Fenway 1912 (8 page)

As McLaughlin sat at his desk early in the fall of 1911, however, his ballpark was still nothing more than a pile of drawings. Now that the ownership issue had finally been decided, the task was to turn those plans into reality. The Taylors had already hired the Osborn Engineering Company of Cleveland and civil engineer L. Kopczynski of the Concrete and Expanded Metal Construction Company of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, to provide engineering and other needed technical expertise. Osborn had worked on several other concrete-and-steel ballparks and was an obvious choice to help translate McLaughlin's sketches into sound and detailed plans. Kopczynski was familiar with local contractors, and his company's workers were among the most experienced reinforced-concrete workers in Boston. The New England Structural Steel Corporation of Everett, Massachusetts, was already at work fabricating steel and would provide the ironworkers needed on the project.

To provide extra manpower and oversee construction Taylor selected Charles Logue and the Charles Logue Building Company to serve as the general contractor. Like McLaughlin, Logue was an immigrant, a native of Derry, Ireland. Stowing away at age thirteen, he landed in Newfoundland before making his way to Nova Scotia. While boarding there with a family, he tried to break up a dispute and was shot in the hand, losing a finger. He returned to Ireland, where he learned carpentry, and then immigrated again, this time legally, to Boston in 1882. He formed his own company in 1890, just in time to take advantage of the Irish takeover of Boston's political machine and the resulting flood of building contracts suddenly accessible to Irish firms. A large man with a thick beard and forearms that spoke of a life of labor, Logue did good work at an honest price and soon earned the trust of those who held the power in Boston politics.

In recent decades it has become something of a cliché to refer to Fenway Park in religious terms, as a kind of shrine. Yet the observation is in some ways accurate, because to Charles Logue building was something he did in the service of God. The commissioner of public school buildings in Boston under his close friend Mayor John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, Logue and his wife had sixteen children, including two sons who became priests and two daughters who became nuns, and they were lauded by the Church for having such a large and exemplary family. Logue became close to Cardinal William O'Connell and was perhaps best known as a builder for the Archdiocese of Boston. He supervised the construction of dozens of churches in and around Boston, as well as many buildings on the campuses of the Catholic universities Boston College and Holy Cross in nearby Worcester, Massachusetts. A pious man, Logue attended Mass every day and died in a church, succumbing to a heart attack and passing away in the arms of his son while working on the scaffolding of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Dedham, Massachusetts.

He may well have been selected to serve as the general contractor for Fenway Park owing to his close relationship with O'Connell—the archdiocese owned a sizable property almost adjacent to Fenway Park on Ipswich Street, and it was both good policy and good politics in Boston to stay on good terms with the Church. Although Sunday baseball was banned, the ball club lusted after these lucrative dates and at some point in the future would need the blessing of the archdiocese if the restriction was ever to be lifted. It just made sense to keep the Church happy.

Logue and James McLaughlin got on well with each other, Logue providing the practical solutions to the structural and aesthetic demands of McLaughlin's design, while McLaughlin ensured that Taylor's wishes were reflected in the final product. Neither man was either hot-tempered or impatient, and from a construction standpoint Fenway Park was not overly challenging. It was like working on any other building.

As the days grew shorter in October McLaughlin spent less and less time in his office, at least during daytime hours. Most of his time was spent at the ballpark overseeing his project, huddled with engineers and foremen around a potbellied stove to stave off the seasonal chill in one of two cramped construction shanties built in foul territory between the fenced-off infield and the first-base grandstand.

Boston's fans and players also prepared to spend the winter huddled around the stove, for as soon as the players made a final visit to John I. Taylor to pay their respects and pick up their final paychecks, the "Hot Stove League" began in earnest. The new ownership and a new ballpark were only the first changes that would take place before the Red Sox took the field to open the 1912 season.

As soon as they collected their paychecks, most Red Sox players scattered. Not a single player called Boston home in the off-season. For some, like Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper, it took nearly a week to travel to their homes on the West Coast.

