Fenway 1912 (29 page)

The Red Sox were feeling so confident after Wood's win over the Browns that they made a deal with the club that until only a few weeks earlier had been playing rabbit to Boston's tortoise—the White Sox. For months Boston had been trying to get Eddie Cicotte through waivers and trade him out of the league, where it would be impossible for him to come back and haunt them. Yet each time they placed him on the procedural list the White Sox claimed him. Unwilling to give another contender a starting pitcher, Boston would pull Cicotte back off waivers and try again a few days later, only to have Chicago claim him once more.

Now Boston no longer considered the White Sox a threat. At the beginning of the 1912 season Cicotte had seemed to be a stalwart of the rotation, but he had never gotten untracked, and first Hall, then Bedient, then O'Brien, and now Ray Collins had pushed past him. He became a spare part the Red Sox did not need, and now they offered him to Chicago in a straight sale.

It was a smart move. The White Sox, eight and a half games behind Boston, were only nominally in the pennant race, and even though Boston was still due to play them another eleven times, including immediately after the St. Louis series, the Red Sox were still more worried about the A's and the Senators. A quick look at the schedule told them that the White Sox had thirteen games left to play with Washington and fourteen with Philadelphia. If Cicotte could turn his season around and collect a few victories against either of those clubs down the stretch, it would only help Boston's cause. In fact, over the remainder of the year, even though the White Sox would stumble to the finish, Cicotte would thrive on regular work and be their second-best pitcher after Walsh, beating the A's and Senators three times. The trade would rejuvenate his career, and Cicotte would go on to become one of the most effective pitchers in the American League for the remainder of the decade before getting caught up in the Black Sox scandal and being banned from baseball for life.

Even though Cicotte did not instigate the throwing of the 1919 World's Series, he was certainly acquainted with one of the principals, Boston gambler Joseph J. "Sport" Sullivan, from his time in Boston. Sullivan was a regular in the hotel lobbies and taverns frequented by the team and was familiar to all the Boston players. Loosely aligned with the Royal Rooters, it was not at all uncommon for Sullivan to follow the Red Sox on the road and even stay in the same hotel, albeit in more sumptuous surroundings than the players, who bunked two to a room. Sullivan stayed in a suite. And Sullivan, like most other Boston gamblers, was already whetting his appetite in anticipation of the World's Series.

After doing away with the Browns by taking two of three, the Red Sox welcomed Detroit's Tigers, the next ball club to encounter the buzz saw that Fenway Park was becoming. Over the remainder of the regular season the Red Sox would lose there only nine times. Everyone—pitchers, fielders, hitters—had adjusted, and so too, finally, had the fans.

Championship clubs create their own generation of supporters. Over the course of a season championship teams draw new followers who slowly fall in love, an April-to-October romance that builds slowly and finally blazes into passion just as the fall leaves explode into color.

Since coming into existence the Red Sox fan base had barely changed. At the beginning it consisted primarily of the Royal Rooters, who had transferred their allegiance from Boston's National League club, and the residents of Roxbury, the neighborhood that surrounded the park. But now, in 1912, a new constituency was finally beginning to discover the Red Sox—and Fenway Park. While the new park was somewhat less convenient for many of their older fans, new fans and residents of other Boston neighborhoods, like the Back Bay, found Fenway Park somewhat more convenient—and more comfortable than the old Huntington Avenue Grounds. Over the course of the season, as the Red Sox slowly built momentum with each victory, these new fans, who might have attended their first game on a lark or out of curiosity over Fenway Park, were now returning. Watching the Red Sox win was fun, and for these fans the old Huntington Avenue Grounds held no nostalgia. The feeling of separation that left some longtime fans pining for the old ballpark was not an issue for them.

