Fenway 1912 (15 page)

Past first base was the open-alley firebreak some ten to fifteen feet wide between the grandstand and the pavilion, where another thousand fans or so sat crammed together in the lower sections of the wooden bleachers. Nearly 250 feet long, the pavilion itself did not precisely parallel the first-base line but was tilted slightly toward the field, so the most distant corner of the stands (section 6 in Fenway today) encroached on the field and created the beginning of the outfield wall. By today's standards, it was not far off—barely 300 feet, if that, from home plate down the line. At the front end of the pavilion a bare wooden fence of vertical planks only about eight feet tall angled far back and then turned and met the center-field bleachers more than 400 feet from home plate. Commenting in the
Post
that the right-field fence was "even farther" away than the fence at Huntington Avenue, which was at least 320 feet down the line, Paul Shannon was referring to the distance in the power alley. He also made the claim that the distance to the center-field bleachers was "essentially the same" as Huntington Avenue. But true and accurate measurements to the fences at Fenway Park at the time the ballpark opened may never be known unless precise architectural plans dating to the construction surface. Even then, these distances may never be known with absolute certainty. In the era before the home run, there was no real need to know precisely how far each fence was from home plate. The urge to pin down distances would arrive with the long ball.

The center-field bleachers faced the infield, were roughly rectangular in shape and approximately 140 feet in length, and contained more than forty rows of seats. The far end extended almost to the property boundary on Lansdowne Street, while the backside of the bleachers was hard against the property of the Fenway Garage Company, almost filling the triangle between Lansdowne Street, Ipswich Street, and Fenway Park. Between the bleachers and the center-field end of the left-field wall, in dead center field, was an open area of fair ground shaped roughly like a triangle. At the back of this open space the park was at its absolute deepest, reportedly 488 feet from home plate, and an enormous flagpole just a few feet from the back fence towered over the bleachers.

From the deepest part of the park ran the left-field fence—neither green yet nor a monster—fronted by an earthen embankment not unlike that in Cincinnati, which extended from the end of the bleachers to the property line, paralleling Lansdowne Street. In an oddity, the rise drew no comment on this first day, perhaps because it had been visible in the plans for Fenway Park since at least 1911 and was considered so far from home plate that few believed it would ever come into play on a regular basis.

Although this rise—which would eventually be nicknamed "Duffy's Cliff" after Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis—would soon be turned over for use by standing-room crowds or to support temporary bleachers, this usage was incidental. The purpose of the hill was purely structural—and economic. Since the plot of land on which Fenway Park was built was higher on the Lansdowne Street side, that end of the field had been brought down to grade to make it level with the remainder of the park. To accomplish this the grade of the field was lowered along Lansdowne Street, leaving the street itself ten to fifteen feet above field grade.

To make up the difference architect James McLaughlin essentially had two options, for no one ever even gave a thought to moving Lansdowne Street. A poured reinforced-concrete fence, built atop piers built on hardpan, like that which surrounded Shibe Park, would have been sufficient both to "hold back" Lansdowne Street and to create a barrier for the ballpark. But it also would have had to be at least twenty or twenty-five feet tall to accomplish the task. At a length of nearly four hundred feet, stretching to the corner of the property (below what is now the very back of section 38 of the bleachers), such an edifice would have been extremely costly and would have used nearly as much concrete and reinforcing steel as the grandstand itself.

So McLaughlin did the next best thing. It was a relatively easy task for engineers to calculate the pressure that the difference in grade would produce on the high side. To counteract that an earthen slope—essentially a dam—was created to ensure that Lansdowne Street would stay put. Although it has often been reported that the incline was ten feet tall, anecdotal evidence based on photographs and the fact that at least seven rows of temporary bleacher tiers were later built atop the wall suggest that it may have been somewhat taller, perhaps twelve feet, and that the slope itself stretched a bit farther out toward the field—by fifteen to twenty feet—as the embankment angle appears to be somewhat less than forty-five degrees.

