Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  Herzog had to stop at second. Chief Meyers advanced him to third on a sacrifice bunt, but he was left stranded—assist by Fenway.

  Mathewson, meanwhile, was just this side of magnificent. Through the first four innings he gave up only two hits, the second one a double by Larry Gardner that handcuffed Snodgrass in center field, but Gardner tried to stretch the hit to a triple and was thrown out. It was beginning to look like the Red Sox, while playing better than they did in the last two contests, were destined to die quietly.

  That changed in the fifth. Devore led off with a single, and this time McGraw sent him to second on a steal, but Cady gunned him down. Larry Doyle, up next, pulled a drive to far right, and the ball, captured by the wind, seemed destined for the seats in right field just a few yards fair, where the fence was barely three hundred feet away from home.

  Harry Hooper got an excellent jump on the ball and tracked it back, as one reporter noted, "in full careen." The ball fell toward the earth just to the left-field side of where James McLaughlin's short fence in front of the right-field bleachers met the pavilion stands. Had it not been for the new stands and fence installed for the World's Series, Hooper would have been able to make the catch on the run, a nice play, but not a particularly remarkable one. But now he was running out of room, and as he approached the barrier he turned for the ball, hit the short fence, and began to flip over, much as Red Murray had fallen over the fence going for a catch in left field earlier in the Series. Even as he began to fall back Hooper saw the ball coming at him and instinctively held up his bare hand, reaching for the ball before tumbling into the arms of grateful fans. Seconds later he emerged, holding the ball high. Over time the significance of Hooper's catch would grow until usurped by a similar catch by Dwight Evans in right field at Fenway Park in the eleventh inning of game 6 of the 1975 World Series that robbed Cincinnati's Joe Morgan of a go-ahead home run.

  Even Hooper could barely believe he had held on. He later gave credit for the miraculous catch to a prayer card he had found on the ground before the game and tucked in his pocket. The Giants did not believe it and protested futilely, claiming that Hooper had either left the playing field prior to making the grab—which would have rendered his catch meaningless—or palmed it, while out of view, from a fan who had caught it. Billy Evans, manning the right-field line, was adamant. Hooper had caught the ball. Doyle left the field kicking at the dust.

  Still, entering the seventh inning, the Red Sox trailed by a run, and Mathewson, needing only nine more outs, seemed unbeatable. After retiring the Sox with only three pitches in the fifth, he had worked his way out of a jam in the sixth when the Red Sox, with Speaker at first and Yerkes on third, tried a double steal. New York catcher Chief Meyers threw toward second, and Mathewson was prepared on the set play. He cut off the throw as it passed the pitcher's mound, then spun and threw to third where Herzog put the tag on Yerkes, who had broken for home and was caught scrambling back. In the press box the scribes began asking each other where they were spending the winter.

  Larry Gardner led off the seventh by flying out, and then Jake Stahl lifted a short fly to left. Murray came in, Fletcher and Herzog went out, and each man looked at the others to see who would call for the ball. When no one did, it landed on the field with a soft thud and Stahl had a cheap hit.

  Mathewson could see victory slipping away on such a play and lost his composure, walking Wagner on four straight pitches. But when Cady popped up, bringing up Bedient, a poor hitter, Mathewson looked like he would work out of it.

  Now Stahl pulled a surprise. From second base he called for a pinch hitter. Despite the fact that Bedient had given up only a single run and five hits in seven innings of work, Boston was running out of time and needed to score. Besides, he had the best pitcher in baseball sitting on the bench—or at least someone who had been the best pitcher in baseball until twenty-four hours before. Bedient left the game having pitched Mathewson to a standoff. He was one of the few players on the Boston roster who had played over his head during the Series, a performance that seemed to herald the start of a remarkable career.

  Stahl had several hitters to choose from. The best—and most experienced—was Bill Carrigan, but he had gone hitless against Mathewson in game 2, and after the events of the past few days Stahl didn't trust him. Instead he called on his only left-handed hitter on the bench, little Olaf Henriksen, Boston's little-used, Danish-born fourth outfielder, a player who had come to bat during the regular season exactly fifty-six times. He had been off the bench only once in the Series, to pinch-run in game 3.

