Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  He had already spent several days at the new place preparing the soil, raking it over and over again, sifting the loose dirt through a wire sieve to remove rocks and roots, adding loam and clay and sand in the right proportion, turning it over again and again. The work crews clearing the site had erected a fence around the infield to protect the space so no wheelbarrow or workman would tread across the bare ground and scar it with ruts or divots. It was ready now, and all Kelley had left to do was supervise the removal of the sod from Huntington Avenue and truck it to its new location.

  He gathered his small crew of men and tools and handcarts and made his way toward the field, stopping just short of fair territory. Only a week after the end of the season the field already looked a bit ragged. Sawdust was pressed into the ground around home plate and the pitcher's box, left over from Kelley's effort to make the field playable on its final day, when a deluge had soaked the field overnight. Tufts of new grass had already sprung up in the dirt portion of the infield, and the outfield turf, left untended, was long and shaggy. Pigeons swooped and flocked beneath the grandstand roof, the only spectators amid the empty seats, and a few stray papers swirled before the dugout. The breeze still carried the smells of the ballpark—a mix of peanut shells, tobacco juice, and cigars that over the last decade had penetrated the fibrous wood and now remained, even when the crowd was gone.

  Kelley and his crew worked slowly and methodically as they cut the sod into strips, loosened it from the soil beneath, then used a sharp spade to cut the strips into squares. The work was familiar, not unlike the cutting of sod many of them had done in Ireland, where for generations men had worked the bogs, peeling back the surface to uncover peat, which they had cut and stacked and dried to burn for fuel.

  It took most of the morning to remove the sod and wheel it to the horse carts waiting behind the grandstand, but by noon the work was done and the green space that had once been the focus for thousands of sets of eyes and the home for legends like Collins, Buck Freeman, Chick Stahl, and Cy Young was now stacked in layers, like the pages of a history book.

  One after the other, as Kelley and his crew climbed on board, the wagons pulled out and followed one another up Huntington Avenue, then down Massachusetts Avenue toward the new place. Thousands of Bostonians had spent much of the summer obsessed with what had taken place on the field, but now they were oblivious as it passed by them.

  Less than an hour later, the wagons turned onto Jersey Street and made their way down the rutted pathway to a bare open lot dotted with piles of rock and debris. Knots of workmen wielding shovels and wheelbarrows scurried about amid surveyors eyeballing grade stakes and men rushing in and out of a makeshift construction shack, carrying plans and barking orders. The site was on the edge of what had once been a mud flat occasionally overrun with brackish water, the ancestral holdings of the Dana family, whose roots in and around Boston predated the American Revolution. The filling of the Back Bay and the Fens, finished only a little more than a decade earlier, had turned the useless marsh into raw land, undeveloped and potentially lucrative. And for most of the last decade it had sat there, undeveloped, used as an occasional dump, awaiting its fate as Boston grew out to meet it.

  Kelley's men steered their wagons to the small fenced-off area on the southwestern corner of the property, near Jersey Street, opened a gate, and began unloading their precious cargo. As they laid the sod a few workmen stopped and watched for a moment as, piece by piece, over the course of the next few hours the bare ground, apart from a narrow strip that ran from the pitcher's mound to home plate, changed from brown to green. As it did the emerging infield made it possible to imagine a grandstand rising around it, then the outfield and a distant outfield fence, followed soon by the five senses of a ballpark: the crack of a bat, the smell of cut grass, the taste of plug tobacco finding its place in your cheek, the feel of a worn glove wrapping the hand, the sight of long cool shadows cutting across the infield, and the muffled hum of the crowd slowly filling in the space between the wisecracks of the players.

  Square by square, a new page was turned open to the sun. Something was passed from Huntington Avenue to the new place. It would soon take root there and then, in time, flourish every spring.

  1. 1911

  The lovers of the game in this part of the country already begin to realize the important part in the sport that an ideal home for the game plays.

  —Boston Globe

  THE RED SOX needed more than a new ballpark.

