Fenway Park

by John Powers

  Every significant moment from every year is here, and then some. The dramatic World Series victory over the Giants in 1912. The 1934 fire that scorched Tom Yawkey’s renovated park. Ted Williams’s “Great Expectoration” of 1956. Jim Lonborg’s “hero’s ride” after putting the Sox in position to secure the Impossible Dream pennant in 1967. Carlton Fisk’s dramatic, “is-it-fair?” homer in the 12th inning of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series against the Reds. Bucky “Bleeping” Dent’s heartbreaking screen shot in the 1978 divisional playoff game with New York. Roger Clemens’s record 20 strikeouts against the Mariners in 1986. Dave Roberts’ stolen base against the Yankees in 2004 that was the beginning of the end of 86 years of October frustration.

  Fenway is all about lore. The Royal Rooters torturing visiting ballplayers with incessant renditions of “Tessie.” Williams’s monster bleacher shot knocking a hole in a fan’s straw hat. Manny Ramirez’s mystery disappearance inside the belly of the Monster. Jimmy Piersall oinking like a pig on the base paths. Luis Tiant’s rhumba windup that the New Yorker’s Roger Angell dubbed “Call the Osteopath.” Pedro Martinez playing matador to former skipper Don Zimmer’s enraged bull during a brawl with the Yankees. A midget coming out of the stands to cover third when the Indians used the “Williams Shift.”

  This is the story of 100 years of Fenway Park, in chapter and verse, by the people who lived it.

  1910s

  A member of the Royal Rooters, a group of passionate Red Sox fans, sounded the drumbeat during a 1903 World Series game with the Pittsburgh Pirates at Huntington Avenue Grounds. The Rooters continued their antics for several years after the Sox moved to Fenway.

  “Now for the opening of Boston’s magnificent new ballpark and a chance to see the Red Sox in action while leading the American League, a position gained while on the road.”

  —BOSTON GLOBE, APRIL 20, 1912

  By the time Fenway Park debuted it was something of an anticlimax. The ballpark, which replaced the old Huntington Avenue Grounds, actually had been opened and used 11 days earlier when a handful of fans braved wintry weather to see the Red Sox shut out Harvard College in an exhibition. The game with the New York Highlanders (now Yankees) had been postponed by two days of rain. And most people were preoccupied with the Titanic, which had sunk on April 15 with several dozen New Englanders among those aboard. The day the new ballpark opened it was packed with 24,000 spectators, yet attendance for the season would total only 597,000. Sporting News predicted that the park would become more popular when people got accustomed to “journeying in the new direction.” In its first season Fenway hosted the World Series, and two years later it did so again—for the crosstown Boston Braves. The park’s colorful fandom featured saloonkeeper Michael McGreevy, society lady Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the raucous Royal Rooters, and they cheered the Sox to four world titles in seven seasons. But in Fenway’s early days, it was much more than the home base for the Red Sox; it hosted football, lacrosse, hurling, parades, memorials, and political gatherings. Former President Teddy Roosevelt attended an outing in 1914 at Fenway, 30 years before his cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, gave the final campaign speech of his life there. The decade was capped by a rally for Irish independence attended by 50,000, by a world title captured in a season abbreviated by the Great War, and by a trade that would become the 86-year symbol of Red Sox futility.

  A rendering of the new ballpark from architect James E. McLaughlin was published in the Boston Globe, which estimated the cost of the park at $1 million.

  From the very beginning, the cherished and cursed home of the Boston Red Sox was the most misshapen and quirky collection of angles and corners in baseball. It was, John Updike wrote, “a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.” Even the much-beloved name started as a simple tribute to geography. “It’s in the Fenway section, isn’t it?” the team’s owner said at the time.

  The very genesis of Fenway Park was a matter of straightforward commerce. John I. Taylor was the owner of a ball club that played in a rented park. What he wanted was to own half of a club playing in a ballpark that he fully controlled, preferably in the embryonic neighborhood where his real estate company owned a large chunk of the reclaimed swampland that he and his partners hoped to develop into one of Boston’s desirable districts.

