Fenway Park

by John Powers

  He was stricken again on a train trip to Kansas City, and the severe infection was complicated by phlebitis. Just when he appeared to be recovering, he died suddenly of a massive pulmonary embolism at Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge on June 27. He was 26.

  More than 25,000 paid their respects at St. George Greek Orthodox Church in Lynn. Every Greek Orthodox church in North and South America, more than 300 of them, held memorial services, an honor customarily reserved for Greek royalty and statesmen.

  On a fall day in 1991, 36 years on, Agganis’ nephew, George Raimo, visited his grave in Lynn’s Pine Grove Cemetery and found a baseball placed there, with the simple inscription: “In everlasting respect.”

  A crowd gathered on the roof of the post office building overlooking Fenway Park during the 1946 World Series.

  NIGHT BASEBALL DEBUTS AT FENWAY

  The Red Sox played their first night home game on June 13, 1947, before 34,510 fans. And although some ominous signs were noted beforehand—it was played on Friday the 13th, as the opener of a 13-game home stand—it turned out well for Boston. The Globe’s Bob Holbrook reported the next day that the ball club “inaugurated night baseball at Fenway Park in a fashion pleasing to Bostonians as they tipped over the Chicago White Sox, 5-3, before a near-capacity crowd.”

  The Red Sox were the third-to-last of the 16 major-league teams of the time to install lights in their home park, and owner Tom Yawkey was clearly reluctant to do so. As a preview story in the Globe by Hy Hurwitz noted: “No special festivities will accompany the arc-light premiere at Fenway. If not for public demand, Tom Yawkey would never have installed the giant towers over his orchard. Like Walter O. Briggs of Detroit and Phil K. Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs, Yawkey believes that baseball should be played under sunlight.” Indeed, the only ceremony accompanying the first night game was the lowering of the colors at sunset, five minutes before the 8:15 game.

  The Red Sox teams of the era were the franchise’s best in nearly three decades, and in 1947 they were coming off a league championship. Certainly, they didn’t need gimmickry to fill the ballpark. As Hurwitz noted, “Yawkey is strictly in the baseball business. He doesn’t believe in fashion shows, nylon hosiery door prizes and other nonsense. As for fireworks, he hopes they will be provided by Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Rudy York & Co.”

  The Red Sox provided little offensive firepower on opening night, as they scored all five of their runs in the fifth inning on a combination of walks, errors, and infield hits. The Sox and starting pitcher Dave Ferriss held on to win and the Globe story the following day noted, “You couldn’t get breathing space in the park.” It also said that the new lighting system—the brilliance of which “startled the capacity throng”—made it one of the two best-lighted stadiums in the world, equaled only by Yankee Stadium.

  Yet the Sox filched Game 1 at Sportsman’s Park as York deposited one of Howie Pollet’s slow curves into the left-field seats with two out in the 10th inning. “I just shut my eyes and swung,” said York after the 3-2 triumph. And after Harry “The Cat” Brecheen blinded them 3-0 in Game 2, Boston’s Dave “Boo” Ferriss, who’d won 25 games, produced a dazzler of his own in the Fenway opener, which was all but decided in the first inning when York hit a three-run homer to left. “The ball which he hit struck the Cardinals right over the heart although it lodged in the fish nets many yards away,” Nason wrote in the Globe.

  Never had the citizenry been quite so febrile about Yawkey’s paid performers. Nearly a half-million fans applied for Series tickets and hundreds of them jammed the Hotel Kenmore lobby. When standing room tickets went on sale, fans mobbed the ticket windows, nearly creating a riot.

  The Cardinals, though, were unwilling to collaborate in the entertainment and they battered Boston in Game 4, matching the Series record of 20 hits set by the 1921 Giants in a 12-3 shelling. “I’d much rather lose a game 12 to 3 than 2 to 1 or 3 to 2,” shrugged Williams, whose mates Globe columnist Nason said had played like married men at a church picnic. “We just had our ears pinned back.”

  Joe Dobson righted things in Game 5 with his “atom pitch,” an explosive curve that all but vaporized the Cardinals and staked the Sox to a 6-3 victory, sending them back to Missouri with two chances to win the championship. But Brecheen confounded Boston again in Game 6 as St. Louis knocked out Sox starter Mickey Harris early. “Well, the Cat not only skinned us again, but this time he feasted on our flesh and scratched on our bones,” Williams conceded in the Globe.

