The Relationship of Legendary Managers Connie Mack and John McGraw with Their Native American Players

Before the first game of the 1911 World Series, legendary managers John McGraw (left) of the New York Giants and Connie Mack (right) of the Philadelphia Athletics are pictured shaking hands. Also shown are the pitching aces of the two teams, Hall of Famers Christy Mathewson (left) of the Giants and Charles Albert Bender (right) of the Athletics. Bender was a Native American popularly known by the nickname “Chief,” but Mack always addressed him as Albert. Not shown is the star catcher of the Giants, John Tortes Meyers, also a Native American known as “Chief.” Like Mack and Bender, McGraw and Meyers had a good relationship. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

 

Without question two of the greatest managers in the history of major-league baseball were Connie Mack (1862-1956) and John McGraw (1873-1934).

Cornelius McGillicuddy, better known as Connie Mack, piloted 7,466 games in a 50-year career as Philadelphia Athletics skipper. He managed an additional 289 games for the Pittsburgh Pirates for a total of 7,755 games, by far the most of any major-league manager.

John McGraw managed the Baltimore Orioles for 2½ years and the New York Giants for 31 years, for a total of 4,769 games.

Connie Mack, 6-feet-1 and 150 pounds, was known as The Tall Tactician for his stature and his baseball acumen, and “the grand old gentleman” for his quiet reserve and dignity. He always wore a business suit rather than a uniform in the dugout during games. He guided the Mackmen to nine American League pennants and five World Series titles. He was famed for developing young players and then, after their A’s teams had won championships, selling their contracts to keep the club solvent. Then he would repeat the cycle, building another winning team. One of the young players he tried to lure was Christy Mathewson. Mack succeeded in signing the Giants pitcher, but probably influenced by John McGraw, Mathewson broke the contract and returned to the Giants.

Mack is best remembered for his longevity and civility. His entire career as a journeyman catcher, manager, and owner lasted 71 years. He addressed his players by their given names, not nicknames, and they invariably called him “Mr. Mack.” As the New York Times observed in Mack’s obituary, “The old-time leaders ruled by force, often thrashing players who disobeyed orders on the field or broke club rules off the field. … [Mack] always insisted that he could get better results by kindness. He never humiliated a player by public criticism. No one ever heard him scold a man in the most trying times of his many pennant fights.”1

Players on other teams applauded Mack’s approach to managing. Writing just before the 1913 World Series, Christy Mathewson compared the A’s to a college team, saying, “There is never any dissension. … You never hear one member of the team knocking some fellow player.” According to Mathewson, the A’s harmony was due to Connie Mack, who was “a marvel at handling men.” By contrast, Mathewson claimed, the hard-driving McGraw had the players wound up tight.2

In 1937, 13 years before he retired as A’s manager, Mack was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His Hall of Fame plaque calls him “Mr. Baseball.” Outside Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia there is a life-sized statue of Mack, wearing a business suit, waving the rolled-up scorecard he invariably held during games.

In contrast to the lanky Connie Mack, the pudgy John McGraw was only 5-feet-7. However, his reputation far exceeded his size. McGraw has been praised as the epitome of “what a baseball manager was supposed to be: smart, shrewd, pugnacious, tough and demanding with his players.”3 After McGraw’s death, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis called him “one of the greatest natural leaders any sport has ever known,” adding, “Baseball to him was more than a game. It was a religion and war combined. … He was emblematic of the fire and dash that belongs to the national game. He knew ballplayers and he knew how to handle them.”4

From 1902 to 1932, McGraw led the New York Giants to 10 National League pennants, three World Series championships, and 21 first- or second-place finishes.

Known as Mugsy and Little Napoleon (both nicknames he resented), McGraw developed his reputation for pugnaciousness as an infielder for the Baltimore Orioles and perfected it as a manager. As Arlie Latham, one of his coaches, said of McGraw’s famous irate charges across the diamond to confront an umpire, he “eats gunpowder every morning and washes it down with blood.”5 He was ejected from 118 games as a manager and 14 as a player during his career, a record for total game ejections that stood until it was surpassed by Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox in 2007.