The last two players to leave Boston were Bill Carrigan and Tris Speaker. They had been left behind at Put's to convalesce. Carrigan's broken leg was still in a cast—he had not left the hotel in weeks—and Speaker was still laid up by the pitch he took off his lower leg in the season finale. It was awkward for the two men, who were forced by circumstances to share an apartment for about a week, but in the long run it may have been for the best. Without the other Masons and KCs to egg them on, the enmity between the two took too much energy to sustain, and with each man hobbled, they were dependent on one another. Carrigan finally had his cast changed on October 10 and was allowed to begin to move about on crutches, but it would be another three weeks until doctors would allow him to travel to his home in Lewiston, Maine. Speaker, meanwhile, recovered rapidly and was looking forward to the World's Series. The
Globe
had signed him up to ghostwrite a column on the series. In truth, that meant he had to do little more than watch the Series and nod in agreement with whatever the
Globe
man wrote under his name, but it was easy money.

He was not the only Boston player for whom the postseason meant opportunity. With a week between the end of the regular season for the Athletics and the start of the World's Series, the American League champion Athletics wanted to stay sharp. Manager Connie Mack asked Jimmy McAleer to put together an all-star squad to scrimmage the A's, and McAleer asked both Larry Gardner and Joe Wood to play for a team that also included such luminaries as Tiger outfielder Ty Cobb, Yankee first baseman Hal Chase, and pitcher Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators.

It was quite an honor for each player to be selected for the team, which had the added benefit of giving McAleer a chance to get to know each man a bit better heading into the 1912 season. Each player made the most of it. Gardner more than held his own at third and knocked a series of hits off the champions, and even though Joe Wood was defeated, 3–2, in his only pitching appearance, he held the champions to only five hits, a performance that seemed to underscore his late-season surge. After the A's beat the Giants in the World's Series, four games to two, Wood's stock rose even higher, since his effort compared favorably to those of the Giants' pitchers in the Series, even the great Christy Mathewson.

The A's six-game victory was no upset, but the Giants, behind combative manager John McGraw, had usurped the Cubs as the National League's best club, and baseball reporters considered them to be a team on the way up. The Red Sox, however, were not overly impressed. Speaker, Wood, pitchers Ray Collins, Charley Hall, and Eddie Cicotte, and a few other Sox had faced the Giants in 1909 in a postseason series that Boston had won handily, four games to one. Although Wood had been Boston's only losing pitcher, he had actually earned a draw with Mathewson in the first game, giving up only six hits to the ten Boston earned off Mathewson, and he lost only because of Boston's porous defense. Speaker had been particularly impressive, hitting .600 for the series and battering Mathewson as if he were a rank amateur. Murnane called him the "twinkling star" of the contests and offered that the Sox had outplayed the Giants "in every department." Just as the Red Sox had believed that they were better than the Athletics at the end of the regular season, Speaker let his teammates know after the 1911 Series that the Giants were intimidating in name only.

As the last leaves dropped off the trees, the attention of Red Sox fans, management, and players now turned to other matters. Charley Hall had fallen for a Roxbury girl, Marie Cullen, and they married in mid-October. At the reception at the bride's home the guests were entertained by the Red Sox Quartet, a barbershop singing group made up of Buck O'Brien, first baseman Hugh Bradley, and pitchers Marty McHale and minor leaguer Bill Lyons, who were filling in for occasional tenor Larry Gardner, already back home to Vermont. Later that fall the quartet played the New England vaudeville circuit, including B. F. Keith's theater in Boston, where a receptive reviewer noted that "if they wish to foreswear baseball as a livelihood there is a rosy career awaiting them as singers."

While the players whiled away the winter, Red Sox management was focused on building—both the ball club and the ballpark. Shortly after the end of the World's Series, McAleer traveled to Chicago, a trip that served two purposes. There was that annual hunting trip with Johnson and about three other baseball big shots, which always included attending to a bit of baseball business beforehand. But Chicago was also the home of Jake Stahl, the man McAleer wanted to manage his ball club. Before leaving for Wisconsin McAleer met with Stahl and tried to convince him to sign on.

