Fenway Park

by John Powers

  In a 2003 interview with the Globe’s Stan Grossfeld, Buckner acknowledged that all was not forgotten. “I still hear stuff,” he said. “I laugh at it. Sports are for teaching young people to deal with success and failure. The saddest thing is, what are you teaching kids today? That you can’t make a mistake? You make an error and you don’t win, so you say, ‘I don’t want to play.’ That’s not what sports is all about.”

  On Opening Day 2008, after enduring years of hecklers and worse, Buckner came back to Fenway to throw out the first pitch to former teammate Dwight Evans and received an emotional, four-minute ovation.

  “I didn’t think I was going to do it,” said Buckner later. “I told them I’d think about it, but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to come. Then I prayed about it a little, and here I am. Glad I came.”

  Bill Buckner wiped his eyes during the extended ovation he received when he threw out the first pitch to open the 2008 Red Sox home season.

  The hangover continued through the following season as Boston finished 20 games out in fifth place in 1987, posting a losing record (78-84) for only the second time in 21 years. Things had begun trending downward during spring training when both Hurst and Boyd were injured and Clemens held out; the club already was 0-3 when the pennant was hoisted at the home opener. “It made me mad,” said Evans, after the players received rings for winning the American League the previous season. “There should have been ‘World Championship’ on that ring.”

  By early May, the Sox already were sagging badly after dropping eight of 10 on a trip to Texas and the West Coast. Just after mid-month, they were buried in sixth place and never rose above fifth for the rest of the season. “I’m just waiting now for October 4th to get here,” McNamara remarked on September 23. The dismal season wasn’t the manager’s fault, Lou Gorman declared. “There’s no way you can blame him for this year,” the general manager concluded. “I’m sure some people will do it, but I don’t think he’s responsible at all for the kind of season we’ve had.”

  McNamara did get the blame in 1988 when a $6 million palimony suit filed against Wade Boggs by companion Margo Adams made national news and created clubhouse dissension. With the team barely above .500 at the All-Star break, owner Jean Yawkey concluded that McNamara had to go and fired him against the wishes of both Sullivan and Gorman. “We want to try and turn this thing around,” said Gorman. “We’re not saying that John McNamara didn’t do a good job, but the manager is always the scapegoat—fairly or unfairly.”

  Stepping in with just a few hours of notice was Third-Base Coach Joe Morgan, a Walpole, Massachusetts, native who’d managed the PawSox for nine years and was the first local resident to manage the Boston Red Sox since Charlestown-born Shano Collins in 1932. “Communication is important,” he acknowledged during his first day on the job. “You have to talk to players. But if they get out of line, you have to step on ’em.”

  The first to feel Morgan’s tread was the captain. When Rice objected loudly after being pulled for pinch hitter Spike Owen, he and Morgan shouted and scuffled in the dugout and Rice was suspended for three games. “I’m the manager of this nine,” Morgan declared.

  By then the Sox already were up and away on their best run since 1948, a 12-game winning streak that included a six-run comeback over the Royals. “It’s unbelievable, really,” marveled Stanley. “I’m shocked. We’re winning games we were losing before.”

  It was “Morgan Magic,” the press declared, a spell conjured by a plainspoken citizen who channeled the catchphrase, “Six, two and even,” drove a snowplow along the Massachusetts Turnpike during the off-season, and seemed unfazed by a position that had driven some of his predecessors to drink. “There is no pressure, gentlemen,” Morgan declared as his nine ascended the standings, winning 19 of 20. “I had more pressure trying to hit in the big leagues than I do managing.”

  By Labor Day, the Sox were in first place for good and despite dropping six of their final seven games—including 11-1, 15-9, and 1-0 home losses to Toronto—Boston still won the division by a game over Detroit and earned a playoff date with Oakland. Boston had dismissed the Athletics en route to the 1975 World Series, but this edition of the A’s proved to be decidedly more stubborn.

  In the opener at Fenway, Hurst pitched well enough to have won most playoff outings. But Oakland pitcher Rick Honeycutt starved the hosts until old friend Dennis Eckersley entered in the eighth to finish off his former mates, whiffing Boggs on three pitches with two on and two out in the ninth. “We’ve got to come back tomorrow with the hammers of hell,” declared Morgan. That meant Clemens firing ingots from the mound. But the visitors rallied from two runs down on Jose Canseco’s two-run blast in the seventh, nicked Lee Smith for the winner with two out and two strikes in the ninth, and brought in Eckersley again to tie the Sox in knots.

  THE MANIACAL ONE

  “Sometimes the truth hurts,” said Chuck Waseleski with a chuckle when asked about his nickname. “It’s true. I can’t refute it.”

