Fenway 1912

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Fenway 1912 Page 23

by Glenn Stout

But if the team had one cause for worry it was Murnane's tribute to the "Board of Strategy," Wagner and Carrigan, which included the kind of praise usually reserved for the manager. There was, wrote Murnane, no one "more capable of working out a scheme for playing a whole game than this same board of strategy." But of the man who signed the checks and put together the roster, owner James McAleer, Murnane uttered not a single word. To be fair, it was not yet October, and the championship had yet to be won, but for the remainder of the season the question of who should receive credit for Boston's performance—or the blame—would fester until it finally burst into the open. Despite Murnane's propaganda about the winning ball club's "espirit d'corp," there were fault lines in the makeup of the roster that even winning could not quite mask.

  Oddly, the impact of Fenway Park on Boston's pennant run garnered not a mention in the press from Murnane, Shannon, or anyone else at the time. Apart from the benefits of playing in front of a supportive crowd, the notion that a ballpark would or even could affect performance was an alien notion. Not until the Phillies' Gavvy Cravath took advantage of the addition of a section of bleachers in left field at Shibe Park to hit a record twenty-four home runs in 1915 did it become obvious that a ballpark could have a dramatic influence on the outcome of a game. But it would take a few more years—until Babe Ruth started hitting the ball out of the Polo Grounds with astounding regularity in his inaugural season with the Yankees in 1920—before the notion really took hold. The Yankees took note, and when Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, it was not so much "The House That Ruth Built" as "The House Built for Ruth." The Yankees were the first team to build a ballpark specifically tailored for its players, and it gave the club a tremendous advantage. In contrast, little mention would be made of Fenway's impact on the game until 1931, when Earl Webb tattooed the left-field wall on his way to a major league record sixty-seven doubles. Only then would it be widely recognized that Fenway Park had its own unique influence on the game. It was no accident that soon afterward the Red Sox began to seek out right-handed power hitters to take advantage of the wall.

  After the Cleveland series the Sox and Naps, who became known as the Indians in 1915, both boarded the same train and headed west, the Red Sox heading to Chicago and Cleveland returning home. In Albany a car carrying the White Sox joined the train as well, and all three clubs traveled together through the night. Members of all three teams reportedly spent the evening "playing the national indoor game," which presumably referred to playing cards and drinking.

  If anyone was expecting the Red Sox to collapse on the road trip, they were sorely disappointed. Boston won series in both Chicago and Detroit at the start and the end of the trip and split series in St. Louis and Cleveland in the middle before returning to Boston on August 12 with a comfortable lead. Happy Sox fans all but ignored the impending U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. They were obsessed with baseball, not politics. Had a conquering army landed on the beaches of South Boston, few would have paid attention, at least not until after the game.

  There was, however, some cause for concern. On July 28 against Chicago, Joe Wood cruised through the first four innings. But in the fifth, with one out, he hit a batter, then gave up a hit, then fielded a bunt and threw wild to first base. After a fly-out he then walked a man and gave up another hit, giving Chicago four runs and causing Jake Stahl to pull him from the game in favor of Bedient. It was Wood's worst performance since Cady had become his personal catcher.

  The breakdown was inexplicable—at first. But a few days later there were whispers in the papers that Joe Wood, who had already started twenty-four games and made three relief appearances for the season, had a sore arm. Nevertheless, although it may have been wiser to give him some rest, on August 2 in St. Louis, Wood started against the Browns and seemed to alleviate concerns by tossing a three-hit shutout. Wood, wrote Murnane, "was in fine fettle ... [with] remarkable speed, perfect control of his drop and curve, and was handled in superb style by Forrest Cady, a great catcher." But a few days later Wood was complaining again, this time about a sore wrist, an injury that might have occurred in an attempt to take the strain off his elbow or shoulder.

  Although Wood would later sometimes claim that he never had serious arm troubles before 1913—when he apparently injured his arm after returning to the mound too quickly after breaking his thumb—the facts tell a different story. According to the papers, he was plagued by arm trouble over most of the second half of the 1912 season. Although Wood, who once said, "I threw so hard I thought my arm would fly right off my body," was still able to pitch, his chronic soreness may well have been a sign that his arm was already going bad. Somewhere inside his right arm the magic musculature that allowed him to throw the ball nearly one hundred miles per hour was starting to fray.

