by Glenn Stout
No one in the city was thinking about baseball. Men wielding shovels and horses pulling plows struggled to keep Boston's streets clear of snow. For the first time in several years Boston Harbor was virtually frozen over. Every morning young boys filled the dock basins between the wharves on Atlantic Avenue, skipping school to play hockey.
Nevertheless, day by day Fenway Park took shape, and as the player contracts trickled back to Boston the 1912 Red Sox began to come into focus. Spring was in the air.
3. Hot Springs
The members of the Red Sox team are in pretty fair condition, for when not able to work out on the field they receive great benefit from their long hikes over mountain roads and the warm baths later. These baths take all the soreness out of the players' muscles ... this fact alone makes Hot Springs the best place in the country in which to train ballplayers.
—The Sporting News
HOT SPRINGS.
The mere mention of the name brought a smile to the faces of the Red Sox players and the Royal Rooters, the rabid Red Sox fan club that followed the team. For as the winter's snow and cold locked up the boats in Boston Harbor, talk of spring training delivered the promise of warmer days ahead and the sound of baseball being played again. Since holding their first spring training in 1901 in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Sox had tried a variety of venues, including Augusta and Macon, Georgia; West Baden Springs, Indiana; and, most recently, Redondo Beach, California. But players and fans alike recalled the two sessions the team had spent in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1909 and 1910, with the most fondness.
Hot Springs was, well, Hot Springs, a resort town renowned not only for its forty restorative 147-degree mineral baths, which had earned it the nickname "the National Spa," but for everything that came with it—fine hotels, sumptuous restaurants, the splendor of the nearby Ouachita Mountains ... and casinos, dance halls, dogfights, painted ladies, quack doctors, and cures for the Hot Springs strain of "malaria" that the savvy recognized as venereal disease. Decades before Las Vegas was anything more than a spot on a map of the Nevada desert, Hot Springs, Arkansas, was the gambling and vice capital of the United States.
Corruption allowed it to happen as local officials gladly accepted bribes to look the other way. The result was an exciting yet violent place where, as Tim Murnane once noted, "shooting people was a regular and popular pastime with the best citizens." In March 1899, in fact, Jimmy McAleer had been in town for spring training and witnessed the infamous "Hot Springs Gunfight," when the police department and the county sheriff's department, each of which backed a different gambling faction, shot it out on the streets in one of the most notorious episodes in Arkansas history. McAleer told Murnane that when he left his hotel after the shootout, "he saw seven dead men laid out on the sidewalk."
As soon as McAleer took command he began to formalize his plans for the spring, securing time at one of several ballparks, making reservations at the Hotel Eastman, and lining up exhibition games with the other teams training in town. Although McAleer had not returned to Hot Springs since the gunfight, now that he was in charge of the Red Sox he felt that the benefits of training in the resort city far outweighed any potential distractions. In fact, the distractions, along with the relatively mild weather and the baths, were the main reason why several major league teams chose to work out there. In 1912 the Sox were joined by three National League teams, the Pirates, the Phillies, and Brooklyn. Spring training was no exercise in incarceration but more an excuse to break out after the confinements of winter around hearth and home and work the kinks out of muscles gone soft. Besides, it was easier to entice contract holdouts to give in if they knew they were going to Hot Springs for a month as opposed to a place like Macon or Augusta. A happy club presumably worked harder, and there was plenty to keep the players happy in Hot Springs, from the notorious dance hall and bordello known as the Black Orchid to the local opera house, the Oaklawn racetrack, and the tourist traps, like the alligator farm and ostrich ranch, that flanked Majestic Park, where the Red Sox planned to train. Just about every player on the team would return with a "bouquet" of ostrich feathers from one of the three hundred birds on the ranch and a staged photograph posing on a stuffed alligator, the least dangerous of the 1,500 reptiles that roamed the site.