  So for the first time since 1912, the Sox were pushed to the limit in the Series. After falling behind by two runs in the fifth inning of Game 7, Ferriss was sent to the showers. Boston drew even in the eighth when DiMaggio doubled home two men. But when he twisted an ankle rounding the bag, it proved a most costly misstep. Leon Culberson replaced him in center field. With Enos Slaughter on first base and two out, Culberson didn’t see DiMaggio motioning from the dugout for him to move more to the left.

  TEN MEN OUT

  For once, someone else stole the spotlight with Ted Williams at the plate.

  During a game at Fenway with the Cleveland Indians on August 26, 1946, Lou Boudreau, the Indians player-manager, employed his typical Williams Shift, moving the shortstop into short right field and the third baseman to second base. The Indians’ Pat Seerey, who stood in short left field, was their only player on the left side of the diamond.

  Suddenly, a midget jumped out of a box near the visitors’ dugout and walked onto the field. The man, who was later identified as Marco Songini, a vaudeville performer, picked up the glove that had been left on the field by Red Sox third baseman Mike “Pinky” Higgins and took a fielder’s stance, pounding the glove for effect. It was customary for fielders of that time to leave their gloves on the field between innings. It wasn’t until 1954 that the practice was banned.

  The players, umpires, and the 28,082 fans in the park that day stared in disbelief, and then began to laugh. The laughs continued when Songini was eventually ordered off the field. He got a boost over the infield fence by Buster Mills, an Indians coach, and then climbed atop the visiting dugout and struck a fighting pose before the game continued.

  The headline in the next day’s Globe read, “What Next at Fenway? Midget Plays Third, Indians Lose Anyway.” The Red Sox won, 5-1, and as Gerry Moore’s story noted: “Although a 10th man in the form of a dwarf-sized character tried to assist them by playing third base, Cleveland’s Indians couldn’t escape mathematical elimination from the American League pennant race.”

  Later in the game, Cleveland pitcher Bob Lemon and shortstop Boudreau combined to pick Williams off second base. Williams was so upset with himself that he kicked his glove all the way out to left field to start the next inning. Moore noted that, “The victory, the 10th man, and Ted’s being picked off second seemed to satisfy the clients.”

  “I believe that these temples are our secular cathedrals and they tell us as much about what we care about as anything in our environment.”

  —Ken Burns, filmmaker

  In August 1946, Red Sox fans’ thirst was quenched by root beer, and by their team’s pennant run.

  One happy Boston fan scored World Series tickets, while another wrote the local newspaper to complain that many would not be as fortunate.

  SAME OLD STORY

  Letter to the editor [of the Boston Globe], August 27, 1946:

  As a Red Sox fan of the last 25 years, I should like to make a suggestion now for sale of tickets to the forthcoming World Series.

  Preliminary inquiries seem to indicate that only by luck, going to the ticket scalpers, or knowing someone who knows someone will the average fan be able to get a ticket to even one game.

  So-called celebrities from Hollywood and New York will occupy seats that rightly belong to Boston fans.

  Wouldn’t it be fair to let Boston followers have first chance at available seats, even if it takes personal interviews with Eddie Collins and Mr. Yawkey?

  —James Detrich, Brighto
n

  FOWL PLAY

  BY HAROLD KAESE

  August 4, 1947—The Red Sox are really in a bad way. Not only did the Tigers claw them, 10-3, yesterday, but fans no longer bothered to ask, “What’s the matter with the Red Sox?”

  Instead they wanted to know, “What’s the matter with the pigeon?”

  Baseball indeed plunged to a new low at Fenway Park yesterday. The bird, identified as Parsley P. Pigeon, parked, perched, or roosted himself on the screen’s western edge about 20 feet above the backstop. He remained there somewhat longer than three hours, turning this way and that, now and then fluttering his wings, but giving no great display of worry or anguish.

  The major mystery was, how could he stand it? How could he sit there enduring such a tedious game when blue skies and green fields beckoned? Obviously, he was not a homer. He was stuck, a foot or toe caught in the wire mesh. Either that or he was a Detroit pigeon and was enjoying himself heartily.

