Fenway 1912 (28 page)

Boston was starting to believe, and baseball fans all around the country were starting to notice. The Red Sox were a championship-caliber team worthy of facing the mighty Giants in the World's Series. And now, after a spring marred by rain and mud and inconsistency that had held attendance down to an average of only about seven thousand fans a game, the change in the weather and the first-place team were getting everyone's attention. It was summer, the Red Sox were suddenly in every conversation, and Fenway Park was as popular a destination as the sands of nearby Revere Beach. Pennant fever was sweeping the Hub.

As game time approached fans poured toward Fenway Park in a flood. Nearly filling the place, a crowd of fifteen thousand fans—the largest of the year apart from special events and holidays—had found reason to skip work and spend the afternoon in the warm sunshine of Fenway Park.

For once, the park looked the way a baseball park was supposed to look, the stands filled almost to overflowing and the grass lush and green. A month in the sun without ballplayers running back and forth over the turf had helped the field immeasurably, while the sight of a full grandstand gave the tired Sox a much-needed jolt of adrenaline. Over the next four weeks the club would play the Athletics six times and the White Sox nine. If the Red Sox could maintain their momentum, the pennant was theirs for the taking.

Fenway proved friendly for Boston. On June 28 and 29 the Red Sox swept New York in back-to-back doubleheaders. In the second twin bill, this time in front of twenty thousand, Boston battered New York, pitching for thirty-one hits and nineteen runs, winning the first game 13–6 and the second 6–0 in seven innings as Wood gave up only one hit in a game cut short by darkness and the utter inability of the Yankees to beat the Red Sox. A 4–1 win the next day gave the Sox their twenty-second win in the last twenty-five games, a pace that even the mighty Giants would have a hard time matching.

What made Boston's streak even more amazing was the fact that they were winning without much of a contribution at all from right fielder and leadoff hitter Harry Hooper. While his teammates were flying high, the horse-faced outfielder was moping and walking around like his dog had just died. In the two doubleheader sweeps Hooper had managed only one hit, and his batting average was lingering below .250. If there was a weakness in the Boston lineup, and a place for a statistically astute critic to question Jake Stahl's acumen, it would have been the decision to bat Hooper leadoff and leave him there all season. Although no one was keeping track of stats like OBP (on base percentage) and OPS (on base percentage plus slugging percentage), Hooper's, like his batting average, were near the worst among Boston regulars. Putting Hooper in the leadoff slot was akin to having an Orlando Cabrera bat leadoff rather than someone like a Johnny Damon.

In 1911, at age twenty-three, he had hit .311 and led the team with thirty-eight stolen bases and ninety-three runs scored. Although those numbers did not put him quite in the same class as Tris Speaker, the Red Sox had every right to expect continued improvement. Unfortunately, the 1912 regular season, in many ways, was the worst of Hooper's career.

Thus far in 1912 his contributions had been primarily on defense. A decade later Giants manager John McGraw would include Hooper, along with Cobb and Speaker, in his all-time best American League outfield. A number of Hooper's contemporaries, among them Babe Ruth, would come to a similar conclusion, and of Boston's three outfielders, Bill Carrigan believed that Hooper, not Speaker, was the best fielder.

In Fenway Park, where there were as yet no bleachers or bullpens in right field, Hooper had to cover nearly as much ground as the center fielder, and he was every bit his teammates' defensive equal, save for Speaker's signature ability to go back on the baseball. Hooper, in the words of Tim Murnane, "covers the ground like a shadow, but with a speed that is phenomenal, though not showy." Of all the Boston outfielders, Hooper made the fewest errors, had the strongest arm, got rid of the ball the quickest, and was the most accurate and perhaps the smartest. He pioneered the use of sunglasses in 1911 to aid him in catching the ball, and he was a master at luring hitters into trying to take an extra base only to gun them down.

At the plate, however, Hooper struggled, particularly in 1912. A natural right-handed hitter when he entered St. Mary's College in California, Hooper had experimented with switch-hitting before finally choosing to bat left-handed full-time. It was the Dead Ball Era, and he figured that being a step or two closer to first base would serve him well. It did, but the move to Fenway Park in 1912 hurt Hooper's offense. Although he would later develop a reputation as something of a pull hitter, in 1912 he was still more accustomed to slapping the ball the other way. When he did that at the Huntington Avenue Grounds the flares he hit over the infield to left tended to fall in. That was not the case at Fenway Park.