  On the first day of September, 1911, with the Red Sox trailing the world champion Philadelphia Athletics 3–1 and two outs in the ninth inning, pinch hitter Joe Riggert worked a walk from A's star pitcher Eddie Plank. As the fifteen thousand fans in attendance at the Huntington Avenue Grounds began to stir, Boston outfielder Harry Hooper followed with a sharp drive to left. When the ball cleared the infield and struck the ground for a clean base hit, the crowd cheered. After being shut out in the first game of the doubleheader, it appeared as if the Red Sox just might rally and take game 2.

  A's outfielder Harry Lord fielded the ball on a hop and looked toward second base, where he expected to see Riggert pulling in safely. But instead of making the smart play and stopping at second, Riggert, running like a kid on the sandlot in a hurry to get home for supper, inexplicably headed toward third.

  The cheers stopped. Lord calmly took aim and fired the ball to third baseman Frank Baker. He waited for Riggert's obligatory slide, applied the tag, and mercifully ended the game.

  A few boos and catcalls echoed over the grounds, but most of the crowd filed out in near-silence. In the ramshackle press box that sat atop the grandstand roof, veteran Boston Globe baseball writer Tim Murnane sat before the typewriter and tried to sum things up. A former professional player himself, Murnane, known as "the Dean of Baseball Writers" and "the Silver King" owing to his shock of silver hair, was usually gentle on the Red Sox players. In the 1870s and '80s, Murnane had played in the National Association, the National League, and the Union Association, all considered major leagues at the time. His voice was the most authoritative among Boston's baseball scribes. He well understood the players' lot but had no patience for stupid play.

  On this afternoon the Red Sox, by dropping both ends of the doubleheader to Philadelphia, had fallen from third place to fourth—trading places with the Yankees—and now seemed determined to take dead aim at fifth place. Over eighteen desultory innings the Red Sox had scored but a single run as the Athletics, despite being outhit by Boston, showed the difference between the two clubs by winning 1–0 and 3–1, each time putting the game away late by taking advantage of a Red Sox miscue. To make matters worse, Boston shortstop Charlie "Heinie" Wagner sprained an ankle while running the bases, an injury that knocked him out for the rest of the season.

  The old ballplayer had seen enough for one day and started typing the ending to the running game story he had constructed over the course of the contest. Riggert, wrote Murnane, had "spilled the beans by trying to make third" and had been out "by a city block." It was, he accurately concluded, a "bonehead play."

  There had been a lot of spilled beans and bonehead plays at the Huntington Avenue Grounds over the past few years, and there was now little doubt that the 1911 season would end just the way most of the previous seven seasons had ended, in disappointment. The Red Sox, once the flagship of the American League, were adrift and directionless, listing back and forth in the middle of the pack, a team with no identity and apparently little hope for the future.

  RED SOX DROP TWO GAMES

  Sad In The Morning Worse In The Afternoon

  American League president Ban Johnson had created the circuit in 1900, and in 1902 he declared that it was now a major league and that he intended to go to war with the only major league at the time, the National League. One key to the success of Johnson's effort was the placement of a franchise in Boston, virtually next door to the existing National League team, as one of the new league's flagship franchises.


  Johnson, a man whose ambition, ego, and self-confidence matched his girth, made the success of the new Boston team a priority. He ran the league like his own personal fiefdom and initially owned a financial stake in every franchise. For the first two decades of the league's existence he had near-dictatorial powers, which he was not shy about employing. By selecting, as he often did, not only who could own or invest in a club but who they could employ as manager and players, Johnson had the means to manipulate the standings. In order for his new league to succeed he needed the new Boston club to get a leg up on Boston's long-established National League team. The best way to do that was to make the team a champion.

  Together with Charles Somers, Johnson's toady and financial benefactor, who helped finance the new league and served as the titular leader of the AL's Boston franchise, Johnson led a raid on Boston's potent National League club, a recent dynasty. He signed away many of its best players, including star pitcher Cy Young and third baseman Jimmy Collins, a devastating blow to the established club. The two men also built a new ballpark, the Huntington Avenue Grounds, on land leased from the Boston Elevated Company.

