Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  Stahl quieted the dissension in the series finale by selecting Wood to square off against Walsh, and his teammates responded by playing airtight baseball on a day in which a stiff north wind made hitting in Fenway Park difficult. With no surrounding buildings to block the breeze, hitters faced a virtual gale that knocked down any ball hit into the air. Boston scratched out two runs in the second inning on only one hit, and Wood, with help from Larry Gardner, Hugh Bradley, and Steve Yerkes, who finally returned to the lineup, made it stand up with some stellar defensive play as the Red Sox dumped Chicago 2–0. The Red Sox had lost the series and lost ground to the White Sox, but the victory in the final game provided some comfort. The club believed that if Stahl had made some better decisions about who to pitch—or if Pape had simply fielded a routine ground ball—they would have taken two of three from Chicago. The White Sox left Boston still in first place, but just as Boston's first series with the Athletics had told them they were a better team than the A's, the series against Chicago told them that the White Sox were beatable. Each team in the league played the others eighteen times, so with fifteen games remaining against the White Sox, a four-and-a-half-game lead was not insurmountable.

  The Sox began chipping away at Chicago's lead in their next three games against Cleveland, sweeping them behind O'Brien, Hall, and Cicotte. All of a sudden Boston was riding a four-game winning streak. Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics followed Cleveland into Fenway, and the Red Sox were eager to take advantage of the struggling A's, who were still under .500. Despite their so-so record, there was no dramatic difference in the champions from the previous season. Most observers felt that they simply had not yet hit their stride.

  To that end McAleer, dissatisfied with Hugh Bradley's play and uncertain if Jake Stahl's ankle would hold up, began to cast about for a replacement. He settled on New York first baseman Hal Chase. The Yankees had offered him to Boston when Stahl was first injured, only to be rebuffed when they asked for Tris Speaker in exchange. Now, apparently, the price had dropped.

  Among his peers, the flamboyant, twenty-eight-year-old Chase was considered one of the best players in baseball. The greatest fielding first baseman the game had ever known, Chase played first base as if he were a shortstop, ranging all over the diamond and often taking throws at first while on the run. He was somewhat less impressive at bat, but was a savvy hitter who knew how to play inside baseball and was coming off the best season of his career, hitting .315 for New York in 1911.

  But Chase, a ladies' man and bon vivant known far and wide as "Prince Hal," was also baseball's greatest prima donna and would soon earn a reputation as perhaps one of the most corrupt players in baseball history. New York manager George Stallings had already accused Chase of "laying down"—throwing games—during the 1910 season. With New York going nowhere, Chase, who earned a pretty salary, was available. All the Yankees wanted now was Hugh Bradley and backup outfielder Olaf Henriksen in return.

  The deal was tempting, but acquiring Chase risked alienating Stahl and possibly creating yet another rift on a team that already had its problems off the field. McAleer was tempted, yet in the end he turned the Yankees down. The Red Sox would win—or lose—with what they had.

  The ballpark—finally—was rounding into shape. A stretch of relatively warm and dry weather finally gave Jerome Kelley a chance to do some real work on the field, and for the first time all year infielders and outfielders alike began to feel more secure chasing down batted balls without worrying whether they would end up either slipping or stuck in the mud. Moreover, the Red Sox, their opponents, and their fans were becoming more accustomed to the vagaries of Fenway Park. Fly balls to Duffy's Cliff were no longer the subject of amazement but were becoming an expected part of the Fenway Park experience.

  That was on display in the first inning against Philadelphia. Facing Hugh Bedient, who had dominated the A's in two appearances earlier in the year, Frank Baker doubled off Duffy's Cliff with one man to give the A's a quick 1–0 lead. But with one out in the bottom of the inning, Steve Yerkes also hit one to the bank, the ball skipping up and then off the scoreboard. After another hit and walk, Connie Mack was in a panic. He pulled pitcher Lefty Russell so quickly, as Paul Shannon noted, "that many of the fans never saw him go out." The Sox ended up scoring twice to take a 2–1 lead.

  The two clubs traded the lead back and forth, and with the score tied in the fifth inning, Rube Oldring, the A's center fielder, lofted one to left field.

