Heinie Wagner

“I don’t care for Rockefeller’s millions and I have no desire to share Wilson’s honors,” Heinie Wagner once quipped to a group of players during a long, hot train ride out west. “But I would like to be as good a pitcher as Walter Johnson and always be able to pitch for a team as strong as the Athletics.” iAlthough never regarded as especially fast, the longtime Red Sox shortstop and coach made a name for himself for covering wide territory from deep short and occasionally slipping his oversized feet in front of opposing base runners to trip them up as they headed for third. On and off the field, his quiet leadership, dogged loyalty and wry humor earned him the respect of teammates, adversaries, and fans in Boston for over two decades.

His nickname, “Heinie,” was a lifelong reminder of his German ancestry, but Charles Francis Wagner, son of German-born John Wagner and American-born Catherine Siedle, born in New York City on September 23, 1880, was as American as they came. As a boy, Wagner mastered the inside game in gritty fashion, playing barefoot on the rough-and-tumble side streets and vacant sandlots of Harlem. His first experience on the baseball diamond took place on the streets of Manhattan, and by the age of 17 he was among the most prominent amateurs on the island. Billy Rodenbach, a player and manager of a semipro team on the upper West Side, had a game scheduled with a crack team in New Jersey when his third baseman fell ill. Dismayed, Billy searched for a substitute, and he nearly gave up the search when a friend urged him to check out a kid playing on the streets in Hell’s Kitchen. “Go take a slant at him,” he was told.

Rodenbach would not regret the trip. On a cobblestone street near 39th Atreet and 11th Avenue, he found the “championship of the Kitchen” in progress. He was impressed by what he saw, and between innings he approached Wagner and complimented him on his ability to scoop hot grounders off the uneven surface.

“Say, Kid,” he said, “come over to Jersey and play with my club.”

“Aw, I can’t play with you big fellows,” Heinie retorted.

“I’ll take a chance on you,” said Rodenbach. “Now, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You come over with us and if you make good I’ll slip you half a dollar.” Wagner agreed. ii

Believing there was no better way to “gather in easier money than in baseball,” after graduating from high school in 1898 Wagner landed his first regular paying work on the New York semipro circuit, earning a dollar a game for the Murray Hills nine.iii In the spring of 1902, after a brief jump to Waverly in the New York State League, Wagner signed on to play short with the Columbus Senators, the smallest by population of the six charter cities in the newly re-formed American Association.

Wagner’s break into the big leagues came in Columbus at midseason of 1902. Desperate to fill the spikes of ailing Joe Bean at shortstop, in late June John McGraw offered Wagner a shot with the Giants in New York. Heinie accepted without batting an eye, and in his July 2 debut he brought the New York fans to their feet with a spectacular grab of a Fred Tenney line drive.iv Wagner made 17 appearances over the next two weeks, hitting .214 in 56 at-bats, but McGraw – perhaps mistaking Wagner’s mellow demeanor as a lack of competitive fire – was unimpressed. He handed Heinie his unconditional release on July 17.

Wagner was not out of the game for long. The following spring, Heinie signed on with Walt Burnham’s Newark Sailors in the Eastern League (today’s International League).He never hit better than .241 in his four years with the club, but his deft fielding and deadly accurate arm solidified his reputation as a premier middle infielder. Wagner also made a name for himself as one of the league’s most gifted brawlers, even winning an arrest during a contest with Jersey City in September of 1906 for punching an umpire in the face for a call Wagner deemed off the mark. Big league eyes may well have been watching that afternoon, for not two weeks later his contract was picked up by the New York Americans. Almost overnight, and amid little fanfare, the Highlanders turned him over to owner John I. Taylor and the Boston Americans.