  Today a pitcher with Wood's ability would be placed on the disabled list and treated like a fragile piece of crystal. But in 1912 it was frowned upon to "coddle" pitchers, even those with a sore arm. Once a pitcher lost the ability to take the ball every third or fourth day, he was considered damaged goods, a so-called Sunday pitcher who lacked the mental and emotional strength to appear more regularly. And besides, if a pitcher was hurt and could not pitch, he did not get paid. As a result, many sore-armed pitchers threw until, literally, they could not lift their arms and the damage was so severe that there was no chance of recovery. The road to the Hall of Fame has been littered with hundreds of pitchers who enjoyed brief, blazing success before becoming injured and then being discarded like an old appliance.

  After his injury in 1913 Wood became just such a Sunday pitcher, a hurler who could pitch one or perhaps two or three games in a regular rotation but then would have to rest. Even though he remained effective, he would never again be the same. As he told Lawrence Ritter, following the injury, "I never again pitched without a terrific amount of pain in my right shoulder ... After each game I pitched I'd have to lay off for a couple of weeks before I could even lift my arm up." The description of the malady correlates almost certainly with a tear of the rotator cuff, an injury that, while sometimes treatable today through surgery, is still perhaps the most debilitating injury a pitcher can have. Decades after he retired from baseball Wood's shoulder still gave him pain and restricted his movements.

  With Wood ailing, it was even more strange that in the midst of the road trip Stahl removed Charley Hall from the pitching rotation. While Hall was not pitching quite as well as he had earlier in the year and had been battling a pulled muscle in his side, he was still effective and still taking a regular turn as a starting pitcher. Since the beginning of the season, the Red Sox, like most teams of the era, had loosely used a five-man pitching rotation, albeit one that occasionally skipped over a starter or shuffled the order, according to the whims of Stahl and whether or not a starting pitcher had been pressed to serve in relief. The Red Sox, as was more or less customary at the time, did not have a true relief pitcher on the staff. On rare occasions Larry Pape would be called on to mop up in a lost cause, but Stahl usually called on one of his stalwarts to step in and stanch the bleeding as needed.

  Wood, Hall, and O'Brien had been in the rotation from the start, then Bedient and Collins had stepped in when Cicotte went to the woodshed. Yet suddenly Stahl chose to depend on four starting pitchers almost exclusively while relegating Hall to the bullpen. To a degree, the move made sense. Hall had been remarkably effective in limited relief duty. Eddie Collins once wrote that while Hall never had much success against the A's as a starter, "let him relieve ... and invariably he would have the upper hand." But sending Hall to the bullpen without replacing him in the rotation risked creating more problems than it solved. Since getting married, Bedient had not pitched particularly well, now Wood's health was in question, and every starting pitcher's workload was due to increase.

  The logic behind Stahl's thinking may have resided in New York, where the Giants, after tearing the league apart for the first half of the season behind Marquard, were suddenly slumping. Stahl's club, now th
at the pennant was wrapped up, was in the same position the Giants had been in a month earlier—far ahead and being pushed by no other team. He may have turned to a four-man rotation in an effort to avoid the kind of sag that had since plagued the Giants, the baseball equivalent of a jockey going to the whip hand long before the stretch. But it also guaranteed that his best pitchers would get additional work over the remainder of the season—Wood, after starting only five games in July, would start seven games in August and make two additional appearances in relief. In theory that would make a slump less likely, but it also threatened to gas the staff. Wood was already hurting, and although Hall was now in the bullpen, he would not be used to give pitchers a rest after five or six innings but would pitch only when a starter fared poorly, leading the Boston Post to call him a "rescue pitcher." Any way one looked at it, the change was a high-risk move. If any of the remaining four starters faltered or were injured because of the increased workload—particularly Wood—Boston's chances in the postseason would almost certainly suffer.

