Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

So McLaughlin did the next best thing. It was a relatively easy task for engineers to calculate the pressure that the difference in grade would produce on the high side. To counteract that an earthen slope—essentially a dam—was created to ensure that Lansdowne Street would stay put. Although it has often been reported that the incline was ten feet tall, anecdotal evidence based on photographs and the fact that at least seven rows of temporary bleacher tiers were later built atop the wall suggest that it may have been somewhat taller, perhaps twelve feet, and that the slope itself stretched a bit farther out toward the field—by fifteen to twenty feet—as the embankment angle appears to be somewhat less than forty-five degrees.

  Atop the wall was a simple but robust plank fence that had probably been treated with both a fire-retardant and a preservative to protect it from the rain and weather; it was held fast by both horizontal supports known as "whalers" on the backside and stout wood braces that extended at nearly a forty-five-degree angle toward Lansdowne Street. The fence was not precisely on the property line but several feet south of it, so a secondary fence ran along Lansdowne Street to prevent passersby from trying to scale the wall. Upright wooden support columns were probably set in concrete far below grade.

  But on this first day the fence was not yet finished. Wallace Goldsmith's cartoon drawings in the Globe the next day clearly show that the fence was built in two separate vertical sections, one atop the other, and that only a few of the top sections, flanking the space where the scoreboard was supposed to be, were yet in place.

  The reason for the wall, of course, was to prevent people standing atop any building the Boston Garage Company might build on Lansdowne Street from seeing inside the park. But on this day anyway, with the top half of the wall unfinished, it was probably still possible to look into the park from the garage without buying a ticket. Until the wall was finished, the height of the barrier from the field in front of the embankment to the top of the fence was just over twenty feet. When finished, the wall would be approximately 35 feet tall.

  That was not all a player saw that first day when he looked upon the wall. According to a Goldsmith drawing, at some point during the contest the game was watched by two spectators perched on some scaffolding that hung from the top of the wall near the left-field line—scaffolding that was either used during construction of the fence or was in place to hang advertisements over the next week. These two anonymous workmen were the first two spectators to watch a game from roughly the same viewpoint as those who occupy today's "Green Monster" seats.

  If Goldsmith's drawing is accurate, as of yet there were no advertisements in place on the unfinished wall. By the time Fenway Park opened officially that was no longer the case. Although it is uncertain precisely when the wall was covered entirely by advertisements, there is no doubt that by the end of the season it was completely covered.

  The left-field fence continued far into foul territory until it reached the property boundary just short of Brookline Avenue; then another tall fence ran approximately two hundred feet to meet the backside of the grandstand on the third-base side, leaving a wide expanse of foul ground between the foul line, the grandstand, and the outfield fence and occupying the space taken up by sections 28 to 33 in today's Fenway Park. Some sportswriters speculated that the area would make a fine place for pitchers to warm up, but "bullpens" as such were not much in use at the time. Since the area was not in view from the third-base dugout, where the opposing manager could see who was warming up, such an arrangement would have needed approval from the league. Besides, at some point in the future, as needed, the club planned to fill this space with seats. The grandstand, in fact, had been designed so that whenever more seats were built it could be done seamlessly and made to look like part of the original structure.

  After Casey Hageman threw a few warm-up tosses to Pinch Thomas, Harvard Crimson third baseman and captain Dana Wingate stepped into the batter's box, becoming the first batter in the history of Fenway Park. A native of Winchester, Massachusetts, Wingate took Hageman's first pitch for a ball, then struck out, overmatched by Hageman's fastball.

  He may well have been intimidated, and with good reason. While pitching for Grand Rapids in the Central League in 1908, Hageman threw a pitch that struck hitter Charlie Pinkney behind the left ear, killing him. Hageman was mortified and sat out the 1909 season before making his return in 1910, with Denver in the Western League, where he teamed with Buck O'Brien in 1911 to form one of the best pitching tandems in the league.

  The pitcher dispatched the next two Harvard batters with ease. One of them, shortstop Dowd Desha, became the first man to make fair contact with the ball at Fenway Park, lofting a soft fly to Steve Yerkes at second for the second out of the game.