  So he bought more than 365,000 square feet from his company, had architect James McLaughlin draw up plans and sold half of the Red Sox to former Washington Senators manager Jimmy McAleer for $150,000. Taylor then set about building what the Boston Globe promised would be a “magnificent baseball plant” between Lansdowne and Ipswich Streets. The new facility would be made of concrete and steel with a brick exterior that was a cross between a South End bowfront and a New England cotton mill and it would accommodate 28,000 spectators, twice as many as did the wooden Huntington Avenue Grounds in which the team had played since 1901.

  Taylor, whose father Charles was publisher of the Globe, opted for the obvious and commercially convenient name of Fenway Park. The constraints of the site, cost, calendar, and concern for squinting batsmen led to Fenway’s endearing and infuriating dimensions.

  Since Taylor didn’t want hitters blinded by the setting sun in an era when games began at 3:30 p.m., he had the diamond oriented with home plate looking out toward Lansdowne.

  He didn’t want freeloaders sneaking into the standing areas in the outfield or peering down from nearby rooftops, so he erected a 25-foot wooden wall that he could cover with paid advertisements and that was buttressed by a 10-foot incline that made fielding fly balls something between art and accident.

  Red Sox team president John I. Taylor, whose father was principal owner of the Globe, sold half of the Red Sox and built Fenway Park on land that he owned in the newly developed Fenway section of the city.

  The first ball put into play in the first game at Fenway Park, with an inscription by umpire Tom Connolly.

  The Boston Post ran several photos of the new ballpark the day after the Red Sox defeated the New York Highlanders, 7-6, in 11 innings, in the park’s inaugural game.

  Hall of Fame outfielder Harry Hooper is the only man to play on four Red Sox world championship teams.

  Although the foundation was designed to support an upper deck, Taylor wanted his $650,000 playpen finished in time for the 1912 season, which left only seven months from the September groundbreaking. So a grandstand was built to hold 15,000 ticket holders with additional seating along the lines. Quartets of box seats were offered at $250 for the season, with pavilion seats going for 50 cents a game and bleacher spaces for 25 cents.

  Fenway Park was such a novelty and the April weather so inhospitable that what the Globe called “the real down-to-the-book official dedication with the music stuff, the flowers and the flags” did not occur until May 17, when the Sox lost to Chicago, 5-2, after leading 2-1 until the ninth, before 17,000 fans. Only 3,000 witnesses had turned out for the dress rehearsal on April 9, a 2-0 exhibition game victory over Harvard that was played amid snow flurries. “It was no day for baseball,” the Globe concluded. Nor were April 18 and Patriots Day, when the scheduled league opener and rescheduled doubleheader were rained out.

  When the sun finally appeared on April 20, more than 24,000 fans were on hand for the first official game and what would, in later decades, become a celebrated rarity—a victory over New York, this one achieved in 11 innings by a 7-6 count.

  It took another four games for a ball to be knocked over the left-field wall, which then was more of a barrier than a monster. The man who did it, reserve first baseman Hugh Bradley, had hit only one other homer in his career and never managed another. But after sitting on one of southpaw Lefty Russell’s corkscrew curves, Bradley lashed “a terrific smash” over the fence for a three-run shot that gave the Sox a 7-6 victory over the Athletics. “The scene that followed was indescribable,” Tim Murnane wrote in the Globe. “Spectators jumped onto their seats and threw their hats in the a
ir and howled like Indians until Bradley had ducked out of sight, with the Boston players offering congratulations.” The Sox quickly proved themselves capable of running up dizzying numbers. “SWAT! SWAT! SWAT!” read the Globe headline after the “Speed Boys“ outgunned Washington, 33-19, in a May 29 home doubleheader, with the scorers for both clubs covering over three-and-a-half miles (“Hitting and Run-Getting on Wholesale Basis at Fenway Park”). On June 29, rain washed out the game with New York with Boston leading, 10-0, with two out in the first inning. But the hosts won, 8-0, the next day.

  By July 20, when the club was in first place by seven games over the Senators, the Globe essentially awarded it the pennant with this headline: “Keen Head Work Combined With Acutely Schemed Team Play; Excellent Pitching, Catching, Infield and Outfield Action; Timely Hitting and Shrewd Base Running Have Shined Gloriously Bright the Outlook for Winning the 1912 Championship.”

