Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  When the Red Sox arrived at Grand Central Station they were forced to run a gauntlet as a crowd of New Yorkers pelted them with rocks and other debris. New York police simply looked the other way, and Buck O'Brien was badly cut on the face when struck by a stone. Still, despite some lingering bad blood after game 1, during the trip the members of both teams let their guard down a bit. Both teams' players realized that while they were pitted against one another on the field, off the field they were united against the men who owned baseball.

  Sometime during the journey from Boston to New York the players began talking to one another, and perhaps after perusing the most recent issue of Sporting Life or being tipped off by one of the writers on the train or by a fan or family member, they became aware of the decision by the National Commission a few weeks earlier in regard to the division of the World's Series money. They learned that they would share in the proceeds of the first four games only, regardless of whether one of those games ended in a tie, with the remainder going to management, shared by the National Commission and the two participating teams. For the players, who already felt that they should receive the lion's share of the proceeds, the question in regard to the tie game was hardly insignificant. As recently as 1907, in fact, a Series game had ended in a tie. The players, while powerless, were acutely aware of their rights—or lack thereof. It was an era of reform, and players were becoming increasingly political. The recent millworkers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had gained the widespread sympathy of the public, and players in both leagues were increasingly disgruntled at being treated like serfs. Mineworkers and chambermaids had more rights than major league ballplayers.

  The issue of the tie game was brought to the attention of the Giants' Christy Mathewson, the uncrowned monarch, the players' moral leader, and a man of honor beyond reproach. Mathewson agreed that the ruling was patently unfair, and he was determined to do something about it.

  The next morning Mathewson, who was staying with the rest of the Giants and most of New York's entourage of writers at the Copley Square Hotel, spoke with Sam Crane of the New York Evening Journal and voiced his complaint. Crane, an old ballplayer himself, was sympathetic. He knew, better than most, that while players were relatively well compensated during their careers, those careers were brief. Once players' skills had eroded or they became injured, they were discarded like yesterday's newspaper. At a time when the average life span was just over fifty, few players, even those with a college education, were able to start a successful second career after retiring from baseball. Crane had been lucky to become a journalist. Many other old ballplayers ended their lives as clichés, working menial jobs and mourning days gone by over shots of rye.

  The contrast between players and owners was telling. The members of the National Commission were crying poor mouth, but they were staying at Boston's newest and most expensive hotel, the opulent Copley Plaza. It had opened for business a little more than a month earlier. The players were picking up the tab.

  When the two men finished speaking Crane returned to his room and started writing. Mathewson, he wrote, "insinuates, or rather threatens, that if the players' share is curtailed in future games the National Commission will find itself left flat by one club or the other.... Mathewson's present complaint is the commission's refusal to allow the players to share in any playoff game in case there is a tie in any game of the first four played." He then quoted Mathewson directly: "There are many of us who think we are entitled to a share of all the games played. The Commission makes rules without consulting us or letting us know their intentions." While Mathewson did not threaten specific action, he was clearly speaking for the players of both teams and made it clear that the players were united by both their anger and their determination to have the inequity resolved. They were keenly aware that the immense crowds in Boston and New York promised to bring in a record-setting amount of money. The players, not James McAleer, John Brush, or Ban Johnson, were the reason for that.

  As Mathewson spoke with Crane, Fenway Park was becoming the most popular piece of real estate in Boston. The streets surrounding the ballpark were already choked with some five thousand fans who had spent the night in gigantic lines that stretched out in every direction from the eight ticket booths on Jersey Street. From there they spread, spiderlike, up Van Ness Street (then still referred to as "Auto Road"), Boylston Street, Ipswich Street, and Brookline Avenue. Some in the crowd had gone directly from South Station to Fenway Park. While the crowd sipped from flasks and sang "Tessie" and other favorites all night long, enterprising boys sold sandwiches, coffee, cigars, and mugs of milk and ran errands. Tickets finally went on sale at 9:00 a.m., and the team began rushing fans inside before they could slip their tickets to scalpers. By 1:00 p.m., just as the Red Sox were taking the field for batting practice, the line was suddenly gone. Thousands more who had arrived later that morning and seen the long lines had assumed that the game would be sold out. They had turned around and left, deciding to follow the game for free at Newspaper Row or in the comfort of a theater. But now, although few realized it, the crowd was gone and seats were still available without waiting. The first World's Series game at Fenway Park would not quite be a sellout.

  Inside the park tensions were high and tempers short. Fifteen minutes before the start of the game the crowd turned a bit chaotic. Some fans with tickets for the center-field bleachers broke through a gate and, chased by police the whole way, squeezed their way into some of the seats rimming the outfield. But there were more escapees than wardens, and once they made it into the stands it was hard to determine who belonged and who did not, and most made it safely. At home plate the ubiquitous Mayor Honey Fitz presented a car to Jake Stahl, a gift of the subscribers to the Boston American, a fully equipped "White 30," and Charlie Wagner was given a silver bat. As soon as that ceremony ended the Royal Rooters, craving attention like a hitter craves base hits, marched in behind their band through the center-field gate between the left-field wall and the center-field bleachers. They then paraded to their place in the stands, most on Duffy's Cliff, where the Red Sox had agreed to reserve a block of seats in the Rooters' name. More enterprising fans who made the instant decision to become Royal Rooters in order to get better seats for free followed them through the gate and sent the police chasing after still more scofflaws. At the same time the Elks Club band, already stationed in the center-field bleachers, decided to play. For much of the day the antics of the crowd made Fenway seem more like the venue of a college football game than a baseball game. First the Royal Rooters band and then the Elks Club band would break out in song, each trying to play louder and faster, often playing the same song at the same time but not so often on the same measure, as their constituents sang and waved pennants and made everyone who was not from Boston want to cover their ears and hide.

