Fenway 1912 (3 page)

American League president Ban Johnson had created the circuit in 1900, and in 1902 he declared that it was now a major league and that he intended to go to war with the only major league at the time, the National League. One key to the success of Johnson's effort was the placement of a franchise in Boston, virtually next door to the existing National League team, as one of the new league's flagship franchises.

Johnson, a man whose ambition, ego, and self-confidence matched his girth, made the success of the new Boston team a priority. He ran the league like his own personal fiefdom and initially owned a financial stake in every franchise. For the first two decades of the league's existence he had near-dictatorial powers, which he was not shy about employing. By selecting, as he often did, not only who could own or invest in a club but who they could employ as manager and players, Johnson had the means to manipulate the standings. In order for his new league to succeed he needed the new Boston club to get a leg up on Boston's long-established National League team. The best way to do that was to make the team a champion.

Together with Charles Somers, Johnson's toady and financial benefactor, who helped finance the new league and served as the titular leader of the AL's Boston franchise, Johnson led a raid on Boston's potent National League club, a recent dynasty. He signed away many of its best players, including star pitcher Cy Young and third baseman Jimmy Collins, a devastating blow to the established club. The two men also built a new ballpark, the Huntington Avenue Grounds, on land leased from the Boston Elevated Company.

It was an audacious move, for the new park sat just across the railroad tracks from the Nationals' home, the beloved but increasingly decrepit South End Grounds, but it had worked. The combination of a good ball club, a new and spacious ballpark, and an admission charge of twenty-five cents—half of what the Nationals charged—had proven to be an unstoppable combination. The Americans, as most fans called them at the time, were a powerhouse.

After the 1902 season Somers, who lived in Cleveland and was also an investor in that club, cashed out and sold the club to Milwaukee attorney Henry Killilea, another Johnson crony. He agreed to take over until Johnson could find a compliant local owner. It proved to be a good investment. In 1903 Boston won its first American League pennant and the first "World's Series," as it was then called, defeating Pittsburgh. By then Boston's National League team didn't matter much anymore—Boston was an American League town.

Johnson knew it was a good time to sell again. The Nationals had been vanquished, and the Boston Americans would never be more attractive to a Massachusetts man with some money. Of course, Johnson really didn't give a damn about Boston anymore. Now that Boston had won a title, he intended to make his New York team the next American League champion, even if it hurt Boston.

Johnson found the perfect patsy, someone who would virtually guarantee that no matter what Johnson did to help New York, he would receive little criticism from the generally boosterish local press.

The sucker was John I. Taylor and his father,
Boston Globe
publisher and Civil War hero General Charles Taylor. The younger Taylor was not unlike the progeny of many other rich and influential men of the age. While not quite a complete ne'er-do-well—Taylor had briefly worked in the family business, twiddling his thumbs in the
Globe
's advertising and editorial departments—he much preferred enjoying the fruits of his family's bank account and resulting social status. Taylor liked to sail, ride and show horses, raise Irish terriers, shoot skeet, play whist, and enjoy every other pastime appropriate to a man of his station, much of it breathlessly reported in his father's newspaper. He wasn't a bad fellow and could be a great deal of fun after a few cocktails, but he fancied himself as more of an athlete and sportsman than he really was.

Boston's world championship baseball team had been a boon to local newspapers, and in 1903 John I. Taylor had fallen for the club like it was a prize Irish terrier. He also needed something tangible to occupy his time, so in April 1904 the General indulged his son, put up the $135,000 sale price, and installed John I. Taylor as club owner and president. The younger Taylor hadn't a clue as to what he had bought or what to do with it, but he liked the company of the players and could often be seen at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. He liked to sit on the bench during batting practice before moving to his box near the end of the dugout for the game, close enough to the action for the players to see his reaction and for Taylor to hear their earthy conversations.

