Game Six (4 page)

Stockton walked out onto the field after the meeting and caught up with Tony Kubek as the grounds crew rolled out the batting cage. The tall, striking, square-jawed former shortstop, only thirty-nine but ten years retired from the game, still looked fit enough to suit up and play. Stockton mentioned that for the last two days the mood around press headquarters at the downtown Statler Hilton had been spiraling toward indifference about this Series, and he wondered if the players would be similarly deflated by the layoff. Kubek looked out at the first players who were trickling onto the field for early stretching and warm-ups.

“In 1962, we flew back out to San Francisco for Game Six with a three-to-two lead, just like Cincinnati has here. Rained for three straight days out there. Ballplayers are creatures of habit; during the season every minute is scheduled and regulated. Something like that breaks up your routine, it’s unnatural, makes you deeply uneasy. It got to the point where everybody just wanted to get it over with and go home.”

Players trotted into the outfield, gingerly testing their footing in the rain-soaked turf. Others began tossing across the sidelines, stepping back to deeper range, warming up their arms.

“What was it like to play again?” asked Stockton.

“When we finally got back on the field, it was as tough as any Series I played in.” Stockton reminded himself that Kubek had played in six—and won three of them—as part of one of the greatest everyday lineups in history. “All of a sudden we were back out there and it dawned on you exactly how much was at stake. And it got to some people.”

The home team Giants held off the juggernaut Yankees to win that Game Six in 1962 and tie the Series, and Stockton suddenly remembered that Tony Kubek had the next day created the only run of the contest to win Game Seven and the World Series.

“The biggest advantage in sports is playing in your home park, and you can almost double that advantage here,” said Kubek, who had played more than seventy games in Fenway. “But those guys over there…” He nodded toward where some of the Reds—Pete Rose, Bench, Joe Morgan—had gathered around the batting cage. “They know how to play the game.” Tony paused and said it again, with emphasis.

“They know how to play the game.”

As the first crisp cracks of ball on bat and leather filled the air—the relaxed, preliminary rituals of any ball game—Stockton began to feel an expectant buzz build again around the stadium.

Now we’re ready.

LATE THAT AFTERNOON
, from all around Boston and surrounding environs, lucky ticket holders for Game Six left home or work to make their way downtown and slowly converge on Fenway Park. Optimists arriving without tickets found scalpers outside offering grandstand tickets for as much as $60—face value of $7.50—while buck-fifty seats in the outfield bleachers were going for $35. Standing room along the top of the grandstands would set you back $25. When all those aftermarket transactions concluded that evening, a capacity crowd of 35,205 had flowed through the turnstiles at Fenway. Another eighty or so, mostly enterprising teenagers, found cheaper seats
on the girders of a whiskey billboard atop the roof of a Lansdowne Street building, about five hundred feet from home plate.

In the years to come, the number of people who would later claim to have been at Game Six that night would increase twenty-fold.

B
EFORE THEY MOVED DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE PREGAME
ceremonies, the two old men, friends for more than forty years, watched the crowd file in from the owner’s box on the roof of Fenway’s grandstand above the first base line. George Edward “Duffy” Lewis, eighty-seven, was the sole surviving member of the “Picket Line,” what had forever been thought of as the greatest outfield in Red Sox history. Playing alongside future Hall of Famers Harry Hooper in right and Tris Speaker in center, Lewis had patrolled left field in Fenway Park from the day it opened in 1912 until he entered the army in 1918 to serve in World War I. Those had been the glory days of the Boston franchise, winning four of its five World Series titles on the strength of that outfield and, during the last two in 1916 and 1918, the left arm of a phenomenal young pitcher named Babe Ruth.

During the intervening fifty-seven years, the World Series had only come back to Fenway Park twice.

