Fenway 1912 (35 page)

In the early innings the game moved like the early rounds of a boxing match between two heavyweights of equal ability as each club probed the other with jabs, only to be repulsed. In the third George McBride drove a pitch from Wood over Duffy Lewis's head and onto the Cliff, which Lewis could not climb because of the crowd, for a double, and he moved to third on a sacrifice. When Walter Johnson, a fine hitter, hit a sharp ground ball, McBride broke for home on contact. But Wood stabbed Johnson's hard grounder and flipped the ball to Cady. McBride braked hard and tried to scramble back to third, but Gardner and Cady chased him down. The Senators went on to put two more men on base. Wood ended the threat by fanning Moeller, but through three innings he had already thrown nearly sixty pitches. In the fourth Speaker walked and took second on a fielder's choice but was left stranded, and in the fifth, after Ainsmith walked and Walter Johnson beat out an infield hit, Duffy Lewis and Tris Speaker nearly collided going after Clyde Milan's fly ball. At the last second Speaker pulled up and Lewis cut in front, stuck his glove up, and managed to hang on.

Johnson, apparently getting stronger, fanned the side in the bottom of the fifth, dispatching Wood on only four pitches for the final out. Washington threatened again in the bottom of the inning when former Red Sox infielder Frank Laporte drove a ball that bounded into the crowd between Speaker and Hooper for a double, but Wood escaped the jam by striking out Roy Moran.

Entering the sixth inning, the game was still scoreless, but although neither team had pushed across a run, Johnson seemed to have the edge. Wood was using more curves and seemed to be saving his best fastballs for when he needed them most. Meanwhile Johnson, as he had demonstrated in the fifth, seemed to be settling in, his fastball a straight stream of milk from his hand to the plate.

Johnson got two quick outs in the sixth, bringing up Speaker. He blew a fastball past the outfielder on the inside, and then broke a rare curveball in on his hands for strike two. After wasting a pitch, Johnson came back with a fastball over the outer half.

The pitch beat Speaker, but he still got the fat part of the bat on the ball, lacing a line drive over Foster's head at third. Speaker ran hard out of the box, but the ball made the crowd before Roy Moran could gather it up, and Speaker loped into second with a ground-rule double. It was no cheap hit—even if Moran had gotten to the ball before the crowd scooped it up, he probably would have had no play on Speaker.

Now the Boston crowd came to life again, for they knew that a base hit of almost any kind would be certain to score Speaker. Over the years they had grown accustomed to seeing Duffy Lewis, who led the Red Sox in RBIs, do just that.

Then the Senators made a mistake. Knowing that the right-handed-hitting Lewis was a pull hitter, they sent their outfield around toward left. With any other pitcher on the mound, it was the smart move, but with Johnson on the mound, perhaps not. Over the last two innings he had overpowered Boston's hitters—and even Speaker had been late getting around on the ball. Not even a dead pull hitter like Lewis could get around on Johnson.

Lewis worked the count to two balls and a strike when Johnson poured a high fastball over the outside corner. Lewis flailed at the pitch, and as Mel Webb described it in the
Globe,
"He could not get his bat around far enough to hit to his accustomed field. Instead the ball shot off to right field, and without much fire on it." It soared through the air, in the parlance of the day, like a "dying quail."

Paul Shannon captured best what happened next.

The bleachers rose en masse as the ball sailed over the head of first baseman Gandil and down towards the right field fence.

Like a deer the fleet footed Moeller raced for the fence, trying to corral the sphere in its course and thereby retire the side. One stride more and the game might well have gone into extra innings. But Moeller's desperate run was all in vain.

Though his outstretched fingers just touched the elusive leather it dropped safely and fell at his feet, Speaker scoring from second and Lewis getting second.

Moeller in fact even dove for the ball, but could not make the catch.

Boston led 1–0. The potential difference between victory and loss, Wood's winning streak and defeat, and the crown as the King of the Pitchers, was only a scant inch or so, if that.

