Fenway 1912 (30 page)

If some fans and writers around the league did not give Wagner his due, Boston's opponents did. A's second baseman Eddie Collins, who was still earning extra money by writing a syndicated column, wrote at about this time that Wagner "has been overlooked by those who only scratch the surface of baseball. He has held the infield together ... and next to Tris Speaker, I would say that he is the most dangerous hitter on the club." His only problem, noted Collins, was that he shared a surname with his contemporary, Pittsburgh's Honus Wagner, still considered one of the best shortstops in the history of the game. "If his name were Krause or Keller or some other of the common names of German extraction, he would be very much better off as far as publicity goes," wrote Collins.

The White Sox followed Detroit into Boston for five games trailing the Red Sox by eleven and a half games, knowing this would be their last chance to get back into the pennant race. Four days later they left Boston thoroughly demoralized, knowing that for the remainder of the 1912 season they would do nothing more than play out the string. Ed Walsh—again—had won the first game of the series, beating Buck O'Brien 1–0, but after that it was all Boston as Wood took the second game of the doubleheader 7–3 before a crowd of twenty-one thousand. The White Sox chose to start Eddie Cicotte in the third game of the set on July 18, and the Red Sox battered their old teammate for ten runs in the first inning—only to have the skies open up and have the game called. In the series-ending doubleheader the next day Boston swept the Sox behind Collins and Bedient, then buried Chicago and got revenge on Walsh by beating him in the finale, 3–2, before a packed house of twenty-two thousand. The game was marked by Jake Stahl's home run over the left-field wall and Bill Carrigan's game-winning hit to center in the bottom of the ninth, as well as by what Tim Murnane described as "hair raising situations that were thicker than broken bottles along Revere Beach after a holiday." Cady was still getting his share of work behind the plate, and since he had bulled his way into the lineup, Carrigan had awoken and over the last month had made the most of his opportunities. Although Cady was often still the better choice behind the plate, Boston now had two catchers playing as well as any in the league.

The Sox split the final four-game series of the home stand with Cleveland, as Wood upped his record to 20-4, and now had seven games on Washington and ten on Philadelphia. With Boston at 63-29, however, the pennant "race" was effectively over, Boston winning in a walk as neither challenger showed signs of gaining any traction. A few days earlier, in the
Post,
Paul Shannon, who was usually a bit stingy with praise, admitted that "the Red Sox are going at a whirlwind gait, dropping a game now and then [only] as a sort of 'rester' for the next series." In the
Globe,
Murnane furnished a kind of midseason report card, noting that Boston's lead was not "the result of a sudden spurt through a loose field, but a consistent gain," adding that "the Red Sox are now even money or better against the field." He lavished praise on most Boston players but gave most credit for the club's performance, not to Wood (although he admitted that Walter Johnson had "nothing in particular on him"), or to Speaker ("who has been hitting like a fiend all season"), but to Jake Stahl—for his play, his "knowledge of the inside of inside baseball," and his ability to fertilize the "soil of fellowship" among the players.

But if the team had one cause for worry it was Murnane's tribute to the "Board of Strategy," Wagner and Carrigan, which included the kind of praise usually reserved for the manager. There was, wrote Murnane, no one "more capable of working out a scheme for playing a whole game than this same board of strategy." But of the man who signed the checks and put together the roster, owner James McAleer, Murnane uttered not a single word. To be fair, it was not yet October, and the championship had yet to be won, but for the remainder of the season the question of who should receive credit for Boston's performance—or the blame—would fester until it finally burst into the open. Despite Murnane's propaganda about the winning ball club's "espirit d'corp," there were fault lines in the makeup of the roster that even winning could not quite mask.

