Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History

by Cait N Murphy

Overview

From the perspective of 2007, the unintentional irony of Chance's boast is manifest—these days, the question is when will the Cubs ever win a game they have to have. In October 1908, though, no one would have laughed: The Cubs were, without doubt, baseball's greatest team—the first dynasty of the 20th century.

Crazy '08 recounts the 1908 season—the year when Peerless Leader Frank Chance's men went toe to toe to toe with John McGraw and Christy Mathewson's New York Giants and Honus Wagner's Pittsburgh Pirates in the greatest pennant race the National League has ever seen. The American League has its own three-cornered pennant fight, and players like Cy Young, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and the egregiously crooked Hal Chase ensured that the junior circuit had its moments. But it was the National League's—and the Cubs'—year.

Crazy '08, however, is not just the exciting story of a great season. It is also about the forces that created modern baseball, and the America that produced it. In 1908, crooked pols run Chicago's First Ward, and gambling magnates control the Yankees. Fans regularly invade the field to do handstands or argue with the umps; others shoot guns from rickety grandstands prone to burning. There are anarchists on the loose and racial killings in the town that made Lincoln. On the flimsiest of pretexts, General Abner Doubleday becomes a symbol of Americanism, and baseball's own anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," is a hit.

Picaresque and dramatic, 1908 is a season in which so many weird and wonderful things happen that it is somehow unsurprising that a hairpiece, a swarm of gnats, a sudden bout of lumbago, and a disaster down in the mines all play a role in its outcome. And sometimes the events are not so wonderful at all. There are several deaths by baseball, and the shadow of corruption creeps closer to the heart of baseball—the honesty of the game itself. Simply put, 1908 is the year that baseball grew up.

Oh, and it was the last time the Cubs won the World Series.

Destined to be as memorable as the season it documents, Crazy '08 sets a new standard for what a book about baseball can be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060889388
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/19/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	162,992
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Cait Murphy is the author of Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History and has worked at Fortune, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal Asia in Hong Kong. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

The Hot Stove League

Then it's hats off to Old Mike Donlin
To Wagner, Lajoie, and Cobb . . .
Don't forget Hal Chase and foxy Mr. Chance
Who are always on the job . . .
Good old Cy Young we root for,
And Fielder Jones the same . . .
And we hold first place in our Yankee hearts
For the Stars of the National Game.—performed on vaudeville by
Mabel Hite and Mike Donlin¹

small minds might check the schedule and conclude that the 1908 season begins on Opening Day, April 14. They would be wrong. The 1908 season began the instant that the last Detroit batter popped up for the last out of the 1907 World Series.

Having lost to the mighty Cubs 4-zip (with one tie), the Tigers limped home to lick their wounds. Their poor performance was particularly galling since they had shown true grit down the stretch, beating the Philadelphia Athletics in a pennant race that the New York Times called the "greatest struggle in the history of baseball." Hyberbole was as common as bad poetry on the sports pages in 1907, but the Times just might have had it right—albeit only for a year.

The turning point came in late September. The Tigers had ridden a five-game winning streak to overtake the A's. As they faced a three-game series in Philadelphia—already known for its aggressive fans—Detroit was anything but complacent. The series would go a long way toward settling matters one way or the other. The Tigers won the first game, then a rainout and a Sunday—the city of brotherly love did not allow ball games on the Sabbath—meant the clubs wouldplay a doubleheader on Monday, September 30. In the event, only a single game was played—a seventeen-inning classic.

The A's jumped out to a 7–1 lead after six innings and Rube Waddell, the game's finest left-hander, was cruising. But he lost his fastball, or perhaps his concentration—the Rube was not wonderfully well-endowed mentally—and the Tigers scrapped for four runs in the seventh, then one more in the eighth. In the top of the ninth, they trailed 8–6. Slugger Sam Crawford led off with a single; the next batter was Ty Cobb. The 1907 season was the twenty-year-old's breakout year—as it was, not coincidentally, for the Tigers. Cobb led the league in hits, average, runs batted in, and stolen bases while confirming his reputation as a young man as distasteful off the field as he was wondrous on it. He dug in, took a strike—and cracked a home run over the right field wall. Tie game.

The Tigers scored a run in the top of the tenth; the A's did the same in the bottom. The game went on; the light thickened; the tension built.

In the bottom of the fourteenth, Detroit's Sam Crawford drifted back to catch a fly in an outfield that was packed with fans; Columbia Park had seats for only fifteen thousand, and the grass was roped off to provide standing room for thousands more. As Crawford reached for the ball, a couple of cops crowded him, either to keep the throng back or to help the A's, depending on one's view of human nature. At any rate, Crawford dropped the ball. The A's had a man in scoring position—briefly. Detroit argued that the cops had interfered with Crawford. There ensued a few minutes of civilized colloquy, marked by only a single arrest (of Detroit infielder Claude Rossman) and a trivial riot. Bravely, umpire Silk O'Loughlin decided against Philly, calling the batter out.

What becomes known as the "when-a-cop-took-a-stroll play"² loomed large when the next hitter hit a long single, but, of course, there was no man on second to score. No one else did, either. At the end of seventeen, the umps ended the game on account of darkness. The box score called it a tie, but the Tigers felt as if they had won. The A's were certain that they wuz robbed. Manager Connie Mack, a kindly man, was uncharacteristically bitter: "If there ever was such a thing as crooked baseball, today's game would stand as a good example."³

The controversial tie turned the season. The A's had lost their best chance to track down the Tigers, who promptly ripped off five straight wins on their way to the pennant. Delighted with the team's first championship in twenty years, Detroit's happy multitudes celebrated by lighting bonfires and painting their pooches in tiger stripes.⁴

To flop against the Cubs after all that—well, it hurt.

