Fenway 1912 (16 page)

Unfortunately, by the time he did New York led 2–1. In the bottom of the inning the Yankees jumped all over him, taking advantage of a walk to leadoff hitter Harry Wolters and then using a series of sacrifices, stolen bases, and daring base running to plate two runs while Boston threw the ball all over the lot. Only a strong peg from Duffy Lewis in left that cut down a run at home allowed Boston to escape the inning.

It might have been the best thing that could have happened to Joe Wood. In one short inning he demonstrated every trait that had made him so frustrating to watch in 1911—a bout of wildness coupled with an inability to hold runners on had combined to cost him a lead, underscoring every point Stahl had been trying to make to him all spring.

It finally began to click. Wood settled down after the first, and like his Yankees counterpart, Ray Caldwell, he held the opposition scoreless through the next seven innings. He may have been helped by the fact that in 1912 American League pitchers were allowed to make some warm-up tosses before each inning. In 1911, when the practice had been banned, Wood and every other pitcher in the league faced the first hitter of each inning stone-cold. For a hard-throwing youngster like Wood, the chance to take a few warm-up tosses could only help.

Still, the Sox entered the ninth trailing 2–1. Then Stahl started the inning with a walk. Playing to tie the score, Gardner sacrificed him to second, and Lewis made his manager look like a genius with a single to tie the game. Caldwell then made Stahl look even smarter as he came unglued. By the time he was pulled from the game, Joe Wood's two-run single had made the score 5–2. The Sox pitcher held on in the bottom of the inning, and the Sox won, 5–3. They beat New York the next two days behind Buck O'Brien and Charley Hall. Hall came on in relief of Casey Hageman, who in the first inning discovered that the Yankees were a bit harder to retire than the boys from Harvard. His performance was such a disappointment that it virtually ended his Red Sox career. The first Red Sox pitcher to appear at Fenway Park—albeit in an exhibition—would make only one more appearance in a Boston uniform.

After the game the Sox took the train to Philadelphia to face the defending champions in a three-game series before returning home for the official opening of Fenway Park scheduled for April 18. By the time they took the field against the Athletics on the afternoon of April 15, newsboys on every corner were screaming out headlines from the local papers, letting everyone know about the deadly sinking of the RMS
Titanic.
An Olympic-class passenger liner owned by the White Star Line, a British shipping company, the ship had struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, killing 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board, one of the deadliest maritime disasters in history.

Many historians have subsequently claimed that opening day at Fenway Park was overshadowed by the disaster and have blamed it for the apparent lack of sufficient newspaper coverage of the event. Such an interpretation not only ignores the fact that the
Titanic
sank a full five days before the Red Sox actually opened Fenway Park but shows little understanding of baseball's role in society or of the journalism of the day.

In 2012, or at any other time in the last five or six decades, the opening of a new major league ballpark, a symbol of civic pride or urban renewal, has almost always spawned newspaper coverage ranging from the comprehensive to the excessive. Not so in 1912. Ballparks were seen as utilitarian structures symbolic of little more than the need to put more people in the seats. Few lasted more than a couple of decades, so the building of a new park was not a once-in-a-lifetime event that inspired much poetry. In the context of the era the opening of Fenway Park was simply not that big of a deal.

The size and scope of the coverage in the sports sections of the Boston papers was unaffected by the
Titanic
story—on Saturday, April 20, the day the park finally opened, the
Globe
sports section, for example, was its usual three pages, with a full page given over to the running of the Boston Marathon. Coverage of the opening of Fenway Park and the first Red Sox home game of the 1912 season appeared the next day in the expanded Sunday papers, where there was more than enough room to report on the game, the opening of Fenway Park, and the
Titanic
disaster. Most papers, including the
Globe,
still found room to begin their game story on
[>]
, sharing it with news of the disastrous accident, but none saw the need to go overboard with their coverage of the opening of the ballpark. Two years later the opening of Braves Field would be treated in the same matter-of-fact fashion. There is simply no evidence whatsoever that the sinking of the
Titanic
had any adverse or significant impact on the coverage of the opening of Fenway Park.