  It was an audacious move, for the new park sat just across the railroad tracks from the Nationals' home, the beloved but increasingly decrepit South End Grounds, but it had worked. The combination of a good ball club, a new and spacious ballpark, and an admission charge of twenty-five cents—half of what the Nationals charged—had proven to be an unstoppable combination. The Americans, as most fans called them at the time, were a powerhouse.

  After the 1902 season Somers, who lived in Cleveland and was also an investor in that club, cashed out and sold the club to Milwaukee attorney Henry Killilea, another Johnson crony. He agreed to take over until Johnson could find a compliant local owner. It proved to be a good investment. In 1903 Boston won its first American League pennant and the first "World's Series," as it was then called, defeating Pittsburgh. By then Boston's National League team didn't matter much anymore—Boston was an American League town.

  Johnson knew it was a good time to sell again. The Nationals had been vanquished, and the Boston Americans would never be more attractive to a Massachusetts man with some money. Of course, Johnson really didn't give a damn about Boston anymore. Now that Boston had won a title, he intended to make his New York team the next American League champion, even if it hurt Boston.

  Johnson found the perfect patsy, someone who would virtually guarantee that no matter what Johnson did to help New York, he would receive little criticism from the generally boosterish local press.

  The sucker was John I. Taylor and his father, Boston Globe publisher and Civil War hero General Charles Taylor. The younger Taylor was not unlike the progeny of many other rich and influential men of the age. While not quite a complete ne'er-do-well—Taylor had briefly worked in the family business, twiddling his thumbs in the Globe's advertising and editorial departments—he much preferred enjoying the fruits of his family's bank account and resulting social status. Taylor liked to sail, ride and show horses, raise Irish terriers, shoot skeet, play whist, and enjoy every other pastime appropriate to a man of his station, much of it breathlessly reported in his father's newspaper. He wasn't a bad fellow and could be a great deal of fun after a few cocktails, but he fancied himself as more of an athlete and sportsman than he really was.

  Boston's world championship baseball team had been a boon to local newspapers, and in 1903 John I. Taylor had fallen for the club like it was a prize Irish terrier. He also needed something tangible to occupy his time, so in April 1904 the General indulged his son, put up the $135,000 sale price, and installed John I. Taylor as club owner and president. The younger Taylor hadn't a clue as to what he had bought or what to do with it, but he liked the company of the players and could often be seen at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. He liked to sit on the bench during batting practice before moving to his box near the end of the dugout for the game, close enough to the action for the players to see his reaction and for Taylor to hear their earthy conversations.

  He had a grand time watching in 1904. Despite the best efforts of Ban Johnson, who arranged a suspicious midseason trade that sent one of Boston's better players, Patsy Dougherty, to New York, Boston still won the pennant. On the final day of the season Boston defeated New York when star pitcher Jack Chesbro threw a wild pitch that cost him the game and his team the pennant. Boston then managed to retain its status as world champion without playing a single game when the National League champion New York Giants, in a fit of pique, refused to play them in the postseason.

  The club's success made Taylor, who had very little to do with the creation of the roster besides signing the checks, think he was a genius. So in the off-season he began meddling with the roster and made several questionable deals against the wishes of player-manager Jimmy Collins. At the same time Boston's stars began to show their age. The team slumped to fourth place in 1905 and rapidly slid downward from there. When Collins criticized Taylor, the owner froze the manager out and over the next season or two refused to make any substantive trades at all out of pure spite. In 1907 he finally traded Collins away, a move that sent Boston's Irish fans into a frenzy and newsboys selling the Globe in certain sections of the city scurrying for cover. Meanwhile, some very real tragedies further harmed the club. In 1905, after being injured in a carriage accident, catcher Lou Criger became addicted to morphine. And in 1907 Collins's replacement, player-manager Chick Stahl, whose record of emotional instability had made him a strange choice for the job, was blackmailed by a former girlfriend who had become pregnant. Stahl couldn't take the scandal and committed suicide, drinking carbolic acid while the team was at spring training at West Baden Springs, Indiana. His death rocked the club, which would go through another four managers before the end of the season.

