Fenway Park

by John Powers

  When Williams finally turned up, he was both relaxed and reflective, eager to put the tumult and torment of the previous season behind him. He even “shook hands all around” with newspaper reporters, the Globe reported on March 10. “They said I was a heel and I’ll admit I had a lousy attitude,” he later conceded in June. “But I don’t think I deserved all they wrote about me, even though I have to admit the start of it all probably was my fault.”

  Nobody could find a flaw in his performance, as Williams went on a 23-game hitting streak during which his average soared to .436. “The Kid has grown up,” the Globe declared.

  When he hit the game-winning, three-run homer with two out in the ninth inning in Detroit to win the All-Star Game for the American League, there was no doubt about who was baseball’s most electrifying player. By then the Sox had fallen out of contention after being swept at New York. The only two story lines keeping Boston fans intrigued were Ted Williams’s quest to hit .400 (something no one had done for a full season since 1930) and Lefty Grove’s push to reach 300 career wins.

  It had been 16 years since his first victory and Grove was at the end of his career at age 41. When he took the mound against the Indians on Ladies Day in Fenway, he hadn’t won a game in more than three weeks. The thermometer read 90 degrees and Grove fell four runs behind. “The toughest game I ever sweated through,” he said. But Foxx’s two-run triple and Jim Tabor’s second homer gave the Sox a 10-6 triumph and Grove, who never won another game, his 300th career victory. Grove was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1947.

  An American Legion memorial Mass on May 20, 1940.

  FOOTBALL, FATE, AND THE COCOANUT GROVE

  In 1896, Boston College and Holy Cross played the first game in what was to become one of the longest-running rivalries in college football. In 1916, the schools squared off at Fenway Park for the first time, and in 1920, BC capped an 8-0 season with a 14-0 victory over Holy Cross before 40,000 fans at Braves Field.

  BC hired Frank Leahy as coach in 1939, and he turned the Eagles into a national power that won 20 of 22 games over the next two years, including an undefeated season in 1940 and two straight victories in the Sugar Bowl in 1940 and 1941.

  The Eagles were routinely dominating their rivals from Worcester, and entering the 1942 matchup at Fenway Park, undefeated BC had routed its eight previous opponents that season by a combined 249-19 and was nearly assured of a berth in the Sugar Bowl. Holy Cross was 4-4-1, and the Crusaders were expected to provide little resistance. BC had already scheduled a victory party at the swanky Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston.

  A crowd of 41,350 packed Fenway Park on November 28, and, led by halfback Johnny Bezemes, who scored three touchdowns and passed for another one, Holy Cross proceeded to rout the vaunted Eagles, 55-12. Seeing its expected spot in the Sugar Bowl vanish, BC canceled its victory party. That night, a deadly fire swept through the glitzy Cocoanut Grove nightclub, killing nearly 500 people in the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history. A BC victory surely would have resulted in the deaths of some of its football players, as a large table had been reserved for the team in the club’s main dining room.

  William Commane, a fullback on the 1942 BC squad, had planned to be at the Cocoanut Grove that night, but like his teammates, he switched plans after their loss and went to the Statler Hotel. “The next day, I was listening to the radio at home with my family,” Commane recalled. “They read out the names all day; it was a terrible tragedy. The football game didn’t mean much after that.”

  The teams’ annual clash in 1956, a 7-0 Holy Cross victory, would be their final contest at Fenway Park, as the Red Sox banned football from the ballpark for several years. Shortly thereafter, the schools took different athletic paths, with Holy Cross deciding to de-emphasize the sport. In 1986, after losing 17 of the previous 20 games to BC, Holy Cross terminated the series.

  LIB DOOLEY: ULTIMATE FAN

  Elizabeth “Lib” Dooley got her first season ticket during World War II and didn’t miss a Red Sox home game for the next half-century, attending more than 4,000 consecutive ballgames at Fenway. She had a direct link to the franchise’s beginnings in 1901 through her father, and she sat in the first row behind the Red Sox on-deck circle in Box 36-A. Mickey Mantle would stick out his tongue at her when he homered for the Yankees, and she was Ted Williams’s favorite fan.