  Although the addition of the extra seats made it the biggest official crowd in Fenway history—30,148—by the start of the game a handful of seats were still available on Duffy's Cliff and fans at the top of the center-field bleachers still had room to stretch out. The weather, although fall-like, was fine, mostly overcast but with an intermittent swirling wind blowing out to left field. Fenway Park was a gem, the green grass the only splash of color on the gray day.

  Just before 2:00 p.m. head umpire Silk O'Loughlin called Jake Stahl and John McGraw to home plate to exchange lineup cards and discuss the ground rules. The decisions made in the next few moments were perhaps the most important in the World's Series. The new seats that ringed the ballpark had changed everything. Fenway Park itself would exert as much influence on the Series as any player.

  The umpires had been given what the National Commission deemed "supreme authority" over matters such as the ground rules, and the recent additions to Fenway Park necessitated some changes from the rules that had been in effect during the regular season. With the new bleachers on Duffy's Cliff and several rows of seats now intruding onto the field in front of the Cliff and encircling the outfield, both
the Cliff and the left-field wall were now out of play entirely. As the Red Sox and Giants had taken batting practice O'Loughlin and the other umpires had watched closely as fly balls that were routine outs only a few weeks before now landed in the crowd, and dozens of practice balls had already been lost to young boys. As the umpires and managers discussed the situation, everyone agreed that if balls hit over the new, much closer, and much lower left-field fence were allowed to be home runs, there might be as many as five or six in each contest. That would turn the game into a travesty and, if it benefited New York, perhaps even cause a riot by disgruntled fans dizzy from watching Giants run around the bases. That would not do at all.

  Since they could not move the fence back, O'Loughlin decided it was only fair to rule that any ball that landed over the low rail fence and in the crowd would not be a home run at all. Instead such hits would be good for only two bases, a ground-rule double. Whether or not the ball hit the wall and bounced back onto the field or even cleared the wall and landed on Lansdowne Street was insignificant. Any ball that went over the temporary fence installed in front of the Cliff would only be a double, even one that cleared the left-field wall on the fly, like Hugh Bradley's first-ever Fenway Park home run in April and the handful that had subsequently cleared the barrier. No matter how far the ball was hit, the only possible home runs hit to left field would have to be of the inside-the-park variety, and given that the distance to the fence had been greatly reduced, one of those was not very likely. Had the 1975 World Series been played under the same ground rules, for example, Carlton Fisk's game-ending home run in the twelfth inning of game 6, perhaps the best-known home run in Red Sox history, would have only been a double. Then again, so would Bucky Dent's blast in the 1978 playoff against the Yankees.

  Stahl and McGraw readily agreed to the changes. The integrity of the game had to be preserved, and O'Loughlin had come up with a commonsense solution. Home runs over the wall were still so rare that few writers covering the Series even saw fit to mention the change, and no one complained about the rule during the Series.

  Fortunately, that specific ruling would have little impact—no ball hit during the Series would clear the left-field fence atop the Cliff, although a significant number of otherwise routine fly balls would become doubles. But then O'Loughlin made another ruling that would have a much greater impact.

  The new shorter and lower fences in center and right field created a problem as well, particularly the fence in right. During the regular season any hitter who struck the ball over the right fielder's head had a fair chance of getting at least a triple, if not an inside-the-park home run. That was impossible now. Not only was the fence shorter, but instead of being a solid stockade fence, like the one in dead center, the fence that stretched around to right field was a plank fence only eighteen inches tall topped by a rail three feet off the ground, leaving an eighteen-inch gap between the planking and the rail, similar to the kind of fence used on a farm to contain pigs. During batting practice the umpires had noticed that even though the new fence was much closer, no one had hit the ball over it and only a few balls had even bounced that far.

  O'Loughlin, perhaps feeling some sympathy for the hitters after his ruling in regard to left field, ruled that if a ball either was hit over or even bounced over the low three-foot-high stockade fence in center field, it would be a home run. But in right field the ball would be a home run not only if it cleared the fence or bounced over it, but also if it went through the gap between the planks and the rail. Thus, during this World's Series at Fenway Park, balls hit over the fence in left field could not be home runs, but balls that bounced over or through the fence elsewhere would be. Fenway Park, already made smaller by the addition of the extra seats, became dramatically smaller. The ground rules would have an immediate, dramatic, and lasting impact on the Series.