Atop the wall was a simple but robust plank fence that had probably been treated with both a fire-retardant and a preservative to protect it from the rain and weather; it was held fast by both horizontal supports known as "whalers" on the backside and stout wood braces that extended at nearly a forty-five-degree angle toward Lansdowne Street. The fence was not precisely on the property line but several feet south of it, so a secondary fence ran along Lansdowne Street to prevent passersby from trying to scale the wall. Upright wooden support columns were probably set in concrete far below grade.

But on this first day the fence was not yet finished. Wallace Goldsmith's cartoon drawings in the
Globe
the next day clearly show that the fence was built in two separate vertical sections, one atop the other, and that only a few of the top sections, flanking the space where the scoreboard was supposed to be, were yet in place.

The reason for the wall, of course, was to prevent people standing atop any building the Boston Garage Company might build on Lansdowne Street from seeing inside the park. But on this day anyway, with the top half of the wall unfinished, it was probably still possible to look into the park from the garage without buying a ticket. Until the wall was finished, the height of the barrier from the field in front of the embankment to the top of the fence was just over twenty feet. When finished, the wall would be approximately 35 feet tall.

That was not all a player saw that first day when he looked upon the wall. According to a Goldsmith drawing, at some point during the contest the game was watched by two spectators perched on some scaffolding that hung from the top of the wall near the left-field line—scaffolding that was either used during construction of the fence or was in place to hang advertisements over the next week. These two anonymous workmen were the first two spectators to watch a game from roughly the same viewpoint as those who occupy today's "Green Monster" seats.

If Goldsmith's drawing is accurate, as of yet there were no advertisements in place on the unfinished wall. By the time Fenway Park opened officially that was no longer the case. Although it is uncertain precisely when the wall was covered entirely by advertisements, there is no doubt that by the end of the season it was completely covered.

The left-field fence continued far into foul territory until it reached the property boundary just short of Brookline Avenue; then another tall fence ran approximately two hundred feet to meet the backside of the grandstand on the third-base side, leaving a wide expanse of foul ground between the foul line, the grandstand, and the outfield fence and occupying the space taken up by sections 28 to 33 in today's Fenway Park. Some sportswriters speculated that the area would make a fine place for pitchers to warm up, but "bullpens" as such were not much in use at the time. Since the area was not in view from the third-base dugout, where the opposing manager could see who was warming up, such an arrangement would have needed approval from the league. Besides, at some point in the future, as needed, the club planned to fill this space with seats. The grandstand, in fact, had been designed so that whenever more seats were built it could be done seamlessly and made to look like part of the original structure.

After Casey Hageman threw a few warm-up tosses to Pinch Thomas, Harvard Crimson third baseman and captain Dana Wingate stepped into the batter's box, becoming the first batter in the history of Fenway Park. A native of Winchester, Massachusetts, Wingate took Hageman's first pitch for a ball, then struck out, overmatched by Hageman's fastball.

He may well have been intimidated, and with good reason. While pitching for Grand Rapids in the Central League in 1908, Hageman threw a pitch that struck hitter Charlie Pinkney behind the left ear, killing him. Hageman was mortified and sat out the 1909 season before making his return in 1910, with Denver in the Western League, where he teamed with Buck O'Brien in 1911 to form one of the best pitching tandems in the league.

The pitcher dispatched the next two Harvard batters with ease. One of them, shortstop Dowd Desha, became the first man to make fair contact with the ball at Fenway Park, lofting a soft fly to Steve Yerkes at second for the second out of the game.

Sam Felton, the son of a railroad magnate and better known for his kicking ability on the gridiron, toed the rubber for Harvard. Although he would later be offered a $15,000 contract by the Philadelphia Athletics—which he would refuse—on this day he pitched like a rank amateur and struggled to find the plate. Harry Hooper led off for the Red Sox with a deep fly ball, then Steve Yerkes singled to right field to collect Fenway's first hit, but after loading the bases the Red Sox failed to score.