The Cubs, of course, were exultant. They had gone into 1907 determined to erase the insult of losing the 1906 World Series to the crosstown White Sox, a team they considered—and probably was—inferior. The Cubs played well all year, finishing ahead of the second-place Pirates by seventeen games and twenty-five ahead of the New York Giants, their least-favorite team—a deeply satisfying result to the Cubs, and a mortifying one to the Gothamites. By finishing off 1907 with such élan, the Cubs restored their sense of superiority. They strutted home for the winter, their wallets engorged with their World Series winnings: $2,142.⁵

Just because the games are over, though, does not mean that the game is. Baseball never sleeps; instead, it huddles around the metaphorical hot stove to rehash the past and dicker about the future. Even in the depths of winter, there is always a thrumming pulse of wakefulness—deals to make, rules to refine, lies to swap, mangers to fire. At the February 1908 annual meeting of the National League, the air at the Waldorf-Astoria fairly reeks of smoke and self-congratulation. Baseball is "in a most prosperous and healthy condition," concludes NL president Harry Pulliam in his annual report. "My experience as president of your organization has been a very pleasant one during the last summer."⁶ Given what would happen to Pulliam in 1908–1909, the words are desperately poignant. Sporting Life, a weekly magazine that was a reliable barometer of what the bosses were thinking, is also sunny: "There is not one cloud in sight."⁷

Crazy '08
How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History. Copyright © by Cait Murphy. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     ix
Foreword   Robert Creamer     xi
Introduction     xiii
The Hot Stove League     1
Land of the Giants     15
Origins of a Dynasty     35
Chicago on the Make     49
Opening Days     57
The Murder Farm     72
The Great Sorting     79
Heat and Dust     97
Doubleday and Doubletalk     129
The Guns of August     135
The Dog Days     151
Baseball's Invisible Men     167
The Merkle Game     177
That Other Pennant Race     199
The Red Peril and the Red Priestess     225
Down to the Wire: The National League     233
The Merkle Game II     257
Curses!     273
Covering the Bases     277
Epilogue     289
Sources     301
Notes     323
Index     361

Editorial Reviews

Crazy ’08 is simply a delight, required reading for all fans of baseball in Chicago. — —Chicago Tribune

“If you are any kind of fan, you ought to relish and revel in this wonderful book” — —Washington Times

A penetrating look at the dead-ball era, when the game truly was the national pastime. A- — —Entertainment Weekly

“picturesque details are what make...Crazy ‘08 such a fun and revealing journey through the early days of baseball.” — —Sports Illustrated

“Entertaining and meticulously researched.” — Wall Street Journal

“Beguiling” — Raleigh News & Observer

“[A] rollicking tour... will fascinate students of baseball... cause today’s Cub fans to experience an unaccustomed feeling—pride...” — New York Times Book Review

“[W]orthy to stand alongside The Glory of Their Times..., out in front.” — Raleigh News & Observer

From the Publisher

Entertaining and meticulously researched.

Wall Street Journal

Beguiling

Raleigh News & Observer

[A] rollicking tour... will fascinate students of baseball... cause today’s Cub fans to experience an unaccustomed feeling—pride...

New York Times Book Review

A penetrating look at the dead-ball era, when the game truly was the national pastime. A-

Entertainment Weekly

Entertaining and meticulously researched.

Wall Street Journal

If you are any kind of fan, you ought to relish and revel in this wonderful book

Washington Times

picturesque details are what make...Crazy ‘08 such a fun and revealing journey through the early days of baseball.

Sports Illustrated

Crazy ’08 is simply a delight, required reading for all fans of baseball in Chicago.

Chicago Tribune

Readers of Crazy ’08 can almost smell the whiskey and taste the pigs’ knuckles. This rollicking tour of that season will entertain readers interested in social history, will fascinate students of baseball and will cause today’s Cub fans to experience an unaccustomed feeling — pride — as their team enters the 2007 season, the 99th season of its rebuilding effort.
— The New York Times

George F. Will

It's been almost a century since the loopy shenanigans of 1908 that produced what Fortunemagazine editor Cait Murphy calls "the year that baseball comes of age," but the resultant drama has hardly faded with time. Although baseball books tend to sag with nostalgia, Murphy's wisecracking yarn digs right into the era's brawling, vivid ugliness with little regard for such niceties, and is all the better for it. Her book is so rife with corruption, greed, stupidity and downright weirdness that it makes today's sport of sanctimony and clean behavior look positively sleepy in comparison. This isn't surprising, given that 1908 was not just the last year that the shockingly victorious Chicago Cubs made it to the World Series, but also the year when a game would be called a tie through sheer Rashomon-like confusion and when a game day riot would take the lives of two people. The titanic matches between the rival Cubs and New York Giants are thrilling enough, but what really makes Murphy's book an addictive pleasure is the joy the author takes in the colorful asides where she fills in the chaotic blanks of an America discovering not just the joy of its national pastime but its very character. (Mar.)

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Publishers Weekly

With adroitness and flair, Murphy (Fortunemagazine) revisits this fantastic season in baseball history, which has been certainly studied and celebrated before but never with her skill. This was a year with such driving forces as Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie, Christy Mathewson, and an aging Cy Young. And it was the last time the Cubs won the series. Murphy mixes irreverence, insight, and erudition to produce this treat.

Library Journal

Crazy ’08 is simply a delight, required reading for all fans of baseball in Chicago.

Chicago Tribune