With his throne in sight, Wood seized the day, striking out the first two Washington hitters in the seventh inning on only six pitches before getting Johnson to ground out to third. Johnson too settled down in the seventh and did not give up a base runner. After watching one Johnson pitch pass by for a strike, one of the Washington players was overheard to call out to Wagner, "Why don't you hit it?" Wagner stepped out, turned his head, and replied, "I can't see anything except a streak," before grounding out weakly. Washington threatened in the eighth when Eddie Foster singled and stole second, and for a moment it looked as if the game would be tied, for Chick Gandil hit a near mirror image of Speaker's earlier double with a line drive over Engle's head at first, but the ball curved foul. Although he then hit a pop-up foul off third that on any other day would have been an out but on this day made the crowd, Wood finally got him on a weak infield fly.

In the ninth inning, as the Rooters and the crowd chanted and swayed back and forth as one, Washington almost broke through again. Laporte hit a hard shot past Gardner at third for a single, and then Moran dropped a bunt, sacrificing him to second. All at once the singing and chanting stopped, and for the first time all game the crowd fell silent, knowing a hit would tie the game, as Moeller stepped to the plate.

All eyes were on Joe Wood, and Wood went with his best, a fastball. For the first time all game it was possible to hear the sound as it smacked into Hick Cady's mitt, but the pitch missed the plate for a ball. Fastballs had gotten Wood this far in his career, and at this moment there was no other thought in his mind besides reaching back and throwing as hard as he could, his wind-up starting as soon as Cady flashed the sign. Moeller fouled off three straight, but on the fourth pitch the crowd again heard the ball collide with Cady's mitt. Moeller shuddered, the bat frozen to his shoulder, and umpire Tommy Connolly's right arm shot up in the air. Moeller spun away from the plate, out on strikes.

Now the crowd could taste it, and so could Wood, and Cady hardly had to put a sign down. Ainsmith topped the first pitch he saw, then swung through another. With the count 0-2, he watched one pass, and this time the umpire's arm stayed at his side, making the count 1-2.

Then, for the 121st time in the game, Wood toed the rubber, took the sign, and threw. Ainsmith waved at the ball, Cady's mitt caught the sound, and the catcher rose from his crouch in triumph as Connolly called Ainsmith out. Jake Stahl raced to embrace Wood, and Fenway Park burst open like a fat man loosening his belt after a big meal. The crowd poured onto the field, and in seconds Wood was enveloped as he was half-carried and half-pushed by his teammates toward the Boston dugout.

With his thirtieth victory—making him an ungodly 30-4 for the season—and his fourteenth win in a row, Wood came away with Johnson's AL record of sixteen straight wins still within reach. In every way the game had lived up to its billing. Johnson had given up only five hits while throwing 103 pitches, including throws to first, and Wood had thrown 121 pitches while giving up six hits, but Boston's finest had struck out nine to Johnson's five, and Johnson's record fell to 29-10. The
Washington Post
's Joe Jackson wrote that "the result proved nothing save that luck broke with Wood," and even
Sporting Life
offered that "Johnson ... pitched the best game," but no one in Boston agreed. "The challenger," wrote Mel Webb, "went down before the challenged." "All hail to Joe Wood," wrote Shannon, "uncrowned king of American League pitchers!"

As the throng of happy fans stayed on the field and celebrated, and Joe Wood finally let a smile escape from his lips in the clubhouse, James McAleer, Robert McRoy, and John I. Taylor surveyed the mob that had filled every nook and cranny of the ballpark. Looking around, they could not help but share the same thoughts. After smiling for a moment at both the result of the game and the amount of money they had earned over the preceding one hour and forty minutes, each man next thought ahead to the World's Series. Watching the mayhem on the field and the logjams in the aisles and in front of each exit, they surely wondered how precisely they were going to accommodate the crowds that were certain to come in October. "Oh," wrote Tim Murnane a few days later, "for a ballpark large enough to accommodate all the people who would gladly pay double to see the World's Series."

Fenway Park, less than a season old, was already too small.

Baseball fans who visit Fenway Park next week to see the new American League Champions perform will be surprised at the changes that have been made since the team went away ... The work is being rushed and, according to the contractors, will be finished a few days previous to the opening game of the big series.