In Philadelphia, where the A's had already opened their season a few days before, the game went on without regard to the disaster and the players seemed unaffected. Boston pitchers continued to experience first-inning woes as the A's jumped on knuckleballer Eddie Cicotte for four runs and won going away, 4–1, but the next day the Sox bounced back to score four runs of their own in the first inning and stake Joe Wood to a 4–0 lead.

Once more, however, Wood exhibited first-inning jitters as the A's parlayed a couple of hits and a passed ball into a run. An exasperated Jake Stahl was about out of patience and had Buck O'Brien already warming up when Danny Murphy ripped a line drive down the third-base line. Larry Gardner left his feet, stretched out, and snared the ball. A's third baseman Frank Baker was already halfway to third when Gardner doubled him off second to end the inning and give Wood another chance.

He did not disappoint. Over the remainder of the game he found both the plate and his fastball, striking out eleven and giving up only one more run as the Sox gained some confidence with a decisive 9–2 win over the A's. So far they hadn't seen anything from either New York or Philadelphia that scared them. The final game of the series against Philadelphia, on April 17, was rained out. The Red Sox immediately caught a train north and made it to Back Bay Station just before 10:00 p.m. They scattered for their homes and hotels in anticipation of the official christening of Fenway Park the following afternoon, on April 18.

Although the
Titanic
did not affect the game, once again the weather did, as it had all spring long. The same system that caused the rainout in Philadelphia on April 17 was parked over Boston when the players awoke on the morning of April 18. Nevertheless, despite the gray skies and the fact that the forecast called for clearing the following day, Patriots' Day, the Sox prepared to play. Jake Stahl intimated that either Buck O'Brien or Charley Hall would be the starting pitcher for Boston.

Out at Fenway Park a great deal of activity had taken place since the exhibition game versus Harvard. All the grandstand seats were now in place, each one numbered in gold leaf, and the left-field wall was finished, reaching its full height. A few warm, sunny days had helped the field turn a bit greener, and Jerome Kelley's crew had handled the grounds with care. They were delighted that one of four sections of rubberized canvas designed to protect the infield from inclement weather arrived before the game. They would soon need it.

Workers had spent the previous day hanging bunting from the box seats at the base of the grandstand and clearing the park of construction debris and other signs of the work that had occupied hundreds of men from October until the last few hours. To the fans the park was, for all intents and purposes, finished. But there was still no one working behind the windows on the second floor of the Jersey Street building. Apart from the first-floor ticket office, the rest of the team's offices were still unfinished and incomplete, as was the players' clubhouse. For the time being they would continue to dress at the riding school and walk to the park.

The Sox planned to open Fenway with a bit of pomp and circumstance. The Letter Carriers' Band, a staple at big events at Huntington Avenue, was scheduled to be on hand and begin serenading the crowd at one o'clock, accompanied by a quartet. Section L of the grandstand was held in reserve for local luminaries, primarily politicians and members of the Church. In a longstanding tradition in Boston baseball circles—one that, to a degree, is still in effect and until recently was little changed—free tickets and passes for opening day were distributed to the most powerful denizens of City Hall, virtually all of whom took advantage of the perk. Cardinal William O'Connell, a close friend of contractor Charles Logue, had it even better. McAleer and Stahl had already presented him with a gold lifetime pass to the new park, and he was expected to take advantage of it. Logue himself also intended to attend, and presumably so did architect James McLaughlin.

McAleer and company expected a big crowd. The advance sale at Wright and Ditson's was enormous, and the Sox decided to hold back 7,500 tickets to sell on the day of the game so fans who arrived without a ticket would not be turned away, and, just as significantly, to keep the precious tickets out of the hands of speculators.

But rain that began as a fine mist turned into a drizzle. Just after noon, as the first fans began to show at the park, it became a deluge. McAleer had no choice but to cancel the game. Opening day was a washout.

