Fenway 1912 (10 page)

While McAleer and McRoy tended to the contracts, Charles Logue had his hands full at Fenway Park. The major next stage of construction was the grandstand roof. As soon as workers cleared the grandstand deck of snow and ice, structural steel to support the roof had to be put in place.

Before the development and widespread use of portable cranes powered by steam, diesel, or gasoline, structural steel was lifted and put in place by the use of a "guy derrick," a tall mast capable of being rotated, supported by guy wires. A boom nearly the same height as the mast was attached to the bottom of the mast by a pivot and to the top of the mast by a cable. The boom was then lowered and raised by mechanically withdrawing or extending the cable through a series of pulleys. In this fashion the boom was lowered, large steel columns and girders were attached to it by steel cables and slings by ironworkers, and as the boom was raised closer to the mast the steel was hoisted into the air while ironworkers worked lines attached to the steel to keep it from swinging out of control and damaging either the mast or the boom. The load could then be spun into place and the boom lowered (the origination of the phrase "lower the boom"); the ironworkers would then bolt and rivet the steel in place.

At Fenway Park the erection of the structural steel to support the grandstand roof began with what was then section L just beyond third base, known as section 27 today. The steel was staged along the edge of the grandstand; then upright steel columns were lifted and put into position, atop foundations and anchors, and bolted into place. Ironworkers, using the hot rivet method, then attached each column to the next one with horizontal girders.

The mast and boom used at Fenway were each nearly one hundred feet long, which allowed the boom radius to approach half that distance—nearly fifty feet—in every direction. After all work was done within that radius the guy derrick was taken down and re-erected in another place. In all likelihood two sections of the grandstand could be built before the guy derrick had to be moved. No more than two guy derricks at a time were in use—the proliferation of cables needed to control each one precluded using more.

Once the structural steel columns and girders were in place, it was a relatively easy process to plank the roof, although it would be spring before it could be made waterproof. While workers persevered, the weather was brutal: over the month of January temperatures rarely rose above single digits, and ironworkers riveting steel together hung in the air in wind-chills of thirty below zero or less. As they fought frostbite the front pages of Boston newspapers were screaming with headlines detailing the lengthy Lawrence textile strike. A new Massachusetts law had recently reduced the workweek for women and children from fifty-six hours to fifty-four. Mill owners responded by cutting pay, leading some twenty-five thousand workers to strike, the first mass job action in New England, and causing the state to call in the militia. Laborers at Fenway Park, toiling away in the bitter cold for up to twelve hours a day while earning a top salary of only thirty dollars or so per week, paid close attention.

No one in the city was thinking about baseball. Men wielding shovels and horses pulling plows struggled to keep Boston's streets clear of snow. For the first time in several years Boston Harbor was virtually frozen over. Every morning young boys filled the dock basins between the wharves on Atlantic Avenue, skipping school to play hockey.

Nevertheless, day by day Fenway Park took shape, and as the player contracts trickled back to Boston the 1912 Red Sox began to come into focus. Spring was in the air.

The members of the Red Sox team are in pretty fair condition, for when not able to work out on the field they receive great benefit from their long hikes over mountain roads and the warm baths later. These baths take all the soreness out of the players' muscles ... this fact alone makes Hot Springs the best place in the country in which to train ballplayers.

—
The Sporting News

H
OT SPRINGS
.

The mere mention of the name brought a smile to the faces of the Red Sox players and the Royal Rooters, the rabid Red Sox fan club that followed the team. For as the winter's snow and cold locked up the boats in Boston Harbor, talk of spring training delivered the promise of warmer days ahead and the sound of baseball being played again. Since holding their first spring training in 1901 in Charlottesville, Virginia, the Sox had tried a variety of venues, including Augusta and Macon, Georgia; West Baden Springs, Indiana; and, most recently, Redondo Beach, California. But players and fans alike recalled the two sessions the team had spent in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1909 and 1910, with the most fondness.

