draft notice. Fearful of dying on a European battlefield
with what he considered a sin on his conscience, the pitcher’s
goodbyes to Mathewson included a confession that he and Chase
had been cheating the manager and Ryder at the bridge table
all year. Only hours later, Mathewson broke major league protocol
by announcing the suspension of Chase for throwing games, then
two days later resigned from his managing job to join the Army.
Not
even these events exhausted the odd relationship between Chase
and Mathewson, or between the two of them and McGraw. When it
came time for the National League to hold a hearing into the
game-throwing charges in January 1919, Mathewson was in Europe,
claiming that he was still too weak from a gas attack even to
send any further depositions in the case. But no sooner had
the hearing ended with an acquittal of Chase for insufficient
evidence than Mathewson returned to the United States to take
on a coaching job for McGraw with the Giants. McGraw, who had
walked the most diplomatic of lines between his two sons during
his hearing testimony, then closed the circle by obtaining Chase
in a trade with the Reds.
Chase’s
return to New York as a Giant in 1919 lacked only McGraw’s
Herald Square pool room for reviving old times. By then, McGraw,
faced with more money problems, had sold out his interests in
the Marbridge Building parlor, leaving Chase to frequent Jack
Doyle’s establishment near Times Square. There he continued
to display his Eight Ball and straight pool prowess for financing
the all-night poker games that inevitably left him back scratching
for money.
The
next couple of years were a kaleidoscope of scandals, trials,
and betrayals. If the rogues gallery of players McGraw assembled
for his 1919 squad represented the most crass collection of
hustlers ever assembled in New York baseball, it still ended
up being only a backroom exhibition to the Black Sox World Series
follies of the same year. It hardly came as a surprise that
two of the most prominent names linked to the skullduggery around
the Chicago-Cincinnati Series were those of Chase and his pool
room rival (and McGraw partner) Rothstein. But while historical
evidence has never been scarce for fingering Rothstein as the
chief bankroller of the bribery games, Chase’s role in
the proceedings has been far more dubious.
At
most, Chase appeared to have introduced Rothstein to organizers
of the plot, then picked up a few bucks (as did numerous other
major leaguers) with side bets on the underdog Reds. But this
didn’t prevent baseball officials from trying to get even
for the acquittal on the Mathewson charges. Not even the fact
that the first baseman was on an exhibition tour with the Giants
in New England during the World Series stopped allegations that
he was pulling all the strings in the fix. If that was mere
wish fulfillment, the suddenly moralistic McGraw threw in perjury
--- declaring under oath that he had been so tired of Chase’s
rigging tactics that he had suspended him from the Giants before
the end of the 1919 season and sent him a 1920 contract so ludicrous
in its terms that he knew The Prince would have to reject it.
Both assertions were lies (and appeared traceable to McGraw‘s
desire to cut his ties with the increasingly, embarrassingly
investigated Chase). Not only did Chase remain with the club
through its postseason exhibitions in New England, but the Giants
sent him a contract for the following season identical to the
one he had played under in 1919.
Contrary
to a popular impression, Chase was never banned from baseball
by Commissioner Kenesaw Landis in connection with the Black
Sox Series or with any other scandal. But he also read the writing
on the wall, and left the big leagues after the 1919 season.
Back in California and then in Arizona, he started down a slippery
slope toward alcoholism in between playing baseball for progressively
lower classification teams. What he always remained very major
league at, however, was shooting a rack. One witness to this
was Cowboy Ruiz, a 1926 teammate on a roughhouse semi-pro team
in the Arizona border town of Douglas:
He played mostly straight and Eight Ball. Usually
he’d just hang around talking to the guys. If you
weren’t a good player, Hal didn’t want to
play with
you. He would just show you trick shots. But when
a pool shark got cocky, Hal would say, “Hey, pally,
how about a line or two with an old lefthander?”
That was a favorite line of his. “What do you say,
pally --- maybe half a yard ($50) for starters?”
Twenty
years later, shortly before his death, Chase was playing out
similar scenes in the northern California town of Williams.
This time his audience was his grand-nephew Frank Cloak, who
walked him to the local tables from the aging Prince’s
cabin three miles away. Cloak:
The local hot shots usually took about two hours
to fleece any challengers. One time this rancher
announced to everybody that he had “kicked en-
ough ass” and was going home. In a flash Uncle
Hal became Prince Hal. “Hold on, Sonny,” he
says. “You haven’t tried me yet. I got a sawbuck
here that says this old lefthander might be too
tough for you.” The outcome was always the
same. This particular night the rancher broke
and ran six balls, and then never took another
shot. Uncle Hal won $120, bought drinks for
everyone in the bar, and as we were leaving to
all these cheers, he turned and took the deepest
bow you ever saw. That three-mile walk home
under those stars that night seemed to take ab-
out 10 seconds.
It
wasn’t only vain locals Chase challenged. It was also
in Douglas, in the early summer of 1926, that he took on Hoppe
in one of their most notable duels. On one of his regular tours
of the southwest at the time, the billiards champion arrived
to see the uniform-clad Chase leading a parade down the center
of the town after getting a big hit to win a local game. After
warming over some old New York City stories, Hoppe, knowing
that Chase was down on his luck but still needing his own score,
gingerly suggested that the two of them play a little straight
pool for 20 dollars a game. Chase smiled and tossed two thousand
dollars on the table. When Hoppe confessed he had only a thousand
dollars on him, Chase said the billiard master’s ivory
cue could cover the other thousand. Hoppe then described what
happened:
He walks over to the rack, takes a cue, breaks, and
runs the table twice, actually 35 balls. I get back in
the hunt and run 33. Hal then goes into real product-
ion. He’s got the whole house behind him. He’s
still
wearing his spikes from the baseball game. Can you
imagine --- he’s playing the number one player in
the
world and he never even took off his spikes! He then
runs 65 balls. I couldn’t catch him. I’m mad
as hell,
but a deal’s a deal. I flip him my cue. He catches
it,
examines it, then flips it back to me. He says, “Keep
your cue, Willie. You make your living with it. I’ll
give you some advice, though. Don’t get attached
to
people or things.”
Hoppe
admitted that not even the return of the cue mollified him.
When Chase saw this, he said, The Prince also gave him a hundred-dollar
bill, saying: “There’s no point being broke, champ.
I know by tomorrow this hundred dollars I give you will be a
thousand at the expense of some of these drunken miners and
soldiers we got in town.” It was because of this scene,
Hoppe said, that many years later, when he mounted the cue on
a wall in his den, he added an inscription saying: “Never
met a man who could take it from me --- except one, The Prince.”
Despite
his alcoholism and attendant diseases, Chase lived to 64 --
three years more than McGraw and 20 more than Mathewson. But
he himself admitted that his life contained too many scratches,
so that, instead of the plaque in Cooperstown his on-field ability
might have merited, he had to be content with the inscription
in Hoppe’s den.
