The Great Bonehead Play

McCormick trots home, the merry villagers flock on the field to worship the hollow where Mathewson feet have pressed, and all of a sudden there is doings at second base.

--New York Times, Sept. 24, 1908

The "doings" that so spun the Times's sports reporter that September afternoon cost the New York Giants a pennant and started an argument that may live as long as baseball: Did Fred Merkle really pull a bonehead play that gave away the game?

Bare percentage points on top of the National League, John McGraw's Giants had just dropped the first two of a three-game series with the second-place Chicago Cubs, managed by Frank Chance. In the ninth inning of the final game, the score at the Polo Grounds was tied, 1-1. There were two outs when the Giants' Outfielder "Moose" McCormick beat out a single. Long-legged Fred Merkle, the Giants' first baseman, sent him to third with another single. Shortstop Al Bridwell lined a clean base hit over the head of the Cubs' Second Baseman Johnny Evers. McCormick scored. Merkle did not bother to touch second; he trotted out to the clubhouse in center field.

In a similar situation in Pittsburgh three weeks earlier, Evers had called for the ball, touched second base and claimed a forced out. Umpire Hank O'Day had overruled him, and the league president had not allowed the Cubs' protest. Undaunted, Evers tried again at the Polo Grounds. Fans were already swarming across the infield, but somehow, in the confusion, canny Johnny Evers got his hands on the ball (or a ball) and pushed his way to second. Standing on the bag, he called to the head umpire--the same Hank O'Day. This time O'Day surprisingly called Merkle out, ruled the game a tie. The Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance Cubs went on to win the playoff and the pennant--and took the World Series from Hughie Jennings' Detroit Tigers (Ty Cobb & Co.) four games to one.

Until the day he died in 1934, the Giants' Manager McGraw insisted that Evers had made the put-out with a phony ball. According to McGraw, his first-base coach, Old Pitcher "Iron Man" McGinnity, had grabbed the ball hit by Bridwell and heaved it into the stands. Evers, of course, told a different version, and the league decided that this time Evers was right.

Merkle played on in the big leagues for 18 years--with the Giants, the Dodgers, the Yankees, and even the hated Cubs. A crack first baseman, he was a hustler in the field and had a sharp eye at the plate. Even in those days of the dead ball, he often hit close to .300. But until the day he died--in Daytona Beach, Fla. last week at 67--Frederick Charles Merkle never escaped the memory of that coincidence of time, place and official fickleness that came to be called "Merkle's bonehead play."

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