Boston's population was exploding. With more than 100,000 residents added since the Red Sox played their first season in 1901, the population had swelled to nearly 700,000 citizens, and Boston now battled St. Louis for bragging rights as the fifth-biggest city in the country. And after a series of recessions in the early 1900s that made money tight, the economy by 1912 was in the midst of a long, sustained boom. Bostonians had money. The fans turning out at Fenway Park were suddenly younger, more enthusiastic—and more female. The newspapers published pictures of the players every day, and a young player like Joe Wood was much more than a name in the paper—he was now a picture on the wall and a page in a scrapbook. Fenway Park was not just a place where the Red Sox played baseball but, like a dance hall, a place to meet friends, spend time together, socialize, and share an experience. It was even possible to eat at Fenway Park, for the new park featured more concessions than had been offered at Huntington Avenue, where most fans brought their own snacks because only simple sandwiches and peanuts were available. At Fenway Park one could buy not only these items but also soda, popcorn, candy, cigars, and other items from vendors, usually young boys, sometimes unauthorized, who moved through the crowd hawking their wares. As yet, there were no concession stands per se, a feature that would first appear in major league baseball at Wrigley Field in 1914. Neither was there, apparently, liquor or beer, apart from what a patron could carry into the park by way of a flask, bottle, or bucket. Still, for a whole new generation Fenway Park was becoming the place to be and, just as significantly, also a place to be seen.

Bankers, brokers, office clerks, tradesmen, and housemaids all over Boston called in sick or begged off work on Friday, July 12, for the doubleheader against Detroit. Ty Cobb, a player the crowd loved to hate, was one reason for the turnout of fifteen thousand—a remarkable number for a workday—but the main attraction was Joe Wood. He was scheduled to pitch game 2. Even the casual Boston baseball fan was beginning to realize that when Wood pitched Boston was almost guaranteed to win. Ray Collins set the stage in the first game in a tidy one hour and forty-five minutes, holding Detroit to only four hits as the Sox won 4–1, the telling blow coming on a Duffy Lewis double off his left-field namesake.

The second game was the kind that would keep fans talking for weeks, the rare contest in which every pitch and swing was capable of changing the game. Wood and his Detroit counterpart, the capable Ed Willet, walked a high wire with no margin for error as fans oohed and aahed in astonishment each time one of the pitchers left the opposition stranded short of home plate. In the first inning, after Cobb singled and went to second on an errant throw, Wood, now more comfortable pitching from the stretch, picked Cobb off. In the second inning, with two on and no out, Wood reared back and struck out the side, and he again stranded runners in scoring position in the fifth and the sixth. In the ninth Jim Delahanty doubled, but Cady, in a great play, threw behind him on a pickoff play to put him out.

Boston went out in similar fashion, and as long shadows began to stretch over the field it began to look as if the game might end in a draw. Then Fenway Park—and Tris Speaker, looking to prove himself before Cobb once again—got into the act.

With two out in the eleventh inning, fans who had played hooky were getting antsy and thinking about heading home before anyone figured out they had gone to the ballpark when Tris Speaker stepped to the plate. Thus far he and Cobb had played each other even, Cobb collecting two hits, including a double, and being picked off, while Speaker had a double of his own. Yet Speaker hadn't fielded a ball in the air in center field all day as Wood, his fastball at its blazing best, struck out ten.

Boston had a friend in left field in the name of Duffy's Cliff, however, and that would make the difference. Speaker drove a ball deep to left-center field, where it skipped up the bank and then careened toward center. Speaker read the carom perfectly and chugged his way to third while Ty Cobb gathered the ball in too late to catch him. Duffy Lewis followed with a sharp single past second, and the ball game was Boston's. Wood was 18-4, and the Red Sox were two games closer to the World's Series.

The Sox took two of the next three from the Tigers as O'Brien followed Wood's shutout with one of his own, and Hooper finally showed some signs of life at the plate with three hits—while remaining a genius in the field, something Cobb could attest to.

With the Tiger outfielder on first, Sam Crawford hit a fly to Hooper. Cobb held at first, but as the ball started down toward Hooper's mitt, he appeared to lose the ball. Seeing that, Cobb jogged toward second, smugly certain that second base was his.

Only Hooper had not lost the ball. He fielded it on the short hop as it touched the ground, then gunned to second, high, where Wagner, acting nonchalant, suddenly jumped up and stabbed the ball out of the air with one hand and slapped a tag on the startled, sliding Cobb before he knew what was happening. Together, Hooper and Wagner had taken what might have been a small mistake and turned it to their advantage—still getting an out but exchanging Cobb, a maniac on the bases, for the more sedate Sam Crawford.

The play was a perfect demonstration of Boston's best-kept secret: their defense and mental alertness. Although everyone knew about the outfield play of Lewis, Speaker, and Hooper, the club's other defenders, while less spectacular, almost went unnoticed outside of Boston and caught the opposition sleeping all year long. Only Yerkes, at second, was a below-average fielder. Stahl was at least adequate at first base, while Larry Gardner and Charlie Wagner sealed off the left side of the diamond as well as any combo in the league.