McGraw was an innovator. He introduced what has been called the inside game or scientific baseball, a style of play that emphasized strategy and deceit over raw power. The Giants manager stressed solid defense, situational hitting, and aggressive baserunning

McGraw was known to keep such close tabs on players that he would review hotel meal checks to see which of his players might be overeating. One of his heavier players once convinced a waiter to write down “asparagus” on his check when he had actually ordered pie a la mode.6

 

At first many of McGraw’s players were in awe of him, even afraid of him, but they often grew to admire him. As Josh Devore said of McGraw, “He was this gruff, angry guy sometimes, but the reputation was worse than the reality. How do you think he got so many different kinds of players to play so well for him through the years?”7

McGraw was posthumously elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937 and inducted with the class of 1939. Though flamboyant as a manager, his Hall of Fame plaque read simply “For 30 years manager of the New York Giants. … Under his leadership the Giants won 10 pennants and 3 world championships.”

Connie Mack, whom McGraw recognized as an outstanding manager, called the Giants skipper in 1927 more effusively “the greatest baseball manager of all time.”8

Both Mack and McGraw managed Native American ballplayers who were among the stars of the Deadball Era.

On a pitching staff that included greats like Lefty Grove, Herb Pennock, Eddie Plank, and Rube Waddell, Connie Mack considered Charles Albert Bender (1884-1954) his ace.9

A member of the Chippewa nation (also known as the Ojibwe, and in their own language Anishinaabe, for “original people”) Bender spent part of his childhood on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. His mother was Chippewa and his father was of German-American ancestry. Bender learned to pitch at the famed Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he spent five years, graduating in 1902. He also developed at Carlisle a sharp mind, applying his acuity to the craft of pitching. However, like other Carlisle students, he experienced the disparaging of his Native American heritage, which had a lasting effect on him.

Bender was signed by Connie Mack to a contract with the Philadelphia A’s in 1903. In his rookie year he had an impressive 17 wins. Although various ailments limited his pitching stamina, Bender developed a reputation as a reliable and effective hurler. He especially excelled in his World Series performances. In the only game the A’s won in the 1905 Series, Bender outdueled Joe McGinnity in a four-hit 3-0 shutout. Facing the New York Giants in the 1911 World Series, Bender pitched brilliantly, winning two of three starts, posting a 1.04 ERA, and striking out 20 batters in 26 innings.

Over a 16-year major-league career, Bender won 212 games and posted a .625 winning percentage. He “led the American League in winning percentage three times, tossed a no hitter in 1910, and was one of the early World Series stars, posting a 2.44 earned run average in five career Series.”10

Like other Native American ballplayers, Bender had to endure constant, sometimes vicious, racism. For example, during the 1905 Series against the Giants, Bender was bombarded with racist taunts like “Back to the tepee for yours.” John McGraw even joined in, saying, “It will be off the warpath for you today, Chief.”11 Bender resented the bigotry, as evident in the moniker “Chief” given to virtually all American Indian major leaguers. When applied to all Native American ballplayers, “Chief” “assumed the same patronizing overtone as the term ‘boy’ when applied generically to all African American males.”12

Bender always signed autographs with “Charles” rather than the racist nickname he rejected. “I do not want my name to be presented to the public as an Indian, but as a pitcher,” he told Sporting Life in 1905. However, he was called “Chief” so often during his career that he even allowed the nickname to be etched into his tombstone. Bender’s obituary in The Sporting News carried the headline, “Chief Bender Answers Call to Happy Hunting Grounds.”13

 

In an October 1905 article in Sporting Life, sportswriter Charles Zuber praised Bender for a World Series shutout victory over the Giants, but then added that the success was due to the influence of his manager Connie Mack, for “like the negro on stage, who … ‘will work himself to death’ if you jolly him, the Indian can be ‘conned’ into taking up any sort of burden.”14

For the most part, despite journalists’ assumptions, Bender enjoyed a positive, respectful relationship with Connie Mack. Although other players and coaches, including his own teammates on the Philadelphia Athletics, invariably called Bender “Chief,” Mack never used the label when talking to Bender. Instead, the A’s manager called Bender by his middle name “Albert.” Mack said of his ace pitcher, “If I had all the men I’ve ever handled, and they were in their prime, and there was one game I wanted to win above all others, Albert would be my man.”15

