The First Fall Classic

by Mike Vaccaro

  As the sun fell, so did the temperature, and so the sight of an ambitious coffee wagon warmed the spirits of the thousand or so people who lined up behind Lehan.

  “I’m some kind of cold,” he reported, “but I won’t mind if I get a chance to see the game. Of course, I will gladly sell my ticket or my place in line if some chap wants to give me real money for it. Otherwise I’ll give up my dollar gleefully to watch the game.”

  It would have behooved Lehan, and anyone else on line, to have packed a heavy winter jacket, because when the sun made its reappearance early in the morning it didn’t bring any warmth with it. Still, at first light, the streets around Fenway Park were already thick with humanity, even though a misty rain filled most of the morning hours, to the point that the switchboards of the Globe, the Herald, and the Boston Post were overrun by frantic callers wanting to know if the game was really going to be played.

  The umpires wanted to know the same thing, so they showed up extra early, just past 9:30. Cy Rigler had actually suffered an injured knee colliding with Fred Merkle after Game One was over, when Merkle started sprinting for the center-field clubhouse at game’s end and inadvertently ran into the unsuspecting umpire. Rigler, however, was assigned to first base and the right-field line, so it wasn’t expected to hamper him. It was Silk O’Loughlin’s turn to call balls and strikes, and so he carefully chatted with groundskeepers and Red Sox team officials while theatrically keeping his palm pointed toward the sky so photographers could see he was diligently hunting for raindrops.

  “The field looks good to go,” O’Loughlin told Jerome Kelley, Fenway’s head groundskeeper, just before 10 o’clock.

  “She’s as ready as any field’s ever been ready, sir,” Kelley replied.

  “Well, then. What say we play some ball then?” And with that, the gates were opened and the masses were unleashed on the grandstands and bleachers, ensuring that Fenway Park would be stuffed like a sardine tin for the very first postseason game of its life.

  “We hurried into the bleachers and our long vigil began,” a Red Sox fan named Kevin Shaughnessy would report to the next edition of The Sporting News. “It was then about 10 o’clock. Five hours to wait for the game to start and the worst of it was there wasn’t a moment that we did not expect to hear there would be no game because of poor weather. By noon the stands were filled and every woman who passed in front of the center field bleachers received an ovation, and there were quite a few ovations.”

  Prominent among the fans in attendance was a seventy-something gentleman named Grandpop Nutt, who claimed he’d been at every important Boston game since the National League’s Red Caps played at South End Grounds; belying his birth certificate, Grandpop raced to a vacancy in the grandstand and claimed it for his own. The park into which he raced was substantially different from the one the Red Sox had last visited thirteen days earlier, when they’d defeated the Highlanders 15–12 in a slugfest that closed out the home portion of the regular-season schedule. New stands had been erected down the left-field line and in right center, fully enclosing the park for the first time. There would also be temporary stands erected just in front of the left-field wall, into which a batted ball would be declared a ground-rule double. Fifty cents would get you a bleacher seat; if you wanted to be closer to the play, you could spend as much as $5 through the Sox ticket office (which was the preferred method; unlike in New York, forgers had been able to readily duplicate the ducats for the Boston games, and several hundred fans would receive the horrible surprise that day that they carried fakes in their pockets).

  Just as there’d been a keen sense of anticipation the day before in New York, there was a tangible, kinetic energy at work inside Fenway, which was completely filled by noon, three full hours before game time. Honey Fitz had already declared the day a civic holiday within the town’s borders, so thousands of workmen and schoolchildren freed from their workaday tedium descended on the Fens, and when they discovered no tickets to be had there they jammed both the Common, where upward of 60,000 people would gather by late afternoon, and Newspaper Row, where an additional 30,000 would assemble in an area that could barely accommodate a third of that number comfortably. And there would be other interested parties now, too. Back in New York, the entire Atlantic fleet of the U.S. Navy had come for review in the Hudson River, a staggering display of nautical might that drew thousands of mesmerized onlookers; the sailors, though, were hungry for information about the World Series and so the New York Herald had agreed to keep its wireless connection open so the battleship Wyoming could get pitch-by-pitch updates, and the Wyoming would then relay the news to her sister ships.