  Less than 15 minutes after game’s end, a tall ladder was set up against the screen by Fenway Park’s Ladder Company No. 4. No sooner had an MSPCA agent started climbing the ladder when Parsley flew away, briskly in the direction of South Williamsburg.

  Fans calling up sports departments that evening asked first, “How did the pigeon make out?” and then, “What about the Red Sox?”

  According to one press box worker, Parsley was not stuck at all. “He’s just a lazy lout, that’s all. I’ve seen him before sit all afternoon on that screen, even when there wasn’t a game to watch.”

  A little boy with his mother was overheard to say, “Maybe he’s going to build a nest, mama, and lay an egg.”

  That probably wasn’t Parsley’s intention at all. He knew that his wouldn’t be the first egg laid at Fenway this season. Not the biggest. Nor the last.

  Quoth the pigeon: “Bobby Doerr.”

  When Culberson had to chase Harry Walker’s looping liner, Slaughter took off on a mad dash around the bases. Culberson’s throw to Pesky was weak enough (“He threw me a lollipop,” the shortstop said decades later) that Slaughter decided to risk going all the way. “All I kept seeing was the World Series ring on my hand,” he said. How long Pesky held the ball has been barstool debate fodder ever since. The Globe’s Nason said that Pesky “froze momentarily” and Pesky readily took responsibility. “I’m the goat,” he said. “It’s my fault. I’m to blame. I had the ball in my hand. I hesitated and gave Slaughter six steps. When I saw him, I couldn’t have thrown him out with a .22.”

  After Brecheen shut down Boston in the ninth for his third victory of the Series, he was borne aloft by his triumphant birds of a feather. The Sox dressed quietly in their clubhouse. “We lost to a great team,” concluded Cronin. But Williams, who wept in the shower and sat staring into his locker for a half hour, was inconsolable after hitting .200 for the Series. Boston Mayor James Michael Curley canceled his planned welcome-home reception for the club. “I guess the boys just simply aren’t in the mood for a reception, anyway,” he said. The railroad ride back to the Back Bay was somber. “This wasn’t just an ordinary train,” Harold Kaese observed in the Globe. “It was the Red Sox Special. It was a shield, bringing back to Boston a Red Sox corpse.”

  The renaissance in 1947 came from the Yankees, who hadn’t won the pennant in four years and came out of the war disorganized and distracted, going through three managers in 1946 and finishing 17 games behind Boston in third place. Though the Sox were in second for most of the season, they dropped eight of nine games to fall eight games back on Independence Day and never were in contention again. With Ferriss, Hughson, and Harris all ruined by arm problems (they combined to win just 20 games), the rotation came apart and even Williams’s Triple Crown season (.343, with 32 homers and 114 RBI) couldn’t keep the Sox in contention.

  As it was, early in the season Yawkey had come close to trading Williams to New York for Joe DiMaggio, which would have been the biggest one-for-one blockbuster in baseball history. But Boston also wanted catcher Yogi Berra, so Yankees owner Dan Topping nixed the swap. Yawkey did acquire a former Yankee icon, though, when he hired Joe McCarthy at the end of the season to succeed Cronin, who replaced Eddie Collins as general manager.

  Workmen made sure everyone knew that Fenway would be host to Game 4 of the 1946 World Series.

  “I’m going up with the real Irish now,” cracked McCarthy, who’d resigned from the Yankees for health reasons in May of 1946. McCarthy was 60 years old, but his résumé was top-drawer—nine pennants and seven Series championships with the Yankees and Cubs. “Now the Red Sox have as their manager a man who converses with gremlins,” observed Kaese, “instead of one who converses merely with knives and forks.”

  So the front office soon made a deal with the St. Louis Browns, whose mascot resembled a gremlin, and brought in starting pitchers Jack Kramer and Ellis Kinder and shortstop Vern Stephens for cash and scrubs. Kramer and Kinder won 28 games between them in 1948, and Stephens led the club with 29 homers. Yet it wasn’t until after Memorial Day, when they were in seventh place and nearly a dozen games out, that the Sox came alive, winning 15 of 16 at Fenway in late July to move into first. “It took the Red Sox 98 days of the season to chin themselves into first place,” Kaese observed. “They have 70 left in which to elevate the rest of the body.”