Mack called Bender “the greatest money pitcher the game has ever known,” at a time when the phrase, commonly used in sports, meant “one who excels when the pressure is greatest.”16 That perspective was put into practice when Mack surprised observers by bringing Bender back to pitch the sixth and deciding game of the 1911 World Series against the Giants. In the 1913 World Series, Mack cited Bender’s “baseball smarts” when the pitcher repositioned Athletics outfielders. It was a move, Mack said, that few in the stands would have recognized but which was crucial to winning the game and the Series.17

Connie Mack was not the only one to recognize Bender’s contributions. Christy Mathewson, who faced Bender in the World Series, said of the A’s pitcher that he was “a student of baseball and a deeper student than many fans and writers are willing to admit. His presence on the bench or coaching lines would naturally mean much to a ball club, for I have never met a player who could grasp situations as quickly as the Indian.”18 Mathewson observed that Bender had “a cool head and a fine arm and plenty of courage.”19

John Tortes Meyers also paid tribute to Bender, calling him “one of the main dependencies of Connie Mack’s wonderful Athletics” and adding, “Fandom has endorsed him as one of the greatest pitchers of the age.”20

At a time when one of the stereotypes often applied to Native American athletes was that they were lazy and lacked the will to win, Albert Bender was a consummate competitor. He “did not simply want to win baseball games, he burned with a white heat to win them.” Sportswriters often described Bender’s demeanor on the mound as “stern,” “cool,” “stoical,” and “impassive,” but there was no doubting his intensity in crucial games. What made him such a competitor was not only “a blazing fastball, a very good slider and change-up, and an ardent desire to win, [but also] keen intelligence.” Sometimes reporters would set aside their racial prejudice and note, as one wrote, that Bender pitched “with brain and nerve rather than brawn.”21

However, it is important to note that Connie Mack’s relationship with Bender was not always positive. After the 1908 season, one of Bender’s weakest on the mound, Mack was told that his starting pitcher was contemplating leaving the A’s to devote himself to trap shooting, another sport at which he excelled. Mack responded by saying, “[H]e did very little work for us last year and it is immaterial to me whether he pitches for the Athletics this season.”22 Bender relented and signed a contract with a 50 percent pay cut, but it left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Bender’s pitching also faltered during the 1912 season, in part as a result of his abuse of alcohol, which some believe began after the sudden death of his younger brother, John, who was also a baseball player.23 Reporters took notice that Bender was at times so obviously inebriated that Mack had to respond. Drawing on common stereotypes, sportswriter F.C. Lane wrote in Baseball Magazine that Mack blasted Bender when his star hurler “blew in [to the team hotel] after a somewhat prolonged dalliance with the fire water which the soul of the red man craveth.”24 Mack tried tolerating Bender’s drinking, but after more incidents, he suspended Bender and his drinking buddy, outfielder Rube Oldring.25

Before the 1913 season, Bender apologized to his manager for his behavior during the 1912 campaign and promised to remain sober. Mack once again cut Bender’s salary in half and wrote into his contract that he would receive his full salary only if he “refrains from intoxicating liquors.”26 Bender’s stellar record during the 1913 season suggests that he kept his promise, and his relationship with Mack improved.27

The next year tension between Mack and Bender reemerged. The A’s manager told Bender to scout the Boston Braves, whom the A’s would face in the 1914 World Series. Instead, Bender went on a fishing trip. When Mack confronted him, Bender’s excuse was that the Braves were just a “bunch of bush leaguers.”30 The “Miracle” Braves,” as they were known, proved him wrong, sweeping the A’s four games to none in the Series.

During the 1930s, after his playing career had ended and he had overcome his drinking problems, Bender reconciled with Mack.31 He was named a scout for the A’s and continued in that role into the 1940s. In 1951 he served as the team’s pitching coach.32 Mack and Bender remained friends for the rest of their lives. A clearly emotional Mack attended Bender’s funeral in 1954.