  If the World's Series was to be decided on a matchup between Christy Mathewson and Olaf Henriksen, the Giants would have accepted those odds a hundred times, secure in the knowledge that Mathewson would win the battle on at least ninety-nine occasions. But this was the one time in a hundred.

  With two strikes, Mathewson got too cute and left a curveball over the plate. Henriksen swung, fighting off a pitch that fooled him. He chopped at the ball and sent it bounding down the third-base line, where it just got past Herzog, then bounced into foul territory.

  Stahl, running as fast as he could, scored, and as the ball twisted away from Herzog, Henriksen made second and the game was tied. For the first time all game the stands did not sound half-empty. But after Hooper flew out, now Wood had to take the mound for Boston.

  This was his chance for redemption, and he knew it. If the Red Sox were to lose this game and lose the Series, Wood would live with the ignominy of being the losing pitcher for the last two games of the World's Series, something that had never happened before. He would live with the goat horns on his head forevermore, the great accomplishment of his 1912 season washed away in defeat, just as Jack Chesbro's wild pitch that cost New York a pennant on the last day of the 1904 season had overshadowed his remarkable forty-one wins that season. Whatever had ailed Wood the day before—his arm, his head, his heart, or his wallet—was not an issue now.

  He had nothing, really, but the one thing he had not shown the previous day, and that was guts. The Giants got good swings, but over the course of the season, particularly with Cady catching, Wood had learned to pitch without his best stuff. Although not at his blazing best, he was good enough, and he and Mathewson matched each other through the eighth and the ninth innings. The game entered extra innings still tied, and the longest World's Series in history kept going a little longer.

  In the tenth inning, however, with one out, Wood faltered. Red Murray got around on the ball and popped it to left. Duffy Lewis went back, but that damn short fence got in the way again, and the ball landed in his namesake seats. Had they not been there—and on this day, with the stands half full, they were not even needed—he might have made the catch. But as every player knows, Fenway Park both gives and takes away, and this time it gave the Giants a cheap double. The Red Sox would have to earn this victory on their own.

  Better than any other man, Tris Speaker knew that more games were lost on singles that fell in front of an outfielder than on balls hit over their heads, but he also knew that an outfielder had to make the right judgment on such hits. Fred Merkle, up next, hit a sinking liner right in front of Speaker. If he played the ball on a hop, the hit was a single and would put runners on the corners. If he tried for the catch, it would either save Wood's neck or cost his roommate both the ball game and the rest of his reputation.

  Speaker sprinted all out, going for the catch, but the ball found the ground before it found his glove, then trickled away, just far enough for Red Murray to charge around third to score and for Merkle to make second on the error and to put the Giants ahead, 2–1. It now looked as if two goats of the game would be sharing the same address in Winthrop.

  On the mound Joe Wood decided that if he was going to lose he was going to go out in glory. He bore down and struck out Buck Herzog on what he later said were his "hardest three pitches of the season."

  But he was now spent, all exhaust and no smoke. Chief Meyers ripped a pitch up
the middle, and for the first time all year Wood faced a ball that was faster coming out than it had been going in.

  He reacted, throwing his bare hand at the ball. He knocked it down, picked it up, and threw to first for the last out, but he knew before he took another step that it was also the last ball he would throw that year. The ball had hit the fingers of his throwing hand flush, and they were already starting to throb and swell. He could not pitch another inning against his little sister, much less the Giants. He left the field to a smattering of polite but tired applause, thinking in his heart that he would be remembered as a loser.

  Mathewson needed only three more outs to cap off the most improbable comeback in the history of the World's Series and was only moments away from winning the most important game of his distinguished career. The veteran had entered the Series almost as an afterthought, not even in the same conversation with Wood and Tesreau, yet had outpitched them both. When he had been the hero of an earlier Series—in 1905 he won three games, all by shutout—he had been young and felt indestructible. Now he was older and knew it was not so easy. That made him treasure the moment even more.