After a winter spent away from the ballpark, most Sox players were looking forward to such distractions and the excitement they entailed. Charley Hall, Duffy Lewis, and Ray Collins had all married, while Hugh Bradley and the other members of the Red Sox Quartet had toured New England. Bill Carrigan had gone home to Lewiston, Maine, and looked after his business interests, which included a cigar store, and built the strength back up in his broken leg.
A number of players wrote to Boston Post writer Paul Shannon detailing their winter activities. Larry Gardner was in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, "leading the customary country life," farming and hunting. From New Rochelle, New York, Charlie Wagner admitted that in 1911 "my wing was never right ... but my arm feels all right now." If true, that was terrific news, for it meant that Wagner could return to shortstop and answer the biggest question in the Boston lineup. Joe Wood wrote from his home in Parker's Glen, Pennsylvania, where he and his father looked after their Woodton Poultry Farm, that he had spent as much time as possible hunting and "tramping through the fields and woods" and that "I feel hard as nails." Boston hoped so, for his annual bout with a sore arm was something the club could do without. Wood also asked Shannon to squash a story that intimated he was about to get married: "About that marriage dope, I wrote you last week asking you to contradict the story." As the team's most eligible bachelor, Wood was constantly tied to one local maiden or another by the papers, and he was in no hurry to tie the knot and stem the flow of scented notes to his mailbox or the quiet tappings on his door.
Now that McAleer was in control, other clubs soon called, proposing player swaps and trades. Former Boston third baseman Harry Lord, a recent fan favorite who was dealt with Amby O'Connell to the White Sox for two warm bodies, had flourished in Chicago. White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey hoped that McAleer might be enticed by the prospect of bringing the Maine native back to Boston and asked for Tris Speaker in return, but McAleer was no fool. Lord was a good player, but Speaker was already great and getting better.
Signed contracts for the 1912 season soon began trickling back in. Even those players who thought they deserved more money had virtually no leverage when it came to contract negotiations. Their only option was to refuse to play altogether and hope that might spark a trade to a team more likely to meet their contract demands, but even this was unlikely to happen. If a player wanted to play, he more or less had to accept what was offered. About the only way to express displeasure was to sit on the contract for a few weeks and hope the club responded by upping the ante. More often, however, teams waited out the holdouts until they came slinking back.
McAleer, however, did make one deal. It seemed to be an insignificant transaction at the time, but it would soon pay huge dividends.
Near the end of the 1910 season the Red Sox had drafted pitcher Hugh Bedient from the roster of Fall River of the New England League and then took the hard-throwing young sidearm pitcher to spring training in California in 1911. He had first drawn the attention of scouts in 1908 when, while pitching for a semipro team in Falconer, New York, he struck out forty-two batters in a twenty-three-inning victory, a performance that resulted in nineteen contract offers from professional clubs. He was impressive in the spring of 1911 for Boston, but the Sox chose to stick with more veteran hurlers and Bedient was sent to Providence for more seasoning.
Since Bedient was not on the Boston roster, Providence was able, in turn, to send him to Jersey City in the Eastern League. His record in 1911 for Jersey City was only 8-11, but on a team that lost nearly twice as many games as it won, Bedient stood out, and he impressed Boston scouts. Now the Sox wanted Bedient badly, but so did several other clubs. A bidding war over his services seemed likely.
Boston had an
enormous advantage. Hugh McBreen had served as club treasurer under John Taylor, and after McAleer took over the Red Sox, McBreen bought into Jersey City. He spurned offers of as much as $6,000 for the pitcher and instead accepted Boston's offer of seven ballplayers, but no money, in exchange for Bedient. The deal would prove to be a bargain for the Red Sox.
Even though most Red Sox were not planning to leave for Hot Springs until March 6, a few started trickling in a month ahead of time. Bill Carrigan, eager to test his leg, was the first to arrive, followed closely by youthful Dr. Fred Anderson, a spitball artist who had nearly made the club several years earlier, only to choose a career in dentistry instead, a decision he now regretted. McAleer planned to go to Hot Springs soon as well, but before he did he wanted to make sure that work on Fenway Park was on schedule.