He had a grand time watching in 1904. Despite the best efforts of Ban Johnson, who arranged a suspicious midseason trade that sent one of Boston's better players, Patsy Dougherty, to New York, Boston still won the pennant. On the final day of the season Boston defeated New York when star pitcher Jack Chesbro threw a wild pitch that cost him the game and his team the pennant. Boston then managed to retain its status as world champion without playing a single game when the National League champion New York Giants, in a fit of pique, refused to play them in the postseason.

The club's success made Taylor, who had very little to do with the creation of the roster besides signing the checks, think he was a genius. So in the off-season he began meddling with the roster and made several questionable deals against the wishes of player-manager Jimmy Collins. At the same time Boston's stars began to show their age. The team slumped to fourth place in 1905 and rapidly slid downward from there. When Collins criticized Taylor, the owner froze the manager out and over the next season or two refused to make any substantive trades at all out of pure spite. In 1907 he finally traded Collins away, a move that sent Boston's Irish fans into a frenzy and newsboys selling the
Globe
in certain sections of the city scurrying for cover. Meanwhile, some very real tragedies further harmed the club. In 1905, after being injured in a carriage accident, catcher Lou Criger became addicted to morphine. And in 1907 Collins's replacement, player-manager Chick Stahl, whose record of emotional instability had made him a strange choice for the job, was blackmailed by a former girlfriend who had become pregnant. Stahl couldn't take the scandal and committed suicide, drinking carbolic acid while the team was at spring training at West Baden Springs, Indiana. His death rocked the club, which would go through another four managers before the end of the season.

While Taylor stewed, the Red Sox landed with a thud, finishing in last place in 1906 with a grim record of 49-105, and in seventh place in 1907. Apart from a brief foray into the first division in 1909, the Huntington Avenue Grounds had become a place where Boston fans went to watch baseball, but not to watch
winning
baseball. In a sense the park became the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Wrigley Field, a pleasant place to be but rarely the site of any significant drama concerning wins and losses.

For many fans the real action took place in the stands along the first-base line, which effectively served as an open betting parlor. Many of the same faces sat there every day, oblivious to the score, wagering on such things as strikes and balls and pop-ups and groundouts, bets that didn't depend on wins and losses.

In the first few years of his ownership Taylor's most significant contribution to the ball club was to change its name. Before the 1908 season he announced that the team would wear red stockings and henceforth be known as the Red Sox. The name harkened back to the glory days of the sport, when the original Red Stockings of Cincinnati had relocated to Boston and given the city its first championship club. It was hardly an appropriate name for Boston's current collection of has-beens and never-would-bes, but up to that time neither fans nor sportswriters had ever been quite sure what to call the team. They usually called them "the Americans" simply to differentiate them from Boston's National League team. Other names, both awkward and colorful, like the Pilgrims, worked in newspaper headlines but were rarely used by the fans in the stands.

The only thing the club had going for it was that the National League team was even worse, and the South End Grounds even worse than that. The double-decked wooden park had once been one of the game's most distinctive venues. But in 1894 it burned, and even though the park had been rebuilt, the new facility lacked the charm of its predecessor. The Red Sox, despite all their troubles, were first in a league of two, and that seemed good enough for John I., if not the Boston fans. They were simply there, the flag in the corner of the gymnasium, hanging listless and limp.

But by 1911 the team was not completely talentless. By chance and serendipity, the Red Sox slowly began to acquire a new core group of players that would soon become at least the equal of the 1903 champions, if not better.

Traditionally, most professional ballplayers had come from New England and the Northeast. That was where baseball first became popular and where the game was well established and where boys and young men could still be found on nearly every empty lot or town square tossing a ball around. But as professional baseball spread there was growing demand for young players, and the Red Sox faced increased competition in their own backyard. That, combined with the expansion of the American League to the west as far as St. Louis and Chicago and as far south as Washington, D.C., led some teams, including the Red Sox, to look for prospects ever farther away in parts of the country where there was less competition for players and a greater chance to nab a real prize. It wasn't part of any great plan on Taylor's part, but an instance of innovation inspired by necessity. By accident, the Red Sox became one of the first teams to take advantage of these relatively untapped new markets. It soon paid off.