  Wood was due to lead off, but he could not even hold a bat in his swollen hand. Stahl looked past Carrigan again, and his eyes settled on Clyde Engle, 0-for-2 thus far in the Series and a .234 hitter for the season. He told Engle to grab a bat.

  Out in center field Fred Snodgrass had been having an uneventful day until the fourth inning, when his miscue on Larry Gardner's drive had reignited the crowd in center field. Although fewer in number than the day before, they had still spent the rest of the game reminding Snodgrass that they had not forgotten him. Now, with the game only a few pitches from ending, Snodgrass was looking forward to the silence that would come over the crowd with a New York win and perhaps starting to think about how he might spend that World's Series swag. Engle was no threat.

  The Boston pinch hitter took a swing and hit under the ball, lofting what Snodgrass later called a lazy, high fly ball to left-center. Red Murray, in left, called for the ball first, but Snodgrass waved him off. It was the kind of ball Snodgrass had tracked down hundreds of times each year and probably dropped once.

  Make that twice. The ball hit his glove, bounced out before his bare hand could hold it fast, and fell to the ground. When Snodgrass followed up the error by making a weak throw, Engle, running hard, slid safe into second, then stood up, grinning, as Murnane wrote, "to the music of a thousand yells."

  The players on the Boston bench began to stir, and the boy behind the scoreboard on the left-field wall slid a big white marker under the slot that was headed "ERROR." The crowds at Newspaper Row, who had started to drift away, saw Engle's name at second base, stopped in their tracks, and pushed closer. Joe Wood, sitting alone on the Boston bench, felt the noose around his neck begin to loosen, and the fans in center field heckled Snodgrass with renewed vigor as he stood, his face flushed with embarrassment and anger at himself, feeling, as he later explained, "frozen to the marrow." In the press box, from Murnane and Shannon and Nickerson to Fullerton, Rice, Lardner, and Runyon, all the writers paused from the stories they were starting to write about Mathewson's triumph, looked to their scorebooks, wrote "E-8" representing the error by Snodgrass, and circled it. They knew it was the kind of play that could change everything. The door was open a crack.

  Harry Hooper stepped in next. After making the catch in right field, he felt great, but was disappointed when Stahl called on him to sacrifice. He failed to get the hit down, but with two strikes he ripped a Mathewson pitch to right-center and was thinking triple as he left the batter's box, certain he had just tied the game.

  Snodgrass ran after the ball as if his life depended on it, and now he made the kind of catch a player makes only once or twice a season, one as spectacular as his previous effort had been awful. With his left hand stretched out and up as far he could reach, he caught the liner on the dead run, the grass- and tobacco-stained ball smacking into his glove, the leather fingers closing around it. Engle, unsure whether or not the ball would be caught, strayed too far off second, and when Snodgrass made the catch he had to race back. Knowledgeable fans groaned, for if he had just stayed at second, he could have tagged up and made third, and if the ball had fallen in he could have scored anyway.

  Mathewson seemed disturbed once again, and now he walked Yerkes, the winning run. That brought up Speaker, Boston's best hitter, when they needed him to be just that.

  Two of the greatest players in the history of the game squared off in an at-bat that could follow either to the grave, both knowing the game and the Series were on the line. Mathewson threw and Speaker popped it up.

  The shallow fly drifted into foul ground almost to first base, maybe fifteen feet off the line. It was Merkle's ball all the way, but the first baseman, as one reporter put it, "turned to stone" and was inexplicably slow to react. As the ball started to drop, Mathewson, seeing Chief Meyers racing for the ball as Merkle moved like his feet were stuck in concrete, called out the name of his catcher to alert him to the fact that Merkle might not get there in time and Meyers had to. Meyers lunged as Merkle pulled up short and the ball dropped free.

  As Mathewson walked back to the mound Speaker reportedly grinned and called out, "You just called for the wrong man [Meyers]. It's gonna cost you the ball game." But the fault was not as much Mathewson's as it was Merkle's.

