by John Powers
TED AND GLADYS
As the Globe’s Bud Collins recalled it, “Gladys Heffernan was one hardheaded woman. You can bet your Louisville Slugger on it. Sweet, congenial, grandmotherly, but—lucky for her and for Ted Williams that September Sunday afternoon in 1958—she was topped by a skull that could have gone 10 rounds with Gibraltar.”
Collins was in the Fenway press box when Williams struck out against the Washington Senators’ Bill Fischer (who would go on to become the Red Sox pitching coach in the 1980s). Williams’s temper was legendary, even at age 40, and he was so furious at striking out that, as he strode away from home plate, he took a vicious cut at the air—but the bat slipped from his hands.
There was no time for the 69-year-old Heffernan, sitting a few feet away in the first row near the Sox dugout, to react. Like a guided missile, the speeding bat beaned her. A communal gasp of horror and concern swept the park, followed by choruses of boos, as attendants rushed to the felled woman. A distraught Williams was quickly over the low wall and beside her.
As Collins told it, by the time he had run down the staircase from the press box and along an aisle to where she had been sitting, he was told by an usher that she was in the first aid room. Was she dead? The usher didn’t know.
Outside the room, Red Sox General Manager Joe Cronin greeted Collins with, “She’s fine. Nothing to worry about.”
“Fine?”
“Of course,” Cronin said with a smile. “Ted has talked to her. Apologized. She told him she knows he didn’t mean it, that it was an accident. Just a little bump.”
“But maybe a big lawsuit, Joe?” “No, no, no. There’ll be no lawsuit,” he said firmly.
Collins frowned. “This happened five minutes ago. How can you be so certain there’ll be no suit?”
“Because,” Cronin smiled again, “Gladys happens to be my housekeeper.”
Williams reportedly cried in the dugout after the accidental beaning. In his next at-bat, he doubled to drive in the second run in a 2-0 Boston win. Williams would go on to finish with a .328 average that season to win his final AL batting title.
Cronin’s daughter, Maureen, who was 13 years old at the time, recalled the incident years later. She said Heffernan spent a week in the hospital, and Williams felt awful about it. “He went to see her every day in the hospital and bought her a diamond wrist watch,” Cronin said. “She loved Ted and forgave him, but she never went to another game.”
Joe Cronin decided the family’s seats were a little too close to the action and moved them back a few rows, much to his four children’s displeasure.
“That moment, when you first lay eyes on that field—the Monster, the triangle, the scoreboard . . . the left-field grass where Ted [Williams] once roamed—it all defines to me why baseball is such a magical game.”
—Jayson Stark, ESPN analyst
Workmen at Fenway Park strain to assemble giant speakers, part of a stereophonic system used for the Boston Jazz Festival.
It was the last great moment for Parnell, who tore an elbow muscle and retired after the season. For nearly a decade, he’d been the mainstay of a staff that never had enough pitching, which is why Boston perennially ended up double-digits behind New York. In 1958, when Williams and teammate Pete Runnels finished 1-2 in the batting race and Jackie Jensen was Most Valuable Player, the Sox still finished 13 games out.
Had Jensen been able to play all of his games in the Fens, he might well have been a Hall of Famer. But his acute fear of flying exhausted him. When his teammates were heading for Logan Airport, Jensen often was jumping into a car and driving all night to the next city. He could handle Bob Lemon but not Rand McNally, so he quit the game a year later.
For Williams the most difficult opponent had become Father Time. He turned 41 in 1959, when a pinched nerve in his neck wrecked him for the season. The Sox sank with him and when they were in the cellar in July, Yawkey decided to ax Manager Mike “Pinky” Higgins, the former infielder who’d taken over for Lou Boudreau at the end of the 1954 season.
Yawkey dispatched General Manager Bucky Harris to Baltimore to give Pinky the pink slip. “The little one (Harris) keeps saying, ‘You gotta quit, you gotta quit,’” a barmaid told two Boston sportswriters who’d paid her to provide a report. “And the big one (Higgins) keeps telling the little one to go bleep himself.”
