by John Powers
In announcing the change, Sox GM Eddie Collins estimated that 600 to 700 box and grandstand seats would be added and provide sorely needed revenue for the team. Fenway’s home-run distance to the right-field foul pole shrunk from 325 feet to 302, while the right-field distance dropped from 402 to 380. As the Globe’s Harold Kaese wrote in a story in 1952, “Some optimistic experts predicted [Williams] would hit 75 home runs, or at least break Babe Ruth’s record of 60 with the park changed.” However, Kaese contrasted Williamsburg’s 380-foot distance in straightaway right field to the bullpens that had been constructed in the late 1940s in Pittsburgh, the so-called “Greenberg Gardens”—which required only a 335-foot poke from Pirates slugger Hank Greenberg. “Williamsburg,” Kaese concluded, “is no joke, but Greenberg Gardens . . . is a big laugh for a slugger.” Even with the new configuration, Fenway remained the longest right-center field fence to reach in the American League.
Kaese’s analysis in 1952 led him to pronounce that Williams had gained a total of 48 home runs over nine seasons (1940-42; 1946-51), or just over five a year from the reduced distances. Indeed, in 1940, the first season of the change, Williams actually hit fewer homers overall (23, down from 31) and fewer to right field than he had in his rookie season of 1939 (seven in 1939; five in 1940—four of which landed in the pens, one of which reached the bleachers beyond). Perhaps, Kaese wondered, Williams had pressed because of the expectations.
If nothing else, Williams made shrewd adjustments over his career. Kaese noted that in his first five seasons, Williams had not hit a single home run over the left-field wall, but in his succeeding five seasons, he hit 15. Kaese noted that the uptick coincided with the introduction by Lou Boudreau, the Cleveland Indians’ player-manager, of the Williams Shift, a realignment that left only one fielder to the left of the pitcher’s mound.
Twelve years later, Williams recalled the inflated expectations for 1940. “I didn’t hit the home runs that I had my first year,” he said. “I got a lot of catcalls and criticism. That just irked me enough, so I got a little sour on everything and everybody.”
That would not be the last time that Williams soured on the fans or the press in his brilliant, tempestuous 19-year career.
HERE’S TO YOU, MISS ROBINSON
Ted Williams called her “Sunshine.” Joe Cronin trusted her to babysit his sons. And Nomar Garciaparra never forgot to send her flowers.
For more than 60 years, Helen Robinson was the no-nonsense Red Sox switchboard operator who controlled access to the team’s decision makers, guarded its most explosive secrets, and ultimately created a legacy of loyalty and longevity.
“Helen Robinson was a legend, really,” said Red Sox GM Dan Duquette after Robinson, of Milton, Massachusetts, died of a heart attack in 2001 at age 85.
Robinson had witnessed it all with a telephone in her hand, all the sadness and glory that was Red Sox history for 60 years. She fielded condolence calls after the deaths of Thomas and Jean Yawkey, Tony Conigliaro, Joe Cronin, and one Sox great after another. And she endured the profanity-laced protests from fans after the most devastating losses on the field.
Robinson’s greatest admiration was for Tom Yawkey. “He wasn’t just a boss,” she said, “he was also a friend.” Although the switchboard went crazy whenever the Sox made a trade or were in a pennant race, Robinson remembered July 9, 1976, as her busiest day. That was the day the Red Sox announced Yawkey’s death.
“She has lived through some of the greatest and most trying moments in Red Sox history,” then-CEO John Harrington said at a ceremony marking Robinson’s 60th year on the job—one month to the day before she died, “and she will forever be entwined with Red Sox lore.”
A seamstress, Robinson knitted sweaters for Sox players who went off to World War II and Korea. Decades later, she helped sew tiny American flags on the backs of uniforms after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Robinson was working for New England Telephone in 1941 when she learned of an opening with the Red Sox. She was interviewed by Hall of Famer Eddie Collins, then the general manager, and landed the operator’s job.
“I was the only non-uniformed personnel he ever hired,” she proudly told people.
Those were the days of the telephone circuit board, when the operator needed to monitor the line to know when both parties were connected and disconnected on a call. Thus, she knew more about the inner workings of the Sox than almost anyone, but she never publicly whispered a word of it.