Their performance was, of course, relative, for in an era in which gloves were little more than leather pads and field conditions were often poor, errors were far more prevalent than they are today. Wagner and Gardner combined for ninety-six errors in 1912—sixty-one by Wagner. By today's standards those totals would probably lead to the outright release of both players, but in 1912 they were better than average, and each infielder also had more than adequate range and was known for a powerful throwing arm. As a team, the Red Sox did not often beat themselves in the field, or at least not as often as other clubs.

Part of the reason was the improved infield surface at Fenway Park compared to Huntington Avenue, particularly after the work that had been done on the field during the long road trip. While fielding is notoriously hard to judge through the few statistics available from this era, Boston's errors in 1912 dropped by 18 percent from the year before, and the team would end the season with the second-highest fielding percentage and the second-lowest number of errors of any team in the league. As a result, as later statistical analyses would reveal, they gave up nearly one hundred fewer unearned runs than the league average, a strong indication of the quality of Boston's defensive play.

To writers like Murnane, Shannon, Walter Barnes, and other veteran members of the Boston press corps, however, the defensive contribution of Boston's infielders did not go unnoticed. Murnane, for instance, called the play on Cobb a "remarkable play by a wonderful performer." The Boston writers lavished praise on Wagner in particular, for both his infield play and his baseball acumen. Over the course of the season Wagner's fielding seemed to be mentioned in nearly every game story that appeared.

Wagner, who was born and raised in New York City, first made it to the big leagues as a member of John McGraw's Giants in 1902, but after he failed to hit in a brief tryout, he was released. He spent the next five years playing for Newark in the Eastern League—earning a reputation as a good fielder and a smart, scrappy player who struggled at the plate—before being drafted by the Red Sox in 1906. Dubbed "Heinie" because of his German heritage, his glove got him back to the major leagues. Then, rather remarkably and without explanation, he found major league pitching easier to hit than that of the Eastern League, and in 1908 Wagner, at age twenty-seven, finally became Boston's regular shortstop. A Catholic, Wagner fell in with the other KCs, becoming particularly close to Bill Carrigan, who would be his roommate. Together the two men became the leaders of that faction of the club.

While not a spectacular fielder, Wagner was the kind of shortstop pitchers like pitching in front of—dependable and steady, he made routine plays routine. In an era when few players could catch the ball and hold on with one hand, Wagner was particularly adept at doing so, and as he had demonstrated against Cobb, he managed to hold on to the ball when applying tags. He always seemed to be in the right place, anticipating plays before the base runners and, like Derek Jeter in a later era, sometimes catching the opposition off guard. Inside baseball was his forte. At the plate Wagner was particularly adept at the bunt, the hit-and-run, working pitchers for walks, and coming through in the clutch.

Wagner once admitted that "I would like to be as good a pitcher as Walter Johnson," but at 5'9", that was never more than a dream. Yet apart from the club's pitchers, he and Harry Hooper had the best arms on the team. On an almost daily basis he made plays that few other shortstops in the league could match. His sore arm in 1911 had played a part in Boston's poor performance, and his recovery in 1912 was like adding an experienced player to the team.

Although his arm made him stand out, it was Wagner's brain that made him even more valuable. The play he worked with Hooper was no accident. Nearly every day Wagner and Bill Carrigan met—sometimes with Stahl—and talked strategy. Once the team was on the field it was Wagner—and Carrigan when he was catching—who ran the defense, positioning the outfielders, deciding whether to play the infield in or out, and making other defensive calls. Yet Wagner's defensive leadership went beyond that. As the play on Cobb demonstrated, Wagner knew to be waiting at second for a throw because he had probably discussed with Hooper ways to use Cobb's legendary aggressiveness and baseball savvy against him. Another player might have gone halfway to second and waited to see if the ball dropped before committing to run, but Cobb, ultra-confident, had read the play and taken off, so certain that Hooper had lost the ball and could not make a throw that he did not bother to run hard. Only Wagner had not been surprised. He had been expecting the play, and even though the end result was subtle—the exchange of base runners—it was the kind of small play that sometimes changed the course of a ball game.