Fenway 1912 (40 page)

There was dissatisfaction from the start on the part of applicants who felt wrongly denied, less well-heeled fans who did not have access to the advance sale and now had to make plans to stand in line for hours on the day of the game to secure tickets, and even the ticket holders themselves. On their way to and from the park they were hounded by fans and scalpers willing to pay top dollar. The Red Sox hoped to prevent scalping by insisting that they had a record of precisely who had purchased each seat, but that did little to slow the trade in tickets.

The Rooters were having a rough time as well. New York owner John Brush, in poor health, turned McAleer's request down cold. He blamed the National Commission, telling McAleer that since the commission was handling the sale of tickets for the Giants, he "had no justification" to secure tickets for the Rooters. Besides, the Red Sox had already received an allotment of two hundred tickets per game. That was true, but the club had already distributed those tickets.

The Rooters were desperate. Together they had more than $100,000 to bet on the Red Sox, and they needed to get to New York, where Giants fans were begging for action, before the Series got under way and the odds changed. With Wood lined up to pitch game 1—and in the opinion of the Rooters he was a lock to win—once the Sox went ahead in the Series, New York money was almost certain either to dry up or to demand unrealistic odds. If the Giants came to Boston trailing in the Series, New York backers would keep their money in their pockets.

Never fear. The Rooters had friends in high places. Mayor Fitzgerald stepped in on their behalf and appealed to both the chairman of the commission, August Herrmann, and Ban Johnson by telegraph. Both men were savvy enough to realize that keeping the mayor of Boston and the Rooters happy was good business, although neither man was particularly thrilled with allowing the Rooters to feel even more important than they already did. They represented the past, and neither McAleer nor McRoy felt it necessary to continue to kowtow to the group, whose members acted like they owned Fenway Park and operated the team. But on October 3 Johnson cabled Fitzgerald, "Have instructed Sec. Heydler to provide 300 tickets for you and Boston rooters." The Giants weren't happy and still balked at turning over the tickets, but Johnson—and the Rooters—eventually prevailed.

Fenway Park was nearly ready. In the week since the Red Sox had left town the new stands had been completed, and as one report noted, Jerome Kelley and his crew had put the field "in the best possible shape. The diamond has been re-graded, every pebble has been hand-picked and heavy rollers have been hauled back and forth over the infield and baselines until the surface is as smooth as a table." To guard against inclement weather, Kelley's staff kept the infield covered with a heavy canvas when they were not working on it. He planned to leave it on until the beginning of the Series, removing it only to accommodate the practice session the Sox planned to hold two days before the start.

The biggest change to the park since the Red Sox had left town was obvious on the roof of the grandstand. The original press box could barely accommodate more than a dozen men—and even then, not very comfortably. For the World's Series, hundreds of writers planned to descend on Boston and New York—several representatives from each of the daily papers in each city as well as correspondents from regional papers and major newspapers and wire services all over the country—not to mention copy boys and various underlings. Clearly the size of the existing press box was woefully inadequate. Either it had to be expanded or seats that would otherwise be occupied by paying fans had to be taken out of circulation. In the Polo Grounds that was exactly what the Giants had to do—they turned over box seats behind home plate to the press.

McAleer shuddered at the thought of losing the income from such pricey seats. To accommodate the crush they decided instead to expand the press box atop the Fenway Park grandstand. One observer later described the new press box as looking like an extended trolley car. The modest original structure, only about thirty feet long, was torn down and replaced by a press box nearly ten times larger, one that stretched from above what is now section 16 around behind home plate to section 25. Compared to the original press box, which looked like a hastily built shed, the new facility was much more handsome. The open-air side facing the field was supported by vaulted columns every ten or twelve feet and was set precisely on the edge of the grandstand roof. Writers in the first of two tiered rows were able to peer almost straight down into the stands. Their view of the field was unimpeded.

There were other reasons to make the change. Anyone who was anyone in the baseball writing community was covering the Series, and the club certainly wanted to put on its best face. The writers representing the nearly two dozen daily newspapers in Boston and New York were among the best and best-known writers in the country at the time and included many legendary figures known to many fans even today. Some, like Murnane and Sam Crane of the
New York Evening Journal,
both of whom were often referred to as the "deans" of American baseball writing, were former players whose relationship with the game reached back to its dark ages. After graduating from Holy Cross prep school, Murnane began his playing career in 1869, and in 1872 he became a big leaguer when he joined the Middletown (Connecticut) Mansfields in the National Association. Over the next twelve years he played for a number of teams, and in 1876, while playing for Boston, he was credited with the first stolen base in the history of the National League. Crane's career started only a few years later. The Massachusetts native abandoned his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in favor of baseball, eventually joining National League Buffalo in 1880 and playing throughout the decade before, like Murnane, becoming a sportswriter. He covered the Giants for the
Journal
and was as closely identified with the club as McGraw, whom he counted as a close friend.

Murnane's Boston contemporaries included colleagues Mel Webb and Lawrence McSweeney of the
Globe,
Paul Shannon of the
Post,
Herman Nickerson of the
Journal,
A. H. C. Mitchell of the
American,
Ralph McMillen of the
Herald,
and Jack Morse and F. C. Lane of the Boston-based
Baseball
magazine. All these names were as familiar to Red Sox fans of that era as figures like Peter Gammons, Gordon Edes, Steve Buckley, Amalie Benjamin, Tony Massarotti, and John Tomase are to Red Sox fans today.