Nor did she betray the secrets she gathered by handling personal calls for players from Williams’s early years to Garciaparra’s heyday. And though the proliferation of cell phones curbed her contact with contemporary players, it was taken as much more than a minor observation when she first met Manny Ramirez and declared him “a fine young man.”
Robinson never married (“The Red Sox were her life,” Duquette said), and she counted Ted Williams among her closest friends. When they were young and single in the early 1940s, Robinson and Barbara Tyler, Collins’s secretary, often socialized with Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Charlie Wagner.
“She loved Ted,” Pesky said. “Ted always has called her ‘Sunshine.’”
When Elizabeth Dooley, generally considered the greatest Sox fan, died in 2000, Robinson was on the phone trying to contact Williams. “I knew Ted would want to know,” she said.
At her switchboard on the third floor at 4 Yawkey Way, Robinson worked from 9 a.m. until well after a home game ended, day or night. She left precisely at 5 p.m. when the team was on the road. And during weekend homestands, she arrived promptly on Saturdays and after church on Sundays.
In 60-plus years, Robinson was rarely absent. She kept working more than 20 years after she beat cancer in the 1970s. And she made no secret that she intended to work until she no longer was able.
“She went out doing what she wanted to do,” Manager Joe Kerrigan said when she died. “She worked till the last day. . . . I hope she gets her due. I hope people realize what she meant to the Red Sox.”
Although New York ran away with the pennant and the World Series, and the Sox ended up fifth, they still won more games (80) than they had since 1917 and their bankroller finally had a glimpse of a payoff. Boston would win a pennant “if it takes 1,000 years,” Yawkey vowed before the 1938 season, but his checkbook had a limit. “I’m through playing Santa Claus,” he declared when four players still were holding out on the eve of spring training.
As long as Yawkey had “The Beast,” he had a potent holiday punch, particularly at Fenway, where Foxx’s right-handed bat had the power of a cudgel. He had a monster campaign on the premises on the way to winning the league’s most valuable player award, hitting .405 at home with 35 homers, 104 RBI, and an .887 slugging percentage. His loudest thunderclap came at the end of an August 23 doubleheader against Cleveland, when Foxx crashed a grand slam with two out in the bottom of the ninth to give his team a 14-12 triumph and a sweep after they’d trailed, 6-0.
“Who cares if the Yankees win the pennant after this?” crowed Cronin’s wife, Millie, after Foxx had circled the bases with what the Globe’s Moore called “a grin as wide as the Sahara Desert.” By then New York had already run away with the league en route to a third straight world championship. But Boston’s second-place showing was its best since Ruth had departed.
Another potential Ruth arrived in 1939 in the form of Ted Williams, a goofy and gangly 20-year-old out of San Diego who was so skinny that he eventually was dubbed the Splendid Splinter. He’d arrived at spring training a year earlier full of braggadocio that was deemed the prerogative of a veteran like Foxx, whose slugging credentials were beyond dispute. “Foxx ought to see me hit,” he proclaimed.
Doc Cramer, Joe Vosmik, and Ben Chapman, who’d had the outfield jobs locked up, mocked Williams mercilessly. “Tell them I’ll be back,” Williams told clubhouse man Johnny Orlando as he was shipped up to Minneapolis for seasoning, “and I’m going to wind up making more money in this game than all three of them p
ut together.”
There was no keeping Williams down the following season, although Cronin, who’d originally dubbed him, “Meathead,” was quick to sit the rookie when he threw a ball over the grandstand roof in Atlanta after misjudging an outfield fly in an exhibition game. “I’ll continue to crack down on him until all the ‘bush league’ is out of him and he begins to act like a major leaguer,” the skipper vowed.
Raising the backstop—an April ritual.
There was nothing bush about his bat, though. “If he puts it there again, I’m riding it out,” Williams promised after Red Ruffing had struck him out twice on Opening Day in New York, and then hammered a ball more than 400 feet that just missed going over the fence. In his third game at Fenway, Williams went 4 for 4 and hit his first homer. In Detroit, he launched the two longest homers ever hit at Briggs Stadium. “This kid can hit a baseball as far and as hard as any ballplayer that ever lived,” a rival told sportswriter Grantland Rice. “And I’m not even barring the Babe.”