Yet there was no call for Hooper to be dropped in the batting order, either from the fans or from his teammates. Hooper was a crowd favorite, and he enjoyed a reputation as a hitter who hit when it mattered. "If there was any one characteristic of Harry Hooper's," said Joe Wood once, "it was that he was a clutch player. When the chips were down that guy played like wildfire."

The other reason for Hooper's offensive struggles in 1911 probably stemmed from his personal life. He spent much of the 1912 season pining for his girlfriend, Esther Henchy, whom he had left behind in California. The two would marry in November 1912, and if the endearing letters he wrote to his young wife in 1913 are any indication, in 1912 Hooper felt like a lovesick puppy. He wasn't the only Red Sox player contemplating marriage either. When the Red Sox returned to Boston from the road trip Hugh Bedient, who had been lobbying Stahl for a few days off for, as a local newspaper reported, "some mysterious purpose," got tired of waiting around. He had his fiancée come to Boston, and after one of the New York games they married.

The newly married Bedient, perhaps still in the thrall of his abbreviated honeymoon, failed to perform as well as he had as a bachelor. Boston was caught looking ahead to their series with the A's as New York took the final game of the series, 9–7, Boston's first loss all year to either the Yankees or the Browns. But in a rarity, the Red Sox, who hit only twenty-nine home runs for the season, cracked three in a losing cause. Larry Gardner hit two, the first striking the fence in center field on the fly as he nearly became the first player to clear the center-field fence, and his second rolled into no-man's-land in deep right. Boston's other home run, by Duffy Lewis, was the third in the short history of Fenway to clear the left-field wall, reportedly "a longer hit than the first of the year made over the same boundary by Hugh Bradley." The crowd was not quite oblivious when the ball went over the wall, but the feat was no longer worthy of a headline, or even more than a few lines, in the game stories in the newspapers the next day.

When the Red Sox boarded the train to Philadelphia after the game no one was more anxious to reach Philadelphia than pitcher Buck O'Brien. Earlier in the year he had made the acquaintance of Marguerite Mack, Philadelphia manager Connie Mack's nineteen-year-old daughter. She spent most of her summers in Massachusetts with her cousins and was a frequent visitor to Fenway Park. Although her father had forbidden all his daughters to date ballplayers, O'Brien—older, silver-tongued, and quick-witted—had swept her off her feet, quite an accomplishment for the former factory worker. Connie Mack had yet to get wind of the romance, but when he did there was no question that the suitor was in for a rough time. Although Mack was outwardly gracious and mild-mannered, he wielded an enormous amount of power in the game. Getting on his bad side was something no player wanted to do.

The A's, however, were looking forward to playing the Red Sox. For the first time all year they were playing like a championship club, going 11-4 over the last two weeks and winning eight of ten from the Senators to push their way into second place, six games behind Boston. With a six-game series against Boston in Shibe Park, the A's had a chance to leapfrog into first place. After all, no one yet knew how the youthful Sox would respond to the pressures of leading the league. Even if the Athletics did not sweep the Red Sox, they hoped to give Boston something to think about.

They made that clear before the first game. With twelve thousand fans on hand, the A's chose the date to raise their 1911 championship banner. They paraded onto the field behind a brass band and a one-hundred-member chorus, then celebrated the flag-raising with the launch of hundreds of helium-filled balloons. Every man on the field had to stop and watch except for the pitchers, who were beginning to warm up to start the game.

It had been a foregone conclusion that Joe Wood would pitch the first game of the important series for Boston—and Stahl did send him out to warm up. But he also sent out Ray Collins. When Stahl saw that Mack had selected his pitching ace, Jack Coombs, to start the game, Stahl pulled a switch and substituted Ray Collins for Wood.

It was a risk, for if Collins faltered and then Wood did the same the next day, Stahl would be left wide open to criticism. But it was a risk that Boston, leading by six games, could afford to take. It worked to perfection as Collins solidified his spot in the rotation and the Red Sox knocked Coombs around before emerging with a 7–2 win.

