Fenway 1912 (33 page)

Within a few moments O'Loughlin was surrounded by virtually the entire Chicago team, half of them screaming and the others dramatically throwing their gloves in the air and waving their arms. He listened for a remarkably long time before finally walking away as Fred Westervelt made a show of taking out his pocket watch to move things along. But each time O'Loughlin returned to his place, the White Sox resumed the argument. The crowd got restless and booed the White Sox unmercifully, but even they grew tired. Over the next twenty minutes, as the White Sox continued to hound the umpires and Bill Carrigan stood patiently on second base, hundreds, if not thousands, of fans grew impatient and left Fenway Park. It was more than twenty long minutes before the game was able to resume.

After nine innings the game was tied, 8–8. The tenth inning was played in twilight, and with the game still tied, most observers expected it to be called because of darkness.

But now the umpires got their revenge on the White Sox. As reporters in the press box and fans at the top of the stands could clearly see, outside the park automobile drivers had turned on their headlights, the gas street lamps had begun to flicker on, and the electric streetcars were illuminated. But O'Loughlin and Westervelt, giving Boston every opportunity to win, refused to call the game. By the twelfth inning it was so dark that it was hard for those in the press box to see the outfielders, much less their scorebook. The players were becoming impatient too, and in the top of the inning Harry Hooper struck out on a pitch that observers thought might have been outside, but it was so dark they could not be sure. Finally, when Tris Speaker made the third out of the twelfth inning by trying to make second base from home after a dropped third strike—essentially trying to end the charade by getting himself called out on purpose—the umpires relented and called the contest. It was nearly 7:00 p.m., almost three and a half hours after the game began, and twenty minutes after the sun had dropped below the horizon in those days before Daylight Savings Time. Only a few minutes after the end of the game Fenway was bathed in darkness. Not until 1947 would lights be installed at Fenway Park and enable night baseball to be played.

A doubleheader was scheduled for the following day to make up for the tie, but most fans were far more excited by the announcement that it was finally possible to reserve World's Series tickets. In a press release the club instructed fans who had collected ten or more rain checks for grandstand tickets to send them in by mail to the Red Sox. Then, "if the Red Sox win the pennant," read the press release, "you will be advised what reservation has been made for you." The team was already worried about scalpers and hoped that by asking for rain checks speculators could be prevented from scooping up all the tickets.

The Red Sox swept the doubleheader before twenty thousand fans. Wood threw a shutout in game 2 to win his twelfth in a row as the White Sox, still smarting from the day before, played as if they could not wait to leave Boston. And once again, fans in Fenway found yet another new and novel place from which to watch the ball game. Deep in the left-field corner stood a portable ladder more than thirty feet high that Jerome Kelley's crew used to maintain the advertising signs on the left-field wall, propped against the fence in foul ground. On this day enterprising fans climbed the ladder and watched the game from that vantage point—including one, at the very top, who was dressed in a Red Sox uniform. In his cartoon account of the game, Wallace Goldsmith took note and speculated that the scene had "a prophetic meaning"—Boston on top.

The A's followed the White Sox into Fenway for three contests, needing a miracle to pull back into the pennant race, but it didn't happen as the Sox swept the series before crowds that were becoming more frenzied each day. For the finale, the
Globe
estimated, thirty thousand fans packed Fenway Park, though the
Post
put the figure at thirty-three thousand, including some six thousand who ringed the field, standing behind ropes. Fans even sat atop the left-field wall, and one picture in the newspaper showed a woman standing on the aforementioned ladder captioned "Watching the Game from the Perch in Lewisville," now the occasional name for left field. In the last week nearly ninety thousand fans had packed Fenway Park. The World's Series was a month away, and Boston was already in a lather.

Before the Washington series the Sox gave everyone a break by traveling to New York for a Labor Day doubleheader. The city had been nothing but kind to the Red Sox in 1912, for they had yet to lose a game there, going undefeated at the Yankees' Hilltop Park. For this series, however, they would not be playing at Hilltop Park. In April and May 1911, after much of the Polo Grounds was destroyed by a fire, the Yankees had allowed the Giants to use their park while the Polo Grounds—also known as Brush Stadium, after Giants owner John Brush—was rebuilt in concrete and steel. The Giants now returned the favor and allowed the Yankees to use the Polo Grounds for their series against the Red Sox, including the big Labor Day doubleheader to take advantage of its larger stadium capacity. In fact, in 1913 the Yankees would abandon their own park completely and play at the Polo Grounds until Yankee Stadium opened in 1923.