  Sam Felton, the son of a railroad magnate and better known for his kicking ability on the gridiron, toed the rubber for Harvard. Although he would later be offered a $15,000 contract by the Philadelphia Athletics—which he would refuse—on this day he pitched like a rank amateur and struggled to find the plate. Harry Hooper led off for the Red Sox with a deep fly ball, then Steve Yerkes singled to right field to collect Fenway's first hit, but after loading the bases the Red Sox failed to score.

  They broke through on Felton in the second when, after two walks, Hageman helped his own cause with a hit, knocking in Marty Krug, who gained the honor of scoring the park's first run. With that out of the way, the rest of the contest went fast as one Harvard hitter after another went down on strikes, the Crimson collecting only one hit, and the Red Sox, taking advantage of Felton's wildness, kept walking to first only to be stranded. Then, in the fifth inning, Hageman, a one-man team, singled in a second run to give the Red Sox a 2–0 lead. By then it was snowing, and a cold wind blowing in from the northwest made it feel even colder. The crowd had seen enough and started to drift off, and after Harvard went out again in the top of the seventh, as Hageman collected his ninth strikeout, the Sox decided they had had enough as well. Stahl waved the umpire over to the dugout and to the relief of all ended the contest.

  The game, admitted Mel Webb in the Globe the next day, "did not amount to a great deal." Another unattributed comment in the Globe gushed over the grandstand, praising it for its pitch, so that "the milliner's 'art' in front of you will give you no bother," and offered that "it is a great thing to have an unobstructed view," which of course was true—and remains true—only of seats in the lower half of the stands. Local scribes, to no great surprise, gave the ballpark a thumbs-up. Herman Nickerson of the Boston Journal called the new park "a corker" and added, "When it is finished it will be the best in either major league circuit." That wasn't true, for Fenway was neither as spacious nor as handsome as most of the other concrete-and-steel structures built at the time, but few cities in baseball have ever been more boosterish than Boston, and that was as true in 1912 as it would be for some decades after.

  BOSTON 2, HARVARD 0

  Crimson None Too Easy Sox Open New Park With Victory Crowd Of 3,000 Shivers

  The Sox were supposed to go to Worcester for an exhibition the following day, but owing to the cold Stahl called the game off. They left by train for New York and opened the season for real on April 11 at Hilltop Park against the Yankees.

  The weather was much better in Manhattan, and it almost felt like spring when Boston took the field. The Sox had finished only a game and a half ahead of New York in 1911, and Boston had won the season series by the margin of only a single game, so the opening series against New York promised to provide Stahl with an accurate gauge of just how much his team had improved—or not.

  The two clubs were already rivals, a relationship that over time has only grown more heated. Indeed, the rivalry dates back nearly to the birth of the game, when the fledgling Boston version of baseball, known as "the Massachusetts game," lost out in favor of New York's version. Ever since that time Boston and New York baseball interests have intermittently seemed to go head-to-head against one another, as if no other two cities are similarly connected
through geographic proximity and cultural roles. Boston, considered America's dominant city at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had lost that position to New York by the dawn of the twentieth century. The Hub has since taken great pride in bettering New York at anything.

  But the rivalry was also more than symbolic. Much to the consternation of Ban Johnson, the Yankees had yet to win a pennant or mount much of a challenge to the powerful Giants of the National League. That may have been the last bit of unfinished business left for his league in its long, drawn-out battle against the NL. That conflict, while outwardly peaceful, had lasted more than a decade and was still occasionally acrimonious. Johnson had tried several times to steer a pennant New York's way, including in 1904 when he tried to do so at Boston's expense. Jack Chesbro's ill-timed wild pitch had thwarted that effort, and in recent years New York's two corrupt co-owners, Frank Ferrell and William Devery, had squandered every advantage Johnson had steered their way. The role of Giant killer now fell to other American League franchises. The Athletics had successfully filled the role in 1911, and the more optimistic Red Sox fans in 1912 hoped it was now Boston's turn. But any talk of besting the Giants in the 1912 World's Series was as yet a premature and distant dream, one that had no reality whatsoever unless the Red Sox could first prove they were better than the Yankees, not to mention the Athletics, Tigers, and other AL powers.