“The Kid” was Ruthian in both his power and his personality, which was unapologetically adolescent, marked by what Moore described as “his constant boyish chatter, seldom possessing any meaning” and his “screwball acts.” But his rookie numbers were irrefutably adult—.327 with 31 homers, 145 RBI, and 107 walks from pitchers reluctant to see their offerings sailing into the seats.
Even before Williams earned the nickname “Thumping Theodore,” his colleagues had been optimistic about dethroning the Yankees, who’d been picked by their manager Joe McCarthy to win a fourth straight crown. “Perhaps the Fates will cross him up on the prediction,” Cronin said. As always, though, it was a futile and frustrating chase that ended with a fiasco at the Fens on Labor Day weekend.
After winning the opener of the Sunday doubleheader by squeaking by the Yankees, 12-11, the Sox hoped to salvage the nightcap by stalling as the clock approached the 6:30 p.m. curfew with New York leading, 7-5, in the eighth. If the game couldn’t be completed by then the score would revert to 5-5 (the score at the end of the seventh inning), so Cronin ordered an intentional walk to Babe Dahlgren to load the bases. But the Yankees countered by playing hurry-up, as George Selkirk and Joe Gordon trotted home and let themselves be put out.
After the fans littered the field with soda bottles, straw hats, and rubbish, umpire Cal Hubbard called Fenway’s first forfeit and awarded a 9-0 victory to the visitors, a decision that later was rescinded by the league president, Will Harridge, who ordered a replay that was scrubbed by rainouts. Not that it mattered. Boston already was hopelessly in arrears and ended up 17 games behind.
Ted Williams at spring training in March 1938. The “Splendid Splinter” made his Red Sox debut in 1939, hitting .327 with 31 home runs and 145 RBIs.
HATS OFF TO ARTHUR D’ANGELO
BY STAN GROSSFELD
In blazing sunshine directly across the street from Fenway Park in 2006, Arthur D’Angelo, 79, was slowly and methodically pressure-washing the stale beer off the sidewalk in front of his souvenir store. By the time he finished, one side of Yawkey Way was clean enough to eat an El Tiante Cuban sandwich off it.
Inside the megastore, D’Angelo’s 65-person staff was enjoying the air conditioning. But D’Angelo, a short man with a sweet smile, didn’t want to delegate the cleaning chore.
Arthur and his twin brother, Henry, arrived in Boston’s North End from Italy with their family in 1938, fleeing the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. “I was 14 when we came to Boston,” he said. “I couldn’t speak a word of English.”
The brothers started hawking newspapers, the Daily Record and the Boston American. The two eventually wandered from the North End to Dorchester to Fenway Park.
“We saw these crowds,” D’Angelo said. “We didn’t know what baseball was. We snuck into the ballpark. The game started at 2 p.m. and we thought, ‘What are these idiots doing with a baseball bat?’ But then it caught on and we loved the game. Why not capitalize on it?” They did, in a big way.
D’Angelo said that the Souvenir Store, run by Twins Enterprises, Inc., is the largest of its kind. Most locals refer to it as “Twins” even though Arthur D’Angelo’s twin brother Henry died in 1987.
“We sell more caps than anybody in the world,” said D’Angelo, who operates Twins Enterprises with his four sons. “We make them for all the major-league teams. We also have licensing for 200 colleges.”
After a stint in the Army, D’Angelo was discharged in 1946 and returned to Fenway, hawking pennants. Interest in the team was high, as the 1946 Sox won their first American League pennant since 1918 and played to a record 1.4 million fans.
“Ted was back from the service,” D’Angelo said. “They had Dave Ferriss, Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky. Pennants were 25 cents. We had buttons with the players’ pictures on them. We used to buy ‘em for 12 cents and sell them for a quarter. You didn’t need a license back then.”