Duffy Lewis looked out toward left field and the looming, iconic Green Monster. In his day they hadn’t painted it green yet, or dubbed it a “monster,” but an earlier incarnation of the wall had been there from Opening Day, a quirky concession to the limits of Fenway’s
original land rights. Baseball was never played at night in 1912, which meant home plate had to be anchored in the southwest corner of the park so batters in late innings wouldn’t be staring directly into the western setting sun. That set the fixed line of Lansdowne Street just beyond left field, not much more than 320 feet from home, which meant no room for left field bleachers; no room for anything between the edge of the ballpark and Lansdowne Street but a sheer vertical wooden wall, built over thirty feet high at the insistence of the street’s local business owners, who didn’t want baseballs crashing through their fancy glass storefronts. Soon, plastered with advertising, the left field wall morphed into the biggest billboard in town, and ever since had developed its reputation as the most distinct architectural oddity of any American ballpark.

During Duffy Lewis’s playing days the ground in deep left field sloped sharply up to meet the base of the wall—ten feet of grade in less than thirty feet of space—from the left field line all the way across to center. So adept had Lewis become in patrolling this perilous chunk of real estate, racing up the slope to pluck line drives off the wall with acrobatic abandon and fire the ball back in with his cannon arm, that fans called the area “Duffy’s Cliff” for years after he left the game. Until, in its entirety, the quirky hillock was removed in 1934 by the man standing next to Duffy Lewis in the owner’s box at Fenway before Game Six that night.

Thomas Austin Yawkey, seventy-two, had been the sole proprietor of the Boston Red Sox since 1933. He made a handshake deal to buy both the ball club and Fenway Park for $1.2 million only four days after his thirtieth birthday, the moment when the vast timber and mining fortune that had long been held in trust for him came legally under his control. The genesis of the Yawkey fortune reached back into the middle of the nineteenth century, a dynasty built on the paper mills and virgin pine forests of the American and Canadian west, and a story rife with enough family melodrama to fill a dozen potboilers. If Tom Yawkey’s young life had been dreamt up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that generation’s most eloquent chronicler of
the moral perils of American wealth and fame, no one would have believed it.

His mother, Augusta Yawkey, had married a straightlaced insurance executive named Thomas Austin, a match that pleased her conservative tycoon father, William Clyman Yawkey, the reigning patriarch of their clan. But Thomas Austin died suddenly during his son’s first year, and when Augusta proved unable to subsequently cope with the trials of single motherhood, three-year-old Tom was delivered into the care of her brother, Bill Yawkey, a notorious New York bachelor playboy. Under the category of “What were they thinking?” young Tom grew up in his uncle Bill’s Upper East Side penthouse, a madcap whirligig of dissolute socialites, degenerate gamblers, pliable showgirls, and professional wrestlers. Determined to help his wayward son find some semblance of a vocation, William Clyman Yawkey made a bid to buy the Detroit Tigers in 1903 for the baseball-obsessed Bill, but died suddenly before the deal went through. With his share of the family fortune now available to him, Bill Yawkey doubled back and made an even better deal for the Tigers, and quickly decided he had found the millionaire’s ultimate toy train. Ballplayers, he discovered, shared all of Bill Yawkey’s manly interests—hitting, pitching, hunting, drinking, and playing the field, not necessarily in that order—and with Bill writing the checks, the party never ended. A few years later, in 1907, his Tigers rewarded their owner’s largesse by winning the American League pennant and playing in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. Yawkey enjoyed that ride so much, even though they lost in five games, that he rewarded his Tigers with Series bonuses bigger than the shares received by the winners.

When Augusta Yawkey died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, Uncle Bill legally adopted his young ward, rearranging his name from Thomas Yawkey Austin to Thomas Austin Yawkey. But Bill Yawkey would follow his sister in death less than a year later, not long after he and Tom had set out on a motoring trip across the country to celebrate Tom’s sixteenth birthday. They had just stopped
in Georgia to visit Bill’s closest friend on the Tigers, legendary outfielder Ty Cobb, when Bill was stricken with a virulent pneumonia. He died days later in his famous friend’s arms, but not before extracting a promise from Cobb that he would help look after Tom after he was gone. Bill’s stake in the Tigers was sold off by his estate’s conservators—for considerable profit—but Ty Cobb kept his word, serving as a substitute foster father to young Tom. The fiercely aggressive, and probably sociopathic Cobb thus became the second of Tom Yawkey’s dubious male role models.