Oddly, the impact of Fenway Park on Boston's pennant run garnered not a mention in the press from Murnane, Shannon, or anyone else at the time. Apart from the benefits of playing in front of a supportive crowd, the notion that a ballpark would or even could affect performance was an alien notion. Not until the Phillies' Gavvy Cravath took advantage of the addition of a section of bleachers in left field at Shibe Park to hit a record twenty-four home runs in 1915 did it become obvious that a ballpark could have a dramatic influence on the outcome of a game. But it would take a few more years—until Babe Ruth started hitting the ball out of the Polo Grounds with astounding regularity in his inaugural season with the Yankees in 1920—before the notion really took hold. The Yankees took note, and when Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, it was not so much "The House That Ruth Built" as "The House Built for Ruth." The Yankees were the first team to build a ballpark specifically tailored for its players, and it gave the club a tremendous advantage. In contrast, little mention would be made of Fenway's impact on the game until 1931, when Earl Webb tattooed the left-field wall on his way to a major league record sixty-seven doubles. Only then would it be widely recognized that Fenway Park had its own unique influence on the game. It was no accident that soon afterward the Red Sox began to seek out right-handed power hitters to take advantage of the wall.

After the Cleveland series the Sox and Naps, who became known as the Indians in 1915, both boarded the same train and headed west, the Red Sox heading to Chicago and Cleveland returning home. In Albany a car carrying the White Sox joined the train as well, and all three clubs traveled together through the night. Members of all three teams reportedly spent the evening "playing the national indoor game," which presumably referred to playing cards and drinking.

If anyone was expecting the Red Sox to collapse on the road trip, they were sorely disappointed. Boston won series in both Chicago and Detroit at the start and the end of the trip and split series in St. Louis and Cleveland in the middle before returning to Boston on August 12 with a comfortable lead. Happy Sox fans all but ignored the impending U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. They were obsessed with baseball, not politics. Had a conquering army landed on the beaches of South Boston, few would have paid attention, at least not until after the game.

There was, however, some cause for concern. On July 28 against Chicago, Joe Wood cruised through the first four innings. But in the fifth, with one out, he hit a batter, then gave up a hit, then fielded a bunt and threw wild to first base. After a fly-out he then walked a man and gave up another hit, giving Chicago four runs and causing Jake Stahl to pull him from the game in favor of Bedient. It was Wood's worst performance since Cady had become his personal catcher.

The breakdown was inexplicable—at first. But a few days later there were whispers in the papers that Joe Wood, who had already started twenty-four games and made three relief appearances for the season, had a sore arm. Nevertheless, although it may have been wiser to give him some rest, on August 2 in St. Louis, Wood started against the Browns and seemed to alleviate concerns by tossing a three-hit shutout. Wood, wrote Murnane, "was in fine fettle ... [with] remarkable speed, perfect control of his drop and curve, and was handled in superb style by Forrest Cady, a great catcher." But a few days later Wood was complaining again, this time about a sore wrist, an injury that might have occurred in an attempt to take the strain off his elbow or shoulder.

Although Wood would later sometimes claim that he never had serious arm troubles before 1913—when he apparently injured his arm after returning to the mound too quickly after breaking his thumb—the facts tell a different story. According to the papers, he was plagued by arm trouble over most of the second half of the 1912 season. Although Wood, who once said, "I threw so hard I thought my arm would fly right off my body," was still able to pitch, his chronic soreness may well have been a sign that his arm was already going bad. Somewhere inside his right arm the magic musculature that allowed him to throw the ball nearly one hundred miles per hour was starting to fray.

Today a pitcher with Wood's ability would be placed on the disabled list and treated like a fragile piece of crystal. But in 1912 it was frowned upon to "coddle" pitchers, even those with a sore arm. Once a pitcher lost the ability to take the ball every third or fourth day, he was considered damaged goods, a so-called Sunday pitcher who lacked the mental and emotional strength to appear more regularly. And besides, if a pitcher was hurt and could not pitch, he did not get paid. As a result, many sore-armed pitchers threw until, literally, they could not lift their arms and the damage was so severe that there was no chance of recovery. The road to the Hall of Fame has been littered with hundreds of pitchers who enjoyed brief, blazing success before becoming injured and then being discarded like an old appliance.