On September 26 in Chicago, Heinie Wagner appeared in the first of the 805 games he would eventually play in a Boston uniform. He committed an error to open the contest but went on to nail out two clean hits to win accolades from the press. “Wagner played a great game,” the Boston Globe wrote the next day. “He has all the earmarks of a real find.”v A “real find” was exactly what the beleaguered 1906 Boston team needed that summer. Only two years away from championship glory, Taylor’s club had inexplicably sputtered and spiraled their way from first to dead last in the American League. Taylor, hoping to infuse his aging club with young guns, made Wagner and rugged Holy Cross catcher Bill Carrigan the first installments of a team Taylor vowed would be rebuilt on youth, power, and, above all else, speed.

Wagner’s work in late 1906 was more than enough to earn him an invitation to train with Boston the following spring, and on March 1 he dutifully joined his teammates aboard the 9:50 A.M. train out of New York bound for Little Rock. It was a taxing summer from the outset. After enduring five weeks of camp as a rookie newcomer, on the eve of opening day Wagner and his teammates were rocked by the horrifying suicide of enormously popular manager, Chick Stahl. For Wagner, the season only went downhill from there. Playing under no fewer than four managers over the next five months, Wagner fought bitter battles with disgruntled Freddy Parent, who was none too pleased to be dumped from his regular position at short to make way for the upstart Wagner. “Naturally, the presence of Parent on the same team worried Wagner a great deal,” the Boston Post later wrote. “[Wagner] did not do himself full justice and was at times moody and morose.”vi In October, John I. Taylor put an end to the conflict by sending Parent to Chicago as part of a three-team deal that brought infielder Frank LaPorte from New York to Boston.

With Parent now out of the picture, in the spring of 1908 Heinie Wagner found a home for himself in Boston; that was no less the case away from baseball, where the pieces of Wagner’s personal life similarly fell into place. Back in ’04, Wagner had wed fellow New Yorker Martha Hahn, whose sister, Augusta, had married Heinie’s older brother, George, a year prior. Within a year of their wedding, Martha gave birth to the couple’s first child – a girl, Elizabeth – and in 1906 Heinie and George moved their growing broods 45 minutes north of Harlem to the tiny hamlet of New Rochelle, where the duo purchased a sprawling duplex on Webster Avenue. In addition to serving with his brother as a volunteer firefighter, Wagner – famously at the time – began raising chickens in the back yard of the property. “He was something of a star in his hometown,” daughter Eleanor Wagner recalled with great fondness in 2001. “Dad was always manager of the kids on the New Rochelle team. Even when my oldest brother was very little, he was the manager. And he always made it a point to make sure the black kids and the white kids all had the opportunity to play alongside one another – he was adamant about it, in fact.”vii Outside of coaching neighborhood youngsters during the offseason, however, rarely did baseball intervene in what was otherwise a quiet home life. During the regular season, Martha rarely traveled to New York or Boston to watch her husband play, and after spending weeks and months crisscrossing the American countryside by rail, Heinie had no interest in venturing anywhere outside New Rochelle when the season came to a close. “I regret to see Charley leaving home, as it seems so long each time before he returns,” Martha lamented in a rare interview during the winter of 1910. “Some day, however, he will give up baseball and settle down to a quiet home life.” viii

That would be many years off. As Wagner etched steady work for himself with the newly christened Red Sox, club president Taylor followed up on his earlier promise and, one by one, assembled one of the youngest, swiftest squads in baseball: Eddie Cicotte, Harry Lord, and Tris Speaker; Joe Wood, Larry Gardner, and Ray Collins; Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis. Off the field, they were cliquish and at times their own best enemies, divided – like most of America at the time – along the seemingly impenetrable lines of religion and ethnicity. But on the field it was a different matter. “I had heard there was a division on the team, but my dad never said much about it,” recalled Eleanor Wagner. “They were divided at times, and possibly religion was a part of it. In spite of the differences, they got along, and when they were on the field they played baseball.”ix