  This time it was Duffy Lewis's turn to run to the wall and look up in wonder as Oldring's drive cleared the left-field wall for a home run. The blast caused the usual buzz among the fans, but not at the same level as the first time it happened. Oldring's home run wasn't hit quite as well as Hugh Bradley's—it cleared the fence, and then just barely, somewhat closer to the line—but in only twenty-two games the wall had now been breached twice.

  Bedient, however, was unbothered. His cool under pressure would serve him well on the mound. He shut the A's down the rest of the way and helped his own cause with a run-scoring single in the seventh. Speaker then knocked in the winning run, and the Red Sox won their fifth in a row. With Wood and O'Brien scheduled to pitch next, the Sox seemed poised to make a run at the White Sox, who had stumbled since leaving Boston and now led by only three.

  But Joe Wood and Buck O'Brien were still both maddeningly inconsistent. With each pitcher coming off his best start of the year, each followed up with his worst start of the young season. Wood had no control, walking five and hitting another as the A's beat him 8–2, and O'Brien made the case that he might have been better off back at the boot factory when he lost 12–6. Fortunately for the Red Sox, Connie Mack inexplicably chose the series finale to "try out" a series of youngsters on the mound, including eighteen-year-old Herb Pennock. While Pennock would one day earn admission to the Hall of Fame, on this day neither he nor anyone else Mack chose to throw even earned their way into the ballpark as the Sox salvaged a series tie on the first hot and muggy day of the year with a 7–3 win.

  Now that the rain that fell for so much of the spring had finally abated, the Sox had to pay for the effects of the earlier deluge and make up a rained-out contest with Washington by playing a doubleheader on May 29, one day before a previously scheduled Memorial Day doubleheader on May 30. It was just the kind of thing that had worried Stahl when the games had first been canceled. Boston felt that they were a better team than Washington, but playing four games in two days would test a pitching staff that was still unproven.

  It would also test Boston's offense, for while the Sox had come up with the occasional explosion of runs, they were also struggling to score on a consistent basis. Speaker was the only regular on the team hitting over .300. Both Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper, though showing some power, were hitting only around .250. Hugh Bradley, still filling in at first for Stahl, had not hit at all since going over the left-field wall. Steve Yerkes hadn't had a dozen hits since opening day, and behind the plate Bill Carrigan and Les Nunamaker were barely hitting their weight.

  Fortunately for the Red Sox, the weather had turned at precisely the right time. It was not quite as warm for the first doubleheader against Washington as it had been the previous day, but there was still a stiff wind blowing from the southwest. Both clubs would soon learn that when the weather is warm and the wind is blowing out at Fenway Park, hitting there is quite a different experience.

  After two scoreless innings Washington scored a single run in the second before Boston rallied, stringing together walks, hits, and errors to plate three runs, then adding three more when Charlie Wagner got a ball in the air. Riding the wind, it soared over Clyde Milan's head in center field, hit the ground, and then kept going as Wagner toured the bases for a home run. The rout—and the record-setting—was on.

  Fenway fans and pitchers both got stiff necks watching balls fly around Fenway for the rest of the day as every ball every pitcher threw seemed to get hit hard and every ball hit hard in the air seemed
to fly over an outfielder's head. At least six balls either found Duffy's Cliff or ricocheted off the left-field fence, and both right fielders spent most of the day with their backs to the infield, chasing down drives. When game 2 was called because of darkness after only seven and a half innings the two teams had combined that afternoon for seventy-seven total bases, fifty-six hits, fourteen errors, thirteen doubles, eleven walks, six stolen bases, one triple, and one home run, scoring a combined total of fifty-two runs, with another twenty-four base runners left stranded and exhausted on base. According to the Globe, which speculated that the official scorer "might have lost a run or two in the excitement," players who scored a run in the game "ran an aggregate distance of 3 6/11 miles."

  Somehow the Sox had managed to win both contests during the five-hour marathon, taking game 1 behind Wood, 21–8, as he threw a million pitches and hurled a complete game, and winning the second game 12–11 despite falling behind 6–0 in the first inning when Eddie Cicotte failed to retire a hitter. The victories were even sweeter due to the fact that the White Sox also dropped a doubleheader, allowing the Red Sox to pull to within two games of first place.