Now the presumptive heir to both his mother’s and uncle’s shares of the Yawkey fortune, Tom moved on to Yale, and got down to seriously pursuing the around-the-clock cocktail-hour lifestyle he’d learned from Uncle Bill; he came closest to applying himself academically when he played some second base for the Bulldogs baseball team. He also ended up in the vanguard of a tumultuous cultural revolution: GIs returning from World War I tours of duty in Paris and other European capitals had brought home with them an appetite for more sophisticated sin; tastemakers and advertisers capitalized, and young Americans following their lead threw aside the lingering puritanical inhibitions of the nineteenth century with a vengeance. The last gasp of the Victorian generation’s crusade to stamp out the evils of hedonism came in 1919: a misguided constitutional amendment called the Volstead Act, better known as Prohibition, which outlawed the production and distribution of alcohol. Free, filthy rich, and twenty-one, openly scoffing at Prohibition, Tom Yawkey was frequently singled out in the press as a standard-bearer for this “Roaring Twenties” generation. A few years later Tom married a Jazz Age icon, a legendarily alluring dancer and beauty queen named Elise Sparrow, who had once posed for a famous portrait as a “flapper,” the era’s signature party girl. During the rest of the decade, their sybaritic life drifted hazily between a Park Avenue penthouse, the old family manse in Michigan, and a sprawling rural estate in South Carolina, stocked with game birds and deer for Yawkey’s frequent hunting trips. During one of the many stag retreats they spent together there, his mentor Ty Cobb planted the idea
in Yawkey’s head that, just as his late uncle Bill had, Tom might find his calling—and prove to his disapproving trustees he could
make
money as well as spend it—in the ownership of a major-league baseball club. On another hunting trip the following year, Yawkey received something a lot less welcome from his old friend: a brutal alcohol-fueled one-sided beating—sudden acts of violence being just one of Cobb’s misanthropic tendencies—that abruptly ended their relationship.

The Jazz Age ended just as suddenly not long afterward, but 1929’s catastrophic stock market implosion hardly dented the Yawkey family’s commodity-based businesses. As his thirtieth birthday approached, the age when the trust stipulated that control of his fortune would pass into his hands and instantly make him one of the fifty wealthiest men in America, Tom Yawkey remembered Cobb’s advice. When he got word that Boston’s American League franchise was in play, Yawkey swooped in and snapped up the Red Sox during the darkest hour of the Great Depression. Like much of the rest of the country, America’s national pastime, and the Red Sox and Fenway Park in particular, had fallen on hard times. For the first time in his life, when many of baseball’s owners were either scraping by or actively looking to get out from under their obligations, Tom Yawkey had bought himself a job—and set course on an obsessive quest for the prize that had eluded his uncle and, he declared, would give his life meaning: winning a World Series.

Yawkey landed in Boston as a complete stranger—worse yet, a lifelong New Yorker—with no connections to its cloistered, tight-knit community; New Englanders greeted him warily. To win them over and demonstrate the seriousness of his intent, Yawkey immediately began a badly needed renovation of twenty-year-old Fenway Park. The park was stripped down to its original steel frames, and out went the old wooden bleachers and the slope on Duffy’s Cliff. Yawkey ordered up a new clubhouse and state-of-the-art amenities for his players, including a bar and a bowling alley in the basement. A new thirty-seven-foot-tall metal-and-steel wall, the exoskeleton of the Monster that stands to this day, went up over the newly level
left field, sporting the game’s first electric scoreboard. Pouring fifteen thousand cubic yards of concrete, Yawkey added over ten thousand new seats and an expansive press box, employing more Bostonians than any other construction project had since the Crash. Having spent well over a million dollars, he now had the far more difficult problem facing him of a complete renovation of the Red Sox roster, a team that had finished dead last in nine of the last eleven seasons.