  Boston wound up in an enthralling pennant chase that came down to the final weekend with three teams in contention. The Indians, who were two games up with four to play, had the edge and the Sox needed to beat the Yankees twice at Fenway to force a playoff. “Nevertheless, if you can manipulate an Oriental abacus, you can still juggle the little wooden pegs and come out with a Red Sox victory,” Hy Hurwitz calculated in the Globe.

  The Sox took care of one variable on Saturday when Williams, who’d been bothered by a head cold and had hit only one homer in six weeks, crushed a two-run shot in the first inning, spurring his mates to a 5-1 triumph and eliminating New York from the pennant chase. Then, as the Tigers were rocking ace Bob Feller en route to a 7-1 decision at Cleveland on Sunday, DiMaggio and Stephens each hit homers to rally the Sox to a 10-5 victory over the Yankees and set up the first pennant playoff in American League history—a single elimination game against the Indians at Fenway the following day, October 4.

  “We were counted out in the spring,” remarked McCarthy, as thousands of fans were mobbing the ticket windows for reserved seats and thousands more were lining up overnight for bleacher spots. “We were counted out as late as last Wednesday. But those players never gave up.”

  The speculation was that Kinder, the most rested Sox starter, would face Cleveland’s Bob Lemon for the pennant. But Boudreau opted for left-hander Gene Bearden, a 20-game winner. Bearden would be pitching after just one day of rest, but his knuckleball was unhittable when it was behaving for him. McCarthy not only skipped over Kinder, he also bypassed Mel Parnell, who’d won 15 games and had the staff’s best ERA at home. Parnell was a southpaw and a rookie, which McCarthy concluded was a dangerous combination at Fenway with the pennant on the line and the wind blowing to left field. “Sorry, kid, it’s not a day for left-handers,” the manager told him. McCarthy instead went with a most unlikely starter in right-hander Denny Galehouse, a 36-year-old journeyman who had pitched only once since September 18.

  Baffled, Boudreau had someone check to make sure McCarthy wasn’t warming up his real starter beneath the stands. Galehouse served up two homers, a solo shot by Boudreau and a three-run blast by Ken Keltner, while the knuckleballer Bearden bollixed the Boston hitters, allowing only five hits as Cleveland won, 8-3. “It’s pretty tough when you know what’s coming and still can’t hit it,” said DiMaggio.

  Instead of the Sox facing the Boston Braves in the first Streetcar Series in the city’s history, the Indians went on to win their first championship since 1920, and Galehouse, who pitched only two more innings in his career, became a synonym for Sox failure for more than a half-century.

  It didn’t seem possible that the Sox
could lose a pennant in a more wrenching fashion, but they did just that in 1949. Once again, they staged a second-half surge. Once again, they played with the pennant on the line in the season’s final weekend against the Yankees.

  That had seemed unlikely at the end of June when Joe DiMaggio, who’d been sidelined all season after heel surgery, swept Boston all by himself at Fenway in what he called the greatest series of his career. He hit a two-run homer and snagged Williams’s long ball for the final out in a 5-4 victory in the Tuesday opener. He lifted up his pinstriped colleagues from a six-run hole with a three-run shot, and then hit another two-run homer in the eighth for a 9-7 revival on Wednesday. Then in the Thursday wrap-up game, DiMaggio hit a monster three-run blast off the left-field light tower in a 6-3 conclusion that brought a standing ovation from Sox fans who’d always claimed that Dom was the better DiMaggio. “You swing the bat and hit the ball,” Joe explained after he’d scored five runs, knocked in nine more and batted .455 for the series.

  In April 1947, the pennant was hoisted at Fenway by (from left) MLB president Will Harridge, Red Sox manager Joe Cronin, and Ossie Bluege, manager of the Washington Senators.

  After dropping a doubleheader in the Bronx on Independence Day, Boston seemed all but finished, sitting 12 games behind in fifth place. But the Sox went 42-13 in August and September to come storming back into contention. The season turned when the Sox won two pivotal games at Fenway to draw even with the Yankees. They took the first on Williams’s 42nd homer, a 410-foot launch into the right-field stands, and a daring dash by Al Zarilla, who scored from second after catcher Yogi Berra bounced a throw to first trying for a double play.