Boston players and fans, daydreaming about the World's Series, looked forward to the opportunity to become familiar with the Giants' home field. That prospect, along with the opportunity for Boston rooters to make contact with their New York counterparts and prime the pump for the frenzied gambling that was certain to take place during the World's Series, was too tempting to ignore. The Royal Rooters telegrammed Boston club secretary Bob McRoy and asked him to secure 250 seats in New York behind the visitors' bench so they could scope out the prospects that awaited them in October. Those who stayed behind in Boston, however, were not without entertainment. The Giants themselves were playing in the Hub.

The Polo Grounds, with its lofty, horseshoe-shaped, double-decked grandstand backed by the rock escarpment known as "Coogan's Bluff," made Fenway Park seem small and quaint, a diminutive outdoor stage compared to the Globe Theater that was the Polo Grounds. While Polo Grounds architect Henry Herts would describe his design as "utilitarian," it was anything but. The grandstand, nearly twice as high as its Fenway Park counterpart, towered over the infield. The upper deck was faced with a decorative frieze, and the facade of the roof was adorned with the coats of arms of all the National League teams. Ornate carved eagles perched along the top of the upper deck, easily the most decorative and distinctive element of interior ballpark design for the era, and the box seats were modeled after the royal boxes of the Coliseum in Rome. Although, like Fenway Park, the grandstand surrounded only the infield, when full it made for a raucous, intimidating arena, a place where the passion of the fans matched that of McGraw and his Giants and made life absolutely miserable for the opposition.

That is why the Red Sox were so happy to be playing the Yankees instead, who had none of the qualities that distinguished the Giants. Although a number of Boston players had played in the previous incarnation of the Polo Grounds, many of them in the postseason series between the Giants and Red Sox two years before, none had played in the new facility. And a number of key players, like Hugh Bedient, Buck O'Brien, Hick Cady, and Larry Gardner, had never laid eyes on the place.

The Yankees were compliant before a crowd of twenty-five thousand—many of whom cheered Boston—and played the Red Sox hard. Nevertheless, New York fell twice, 2–1 to Bedient, who nearly threw a no-hitter in the best performance of his career, and 1–0 to Wood. After being staked to a lead in the first inning, Wood had walked a tightrope the rest of the way, bending time and time again before finally securing his shutout, his twenty-ninth victory, and his fourteenth in a row by striking out pitcher George McConnell with the bases loaded and two outs in the final inning. The victory upped Boston's lead to thirteen games, much larger than the margin enjoyed by the Giants. After leading by as many as sixteen games earlier in the season, the defending NL champions had slept like a hare for two months until recently being jolted awake by the discovery that the Chicago Cubs were closing like a tortoise. The Giants responded with a sprint, and now, for the first time all season, the Red Sox players openly began to talk about playing their National League counterparts in the World's Series.

The game was rained out the next day, and it was a happy ball club that boarded the train back to Boston, for the Red Sox were beginning to look forward to clinching the pennant officially. Joe Wood's mother and little sister Zoe were aboard, making their first visit to Boston, and they were joined by Tris Speaker's mother and Jake Stahl's wife. The players had a bit of a party on the train ride back and took particular joy in stealing Tim Murnane's straw summer hat and returning it to him with the top punched out.

When Washington arrived for a three-game set with the Red Sox, Clark Griffith, still smarting over the decision that robbed Johnson of his chance to match Marquard's record, threw down the gauntlet. He announced that he was holding Walter Johnson back until Boston decided to pitch Wood. That way Johnson himself would have the opportunity to prevent Wood from matching his American League record of sixteen straight wins. "I want to give the fans a chance to see those pitchers hitched up and feel sure my man can win the honors," said Griffith. "Johnson's record this season was against all comers, and I want to see Joe Wood tied up with our man." Then Griffith made the challenge a little more personal. "Tell Wood," he sneered, "that we will consider him a coward if he doesn't pitch against Johnson."

