Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  Speaker, more cautious than Hooper but with his ankle feeling better, stole second, and when Duffy Lewis hit a sharp liner to left it looked as if Speaker might score, but Josh Devore raced in and caught the ball shin high to end the inning. Although the Red Sox had not scored, they had put pressure on the Giants, and Marquard, as Hugh Fullerton later noted, seemed "wabbling and uncertain." It seemed only a matter of time before Boston would break through against Marquard and the Giants would begin to fold.

  The bottom of the inning started quietly too—sort of, for John McGraw, coaching third for the Giants, and his cohort, Wil Robinson at first, unleashed a barrage of insults and distractions at O'Brien from the start. They had tried the same thing against Bedient, to no effect, but they had better ammunition to use against O'Brien, who was quicker to anger anyway. Word of his romance with Connie Mack's daughter had made the rounds, and some found his singing in the Red Sox Quartet somewhat less than manly. There was little respect for the thirty-year-old rookie who only a few years before had been working in a shoe factory. He was just a semipro punk.

  Josh Devore led off against O'Brien and grounded meekly to third. Then Larry Doyle topped a spitball and beat out the slow roller to second.

  Now it was Doyle's turn to dance off base, and he stole second, but O'Brien didn't seem bothered, striking out Fred Snodgrass. His spitball was working fine, dropping just as it should, this time causing Red Murray to top the ball, another bleeder that hung up in the long grass of the Polo Grounds infield before Charlie Wagner could grab it. The Giants now had men on first and third with Fred Merkle at the plate.

  It was the kind of situation McGraw's team thrived on—two quick runners on the corners—and he had both men take huge leads, putting pressure on O'Brien, while he and Robinson continued their tirade. O'Brien worked carefully, trying to keep Murray from breaking toward second and giving Doyle a chance to steal home if Cady tried to nab Murray.

  Once, twice, three times O'Brien threw to first, and each time Murray made it back free, only to dance off the bag again as soon as Stahl returned the ball to the pitcher. Then, as Murray left the bag once more, O'Brien appeared to begin his wind-up, then stopped and feinted a throw to first, cocking his arm, starting to throw, then stopping as Murray dove back in.

  According to Damon Runyon, "for a full ten seconds none of the Giants seemed to gather the import of the act." Then "the hoarse bellow of Robinson rolled across the diamond."

  From the first-base coaching box Giants coach Wil Robinson nearly jumped out of his shoes. "Balk," he started sputtering, looking first toward home plate umpire Bill Klem and then to base ump Billy Evans. "Balk! Balk!"

  Evans, in the best position to see the play, immediately looked at O'Brien's feet. If his foot was not on the rubber, a fake throw was legal, even to first base. But if his foot was on the rubber, it was a clear balk, an attempt to deceive the runner. If a balk was called, both Murray and Doyle would be allowed to advance, giving the Giants a 1–0 lead.

  As Evans later recalled, he was "standing directly behind O'Brien when he made the slip," but when he looked at O'Brien's feet, "I was really in doubt myself" over whether the pitcher had committed an infraction. Evans erred on the side of caution and made no call.

  But Robinson kept yelling, and now so too did McGraw, the other Giants, and the fans around the infield. According to Evans, home plate umpire Bill Klem "hesitated several moments before motioning the runners to advance." Doyle ran home, Murray ran to second, and McGraw and Robinson started blasting away again at O'Brien as the partisan crowd roared.

  In the field-level press box behind the home plate screen the play looked bad, at least to those sportswriters who were actually watching when it took place. Balk calls, while rare, were usually made when the pitcher made an inadvertent move while his foot was on the rubber. Stopping in mid-wind-up to fake a throw to first base with a foot on the rubber was something professional pitchers simply did not do. Fullerton called it "bone-headed, grammar school baseball."

  As the crowd howled and hooted, Evans asked O'Brien, "What in the world were you thinking about?"

  "Bill," O'Brien answered back, "I thought my foot was off the rubber." The feint to first was not a mistake but something O'Brien had planned to do, only to have Klem—much farther from O'Brien than Evans—rule that the move was a balk.

