John McGraw
Alexander, Charles C.
46 JOHN McGRAW Charles C. Alexander/Viking/$18.95 Joe Mysak T he legend of John McGraw sur- how McGraw, who lived baseball, put vived his friends, and it will prob- it. His management style was...
...He was garb...
...up to shake hands across the years...
...sarcastic jabs at his players, the opposi- He sometimes managed in civilian tion, all umpires, and the press...
...His management style was summed ably survive the scholars...
...He was generous to old ball-New York City baseball's first media players...
...managed the New York Giants for thir- With what...
...He was as puckish as he was was routinely suspended for dozens of pugnacious, tossing off one-liners and games during the course of a season...
...Yet for all that, he remains an Here I think of such works as Caro's unknown...
...and aggressiveness to back almost everything up, both as a player and as a manager...
...And, in the final accounting, McGraw "should have stopped managing at least five years before he did...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 47...
...get an impressive collection of data, a Charles Alexander, a professor at welter of admittedly absorbing detail, Ohio University who a few years back presented in a style slightly redolent of tried to rescue Ty Cobb from the obli- the candle...
...Alexander's life of ments, had a propensity for injuring Cobb, "The book's a little dry...
...The author is at his best in the conclusion, although his get-off line, "he's worth remembering," is lame...
...He chief saloon correspondent, is manag- can paint the political scene, and the ing editor of the Bond Buyer...
...McGraw's judgment of players was not always keen, and he "never grasped the significance" of building up a farm system, as Branch Rickey of the Cardinals did...
...He is superb in his descriptions of ballparks and their inJoe Mysak, The American Spectator's habitants both on and off the field...
...He characters of the game...
...politicking behind the scene, pretty THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1988 well...
...As my batterymate once said in a drink, made bad real estate invest-a review of Prof...
...These are fascinating details...
...But to meet him, you'll have to wait for the one-man show, which must star Charles Durning...
...But not my traveled to Cuba during the winter...
...He McGraw...
...To the end McGraw saw putting together a winning team as mainly a matter of spotting and buying the best talent in the higher minors and buying and trading for what was available in the majors...
...He screamed at another, "You thought...
...John McGraw is a good piece of work about a great man...
...And man...
...Well, they never go gently...
...I don't give a hill of beans when it more or less evolved into its about anything else but winning," was present form...
...own, but taught all of his boys, among In John McGraw, we get some of them Casey Stengel, the secret of win- that...
...He pulled down a bigger salary endearing and multi-dimensional than anyone except Babe Ruth...
...But they do not give What's more, he had the talent, brains, me the man...
...Or with the famed late-night baconand-egg sessions Stengel spent in McGraw's kitchen: Stengel, who later McGrawed the cross-town rival Yankees to ten pennants and seven World Series championships...
...The game of baseball isA lexander presents baseball from only fun for me when I'm out front and its prehistoric days to the 1930s, winning...
...Alexander discusses in depth McGraw's infatuation with reclamation projects, usually drunks, but the same does not obtain for his descriptions of McGraw's relations with Frank Frisch, a favorite son later packed off to the Cardinals...
...Alexander is a good writer vion of the brass plaque and record of narrative history, and so we get book, here tries a similar salvage opera- much of the colorful times, but not a tion on McGraw, with about the same lot of the life...
...Cobb himself in bizarre ways, never learned was a jerk...
...After the hagiographers had LBJ, or Manchester's Mencken and done with him, and the memoirists em- Churchill, or W. A. Woodward's Washbalmed him in a few anecdotes, we ington and Grant, or Robert Creamer's know little more of the real John Stengel, all of which contain master-McGraw, for all his notoriety, than we ful writing, and all of which give us the do of the Marquis de Lafayette...
...When he was on the losty years, collecting ten National League ing end of a drunken brawl, he said he pennants and three World Series cham- went down due to a case of "bunched pionships...
...To say that McGraw liked results...
...He had no children of his hits...
...McGraw, he says, "was the first manager who insisted on trying to control everything that happened on the field," at times even calling every pitch from the bench...
...Or with the 17-year-old Mel Ott, who was never sent to the minors but who learned at the master's knee because McGraw was afraid some other manager would tinker with the youngster's unorthodox batting stance...
...darling, a role he excelled at, and in No doubt Tom Wolfe could weave them which he was topped only by Stengel...
...He epit- up when he once told a player, "If my omized the scrappy Old Orioles when brains hold out, we'll win it," and later he played for them in the 1890s...
...into a good yarn...
...to drive, loved horse racing, and possiCobb, who once told McGraw, "If bly went along with some bribery you were a younger man, I'd kill you," schemes, does not give us much of the and meant it, was not one of the more man...
...Instead, in Alexander's work, we McGraw was a lot more accessible...
...This worked very well over the course of a season, but as Christy Mathewson once pointed out, it also inhibited player initiative and improvisation, especially over the short haul, which was why the Giants only won three World Series titles...
...But the real McGraw never shows ping big...
...But Bill James, of historical abstract fame, says more about the odd-couple relationship between McGraw and his ace pitcher, Christy Mathewson, in one quote—i'McGraw wanted to win more than he wanted anything else, and Mathewson could win games for him...
...Matty wanted to be respected more than he wanted anything else, and McGraw treated him with respect"—than Alexander does here...
Vol. 21 • October 1988 • No. 10
