Fenway Park

by John Powers

  Even Quinn was intrigued by that novelty, announcing that he would spend a million dollars to double-deck the ballpark and increase capacity to more than 52,000—as soon as his club was good enough to make it necessary. Acrophobia and gravity proved a fatal combination, though, and the Sox soon began free falling. Before the end of July they were back at the bottom of the standings and the Globe provided an early obituary (“A Sad Decline”) in early September. “On the diamond we produce, instead of a succession of championship teams, a perpetuation of tailenders,” the editorial concluded.

  Until Terry Francona duplicated the feat in 2007, Bill Carrigan was the only manager to have won two World Series titles with Boston (in 1915 and 1916). He returned to manage the Red Sox in 1927, but couldn’t do better than last place in each of his three seasons.

  After four years of viewing the league from an upside-down perspective, the Sox were justifiably reserved about their prospects for 1929. “I am predicting nothing, but I am hopeful,” Carrigan said before the season. An Opening Day triumph over the Yankees at home was a splendid start, but Boston already was sending out distress signals on May Day when the Athletics dispensed a 24-6 drubbing that at the time set a Fenway record for offense—by the visitors. The Boston Globe tallied what it described as “a terrific cyclone of bingles of all descriptions”—29 hits, 44 total bases (11 by Jimmie Foxx), three homers, and six doubles, with 10 Philadelphia runs coming in the sixth inning.

  By mid-month, the season already was a lost cause for Boston’s two baseball teams, which both finished eighth in their respective leagues. “In a postseason series between the Braves and the Red Sox, which would win?” the Globe mused in October. “Don’t you mean post-mortem series?” retorted the Brockton Enterprise.

  1930s

  Lefty Grove, who won 105 games for the Red Sox between 1934 and 1941, watches the action from the dugout.

  By the time the 1930s were in the rearview mirror, Fenway Park itself and its major inhabitants had undergone a transformation. The team and the ballpark got a new owner in 1933, and the Red Sox made a slow climb from being cellar dwellers in nine out of 11 seasons through 1932 to a pair of second-place finishes in 1938-39. This effort was no doubt helped along by Tom Yawkey’s inclination to spend his considerable wealth on players he thought could help. The park itself also benefited from the infusion of Yawkey’s cash and enthusiasm. Although a five-alarm fire undid many of the off-season renovations that had cost nearly $1 million to complete by January 1934, Sox General Manager Eddie Collins vowed that the team would still open the season in a retooled Fenway. It required a massive additional commitment of money and manpower, but Collins was correct. For probably the first time, the Red Sox attempted to tailor their home field to take advantage of the presence of a slugger. Rookie Ted Williams had hit .327 with 31 home runs and an amazing 145 RBI in 1939. So bullpens were constructed in right and right-center field during the next off-season, with the expectation that Williams would be able to reach the seats (or at least the bullpens) more often en route to a potential Triple Crown-winning season. Williams, feeling the weight of expectation, hit fewer homers in 1940, and his on-again, off-again relationship with fans—and his open feud with newspaper writers—hit a significant rough patch. “There were 49 million newspapers in Boston, from the Globe to the Brookline Something-or-Other, all ready to jump us,” said Ted years later. Indeed, it must have seemed that way. The Boston Braves (later Redskins) of the National Football League debuted in this decade, but the NFL failed to rouse enough local support, so the Redskins left for Washington after the 1936 season.

  A Red Sox-Yankees doubleheader brought an early-morning crowd to Fenway on August 12, 1937.

  As the thirties began, the Depression in the Fens already had been underway for a decade. Defeated and dispirited after three dreary years in the league basement, the skipper, who’d been used to pennants flapping during his days as player-manager, threw up his hands. “After handling three tailenders Bill Carrigan decided that he would not try again to start the Red Sox on an upward journey,” Mel Webb wrote in the Globe.

  That task fell to Charles “Heinie” Wagner, Carrigan’s assistant and former teammate who’d seen enough of his players to be realistic. “All we need is a little quiet discipline and a little time,” he said after inheriting the job just before Christmas of 1929. “You can’t bring a ball team up to the top in a minute.”