  “Forever, she’s the greatest Red Sox fan there’ll ever be,” said Williams in 1996.

  Dooley, who retired after 39 years as a physical education teacher in Boston, said that she attempted to guide her students in the right direction by telling them, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke; I go to ballgames.”

  Dooley fell in love with the sport in an era when she was one of the comparatively few female baseball fans. She grew up hearing the men in her family share stories about the game and looked forward to days when she could accompany her father to the ballpark.

  Dooley decided to buy her own season pass in 1944 and “make baseball my hobby.” One of her sisters had taken up bridge, but Dooley didn’t have the stomach for that: “I despise bridge and I hate gossip. I wanted something where I could go by myself without anyone ruining it by saying, ‘I can’t do it this week.’ It gets you out in the fresh air and keeps you from talking about your neighbors.”

  Dooley’s father, John Stephen Dooley, helped the upstart American League ballclub get a home at the Huntington Avenue Grounds in 1901. He was also the founder and president of a boosters group known as the Winter League, a forerunner to today’s BoSox Club. According to family lore, Dooley attended every Boston baseball opener from 1894 until his death at the age of 97 in 1970.

  Lib Dooley went on to become a member of the board of directors of the BoSox Club, the team’s official booster club. In 1956, she moved to Kenmore Square so she could walk to Fenway. “It’s seven minutes to the ballpark, a little more now as I get older and the crowds get bigger,” she said in 1995.

  Williams lived nearby, and during his playing days he would visit her apartment on his way to the park, stopping by for “her words of wisdom for the day.”

  “Theodore trusts me,” Dooley explained, “because he knew I was a schoolteacher and I would talk to him straight.” Dooley recalled telling Williams that he’d never know who his real friends were until he left the game.

  For his part, Williams called her “Goddammit Red,” as in: “Goddammit Red, how do you know that?”—even as her red hair became tinged with silver.

  Along with Williams, her favorite players were Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky. She called them “my four baseball brothers.”

  “She was just a perfect lady,” said DiMaggio in June 2000, after Dooley died at 87. “I remember so well when she presented us with our American League championship rings after we won in 1946. She was so thrilled. The Red Sox were practically her whole life.”

  Dooley took at least one road trip with the team every year, and she claimed she’d seen five no-hitters. Despite her prime location, she fielded only one foul ball—a pop-up off the bat of Sox outfielder Carroll Hardy in the early 1960s. She broke two fingers in the effort and never attempted to catch another.

  Jim Rice was a favorite in the 1970s and 1980s, and later on, she took to Nomar Garciaparra. “Nomar would give her a wink when he came into the on-deck circle,” said David Leary, her grandnephew.

  Her strongest negative feelings were reserved for the team in pinstripes.

  “I despised the Yankees,” she said, “because they gave us so much trouble. They always beat us, always.” Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and Mantle “were the only three Yankees who I tolerated, because of their great talent.”

  “The fans are really baseball, not the players,” Dooley said when a strike marred the 1994 and 1995 seasons. “You can always get someone to play ball—it doesn’t have to be someone who gets $4 million to work two hours a day.” A moment later, she added with a grin, “I wonder if I’m going to need a bodyguard to get back into that park.”r />
  Dooley once explained her position thusly: “I do not consider myself a fan. I am a friend of the Red Sox.” An anecdote from her nephew, Owen Boyd, backed up that statement.

  Boyd was at a game with Dooley when she directed him to dial a number for her on his cell phone. To his astonishment, “Happy birthday, Theodore” were the next words out of her mouth.

  “You know Ted Williams?” Boyd asked in amazement.

  “More importantly,” she replied, “Ted Williams knows me.”

  Daily life for grounds crews in the ‘40s included pulling tarps and pushing lawn mowers.

  HOMESTEAD GRAYS COME TO TOWN

  The Homestead Grays, the two-time defending champions of the Negro League who featured Hall of Famers such as Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, defeated the Fore River Shipyard team of the New England Industrial League, 1-0, in a game played at Fenway Park on May 26, 1944.