  They got a start on that on opening day at Hilltop Park. After watching patiently while New York went through with the usual opening day rituals, including the presentation of a loving cup to manager Harry Wolverton, Boston began the first inning as if they were executing a plan. Leadoff hitter Harry Hooper singled, stole second, went to third on an errant throw, and then walked home when Jake Stahl sent a deep drive to left. It was 1–0 and Joe Wood had yet to break a sweat.

  Unfortunately, by the time he did New York led 2–1. In the bottom of the inning the Yankees jumped all over him, taking advantage of a walk to leadoff hitter Harry Wolters and then using a series of sacrifices, stolen bases, and daring base running to plate two runs while Boston threw the ball all over the lot. Only a strong peg from Duffy Lewis in left that cut down a run at home allowed Boston to escape the inning.

  It might have been the best thing that could have happened to Joe Wood. In one short inning he demonstrated every trait that had made him so frustrating to watch in 1911—a bout of wildness coupled with an inability to hold runners on had combined to cost him a lead, underscoring every point Stahl had been trying to make to him all spring.

  It finally began to click. Wood settled down after the first, and like his Yankees counterpart, Ray Caldwell, he held the opposition scoreless through the next seven innings. He may have been helped by the fact that in 1912 American League pitchers were allowed to make some warm-up tosses before each inning. In 1911, when the practice had been banned, Wood and every other pitcher in the league faced the first hitter of each inning stone-cold. For a hard-throwing youngster like Wood, the chance to take a few warm-up tosses could only help.

  Still, the Sox entered the ninth trailing 2–1. Then Stahl started the inning with a walk. Playing to tie the score, Gardner sacrificed him to second, and Lewis made his manager look like a genius with a single to tie the game. Caldwell then made Stahl look even smarter as he came unglued. By the time he was pulled from the game, Joe Wood's two-run single had made the score 5–2. The Sox pitcher held on in the bottom of the inning, and the Sox won, 5–3. They beat New York the next two days behind Buck O'Brien and Charley Hall. Hall came on in relief of Casey Hageman, who in the first inning discovered that the Yankees were a bit harder to retire than the boys from Harvard. His performance was such a disappointment that it virtually ended his Red Sox career. The first Red Sox pitcher to appear at Fenway Park—albeit in an exhibition—would make only one more appearance in a Boston uniform.

  After the game the Sox took the train to Philadelphia to face the defending champions in a three-game series before returning home for the official opening of Fenway Park scheduled for April 18. By the time they took the field against the Athletics on the afternoon of April 15, newsboys on every corner were screaming out headlines from the local papers, letting everyone know about the deadly sinking of the RMS Titanic. An Olympic-class passenger liner owned by the White Star Line, a British shipping company, the ship had struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history.

  Many historians have subsequently claimed that opening day at Fenway Park was overshadowed by the disaster and have blamed it for the apparent lack of sufficient newspaper coverage of the event. Such an interpretation not only ignores the fact that the Titanic sank a full five days before the Red Sox actually opened Fenway Park but shows little understanding of baseball's role in society or of the journalism of the day.

  In 2012, or at any other time in the last five or six decades, the opening of a new major league ballpark, a symbol of civic pride or urban renewal, has almost always spawned newspaper coverage ranging from the comprehensive to the excessive. Not so in 1912. Ballparks were seen as utilitarian structures symbolic of little more than the need to put more people in the seats. Few lasted more than a couple of decades, so the building of a new park was not a once-in-a-lifetime event that inspired much poetry. In the context of the era the opening of Fenway Park was simply not that big of a deal.