While the January cold spell had made it impossible to pour concrete, work elsewhere on the ballpark had progressed nicely. Underneath the grandstand, in areas that could be temporarily heated, masons used hollow tile brick to build partitions and create rooms for the umpires, storage, concessions, and other uses. The clubhouses for each team, complete with shower baths, had been roughed in, as had the team offices. Now that the weather had broken, the pace picked up considerably, and work resumed on the stands.
Concrete workers began to build forms and pour concrete for what were known as the "treads," or steps, upon which would sit thirty-two rows of grandstand seats, not including the box seats. Tied to the main structure by reinforced steel, the treads had a design that was unique in several ways. For one, instead of using stone aggregate in the concrete mix, workers used cinders, which lowered the weight by nearly one-third, from 150 pounds per cubic foot to only 110 pounds, reducing both the cost and the weight load on the deck. The size of the treads also varied. Toward the front of the grandstand, where seats would be more costly, each tread was forty inches in width, giving patrons ample leg room. But as one went higher up in the stands the width of the treads narrowed, first to thirty-two inches and finally to only thirty inches, a variation that would trip up generations of fans. Each tread step rose from between eight and eleven inches and for drainage purposes was angled ever so slightly back so that water ran down toward the field, where it could be carried away by drains at the base of the stands. Each box seat section was truly a box, separated from other seats by a poured concrete wall and from other boxes by a pipe rail. Unlike today, the box seats did not go all the way down to field level—the floor of the first row of box seats sat three feet above the field.
As the stands rose from the field the slope of the grandstand deck gradually became steeper. The Fenway Park grandstand utilized what is known as a "rising floor," not one built at a uniform pitch from the field to the back of the stands, but one that was slightly concave. At the base of the grandstand the pitch was only 15 percent, but as the stands went higher—roughly every eighteen to twenty feet, or each time a pier was crossed—the pitch was increased by one degree. The top section sat at a twenty-degree pitch in relation to the field. The result was better sightlines and more seats, and the back of the grandstand stood six and a half feet higher than if the grandstand had had a uniform pitch.
Increasing the pitch in this manner also allowed the grandstand roof to match the height of the pavilion and, by keeping the same roofline, made it appear more like it was part of the same overall structure (albeit separated by an open alleyway between the two stands). Despite its appearance, the pavilion was a completely separate structure, and while Fenway Park was credited as being a concrete-and-steel ballpark, that was true only in regard to the grandstand. The pavilion rested on concrete piers, and the roof was supported by structural steel columns that started at grade, but the pavilion stands were not supported by or built of reinforced concrete.
The rest of the pavilion, including the seats, was built of wood, some recycled from the Huntington Avenue Grounds. The old wooden pavilion structure at the Huntington Avenue Grounds had been carefully taken apart, and much of the lumber was reused in the construction of the stands for the Fenway pavilion. Apart from the steel roof supports, the pavilion was really nothing more than a glorified section of bleachers, with bare wooden plank seats resting atop a maze of robust wooden scaffolding, as prone to fire as the old Huntington Avenue Grounds. That was the reason the pavilion was separated from the grandstand by the alleyway (the vestigial remains of which are still partially visible in Fenway Park today by the gap known as "canvas alley"), which served as a firebreak between the two structures. Although the roof of both the grandstand and the pavilion, made of wood planks and sealed with tar, was highly flammable, it was continuous and had no firebreak so that fans would stay dry during rain showers. That meant that a blaze in the pavilion could easily spread to the grandstand by way of the roof. Claims that Fenway were fireproof were, in reality, relative.
Unlike the main grandstand, the pavilion stands were built at a uniform pitch. Photographs that appeared in newspapers clearly show that the back portion of the stands, but not the roof, towered some six or eight feet higher than the main grandstand. This made for a much denser seating area in which each row was only about two feet in width—six inches narrower than the least spacious seats in the main grandstand. As a result, in roughly the same surface area as the grandstand, the pavilion held more than forty rows of seats as opposed to thirty-two rows, exclusive of the box seats. Patrons in the pavilion were cramped and uncomfortable from the start.