  It should have been an omen when President Herbert Hoover threw out the first pitch for Boston’s initial game at Washington and bounced the ball. Before the next day’s home opener against the Senators, which the Sox dropped by a 6-1 count before 7,500 chilled fans, Wagner was presented with an enormous floral horseshoe that required three men to shoulder to the plate.

  It was intended as a good luck gesture, but it might as well have been a funeral wreath as his club was all but buried by Memorial Day, falling back into the cellar after dropping 14 straight games. The most fortunate man on the premises was pitcher Charles “Red” Ruffing, who’d led the league in losses for two years. He was dealt to the Yankees that spring and went on to earn a half-dozen World Series rings and make the Hall of Fame.

  Despite 102 losses and a sixth consecutive last-place finish, owner Bob Quinn was ebullient about his club’s chances for 1931 under new skipper John “Shano” Collins, a Charlestown native who’d already been knocked around enough for a lifetime. He’d been named the victim in the case against the Chicago Black Sox, eight of whom were accused of conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series, which cost Collins $1,784 according to court documents, and then he had been traded to Boston just in time for the Sox downward spiral.

  So even though the Red Sox were at the bottom of the standings and 41 games out at the beginning of the Labor Day weekend, Collins was optimistic. “I am confident that some other club will finish in last place,” he predicted before his men dropped a doubleheader on September 4 to the Athletics. By then the only bit of suspense was whether Earl Webb would break the record for most doubles in a season.

  Webb, who’d mined coal before he made the majors, was a journeyman outfielder whose erratic glove cost his team nearly as many two-baggers as he produced. But he banged out 67 doubles that year with only three triples while knocking in 103 runs and hitting .333. Though Webb was suspected of deliberately holding up at second, Collins said that “The Earl of Doublin” simply was “too darned slow on the bases to get to third.”

  The Sox managed to crawl upward to sixth place, their best finish in a decade. But by the middle of the 1932 season Collins had concluded that they were past the point of mending and quit on June 19. “I have worked unusually hard with the Red Sox,” he said. “I have learned, however, that I was more or less on a treadmill and not going any place in particular.”

  So Quinn tapped infielder Marty McManus to take over what he deemed “the most thoroughly demoralized ball club that ever existed.” Quinn, who’d been struggling financially even before the Depression, was demoralized as well. His club soon fell back to last place and ended up a whopping 64 games behind the Yankees after losing 111 games, the most in franchise history. Attendance plunged by half to 182,000, roughly a third of what the Braves were drawing on Commonwealth Avenue.

  What Quinn needed was either a savior or a sucker who would take the club off his hands for a price, as he put it. The man was Thomas Austin Yawkey, a 30-year-old Yale grad who’d just inherited a fortune from his family’s lumber and mining interests. On February 25, four days after his birthday, Yawkey purchased both Fenway Park and the Sox for $1.2 million. Tom’s uncle and adoptive father, Bill Yawkey, had owned the Detroit Tigers from 1903 to 1919 and saw them win pennants in 1907, 1908, and 1909. Tom, who had the same aspirations, immediately began a refurbishment of both the park and the club. “Painters, plasterers and carpenters were scattered about the plant and soon everything will be in order,” the Globe reported a few days before the 1933 opening game of a city series with the Braves on April 8 (
which the Sox won, 7-0).

  Yawkey’s first priority was expanding the bleachers, where he believed the real fans congregated. “I may be mistaken but I think the grandstand fan is a casual—he comes to the game in much the same mood and manner that the theatre-goer goes to a popular hit,” he said. Renovating the roster was a more daunting challenge, but Yawkey was quick to start upgrading the Sox from 500-1 long shots to contenders, paying top dollar and over-thetop dollar for anyone he could grab.

  SUNDAYS IN THE PARK

  The legendary Massachusetts Blue Laws, which set aside Sunday as a day of worship and rest, prohibited Boston’s professional baseball teams from hosting Sunday home games from their very beginnings. Boston was not alone in banning Sunday baseball, but by 1918, all but three American League cities—Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia—had allowed it. The state law was amended in 1929 to allow for Sunday baseball, but the Red Sox were still stymied from playing at Fenway Park because of its proximity to a church. They played their Sunday contests at Braves Field for the next few seasons, until they caught a break from legislators.

