Fenway 1912 (22 page)

There has been considerable growling among the fans in regard to the new grounds. The bleacher crowds say they are too far away from the diamond, and the 50-centers say they are too far away from first base. As a matter of fact, the Boston fans have always been accustomed to small grounds ... On the old Huntington Avenue Grounds of the American League, the 50-cent seats were close to first base on one side and close to third on the other. On the new Red Sox grounds the grand stand extends way around to first and third bases and this, of course, throws the 50-cent Pavilion further away.

That was one reason, along with the weather, why crowds had thus far been disappointing. Compared to Huntington Avenue, the scale and layout of the park concentrated fans in three nearly separate locations—the lower reaches of the grandstand, the pavilion, and the center-field bleachers. That made the crowd look smaller than it sometimes was and made spectators feel cut off from one another and, for those in center field, cut off from the game. The team was drawing no better in Fenway Park than it had at Huntington Avenue.

These different areas of the stands soon developed their own character and reputation. The grandstand was for the swells and the well connected who could afford the pricier tickets. The most-sought-after spots were directly behind the plate, behind the Boston dugout, and in section L (section 27 today), where the Royal Rooters staked out their territory and walked around as if they owned the place, tooting their horns, beating their drums, and singing just as they had been doing at baseball games in Boston for two decades. In that sense the character of the crowd was not so different from Huntington Avenue.

But elsewhere in Fenway Park the average fan was squeezed out and exiled. The fifty-cent pavilion was farther down the line than comparable seats at Huntington Avenue, so they were less intimate. Also, the best seats were quickly taken over by a rabid contingent of gamblers who bet on absolutely everything imaginable, ranging from the eventual winner to numerous "do they or don't they" bets—wagers on the smallest elements of the game, such as ball and strike calls, or pop-ups versus ground balls, or the number of hits or runs each inning, or even such arcane issues as whether the wind would change direction. In this section of the stands along the first-base line the crowd sometimes behaved like the brokers on the floor of the stock exchange: men stood and waved dollar bills and screamed out odds and bets as if oblivious to the contest on the field, yet somehow they kept a running tally of winnings and losses. While many fans were unbothered by such activities, others not only felt uncomfortable but found the constant betting activity distracting. Yet they were too intimidated to complain. Even if they had, Red Sox management had neither the incentive nor the means to change fan behavior apart from banning gamblers from the ballpark, and they were loath to turn away paying customers of any kind.

Such activity in the ballpark was not just a Boston problem—though it may have been somewhat more pronounced in Boston than in other big league cities. Gambling and baseball had enjoyed a longstanding relationship and were not yet embarrassed to be seen together. Gambling was as intertwined with professional baseball as the stitches used to hold the ball together, and it had been an integral part of the game from the very beginning.

For fans who either felt uncomfortable in the pavilion or could not afford a fifty-cent ticket, the twenty-five-cent bleachers were no better. While populated by far fewer gamblers, fans were also more than four hundred feet from home plate, too far to hear or even see most of the calls by the umpires, and for many the new scoreboard was out of view. With much of the game taking place more than a hundred yards away, viewing the game was akin to the experience of following the World's Series on one of the mechanical scoreboards the newspapers erected each October in front of their offices. Bleacher fans could tell what was happening, but little more.

The stands at Fenway Park were not segregated by race, nor had they ever been segregated at the South End Grounds or the Huntington Avenue Grounds. Although ballparks throughout the South were routinely segregated—and would be until the 1960s—the only major league parks that were segregated in 1912 were in St. Louis. Black fans were rare in Fenway, and they may not have felt welcomed, but they were not banned.

There was also, as yet, no reason apart from Fenway Park to linger in the area, either before or after the game. When the Sox played at Huntington Avenue, several establishments with longstanding ties to Boston baseball had given some fans reason to arrive early and stay late. Nuf Ced McGreevey's Columbus Avenue saloon and other taverns in the area, such as the first-floor kitchen and tavern at the Putnam Hotel, had long been gathering places for fans on their way to or from both the Huntington Avenue Grounds and the South End Grounds to discuss the contest, most arriving and leaving along well-established routes that created a unique ambiance as one neared the park.