In a split-admission doubleheader the next day fifty-five thousand fans shoved their way into Shibe Park, hoping to see the A's push back against Boston, only to be disappointed. In the first game Joe Wood took a no-hitter into the fifth, but then got knocked around and lost, 4–3. In game 2, however, Charley Hall, in relief of the bridegroom Hugh Bedient, stopped the early bleeding, and the Sox salvaged a split, winning the second game 6–5.

The A's were spinning their wheels, and they knew it. O'Brien lost the fourth game of the series, 3–2, in front of his potential father-in-law, but Collins won game 5. Then, in the finale, even the forgotten man, Eddie Cicotte, got into the act, coming away with a sloppy victory. Boston took the series four games to two as the Athletics' pennant dreams evaporated before reality. In a story in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
the anonymous author noted after the final contest that "there was no particular play or psychological period of the finale that can be pointed out as the pivotal point of the contest on which to place some 'might have been,' it was just a general breaking up of the whole bulk that started amidships on the hurling deck and spread from stem to stern." The A's trailed Boston by eight games and would never get closer.

As the Sox returned to Boston for a twenty-game home stand their lead in the American League was beginning to look safe. The Senators had snuck back into second place, but the only other team above .500 was the White Sox. The remainder of the schedule was tilted heavily in Boston's favor. The Red Sox had only six more games remaining with the A's and seven with the Senators, while they still had fourteen games remaining with the last-place Browns.

No one was more aware of that than Joe Wood. Much of his reputation to date had been earned while dominating the Browns—his 1911 no-hitter had come against St. Louis—and there was no team in baseball he liked pitching against more. He was on the mound for the first game of the series against St. Louis on July 8 and did not disappoint.

He was getting to know Cady, and Cady was getting to know Wood. Together the two decided to change things up against the Browns. Instead of wasting his good fastball against a ball club that would have had a hard time hitting even if the ball was placed on a tee, Wood and Cady chose to save Joe's arm by having him "feed the Western men on stew made of slow drops and steamy curves," as the
Globe
put it. The Browns missed not only most of the pitches thrown by Wood but also a fair number of those hit by the Red Sox: the Browns made seven errors, and Boston won, 5–1, without even trying. Wood was now 17-4. Since Cady had taken over behind the plate, he had lost once and given up as many as four runs only twice. And he was just getting started. Although little about his victory over St. Louis was notable, apart from his dependence on the breaking ball, in retrospect the game would grow in significance.

On that same day in Chicago the undefeated Rube Marquard took the mound for the New York Giants, his 19-0 record the best start in baseball history. But on this day his luck—and his control—ran out: he gave up eight hits and seven walks against the Cubs. He was pulled in the sixth inning, trailing 6–2, and took the loss. It hardly mattered to the Giants—at 56-14, they had a fourteen-game lead in the National League pennant race—but it did break a rather remarkable spell. Their performance so far in 1912 had been absolutely otherworldly. With a winning percentage of .800, they were on pace to finish the season an ungodly 123-29.

But all was not as brilliant as it looked. Only a few weeks after the end of the 1911 World's Series the Giants had traveled to Cuba and spent a month playing exhibitions, making an already long season even longer. They were exhausted, and for the remainder of the 1912 season they would appear more out of breath than invincible, as if the rarefied air of their historic pace had finally starved them of oxygen. Although few would notice or give it much credence, for the rest of the season the mighty Giants played like mere mortals. Oh, they would still win the pennant without really breaking a sweat, but they would go "only" 47-34 for the remainder of the season—.580 baseball. And Marquard, who for three months had seemed possessed of supernatural powers, would lose his magic almost entirely and over the remainder of the season lose more games than he would win.

Marquard's magic, in fact, suddenly seemed to reside elsewhere, for as his pitching streak came to an end, two others, nearly as remarkable, began. Five days earlier, on July 3, as Marquard won his nineteenth and final game of the streak, Walter Johnson picked up a victory, and now, on the day Marquard's string of victories came to an end, Wood won. For the next two months both Walter Johnson and Joe Wood pursued Marquard's record with streaks of pitching excellence that, in the end, would leave the Giant pitcher's performance almost forgotten in the annals of baseball history. The only race in the American League that anyone would really care about would be the one between Joe Wood and Walter Johnson. The two pitchers were on a collision course, one that Fenway Park would soon frame as its first great contest.