McAleer wanted Stahl both to manage the team and to play first base. In theory Stahl was not averse to either proposition, but he demanded some extra incentive to leave the cushy and cash-rich confines of his Chicago office. Namely, he didn't want to be McAleer's employee as much as he wanted to be a partner—he wanted a piece of the team. His father-in-law was already on board to be a part owner, and Stahl knew that McAleer was still a bit stretched financially. Besides, if Stahl's father-in-law backed out for any reason, the whole deal could fall apart. In this negotiation Stahl was the hammer and McAleer the mere nail.

In theory McAleer was receptive to the notion. Stahl was willing to invest as much as $15,000 of his own money in the team. But in addition to sharing in the profits, the banker also wanted a hefty salary as player-manager. McAleer balked at his price.

Stahl had McAleer by the short hairs, however, and he knew it, for with each passing day it became more and more important to have a manager in place. Although no contracts could be sent out until the team was formally reorganized after the first of the year, Stahl would have a big say in the makeup of the team and his input was vital.

When McAleer left Chicago for the north woods he claimed to have Stahl all signed up, but when word of that got back to Stahl he denied it, saying, "Matters stand where they did three weeks ago." The two men remained at odds after McAleer returned to Chicago, and in early November he headed back east, still without Stahl's signature on a contract.

But McAleer was more Red Sox figurehead than the final answer. Ban Johnson still pulled the strings, and soon after McAleer boarded his train Johnson apparently got involved.

He knew McAleer needed Mahan's investment, and on November 10 he delivered player-manager Jake Stahl—and $15,000 of his money, representing a 10 percent stake in McAleer's ownership group. Even though Stahl would receive much of his investment back in salary, the agreement made his father-in-law happy and kept the sale from falling apart.

While McAleer was trying to build his team, the Fens echoed with the sounds of construction—hammers and steam engines, saws and steel rivets. Opening day was a little more than five months off, but there had already been a great deal of progress. Ever so slowly, a ballpark was starting to take shape.

It was important to prepare the playing field as quickly as possible, both in order to allow the ground to settle and to begin seeding before winter set in, and much of the first phase of construction focused on these goals. Even before Jerome Kelley relocated the infield sod from Huntington Avenue, engineers and surveyors had laid out the dimensions of the grandstand and crews had already been at work bringing the field to grade. The property sloped downward from the northwest corner to the southeast, and workers first had to excavate earth from the northwest and northern edge of the property to level the field. Then, before Kelley laid out the infield, a network of drainage ditches had to be put in place beneath the playing field.

The drainage system made use of the natural fall of the land from the north to the south and sloped toward several catch basins, near the base of where the grandstand would be, that were tied in directly to the city sewer system. Two-inch vitrified-clay drainpipes crisscrossed the outfield, and as the system inclined toward the infield, the size of the pipe increased, eventually feeding into six-inch trunk lines that ran into the catch basins.

The natural fall of the land is why Fenway's dugouts still often flood after particularly intense downpours. The topsoil sits on a layer of silt approximately twelve feet thick. Beneath the silt is hardpan, a soil layer nearly impervious to water, that slopes from left field toward the first-base line. The hardpan is below the water table, which means that even during dry weather water still seeps along the upper surface of the hardpan, seeking its own level, draining toward the first-base line. Periods of heavy rain can still overwhelm the system, leaving water to back up through drains and flood the dugout and other areas beneath the stands.

Most of this trenching work was done the old-fashioned way, with picks and shovels and calloused hands accustomed to the labor. Mechanized, gasoline-powered excavation machines were just coming into widespread use, either smaller, portable machines on wheels that could be driven or hauled into place or machines supported by towers and operated by the use of draglines. These more modern excavation systems were probably used at Fenway Park only to bring the field to grade and dig foundations for the grandstand.