Pink Tea at the Polo Grounds - Part 1 of 2
If a crowd charges the field, but no police respond, does that still count as a riot?
It’s hard to tell a raucous story involving the New York Giants that does not feature John J. McGraw. Any Giants’ tale from 1902 to 1932 seems to inevitably gravitate toward McGraw’s flinted, antagonistic person as he expertly managed his teams and waged war against umpires, opposing clubs, and any player foolish enough to provoke him.
No contest was meaningless in McGraw’s eyes. He knew that, in their hearts, most fans wanted to see battle, and that suited his personality and managerial style just fine. McGraw’s Giants didn’t just play to win. They played to beat you. Among other innovations, he pioneered the concept of removing pitchers at strategic moments to insert another hitter into the lineup. There was nothing of genteel old-baseball in the pinch hitter–it was the strategic equivalent of a punch to the opponent’s kidneys. McGraw was shrewd, scheming, and abusive, and he passed these traits on to the club he managed. If you rooted for any other team in baseball near the turn of the 19th Century, you hated John McGraw and his team of thugs. If you rooted for the Giants, you either loved him or managed to hold your nose.
On Opening Day, however, baseball’s chief antagonist was home sick.
McGraw had just turned 34 years old and was about to begin the start of his first official season as a non-playing field manager when he was struck down by what was reported then as “the grip.” Borrowed from the French “grippe’” on account of how it could bodily grab you and hang on, nowadays we refer to this illness as influenza or the flu. This was a serious diagnosis in 1907, enough to keep America’s most competitive man down for several days. But, while physically absent on April 11, John McGraw was present in spirit for that day’s game at Manhattan’s Polo Grounds, to the extent that some would even later try and blame him for what transpired on his sick day.
The New York Giants were largely expected to be in the running for a pennant in 1907, as any team of McGraw’s should be, and they had been given the honor of hosting the season’s first game, to be played at home against the visiting Philadelphia Phillies. “Only the ‘weather man,’” one newspaper observed, “who is not always an enthusiastic ‘fan,’ can prevent a most auspicious beginning.”
Opening Day 1907 began with an hour’s concert by the Seventh Regimental Marching Band, who paraded across the outfield. The players from both clubs arranged behind the band, the Phillies in gray uniforms, the Giants in new home whites. Shoulder to shoulder, the teams made the customary march together to home plate, looking to be in “fine fettle” for the start of the long campaign.
“From every pinnacle within the grounds some emblematic flag flew, while draped between were festoons of the National colors and the Star-Spangled Banner.” From each foul pole, one of the Giants’ pennants, earned in 1904 and 1905, snapped and fluttered.
Across baseball’s opening week, winter weather systems trudged up and down the east coast of the United States, doing great damage to the schedule. Several inches of snow fell on New York on April 10, and a less stubborn team might have postponed the April 11 contest, but the Giants were determined to get their game in, lest the honor of opening the season transfer to the cross-town New York Highlanders (not yet the Yankees) on April 12.
To make the game possible, an army of shovelers was put to work clearing six inches of snow off the Polo Grounds’ playing surface. Using brooms, sponges, mops, shovels, and rakes, the crews wrung the grass out to soggy but playable levels.
“The infield was good,” one report said, “but the outfield was sloppy, and the ball fell dead on the wet ground, otherwise the Phillies would have scored even more runs than they did.”
The weak sun that made brief appearances that afternoon would not provide much comfort to the audience, but it was enough to soften the mountainous heaps of snow that ringed the edge of the field. Good packing snow, it would prove to be.
To ensure a full park, at least a third of the attendees had been let in for free or via free invitations which had been scattered all over town by the thousands. Accounts vary, but there seem to have been between 17,000 and 20,000 people present, and for the occasion and the location, this was considered a decent turnout. A scarcity of women in the stands was noted and later attributed to the “unpropitious weather.”
William “Bill” Klem would umpire the contest. Klem would go on to become one of the most celebrated and accomplished of his fraternity, working until 1941. But in 1907, Klem was just a third-year umpire, only beginning to prove himself to the players and audiences, and he came with minimal cachet. Klem was on his own for that day’s game, as umpires always were in that era, unless trouble was expected.
The Giants’ first baseman, Dan McGann, managed the New York club in McGraw’s absence. Without the indomitable manager putting hot irons into their backsides, the Giants seemed deflated. “Many a time during the contest,” one newspaper observed, “the ill-luck of his illness was commented upon with regret, it being said the lack of his inspiriting coaching was responsible for the failure [of the players] to rise to the demands of the occasion.” As you can see, reporters in this era were often paid according to how much column space their stories took up.
The Phillies’ pitcher, Frank Corridon, embarking on the finest of his eight seasons, was unhittable, if wild, allowing just one base hit while walking eight men. Despite the action on the basepaths, Corridon managed to wriggle away throughout the game, completing a shutout.
Offensively, the Phillies, still interchangeably referred to as “the Quakers,” got the better of the Giants’ second-best starter, Joseph “Iron Man” McGinnity, with left fielder Sherry Magee (sometimes identified as “McGee” depending on a publication’s attention to detail) having a particularly fine game, going 4-for-4 with three singles and a triple.
In the end, the lowly Phillies made the “fading ex-champions look like a lot of mollycoddles,” one writer sniffed, winning 3-0. “There was really nothing to the game but Philadelphia, and had the conditions been reversed, there would have been no limit to the crowd’s enthusiasm.” As it was, with temperatures falling during the latter half of the game, the New York crowd’s attention (and certainly its enthusiasm) for the contest began to wane.