  O'Brien was shaken by the call. He started overthrowing the ball, and the spitter, instead of dropping, began to stay straight.

  Now O'Brien, wrote Lardner, "worked in a trance ... he blew, and never in history did anybody blow harder ... a 10-year-old girl with a bat in her hands could have gone up to the plate and made a base hit." It wasn't a ten-year-old girl but Fred Merkle who was up next. He doubled to deep right, and then Buck Herzog did the same to deep left, and in a flash the score was 3–0.

  The other Sox didn't help matters. When Gardner went after Chief Meyers's "slow ugly grounder" to Wagner, he left third base uncovered, which allowed Herzog to advance to third while Meyers beat Wagner's throw to first. As O'Brien, now afraid to do anything that might be ruled a balk, toed the rubber, McGraw ordered a double steal, and Meyers, a slow runner, got a good jump. Cady threw to second as Herzog broke for the plate. Steve Yerkes cut the throw off short and made a quick return throw home, but threw the ball away. Herzog scored, Meyers went to third on the play, and then he scored when Art Fletcher made a perfect bunt. When O'Brien finally ended the inning by picking Fletcher off first—no balk this time—it was 5–0. The Giants and some of the Royal Rooters hadn't even sat down yet. On the Boston bench Joe Wood sat tight-lipped, his jaw clenched, quietly seething.

  The Sox tried to battle back, scoring twice in the second when Clyde Engle doubled in two runs, but then, with Ray Collins pitching in relief of O'Brien and Rube Marquard settling down, they played the final seven innings as if they could not wait for the game to end. The first two innings had taken an hour to play—an excruciating amount of time for the era—but after that players from both teams swung at the first pitch and the game ended in a tidy one hour and fifty-eight minutes. Tim Murnane commented that "the game was simply over after the fourth inning" and that "the players on both teams acted as if rather tired."

  O'BRIEN GOES UP IN THE AIR

  Five Runs Off Moist Ball Twirler In First Give New York Easy Victory

  Immediately after the game, as some Boston players bolted to the clubhouse and others sat stone-faced and angry on the bench, Stahl and McGraw were asked by National Commission chairman August Herrmann to join him on the field. The commission had decided that, since the second game had been a tie, if the Giants beat Boston the next day it would be only fair to have the winner of a coin toss select the location of the final game.

  As the Rooters surrounded the three men ten deep around the pitcher's mound, Herrmann tossed a silver dollar in the air. Stahl called out, "Tails," and the coin landed face down.

  "Where will the game be played?" asked McGraw, knowing the answer already.

  Happy to have won something, Stahl smiled and said, "In Boston." But he still hoped it would not be needed.

  Stahl's decision to use O'Brien over Wood was the subject of little criticism, perhaps because the press knew—or guessed—that the decision had not really been his to make. O'Brien, on the other hand, was excoriated after the game, particularly in New York, where several reports intimated that he had been hungover, but that may well have been sour grapes from New York sportswriters who had lost bets themselves on the game and were none too eager to return to Boston. Murnane, for one, found the rumors in regard to O'Brien being drunk preposterous—he had sat with him on the train to New York and had seen him go to his room the night before. Murnane later referred to those who would perpetrate such stories as "slander mongers ... microbes that thrive in the dark, but who die when the truth of sunlight is flashed across their paths."

  O'Brien's only real crimes—apart from being an Irish Catholic on a team on which half the roster was intolerant
—were the balk (the first in World's Series play), the fact that all five runs scored with two out, and plain bad luck. Most observers overlooked the fact that three of the six hits O'Brien gave up never left the infield, that Gardner made a mental error and Yerkes a real one with the bad throw, that the balk call might not have even been correct, and that after the second inning both teams played like the game was already over. But others did pay attention. Among the touts and sportsmen who made it their business to watch such things closely, some began to wonder if Boston had put forth a full effort.

