Fenway 1912 (54 page)

Mathewson seemed disturbed once again, and now he walked Yerkes, the winning run. That brought up Speaker, Boston's best hitter, when they needed him to be just that.

Two of the greatest players in the history of the game squared off in an at-bat that could follow either to the grave, both knowing the game and the Series were on the line. Mathewson threw and Speaker popped it up.

The shallow fly drifted into foul ground almost to first base, maybe fifteen feet off the line. It was Merkle's ball all the way, but the first baseman, as one reporter put it, "turned to stone" and was inexplicably slow to react. As the ball started to drop, Mathewson, seeing Chief Meyers racing for the ball as Merkle moved like his feet were stuck in concrete, called out the name of his catcher to alert him to the fact that Merkle might not get there in time and Meyers had to. Meyers lunged as Merkle pulled up short and the ball dropped free.

As Mathewson walked back to the mound Speaker reportedly grinned and called out, "You just called for the wrong man [Meyers]. It's gonna cost you the ball game." But the fault was not as much Mathewson's as it was Merkle's.

Nevertheless, with Speaker's boast ringing in his ears, Mathewson wound up and delivered a curve. Speaker turned on the pitch and spanked it into right field for a long base hit. Engle scored the tying run, racing past home plate straight into the dugout as Yerkes slid into third and Speaker went to second on the throw.

Mathewson sagged, but he knew the game was not yet lost. He walked Duffy Lewis, setting up a force play at every base. The Boston outfielder did not run well, and if Mathewson could induce a ground ball, a double play would end the inning and the game would go on, and the Red Sox would have to send out either Collins or O'Brien, both warming up, to pitch the eleventh inning. That is, if there was an eleventh inning. The game was more than two and a half hours long already. It was beginning to get dark. Perhaps there would be another tie—and a game 9.

The World's Series that would not end seemed destined to continue as Mathewson, trying to get Gardner to hit the ball on the ground, fell behind 2-0, Meyers scooping both pitches out of the dirt. Then Gardner swung through a pitch a bit higher, at his knees, and tipped the ball back into the edge of the stands—where Fenway Park, one last time, lent the smallest of assists. The original box seats at the foot of the grandstands sat several feet up off the field, and it was impossible for a fan to lean over and swipe a foul ball from the ground without tumbling onto the field. But the temporary field-level box seats built in front were lower. An alert Boston fan hung over the rail and scooped up the ball, forcing Silk O'Loughlin to put a new white baseball in play. The count was 2-1.

Mathewson knew a walk would beat him, and his next pitch—his last—was a bit higher. Gardner jumped at it and succeeded in hitting the ball in the air to right, where Josh Devore ran to his left, then set himself and waited. The fate of the Series hung in the air.

Before Gardner had come to bat, Devore had tried to gauge just how deep he could play and still catch the ball and throw out Yerkes at the plate, and now he barely moved, waiting for the ball to come down so he could make his throw. Had the old ball still been in play, Gardner's fly might have landed twenty or thirty feet shorter or more, but this one went all the way out to where Devore stood at the extreme edge of his range.

As Devore set himself to catch and throw, Steve Yerkes placed his left foot on the base and prepared to push off with his right, waiting to see the ball in the glove before breaking for home. He did not want to score the winning run and then be called back for leaving the base too soon.

Devore caught the ball and threw it in one motion, releasing it quickly and almost falling to the ground as he followed through. Yerkes broke from the bag and ran, with clods of damp earth flying from his spikes, in a line straight toward home, watching Chief Meyers's eyes tracking the bright white ball as it sailed toward the plate, straight as a string. It hit the infield short of the plate and died in the soft ground, bouncing to the plate a half-second late, trickling in behind Yerkes as he slid over the plate, the winning run. The Series was over at last, the 3–2 score went up on the left-field wall, and the telegraph operators in the press box tapped out the result in a frenzy.

Suddenly the half-empty stands seemed full and erupted with shouts and songs. In seconds it seemed as if everyone had raced onto the field, where the Giants, apart from Mathewson, ran off quickly, heads down, bitter at losing a game and a Series they felt they should have won. Mathewson simply stood there for a moment, worn out and stunned, and did not seem to wake up until he was surrounded by Red Sox fans, grinning and magnanimous, slapping him on his back. He accepted their thanks with a blank face and trudged off.

