Fenway 1912 (19 page)

It was the embankment. He had run into it at full stride, and the shock of his foot finding the earth a split second before he expected it sent him sprawling to the ground.

But Lewis didn't give up. Even as he fell he managed to keep his eye on the ball, twist back, reach up with his glove hand, and catch the ball, only inches from the ground, as he fell spread-eagled on his back on the embankment. Several thousand Red Sox fans whooped and hollered and came to their feet as Lewis lost his, then remained standing, cheering him, as he ran smiling back to the dugout.

Lewis, however, was not yet finished for the day. Leading off the bottom of the inning, Lewis showed Washington how it was done. He turned on a pitch from "Long Tom" Hughes and, true to form, pulled it to left-center. The ball hit on the embankment, skipped to the wall, and then rolled back down. Lewis made second easily, and when the throw went wide he took third base.

Boston held on to win, 4–1, and Lewis was the talk of the game. A
Globe
headline called it "the catch of the season and the throw of a lifetime." There simply wasn't enough room to mention the hit. But on that day Lewis took ownership of both the wall and the embankment. The need for a Boston left fielder to play both features well was underscored for all time as Lewis immediately dedicated himself to learning how to do it. "I'd go out to the ballpark mornings," he later told a sportswriter, "and have somebody hit the ball again and again out to the wall. I experimented with every angle of approach up the cliff until I learned to play the slope correctly." Although Lewis would still take the occasional tumble before he became completely adept at scaling the embankment, he was far better at it than opposing left fielders, providing the Red Sox with a real advantage. By midsummer the embankment was being called "Duffy's Cliff" in honor of Lewis's prowess, both with the glove and with the bat. And it retained that name until the wall was greatly scaled back after the 1924 season and finally removed entirely a decade later.

It was a good victory, and a necessary one, over the Senators. The Philadelphia Athletics followed Washington into Boston, and the Red Sox needed a bit of momentum before meeting the defending champions. Once again, Boston's unique left-field barrier would prove to be the most memorable component of the game.

Stahl was still scrambling to find a pitching rotation, and there was even speculation that Cy Young, who was at the park nearly every day, might be brought back. Before doing so, however, Stahl seemed determined to give every other man on the pitching staff a chance to earn a job. For the opener against Philadelphia on April 26 he selected Larry Pape. The Ohio native had been a valuable member of the pitching staff in 1911—starting nineteen games, pitching two shutouts, and winning eleven, he had tied Ray Collins and Eddie Cicotte for the second-highest total on the staff behind Joe Wood—but Stahl was not impressed. Pape was a nibbler, a pitcher whose success depended on his ability to hit his spots and who didn't have enough stuff to make mistakes.

Against Philadelphia he missed those spots, giving up two hits in the first inning, but he managed to escape without giving up a run. His reprieve would be brief.

Veteran Cy Morgan started the game for A's manager Connie Mack. After Harry Hooper struck out to start the game, Steve Yerkes walked and Tris Speaker reached on an error, bringing up Hugh Bradley.

The singing first baseman, a native of Grafton, Massachusetts, and a graduate of Holy Cross College, was the nephew of George "Foghorn" Bradley, who had pitched for Boston in 1876 and then umpired all over New England. His nephew was a fan favorite whose off-field talent as a singer had made him far better known than a backup first baseman had any right to be. After taking over at first base one day earlier he had impressed everyone with his glove work, but on this day fans would leave Fenway Park talking about his bat.

Bradley was known as a "free hitter," an aggressive batter who swung from his heels rather than trying to place the ball. He sometimes had a hard time making contact and was inconsistent, but when he did strike the ball he was capable of hitting it as far as any man on the team.

This time he did both, pulling the ball hard to left field on a line. Athletics left fielder Amos Strunk turned to chase after the hit, and a split second after the ball sailed past him it struck halfway up the wall with a loud crack and bounded back toward the field. Yerkes and Speaker scored easily, and Bradley pulled into second base with an easy double.

The hit sent fans chattering to one another and pointing toward the outfield. It was the first time in the brief history of Fenway Park that a batted ball had struck the left-field wall on the fly.