Hot Springs was, well,
Hot Springs,
a resort town renowned not only for its forty restorative 147-degree mineral baths, which had earned it the nickname "the National Spa," but for everything that came with it—fine hotels, sumptuous restaurants, the splendor of the nearby Ouachita Mountains ... and casinos, dance halls, dogfights, painted ladies, quack doctors, and cures for the Hot Springs strain of "malaria" that the savvy recognized as venereal disease. Decades before Las Vegas was anything more than a spot on a map of the Nevada desert, Hot Springs, Arkansas, was the gambling and vice capital of the United States.

Corruption allowed it to happen as local officials gladly accepted bribes to look the other way. The result was an exciting yet violent place where, as Tim Murnane once noted, "shooting people was a regular and popular pastime with the best citizens." In March 1899, in fact, Jimmy McAleer had been in town for spring training and witnessed the infamous "Hot Springs Gunfight," when the police department and the county sheriff's department, each of which backed a different gambling faction, shot it out on the streets in one of the most notorious episodes in Arkansas history. McAleer told Murnane that when he left his hotel after the shootout, "he saw seven dead men laid out on the sidewalk."

As soon as McAleer took command he began to formalize his plans for the spring, securing time at one of several ballparks, making reservations at the Hotel Eastman, and lining up exhibition games with the other teams training in town. Although McAleer had not returned to Hot Springs since the gunfight, now that he was in charge of the Red Sox he felt that the benefits of training in the resort city far outweighed any potential distractions. In fact, the distractions, along with the relatively mild weather and the baths, were the main reason why several major league teams chose to work out there. In 1912 the Sox were joined by three National League teams, the Pirates, the Phillies, and Brooklyn. Spring training was no exercise in incarceration but more an excuse to break out after the confinements of winter around hearth and home and work the kinks out of muscles gone soft. Besides, it was easier to entice contract holdouts to give in if they knew they were going to Hot Springs for a month as opposed to a place like Macon or Augusta. A happy club presumably worked harder, and there was plenty to keep the players happy in Hot Springs, from the notorious dance hall and bordello known as the Black Orchid to the local opera house, the Oaklawn racetrack, and the tourist traps, like the alligator farm and ostrich ranch, that flanked Majestic Park, where the Red Sox planned to train. Just about every player on the team would return with a "bouquet" of ostrich feathers from one of the three hundred birds on the ranch and a staged photograph posing on a stuffed alligator, the least dangerous of the 1,500 reptiles that roamed the site.

After a winter spent away from the ballpark, most Sox players were looking forward to such distractions and the excitement they entailed. Charley Hall, Duffy Lewis, and Ray Collins had all married, while Hugh Bradley and the other members of the Red Sox Quartet had toured New England. Bill Carrigan had gone home to Lewiston, Maine, and looked after his business interests, which included a cigar store, and built the strength back up in his broken leg.

A number of players wrote to
Boston Post
writer Paul Shannon detailing their winter activities. Larry Gardner was in Enosburg Falls, Vermont, "leading the customary country life," farming and hunting. From New Rochelle, New York, Charlie Wagner admitted that in 1911 "my wing was never right ... but my arm feels all right now." If true, that was terrific news, for it meant that Wagner could return to shortstop and answer the biggest question in the Boston lineup. Joe Wood wrote from his home in Parker's Glen, Pennsylvania, where he and his father looked after their Woodton Poultry Farm, that he had spent as much time as possible hunting and "tramping through the fields and woods" and that "I feel hard as nails." Boston hoped so, for his annual bout with a sore arm was something the club could do without. Wood also asked Shannon to squash a story that intimated he was about to get married: "About that marriage dope, I wrote you last week asking you to contradict the story." As the team's most eligible bachelor, Wood was constantly tied to one local maiden or another by the papers, and he was in no hurry to tie the knot and stem the flow of scented notes to his mailbox or the quiet tappings on his door.

Now that McAleer was in control, other clubs soon called, proposing player swaps and trades. Former Boston third baseman Harry Lord, a recent fan favorite who was dealt with Amby O'Connell to the White Sox for two warm bodies, had flourished in Chicago. White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey hoped that McAleer might be enticed by the prospect of bringing the Maine native back to Boston and asked for Tris Speaker in return, but McAleer was no fool. Lord was a good player, but Speaker was already great and getting better.