  Nevertheless, with Speaker's boast ringing in his ears, Mathewson wound up and delivered a curve. Speaker turned on the pitch and spanked it into right field for a long base hit. Engle scored the tying run, racing past home plate straight into the dugout as Yerkes slid into third and Speaker went to second on the throw.

  Mathewson sagged, but he knew the game was not yet lost. He walked Duffy Lewis, setting up a force play at every base. The Boston outfielder did not run well, and if Mathewson could induce a ground ball, a double play would end the inning and the game would go on, and the Red Sox would have to send out either Collins or O'Brien, both warming up, to pitch the eleventh inning. That is, if there was an eleventh inning. The game was more than two and a half hours long already. It was beginning to get dark. Perhaps there would be another tie—and a game 9.

  The World's Series that would not end seemed destined to continue as Mathewson, trying to get Gardner to hit the ball on the ground, fell behind 2-0, Meyers scooping both pitches out of the dirt. Then Gardner swung through a pitch a bit higher, at his knees, and tipped the ball back into the edge of the stands—where Fenway Park, one last time, lent the smallest of assists. The original box seats at the foot of the grandstands sat several feet up off the field, and it was impossible for a fan to lean over and swipe a foul ball from the ground without tumbling onto the field. But the temporary field-level box seats built in front were lower. An alert Boston fan hung over the rail and scooped up the ball, forcing Silk O'Loughlin to put a new white baseball in play. The count was 2-1.

  Mathewson knew a walk would beat him, and his next pitch—his last—was a bit higher. Gardner jumped at it and succeeded in hitting the ball in the air to right, where Josh Devore ran to his left, then set himself and waited. The fate of the Series hung in the air.

  Before Gardner had come to bat, Devore had tried to gauge just how deep he could play and still catch the ball and throw out Yerkes at the plate, and now he barely moved, waiting for the ball to come down so he could make his throw. Had the old ball still been in play, Gardner's fly might have landed twenty or thirty feet shorter or more, but this one went all the way out to where Devore stood at the extreme edge of his range.

  As Devore set himself to catch and throw, Steve Yerkes placed his left foot on the base and prepared to push off with his right, waiting to see the ball in the glove before breaking for home. He did not want to score the winning run and then be called back for leaving the base too soon.

  Devore caught the ball and threw it in one motion, releasing it quickly and almost falling to the ground as he followed through. Yerkes broke
from the bag and ran, with clods of damp earth flying from his spikes, in a line straight toward home, watching Chief Meyers's eyes tracking the bright white ball as it sailed toward the plate, straight as a string. It hit the infield short of the plate and died in the soft ground, bouncing to the plate a half-second late, trickling in behind Yerkes as he slid over the plate, the winning run. The Series was over at last, the 3–2 score went up on the left-field wall, and the telegraph operators in the press box tapped out the result in a frenzy.

  BOSTON NOW SUPREME IN BASEBALL WORLD

  Suddenly the half-empty stands seemed full and erupted with shouts and songs. In seconds it seemed as if everyone had raced onto the field, where the Giants, apart from Mathewson, ran off quickly, heads down, bitter at losing a game and a Series they felt they should have won. Mathewson simply stood there for a moment, worn out and stunned, and did not seem to wake up until he was surrounded by Red Sox fans, grinning and magnanimous, slapping him on his back. He accepted their thanks with a blank face and trudged off.

  Yerkes leapt to his feet and ran toward the dugout, where he was first greeted by his manager, who had been on deck, and then Wagner and Carrigan, who had been coaching first. In a moment they were all out there, incredulous and glad, hugging and shaking hands with each other and the fans, suddenly a team again, Gardner and Lewis, Hooper and Speaker, Wagner and Bedient, Collins and Hall, and O'Brien and Joe Wood, who was happier than anyone, the goat horns off his head.

  Only one other Giant was left on the field, John McGraw, marching toward the Boston dugout to seek out Stahl and shake his hand. Some Boston fan could not resist and gave him a shove from behind, and the manager fell to the ground, tasting earth. McGraw stood, turned, and punched the attacker square in the face, dropping him. Then he found Jake Stahl and offered the Red Sox manager his hand.