  Howard “Smoky Joe” Wood, the game’s best “twirler,” went an astounding 34-5 for the Sox in 1912, while his teammates Buck O’Brien and Hugh Bedient each won 20 games. Tris Speaker batted .383 and Duffy Lewis knocked in 109 runs. The Sox didn’t even have to clinch the pennant on their own. When they were being rained out in Cleveland on September 18, the White Sox beat the Athletics to give Boston its first American League title since 1904. By then management had already begun expanding Fenway’s capacity to 32,000, adding 900 box seats and new stands in left and right field.

  “The game was full of interest, the crowd holding its seats to the end, figuring that the Red Sox would eventually nose out the Broadway swells.”

  —T. H. Murnane, Boston Globe, April 21, 1912, in a

  story headlined “Sox Open to Packed Park”

  BACK IN THE DAY

  BY JOHN POWERS

  The Red Sox began the 1912 season with a new brick-and-steel ball yard (“the mammoth plant with the commodious fittings”) and no ghosts. Their fifth-place finish in 1911 had been forgotten. By the time they hosted the New York Highlanders on April 20, a sunny Saturday afternoon, they were already sitting in first place in the eight-team American League, well on the way to the finest year in club history (105-47 and the world championship over the New York Giants).

  J. Garland “Jake” Stahl, the new player-manager who worked as a Chicago banker in the off-season, had promised no less. The Red Sox, he said, would give the Boston public “only the best of baseball this season, barring accidents.”

  “It will be good to play some baseball,” Stahl said. “We have come out of Hot Springs [Arkansas] ready to go. We started well and we do not need any more postponements.”

  The Red Sox were 4-1 after wins in New York and Philadelphia on the way north. The visiting Highlanders had not liked sitting around in their hotel—the Copley Plaza—for extra, wasteful days.

  Opening Day was perhaps something of an anticlimax. Fenway Park, which replaced the old Huntington Avenue Grounds, actually had been opened and used 11 days earlier when 3,000 customers shivered amid snow flurries while the Red Sox shut out Harvard in an exhibition. The game with the Highlanders (now Yankees) had been postponed by two days of rain, from Thursday to Saturday. And most people were preoccupied with the Titanic, which had sunk on Monday morning with several dozen New Englanders aboard.

  The Boston-New York game was listed on the amusements page of the newspaper, merely one of several urban attractions that day. Billie Burke was playing in The Runaway at the Hollis Street Theatre. There was a Taft rally at Faneuil Hall, the Textile and Power Show at the Mechanics Building (admission 25 cents), the BSO at Symphony Hall. And at the Park Theatre, Hoopla! Father Doesn’t Care!!

  If you wanted to attend Opening Day, you could buy a reserved seat in the grandstands for 75 cents or a bleacher seat for a quarter. Tickets were available at Wright and Ditson at 344 Washington Street or at the gate. The ballpark was packed with 24,000 spectators, with hundreds of them standing behind a rope in the outfield. Yet attendance for the season would total only 597,000. The Sporting News predicted that the park would become more popular when people got accustomed to “journeying in the new direction.”

  If you owned a car in 1912, you could park it almost anywhere you pleased near the ballpark. The only two buildings near the park were a riding school and a garage out beyond right field. The West Fens was terra nova at the time. Artists, students, musicians, and assorted bohemians lived there, out beyond the water and marsh. Speculators owned the land, looking to sell it to developers who would erect apartment buildings near the trolley lines.

  Most of the Opening Day crowd arrived by public transit, taking the Ipswich Street, Beacon Street or Commonwealth Avenue cars and walking past open lots to the park. A cadre of “big, fine-looking officers” from Division 16 preserved order. Inside the park customers drank Pureoxia ginger ale, Dr. Swett’s Original Root Beer, and cold lager. If Fenway Franks were available, it was not recorded.

  Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald (the future maternal grandfather of President John F. Kennedy) tossed out the first ball, with Governor Eugene Foss at his side, and Buck O’Brien threw the first pitch at 3:10 p.m. “There was no time wasted in childish parades,” Globe writer T.H. Murnane observed. The boisterous Royal Rooters, led by South End saloonkeeper Michael T. “Nuf Ced” McGreevy, serenaded the assemblage with their theme song, “Tessie.”