  Finally, just past one o’clock, the first line of Red Sox took the field, led by Manager Stahl, and they were treated to a long, reverent ovation. Stahl even took the occasion to tweak his more famous, more decorated counterpart, stealing a page from McGraw’s book, sending four pitchers—Hugh Bedient, Charley Hall, Buck O’Brien, and Ray Collins—out to warm up without once hinting at who his true selection was. When the Giants took the field they were also greeted warmly, although the fans were quick to tease Tesreau. In that morning’s Boston papers, various Red Sox had admitted that they’d only begun hitting him when someone on the bench noted the rookie was tipping his pitches: Whenever he lifted the ball to his face and carefully moistened it, the delivery came in high and fast; when he subtly passed the fingers of his right hand as if he were wiping his mouth, that’s when the low-breaking spitter was coming.

  Tesreau, reading this, had incurred McGraw’s sarcasm by wondering aloud why nobody in the National League had picked up that quirk all year. “It’s because you didn’t have to face the Giants,” McGraw sneered, “although that can surely be arranged if you aren’t more careful in the future.” Sox fans impishly wiped their faces with the backs of their hands as Tesreau walked by, and the pitcher tipped his cap when he saw that, immediately making friends.

  Larry Doyle, meanwhile, ever the team captain, made a most intriguing discovery on behalf of his teammates as he was standing alongside the batting cage, waiting to take his practice cuts. Standing next to Buck Herzog and Fred Snodgrass, the Giants’ second baseman pointed to an advertising sign hanging on the distant wall in left field (which was not yet green, nor yet an oversized monster) that said, in big black lettering:

  THOMAS W. LAWSON OFFERS $250 TO ANY BATTER

  WHO HITS THIS SIGN AND $3,000 TO THE FIRST MAN

  WHO SMASHES THE SYSTEM’S SLATE.

  The slate in question, affixed to the right of the lettering, was about four feet long by three feet wide.

  “Hey, fellows,” Doyle said. “What do you think about that?”

  Snodgrass, a right-handed hitter who, like most Giants, prided himself on being able to spray the ball to all fields, said, “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think I just became a dead-pull hitter for the day.”

  It took Silk O’Loughlin a while to say the two words he loved to utter more than any other. There was more rain: a brief dousing forty minutes before game time that rankled the crowd and brought back horrible memories of 1911, when the Giants and Athletics had spent more time battling storm clouds than each other. There was more ceremony: This time it was Jake Stahl who was given an automobile, by the fans, in grateful recognition for leading the Red Sox back to the World Series after an absence of nine years. There was the spectacle of the Royal Rooters parading around Fenway Park, banners and noisemakers in tow, singing themselves hoarse, finally taking their usual places in the left-field grandstand and their spiritual leader, Mayor Fitzgerald, throwing out the first pitch. There was even a ruckus just before the Sox (behind Collins, who all along was Stahl’s choice to pitch despite his gamesmanship) took the field when a gaggle of men from the right-field bleachers made a break for the unoccupied seats in left field that the Rooters hadn’t yet claimed; it took a dash from a group of mounted policemen to drag them away, much to the delight of the fever-pitched crowd.

  Finally, ju
st as Collins finished his warm-ups, a large ring of photographers snuck onto the field so they could get a closer look at the action through their lenses. But O’Loughlin would have none of it.

  “All picture guys, off the field!” Silk screamed. “You stay here, the Red Sox will forfeit, and then you’ll have to answer to Mr. Stahl!”

  They dispersed.

  And O’Loughlin, slipping on his mask, yelled, “Play ball!”

  The first Giants batter was Snodgrass, who took a pitch and then swung at the second, and there were two immediate, distinctive sounds that followed: first, a loud crack, the timeless hint that a bat has met a ball squarely and completely. And then Larry Doyle, from the on-deck circle, saying, loud enough for all to hear: “No shit?”

  Because Snodgrass’s blast was heading—no shit—straight for Thomas W. Lawson’s sign, straight for his slate, straight for $250 that Snodgrass was already counting as he trotted down the first-base line …

  … only to watch the ball tumble into a gaggle of hands just in front of the sign, maybe ten feet short, maybe five. Snodgrass would have to settle for a ground-rule double and the delighted laughs of his teammates. That’s all he would get, as it turned out, because he wound up stranded at third base.