  The next day, with the wind calm and the day cool, both teams played as if still recovering from the merry-go-round of the day before. They split the holiday doubleheader: the Sox won the first game 3–2 behind Bedient and then fell in the finale, 5–0, as Walter Johnson struck out thirteen. As soon as the game ended the Red Sox hustled over to South Station and caught a train for Cleveland. Now that their longest home stand of the season had ended, it was time for their longest road trip of the year—twenty-seven long days that would take them everywhere in the league but Philadelphia.

  By this time they knew that they would miss Fenway Park. Over the course of the last month they had adjusted to their home field and seemed to have figured out how to use the park to their advantage, going 16-9 for the month, including winning nine of their last thirteen. While they still trailed the White Sox by two games, there was a certain optimism surrounding the club, and several lesser Boston newspapers that generally did not send reporters to cover the team hurriedly made arrangements to send a correspondent to follow the Red Sox on their month-long excursion.

  On the roof of the Fenway Park grandstand, the red flag representing the Red Sox fluttered in the breeze, sandwiched between the flags that represented the third-place Athletics and the first-place White Sox. By the time the Red Sox would see them again, they were hopeful those flags would be unfurled in a different order.

  7. The Big Trip

  Some of the most exciting early games I saw were in 1912 ... Smoky Joe Wood, who belongs in the Hall of Fame, won 34 and lost 5 that year ... With the shadows pushing over the ballpark he would stand out there on the pitching mound with his red trimmed gray road uniform, hitch up his pants and throw. To this day I have a recollection of a strange sensation as if my head had emptied when he fired the ball in the shadowy park.

  —James T. Farrell, My Baseball Diary

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE 1912 season editor F. C. Lane of Baseball magazine penned an article that tried to answer the question of who was the greatest pitcher in baseball. The author spent considerable time pondering the relative merits of pitchers such as Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard of the Giants and Ed Walsh of the White Sox before finally concluding with certainty that "Walter Johnson is the greatest pitcher of the present day." Oh, Joe Wood was in the conversation, but only ever so briefly. Although Lane admitted that because of Wood's performance in 1911, when he twirled a no-hitter and in another game struck out fifteen, one shy of the record at the time, the pitcher "deserves admittance into the front ranks," he concluded that "there are few people who would not pick some other pitcher in preference to the star of Jake Stahl's club."

  There were reasons for that, and as Boston's train rumbled through the night toward Cleveland, where the club would begin the long road trip that could make or break their season, Joe Wood could not have been satisfied with such an assessment. The prevailing view throughout baseball was that Wood, while talented, was not all that he could be as a pitcher. Lane, in fact, was being kind, because thus far in 1912 Joe Wood had been plain rank nearly as often as he had been in the front ranks. And unless he did better, and soon, the 1912 season would be one that Sox fans would soon forget. The opening of Fenway Park would be a mere footnote to an otherwise desultory campaign.

  After beating Washington 21–8 on May 28, Wood's record for the 1912 season stood at 9-3, 8-3 as a starting pitcher. In an era that valued statistical victories above all other measures, Charley Hall, at 7-0, was considered Boston's most successful pitcher of the first two months of the season. Wood's nine wins, while outwardly impressive, were also misleading. He was in fact barely scraping by. His best two starts by far had come against the dismal St. Louis Browns, the worst team in baseball, winners of only twelve games through May. In four of his starts Wood had given up five or more runs, and in his last two efforts he had given up nearly a run an inning and allowed twenty-five base runners in only seventeen innings of work. On at least three other occasions he had pitched indifferently but been saved by his offense. Thus far, Wood was much closer to being 6-6—or worse—than 12-0.

  For all his vaunted speed, the man Paul Shannon would later dub "Smoky Joe" Wood, owing to the speed of his fastball, was a disappointment. An earlier nickname, "Ozone" Wood, was still more appropriate, for Wood sometimes pitched as if his head was in the clouds. His good fastball had been on display only intermittently, and he had been plagued by inexplicable bouts of wildness. The word "potential" hung around Wood's neck like a noose. Like that of the 1912 Red Sox, his season—and perhaps his career—was at a crossroads.