Yerkes leapt to his feet and ran toward the dugout, where he was first greeted by his manager, who had been on deck, and then Wagner and Carrigan, who had been coaching first. In a moment they were all out there, incredulous and glad, hugging and shaking hands with each other and the fans, suddenly a team again, Gardner and Lewis, Hooper and Speaker, Wagner and Bedient, Collins and Hall, and O'Brien and Joe Wood, who was happier than anyone, the goat horns off his head.

Only one other Giant was left on the field, John McGraw, marching toward the Boston dugout to seek out Stahl and shake his hand. Some Boston fan could not resist and gave him a shove from behind, and the manager fell to the ground, tasting earth. McGraw stood, turned, and punched the attacker square in the face, dropping him. Then he found Jake Stahl and offered the Red Sox manager his hand.

The Red Sox, so suspicious for the last three days, were suddenly giddy, and men who would not look each other in the eye or share a seat on the train a few hours before now laughed and grinned. The heroes of the moment—Speaker, Yerkes, and Engle—were swarmed by a bevy of women and smothered in kisses, which they did not reject.

The World's Series was theirs, and they could hardly believe it. One after the other, they ducked into the dugout and then to the clubhouse. On the field, without the Royal Rooters to lead them, the celebration of the fans soon sputtered out, and as dusk fell they skipped across the field and into the stands, heading for the exits.

Despite winning only two of the five games at Fenway Park and tying another, the Red Sox had prevailed, and the keys to their success had been starting pitching, defense, timely hitting, and the occasional assist from their home field. Over time many of the questions that surrounded games 6 and 7 would fade, and Fenway Park's first season would not be remembered for the squabbles of the Red Sox but for their success, the cheers of the fans who did watch game 8 echoing longer and louder than the cheers of those who did not.

History anointed its heroes and sentenced its villains. In the days after the World's Series, Hugh Bedient, the man who mastered Mathewson and was lauded now as one of the great young pitchers in the game, the near-equal of Wood, received the most kudos, as did Yerkes and Engle and Gardner and Henriksen. But over time other heroes emerged—namely, Harry Hooper, for his superb game 8 catch of Doyle's drive, and Joe Wood, who in the end made most people forget game 7 and who won three games in the Series, a performance that underscored his 34-5 mark in the regular season. With 109 wins, the 1912 Red Sox set a club record that still stands. No Boston team has ever been better.

The goat became not Fred Merkle—who botched the foul pop-up that gave Speaker another chance—but Fred Snodgrass, if only because the loss demanded a scapegoat and the writers, somewhat inexplicably, selected him. The next morning a headline in the
New York World
read: "A $29,495 Muff Beats Giants in World's Series." Although his own teammates would absolve him of blame, baseball fans far and wide soon began to refer to his sin in shorthand as "Snodgrass's $30,000 muff," the figure representing the monetary difference between winning and losing. For the record, the extra $29,495 allowed each winning Red Sox player to take home $4,025, while each Giant received a check of only $2,566. The error and the phrase were soon carved in stone and have caused later generations to overlook most of what happened in the 1912 Series prior to game 8. By any measure it was one of the most remarkable World's Series in history. Featuring some of the greatest names in the history of the game, it was played in two settings, the Polo Grounds in New York and Fenway Park in Boston, that provided the perfect backdrops to a masterpiece.

Twenty minutes or so after Yerkes crossed the plate, Fenway Park emptied and fell nearly silent, the only sign of victory the muffled sounds of celebration taking place in the clubhouse. Ushers started scouring the stands for garbage, and in the waning light Jerome Kelley and the other groundskeepers gave the field a quick raking and pulled the canvas tarpaulin over the diamond. They would be back in the morning to begin to put Fenway Park to bed for the winter, but for now they only pulled the covers close.