  Christy Mathewson then took the mound to great applause from the Fenway faithful. Mathewson had regularly enjoyed his trips to this city in the past, mainly because the pitiable Braves always seemed perfectly willing to add to his gaudy win totals. Now, as he stood tall in the box, he would recall “feeling as comfortable as I ever had on a mound. This was the only place in the world I wanted to be. I could think of nothing greater than pitching this game for the glory of the New York Giants.”

  And he barely lived to talk about it.

  Harry Hooper led off with a hard two-hopper that caromed off Mathewson’s glove, rolled out of reach, and rankled Matty because “in my youth I would have snared that with my eyes closed.” As great pitchers do, however, he immediately induced a double-play grounder from Steve Yerkes, a happy development that became significantly less so when shortstop Art Fletcher—whom even his teammates called “softly wound,” an expression that we would change to “tightly wound” a century later—fumbled it, then booted it away.

  “One of the easiest chances in the world for a big leaguer” would be how Mathewson would describe the play for his readers the next morning. “I don’t know what it was. Stage fright? Over-anxiety?”

  Next up was Tris Speaker, who conceded to the convention of the times by laying down a sacrifice bunt, and who was rewarded for his selflessness with first base when both Mathewson and Herzog converged on the ball and neither thought to actually pick it up off the ground. Bases loaded. None out. Fenway was foaming at the mouth.

  Matty wasn’t one to yell at a teammate, but he was a Hall of Fame glarer, and now he fixed a withering stare at Herzog, who acknowledged, “My fault, Matty. I owe you one.” Funny thing, too: On the very next pitch, a fastball to Duffy Lewis, Herzog made good, snaring a sharp grounder, firing it home, getting the first out. Next, Mathewson induced Larry Gardner to hit the ball right back at him, for what would surely have been an inning-ending (and soul-crushing) double play; but, again, Matty’s thirty-two-year-old reflexes betrayed him, the ball merely ticked off his glove, and while Doyle recovered to retire Gardner at first, Yerkes dashed home with the first run. And when Stahl hit a rocket shot between third and short, he brought home Speaker and Lewis, the score was suddenly 3–0, and it seemed Bill Carrigan, who’d predicted a Speed Boy sweep, was as much a prophet as he was a catcher.

  But the Giants were a prideful bunch, never more so than when Mathewson was on the mound. “We all would have given up a year of our lives to get that man a win in the world’s series,” Chief Meyers would remember many decades later. “There’s no question we played much better when he was pitching than anyone else.”

  So it was that the New York bats wobbled to life in the second. Herzog sent a screaming drive toward the cavernous meadow that was (and remains) Fenway Park’s right center field, pulling in for a triple, and Meyers followed by nearly decapitating Larry Gardner with a line drive that practically tore through the Red Sox’ third baseman before rolling away, allowing Herzog to score the Giants’ first run. Two innings later, Red Murray continued his redemption quest by drilling his own three-base hit right to the base of the stockade in center field, scoring two batters later on a sacrifice fly by Herzog to slice the New York deficit to 3–2. Meanwhile, in between those two rallies, the Giants nearly received the break of the Series, and one they would surely have embraced despite all their high-minded talk earlier in the week about wanting to beat the Speed Boys at their best. Leading off the home third, Speaker smacked a hard shot down the first-base line that Merkle knocked down with his chest. Scrambling for the ball, Merkle finally recovered, raced to the bag, and beat Speaker by an eyeblink; Speaker, employing a play that would still give baseball managers migraines a century later, had ill-advisedly slid into first, and when he did that he rolled his ankle something awful. He had to be helped off the field, with Fenway’s silence serving as a mournful backdrop.

  Speaker would never dream of leaving a World Series game, of course, so he gritted on, and he would find himself with a splendid chance to break the game open—and break Matty’s heart in the bargain—in the fifth. With one out Hooper had singled for his third hit of the day, and Yerkes followed by ripping a line drive over Snodgrass’s head in center for an RBI triple and a 4–2 lead. Mathewson had been able to write off his first-inning travails to bad luck; as McGraw would say after, “If he’d had a professional team in back of him, he wouldn’t have allowed even one run.” But now the great pitcher looked shaken, his shoulders slumped, his face ashen. Speaker limped to the plate, but Matty couldn’t see that; he only knew, by reputation, that Speaker was never tougher than when there was a man waiting to be driven home. And both men knew that one more run, on Boston’s home grounds, could put the game all but out of reach. And here was the worst of it: Speaker met Matty’s fastball flush, crushed it on a line, right toward shortstop, and God only knew what high comedy poor Art Fletcher might have in mind.