The D’Angelo brothers rented space outside Fenway until 1965, when they borrowed $100,000 and bought the building on Jersey Street (now Yawkey Way) that still houses the Souvenir Store. It almost folded.
In 1965, the Sox suffered through a 100-loss season, and the next season they drew just over 800,000 fans to Fenway to watch them finish ninth. “Nobody wants to remember a loser,” said D’Angelo.
But then came the Impossible Dream team of 1967. “My favorite team was 1967,” said D’Angelo. “The Sox won the pennant, then lost the World Series in the last game. Besides Yaz, there were no real standout players, but they all charged into it.”
Arthur D’Angelo surveyed the scene on Yawkey Way from his office.
1940s
(left to right) Manager Joe Cronin, third baseman Jim Tabor, and left fielder Ted Williams at the Fenway Park batting cage.
The 1940s were tumultuous times. With the United States pulled into a world war on two fronts, baseball was greatly affected, even though the games went on. Because of wartime enlistments, the Red Sox only had their full complement of players early and late in the decade, and they ended the 1940s with one pennant, a seven-game loss in the World Series, and four runner-up finishes in the American League—including one that resulted from a one-game playoff loss. (The 1970s would produce exactly the same totals, although the American League had been split into two divisions by then.) In a decade that brought victory gardens, rationing, and the GI Bill, Fenway Park also became an important meeting place. It hosted military, civic, and religious gatherings, and it became the “neutral” setting for New England’s biggest college football rivalry of the era, Boston College vs. Holy Cross. Since politics has always been a wildly popular spectator sport in the land of the Kennedys, James Michael Curley, and The Last Hurrah, it is fitting that four-term President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the final campaign speech of his life from a platform at Fenway on the weekend before the 1944 election. Among 10-year epochs during their tenure in Fenway Park, the Red Sox seem to have developed a strong pattern of one good decade followed by two bad decades. They were at their most successful with four world titles in the 1910s, and then suffered through two mostly disastrous decades before returning to form as contenders through most of the 1940s. As the remaining chapters of this book will testify, it was a rinse-and-repeat cycle that kept going to the dawn of the 2000s.
(left to right) Star players Bobby Doerr, Ted Williams, and Dominic DiMaggio obliged the cameraman by posing for this 1940 image.
As the Thirties ended, the Red Sox franchise had made the transition from a losing proposition to a winning proposition, even though the Yankees still were a mile ahead of Boston in the standings. The lineup, too, was in flux with Jimmie Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Doc Cramer nearing the end of their careers, and Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr at the beginning of theirs.
Whether Williams, his teammates, or the fans liked it, he clearly was the future of the franchise. After the front office redesigned the park to suit him, the Kid was feeling the pressure in 1940, particularly since
the homers were slow in coming. Even though the Sox were in first place (thanks to a 17-6 start and a torpid spring in the Bronx) and Williams was hitting well over .300, he felt unappreciated and was vocal about it.
What especially irked Williams was his $12,500 salary, given what he felt was expected of him. “Here I am hitting .340 and everybody’s all over me,” he complained in early June. “I shoulda been a fireman.” When Boston next played in Chicago, White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes, a notorious bench jockey, outfitted his players in papiermâché helmets, cranked up a siren, and had them howl, “Fireman, save my child!”
Once the Sox lost seven games in a row on the road in June—four of them to the fifth-place St. Louis Browns—and then dropped another eight straight in July, all of the engine-and-ladder companies in the Hub couldn’t save them and they ended up in fourth place. Yet Williams, for all his angst, had an exceptional season, hitting .344, clouting 23 homers, and knocking in 113 runs. He even pitched the final two innings in a mop-up role against Detroit in late August. Williams held the Tigers to one run on three hits and struck out Rudy York on three pitches, though the Sox lost, 12-1.
That season was prelude to an achievement that has been unmatched since, as Williams hit .406 in 1941, even while opposing hurlers were pitching around him, walking him 147 times in 143 games. The biggest challenge for the club at first was to find him, as Williams absented himself from spring training, phoning in once to assure the front office that he hadn’t been abducted. “Theodore says he has been so busy shooting wolves in a country so wild that no paths led from there to civilization,” Mel Webb wrote in the Globe.