  In May 1932, the Massachusetts House of Representatives sponsored a bill that would loosen the restriction and allow the Sox to play at Fenway on Sundays. Specifically, the bill would lower the required church buffer zone from 1,000 feet to 700 feet, and the Church of the Disciples, at Jersey and Peterborough Streets, was about 850 feet away from Fenway. The church raised no objection, and the bill passed the state Senate on May 19, 1932. The Sox hosted their first Sunday game at Fenway on July 3.

  If they were hoping to come out winners in their first-ever Fenway game on the Sabbath, the Sox might have chosen a more fortuitous season and a less daunting foe than the Bronx Bombers. In a game that took only 2 hours and 28 minutes to complete before a crowd of 7,000, the Yankees trounced the Sox, 13-2. As a result, the Yankees improved their 1932 record to 50-21, while the Red Sox were comfortably settled in last place at 14-57. Boston would go on to finish 43-111 that season, their worst record ever—64 games behind first-place New York.

  The headline of the story said: “Ten Hits in Sixth, in which 14 Hostiles Go to Bat, Convert Game into Parade.” Dave “the Colonel” Egan, the Globe baseball writer, wrote that the nine-run Yankee inning was filled with “carnage and sabotage and rioting.”

  Egan went on to write, “Ivy Paul Andrews, late of the Yankees, was the unfortunate youth upon whom the wrath of the New Yor-curs fell. He seen his duty and done it noble for the first five innings, but when the smoke of battle had cleared in the sixth, nine runs had been scored, the Messrs Andrews and Pete Jablonowski were weeping on each other’s shoulders in the showers, and Bob Kline was pitching and ducking.

  “In that sordid sixth, 14 of the visitors paraded to the plate, assumed a battling posture, and collected 10 hits, thus reaching a new high for the year and convincing the experts that the Depression is over. And George Pipgras upset all the fine traditions of the pitching industry by making two singles in that one stretch. There should be a law against it.”

  LADY WITH A MEGAPHONE

  Mrs. Lillian Hopkins was known to thousands of Red Sox fans and players simply as “Lolly.” A lifelong resident of Providence, she was awarded a lifetime pass to Fenway Park as the team’s No. 1 fan. She made the 100-mile round-trip hundreds of times over 27 seasons between 1932 and shortly before her death in September 1959 at age 69.

  Lolly occupied Seat 24 in Row 1 of Section 14, and she always came to Fenway with a megaphone and a scorebook. Many fans never met her but recognized her voice as she hollered advice and encouragement to players, managers, and umpires. According to a 1959 feature story in the Globe, “Lolly had become a baseball expert through the years and never hesitated to prove it. Many have felt the good-natured wrath with which she would set them straight.”

  One woman asked in 1958, “Why doesn’t she go over to third base, so Williams can hear her better?”

  “It’s habit, a habit I developed when I was a little girl and my father used to bring me up from Providence to see games at the Walpole Street and Huntington Avenue Grounds,” Lolly explained. “I always tried to get seats in that section if possible.”

  The late Smoky Kelleher, a sports official and a Red Sox fan to rival Lolly in loyalty, used to sit in a box in front of her, where he became accustomed to her hollering. One day in 1938, he gave her a megaphone, telling her it would save her voice. Lolly hollered as loud as ever; the megaphone merely multiplied her range.

  Today, Lolly’s passion for the Red Sox is preserved in the Baseball Hall of Fame. A life-size figure of her, megaphone and all, is front and center in an exhibit of some of the game’s most beloved fans.

  His biggest blockbuster came shortly before Christmas of 1933 when he dispatched two players and $120,000 to the penniless Athletics for pitchers Lefty Grove and Rube Walberg and second baseman Max Bishop. “Yawkey appears to be Boston baseball Santa,” a Globe headline declared. “Has quite an array of Sox to hang up for local fans.”

  Yawkey had more than enough cash to fund his horse-hide hobby. He owned a massive South Carolina plantation, a New York apartment, and soon acquired a suite at the Ritz in Boston. He also supplied fare for the Yuletide groaning board, sending up duck, quail, and venison that he and a few of his new Sox employees had shot during a hunting trip on his land.