  The Grays, who were based in Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, played many of their games at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh while also using Washington’s Griffith Stadium as a second “home” park. The team also barnstormed and often played two or three games a day against local amateur and professional teams.

  The Boston Globe had published a one-paragraph story under the headline: “Negro Home Run King at Fenway Tonight.” Second only to the legendary Satchel Paige among Negro League players in terms of fame and popularity, Gibson was generally considered to be the greatest hitter in the history of black baseball and was nicknamed the “Black Babe Ruth.”

  The story also reported, “A United States Marine band will furnish music. Jack Burns, Skinny Graham and Charlie Bird will be in the Fore River lineup.” The game account the next day showed the Grays out-hitting Fore River, 11-5, on their way to a 1-0 win. Some 3,000 fans attended the game.

  Gibson reportedly won nine home-run titles and four batting championships during a 17-year career that ended in 1946. Paige called him “the greatest hitter who ever lived.” Hall of Fame pitcher Carl Hubbell noted, “Any team in the big leagues could use him right now.”

  While Gibson certainly could have helped any major-league team that elected to sign him, the unwritten rules of baseball kept him out of the majors his entire career. Frustration over his lack of opportunity, various illnesses, and despondency over the death of his wife in childbirth caused Gibson to die of a stroke at the age of 35 on January 20, 1947, just three months before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier.

  Two days after the Grays played at Fenway, the ballpark hosted a military memorial Mass that was attended by an estimated 6,000 people. In his sermon, the Reverend John S. Sexton, an American Legion chaplain, spoke out against racial and religious hatred, saying, “Jim Crow-ism and anti-Semitism are un-American, because in the first instance they are anti-God. Let’s put America ahead of our own little cheap individual, and group interests.”

  On June 3, 1947, the Globe’s Hy Hurwitz wrote a story that said the Red Sox were considering signing Negro League star Sam Jethroe. The story noted that Jethroe, who was playing for the Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American Baseball League, was considered the best hitter in the Negro Leagues since Gibson. Jethroe had led the league in both batting average and stolen bases as the Buckeyes won the Negro League title in 1945, beating the Grays in the championship series.

  Had they signed Jethroe, as they were reportedly considering, the Red Sox would have been the only Major League Baseball team other than the Brooklyn Dodgers, who had signed Jackie Robinson in 1945, with a black player on its roster. Jethroe ended up signing with the crosstown Boston Braves, and he would go on to be named the National League’s Rookie of the Year in 1950. It would be more than a decade before the Red Sox promoted Pumpsie Green to their big-league club, making the Sox the final MLB team to integrate its roster.

  The Williams melodrama went until the last day of the season. His average was .406 after his final home game against the Yankees, which he punctuated with a home run. Going into the concluding doubleheader at Philadelphia, it had dipped to .3995. Though Cronin offered to let him sit out the final two games so that his average would be rounded up to .400, Williams was adamant about playing both games. “A batting record is no good unless it’s made in all games of the season,” he declared. Then he proceeded to go 6 for 8 with a homer against the last-place Athletics and finish the season at .406. “Ain’t I the best goddamn hitter you ever saw?” Williams proclaimed in the clubhouse.

  Joe DiMaggio, who strung together a record 56-game hitting streak as the Yankees breezed to the pennant, might have been the Most Valuable Player, but even he wouldn’t challenge the Kid’s primacy at the plate. Williams had a more than reasonable reprise in 1942, leading the league in batting average (.356), runs (141), RBI (137), and homers (36). But with the country at war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was some dispute as to whether he should be playing at all.

  Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, and Sox teammate Mickey Harris already had been called to duty and Williams’s draft board in Minneapolis had reclassified him 1A in January. But since he was supporting his mother, Williams was switched to 3A on appeal and turned up at training camp. “If Uncle Sam says fight, he’ll fight,” Cronin said in February. “Since he has said play ball, Ted has a right to play.”