Amenities of this kind had yet to spring up around Fenway Park. There were few nearby buildings and virtually no taverns or restaurants in the immediate area. Apart from the Buckminster Hotel, built in 1897 as a lone outpost on Boston's western fringe, there were no nearby hotels. Development in Kenmore Square—officially known as Governor's Square until 1932—and the Fenway neighborhood was in its infancy and would not take off until the subway opened in 1914, sparking a building boom around Fenway Park. By 1920 the park would be surrounded by structures as garages, warehouses, and other businesses sprang up around it on Lansdowne Street, Ipswich Street, Van Ness Street, and Jersey Street. In 1912 fans seemed to arrive at the park from all directions and dispersed so quickly that unless the crowd was unusually large, within fifteen minutes of the finish of a game there was little sign that anyone had been in attendance. Some Roxbury fans still made the trek back down to McGreevey's afterward to retain some of the familiar conviviality, but it was not quite the same.

McAleer and company hoped that those feelings might change during the long home stand that would keep the team in Boston for the remainder of May. The Sox would host every team in the league except the Yankees, and if they played well they could end the month fighting for first place. Then, as now, in order to compete for the pennant the Red Sox knew they had to win at home, and in order for McAleer to survive financially he needed the turnstiles at Fenway Park to start spinning. By June he would know what kind of team the 1912 Red Sox were and just how much of a help—or hindrance—Fenway Park would be to their cause.

It helped that the players were finally able to use the new clubhouse and stop using the riding school to dress before games. The clubhouse accommodations, though much more spacious than they had been at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, were still spartan compared to facilities at most of the other new parks, some of which provided separate player lounges and even billiard rooms. Boston's clubhouse was a dressing room with an open shower bath and little else. Still, compared to the riding school the accommodations were absolutely sumptuous. The team offices in the building on Jersey Street—where the first floor was used for ticket sales and McAleer, McRoy, and other team officials had offices on the second floor—were complete as well, or at least close enough to being finished that they could finally close up shop on Huntington Avenue and move in.

The Detroit Tigers, who had finished second in 1911 but would struggle to play .500 baseball in 1912, opened the home stand in Boston. As far as McAleer was concerned, the Tigers were a welcome sight. Not that they were pushovers, but outfielder Ty Cobb was one of the biggest draws in the league. The twenty-five-year-old Tiger outfielder was at his peak, playing with a devastating and intimidating combination of speed, daring, and—for the Dead Ball Era—power. In 1911 he had hit .420 and led the league in both average and slugging, and he would do the same in 1912, hitting .409.

No one was quite aware of it yet, but Cobb had a challenger. Tris Speaker, coming off a season in which he had hit .334 and slugged .502, was about to make a claim that perhaps he, not Cobb, was the greatest player in the game. For just as Fenway Park would prove a boon to the career of Duffy Lewis, so too would Fenway Park work to Tris Speaker's advantage.

In his first few seasons in the league Speaker had impressed everyone with his all-around play, but entering the 1912 season, although the outfielder was considered a dangerous hitter, his defensive reputation still outstripped his offensive record. His arm, in particular, stood out. During his first full season, in 1909, the former high school pitcher threw out thirty-five base runners from center field. Although that number dropped over the next two seasons as runners became a bit more cautious about running on balls hit his direction, Speaker still managed to throw out twenty or more base runners each year.

The number probably would have been even higher if Speaker, like other Boston outfielders, had not had to play so deep, owing to the vast dimensions of the Huntington Avenue Grounds. If a ball made it over his head or between outfielders, it was a certain extra-base hit. And though Speaker was one of the fastest runners in the league and could go get the ball with the best of them, shallow flares hit to center field that would have been outs elsewhere sometimes fell for hits at Huntington Avenue.