By the end of February the weather had warmed enough that even though much of the ground was still bound with frost, the first few sprigs of grass were springing up in the outfield and the infield was beginning to turn green. Charles Logue and James McLaughlin still had their work cut out for them, but barring disaster, the park appeared certain to be ready by opening day, of which there would be several. Although the Sox would open the regular season in New York playing the Highlanders on April 11, they were scheduled to christen Fenway on April 9 in an exhibition against Harvard University. Fenway Park was then scheduled to open officially on April 18, when New York came to Boston, and the club had planned yet another opening celebration—a dedication—on May 16 to take full advantage of another opportunity to pack the stands.
While work continued at Fenway Park, Jake Stahl became the next man to arrive in Hot Springs. He was anxious to get started, not only to evaluate his team but to get in shape himself. He knew that his success as manager would depend in part on his performance on the field. Before his retirement he had been considered one of the best first basemen in the game, just a notch or two behind the Yankees' Hal Chase. He still thought he could be one of the better players in the league, and the addition of his bat to the Red Sox lineup represented an enormous upgrade—if he returned to form.
Along with Lewis, Hooper, and Speaker, Stahl was one of a number of Red Sox players who either had earned a college degree or had spent time at a university. Yet more so than the others, he was a true scholar-athlete whose belief in the ethic of "a healthy mind in a healthy body" was even reflected in his name. The son of a Civil War veteran, Stahl grew up in Elkhart, Illinois, and worked in his father's store before enrolling in the University of Illinois, eventually earning a law degree. In class Stahl was known by his given name, Garland, a moniker that seemed to reflect his studious approach and unimpeachable reputation, and that was the name he used when signing autographs and legal documents. Yet in the schoolyard, on the gridiron, or on the baseball diamond, he was known as Jake, a good sport, and an athlete who, while always playing fair, was also tough and hard. He earned All-Conference honors in football in 1900, his junior year, and hit over .400 for the baseball team while playing all over the diamond.
Whatever name he chose to go by, he looked and acted the part to perfection. In his business suit as "Garland," wearing reading glasses and poring over bank figures in a ledger while taking notes in a handsome, florid script, Stahl, apart from his athletic build, was indistinguishable from other men of his cla
ss. But when he wore a football jersey or placed a ball cap on his head, his strong jaw, clear gray eyes, and robust frame reflected a steely resolve that earned the respect of his somewhat more earthly peers. He preferred to lead by example, but when challenged, did not back down. Stahl stood a full 6'2" and weighed over two hundred pounds, making him one of the biggest players in baseball for the era.
If he had a weakness as a player, it was that he chose not to call attention to himself and his accomplishments. Baseball writer Francis Richter noted: "If Stahl could get a case of swelled head and begin to think he is really as good as he is, he would be the greatest of them all ... [only] modesty has held him back." He joined the Red Sox directly out of college as a catcher, recommended to Boston by University of Illinois athletic director George Huff.
Stahl's personal modesty served him well in the early days of the American League. While his intelligence could have set him apart, his reticence in calling attention to himself endeared him to his teammates—Stahl was no "egghead," but a regular guy. Traded to Washington, where Ban Johnson was running the franchise, Stahl impressed the league president with his unique combination of brawn and brains, and despite his relative youth Johnson named him manager in 1905. The club seemed to turn a corner, but then collapsed in 1906. Stahl, who hit only .222, took it personally, saying, "If I'd been able to hit .300 this year, as many of my friends predicted, we'd have been up in the first division, but I was a frost." Washington promised Stahl he would be traded back to Boston, where he knew he'd get playing time, but reneged and traded him instead to the White Sox. Stahl felt that he had been lied to and as a matter of principle refused to report to the White Sox. Although he had just married his college sweetheart and begun an apprenticeship at his father-in-law's bank, he was clearly torn over his choice of career. He could not stay away from baseball and soon purchased the semipro South Side Baseball Club in Chicago, a team for which he played first base.