Crane's cronies in New York included Fred Lieb of the
New York Press,
Bozeman Bulger of the
New York Evening World,
Damon Runyon of the
American,
Heywood Broun of the
Tribune,
Dan Daniel of the
New York World Telegram,
Joe Vila of the
Sun,
Sid Mercer of the
Globe and Advertiser,
and others, supplemented by writers with more national reputations like Atlanta's Grantland Rice, Chicago's Hugh Fullerton and Ring Lardner, Washington's Joe Jackson, Francis Richter of
Sporting Life,
J. G. Taylor Spink of
The Sporting News,
and Cincinnati's William Phelon. Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon would go on to become important literary figures, Lardner as a humorist and writer of short stories and Runyon as a chronicler of Broadway—his work later inspired the show
Guys and Dolls.
To many of these men writing and reporting on baseball, under a daily deadline, was a writing workshop without peer.

They were all giants of the field, trailblazers and pioneers, and every day they fought it out with each other in the press box as vigorously as the ball clubs battled on the field, pushing each other to ever more hysterical and breathless fits of prose and occasional poetry as each writer tried to stand out among the others and win for his paper the dedication and loyalty of a growing cadre of readers. While their prose, by today's standards, often appears overwrought, overwritten, and florid, it's important to keep in mind that their reporting filled a role that today is filled not only by newspapers but also by radio, television, and Internet coverage. One hundred years ago the newspapers provided the only coverage of the games available anywhere but in the park itself. Most fans knew about their team from what they read in the newspaper, and the writers had to describe not only what happened but how it happened, allowing the reader to visualize the play. Just as today more fans follow baseball online, in print, or through broadcasts than in person, in 1912 far more fans followed baseball in the papers than in person or by any other method.

Just as it was for the players, the regular season was but a warm-up for the writers to the World's Series, where the stakes and their duties increased exponentially. In the days before the Series their workload increased dramatically. The amount of space allocated for baseball in many newspapers doubled and tripled. Nearly every writer had to write lengthy and detailed analyses of the players and management of both teams, drumming up interest in a Series for which interest was already high, feeding the public's insatiable appetite for the smallest shred of inside information that might give them an edge when putting down a bet. Once the Series began, each writer was responsible not only for a game story or column each day but for background features and analysis, detailed play-by-play accounts, notes columns, and dispatches for magazines like
Sporting Life
and
The Sporting News,
for which many served as local correspondents. On a word count basis, no contemporary newspaper lavishes as much verbiage on a World Series today as many of these papers did then.

And it did not stop there. The public's appetite for baseball news was unquenchable. Other sports, like boxing and horse racing, were of intermittent interest, but baseball was part of the national conversation. What happened yesterday on the field and what would happen tomorrow was a discussion that could take place between two people regardless of class, race, sex, or religion. During the World's Series baseball bumped news of murders and wars and strikes off the front page as every publication scrambled to set itself apart from the competition. To that end virtually every Boston and New York paper had contracted with one or more players from each team, or with other well-known players, to provide inside accounts of each Series contest. The
Boston Post,
for example, published such accounts under the bylines of Cy Young, Ty Cobb, John McGraw, and Heinie Wagner. The
Herald
countered with Walter Johnson and Larry Gardner. Wood, Speaker, Larry Doyle, Mathewson, Jeff Tesreau, and Rube Marquard were also all under contract to provide daily accounts of the Series, and if a lesser-known player had a big day, the papers threw money at him after the game in exchange for an exclusive first-person account to appear in the paper the next day.

These stories have confounded naive historians and readers for years. They were, in fact, almost never written by the players themselves. In most instances they were not even based on anything beyond a brief and cursory interview but were primarily fictitious reports written on the fly. While fascinating and often entertaining—their stilted use of the English language made even the most uneducated player sound as if he had just graduated from elocutionary school—their historical value as accurate representations of the thoughts of the bylined players is, like most ghostwritten accounts, almost negligible. Their rampant use by historians either unaware of their specious origins or unconcerned about their questionable veracity has infected more than one well-intentioned history of the game. In fact, after the 1912 World's Series the National Commission, distraught over the way the accounts tended to point fingers and scapegoat, causing "open ruptures" between teammates, threatened to ban the practice altogether. Top name players like Tris Speaker, Joe Wood, Ty Cobb, and Christy Mathewson and managers like Stahl and McGraw earned as much as $3,000, as one reporter described it, "for mere use of their name above articles they were supposed to have written but which were written by expert newspapermen." For the right price, few cared what words were put in their mouths. But this World's Series would need no embellishment. What actually happened was far better than the hyperbole of any imagination.

By today's standards, Fenway Park's new press box was spartan, with few of the amenities the press receives today, and the writers' coverage of the games, while lengthy, was often incomplete. With the press box open to the elements except for a roof, writers in the first row got wet if the wind was blowing in, and in an era with no instant replay, each depended on his own eyes to write an accurate account of the game. That is why their accounts nearly always differ. It could be extraordinarily difficult at times to determine, not what happened, but precisely how. Eyes could look only one place at a time, and if a writer glanced away and missed a play, he often made up for it by writing what he
thought
happened, turning line drives into ground balls and vice versa, or what he thought made a better story.

There were nearly as many telegraph operators in the press box as reporters, for it was through their efforts that the stories of the writers made their way back to the home office and were then flashed instantly all around the country. In cities large and small, many newspapers operated scoreboards during the Series, ranging from large and complex boards that included lineups, used lights to indicate hits and errors, and featured ersatz runners in silhouette that moved around the bases, to more modest affairs, including configurations that were little more than a man and a chalkboard writing out the play-by-play. Even more complicated tableaus were created in theaters. Some even hired actors in uniform to move from one ersatz base to another to "re-enact" the Series before stage sets of bleacher-filled stands. In the Polo Grounds one hundred extra telegraph wires had been strung to accommodate the press, with a like number in Boston. Tim Murnane estimated that nationwide "over 10,000 telegraph operators will be engaged on the afternoon of the games in helping to relay the bulletins ... nothing outside a presidential election is followed with such widespread interest."