Outfield distances were not marked on the fences at the time—nor would they be at Fenway Park until after the 1933–34 renovation. If documents held by the Osborn Engineering Company are accurate, they indicate that when Fenway opened the distance down the left-field line was 320 feet, while the flagpole in center field stood 468 feet from home plate, just a few feet in front of the fence. The distance down the right-field line when Fenway Park opened is less certain—the extreme end of the pavilion jutted out into the field. But it was probably even less than 300 feet.

No one expected the left-field wall ever to be breached, but in only five games several balls had already landed on the embankment, and now one had reached the wall itself. While a blast over the wall still seemed remote, it no longer seemed completely impossible. Fans could not help but wonder what might have happened if Bradley had just gotten under the ball a bit more.

Larry Gardner knocked Bradley in with a single to score Boston's third run and stake Pape to a 3–0 lead, but after he recorded two quick outs he imploded and gave up three straight hits, including Amos Strunk's triple, which scored two. That was enough for Stahl, and Ed Cicotte came on to pitch the third as Lefty Russell, in relief of Morgan, shut down Boston. But Cicotte was no improvement. He gave up two runs in the third and single runs in both the fourth and the fifth to put the A's ahead 6–3. In desperation Stahl called on young Hugh Bedient for the first time all season to start the sixth.

After taking the lead, the A's had grown cocky and directed a steady stream of banter toward the Boston players. Tim Murnane later wrote that "I never heard or saw so much kicking ... the Mackmen kept up a continual howl," complaining, for instance, that Bedient was balking and that the Red Sox had tried to slip an older, softer ball into play when the A's were at bat.

Pitching against the champions was a challenge for Bedient, but after some initial jitters, he shut the A's down. While he did not shut them up, his performance gave the Red Sox a chance.

In the seventh inning, with one out, Bedient helped his own cause and worked a walk from Russell. The pitcher then struck Hooper with a pitch, and after Yerkes flew out, Tris Speaker singled, scoring Bedient and sending Hooper to third.

The A's still led 6–4 when Hugh Bradley stepped into the batter's box. In theory, he was the go-ahead run, for a home run could give Boston the lead, but even after Bradley's first-inning blast off the wall the possibility of a home run was still so remote that no one dared think about it out loud. The Red Sox had hit only thirty-five home runs in 1911, twenty at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, and had none thus far in the 1912 season. In his brief career Bradley had collected only one major league home run, and in four seasons in the minors he had hit only eight. Expecting to hit a home run was like expecting to be hit by lightning.

Russell was known for his curveball, which he had used effectively since entering the game in relief, and he went with the pitch again. It dropped over the plate knee high as Bradley took his usual hard swing.

The ball left his bat in a blur, and left fielder Amos Strunk took off toward left-center field, as did Rube Oldring in center, tracking the ball in its flight. After only a few steps, Oldring, realizing he could not catch the deep drive, slowed and prepared to play the carom off the fence. But Strunk reached Duffy's Cliff in a full sprint and kept going, striding up the embankment until he reached the wall. Then, as if unable to believe what was happening, he pressed his body flat against it, his head tilted back and looking up.

Overhead, Bradley's hit just kept carrying. It cleared the top of the wall with plenty of room to spare and kept going, disappearing from sight.

The crowd, which had risen to its feet when Bradley first struck the ball, was stunned. A moment of silence was followed by whoops and yells and screams and hoots of delight. Some spectators threw their hats in the air, and others jumped up and down and slapped each other on the back with delight. They could not have been more surprised if Halley's comet had made an appearance. Bradley, meanwhile, raced around the bases, the notion of a "home run trot" completely foreign to him, as Bedient and Speaker crossed the plate ahead of him. Bradley raced after them toward the dugout, where his teammates, fully aware of what had just happened, bolted from their seats to meet him. Boston now led 7–6.