  Waseleski, known as “The Maniacal One” for his devotion to baseball record-keeping, came along before computers and fantasy baseball exploded onto the sports scene, before situational statistics, before obscure but telling numbers became necessary fodder for sports talk shows and play-by-play announcers looking to fill air-time. He provided these statistical insights to Peter Gammons, who began to include them in his nationally recognized Sunday baseball column for the Globe.

  “You hear that so-and-so is a good two-strike hitter,” he said to the Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy in 1987. “I hate that. I want to know how good. Be specific.”

  Maniacal Chuck was born and raised in the village of Millers Falls, Massachusetts, and he went to Turners Falls Regional High, where he was class valedictorian in 1972. Like a lot of New Englanders, he was a casual Red Sox fan until the 1967 Impossible Dream season. “That hooked me for good,” he said.

  In 1982, he began corresponding with Bill James, author of the annual Baseball Abstract. “It was then that I realized there was some demand for this material,” Waseleski recalled. “People would ask, ‘Is Jim Rice a clutch hitter?’”

  Waseleski had the information. He could tell you that “Wade Boggs is hitting .488 (21 for 43) on 1-0 counts this year.” Or, “Ed Romero hit the ball off the left-field wall twice in 1986.” Waseleski has watched and charted every Boston game—every single pitch—since 1983, which happens to be the year Boggs won his first batting title.

  “Oh, yeah,” Boggs told Tampa Tribune columnist Martin Fennelly just before he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005. “He was the guy that would tell everyone how many times I popped up to the infield and kept crazy stats on me, like how many times I swung and missed.”

  Before long, players and their agents were using such numbers to their advantage in salary arbitration cases. Waseleski compiled negotiation files for 30 players after the 1985 season, and for 70 players after the 1986 season.

  In October 2004, when the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918, many people wept. Waseleski typed into his Dell.

  “I can tell you exactly what I wrote when we won it. I have it right here. I wrote that it was a 1-0 count, a fastball, and a ground ball back to the pitcher. It was Keith Foulke’s 14th pitch,” he told Fennelly.

  Maniacal as always.

  The Wave passed by Roger Clemens and Oil Can Boyd, who were focused on other things in the dugout during a 1986 regular-season game.

  Morgan shook up his lineup as the series moved to the Bay Area and Boston grabbed a 5-0 lead in the second inning of Game 3. But Oakland’s bashers quickly pounded Mike Boddicker for six runs and went on to a 10-6 decision that left the visitors on the brink. “We got a game left,” said Boddicker, who’d arrived from Baltimore at the end of July. “We got a bullet left. It hasn’t been done in baseball, but records are broken all the time.”

  Not this time. In the finale, Oakland’s Dave Stewart scattered four runs across six innings and Eckersley c
ame in to complete the sweep by closing out his fourth game. “All we have is some [hats and T-shirts] that say ‘AL East champs,’” Boston’s Todd Benzinger commented once the drubbing was done. “We never really got to enjoy it.”

  Joy remained scarce in 1989 as Boston finished third, a half-dozen games off the pace and with no playoff hopes. The dissolution began in late May, when the club lost six of eight games at Fenway and drifted downward from first place. By far the worst of the defeats—in fact, the biggest collapse in franchise history—was a 13-11 loss to Toronto in which the Sox blew the 10-0 lead they had mounted in six innings. “What a loss,” moaned Morgan, after Ernie Whitt had crushed a grand slam off closer Lee Smith in the ninth and Junior Felix had clouted a two-run shot off Dennis Lamp in the 12th inning of the four-hour-and-36-minute fiasco. “This is the worst defeat of my managerial career in any league or city, hands down.”

  When Boston had climbed back to within one-and-a-half games of the lead in mid-August, the Blue Jays returned to put them out of the race with a sweep. “Is it the president?” someone asked Morgan when the phone rang after the season finale with Milwaukee. “I doubt it,” the skipper said.

  The video scoreboard in center field was removed on October 16, 1987. It was replaced by a version with Diamond Vision technology.

  1990s

  Catcher Mike Macfarlane (15) and outfielder Matt Stairs celebrated a win over Milwaukee that clinched the division title in 1995.