They broke through on Felton in the second when, after two walks, Hageman helped his own cause with a hit, knocking in Marty Krug, who gained the honor of scoring the park's first run. With that out of the way, the rest of the contest went fast as one Harvard hitter after another went down on strikes, the Crimson collecting only one hit, and the Red Sox, taking advantage of Felton's wildness, kept walking to first only to be stranded. Then, in the fifth inning, Hageman, a one-man team, singled in a second run to give the Red Sox a 2–0 lead. By then it was snowing, and a cold wind blowing in from the northwest made it feel even colder. The crowd had seen enough and started to drift off, and after Harvard went out again in the top of the seventh, as Hageman collected his ninth strikeout, the Sox decided they had had enough as well. Stahl waved the umpire over to the dugout and to the relief of all ended the contest.

The game, admitted Mel Webb in the
Globe
the next day, "did not amount to a great deal." Another unattributed comment in the
Globe
gushed over the grandstand, praising it for its pitch, so that "the milliner's 'art' in front of you will give you no bother," and offered that "it is a great thing to have an unobstructed view," which of course was true—and remains true—only of seats in the lower half of the stands. Local scribes, to no great surprise, gave the ballpark a thumbs-up. Herman Nickerson of the
Boston Journal
called the new park "a corker" and added, "When it is finished it will be the best in either major league circuit." That wasn't true, for Fenway was neither as spacious nor as handsome as most of the other concrete-and-steel structures built at the time, but few cities in baseball have ever been more boosterish than Boston, and that was as true in 1912 as it would be for some decades after.

The Sox were supposed to go to Worcester for an exhibition the following day, but owing to the cold Stahl called the game off. They left by train for New York and opened the season for real on April 11 at Hilltop Park against the Yankees.

The weather was much better in Manhattan, and it almost felt like spring when Boston took the field. The Sox had finished only a game and a half ahead of New York in 1911, and Boston had won the season series by the margin of only a single game, so the opening series against New York promised to provide Stahl with an accurate gauge of just how much his team had improved—or not.

The two clubs were already rivals, a relationship that over time has only grown more heated. Indeed, the rivalry dates back nearly to the birth of the game, when the fledgling Boston version of baseball, known as "the Massachusetts game," lost out in favor of New York's version. Ever since that time Boston and New York baseball interests have intermittently seemed to go head-to-head against one another, as if no other two cities are similarly connected through geographic proximity and cultural roles. Boston, considered America's dominant city at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had lost that position to New York by the dawn of the twentieth century. The Hub has since taken great pride in bettering New York at anything.

But the rivalry was also more than symbolic. Much to the consternation of Ban Johnson, the Yankees had yet to win a pennant or mount much of a challenge to the powerful Giants of the National League. That may have been the last bit of unfinished business left for his league in its long, drawn-out battle against the NL. That conflict, while outwardly peaceful, had lasted more than a decade and was still occasionally acrimonious. Johnson had tried several times to steer a pennant New York's way, including in 1904 when he tried to do so at Boston's expense. Jack Chesbro's ill-timed wild pitch had thwarted that effort, and in recent years New York's two corrupt co-owners, Frank Ferrell and William Devery, had squandered every advantage Johnson had steered their way. The role of Giant killer now fell to other American League franchises. The Athletics had successfully filled the role in 1911, and the more optimistic Red Sox fans in 1912 hoped it was now Boston's turn. But any talk of besting the Giants in the 1912 World's Series was as yet a premature and distant dream, one that had no reality whatsoever unless the Red Sox could first prove they were better than the Yankees, not to mention the Athletics, Tigers, and other AL powers.

They got a start on that on opening day at Hilltop Park. After watching patiently while New York went through with the usual opening day rituals, including the presentation of a loving cup to manager Harry Wolverton, Boston began the first inning as if they were executing a plan. Leadoff hitter Harry Hooper singled, stole second, went to third on an errant throw, and then walked home when Jake Stahl sent a deep drive to left. It was 1–0 and Joe Wood had yet to break a sweat.