Charles Albert Bender knew both Connie Mack and John McGraw, as a player and coach. He summarized their styles well, saying, “They were different types, but both were real leaders. Mr. Mack was the fatherly, soft-spoken type while Mugsy was the hard-boiled, swashbuckling hell-for-leather type.”33

John McGraw also managed several Native Americans during his career, including Jim Thorpe. However, the best ballplayer among the Indians for whom McGraw was skipper was John Tortes Meyers of the Cahuilla tribe of Southern California. He was also known by the racist moniker “Chief.” McGraw signed Meyers, who was playing for the St. Paul Apostles (later the Saints), for $6,000 in 1908, a substantial sum for the time. Connie Mack had tried to trade with the Apostles for Meyers but lost in the bidding war to McGraw.

The investment paid off as Meyers, a catcher, became a power hitter and trusted batterymate of the great Christy Mathewson from 1909 until Meyers left the Giants to join the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1916.

Early in his professional career, when playing for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, minor-league team, Meyers demonstrated that he was willing to challenge his manager, a man named Calhoun. Meyers was sent into a game to catch a pitcher who threw a spitball, a pitch Meyers had at the time never seen. He couldn’t handle it and Calhoun pulled him. Instead of retiring meekly to the bench, Meyers confronted his manager and, in Meyers’ own words, “balled [sic] him out like a veteran.” Calhoun apologized and from that point on Meyers was accepted by his manager and teammates.34 This was a story Meyers often told, because it illustrated in his mind that he was being harassed not only because he was a rookie, but because he was an Indian. A half-century later he told Lawrence Ritter, “I don’t like to say this, but in those days, when I was young, I was considered a foreigner. I didn’t belong. I was an Indian.”35

Meyers’ relationship with John McGraw was different. He was among the players who respected the Giants manager. The Cahuilla catcher credited McGraw with changing the way ballplayers were viewed and how they were paid. At a time when baseball players were considered ruffians and second-class citizens, forced to stay in inferior hotels, Meyers claimed, “Mr. McGraw was the one who changed all that. He was the one who paid the price, and even more than the price, to get his ball team into the best hotels. Now, the ballplayer is respected.”36

According to Meyers, McGraw’s insistence upon respect was not only for members of his own team, but for other players as well. On one occasion the Giants manager chewed out fans during a game played in Pittsburgh, shaming them for booing the Pirates shortstop Honus Wagner when he made a fielding error. Meyers said that McGraw “stood up in front of the stands, held up his hands and gave those babies a piece of his mind. McGraw was a commanding figure, you know, and when he got through telling ’em about Wagner they were cheering instead of booing.”37

Meyers also admired McGraw as “a master of invective and irony.” He couldn’t stand a player telling him “I thought.” According to Meyers, “Mr. McGraw didn’t use cuss words. He could cut you down without them.” Once when McGraw questioned Meyers’ pitch selection, the catcher responded, “I thought …” Before he could finish, McGraw said scornfully, “What with?”38

Meyers sometimes got the better of his manager in these feisty exchanges. On one occasion the Giants catcher noticed that a Dodgers pitcher with a great pickoff move to first base was tipping the throw. On the bench Meyers asked his manager if he could steal second base the next time he reached first. McGraw fumed, “Don’t ever steal a base. That’s not your job.” Meyers said he could not resist taking advantage of the opportunity and stole second anyway. McGraw fined him $10, but then asked the slow-footed catcher how he was able to steal the base so easily. Meyers responded by asking if the fine would be dropped if he told him. McGraw agreed and Meyers explained how the pitcher was tipping the throw. “After that,” Meyers remembered, “we ran the poor guy out of the league.”39

What did John McGraw think of Meyers? In a 1912 article, when Meyers was at his peak, McGraw called him “a vicious hitter … the greatest natural hitter in the game.” He also described him as “one of the best catchers in the National League,” “a quick thinker,” “a team leader,” and “all around a very valuable man.”40