  When the final out was recorded and the electronic baseball boards on Boston's Newspaper Row went dark, fans began showing up at Fenway Park, looking for tickets. For much of the next twenty-four hours it would be chaos in the Fenway Park ticket office and bedlam in the streets outside. No one in the entire country had an advance ticket for a game that no one had expected to be played and that suddenly everyone wanted to attend. All advance tickets had been sold in lots of three, one each for the three Series games originally scheduled for Boston, games 2, 4, and 6. But the tie had changed that, giving Boston an extra game and now, after the coin flip, perhaps a second extra game as well. Robert McRoy, fortunately, had tickets on hand to cover the extra games, but precisely how he would distribute them and how he would make certain those who had previously bought tickets in advance would get seats for the added game was still being worked out.

  The only Bostonians who seemed happy were the Rooters in the Polo Grounds. For them the only thing worse than seeing the Red Sox lose was to see the baseball season come to an end, and Boston's loss gave them at least one more day to sing and cheer. They made their usual postgame parade around the Polo Grounds and stopped before the Boston bench. A few players were still lingering, grim-faced, when, as the Times reported, some Rooters "executed a war dance around several of the players who had not yet run for cover." Then the Rooters congregated at home plate, where McGreevey and others gave speeches that spoke of certain victory in the offing.

  After the players boarded their train for the return trip to Boston, ate, and the liquor started to flow, the atmosphere among the Red Sox players became poisonous as teammates looked upon one another with suspicion. It was made even worse when they all learned that a last-ditch effort by Mathewson to get them all some money from the tie game had been shot down once more by the National Commission—this time the members of the commission claimed to have no authority to change the rules the commission itself had enacted. At the same time the players and press learned that Theodore Roosevelt, the presidential nominee for the Progressive Party, had been shot in Milwaukee. Although Roosevelt's wound was minor—in fact, he went on to deliver a ninety-minute speech with the bullet harmlessly lodged in his chest—the news only added to the mood of distrust and disgust permeating the club. Their whole damn world seemed to be spinning off orbit.

  Then the lid came off. Pete Wood, angry over losing the bet he had made on his brother Joe, confronted O'Brien. Angry words were exchanged, and the confrontation exploded into violence, O'Brien emerging from the scuffle with a blackened eye. Yet another report claimed that the combatants were O'Brien and Joe Wood himself, that after Wood made a crack about O'Brien's balk O'Brien knocked Wood out cold with a straight right to the jaw, and that Cady and Bill Carrigan were also pulled into the fray. The Herald reported the next day that there were rumors of "several three cornered battle royals" after the loss, indicating that even more players were involved. The two groups circled each other the rest of the trip, angry and wary. By the time the Red Sox made Boston they were sick of the Series and sick of each other, but at least they were home. Perhaps Fenway Park would prove a tonic to what ailed them.

  After hearing about and probably witnessing some of the brouhaha on the train, the Giants were suddenly feeling optimistic. They liked their chances. The Red Sox were starting to fray at the edges, and they did not think Wood could beat Tesreau a third time, particularly with his own club divided behind him. McGraw, who had seen everything in his life in baseball, knew that as long as the Red Sox were beating up on each other they weren't thinking much about beating his ball club.

  A crowd the Times described as "larger than on previous home days" began to line the streets around Fenway, and as the sun went down and the night turned cold and crisp, the temperature dropping to near forty degrees, Robert McRoy opened the ticket office and started selling. There simply wouldn't be enough time to sell all the tickets by the start of the game if he kept the ticket office closed until morning. As the night stretched on, rumors rippled up and down the line and then spilled into local taverns about Roosevelt, fights between players, anarchists, thrown games, shifting odds, and everything else imaginable.

  Confusion reigned. Those fans who could not prove they had purchased reserved seats to earlier games were only allowed to buy either unreserved seats or the seats in the few areas of reserved seats that had previously gone unsold in advance. Those who had bought tickets in advance and still had the stubs to prove it were allowed to buy tickets at the same price as before, but McRoy could not promise anyone the exact same seats—the club had kept track of buyers, but not the precise location of their seats. At 1:00 a.m. exhausted ticket sellers convinced him to close the office for the night so they could get some sleep. Several of the salesmen slept on their stools, slumped over the counter.