By the end of the seventh inning, some fans decided they’d had enough of the chilly weather and chilled play by the McGraw-less mollycoddles. Leaving a game as the home team is getting trounced is a timeless sporting ritual, but in this case a number of fans watching from the outfield decided it would be most convenient for them to leave via the exits behind home plate. To get there, many opted to take the shortest route, across the field. This was more straightforward a thought than you might imagine—in some parts of the outfield in those days, fans could access the playing area by ducking underneath a piece of rope.
They did so in numbers, and the eighth inning “was played under difficulties” as fans trickled and then streamed across the playing area. Many spectators took their time, enjoying the view and their proximity to the players themselves, who were frequently distracted by well-wishers wanting to shake hands.
Bill Klem was irritated, to say the least. He called time, hoping the crowd would disperse, but the longer folks lingered on the field, the more people decided to join them. Klem, however, was a stickler, and he shouted angrily at the trespassers to hurry them on. Minutes ticked by before the field was clear, while the fans who’d remained behind the ropes and seated in the outfield corner bleachers grew ever colder. Play proceeded, lamely, but Klem’s refusal to keep things moving prompted a growing chorus of frosty hecklers.
During the bottom of the eighth inning, with no improvement to the Giants’ play, the remaining center field crowd largely gave up. In an act of defiance against the domineering Klem, “at least a thousand men and boys” made a coordinated dash over, under, and through the rope fences and into the outfield, surrounding the Giants’ right fielder, George Browne. The umpire halted the game again, but hundreds more joined the crowd and spurned pleas from Klem and the players asking them to depart. Soon Klem was surrounded at home, also, and he was “laughingly threatened” if he forfeited the game. Nonetheless, the rules said unless the field was made playable in the next fifteen minutes, the game would go to Philadelphia as a forfeit. Klem noted the time on his watch.
The crowd was now divided. A significant minority had taken to the field, while the majority remained in the stands, including in raised outfield bleachers that came partway in from the corners. There were some hard feelings between the rule followers and rule breakers, and one boy in the bleachers threw his seat cushion out at the trespassers. It was a rather harmless projectile, but it looked good in flight, and many others in the stands followed his lead. A hail of seat cushions fell on the people on the field, only to be picked up and hurled back.
As “battle” ensued, the field-level fans had a secret weapon: the heaped mounds of snow along the foul lines. These could be broken into one-way projectiles in the form of snowballs, and it was not long before “half a hundred persons” (that’s 50 people, written longer) were pelting the stands with snowballs. By then, the field itself was strewn, one reporter said, “with excelsior.”
The potential of that moment would be underlined in the next day’s many recaps: “There was danger any minute of someone losing his temper in the mob and precipitating a general outbreak, but good nature eventually prevailed.”
Klem’s watch continued ticking. Many in the stands wished to see the game completed and they angrily made their demands known to the umpire. This was the point where the danger of a “general outbreak” was highest, but Klem, by himself, was powerless to move the trespassers, and, unfathomably, there was no one in the stadium to help him.
For this first day of baseball at the Polo Grounds, there were precisely two New York policemen stationed inside the ballpark, both of them detailed to the city-owned ambulance, which was parked in its usual spot in the outfield. These officers refused to intervene or even move when the crowd invaded the field.
The Polo Grounds–and the Giants–were privately-held. This had not stopped New York’s police department from assigning uniformed crowd control officers to the stadium for years, but on Opening Day in 1907, the only people present in uniform were the ballplayers.
A crowd of tens of thousands of people had been crowded into a small space and left to their own devices. How had this come to be the case?
Earlier that same morning, New York’s Commissioner of Police, Brigadier General Theodore A. Bingham, sent word to the Polo Grounds stating that, effective immediately, no on-duty police officers would work security for private events, including baseball games.
Bingham had decided that he would be the first New York police commissioner to actually enforce an existing law that prohibited the police from engaging in such work. As he notified the Giants that they would be on their own, he also sent word to the local precinct captain to keep his officers away. Those orders were followed to the letter, as most orders from Bingham were, by any man on the force who liked having a job.
Who within the Giants’ organization received Bingham’s message, if anyone did, is unclear. At least one paper reported that James Coogan, who owned the Polo Grounds, noticed the absence of police in the afternoon, before the game started, and he tracked down a police “roundsman” to point out the problem. The roundsman explained Bingham’s order and made clear that it would be obeyed. Whoever might provide security that day, it would not be the New York police.
“But suppose some kind of an accident should occur?” Coogan was said to have asked.
“It would be awful,” agreed the roundsman, “but those are the orders I received this morning.”
And so the game began, with no police present, and the Giants having failed (admittedly on very short notice) to supply any private alternative. This was, one publication noted, “the first time in the history of the game” this had happened. The statement, while probably hyperbolic, certainly provides a sense of what norms looked like at the time, and in 1907, it was well-understood that unmanaged crowds were dangerous.
Why then, did Bingham pull out his men? A look at the commissioner’s work that year will show that the hard-charging ex-military man had decided to, rather literally, call Coogan’s bluff.
At Project 3.18, we give baseball’s strange, spectacular misfires their moment in the spotlight and explore the forces that resulted in sports’ most infamous 9-0 losses.
Thank you for reading Part 1 of “Pink Tea at the Polo Grounds.”
Here’s a link to the conclusion: “The Hellraiser”
I learn something new everyday!
I am thoroughly enjoying this writer's stories, and, at the same time, learning quite a bit about the history of baseball.