On another occasion, after Meyers had caught George Wiltse in a one-hitter against the Pirates, the Giants manager gave his catcher nearly as much credit as he did Wiltse, saying, “It was one of the greatest exhibitions of outguessing skilled batters that [I] ever saw.” He went on to praise Meyers as a hitter, commenting, “[H]e is the only man that [I] ever saw who is more likely to hit that ball when a hit will bring in runs than he is when the bases are clear.”41

All things considered, Meyers’ relationship with McGraw was enigmatic. Like many other players and managers at the time, McGraw could act in a racist manner. He was the Baltimore Orioles’ third baseman in 1897 when Louis Sockalexis, one of the first Native Americans to play in the major leagues, signed with Cleveland. The first time Sockalexis appeared in Baltimore, McGraw took the field before the game “wearing a war bonnet with feathers reaching down below the seat of his baggy pants” and chanted “war whoops.” The crowd got the point. “Every time Sockalexis came to the plate, ear-splitting war whoops erupted in the stands. For the remaining games in the series many Baltimore fans wore feathered headdresses.”42

In 1901 McGraw was still managing the Orioles. In a scheme to circumvent the “gentleman’s agreement” that banned Blacks from playing major-league baseball, he signed Charlie Grant, an African American who played in the Negro leagues. McGraw gave Grant the moniker “Charlie Tokahoma,” a play on “poke a homer,” and passed him off as a “full-blooded Cherokee.” The ploy was discovered by Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, who recognized Grant and put out the word that he was not an Indian, but a Negro “fixed up with war paint and a bunch of feathers.” McGraw would not have objected to Comiskey’s stereotypical description of Grant’s garb, for he had used it himself in demeaning Sockalexis.43 Meyers had to endure some of the fallout of the Grant incident. Because of his dark skin, Meyers often heard shouts of the “n-word” from the stands.44

Meyers’s Native American teammate Jim Thorpe rebelled against McGraw’s overt racism and abusive tactics while playing for the Giants. Once, after Thorpe missed one of McGraw’s signs, the manager yelled at him, “You dumb Indian!” It took half the team to restrain Thorpe from physically attacking his manager.45 On another occasion, after learning that Thorpe had visited a New York bar, McGraw said to him, “A young fellow like you shouldn’t ever drink. Besides no Indian knows how to drink.” A clearly irked Thorpe responded, “What about the Irish,” to which McGraw, sensitive about his heritage and his many barroom escapades, said, “Listen, don’t get smart with me!” “I’m not,” replied Thorpe. “It just happens I’m Irish too.”46

Unfortunately, Meyers involved himself in an incident that showed McGraw’s distrustful supervision of Thorpe. When Thorpe joined the Giants, McGraw instructed Meyers to open Thorpe’s mail, even love letters from Thorpe’s fiancée. When Thorpe found one of the intimate notes in Meyers’ locker, he exploded and chased the catcher around the locker room. Thorpe couldn’t catch him, and McGraw, who was observing the scene, chuckled and said, “Looks as though the wrong Indian competed in the Olympic games.”47

In the final analysis, although certainly aware of McGraw’s racist temperament and behavior, Meyers really believed that his manager looked for talent regardless of the player’s ethnicity.48 He also was convinced that in addition to imparting baseball knowledge and skills, McGraw cultivated in players willing to look beyond his bluster and bias “a professional attitude, maturity, and self-respect.”49 Although he was only seven years younger than his manager, John Tortes Meyers considered John McGraw a mentor from whom he learned not only baseball knowledge but valuable life lessons as well.

Meyers summed up his attitude toward his manager in his 1964 interview with Lawrence Ritter for The Glory of Their Times: “What a wonderful man he was. Honest and forthright and charitable in the deepest sense of the word. We always called him Mr. McGraw. Never John or Mac. Always Mr. McGraw.”50

According to Meyers’ grandnephew, the Cahuilla catcher’s most precious possession was not the bat Babe Ruth gave him but rather a gold watch fob in the shape of a catcher’s mitt with a diamond on the clasp and a pearl to represent a baseball. It was presented to him by John McGraw.51

WILLIAM A. YOUNG is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. The books he has written on baseball include John Tortes Meyers: A Baseball Biography and J. L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs Trailblazers in Black Baseball. For the latter book, he received a SABR Research Award. He also contributed essays to the SABR volumes on Jackie Robinson and the Kansas City Monarchs. He is the author of Quest for Harmony: Native American Spiritual Traditions and several other books on religion. Young is a lifelong St. Louis Cardinals fan. He and his wife, Sue, also a retired educator and Cardinals fan, reside in Columbia, Missouri.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An earlier version of this essay appeared in William A. Young, John Tortes “Chief” Meyers: A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2012).