  While Taylor stewed, the Red Sox landed with a thud, finishing in last place in 1906 with a grim record of 49-105, and in seventh place in 1907. Apart from a brief foray into the first division in 1909, the Huntington Avenue Grounds had become a place where Boston fans went to watch baseball, but not to watch winning baseball. In a sense the park became the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Wrigley Field, a pleasant place to be but rarely the site of any significant drama concerning wins and losses.

  For many fans the real action took place in the stands along the first-base line, which effectively served as an open betting parlor. Many of the same faces sat there every day, oblivious to the score, wagering on such things as strikes and balls and pop-ups and groundouts, bets that didn't depend on wins and losses.

  In the first few years of his ownership Taylor's most significant contribution to the ball club was to change its name. Before the 1908 season he announced that the team would wear red stockings and henceforth be known as the Red Sox. The name harkened back to the glory days of the sport, when the original Red Stockings of Cincinnati had relocated to Boston and given the city its first championship club. It was hardly an appropriate name for Boston's current collection of has-beens and never-would-bes, but up to that time neither fans nor sportswriters had ever been quite sure what to call the team. They usually called them "the Americans" simply to differentiate them from Boston's National League team. Other names, both awkward and colorful, like the Pilgrims, worked in newspaper headlines but were rarely used by the fans in the stands.

  The only thing the club had going for it was that the National League team was even worse, and the South End Grounds even worse than that. The double-decked wooden park had once been one of the game's most distinctive venues. But in 1894 it burned, and even though the park had been rebuilt, the new facility lacked the charm of its predecessor. The Red Sox, despite all their troubles, were first in a league of two, and that seemed good enough for John I., if not the Boston fans. They were simply there, the flag in the corner of the gymnasium, hanging listless and limp.

  But by 1911 the team was not completely talentless. By chance and serendipity, the Red Sox slowly began to acquire a
new core group of players that would soon become at least the equal of the 1903 champions, if not better.

  Traditionally, most professional ballplayers had come from New England and the Northeast. That was where baseball first became popular and where the game was well established and where boys and young men could still be found on nearly every empty lot or town square tossing a ball around. But as professional baseball spread there was growing demand for young players, and the Red Sox faced increased competition in their own backyard. That, combined with the expansion of the American League to the west as far as St. Louis and Chicago and as far south as Washington, D.C., led some teams, including the Red Sox, to look for prospects ever farther away in parts of the country where there was less competition for players and a greater chance to nab a real prize. It wasn't part of any great plan on Taylor's part, but an instance of innovation inspired by necessity. By accident, the Red Sox became one of the first teams to take advantage of these relatively untapped new markets. It soon paid off.

  The first of this core group to wear a Boston uniform was Texas native Tris Speaker, a man who grew up doing all the things easterners imagined a Texan did—hunting, fishing, roping cattle, and busting broncos. A natural right-hander, Speaker learned to throw with his left hand after breaking his right when he was thrown from a horse. A good student, Speaker enrolled after high school in Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute, where he played on the football and baseball teams, making a better impression there than in the classroom. In 1906, after he was spotted playing semipro baseball at age eighteen by Doak Roberts, owner and manager of the Cleburne Railroaders in the Texas League, Speaker became a professional. He failed to make it as a pitcher before finding his place in center field, where his speed and arm stood out. Roberts sensed Speaker's raw potential and almost immediately tried, without success, to sell his young prospect to the majors before finally getting the attention of George Huff. The Boston scout, who also served as the athletic director of the University of Illinois and in the wake of Stahl's suicide had actually served as manager for a brief period in 1907, signed the nineteen-year-old outfielder for about $750.