Clubhouse tensions centered on ongoing ill-will between Catholics Lewis, Wagner, and Carrigan and High Mason Tris Speaker, and flared into open warfare more than once. In early August of 1910 things came to a head once again, this time over disgruntled team captain Harry Lord. The merits of Taylor’s decision to deal Lord and second baseman Amby McConnell to Chicago in August 11 would be debated for days, but no one at the time questioned manager Patsy Donovan’s decision to appoint Heinie Wagner as Lord’s replacement in the field. “Quiet and unassuming in his work, he has gradually worked his way to the front rank of ball players in this country,” lauded one Hub scribe. “Although lacking grandstand playing and manners assumed by some players, he has rapidly made a place in the hearts of the fans all over the county by his wonderful stops and throws and knowledge of inside base ball.”x

Just as Wagner found his permanent place on the Red Sox roster, a series of injuries began that would interfere with the rest of his professional career. The exhaustive schedule during the 1911 spring training trip to California left a number of men coming back from the coast in bandages. Wagner’s injury happened right at the end of training, and caused him to be sidelined for much of the season.

On the heels of back-to-back disappointing seasons, in September 1911 the Taylor family sold their control of the American League franchise to Washington manager Jimmy McAleer and Robert McRoy, Ban Johnson’s personal secretary. It was no secret to anyone that Johnson was behind the deal, but to Hub fans weary of nine years of John I. Taylor, it was welcome news regardless. Even better news came weeks later, when McAleer announced that he had enticed first baseman Jake Stahl out of retirement to manage the team for 1912. Under the firm hand of McAleer and with Stahl back in the fold, Boston looked to improve on its disappointing fourth-place finish in 1911. Still, few outside the Hub were ready to predict that Boston was in any position to challenge Connie Mack’s powerful Athletics for supremacy in the American League.

After a series of maddening rain delays, on April 20, 1912, Heinie Wagner went 1-for-5 and stole a base in Boston’s 7-6, 11-inning victory over New York to officially open Boston’s new ball field, Fenway Park. The player-manager of any baseball team of the time also functioned as the captain of the team, but this was not the way the Red Sox were organized in 1912. Jake Stahl managed the team and also played first base, but Heinie Wagner was the Red Sox captain. What manager Stahl said before the game was law, but once the game started, and Jake covered the first base bag, Heinie Wagner took over control on the field, and the manager became just another player who took orders from Wagner over at shortstop. The system worked well, much to the astonishment of baseball purists of the time. xi

Boston trailed Chicago for the first weeks of the summer, but a surge in early June put the Sox atop the American League to stay. Holding down shortstop “like a ballerina,” as Joe Wood later put it, Wagner enjoyed the best season of his career, hitting a career best .272 in 144 games to help lead Boston to its first pennant in eight years and a World Series date with John McGraw and the Giants. xii

Through the ghost pen of the Boston Post’s Paul Shannon, Wagner provided the day-to-day “inside dope” of each of the hotly contested games, which culminated in Fenway Park on October 16, the eighth game of the Series (Game Two had ended in a 6-6 tie, stopped by darkness after 11 innings).

Only 17,034 fans turned out for the Series finale – many rooters boycotting the game after a ticket blunder the day before caused a full-blown riot in center field – but Boston’s 3-2 defeat of Christy Mathewson in the bottom of the 10th remains one of the storied finishes in World Series play.

During the 1912 World Series, John McGraw realized what he had missed by passing over young Charley Wagner. “If I had you with me the series would be all over now,” he said at one point. “I always knew you would make a great ball player.”xiii Smoky Joe Wood offered his own evaluation: “The work of one man stood out prominently all through the game. I never saw such playing at shortstop as that of Heinie Wagner.” xiv The New York papers praised him as well, and lamented that Wagner, “one of the greatest shortstops that has represented Boston in the big leagues,” had slipped through the otherwise astute grasp of John J. McGraw in 1902, only to extract a modicum of sweet revenge with a World Series win.xv