—
Boston Globe

T
HE LIGHTS WERE
on late in Red Sox offices on the evening of September 6. As Robert McRoy supervised the counting of receipts following Wood's victory over Johnson he could hardly believe it. Never before in the history of the Red Sox had a single game, or a single series, been more lucrative. The first-place Red Sox and Wood's winning streak were the reasons, of course, but the mechanism was Fenway Park. Crowds in excess of 30,000 fans had turned out in the past at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, but with fewer than 2,500 higher-priced grandstand seats and so many twenty-five-cent admissions, even when the outfield was ringed with people and the stands were sagging beneath the weight of the crowd, it was impossible to take in more than $8,000 or $9,000 for a single game.

Not so at Fenway Park, where admission to the grandstand, which held nearly fifteen thousand fans when one included standing-room seats, ranged from seventy-five cents for unreserved seats to $1.25 for reserved seats in the first ten rows and $1.50 for a box seat. Another eight thousand fans paid fifty cents to sit in the pavilion. The only twenty-five-cent tickets were those in the bleachers and an unknown number of standing-room seats elsewhere in the park. Only God and Robert McRoy knew what everyone else had paid to stand on the field, for there were certainly some who had paid full price for a seat elsewhere but simply couldn't get to their seat or chose not to.

After the series finale on Saturday, which the Red Sox lost 5–1 before a crowd of twenty thousand, local newspapers tried to guess just how much the Red Sox took in, both for the entire series and for the Wood-Johnson contest. The Red Sox never released an official tally of receipts, but it is safe to conclude that, on September 6 alone, the club must have taken in, conservatively speaking, at least $15,000 and perhaps as much as $20,000, while receipts for the other three games of the series probably totaled more than $10,000 for each contest. In less than a week the Red Sox grossed around $50,000, nearly the cost of their player contracts for the entire season. Clark Griffith left Boston with Washington's share of the gate, a hefty check for almost $20,000. He was delighted and gave Walter Johnson an extra $500 for his role in bringing out the crowd.

President McAleer was not so generous with Joe Wood, who found nothing extra in his pay envelope, but a few days later, when speaking of Wood, McAleer said, "When my boys make good I am willing to pay the money." He was referring to Wood's next contract, and in 1913 Wood's salary would indeed more than double, to $7,500. For the present, however, the best pitcher in baseball was also one of the best bargains in the game.

As the Red Sox players made their way to Chicago for an extended road trip that would take them away from Fenway Park for nearly three weeks, McAleer, McRoy, and John I. Taylor pondered both their fortune and their good fortune. The Giants may have been on the horizon, but so were some gigantic crowds—and some enormous challenges. All three men knew that something had to be done, and quickly, to maximize their profits during the World's Series. As the Washington series had made abundantly clear, Red Sox fans were already half-mad with excitement. Even at inflated World's Series prices, Boston fans could fill Fenway Park on their own. But with New York only a few hours away by train, thousands of Giants fans were certain to make the trek to Fenway Park, and the Red Sox had to reserve some seats for them as well. A certain number of tickets had to be made available to both leagues, other AL and NL teams, the players of both teams and their families, former players, club employees, local VIPs like the Royal Rooters, club vendors and advertisers, city, state, and county politicians, the archdiocese ... the list went on and on and on.

The solution was obvious. Several weeks before, they had called on architect James E. McLaughlin and contractor Charles Logue and asked both to prepare plans to accommodate larger crowds. Now the men had a little less than three weeks to make Fenway Park bigger.

No one was more familiar with the park than McLaughlin, and during the course of his design of Fenway Park he had, at various times, already created drawings that included seats in the two most obvious locations—the empty space between the grandstand and the left-field wall and the open space in right field between the pavilion and the center-field bleachers. The former area, which McLaughlin dubbed "the Third Base Stand," could provide seating for as many as another 5,000 fans, while the latter area could hold 4,500. It was a relatively easy process for McLaughlin to resurrect his basic plans for seating in these areas (see illustrations 9 and 11).

The Red Sox, in fact, had always hoped to add concrete stands along the left-field line but had put those plans on hold in the event that they gained possession of the small wedge of land adjacent to the park on Brookline Avenue. It had been for sale, but the price was too dear for McAleer and Taylor, and it had fallen into the hands of investors. All around Fenway Park, in fact, investors were suddenly snatching up property that a year or so earlier had gone wanting.