In one season Fenway Park had gone from infancy through adolescence, revealing most of the quirks and much of the character that would serve it well for the next hundred seasons as it grew and evolved, almost every year, in ways both large and small. Although Fenway Park is not now the same place it was when the first fans spun through the turnstiles in 1912, it is nonetheless a treasure, a place where, from April to October each season, the history of a city and a people and a team is written, where legends have walked and legions have watched—a ballpark for the heart and the soul.

The next morning, as all Boston prepared to honor the Red Sox at a reception at Faneuil Hall, the Royal Rooters forgot their differences with McRoy and McAleer for a day and jumped back on the bandwagon. Jerome Kelley and his crew, as they did every other day, arrived at Fenway Park early and got busy.

They stripped the bunting from the stands, uncovered the infield, raked the dirt, pulled a few stray weeds, and filled a few holes here and there as the pigeons watched over them from beneath the grandstand roof. As a cold north wind whipped across Fenway Park and the dark low clouds of winter clamped down on New England, Jerome Kelley, like most other Red Sox fans, was already thinking about next year—and spring in Fenway Park.

There was a lot of work to do.

A
FTER WINNING THE
World's Series and turning in what is still the best single-season record in Red Sox history, the franchise seemed poised to begin a dynasty. With baseball's best outfield, baseball's best pitcher, two of the best rookie pitchers, emerging stars at third base and behind the plate, one of the youngest rosters in the game, and a new ballpark now fully operational, the 1913 season seemed to promise another first-place finish and appearance in the World's Series for the Red Sox.

Not so fast.

At first, all seemed well as the on-field record was backed up by a mountain of cash. According to
Sporting Life,
the Red Sox made $450,000 in profit during the 1912 season. Jake Stahl earned upward of $20,000 from his 5 percent stake in ownership, plus nearly another $15,000 in salary and his World's Series check. After making a public apology, McAleer and McRoy survived their run-in with the Rooters, when everyone appeared to forget the shenanigans that had taken place between games 6 and 7 and look toward the future.

But the simmering tensions that had threatened to pull the team apart during the 1912 season were not entirely washed away by the victory. The disagreement between Stahl and McAleer over the game 6 starter revealed a rift between the two, one that took little to reignite in 1913. Stahl, troubled by continuing problems with his ankle, was forced to retire as a player, which both weakened the team offensively and left Stahl with a little less value to the team and a whole lot less leverage. Joe Wood, after spraining an ankle in spring training, got off to a slow start and then pitched inconsistently—good one game and poor the next—as at only age twenty-three the wear and tear on his arm began to show. The Red Sox got off to a poor start, dropping three of four to open the season as the Athletics bolted ahead and everything began falling apart for Boston. After winning the pennant in 1912, the Red Sox did not spend a minute in first place in 1913.

By midseason the Red Sox were out of the race entirely and struggling to play .500 baseball. Joe Wood was on the shelf with a broken thumb, Charlie Wagner had a sore arm again, and McAleer and Stahl were hardly speaking. Stahl's contention that he, not McAleer, should be in charge of the franchise sparked a war among club investors that pitted the Chicago faction against McAleer and the Taylors. In July, soon after Buck O'Brien was sent to the White Sox in a waiver deal at Stahl's behest, the manager lost the tug-of-war. McAleer fired him and named Bill Carrigan manager, a move that put the KCs firmly in control of the ball club. The Sox played a bit better under Carrigan in the second half but still finished in fourth place, 78-71, twenty-five and a half games worse than their record in 1912 and fifteen and a half games behind first-place Philadelphia.

By then McAleer's days were numbered as well. The ticket snafu from the 1912 World's Series was not forgotten by all Boston fans, and the firing of Stahl coupled with the team's poor performance alienated the rest. Attendance dropped from 597,000 fans in 1912 to only 437,000. Investors were not happy. As soon as the season ended Ban Johnson, seeing his own investment at risk, began to engineer a sale. McAleer was powerless to stop him. In December "the assets of all Chicago interests"—meaning those of Stahl, his father-in-law, McRoy, and McAleer—were sold to Canadian Joseph Lannin.

James McAleer
retired to his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and washed his hands of major league baseball. He never worked in organized baseball again and died in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. Of all Red Sox owners, he is, despite his long involvement with the game and the 1912 world championship, perhaps the least well known today.