  At dawn the next day, although the sun broke through, clouds flew across the sky on a blustery day that warned of winter. The temperature sat only a few degrees above freezing and would gain no more than another ten degrees or so over the course of the day. Newsboys stood on every corner near the park screaming "Extra!" and trying to shill newspapers whose front-page headlines were evenly divided between the assassination attempt and the World's Series, but they were left wanting. No one wanted to read about the loss in New York, and now that it was common knowledge that Roosevelt had suffered what his doctor called a "superficial flesh wound," no one much cared about the shooting either. Besides, Boston was a Democratic town, and on such a blustery day it was impossible to unfold a paper and try to read it. All anyone needed to know was that both Roosevelt and the Giants were still alive.

  When the Red Sox gathered at the park about noon it was considerably cooler in the Red Sox clubhouse, with the hotheads of the previous evening now giving each other the cold shoulder. Stahl and McAleer had both seen what took place on the train, or at least its aftermath. In the press McAleer denied that Wood and O'Brien had come to blows, saying that he had been in the locker room immediately after Monday's game "and can truthfully say there was no trouble among the players," conveniently leaving out any mention of trouble on the train. Once the entire team was inside, they closed the door to the clubhouse and everyone aired it out.

  The meeting wasn't civil as players questioned each other over who was trying to win and who wasn't, who had bet how much on what, why, and for what reason, and when they began to voice the hundred other slights and complaints that had built up over the course of the season, violence erupted once again. The Sporting News would report later that "Joe Wood and Buck O'Brien had a fist fight in the Boston clubhouse before Tuesday's game, the cause being a derogatory remark of Wood about O'Brien's balk in Monday's game," and the Washington Post reported that O'Brien defended himself with a bat. McAleer, Stahl, and the players were tight-lipped when they left the clubhouse, Stahl refusing to reveal what the meeting was about except to say obliquely, "We had some things to go over."

  When the Sox took the field to warm up, the Giants liked what they saw—not a team but a bunch of school kids apparently taking a feud out to the playground for the second day in a row. Christy Mathewson, one of the few players who actually did his own writing, later wrote that there was obvious hostility between the Red Sox players during the Series and noted that "such friction could not help but interfere with the team-work. Reduced efficiency is the inevitable consequence of internal dissension."

  The same was apparently t
rue when it came to selling tickets. Nevertheless Fenway Park was nearly full when the Red Sox began their final warm-ups, and apart from the rumor mill and some circumspect reporting in the morning papers, most fans were oblivious to the poisonous atmosphere between the Boston players when Wood began loosening up with Hick Cady.

  The Royal Rooters had yet to appear, but just then, some ten or fifteen minutes before the start of the game, the now-familiar strains of "Tessie" began wafting into the park from behind the center-field bleachers. The Rooters soon appeared on the field, marching behind the band, singing and waving their banners. The weather, meanwhile, was near-apocalyptic. One moment the bright sun would be blazing, then in the next it would give way to great waves of dark thunderheads racing across the sky in a gale that swirled as it blew into the park unchecked, from the west and north, snapping the flags taut. With the field bright and bathed in light one minute, then menacing and dark the next, the day was as dramatic and schizophrenic as the entire Series had been thus far.

  Yet as the Rooters marched across the field toward their usual seats, which included most of the bleachers on Duffy's Cliff, they were stunned to find the bleachers already occupied. One Rooter, an aide to Honey Fitz, had signed for the usual allotment of tickets at noon and produced the wad of ducats to the section gatekeeper, but it was pointless—the seats were full. Nuf Ced McGreevey, Johnny Keenan, and the others all had the same thought: "What the hell is going on?"

  They believed at first that their seats were occupied by interlopers, but Boston police captain Thomas Goode, charged with manning the barricade that provided access to the seats, told them that at 1:00 p.m. Robert McRoy himself had ordered Goode to "throw open the section." In a matter of minutes the seats had been filled by fans who had paid $1 for an unreserved seat. Earlier in the Series such a ticket would have given most of them a seat in either the pavilion or the third-base stands. But when they saw that the Duffy's Cliff bleachers were open—and empty—fans had streamed to the new seats, eager to experience the game from that unique perspective, just as the "Green Monster" seats in Fenway Park today are among the most coveted in the park for much the same reason.