Higgins was given a scouting job and Billy Jurges, a Washington coach, was brought in to supervise the remainder of the season, which was most notable for the arrival of infielder Elijah Jerry “Pumpsie” Green and pitcher Earl Wilson, the franchise’s first two black players. Green made his Fenway debut on August 4, 1959, two weeks after he first played for the Red Sox on the road in Chicago. Ever since the club had turned up its nose at Jackie Robinson at a 1945 tryout, the Sox had shown little interest in signing African-Americans. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the owner was from South Carolina and the manager from Texas, but Boston was the last team to integrate and its all-white roster all but assured continued mediocrity.
Elijah “Pumpsie” Green made his first major league start for the Red Sox in 1959. Green, the first black player for the Sox, was honored during the team's annual Jackie Robinson Day ceremony at Fenway Park on April 18, 2009.
GREEN GIANT
The Wall, now known affectionately as the “Green Monster,” is unquestionably the defining feature of America’s most beloved ballpark. It stands 37 feet tall and 240 feet long, and its legend has been building since 1934.
Fenway Park was created in 1912, when then-owner John I. Taylor moved the home of the Red Sox from the Huntington Avenue Grounds to an undeveloped piece of land he owned in the Fenway area. With Lansdowne Street already established, architect James McLaughlin was left with no option but to truncate the field boundaries.
The short distance to the left-field boundary from home plate was compensated by the dead-ball era of the time and the height of the wall, and though much has happened to it since then, the large, storied structure remains formidable to hitters, pitchers, and fielders today.
BELLY OF THE MONSTER
Inside the Wall, it’s scorching in the summertime and cold in the spring and fall, but scorekeepers get spectacular front-row seats and a chance to chat with outfielders, who can enter through a door that opens onto the field, during breaks in play. Manny Ramirez was particularly fond of ducking inside, sometimes barely making it back out before the game resumed. There is no permanent bathroom, although portables have been used.
HISTORY OF THE WALL
When Fenway Park was built in 1912, there was a 10-foot-tall, sloping embankment in front of a wooden wall in left field. The incline, which served as lawn seating and a picnic area for overflow crowds during the dead-ball era, as well as support for the wall itself, was tough on outfielders. However, Boston’s Duffy Lewis mastered it and the hill became known as “Duffy’s Cliff.”
When Thomas A. Yawkey bought the Red Sox in 1933, Duffy’s Cliff was scaled down, elevating the importance of the 37-foot metal fence behind it.
FISK POLE:
The pole on the left-field foul line atop the Green Monster is known as the Fisk Foul Pole, in honor of Carlton Fisk’s game-winning homer that struck the pole in the 12th inning of Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.
310:
At the foul pole, the Wall is only 309 feet, 3 inches from home plate, but for most of the century the Red Sox posted a sign that read “315.” Club officials refused to allow an independent measurement of the distance, but when a Boston Globe reporter snuck into Fenway and came up with the new figure, the Sox grudgingly changed the sign to read 310 feet in 1995. Major League rules today stipulate that no fence in any new park be closer than 325 feet to home plate.
96:
Metric distances were added to the outfield walls in 1976, when it was thought that the U.S. would adopt the metric system; thus the 315-foot marker had a smaller accompanying 96-meter marking in yellow. The metric figures were painted over during the 2002 s
eason.
THE LADDER:
A ladder runs from above the scoreboard to the top of the Wall. It was once used to retrieve home-run balls, but it is no longer needed with the advent of the Monster seats. A ball is in play if it hits it.
CITGO SIGN:
Every time a player hits a home run over the Green Monster, the CITGO sign is seen by fans at the ballpark and on television. The computer-operated sign is double- faced and measures 60 feet by 60 feet. In early 2005, the sign received a major restoration and technology upgrade from neon light to LEDs.