Background information on Connie Mack is drawn from his SABR biography by Doug Skipper: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/connie-mack/, on John McGraw from Don Jensen’s BioProject biography: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/john-mcgraw-2/. Baseball-reference.com was consulted for statistics.

 

NOTES

1 New York Times, February 9, 1956.

2 Norman Macht, Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 588.

3 Charles Alexander, John McGraw (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 3-4.

4 Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1934, 10; cited in Richard Adler, Mack, McGraw and the 1913 Baseball Season (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2008), 39.

5 Tom Simon, ed. Deadball Stars of the National League (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 39.

6 Frank DeFord, The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 158.

7 Mike Vaccaro, The First Fall Classic: The Red Sox, the Giants, and the Cast of Players, Pugs, and Politicos Who Reinvented the World Series in 1912 (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 114.

8 Norman Macht, Connie Mack: The Turbulent & Triumphant Years 1915-1931 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 451.

9 Background information on Charles Albert Bender drawn from SABR BioProject article on Bender by Tom Swift. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/charles-bender/.

10 Robert Peyton Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2010), 6.

11 Jeffrey P. Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 74-75.

12 William C. Kashatus, Money Pitcher: Chief Bender and the Tragedy of Indian Assimilation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2006), 59.

13 Tom Swift, SABR BioProject article.

14 Beck, 73.

15 Tom Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 252.

16 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 83.

17 Beck, 71.

18 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 251.

19 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 215.

20 John T. Meyers, “Meyers Lauds Jim Thorpe, Olympic Hero,” New York American, May 25, 1913.

21 Beck, 70-71.

22 Washington Post, February 21, 1909; cited by Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 105, and Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 46.

23 Kashatus, Money Pitcher, 95.

24 F.C. Lane, “Greatest by Manager in Organized Baseball,” Baseball Magazine, May 1913, vol. X, no. 7; cited by Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 152.

25 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 222.

26 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 224.

27 Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 156.

28 Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 6; Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 193.

29 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 208, 224; Kashatus, Money Pitcher, 102.

30 Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 175; Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 209; Kashatus, Money Pitcher, 112.

31 Kashatus, Money Pitcher, 145-47.

32 Wiggins, Chief Bender: A Baseball Biography, 225.

33 Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden, 194-95.

34 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 29, 1909.

35 Lawrence Ritter, “Chief Meyers,” The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It, Enlarged Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 172.

36 Ritter, The Glory of Their Times, 172.

37 Grantland Rice, “A Talk with Chief Meyers,” February 4, 1947 (John Tortes Meyers File, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York).

38 Paul Zimmerman, “Sportscripts,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1947, 10; Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball, 85-86.

39 Jim Dawson, “McGraw Rescinded Fine After Talk with Chief,” Riverside (California) Press-Enterprise, June 25, 1969.

40 John McGraw, “Making a Pennant Winner,” Pearson’s Magazine, November 1912: 121.

41 Unidentified, unattributed, undated article, John Tortes Meyers file, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York.

42 Brian McDonald, Indian Summer: The Forgotten Story of Louis Sockalexis – the First Native American in Major League Baseball (Emmaus, Pennsylvania: Rodale Press, 2003), 131.

43 Kashatus, Money Pitcher, 58.

44 Beck, 81.

45 Kate Buford, Native Son: The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 215.

46 Beck, 92-93.

47 Beck, 93.

48 Ritter, The Glory of Their Times, 174.

49 Alexander, John McGraw, 5.

50 Ritter, The Glory of Their Times, 174-75.

51 Colonel John V. Meyers, personal interview, September 22, 2008.