After his injury in 1913 Wood became just such a Sunday pitcher, a hurler who could pitch one or perhaps two or three games in a regular rotation but then would have to rest. Even though he remained effective, he would never again be the same. As he told Lawrence Ritter, following the injury, "I never again pitched without a terrific amount of pain in my right shoulder ... After each game I pitched I'd have to lay off for a couple of weeks before I could even lift my arm up." The description of the malady correlates almost certainly with a tear of the rotator cuff, an injury that, while sometimes treatable today through surgery, is still perhaps the most debilitating injury a pitcher can have. Decades after he retired from baseball Wood's shoulder still gave him pain and restricted his movements.

With Wood ailing, it was even more strange that in the midst of the road trip Stahl removed Charley Hall from the pitching rotation. While Hall was not pitching quite as well as he had earlier in the year and had been battling a pulled muscle in his side, he was still effective and still taking a regular turn as a starting pitcher. Since the beginning of the season, the Red Sox, like most teams of the era, had loosely used a five-man pitching rotation, albeit one that occasionally skipped over a starter or shuffled the order, according to the whims of Stahl and whether or not a starting pitcher had been pressed to serve in relief. The Red Sox, as was more or less customary at the time, did not have a true relief pitcher on the staff. On rare occasions Larry Pape would be called on to mop up in a lost cause, but Stahl usually called on one of his stalwarts to step in and stanch the bleeding as needed.

Wood, Hall, and O'Brien had been in the rotation from the start, then Bedient and Collins had stepped in when Cicotte went to the woodshed. Yet suddenly Stahl chose to depend on four starting pitchers almost exclusively while relegating Hall to the bullpen. To a degree, the move made sense. Hall had been remarkably effective in limited relief duty. Eddie Collins once wrote that while Hall never had much success against the A's as a starter, "let him relieve ... and invariably he would have the upper hand." But sending Hall to the bullpen without replacing him in the rotation risked creating more problems than it solved. Since getting married, Bedient had not pitched particularly well, now Wood's health was in question, and every starting pitcher's workload was due to increase.

The logic behind Stahl's thinking may have resided in New York, where the Giants, after tearing the league apart for the first half of the season behind Marquard, were suddenly slumping. Stahl's club, now that the pennant was wrapped up, was in the same position the Giants had been in a month earlier—far ahead and being pushed by no other team. He may have turned to a four-man rotation in an effort to avoid the kind of sag that had since plagued the Giants, the baseball equivalent of a jockey going to the whip hand long before the stretch. But it also guaranteed that his best pitchers would get additional work over the remainder of the season—Wood, after starting only five games in July, would start seven games in August and make two additional appearances in relief. In theory that would make a slump less likely, but it also threatened to gas the staff. Wood was already hurting, and although Hall was now in the bullpen, he would not be used to give pitchers a rest after five or six innings but would pitch only when a starter fared poorly, leading the
Boston Post
to call him a "rescue pitcher." Any way one looked at it, the change was a high-risk move. If any of the remaining four starters faltered or were injured because of the increased workload—particularly Wood—Boston's chances in the postseason would almost certainly suffer.

That seemed even more likely after Joe Wood pitched eleven long innings in his next start against Cleveland on August 6. He won, 5–4, but wasn't right, giving up thirteen hits, matching his season high, and striking out only five. Nevertheless the victory, number twenty-three, was his eighth win in a row. No one was making much of that yet, because Walter Johnson of the Senators was the winner of eleven straight, sparking speculation that in this season of streaks Johnson just might be able to break Jack Chesbro's American League record of fourteen consecutive wins. If he got lucky, he might even better the major league mark that Rube Marquard had set one month before. Although the Senators had little chance of heading off Boston in the pennant race—they were about to lose five of six, with the lone victory by Johnson—Walter Johnson and Joe Wood were on a collision course.

It was destiny. The two hottest pitchers in baseball would soon meet in Boston in what is still one of the most memorable regular-season games in Red Sox history.

They would change the ballpark forever. Fenway Park would never be the same.

From all parts of New England came the fans to witness this encounter, for the fame of the scheduled pitching duel had aroused the attention of the country, and every train reaching Boston before noon carried its quotient of fans bound for Fenway Park.