Heinie returned to Hot Springs in March of 1913 carrying bold predictions of a second straight Red Sox championship. McAleer had the utmost confidence in his popular shortstop – he told James O’Leary, reporter for the Boston Globe, “I am not unreasonable enough to expect any improvement in ‘Heinie’ Wagner. No one could play a better game than he did last season, and if he does as well this year, that will be good enough. And he will be there, you may be sure.”xvi

Wagner would not come close to his work at the plate the season before, hitting a disappointing .227, but in the field he turned out the finest defensive effort of his career. One of his specialties was covering second base on steals. He could take the catcher’s throw on a run, often one-handed, and apply the tag just in the nick of time. Ty Cobb admitted that Wagner caught him far more often than did any other infielder in the American League.

Wagner was his reliable self at middle infield, but things were not nearly so memorable for the rest of his team. Dogged by injuries and persistent squabbles in the clubhouse and front office, the Sox never made it out of the starting gate. In the midst of a midsummer slump in July, Jake Stahl was shown the door; six months later, McAleer and McRoy were gone as well.

Injuries dogged the veteran players and ultimately doomed the team to fourth place. Wagner dealt with episodes of infection from spike injuries, blood poisoning, and shoulder and arm pain that relegated him to the sidelines on several occasions, allowing greater opportunities for Harold Janvrin to preside over the shortstop position.

And when spring training rolled around in March 1914, it looked as though Heinie Wagner’s days in Boston might well be at an end.

Over the winter, fans in Boston read that Wagner would likely be bumped to second base to make room for the enormously promising Everett Scott, who was already drawing a hefty salary from the franchise. When he arrived in Hot Springs with Carrigan in March, Heinie appeared sickly and thin. He did not bother donning his uniform, limiting his workout to solo walks through the Hot Springs hills, and reporters looked on in disgust as he relied on teammates to cut his meat at the hotel dining room. Days later, accompanying sports scribes revealed that he had suffered an attack of rheumatism over the winter and was being shipped back north for treatment. Back in New Rochelle four weeks later, Heinie issued a statement saying he was suffering from “recurring weakness [and] rheumatism in the right arm,” and had “given up all hope of ever playing big league ball again.”xvii

Wagner’s retirement was brief. Irked by his club’s lax work and hungry for help from the coaching line, in late June Bill Carrigan called Wagner back to Boston to serve as his third base coach and “all around right eye.” Wagner and Carrigan collaborated on strategy as well. They were inseparable friends and celebrated their accomplishments together. Wagner named one of his sons after Bill, and, as an ultimate tribute, Wagner, an amateur poultry raiser in the of-season, named his favorite rooster Rough.xviii

Heinie would not make a single plate appearance during the summer of ’14, but his steady presence in the third base coaching box was a boost to the club and, in particular, to his friend Carrigan. The move clearly pleased new Sox owner Joe Lannin, too. In October he offered Heinie $4,000 to remain with the club for 1915.

Rumors about Wagner’s future in Boston continued to percolate over the winter of 1914-15. One was that he was negotiating a jump to the Federal League; another had it that he was to take over as manager of the Eastern League Providence Grays. However, when the first day of training rolled around at Hot Springs in March, a surprisingly healthy Heinie Wagner was in uniform and ready to play. Now largely a utility infielder, he hit a modest .240 in 84 games in 1915 as the Red Sox won the pennant and spent his nonplaying time coaching at third. Wagner also found himself saddled with an additional, unforeseen duty on the road: overseeing the off-the-field shenanigans of a raw rookie from Baltimore, Babe Ruth. Heinie was included on the eligible players list, but he did not make an appearance during the Series, and instead collaborated with Bill Carrigan on strategy. Under the duo of Carrigan and Wagner and armed with a new generation of young guns on the mound, the Red Sox put their differences aside and again clawed their way to World Series victory, this time whipping Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Philadelphia Phillies, four games to one.