  There would be a new manager as well. Though McManus had nudged the Sox up from the cellar, Yawkey and new Sox General Manager Eddie Collins, the future Hall of Famer who’d been one of Yawkey’s boyhood heroes at the Irving School in New York, wanted a bigger presence. “If we could find a second edition of Connie Mack, that would be our idea of the perfect manager,” Collins remarked.

  He hired Stanley “Bucky” Harris, the “Boy Manager” who’d directed the once-woeful Senators to two pennants and a Series championship before he’d turned 30 and who’d just been cut loose by Detroit. Harris inherited an expensive new lineup for 1934 and an even more expensive playpen that Yawkey had to renovate twice after a January fire turned much of his new handiwork into cinders. Though the construction costs were soaring for what would be the city’s biggest private building project of the decade, Yawkey had cash to burn. “Hang the money,” he declared in early January. “What is the use of having money unless you do something with it?”

  More than 30,000 fans turned up for the home opener against defending champion Washington and marveled at the Fenway improvements, which included an electronic scoreboard at the bottom of the left-field wall that was a baseball version of a traffic signal with its red and green lights. “They did everything in christening the new Fenway but crack a bottle of champagne over the prow of home plate,” John Barry remarked in the Globe.

  When the Yankees came to town five days later, nearly 45,000 people jammed into the park and another 10,000 were turned away. As attendance for the season ballooned past 600,000, the Sox ascended to the first division for the first time since Babe Ruth’s departure and broke even with a 76-76 record. Had Lefty Grove not been sabotaged by abscessed teeth and a sore shoulder, they might have finished even higher than fourth place. “We were all set to shoot for third place,” Harris said in April, “and I believe we could have made it until this terrible thing happened.”

  Park improvements in the early 1930s included a new dugout for the visiting team.

  DAVE EGAN: “THE COLONEL” HELD COURT

  In 1977, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle wrote about Dave Egan, who covered the Red Sox for the Globe and later, for the Boston Record. Barnicle told the story of a boy who spotted Egan sitting alone at the old Hotel Kenmore bar.

  “Excuse me,” the boy stuttered as he approached. “Are you Dave Egan?”

  “I am,” Egan said, looking older and smaller than the boy ever imagined.

  “I write you letters all the time. I think you’re wrong a lot,” the boy said, his knees shaking.

  “I probably am, kid,” Egan replied. “But I never look back. It takes too much t
ime.”

  “It must be great, knowing all those ballplayers and everything like you do,” the boy said.

  “Listen, kid,” Egan replied. “They’re lucky to know me.”

  Egan, who apparently awarded himself the “Colonel” nickname, was never shy about displaying his ego in print. “[He] would put these awful things in the paper—these awful, outrageous, untrue, fascinating, interesting things,” wrote Barnicle. “Ted Williams was always ‘T. W’ms Esq.’ in one of The Colonel’s pieces. . . . Egan was so irritating that he probably sold 100,000 copies a day on his own.”

  Ray Flynn, who would go on to become the mayor of Boston, told Leigh Montville, “I used to sell the Record at the ballpark when I was a kid. Ted Williams was my idol. Whenever The Colonel would write something bad about him, I’d go through all my papers and rip out the page that had The Colonel’s column on it. It was my own little tribute to my hero. I swear on my mother I did this.”

  When Egan died in 1958 at age 57, Boston’s archbishop, Richard J. Cushing, lauded him as a man “blessed with a great natural talent. . . . While all the people who read his columns didn’t agree with him, they all appreciated him.”

  An example of Egan’s prose was his story about the 1932 home opener at Fenway Park, in which Senators left fielder Henry “Heinie” Manush hit a game-winning, three-run homer with two outs in the ninth inning. The piece began: “Perhaps he is not a varlet. Probably he is not even a viper. But Henry E. Manush of the Washington Senators (born in Tuscumbia, Ala., in 1901, by actual count) was the ruination of the Red Sox yesterday afternoon at Fenway Park.

  “The ninth inning froze the chilled crowd that sat through the harsh April day. Jack Russell, who threw them for the Red Sox, had staggered through the game quite well, viewing everything in a large and statesmanlike manner, and entered the last inning with a comfortable lead of three runs. But woeful events transpired, and Manush lashed out his home run, and so the Red Sox lost their second successive game by the margin of one run.