Signed contracts for the 1912 season soon began trickling back in. Even those players who thought they deserved more money had virtually no leverage when it came to contract negotiations. Their only option was to refuse to play altogether and hope that might spark a trade to a team more likely to meet their contract demands, but even this was unlikely to happen. If a player wanted to play, he more or less had to accept what was offered. About the only way to express displeasure was to sit on the contract for a few weeks and hope the club responded by upping the ante. More often, however, teams waited out the holdouts until they came slinking back.

McAleer, however, did make one deal. It seemed to be an insignificant transaction at the time, but it would soon pay huge dividends.

Near the end of the 1910 season the Red Sox had drafted pitcher Hugh Bedient from the roster of Fall River of the New England League and then took the hard-throwing young sidearm pitcher to spring training in California in 1911. He had first drawn the attention of scouts in 1908 when, while pitching for a semipro team in Falconer, New York, he struck out forty-two batters in a twenty-three-inning victory, a performance that resulted in nineteen contract offers from professional clubs. He was impressive in the spring of 1911 for Boston, but the Sox chose to stick with more veteran hurlers and Bedient was sent to Providence for more seasoning.

Since Bedient was not on the Boston roster, Providence was able, in turn, to send him to Jersey City in the Eastern League. His record in 1911 for Jersey City was only 8-11, but on a team that lost nearly twice as many games as it won, Bedient stood out, and he impressed Boston scouts. Now the Sox wanted Bedient badly, but so did several other clubs. A bidding war over his services seemed likely.

Boston had an enormous advantage. Hugh McBreen had served as club treasurer under John Taylor, and after McAleer took over the Red Sox, McBreen bought into Jersey City. He spurned offers of as much as $6,000 for the pitcher and instead accepted Boston's offer of seven ballplayers, but no money, in exchange for Bedient. The deal would prove to be a bargain for the Red Sox.

Even though most Red Sox were not planning to leave for Hot Springs until March 6, a few started trickling in a month ahead of time. Bill Carrigan, eager to test his leg, was the first to arrive, followed closely by youthful Dr. Fred Anderson, a spitball artist who had nearly made the club several years earlier, only to choose a career in dentistry instead, a decision he now regretted. McAleer planned to go to Hot Springs soon as well, but before he did he wanted to make sure that work on Fenway Park was on schedule.

While the January cold spell had made it impossible to pour concrete, work elsewhere on the ballpark had progressed nicely. Underneath the grandstand, in areas that could be temporarily heated, masons used hollow tile brick to build partitions and create rooms for the umpires, storage, concessions, and other uses. The clubhouses for each team, complete with shower baths, had been roughed in, as had the team offices. Now that the weather had broken, the pace picked up considerably, and work resumed on the stands.

Concrete workers began to build forms and pour concrete for what were known as the "treads," or steps, upon which would sit thirty-two rows of grandstand seats, not including the box seats. Tied to the main structure by reinforced steel, the treads had a design that was unique in several ways. For one, instead of using stone aggregate in the concrete mix, workers used cinders, which lowered the weight by nearly one-third, from 150 pounds per cubic foot to only 110 pounds, reducing both the cost and the weight load on the deck. The size of the treads also varied. Toward the front of the grandstand, where seats would be more costly, each tread was forty inches in width, giving patrons ample leg room. But as one went higher up in the stands the width of the treads narrowed, first to thirty-two inches and finally to only thirty inches, a variation that would trip up generations of fans. Each tread step rose from between eight and eleven inches and for drainage purposes was angled ever so slightly back so that water ran down toward the field, where it could be carried away by drains at the base of the stands. Each box seat section was truly a box, separated from other seats by a poured concrete wall and from other boxes by a pipe rail. Unlike today, the box seats did not go all the way down to field level—the floor of the first row of box seats sat three feet above the field.