“FENCE GREEN”
The green paint used on the wall is a 100 percent acrylic made by California Paints, which was founded in Cambridge, Mass. in 1926 and is now based in Andover, Mass. The color, called “Fence Green,” is considered proprietary by the Red Sox; it is not sold publicly, and the formula of colorants is a secret. The hue of Fence Green has apparently been the same since the wall was first painted in 1947, although California Paints didn't start producing the color until the 1970s. It takes about 35 gallons of paint to cover the wall. Other green hues are used around Fenway Park, including Scoreboard Green, Box Green, and Special Green.
FENWAY’S LEFT FIELDERS
Red Sox players who played most games in left field for each of the last 100 years.
1960s
Carl Yastrzemski follows the flight of his second home run of Game 2 of the 1967 World Series, a 5-0 Red Sox victory. Yaz supplanted Ted Williams in left field for the Red Sox and created his own legacy, including an MVP season in ’67 and his stature as the first American League player to have at least 400 home runs and 3,000 hits.
In the early 1960s, the fledgling Boston Patriots of the American Football League began playing at Fenway Park. While there would also be soccer games and wrestling matches played at Fenway during the 1960s, what the ballpark didn’t have for the first part of the decade was much of a baseball club. When Ted Williams retired after hitting a home run in his final at-bat in 1960, he took most of the drama surrounding the team with him. The Red Sox weren’t just a boring club, they were also inept. The Sox of the 1960s echoed the franchise’s teams of the 1920s by finishing in the second division for eight straight seasons, including ninth-place finishes in 1965 and 1966. Little wonder that owner Tom Yawkey ceded to the Patriots’ wishes to play in his park, lifting a ban on football at Fenway partly so that he could derive some income from the newcomers, since Sox fans were staying away in droves. The nadir for the Red Sox came on September 28 and September 29 of 1965, with the team en route to a 100-loss season; the attendance for consecutive games was 461 and 409 fans, respectively. The Sox changed things up in 1967, hiring a brash new manager named Dick Williams and giving its young nucleus a chance to play, and to flourish. Everything changed for Boston and the Red Sox in that Summer of Love; while young people throughout the country flush with “Flower Power” were being warned not to trust anyone over 30, New Englanders were learning to count on a man in his late 20s called Yaz. The Sox captured one of the most exciting pennant races in history, jostling past the White Sox, Twins, and Tigers for their first AL title in 21 years. And Boston baseball would never be the same.
UPDIKE HIT IT OUT OF THE PARK, TOO
BY BOB RYAN
On September 28, 1960, John Updike, 28 years old and, though raised in Pennsylvania, a Ted Williams fan since childhood, decided it was a good idea to attend the afternoon game between the Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles. He, like all members of the public, knew only that it would be the final home game of Ted’s career. Not until the game was concluded did people learn that it would be Ted’s last game, period, that he had decided before the game he would not be making a season-ending trip to Yankee Stadium.
The times were different. The word “hype” had barely entered the language. Today, there would be special editions, minted coins, and live shots galore.
“The world was a simpler place,” Updike noted.
But Wednesday, September 28, 1960, was a dank, dreary day. And the Red Sox, Ted Williams aside, were a dank, dreary team on their way to a 65-89 record and a seventh-place finish. Accordingly, a mere 10,454 fans showed up. And it could very easily have been 10,453. Updike’s first choice that day was to visit a lady on Beacon Hill. Fortunately, the lady was not home.
Updike explained in a 1977 epilogue: “I took a taxi to Beacon Hill and knocked on a door and there was nothing, just a basket for mail hung on the door. So I went, as promised, to the game and my virtue was rewarded.”
The resulting “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” published in the October 22, 1960 edition of the New Yorker, is the most spellbinding essay ever written about baseball. Some, like critic Roger Dean, go even further. “It is simply the greatest essay I have ever read,” he said.
“It influenced me in a big way,” said Roger Angell, who would become the foremost baseball writer of the late 20th century, but in 1960 had yet to publish a word about it. “And it has influenced just about every sportswriter who followed. The great thing is that he went expecting something amazing and incredible—and it happened. Only baseball provides in any number those totally unexpected turns.”
“My one effort as a sportswriter,” explained Updike. “It’s had a longer life than I would have expected.”