No one was more familiar with the old park than pitcher Cy Young, who had taken the rookie Speaker under his wing in 1908. Young recognized that Speaker, because of his speed and instincts, was uniquely equipped to diminish the park's effect, something that was clearly in Young's interest. As Speaker later told a writer, "When I was a rookie, Cy Young used to hit me flies to sharpen my abilities to judge in advance the direction and distance of an outfield-hit ball."

All that extra work underscored something Speaker already sensed. "I know it's easier, basically, to come in on a ball than go back," Speaker said years later.

But so many more balls are hit in front of an outfielder ... it's a matter of percentage to be able to play in close enough to cut off those low ones or cheap ones in front of him. I still see more games lost by singles that drop just over the infield than a triple over the outfielder's head. I learned early that I could save more games by cutting off some of those singles than I would lose by having an occasional extra-base hit go over my head.

But it was not until he began playing at Fenway Park that Speaker was able to demonstrate his remarkable ability to play shallow enough to cut off flares over the infield while still managing to catch most balls hit over his head. In fact, on at least six occasions during his career he turned an unassisted double play at second base, racing in to catch a ball on the fly and then outrunning the base runner to second base, doubling him up. Significantly, however, Speaker performed that feat for the first time at Fenway in 1912, having never executed the play at Huntington Avenue or in other spacious Dead Ball Era parks. For just as the left-field wall allowed Duffy Lewis to play shallower than at Huntington Avenue, the presence of the center-field bleachers in Fenway Park allowed Speaker to play shallower as well. Unless a ball hit over his head was aimed directly at the flagpole, where Fenway's back fence was nearly five hundred feet from home, the center-field bleachers, more than four hundred feet away from home at their nearest point, still gave Speaker some cover and allowed him to play closer than at the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

Although observers would occasionally estimate that Speaker played as close as forty feet from second base, that is likely to have been either hyperbole or a description of his play under special circumstances, such as late in a game with the winning run on third and less than two outs, a situation in which anything more than a short fly ball would be certain to score a run. Most outfielders have an effective range of about 125 feet when pursuing high fly balls, which rarely stay in the air more than five seconds. During the Dead Ball Era a long drive was one that traveled between 325 and 350 feet in the air, and anything longer was an anomaly—so rare as to not be worth worrying about. In all likelihood Speaker generally played two hundred feet or so from home plate, or about seventy-five to one hundred feet behind second base, but still some seventy-five to one hundred feet shallower than the average center fielder does today.

Speaker was suited to the position not only physically but temperamentally, once saying, "I was raised to it. I feel better in the outfield, in center field, with room to swing my elbows. I think maybe the feeling was born down in me down in Texas. I got used to the idea of space all around me."

At the same time—and for an entirely different reason—Fenway Park also served Speaker as a hitter. Like Lewis, Speaker was a pull hitter, but as a left-handed batter he favored right field. Speaker himself once noted that "I cut my drives between the first baseman and the line, and that is my favorite alley for my doubles." Relatively speaking, right field is much larger than left field in Fenway Park, a fact that was even truer in 1912 than it is today, since the construction of the bullpen, among other reconfigurations, has diminished the size of the outfield. And while conventional wisdom has always held that the left-field wall is helpful to right-handed power hitters—particularly home run hitters—the relatively small size of the outfield in left can hold down batting averages. In right field, while home run power is suppressed, there is simply more room for hits to fall in. That is the major reason why most left-handed hitters in Fenway Park have tended to hit for a higher average. Ted Williams, for example, hit twenty-five points higher in Fenway than elsewhere, Wade Boggs hit .328 for his career but .369 in Boston, and through 2010 David Ortiz, a career .281 hitter, had batted .306 in Fenway Park.

During the three-game series against Detroit that began Boston's home stand, Fenway Park continued, like a curtain slowly rising, to unveil both its offensive and defensive impact on the game. In the opener, on yet another cold and damp day, Joe Wood took the mound opposite Tiger ace George Mullin. In the first inning Ty Cobb sent a line drive to center field that in another ballpark might have fallen in for a hit, but Speaker, playing shallower in Fenway Park, was able to snag the drive. Although the Tigers hit Wood rather freely, Boston rode a four-run sixth-inning outburst to a 5–4 win.