Fresh from victory, in January of 1916 the Red Sox released Wagner unconditionally, the franchise revealing only that he “might obtain a berth as a manager in one of the minor leagues.”xixFor his part, Heinie had long been skeptical of the idea of managing anywhere outside of New Rochelle (“Managers, especially big league managers, have tough jobs,” he said with a grimace six months earlier), but whatever his misgivings, in March he agreed to take the reins at Hartford in the Eastern League.xx It was not a great fit. Wagner navigated the Senators to a 19-24 mark by midseason, but unable to “get big league players for nothing and develop a winning club,” he was fired abruptly.xxi Wagner wasted no time in getting in touch with Carrigan, who on June 28 once again called him back to Boston.

The Red Sox were on their way to a second straight AL pennant by September, when Carrigan surprised Hub rooters by confirming his intention to retire when the season was out. Even the sweetness of a second straight World Series pin and promises of more money could not sway the resolute Carrigan, who over the winter affirmed that he was through. Wagner’s name was mentioned prominently as a possible replacement for Carrigan, but in January Red Sox owner Harry Frazee announced captain and second baseman Jack Barry as the “logical choice” to manage the club in 1917. With Heinie again at third, Boston rolled up 90 wins to finish second in the AL, nine games back of pennant-winning Chicago.xxii

At the close of 1917, Harry Frazee assured Wagner that he would be back with Boston in 1918, and over the winter Wagner received a copy of his contract in the mail as usual. When Frazee hired Ed Barrow to replace Jack Barry at the helm of the team, however, the Red Sox owner did an about-face, announcing that he was dumping Wagner at third in favor of former Chicago Cub Johnny Evers. “Good, old Heinie …will not shout out ‘stay up’ from the third base lines this year,” the Globe said with a hint of regret. “The Red Sox owner figures that …Evers will be more valuable to his club.”xxiii

As for Heinie Wagner, Frazee thought there might be a place for him somewhere. His loyalty and years of service to the Red Sox deserved something in return. The Globe’s Ed Martin recalled that Wagner’s loyalty also cost him financially. In 1914, Federal League agents offered him $25,000 to sign a three-year contract, Martin wrote, but Heinie remained loyal to the Red Sox and to his friend Bill Carrigan, although his salary with Boston was less than half of what the Federal League would have paid him.

When the players arrived at Hot Springs in March 1918 for spring training, they soon found out that this year’s session would be different when manager Barrow and coach Evers announced some changes. Gone was the annual hike over the mountains, not a favorite of coach Wagner, either – he approved of the walk but deplored the snakes he often encountered. Manager Barrow complained, “You will understand we are not training to win a mountain climbing championship.”xxiv

The Evers experiment was doomed almost from the start. On the return trip from Hot Springs, weeks of tension between the sharp-tongued Evers and the explosive Barrow collapsed into all- out war.

Midway through spring training, a Hugh Fullerton dispatch carried in the Boston American weighed in on the 1918 Red Sox team. Frazee was throwing money around the league looking for players, but Fullerton asked, “Can money build a ball club?” He was skeptical of Barrow’s ability to pull the team together, and considered Johnny Evers a smart man but incapable of coaching himself, let alone a team of notoriously fragile egos. He theorized that Frazee had hired Barrow and Evers as a “happy medium,” but concluded that the result of the partnership would do practically nothing positive for team management. Fullerton said the Red Sox once had a great manager – Heinie Wagner – and called him one of the greatest of ball players who possessed every quality required of a manager, but he also conceded that Evers and Wagner never would have seen eye to eye. For their part, veteran players were incensed at losing Heinie, and the hiring of Evers provided no consolation.xxv

On opening day, April 15, Barrow issued a terse statement that Evers had been released and Wagner called back to Boston. With Evers awkwardly looking on from the Fenway Park grandstand, that afternoon Heinie was again in uniform and standing at his old post at third. Once again, it seems, the Red Sox needed Heinie Wagner far more than he needed them.