  The first World's Series game in the history of Fenway Park was, wrote the Herald's R. E. McMillen later, both "the best of games" and "the worst of games," a fine mess of baseball that included tremendous plays and stupendous gaffes, fabulous base running and horrendous mistakes, a game with more mood swings than a patient at the nearby State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers. It was a ball game that, as the Tribune noted, "wrecked the hearts of thirty-five thousand fans and tore the nerves of the players to shreds," and one that, in the end, both counted and didn't matter, decided nothing and changed everything. Joe Jackson, writing in the Washington Post, commented later, "Viewed critically or judged as an artistic exhibition, the affair was impossible." In other words, it was a rather typical game at Fenway Park, where no lead was safe and the ballyard itself played a role in just about everything that happened.

  McGraw, to no one's surprise whatsoever, selected his old standby, Mathewson, to start for New York. Jake Stahl countered with lefty Ray Collins, for it was widely believed that the Giants lineup had a bit of trouble with left-handed pitching and, as yet, left-handed pitchers were not thought to be a liability in Fenway Park. That characteristic would develop later, after the introduction of the lively ball in 1920 made the left-field wall a more inviting target for right-handed hitters and sluggers like Jimmie Foxx took advantage.

  THRILLS, THROBS, SIGHS, SMILES

  How They Mixed It Up At Yesterday's Game Big Crowd Gets Its Money's Worth Every Minute

  Collins took the mound, O'Loughlin called out for the game to begin, and with the noise of the crowd reaching a crescendo, outfielder Fred Snodgrass, leading off for the Giants, took Ray Collins's first pitch for a strike. He swung at the second and hit the ball solid to left field, where it went up as a rather routine fly ball but came down and was swallowed by a sea of hands on Duffy's Cliff. During the regular season Duffy Lewis might have either caught the ball or retrieved it in time for a play at second, but not anymore. Snodgrass collected a ground-rule double.

  Collins left him stranded, but in the Boston half Mathewson was not so fortunate. Hooper led off with a single, and then, after he stole second, the Giants played hot potato. Steve Yerkes smacked a soft line drive to shortstop Art Fletcher, who not only failed to hold on to the ball but missed a chance to double up Hooper, who misjudged the hit and was already on his way to third. Both men were safe. When Tris Speaker then dropped a perfect bunt down the third-base line, Mathewson made no attempt to field it but walked behind it until it rolled to a stop, hoping it would go foul while eyeballing Hooper and keeping him at third. That filled the bases. Groundouts by Lewis and Gardner and a single by Stahl gave the Red Sox a quick 3–0 lead.

  The Giants should have gotten one run back in a hurry. With one out in the second, Buck Herzog rapped the ball far and deep to right field, way over Hooper's head, and the ball took a long bounce to the rail fence—a sure home run if it had not hit the top rail with a crack and bounced straight back. Had it gone either over or through the barrier, Herzog would have had a home run, but now he only made third. Fortunately for New York, the issue became moot when Chief Meyers cracked a bad-hop ground ball off Larry Gardner's face and Herzog scored to make it 3–1. Gardner's cheek began to swell almost immediately, and for the rest of the Series he would look like a prizefighter after a bad night.

  In the middle innings the two clubs traded runs as each did its best to give the other the game. New York shortstop Art Fletcher, with one bad play already to his credit, kept it up, having a perfectly wretched day in the field. One day after striking out three times, Fletcher made several other miscues, such as dropping a perfect peg to second base that should have caught Harry Hooper and helping Boston to a run. However, Fletcher saved his best work—from Boston's perspective—for the eighth inning.

  In the top of that inning with the score 4-2, it looked at first as if the Giants had put the game away and tied the Series. It began with Duffy Lewis lending the opposition a helping hand by dropping Fred Snodgrass's leadoff fly ball. Larry Doyle then singled, and after a force-out put runners at first and third, Red Murray hit a slashing drive to deep left. Once again, a few weeks
earlier Lewis, maybe playing deeper, might well have tracked the ball down and made a fine running catch. But on this day, with the close crowd, the ball was past him in a flash and into his namesake bleachers for a double, scoring Snodgrass.

  That was enough for Stahl. The Giants had been hitting Collins hard all day, and at various times the Boston manager had had both Joe Wood and Charley Hall warming up in front of the third-base stands, the only place left in the park where there was room for a pitcher to throw. He called on Hall, and the rescue pitcher nearly saved the day. He got Fred Merkle to pop out foul to Carrigan, who was catching this day instead of Cady. Buck Herzog then lifted another twisting foul toward the first-base stands. As is well known to generations of fans who have sat in the grandstand, a wind blowing in through the stands pushes such foul balls back toward the field, even today. Had Carrigan caught the ball, the Giants would have been out of the inning, but the catcher struggled to track the twisting fly. The ball hit the catcher's glove and then, as Hugh Fullerton wrote, "rimmed around like a golf ball on a long putt" before dropping out. Carrigan cursed loudly as the ball fell, and Herzog was free to hit again.

  He made Boston pay. Once more a long fly was sent toward left. The ball ricocheted off the stockade fence in left-center for a double, two runs scoring. The Giants were suddenly ahead, 5–4, and only six outs away from tying the Series with Christy Mathewson, who had pitched better than the score, looking strong.