Books: The Tyrant of Coogan’s Bluff

THE DAYS OF MR. McGRAW by Joseph Durso. 243 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.

When the alltime, all-star baseball team was recently chosen to mark the game’s 100th anniversary, the man named history’s foremost manager was John Joseph McGraw. His selection was virtually incontestable. More than any other man McGraw transformed baseball from a rustic game of stark individual power into a scrambling contest of split-second team prowess.

In 1891, McGraw arrived in Baltimore to play the infield for the old Orioles. He was small (5 ft. 6½ in.), young (18), and a country boy from upstate New York. At that time, the basis of baseball strategy was simply to hit the ball as far as possible. Young McGraw was brash enough and bright enough to see that the game should be infinitely more complex than that, and soon he was all but running the team. By 1894, Oriole baseball flourished as “a. combination of hostility, imagination, speed and piracy.”

McGraw perfected what is now a commonplace baseball device: the cutoff throw, whereby an infielder checks the throw from the outfield if a runner has already scored and there is a chance that another base runner may be cut down. He raised to an art the hit-and-run play, in which the runner breaks for the next base as the pitch is thrown, while the batter tries to confound the defense by hitting the ball just behind him. In short, he helped make baseball a chess game based on probabilities; its rowdy practitioners he molded into skilled but highly disciplined pawns.

The New York Giants bought Mc-Graw’s genius in 1902 and made him player-manager. On and off the field, his style perfectly suited the abrasive, autocratic temper of the times. The lions of Broadway and Tammany Hall loved the feisty little manager. He drank at The Lambs club with George M. Cohan, and eventually became one of Mayor Jimmy Walker’s favorite cronies.

Other teams, many baseball officials, even some of his own players, hated him. He once threw a baseball at an umpire; playing third base, he did not scruple to hold the belt of an opposing runner tagging up to score after a fly. But his awesome command of baseball strategy led the Giants to ten National League pennants and three world championships.

By the early ’20s, though, the city that had worshiped him began to shift its fealty to the forerunner of today’s independent, iconoclastic superstar: the Yankees’ Babe Ruth. McGraw became increasingly irascible and began to lose the iron grip he had always held on his players. Finally, in 1932, he turned over the Giants’ reins to one of his own rebels with whom he had fought so bitterly, First Baseman Billy Terry. He died two years later.

Veteran New York Times Reporter Joseph Durso has written a literate book full of the deeds and diamond-in-the-rough doings of his hero. Sometimes he threatens to drown the baseball legend in cultural asides and long swatches of Americana. McGraw himself, however, proves a hard man to put down.