To claim publicly that someone was a coward was an insult of the highest order, one that Griffith knew full well could not be ignored. And it was not. As soon as Jake Stahl got wind of it, he didn't waste any time in responding. "All right," he told the press. "Wood will pitch Friday. I had him down for Saturday, but to accommodate Griff we'll make the change and intend to defeat the Senators with Johnson pitching for them." The game was on.

Griffith hadn't announced just when he intended to pitch Johnson, who, like Wood, had last appeared on September 2. All he had said was that he would hold him until Stahl made a decision. Whether the two faced each other on Friday or Saturday did not much matter.

But it did to Boston. A Saturday game was certain to draw a crowd of more than twenty thousand no matter who pitched. It was, as Washington sportswriter Joe Jackson commented in the
Post,
"better business policy" to play the two pitchers Friday and ensure a good crowd on that day as well. Profit, and not necessarily the health of Joe Wood's golden arm, was still paramount.

Boston won the first two games of the series on Wednesday and Thursday, September 4 and 5, 6–2 and 4–3, behind Collins and O'Brien before a combined total of more than thirty thousand Boston fans taking advantage of their team's next-to-last home stand. After the Saturday finale the Sox would head west on a road trip, and play only one more regular-season series in Boston.

Not that anyone paid much attention to the outcome of the two contests, for as September 6 approached the buildup to the matchup between Wood and Johnson grew in intensity.

All the Boston papers touted the contest like no other played that year. Although Joe Wood would later rather famously claim that "the newspapers publicized us like prizefighters" and some newspapers did go overboard with their hyperbole over the matchup, that was not true everywhere. Joe Jackson referred to the game more accurately as "like a circus." But it was the biggest story of the day—and the season—thus far.

On the morning of Friday, September 6, the sun revealed a near-perfect early autumn day. The air was crisp, and a few puffy clouds floated overhead. The forecast was for light winds and temperatures in the low seventies—neither too hot nor too cold, an absolutely perfect day for baseball.

As Boston woke and people scurried to work, the buzz on the street was palpable. Over the summer storeowners had realized that baseball was good for business, and many downtown shops sported Red Sox pennants and other baseball paraphernalia in their windows. In recent weeks the players had been overwhelmed with endorsement offers and other commercial opportunities. Everyone wanted a piece of the Red Sox.

The Royal Rooters had always worn their allegiance on their sleeves and on their chests in the form of buttons and charms and banners and pennants, but now their passion seemed to spread over the entire city. For the first time ever in the history of Boston baseball, the souvenir business was booming. Anticipating a big crowd, vendors were already setting out their wares on the streets around Fenway Park and in nearby shops. There were ties for sale featuring the Red Sox logo for fifty-five cents, genuine Red Sox red socks for fifty cents, flags and pennants for a quarter, pins, placards featuring the faces of the Red Sox players, and even dolls dressed in Red Sox uniforms. Although intended for young girls and boys, more than a few made their way into the hands of young women, housewives, and matrons, sharing space in their purses to be carried around like a good luck charm and doted on like a real infant.

By noon crowds were already beginning to make their way toward Fenway Park, more than three hours in advance of the scheduled 3:15 p.m. start. Many of the reserved seats in the grandstand had already been sold, but unreserved seats in the pavilion and the center-field bleachers were still up for grabs, and there were as many standing-room tickets as the Red Sox were willing to sell.

There were two stories at work this day—the game on the field with the matchup between Wood and Johnson, and the crowd itself. Together they would change Fenway Park forever. No other game in the history of the franchise would ever have a bigger impact on the facility.

With the crowd massing on the sidewalks and spilling over into the street, at about one o'clock the Red Sox began selling tickets and opened the gates. Apart from the reserved seats in the grandstand and the box seats of those fortunate enough to have them, it was a near free-for-all as fans with tickets for unreserved seats staked out their place in the ballpark. By two o'clock the bleachers and pavilion were filled, and fans began to spill out onto the field.