The first of this core group to wear a Boston uniform was Texas native Tris Speaker, a man who grew up doing all the things easterners imagined a Texan did—hunting, fishing, roping cattle, and busting broncos. A natural right-hander, Speaker learned to throw with his left hand after breaking his right when he was thrown from a horse. A good student, Speaker enrolled after high school in Fort Worth Polytechnic Institute, where he played on the football and baseball teams, making a better impression there than in the classroom. In 1906, after he was spotted playing semipro baseball at age eighteen by Doak Roberts, owner and manager of the Cleburne Railroaders in the Texas League, Speaker became a professional. He failed to make it as a pitcher before finding his place in center field, where his speed and arm stood out. Roberts sensed Speaker's raw potential and almost immediately tried, without success, to sell his young prospect to the majors before finally getting the attention of George Huff. The Boston scout, who also served as the athletic director of the University of Illinois and in the wake of Stahl's suicide had actually served as manager for a brief period in 1907, signed the nineteen-year-old outfielder for about $750.

The dour-looking young Speaker was as raw and tough as the leather of a new baseball mitt. He could run but not yet hit. After a brief appearance for Boston near the end of the 1907 season, at age nineteen, when he played tentatively and seemed overwhelmed by both the competition and the city, he was released.

His career could have been finished, but nothing stuck in Speaker's craw more than failure. In the off-season he tried to latch on to another club, but no one wanted him. He even showed up at the New York Giants' camp in Marlin, Texas, in the spring of 1908, but was rebuffed by manager John McGraw.

That didn't stop him, for behind Speaker's dour countenance was a true Texan, a man who felt it was his duty, if not his birthright, to succeed. Refusing to accept the end of his career, Speaker boldly showed up at Boston's spring training headquarters in Hot Springs, Arkansas, without an invitation. Even though he wasn't under contract, the Red Sox let him work out with the club and at the end of spring training found a use for him. They essentially used Speaker to settle their debt to the Little Rock team for allowing the Sox to use their ballpark, paying the rent by handing them Speaker. When Speaker flourished later that year, the Little Rock owner graciously allowed the Red Sox to reclaim the player they hadn't wanted a few seasons before.

Speaker, however, never forgot his shabby treatment in 1907 and used the release as motivation in 1908. When he returned to Boston he was a changed man, both on and off the field. He was now deadly certain of his ability, aggressive in the outfield and at the plate and on the bases, and intimidated no more. In 1909 he earned a starting berth in Boston's outfield, hitting .309, and over the next two years demonstrated all five baseball tools—the ability to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power in an era when doubles and triples mattered more than home runs. Success only increased his swagger, although even teammates who did not particularly like him personally, like outfielder Duffy Lewis, respected him. Lewis called Speaker "the king of the outfield." By the end of the 1911 season Speaker, twenty-three years old and a muscular 5'11", was on the cusp of greatness. Those who had doubted him a few years before now didn't dare touch the chip on his shoulder.

Another outfielder arrived by a similarly circuitous route. John I. Taylor was married to Cornelia Van Ness of San Francisco, and while visiting relatives in California after the 1908 season he met with Charlie Graham, manager of minor league Sacramento. Graham convinced him to take a chance on young Harry Hooper, a California State League outfielder whom people were comparing favorably to Ty Cobb. That was mostly hype, for Hooper shared neither the Detroit outfielder's abrasive personality nor his monumental talent, but Hooper was still a skilled player, with a superb arm, good speed, and an occasionally potent bat, a table-setter and defensive whiz, the perfect complementary player, and one of the few Red Sox players who got along with almost everyone. While it would not have been possible to win a championship with a team of Harry Hoopers, it was impossible to win without a player like Harry Hooper.