At the first owners’ meetings he attended that winter, Yawkey stunned his conservative old-school colleagues by jumping to his feet and bluntly announcing he was in the market for top-shelf players with which to stock his new ballpark and that money was no object. The other owners, quickly getting over their shock at this impropriety, proved only too happy to help; before the week was out, Yawkey had dropped another quarter of a million on a handful of has-beens and never-would-be’s, who would contribute little to changing the Red Sox’s losing ways. An informal competition developed around the league over the next few years to see who could get the Red Sox to overpay the most for marquee names like Lefty Grove and Joe Cronin, who were past their prime. Even bottom-of-the-roster players earned more than the league average under Yawkey, who proved to be a soft touch above and beyond salary for any of his men who came to him with a hard luck story; players on other teams began calling them the “Gold Sox.” By introducing “checkbook” baseball, Tom Yawkey changed forever the way the game was played in the front office, and his hyperactive turnover of talent, perpetually chasing big names with big bucks without much regard for actual need or overall chemistry, set the mood for much of the team’s next four decades.

Another destructive team dynamic was set up by Yawkey’s spendthrift tendencies: A long line of competent field managers found themselves constantly at odds with their general manager—all three of the men who ran the team through 1960 were Yawkey cronies, who only sporadically delivered the sort of player the field
manager felt he needed to win. When in 1935 he finally landed a future Hall of Famer still in his prime, burly slugger Jimmie Foxx, Yawkey went out almost every night after games pub-crawling with the hard-drinking first baseman. Yawkey began a tradition of taking batting practice with his boys before home games and working out with them in the field, casting himself a whole lot more as a pal than a boss. Borrowing another page from Uncle Bill’s playbook, during spring training he arranged regular visits for his team to a local brothel; decades later a tenacious reporter from the
Boston Globe
uncovered evidence that Yawkey may have actually
owned
the brothel. For any manager trying to push, mold, or discipline the owner’s grab-ass buddies, the job was virtually impossible; turnover at the position became a constant.

Although he anticipated the future of baseball by pursuing big-name stars without much regard for cost, Yawkey was slow to react to the most important changes the game would experience over the next twenty years. During the first four decades of professional baseball’s existence, major-league teams had relied on the inexact science of scouting and a loosely defined “regional rights” system to find and sign young players. In the 1920s general manager Branch Rickey of the St. Louis Cardinals, lacking the funds to compete for expensive talent, decided to buy a series of minor-league teams all over the country—and the rights to all the players he then placed on their rosters—thereby controlling and streamlining the process of developing future major leaguers. When this revolutionary innovation produced a roster that resulted in five National League pennants between 1926 and 1934 for the Cardinals, every other team in the majors quickly adopted the same business model. With Tom Yawkey’s mind fixed on chasing established major-league stars, the Red Sox were one of the last to assemble what Rickey had called an effective “farm system.” They were the third to last team to add lights and schedule night games, the prevailing social trend as America’s game transitioned from its pastoral daylight roots to a primary form of evening entertainment for industrialized inner city
workers. Then Yawkey missed the game’s next great sea change by a mile: After Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, the Red Sox were the last major-league team to sign African-Americans—passing up players like the great Willie Mays and Robinson himself, who had been treated shabbily by team officials during a workout at Fenway and forever held a grudge against the Red Sox. As a result Yawkey’s Red Sox became the last major-league franchise to field a black player in their everyday lineup—second baseman Elijah “Pumpsie” Green, twelve years later, in 1959, a hard-to-justify reluctance that raised enduring and legitimate questions about Yawkey’s racial politics.