McAleer then tried to make lemonade from the cancellation. As Paul Shannon put it in the
Post
the next morning, evoking the gods, "should J. Pluvius [Jupiter, god of sky and thunder and the sender of rain] conclude to hold the dipper out and sidetrack the downfall that threatened last night to make a swimming pool out of the new Red Sox park," McAleer had a contingency plan. Friday, April 19, was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, a state holiday that commemorated the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord and was also the traditional date for the running of the Boston Marathon. The Sox were scheduled to play their second contest of the season that afternoon and had already sold thousands of tickets for the holiday event. Rather than turn that contest into a doubleheader, going head-to-head with the marathon and losing out on a full house, McAleer decided to play a morning/afternoon split doubleheader, the first game at 10:30 a.m. and the second contest at 3:15 p.m. That would allow fans from the first game to see the end of the marathon as runners trekked down nearby Commonwealth Avenue toward Copley Square, while the crowd that gathered for the marathon could watch the runners pass and then go to Fenway Park. While a Patriots' Day contest would not become an annual event for the Red Sox until 1959, purely by accident McAleer seemed poised to take advantage of the fortuitous circumstance that paired the holiday with a big crowd just outside Fenway Park. By splitting admission for the two games, he was guaranteed a windfall—if the weather held.

Tickets that had been bought in advance for the canceled contest the day before would be honored at the 10:30 game, and those who had bought tickets at the park could exchange them for any contest played over the course of the remainder of the season. Stahl announced that Charley Hall would have the honor of being the first Sox pitcher in an official game in their new home and that Buck O'Brien would work game 2.

Unfortunately, J. Pluvius dropped the dipper. As the sky brightened over Fenway Park on the morning of April 19, it was clear that even if it stopped raining immediately the floodwaters that covered Fenway Park were more appropriate for duck blinds than baseball watching. McAleer and McRoy canceled the morning contest, but McAleer held out hope that the club would get in the afternoon game. While his ball club napped and chewed the fat, wandering back and forth from underneath the stands to the dugout, McAleer paced the grandstand all morning long, looking back and forth from the sky to the field. The rain was intermittent, but the field was a mess. Had the rest of the tarpaulin arrived, the infield might have been playable, but with the one piece of canvas available Kelley could only cover the pitcher's plate and batter's box. Elsewhere, there were puddles and mud where there should have been grass or sand and crushed clay.

Finally, at 1:20 p.m., he made the call and canceled opening day for a second time. He told the assembled sportswriters that the club would try to play the opener the following afternoon, not a doubleheader but a single contest at 3:15 p.m., both to give the park a chance to dry out and because, with the holiday over, a morning contest no longer made sense, not even on a Saturday, which was still a partial working day for most Bostonians. The players raced back to the Park Riding School, changed out of their uniforms, and dashed to Kenmore Square to see marathon winner Michael Ryan jog by on his way to setting a new course record. Soon after he passed, hundreds of fans abandoned the course for the ballpark, unaware of the cancellation.

Nearly five thousand made their way to the park, only to find the flag atop the grandstand down and the gates locked. Well, most of the gates were locked. One had been inadvertently left open, and several dozen fans made their way inside and gave themselves a private tour.

The three cancellations had probably cost the club 60,000 admissions, no small number in an era when 500,000 fans for a season was considered enormous. It was perhaps the first sign that the franchise was not quite the cash cow McAleer had imagined it would be for him when he first purchased the club.

Finally, on the morning of April 20, dawn revealed baseball weather, the sun blazing and the sky a deep blue. The gates opened at noon, and as soon as they did fans began to fill the stands.

The Red Sox had been at the ballpark since earlier in the morning, taking batting practice as Stahl worried that after three days of waiting they had lost their batting eyes. As fans milled around the stands the players from both squads wandered the field, playing catch and loosening up according to baseball custom.

Apart from the bunting that still hung from the stands and the size of the crowd, there was nothing to distinguish the game from any other. The delays had led the team to cancel all inaugural ceremonies. The Letter Carriers' Band and the singing quartet were nowhere to be seen, and many baseball officials who had traveled to Boston for opening day, like Ban Johnson, had grown tired of waiting and returned home.