  That seemed even more likely after Joe Wood pitched eleven long innings in his next start against Cleveland on August 6. He won, 5–4, but wasn't right, giving up thirteen hits, matching his season high, and striking out only five. Nevertheless the victory, number twenty-three, was his eighth win in a row. No one was making much of that yet, because Walter Johnson of the Senators was the winner of eleven straight, sparking speculation that in this season of streaks Johnson just might be able to break Jack Chesbro's American League record of fourteen consecutive wins. If he got lucky, he might even better the major league mark that Rube Marquard had set one month before. Although the Senators had little chance of heading off Boston in the pennant race—they were about to lose five of six, with the lone victory by Johnson—Walter Johnson and Joe Wood were on a collision course.

  It was destiny. The two hottest pitchers in baseball would soon meet in Boston in what is still one of the most memorable regular-season games in Red Sox history.

  They would change the ballpark forever. Fenway Park would never be the same.

  9. Heavyweights

  From all parts of New England came the fans to witness this encounter, for the fame of the scheduled pitching duel had aroused the attention of the country, and every train reaching Boston before noon carried its quotient of fans bound for Fenway Park.

  —Paul Shannon, Boston Post

  AS THE DOG days of August settled in over Boston, enveloping the city in sweat, Sox fans seeking a respite from the heat and humidity still gathered before and after the games in the dark, wood-paneled confines of Nuf Ced McGreevey's Columbus Avenue tavern, Third Base. Despite the fact that the ball club had moved operations to Fenway Park, the stuffed mannequin known as "the Baseball Man" still adorned the front door, the lightbulbs shaped like baseballs still hung from the ceiling, and photographs of ballplayers still covered the walls. McGreevey's remained the passionate center of the baseball world for the Royal Rooters and other Boston baseball fans. As the cranks gathered to talk and quaff mugs of beer and shots of rye, with the pennant races in both leagues all but over and the World's Series still too far into the future to be the subject of much meaningful debate, there was really only one question that dominated the conversation. Who, one man would ask of another, is the better pitcher: Boston's young ace, twenty-three-year-old Joe Wood, or Washington's veteran star, Walter Johnson?

  That was all it took to spark an argument. Thus far in the 1912 season there had been barely a dime's worth of difference between the two, and Johnson, even in Boston, had his defenders among the Royal Rooters. Some old-timers in the group still argued that the real "King of Pitchers" was Amos Rusie, the Giants' star pitcher in the 1890s, or the Boston Nationals' Kid Nichols from the same era. Others scoffed and offered up the recently retired Cy Young, or the Giants' Christy Mathewson. But now most admitted that the crown was up for grabs between only Wood and Johnson.

  As photographs of Wood and Johnson and other baseball luminaries silently gazed down upon the combatants from the tavern's walls, the diminutive McGreevey, rushing back and forth between the cash register and the bar, would listen closely. He would let such conversations continue, occasionally chiming in with his own ten cents' worth of wisdom and even egging each man on until the voices of the sparring parties, fueled by alcohol, began to grow loud, the conversations turned circular, and each party began to repeat the same arguments they had made only a few minutes before, only louder and with personal insults attached that would begin to be uttered with a sly smile but then begin to stick and sting. And then, when McGreevey saw the faces turn red and begin to flush with anger, he knew it was time to rein the participants back in toward civility. Slamming an empty beer mug or his palm on top of the bar, he would yell out loud enough for everyone to hear, "Nuf ced!" All recognized that as a sign that the argument was over and it was time for the debaters to lower their voices and back off.

  However the Wood-versus-Johnson argument began, it tended to follow the same well-worn paths—a comparison of Wood's youth, toughness, athleticism, and relative exuberance with Johnson's experience, control, brains, and poise. But no matter how the conversation started, before long it generally boiled down to a single question—Who threw harder?

  And now with each passing day it seemed ever more likely that the question might soon be answered. Like two fastballs thrown from opposite ends of the diamond that were destined to meet and explode over the pitcher's mound, Wood and Johnson, two unstoppable forces, rocketed toward one another. Each man was in the midst of an undefeated pitching streak that would soon threaten the record books.