  But only for one more year, Williams vowed at the end of March. “No matter what happens during the coming season, I’m going to enlist when it’s over,” he said. Williams began it auspiciously, lofting a three-run homer into the bleachers in his first at-bat in the Opening Day victory over the Athletics at Fenway. But despite the emergence of a brace of promising rookies (right-hander Tex Hughson and shortstop Johnny Pesky), the Sox couldn’t catch the Yankees and finished nine games behind their rivals despite winning 93 games, their highest season total since 1915.

  The season finale in the Fens, a symbolic 7-6 victory over New York, was telling. The story of the day was that the fans donated more than 46,000 pounds of scrap metal to the war effort. By 1943, the Sox would be donating a third of their lineup to the cause.

  Williams and Pesky had enlisted with the Navy Air Corps and DiMaggio with the Coast Guard. So Cronin, who’d been easing out of his role as player-manager, pressed himself back into service at 36. The 1943 season figured to be a lost cause anyway after Boston dropped 10 of its first 14 games (seven of them to the Yankees) and sank into the cellar after the first week in May. So the skipper chose Bunker Hill Day, which commemorated a gallant but ultimately losing battle by American rebels against the British in the Revolutionary War, to make a bit of history himself.

  The decade’s renovations included a television and radio coop, perched atop the screen behind home plate.

  His attitude wasn’t always so sunny, but Ted Williams smiled for the camera when he left the Fenway Park locker room in July 1942.

  “I guess the old man showed them something today,” Cronin crowed after he’d pinch-hit home runs in both ends of a doubleheader against the Athletics at Fenway, becoming the first major-league player to manage the feat. By the end of the season he’d hit .429 with five homers coming off the bench. But there was no way to salvage a lost campaign. The Sox ended up in seventh place—29 games behind New York—for their worst finish in a decade as attendance dwindled to its lowest level (358,275) since the Depression.

  Nothing was close to normal during the war. Had it been, the Browns never would have won their only pennant in 1944, displacing the depleted Yankees with a “collection of misfits, 4Fs, brawlers and drunks,” as they were described in The Boys Who Were Left Behind, by John Heidenry and Brett Topel. Still, Boston managed to stay in the pennant race until Labor Day, even after military enlistment took catcher Hal Wagner and Doerr, who’d been leading the league in batting in late August, and Hughson, who’d won 18 games.

  Their departures, plus a killer schedule that put the Sox on the road for their final 17 games, finished them off, as the front office didn’t bother taking World Series re
quests. The club lost 10 in a row and finished in fourth place, a dozen games astern. “Maybe it’s just as well,” mused a Globe editorial, “because local fans are so badly out of practice they wouldn’t know what to do with a championship.”

  By 1945, Uncle Sam had spirited away virtually all of the former regulars and the Sox were happy to consider anyone who might be capable of playing 154 games without tripping over himself. So the day before the season opener in New York, the club ran a Fenway tryout for three black players—Jackie Robinson, Sam Jethroe, and Marvin Williams—who were performing in the Negro League. Roxbury city councilor Isadore Muchnick had badgered the club to break baseball’s color line and the players suspected that the workout was perfunctory. Though scout Hugh Duffy proclaimed them “pretty good ballplayers,” the front office didn’t sign them. “Not for one minute did we believe the Boston tryout was sincere,” Robinson would remark. “We were going through the motions.”

  Several players who had enlisted as naval aviation cadets joined Lt. Cmdr. E.S. Brewer at Fenway Park on April 27, 1943, before the Red Sox-Yankees game. Front row, from left: Johnny Pesky of the Red Sox, Brewer, Buddy Gremp of the Boston Braves, and Joe Coleman of the Philadelphia Athletics. Back row, from left: Ted Williams, and Johnny Sain of the Boston Braves.

  FDR’S ROAD SHOW

  When U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s motorcade arrived at Fenway Park on the night of November 4, 1944, there wasn’t a bare patch of ground between Kenmore Square and the ballpark, or for blocks around. It was three days before the presidential election, and FDR’s race against Governor Thomas Dewey of New York had taken a nasty turn. Factor in that Roosevelt was preceded on stage by two enormous talents of music and film, and the ballpark and the surrounding neighborhood were rollicking in a boisterous but far different fashion than if the Red Sox were staging a ninth-inning rally.