The Season is Over.
Saturday, October 8, 1927: New York City
As Schoolboy and I are heading out the door to drive back to Manhattan after we crushed the Pirates in Game 3, one of the locker room boys, Pete Sheehy, intercepts me and says, “Mr. Huggins wants to see you in his office.”
I tell Schoolboy to go ahead without me.
As I walk back through the locker room past the other players, I’m trying to guess what Huggins wants. I doubt it’s to tell me I’m starting Game 4 tomorrow.
(In the 25-year history of the World Series has any pitcher ever been released by his team during the Series?)
When I get to his office, Huggins’s door is open. He’s sitting behind his desk, writing in one of his notebooks.
“Shut the door,” he says.
This can’t be good.
Huggins closes his book, and takes up his pipe, which is always with him, except during our games. He lights it, and his small office quickly fills up with the sweet smell of his tobacco.
Huggins is a meticulous man. He keeps a number of notebooks on his desk, including one I’ve caught glimpses of that appears to be a journal of his baseball observations.
Also on his desk, always facing him, is a framed picture of his sister, Myrtle, who I know from Gallico is Hugg’s closest companion — they live together both in New York during the season and down in Florida during the winters.
Huggins is a baseball man, through and through, with friendships in the game that run three decades. But he is a solitary soul.
One afternoon during spring training this year, just after I had finished my running, I walked up, unnoticed, behind him and Sailor Bob while they were having a conversation about baseball and family.
”It’s too late for me,” I heard Huggins say wistfully, “but I sure would have loved a son. I would have loved to have a boy to share this game with. And, away from the diamond, I could’ve given him so many things I didn’t have.”
Although they were having an intimate conversation, Hugg and Sailor Bob were standing side by side, two old baseball men in a dugout, looking not at one another but out at the empty ball fields turned yellow in the fading sun of an early spring day. Two sage souls who’ve given their lives to the game, now surrounded each day by the young men they had once been.
We’re all Huggins’s boys.
As soon as you make the team and come north to play for the Yankees, Miller Huggins becomes a father figure in your life. What type of father figure depends on your baseball abilities, your personality, and the relationship you had with the father your grew up with — or who wasn’t there for you while you were growing up.
Even with all the accolades Ruth has received in his career, now that the nightmare of 1925 is behind them both, I can’t imagine that anything in baseball means more to the Babe than the fact that he has Miller Huggins’s genuine respect, and deep affection.
I’ve always felt that it’s been an honor to play for Hugg. Too bad it’s about to be over.
“Myles?”
(And now it’s over.)
“Yes, sir.”
“I know the second half of the season has been tough on you.”
“Well, I haven’t pitched as well as I know I can. Certainly not as well as Pipgras. I feel I let the team down.”
“You haven’t let the team down, son. You’ve been an important part of this ballclub.”
(“How?” I wonder.)
“You understand people, son. It’s a rare skill for a ballplayer.”
“It’s a rare skill for a manager.”
(Jeezus. Did I just say that to Miller Huggins?)
Huggins chuckles.
“You’re right,” he says. “That’s why I want to talk to you.
“Bob Shawkey and I think that you have the makings of a good coach, Myles. The modern coach won’t just be an inside baseball man. He’ll be someone who knows how to reach his players.
“The youth of today, they don’t remember the Great War, and certainly not the world before it. They’ve grown up in the roar of the Twenties. They’ve only lived a life of freedom. But I think they still want someone to guide them.”
(The man in front of me is cut from a different mold than any other baseball man I’ve ever met. Goddamn.)
“You understand people, Myles, and people like you. That’s a rare gift in this game, where we spend so much time concentrating just on winning, and thinking about our own play.”
Huggins takes a second to relight his pipe.
“Before you come back down to spring training next year, I’d like you to give some thought to your future in this game.”
“Next year?”
“Yes. I’ve talked to Ed Barrow about your value to our squad. We’ll be offering you another contract — for the same salary as this year’s.”
(I would have taken a pay cut to stay with Huggins and this team. Especially with my World Series share this year, and one likely next year, too — not to mention that $57,400 stashed in my hotel room.)
“There will be some young arms in here next spring. I hope that you can selflessly work with the boys.”
“It would be my pleasure, sir. And thank you for your faith in me.”
I take my leave.
As I walk out, I run into Jumpin’ Joe Dugan, who grunts, “What were you guys discussing?” He’s probably worried that Huggins was talking to me about pitching against the Pirates tomorrow.
“The Communist Manifesto,” I tell Jumpin’ Joe. “Hugg has a copy in his desk drawer, right next to his Bible. He’s got most of it memorized. You know, I think if he could manage any team, in any league, I bet it would be the proletariat.”
Dugan peers into Huggins’s office through the open door.
When he turns back around, I’m gone.
The morning is damp, but by afternoon it’s a perfect autumn day. A perfect day to win the World Series. And 60,000 fans are here to see us do it.
Nobody’s the least bit worried when the Pirates draw first blood in the top of the first, scoring a single run — especially after we immediately come back with one of our own in the bottom half of the inning.
Combs singles. Koenig singles. Ruth singles to bring Combs home — and then Jidge steals second base. We only score one run, but we’ve made our point.
In the fifth, Combs leads off, and again singles. Koenig strikes out, and 60,000 fans stand up and begin to cheer wildly. Not because of Koenig, but because of Ruth. The Babe is at the plate.
Less than a minute later, he’s shaking hands with Lou Gehrig and Eddie Bennett at home plate.
In the seventh the Pirates fight back, with our help, as Wilcy Moore, who started the game, and Lazzeri both make errors.
