Boston's ace "Smoky Joe" Wood and New York's "The Christian Gentleman" Mathewson were far, far more popular and revered than the mugs Wilson and Roosevelt who were campaigning for president against the great baseball fan, President Taft.  The Giants had all the advantages with scale and fame and those black uniforms -- and the Giants had John "Mugsy" McGraw, (left) too: "You win championships on the field, not in the newspapers."  What Boston had was Smoky Joe (right), who had the career year with a fastball that smoked, and Boston also had a just built gem of a park called Fenway and that odd feature later called "the Wall."  The post-pennant World Series the first dozen times had been a mess of promotion, cash and disappointment, given that the Nationals usually won.  The Giants had not won since 1905, but they carried themselves as if the crowd belonged to New York and was leased to others on occasion.   The commission decided that New York and Boston would play seven games over eight days (Sunday off), and also switch parks every day, so there was a lot of time playing cards on the railroad on a Special Train, No. 26.  Every game, every inning, every out was followed religiously by telegraph to newspaper offices on Herald Square and Newspaper Row in New York and to the cheers of the First Red Sox Rooter John "Honey" Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston, as well as to newspapers across the country.  It was heartbreakingly joyous when Boston took the first game in the Polo Fields (Coogan's Bluff, where New York-Presbyterian Hospital stands today).  Game two in Boston was Mathewson's to win, but it was called as a tie for darkness, and then the series got really serious.  Vaccaro portrays the zeal, romance, comedy, gamesmanship and American firepower of the event that turned baseball into a cult -- and this was before the Giants shared the Polo Grounds with the upstart nine, the New York Highlanders, who were sometimes referred to, as the rookies in town, as the Yankees.)  Afterward, the lifetime of regret for Giants centerfielder Fred Snodgrass means that 1912 will always be with us in that commonplace soliloquy of youth, "What Coulda Been."