We all know how the story ends. In the eighth inning, battling horribly adverse weather conditions that had already cost him one shot at a homer, Williams hit a 1-1 pitch from Jack Fisher onto the canopy covering a bench in the Red Sox bullpen. He ran the bases hurriedly amid relentless applause and did not tip his cap. He took his place in left field at the start of the ninth and was replaced by Manager Mike Higgins with Carroll Hardy, in the hopes that Williams would acknowledge the crowd, and again he did not tip his cap. He had not tipped his cap since 1940 and he had no remote intention of deviating from his policy.
Wrote Updike, “No other player visible to my generation concentrated within himself so much of the sport’s poignance, so assiduously refined his natural skills, so constantly brought to the plate that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy.”
Williams liked the piece. At least, that’s what was conveyed to Updike by a third party. And Ted even suggested Updike be a collaborator on a biography, an offer that Updike, a longtime resident of Boston’s North Shore who died in 2009, politely declined.
“I’d said all I had to say on the subject,” he said in the epilogue.
Of Ted’s stubborn refusal to tip his cap that day, despite being given three separate opportunities to do so (coming to the plate, rounding the bases, and trotting in after being removed from the field), Updike sagely noted, “Gods do not answer letters.”
But they sometimes leave behind epic accounts of epic events.
“Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg.”
—John Updike, from “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”
Teammate Jim Pagliaroni offered congratulations after “Teddy Ballgame” hit his 521st home run in the final at-bat of his career.
“We knew almost all the fans in the stands by name.”
—Dick Radatz, the top closer in baseball when he pitched for the woeful Red Sox teams of the early 1960s
There were only 2,466 fans in the stands on April 11, 1962, when the Red Sox played the Cleveland Indians, winning the contest 4-0 on a Carroll Hardy grand slam in the 12th inning.
Bill Monbouquette, a native of Medford, Massachusetts, was one of the few bright spots for the Red Sox of the early 1960s. A four-time All-Star, he won 96 games over eight seasons in Boston, and he no-hit the White Sox at Comiskey Park in 1962.
As mediocre as most of the fifties had been for the Red Sox, the club at least had been finishing in the money at a time when that meant that most of its players wouldn’t have to spend the off-season selling tires. But by 1960, the Sox were bouncing around the bottom of the league and their owner was growing exasperated. “Want to buy a ball cl
ub?” Tom Yawkey asked broadcaster Curt Gowdy after a 12-3 home loss to the Indians. “I’ll sell it for seven million. Seven million will take it.”
It was early June and Boston already was stuck in eighth place, nearly a dozen games out of first. To shake things up one game, manager Billy Jurges switched Bobby Thomson, who’d hit the “Shot Heard ’Round The World” to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants, from the outfield to first base, where Thomson made two of his team’s four errors in the fourth inning.
“I can’t believe what I saw here tonight,” declared Yawkey, sipping bourbon in his office after the game to blot out the memory. “A guy playing first base in the major leagues with a finger glove on. A finger glove at first base. I’ll sell this club. Take it off my hands. This is the major leagues? THIS is the major leagues?”
And yet more than a million spectators came through the Fenway turnstiles that year, most of them to watch Teddy Ballgame play his final season. After his miserable 1959 campaign, by far the worst of his career, Ted Williams actually demanded that the club chop $35,000 from his $125,000 salary. Though Yawkey had suggested during the off-season that the slugger retire, Williams wanted one more .300 season and to reach 500 career home runs before he put away his bat. He easily accomplished both, batting .316 and hitting 29 homers to finish with a lifetime average of .344 and 521 career homers.
While everyone in the park knew that the midweek game against the Orioles at the end of September would be Williams’s last at Fenway, nobody but he, Yawkey, Gowdy and the clubhouse denizens knew that it would be the last of his career. Williams had a nasty cold and had asked the owner if he could skip the final series in New York. So when he deposited Jack Fisher’s fastball atop the Sox bullpen in the eighth inning, it made for a grand finale and a farewell that was completely in character.