  It was going to be good, perhaps, for Wood to escape Boston for a while so he could focus on the task at hand, for there was some cause to blame the city for his troubles. For one, he had little anonymity in the Hub, and his popularity sometimes proved distracting. At the house he shared with Tris Speaker on Circuit Street in Winthrop, Massachusetts, Wood and Speaker sometimes came home after a game and found their front porch crowded with boys and girls—and young women. The address of the seaside cottage had appeared in the newspapers, and Wood's mailbox filled to overflowing each day with "mash notes" and more. As Wood once admitted in regard to the 1912 season, these were "wild days ... there were a lot of girls. They didn't stay home as much as they do nowadays." Rumors that Wood was about to marry seemed to hit the papers every few weeks—rarely with the same name attached. He was already juggling two fiancées—Laura O'Shea, his longtime girlfriend from Kansas City, whom he would eventually marry, and May Perry, a Boston girl who had spent the off-season in Philadelphia to be closer to Joe.

  Although Wood did not drink anything harder than beer and even avoided coffee and tea during the season, he was adept with a cue stick and very much a man's man. The temptations that confronted a ballplayer in 1912 were little different from those that confront the professional athlete in 2012. Indeed, only a few years before, Red Sox player-manager Chick Stahl had committed suicide largely because of a complicated personal life—after he had married, a previous conquest informed him she was pregnant. Even though the same temptations existed on the road as in Boston, at least when he was away from Boston Wood could walk down the street and not be recognized.

  But there was more to Wood's troubles than scented envelopes and blushing babes. The problem came down to Wood's fastball—his command of the pitch and his faith in it. Unless he found both, and soon, both his season and Boston's would slip away. During the road trip Wood was somehow going to have to find a way to harness his ability.

  Pitchers are creatures of habit, and some of Wood's difficulty so far in the 1912 season seemed to stem from his inability to get into a rhythm, a comfortable routine on the mound that would allow him to block out everything but throwing to the glove. The weather had made it difficult to get in work on a regular basis, and pitching in Fenway Park had proven to be a chall
enge. As Wood's last two outings had demonstrated, Fenway could be a dangerous place for a pitcher to work, particularly on warm days with a southerly wind, which seemed to push every fly ball hit to left field up onto Duffy's Cliff. He was also adapting to the change in his motion with men on base that Stahl had forced him to implement in spring training. When he took the mound he was often thinking about everything but getting the batter out, and he found it difficult to stay in a groove.

  Even the mound was a distraction. At the time the rules stated only that the pitching rubber, then called the "plate," "shall not be more than 15 inches higher than the base lines or home plate." That left plenty of room for interpretation, and each pitcher had his preference. Wood had become as accustomed to the mound at Huntington Avenue as if it were an old shoe, but in Fenway Park, although the sod had been transferred from the old park, the soil was different. For most of the month of May Red Sox pitchers had consulted almost daily with Jerome Kelley and his crew, some of them preferring the mound to be low and flat while others asked for it to be higher and steeper. Kelley was accommodating to a point, but the weather had made his job even more difficult: after each game played in a downpour the mound had to be rebuilt.

  The mound was important to Wood because it affected his ability to throw and control his best pitch, the fastball. Baseball writers of the era noted that Wood threw what they called a "jump ball"—an overhand, rising fastball that on good days had a "jump" or "hop" at the end of it. Although the phenomenon is an illusion—no ball thrown overhand truly rises on its way to the plate—a hard, high fastball like Wood's dropped less than hitters were accustomed to seeing and therefore appeared to rise as it reached the plate. When Wood was on his game, hitters could not resist swinging at a pitch that appeared to be coming in just above the belt. Yet as they whiffed they often discovered that they had actually offered at a pitch that crossed the plate at the letters. A higher mound helped Wood get on top of the ball and increase the downward angle of the pitch, which gave him more leverage and increased the illusion.