  They had already met once before in 1912, Wood defeating his counterpart, but that only provided more fuel for the argument. Johnson in fact had already faced Boston four times in 1912 and lost each time, falling once to Cicotte in April, losing twice to O'Brien—once by shutout—and being beaten by Wood, 3–0, on June 26. But instead of ending the debate, those earlier games only gave the arbiters more oxygen. In Johnson's first three games against Boston, one could argue, Wood had been available to throw, but Jake Stahl, fearful of Johnson, had chosen to avoid pitching him opposite the Washington star, just as he had done when Wood had the opportunity to pitch opposite Ed Walsh. And even though their meeting on June 26 had gone Wood's way, Johnson had been victimized by some poor defensive play and struck out ten while giving up only four hits, while Wood had struck out nine and given up three hits. The game had really decided nothing beyond cementing Wood's status as Johnson's foremost challenger. The sporting men in the crowd—and they were all sporting men when the odds were right—relished the opportunity for a rematch.

  Johnson was the established veteran, the star, and as F. C. Lane's article in Baseball magazine had concluded, "the King of the Pitchers," a title that, over the last two and a half seasons, Johnson had wrested from Mathewson. In that time period he had won seventy-five games, and in an era in which hitters still considered striking out something to be ashamed of, Johnson had sent more than six hundred humiliated victims back to the bench.

  While Johnson's six years in the league gave him the aura of a veteran, he was, at age twenty-four, only a year older than Wood. Already the winner of more than one hundred games, it seemed as if he had been in the league much longer. A rangy 6'1", with long arms and fingers, the soft-spoken Kansan had been a star from the start, even as he initially struggled to win with Washington's anemic offensive support. Everyone recognized that if he had played for a better team—the Senators were routinely one of the worst teams in baseball—his record would have been even more impressive. In fact, with better support, Johnson, not Cy Young, might very well hold the all-time record for most major league victories and baseball's annual award given to the best pitcher might bear his name, not Young's. As it was, despite rarely receiving any help from his offensively challenged teammates—he would lose 26 games by the score of 1–0 over the course of his career—Johnson would eventually retire with 417 wins ov
er twenty-one seasons. By any estimation, even given his recent struggles against Boston and the fact that Boston had all but wrapped up the pennant race, Johnson was "the Champion."

  Wood, on the other hand, was seen as the scrappy, youthful "Challenger." Despite pitching for the Red Sox, a team much better than the Senators, his record entering the 1912 season was barely above .500. Only recently had Wood's performance brought him into the same conversation with Johnson.

  And that was because of Wood's fastball. His overhand pitch, while different from Johnson's sidearm whip, was just as devastating to batters, hopping at the end while Johnson's tended to dart and run. Each pitch made an audible sound, a hiss as the seams of the baseball cut through the air when the ball passed by the plate. Wood's motion was violent and quick, while Johnson's was easy and deceptive. In 1912 hitters found it equally difficult to square up the pitch from either man. In just over 1,400 innings Wood would give up only twelve home runs in his career, while Johnson, who would end the 1912 season with more than 1,700 career innings, would give up only thirteen to that point in his career. Hitters who did make contact against Wood often were jammed or popped the ball up. Against Johnson they took defensive swings and often beat the ball into the ground. In contemporary terms, Johnson's motion can perhaps best be described as combining Mariano Rivera's quiet delivery with an arm angle more like that of Randy Johnson (albeit from the right side), while Wood's would be more akin to the all-out effort of a Jonathan Papelbon or Tim Lincecum.

  Both men, perhaps because of their shared western upbringing, were utterly respectful of the other. Johnson once said famously that "nobody can throw harder than Joe Wood," while Wood, who rarely praised opposing pitchers, once told Roger Angell, "I don't think anybody was faster than Walter Johnson." In the mind of each man the question of who was faster—and better—was best left for others to decide based on their records. The consensus seemed to be that while Wood may have been able to throw the occasional pitch faster than Johnson, he could not sustain his speed, something even Johnson had sensed. Earlier in the year he cautioned that Wood "has tremendous speed. But he acquired that speed in such a way that he can't stand it long." Citing Wood's use of the "deadly 'snap ball,'" Johnson offered that "I am afraid he will soon cease to be as effective as he is now, if he doesn't have to retire altogether," and he hoped Wood would "change his pace and extend his career." While Johnson's words would prove prophetic, for the 1912 season Wood's Faustian bargain with his right arm would pay dividends.

 

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