A sacrifice bunt, a single, and a sacrifice fly later, Pittsburgh has tied the game at three apiece.
In the bottom of the seventh, the Pirates bring Johnny Miljus, the “Big Serb,” out of the bullpen.
In Game 1, Pirate manager Donie Bush went to Miljus in the sixth inning, right after Lazzeri doubled to lead off the inning. The first batter Miljus faced, Dugan, sacrificed Tony over to third, but that’s as far as the W*p got. In three innings of relief, Miljus gave up just one hit, a single to Ruth — and then he picked him off first base.
“That Miljus is tough,” said Gehrig in the locker room after game.
“You don’t know the half of it, Lou,” I said to him.
Back when I was a freshman at Penn State, I played semipro ball against Miljus. He was out of school by then — he had been a star pitcher at Pitt, where he became a doctor of dentistry while paying his way by working in the steel mills. Like I said, he’s a tough guy.
After Miljus graduated he pitched in the Federal League for a year, then he made it to Brooklyn in the National League.
And then Johnny went off to war.
Miljus was the first baseball player to enlist. And his reward was to be used as fodder in one of the most brutal battles American soldiers saw during the Great War, the month-long Battle of the Argonne Forest.
The battle began with three hours of shelling, during which the Allies pounded the Huns with more metal than both the North and South combined had fired at each other during the four years of the Civil War. Then the offensive began.
Miljus was wounded by a German shell. He woke up on the battlefield to find that two medics had been sent to fetch him. Only now one was dead, and the other lay dying. Miljus loaded his fallen comrade onto the same stretcher both men had carried out for him, and then dragged the medic to safety, back behind the Allied line.
Inside the medical tent, Miljus discovered that his wound was bad enough to get him tagged to be sent back to the States. His response was to sneak out and run back to rejoin his unit fighting at the front.
Let’s just say that’s not how I would have handled the situation.
Back in the battle, Miljus’s reward for his patriotism was a dose of mustard gas, which forever scarred his lungs, but didn’t keep him out of the fight. Like I keep saying, he’s a tough guy.
After surviving the war to end all wars, the Big Serb spent most of the past six years in the minors, the last three out in the Pacific Coast League with Seattle, where he mastered the curve.
The Pirates called him up in July, and now Miljus is standing on the mound in the bottom of the seventh inning of Game 4 of the World Series, facing the greatest team of all time with his team on the edge of extinction. Given his background, I doubt he’s the least bit nervous.
After Miljus comes in, neither team gets a man past first base until we bat in the bottom of the ninth.
While Combs again walks straight to the plate from center field to start the inning, and Koenig walks to the on-deck circle, Ruth, who is due up third, is pacing inside the dugout, and having a Pavlovian response to the moment: He’s visibly drooling, as he waits for his turn at the plate.
Combs singles.
Man on first. No out. Bottom of the ninth.
Koenig bunts the ball down the third base line, and Pie Traynor muffs the play.
Men on first and second. No out. Bottom of the ninth.
The Babe walks to the plate.
Miljus has a conference with his catcher, Johnny Gooch, and the Pirates first baseman, Joe Harris, who served in the same Army unit with Miljus in the Argonne Forest. Their battle plan secure, the three men take their positions.
But their well laid plan goes awry.
Gooch sets up outside, and Miljus throws inside.
Ruth backs up so as not to get hit by the pitch — he doesn’t want to have the bat taken out of his hands — and the ball goes flying past Gooch. Miljus runs in to cover home plate, which keeps Combs from scoring.
Combs on third. Koenig on second. No out. Bottom of the ninth.
Ruth practically howls as the Pirates — with first base now open — intentionally walk him to load the bases.
No out. Bottom of the 9th. Bases loaded. Gehrig at the plate.
On a 2–2 count, Miljus strikes out Lou, swinging, on a nasty curve ball.
One out. Bottom of the 9th. Bases loaded. Silent Bob Meusel at the plate.
On a 2–2 count, Miljus strikes out Meusel, swinging, on another nasty curve.
Two out. Bottom of the 9th. Bases loaded. “Poosh ’em Up!” Lazzeri at the plate.
It is not lost on a single person in attendance — not the fans, not the press, not the players, and most of all, not Lazzeri, himself — that the last time the W*p was in this situation — Game 7 of the ’26 World Series, almost exactly a year ago, today — an intoxicated Grover Cleveland Alexander came in from the bullpen to strike out Lazzeri, kill our rally and win the World Series for St. Louis.
While Tony tries not to think about the past, Miljus, Gooch and Harris have another conference on the mound.
The Stadium is now as loud as a goddamn locomotive.
Lazzeri stands waiting for a curveball.
And he gets it.
But he’s just a hair too anxious — he swings an eyelash ahead of the ball and slams it foul down the left field line.
Just like in ‘26.
Miljus gets a new ball from the umpire. He walks off the mound, rubbing it into his glove.
I look around the Stadium and see the passion of 60,000 fans.
I see the eternal child, Ruth, cheering Lazzeri from first base.
I see the eternal father, Huggins, coaching from third base, relaying signs to his boys on base and at the plate.
And I see Lazzeri — the W*p who’s brought a whole new population of fans teeming into ballparks around the league all year — looking to redeem himself.
In our dugout, everyone is standing on the top step.
“Five O’Clock Lightning!” shouts Benny Bengough, as the W*p steps back into the batter’s box.
I look at Miljus, and I imagine myself on the mound.
Suddenly the world turns upside down. We don’t win the World Series.
The Pirates lose it.
Miljus has thrown another wild pitch.
Combs comes sprinting home.
The season is over.