  The size and scope of the coverage in the sports sections of the Boston papers was unaffected by the Titanic story—on Saturday, April 20, the day the park finally opened, the Globe sports section, for example, was its usual three pages, with a full page given over to the running of the Boston Marathon. Coverage of the opening of Fenway Park and the first Red Sox home game of the 1912 season appeared the next day in the expanded Sunday papers, where there was more than enough room to report on the game, the opening of Fenway Park, and the Titanic disaster. Most papers, including the Globe, still found room to begin their game story on [>], sharing it with news of the disastrous accident, but none saw the need to go overboard with their coverage of the opening of the ballpark. Two years later the opening of Braves Field would be treated in the same matter-of-fact fashion. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that the sinking of the Titanic had any adverse or significant impact on the coverage of the opening of Fenway Park.

  In Philadelphia, where the A's had already opened their season a few days before, the game went on without regard to the disaster and the players seemed unaffected. Boston pitchers continued to experience first-inning woes as the A's jumped on knuckleballer Eddie Cicotte for four runs and won going away, 4–1, but the next day the Sox bounced back to score four runs of their own in the first inning and stake Joe Wood to a 4–0 lead.

  Once more, however, Wood exhibited first-inning jitters as the A's parlayed a couple of hits and a passed ball into a run. An exasperated Jake Stahl was about out of patience and had Buck O'Brien already warming up when Danny Murphy ripped a line drive down the third-base line. Larry Gardner left his feet, stretched out, and snared the ball. A's third baseman Frank Baker was already halfway to third when Gardner doubled him off second to end the inning and give Wood another chance.

  He did not disappoint. Over the remainder of the game he found both the plate and his fastball, striking out eleven and giving up only one more run as the Sox gained some confidence with a decisive 9–2 win over the A's. So far they hadn't seen anything from either New York or Philadelphia that scared them. The final game of the series against Philadelphia, on April 17, was rained out. The Red Sox immediately caught a train north and made it to Back Bay Station just before 10:00 p.m. They scattered for their homes and hotels in anticipation of the official christening of Fenway Park the following afternoon, on April 18.

  Although the Titanic did not affect the game, once again the weather did, as it had all spring long. The same system that caused the rainout in Philadelphia on April 17 was parked over Boston when the players awoke
on the morning of April 18. Nevertheless, despite the gray skies and the fact that the forecast called for clearing the following day, Patriots' Day, the Sox prepared to play. Jake Stahl intimated that either Buck O'Brien or Charley Hall would be the starting pitcher for Boston.

  Out at Fenway Park a great deal of activity had taken place since the exhibition game versus Harvard. All the grandstand seats were now in place, each one numbered in gold leaf, and the left-field wall was finished, reaching its full height. A few warm, sunny days had helped the field turn a bit greener, and Jerome Kelley's crew had handled the grounds with care. They were delighted that one of four sections of rubberized canvas designed to protect the infield from inclement weather arrived before the game. They would soon need it.

  Workers had spent the previous day hanging bunting from the box seats at the base of the grandstand and clearing the park of construction debris and other signs of the work that had occupied hundreds of men from October until the last few hours. To the fans the park was, for all intents and purposes, finished. But there was still no one working behind the windows on the second floor of the Jersey Street building. Apart from the first-floor ticket office, the rest of the team's offices were still unfinished and incomplete, as was the players' clubhouse. For the time being they would continue to dress at the riding school and walk to the park.

  The Sox planned to open Fenway with a bit of pomp and circumstance. The Letter Carriers' Band, a staple at big events at Huntington Avenue, was scheduled to be on hand and begin serenading the crowd at one o'clock, accompanied by a quartet. Section L of the grandstand was held in reserve for local luminaries, primarily politicians and members of the Church. In a longstanding tradition in Boston baseball circles—one that, to a degree, is still in effect and until recently was little changed—free tickets and passes for opening day were distributed to the most powerful denizens of City Hall, virtually all of whom took advantage of the perk. Cardinal William O'Connell, a close friend of contractor Charles Logue, had it even better. McAleer and Stahl had already presented him with a gold lifetime pass to the new park, and he was expected to take advantage of it. Logue himself also intended to attend, and presumably so did architect James McLaughlin.