Under the dark cloud of war, the growing menace of the Spanish influenza, dwindling fan turnout, and staggering losses at the box office, the summer of 1918 was anything but ordinary. Still, as he had done for a dozen years now, Heinie Wagner served his team with loyalty and dedication. He did his level best to keep an eye on an increasingly cantankerous Babe Ruth, and it was Wagner who was ordered to Baltimore to retrieve the slugging pitcher when he bolted the club in early July. “The veteran has seen the last of his playing days but is one of the cagiest coaches in the business,” lauded one observer.xxvi Indeed, Heinie rarely took the field, having appeared in only six games in the past two years. However, in Washington on July 3, he made his third appearance of 1918. Heinie committed an error and was robbed of a hit by a brilliant stab by first baseman George Burns, but in the bottom of the ninth he ripped a clean single to left off Vean Gregg for his 845th career hit. It would be his last at-bat.

His playing days were over, but at 37, Heinie Wagner had lost none of his competitive fire. “He was quiet but when something was important he’d speak right up and fight for what he wanted,” Eleanor Wagner remembered. “My dad was a fighter.”xxvii That fact was never more in evidence than during Game Two of the 1918 World Series, when Wagner got into a bench-clearing brawl with Chicago third base coach Otto Knabe on the floor of the Cubs dugout. Whoever was responsible for starting the fight was never fully sorted out (by all appearances, it was mutual), but in the end it was Wagner who got the short end of the fight. After being pulled from the melee with a broken finger and uniform that “looked like he had been working on a flivver,” Heinie wrapped the injury and resumed work at third. However, Garry Hermann, president of baseball’s governing body, the National Commission, was not about to let the event go unpunished. Two days later both men were called in front of the Commission and told in no uncertain terms that if either had any further desire to pick up where they left off, there was “lots of opportunity ‘over there.’ ” xxviii

In February 1919, Wagner was out again as part of the Red Sox club. There was a player limit imposed on teams, and non-essential personnel were cut. Wagner got his release once again. In April, he and Bill Carrigan teamed up again and looked into purchasing the rights to the Portland club of the New England League. They at first found Portland’s Bayside Park management holding to an agreement they made with Hugh Duffy, and the two were required to wait Duffy out until he moved aside. Hugh finally did, and the Carrigan-Wagner team was back in business on the baseball diamond. But by the middle of July the league crumbled as two of the six teams collapsed, and they sold out to John Donnelly of the Lowell franchise. Carrigan looked into movie house investments in Lewiston, and Heinie was once again footloose until Ed Barrow approached him to return to Boston in order to clear up the atmosphere of dissension that clouded the Red Sox as they dropped deeper in the American League standings. Despite his infusion of “pep” as the newspapers welcomed him back, it was too late for a comeback for the champions. In January 1920, just days before trading Babe Ruth to New York, owner Harry Frazee announced that he had released Heinie Wagner.

Wagner would return to the Red Sox in 1927, brought out retirement by his old pal Carrigan to resume work at third base, but manager Carrigan had been handed little material to work with, and neither he nor Wagner was able to rekindle the magic of the previous decade. When Carrigan had seen enough at the close of the 1929 campaign, Heinie took up duties as manager but with no more luck. After piloting the woeful 1930 Sox (52-102) to a last place finish in the American League (a whopping 50 games back of pennant-winning Philadelphia) to no one’s surprise Heinie resigned the day after the season ended and returned to New Rochelle, this time for good. There Wagner spent his final years working as a supervisor at a local lumberyard, as a volunteer firefighter, and as manager of the New Rochelle police and fire department baseball teams.

Heinie Wagner suffered from numerous health problems in his later years, and on March 20, 1943, at the age of 62, he suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly at his home on Van Guilder Avenue. Although he had been employed at the lumberyard for twelve years, on his death certificate his family noted “baseball” as his “usual occupation” and “player and manager” his business.

Notes