  The Red Sox, also called the Speed Boys, climbed out of a 5-1 hole and won, 7-6, in 11 innings, helped by five hits, including a pair of doubles, by second baseman Steve Yerkes. Murnane wrote, “Tristram Speaker, the Texas sharpshooter, with two down in the 11th inning and Yerkes on third, smashed the ball too fast for the shortstop to handle and the winning run came over the plate . . . the immense crowd leaving for home for a cold supper but wreathed in smiles.” The size of the crowd may have hindered the Red Sox cause, said Murnane. “Before the game, the crowd broke into the outfield and remained behind the ropes, forcing the teams to make ground rules, all hits going for two bases. This ruling was a big disadvantage to the home team, for the Highland laddies never hit for more than a single, while three of Boston’s hits went into the crowd, whereas with a clear field they would have gone for three-base drives and possibly home runs, and would have landed the home team a winner before the ninth inning.”

  The writers finished up their scorecards promptly at 6:20 and went back to Newspaper Row. Nobody bothered entering the clubhouse to talk to the players.

  Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald tipped his hat after throwing out the first pitch on April 20, 1912, the first official game in Fenway Park history.

  A view from the stands in 1912.

  Even if you didn’t have a ticket, you could view the 1912 World Series through gaps in a fence at the new Fenway Park, where the Red Sox took on the New York Giants.

  Mayor John Fitzgerald (standing) and star pitcher “Smoky Joe” Wood (in the back, with bow tie) took part in Boston’s victory parade after the 1912 World Series.

  “Smoky Joe” Wood dominated the American League in 1912 with a 34-5 record, including 10 shutouts. He also contributed three World Series victories as the Red Sox vanquished the New York Giants.

  When the team returned from Detroit on September 23, a crowd of 200,000 jammed Summer Street for a parade as the players rode in cars from South Station to the Common. “No general and his army, returning victorious from war, were ever received with wilder or more enthusiastic acclaim,” James O’Leary observed in the Globe. Pennant fever was contagious. Women wore scarlet hose and carried dolls dressed in Boston uniforms while men sported oversized neckties with large red stockings woven in.

  After the Sox took the World Series opener from the Giants in New York, more than 1,000 fans were in line at dawn when bleacher seats went on sale for the first home date. “Many had attendants with them who did their bidding, such as running errands to procure cigars, eatables, and wraps when the night air was biting,” the Globe reported.

  Not since the Sox defeated Pittsburg
h for the 1903 championship had they played in the Series and it was the social event of the year. “Staid citizens of conservative Boston danced in their boxes,” remarked the Globe. “They shouted, they hugged their neighbors and punched perfect strangers in the ribs, inquiring opinions they could not hear and didn’t care about.”

  More than 6,000 supporters who couldn’t acquire tickets stood 25 deep on Washington Street, watching the game unfold on a scoreboard in front of the Globe offices downtown with “the stentorian tones of Frank J. Flynn announcing play after play.”

  The game was called for darkness after 11 innings with the score deadlocked at 6-6 and after the visitors won the replay a day later, the stage was set for a Series where winning at home was a challenge. After New York battered Wood with six first-inning runs and went on to win by an 11-4 count to knot the Series at three games each, the season came down to one game at Fenway, and one historic blunder—the “$30,000 Muff” of pinch hitter Clyde Engle’s routine fly by New York outfielder Fred Snodgrass that put the tying run on second in the 10th inning.

  HOLY SMOKY: WOOD’S SEASON FOR THE AGES

  BY BOB RYAN

  If you could be one Boston athlete for one year of the 20th century, who would it be? Bobby Orr in 1970? Larry Bird in 1986? Ted Williams in 1941? Doug Flutie in 1984? These are all worthy choices.

  But my choice is a 22-year-old young man having the ultimate career year playing baseball in a baseball-mad town. There was an aura of freshness and spontaneity because the team had opened a new ballpark. Imagine being 34-5 and dominant enough to have two official nicknames. Imagine being able to help yourself continually with both the bat and the glove. Imagine staring down the immortal Walter Johnson in the most ballyhooed regular-season game ever played in Fenway Park. Imagine winning three games in the World Series. Imagine being that young, that intelligent, that handsome, that gracious, that talented, and that idolized. Imagine being Smoky Joe Wood in 1912. I can’t think of anything better.