Bradley's home run was no popgun shot that just snuck over the wall, like Carlton Fisk's famous homer in game 6 of the 1975 World Series, or Bucky Dent's infamous home run during the 1978 playoff game versus the Yankees, but a bona fide blast. According to reporter R. E. McMillen of the
Herald,
it "not only cleared the barrier but the building across the street," the garage that remains there to this day. That may have been hyperbole, but if the ball cleared the wall it may well have landed on the roof of the garage and then bounded over it.

The hit took the air out of the A's, for, as Wallace Goldsmith later noted, the blast did not "seem human." The A's bench jockeying stopped, and Bedient didn't give up another hit as the Red Sox won, 7–6. Bedient's performance had just as much to do with the victory as the home run, but all anyone wanted to talk about was Bradley's drive. McMillen estimated that it had cleared the fence "seven feet from the upper rim." Paul Shannon, noting that the ball cleared the fence above an advertisement for a taxi company, wrote that "reports from the Athletic headquarters say that the sphere boarded a waiting taxicab." If the advertisement in question is the same one that was on display later during the 1912 World's Series, then Bradley's drive cleared the wall some fifty to seventy feet from the left-field line, to the right of the scoreboard that displayed the game's line score. In Fenway Park today that would be east of the light stanchion closest to the left-field line, approximately where the ladder on the left-field wall remains in place today.

Bradley unquestionably hit the ball on the nose, but he may have had a bit of help. Several newspapers reported that the ball was helped by a stiff wind blowing out to left, and the A's, by intimating that Boston was substituting a used ball earlier in the game, may have led the umpire to introduce a brand-new ball into the game sometime later. A newer ball, one not yet softened by repeated contact with the bat, would certainly have traveled farther than an older one.

Yet despite the fact that in only the sixth game ever played at Fenway Park a player had one hit against the wall and another over it, home runs of any kind at Fenway Park did not become a regular occurrence. For part of the 1914 season and 1915 the Boston Braves played at Fenway while Braves Field was being built. On May 22, 1915, Heinie Zimmerman of the Cubs hit a home run over the left-field fence, and it was reported that his home run was only the sixth such home run ever hit. After Bradley's blast, according to the author of this report, Duffy Lewis and Jake Stahl had both managed to duplicate the feat for the Red Sox, as had Clarence Walker for the St. Louis Browns and Rube Oldring for the A's. Only after the lively ball was introduced in the 1920 season did home runs to left begin to become commonplace, and even then they were usually hit by Boston's opponents. Not until Jimmie Foxx joined the Red Sox in 1936—when twenty-one of his forty-one home runs were hit at Fenway Park, and most of those to left field—did the Red Sox lineup include a slugger who breached the wall with regularity.

It is important to note that no one anywhere was as yet referring to the left-field wall as "the Green Monster" or using any other such name for it. The only thing green about the wall in 1912 was the lumber used in its construction and some of the paint in the advertisements that covered nearly every square inch of it, save for the scoreboards.

Although the wall was first painted "Dartmouth green" in 1947 when Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey decided to remove all advertising from the left-field fence, the name "Green Monster" would not be used to describe the feature for a number of years. Even then, the name would not become commonplace until the late 1970s, when the Red Sox were regularly featured on national television broadcasts and a nationwide audience was introduced to what had been a rather obscure parochial nickname. Most baseball fans, both in Boston and elsewhere, simply referred to it as "the Wall."

The origins of the name "Green Monster" in reference to Fenway's left-field fence are somewhat murky, and likely to remain so, but the phrase itself was already familiar to sports fans before it was ever used to describe a feature at Fenway Park. The term had long been used to indicate something intimidating, which, as baseball evolved into a power game, is precisely what the left-field wall would prove to be for major league pitchers.

In 1951 golfer Ben Hogan won the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills in Michigan, his second consecutive U.S. Open victory, by firing a final round of 67 for a 7-over-par finish of 287. Course architect Robert Trent Jones had modified the course for the event, and par had been lowered from 72 to 70 for the week. Hogan's final-round 67 was one of only two under-par scores shot during the tournament. Afterward he said, "I am glad I brought this course, this monster, to its knees." In subsequent years sportswriters took their cue from Hogan and began referring to the course as "the green monster," a phrase used intermittently throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but only rarely today.