  Only, Fletcher dived, snared the ball, them scampered to his feet and threw back toward third base, where Yerkes had bled a little too far away from the bag. It was a holy-smoke, did-you-see-what-I-saw, bang-bang double play that left Fenway dazed and Speaker confused (and still hobbled), and somehow kept the Giants in the game.

  “That,” Mathewson would explain, “is why you never show up a teammate. Sure, Fletcher had a bad game. But he made one play that made everything else seem possible for us.”

  The Christian Gentleman was never averse to showing a little Christian charity. But he needed more than that now if he was to win the fifth World Series game of his career. He needed the Giants to get him some runs. And quick.

  In later years, it was the Green Monster that became the most recognizable icon at Fenway Park. Locals referred to it simply as “The Wall,” and if you walked right up next to it you could see the pockmarks left behind by thousands of baseballs through the years. Knowing how to play balls off The Wall became a subject of great local debate. Ted Williams became proficient at it, and Carl Yastrzemski mastered it to an almost scientific degree. Even Manny Ramirez, the hard-hitting savant who manned left field in the first decade of the twenty-first century, became an astute practitioner of the various angles, bounces, and caroms so unique to The Wall.

  But back when The Wall was merely a wall, the defining aspect of Fenway was also in left field, as it was there that you would find a leg-breaking slope that rose almost ten feet from a spot fifteen feet in front of the warning track to the base of the fence. It was the bane of just about every left fielder who patrolled out there, with the exception of one man.

  “Duffy Lewis played the most difficult left field in the league,” Harry Hooper would recall many years later. “There was a bank running up to the left field fence an
d it was difficult to judge the ball running up the bank and almost impossible to throw it going down.”

  So proficient did Lewis become at perfecting every nuance of the rise that it almost immediately became known as “Duffy’s Cliff,” and stayed that way until 1934, when a fresh landscaping of the park finally leveled the grounds forever.

  “I’d go to the ballpark every morning and have somebody hit the ball again and again out to the wall,” Lewis explained. “I experimented with every angle of approach up the cliff until I learned to play the slope correctly. Sometimes it would be tougher coming back down the slope than going back up. With runners on base you had to come down off the cliff throwing.”

  So it was with more than a trace of confidence that Collins, Stahl, Fred Snodgrass, the 30,148 people in attendance, and Duffy Lewis himself approached the lazy fly ball off Snodgrass’s bat that led off the top of the eighth inning. Snodgrass had followed his near-miss of Thomas Lawson’s slate with a flyout and a strikeout, and while he’d hit this ball again in the vicinity of the sign, he hadn’t gotten all of it. He flipped his bat in disgust and barely half-stepped his way down the line.

  Imagine his surprise, and everyone else’s, when Lewis got his feet tangled on the patch of Fenway earth named after him and allowed the ball to drop at his feet. The crowd was stunned into a silence so immediate and so complete that the only audible sound came from the third-base coaching box, where McGraw was screaming at Snodgrass for not hustling on the play. “Hope you enjoyed the view on that play, Snow,” he crowed, “because if you don’t score it’s gonna cost you twenty-five bucks!”

  Doyle brightened his manager’s mood considerably when he singled over second base, pushing Snodgrass up ninety feet, and now the Fenway crowd started to mutter to itself ever so slightly. For the first time in the series the Red Sox’ bullpen was busy, Stahl summoning both Charley Hall and Hugh Bedient to start warming up in case Collins couldn’t figure a way out of this growing pool of quicksand, but Collins quickly responded by getting Beals Becker (subbing in the lineup this day for Josh Devore) to nearly bounce into a double play, the speedy Becker barely beating Heinie Wagner’s relay throw to first. But Red Murray, no longer the “Hitless Wonder” that inspired headline writers across the country a year earlier, jumped all over a Collins fastball and plunked it in the temporary seats in left field for a ground-rule double, silencing the ballpark completely save for a stolen few dozen Giants fans scattered about, slicing the lead to 4–3 as Snodgrass sprinted home, grateful to be able to keep the fine money in his wallet. Stahl, reluctantly, walked over to Collins from first base to deliver bad news.