  The decade started with turmoil, and the rumblings of discontent rarely abated throughout the Nineties. Roger Clemens was thrown out of Game 4 of the 1990 American League Championship Series, virtually assuring that the Oakland A’s would sweep the Sox for the second time in three years. After a late-season run the following year, the Red Sox lost 11 of their final 14 games, and put an end to the mini-era of Morgan Magic. The team rushed one of its gritty heroes of the late 1970s, Butch Hobson, into the manager’s seat—a position for which he seemed totally unprepared. Hobson guided the team to a 207-232 record over two-plus seasons and Boston’s first basement finish in 60 years. Hobson was released from duty in 1994—while baseball was out on a work stoppage that would cancel the World Series. Amazingly, attendance at Fenway improved after the strike. That 1995 season brought an unexpected AL East title, and in 1996, attendance improved by another 150,000. In 1997, though they flirted with last place before rallying to finish third, the Sox still averaged more than 27,000 fans per game. As Dan Shaughnessy put it in 1997, “This is Boston. This is Fenway. Fans come for the ballpark and the baseball. Strikes, losing teams, and off-field transgressions don’t matter much here.” By the time the petulant Clemens stomped out of town, bound for Toronto at the end of the 1997 season, he had long since worn out his welcome with many. He was replaced in fans’ hearts first by Mo Vaughn, then by Nomar Garciaparra, and finally by Pedro Martinez, who pitched the Sox to a playoff win over Cleveland. The 1990s and the millennium ended—fittingly, some would say—with an inspiring All-Star Game tribute to the Splendid Splinter, and a playoff defeat to the Yankees.

  Following the 1989 shortfall, there was little reason to believe that Boston would be playing in October of 1990. But when Bill Buckner came back as a spring-training long shot, it seemed a cosmic sign of faith renewed. Buckner received a warm and redemptive Opening Day ovation from the forgiving, if not quite forgetting, Boston fans. Then he legged out an inside-the-park homer against the Angels on his first day in the lineup.

  So it went for the Sox, who beat the Twins, 1-0, in a July game where they hit into two triple plays in five innings after conceding only two in the previous 25 years. Buoyed by magnificent pitching from Roger Clemens and Mike Boddicker, Boston built a lead of more than a half-dozen games by Labor Day. But after Clemens went down with a sore shoulder, the club dropped 10 of 12 and slipped behind the Blue Jays. The season came down to the final day at Fenway, with Boddicker on the mound; Boston needed a victory over the White Sox to avoid a playoff at Toronto, where Clemens already had been dispatched, just in case.

  With the hosts ahead, 3-1, in the ninth and Chicago down to its last strike, champagne was at the ready. But Sammy Sosa singled and Red Sox closer Jeff Reardon plunked Scott Fletcher. Then up stepped future manager Ozzie Guillén to rip a line drive toward the right-field corner. Had it bounced past a diving Tom Brunansky, the game at least would have been tied. “No time to think about what I should do,” said Brunansky, who raced toward the noman’s-land by Pesky’s Pole. “I just had to do it.”

  What resulted was one of the greatest catches in Fenway history, with Brunansky snaring the ball just before sliding into the wall. “Timmy, I’ve got the ball, I’ve got the ball,” he shouted to Tim McClelland, the first-base umpire, one of the few people in the park who had a clear view. “I saw the play,” McClelland said. “He never dropped the ball.”

  Thus did Boston claim the divisional title and earn a rematch with Oakland. “They called us misfits from the North Pole, castoffs,” said Wade Boggs. “We were etched in stone for seventh place. But this team has got heart and desire I’ve never seen before. A heart as big as the Pru.”

  But up against A’s aces Dave Stewart and Bob Welch, the Boston bats were as useless as toothpicks, managing only two runs in the first two games at Fenway. “A beautiful game turned into a horrible evening, didn’t it?” mused manager Joe Morgan after the 9-1 opening loss, when Oakland bashed his bullpen for nine runs—seven in the ninth inning—after Clemens had blanked the visitors for the first six innings.

  Wade Boggs rejoiced after the Red Sox clinched the 1990 East Division title with a victory over the Chicago White Sox.

  The next evening was less horrid, but the 4-1 defeat sent the Sox to the Bay Area in a formidable pickle. “You don’t have to tell ’em too much now,” Morgan said. “They can read that easy enough.” Another 4-1 stumble in Game 3 put Boston on the verge of an early winter and after Clemens was ejected in the second inning of Game 4 for yapping at plate umpire Terry Cooney, his teammates went down by a 3-1 count, swept again and bitterly criticizing their manager.

  “Those things don’t bother me,” Morgan said. “They don’t amount to a row of beans. I’ll tell you this—if a guy is going to manage in Boston, that guy better have some thick skin on his body. We’ve won two out of three years, so we must be doing something right.”

  Boston would not play another playoff game for five seasons. The front office signed Clemens to a five-year contract worth more than $20 million. But before the 1991 season, there were multiple departures (Boddicker, Dwight Evans, Oil Can Boyd, Marty Barrett) and a few notable arrivals (Jack Clark, Danny Darwin, Matt Young). While Clark, acquired from the Padres, made a concussive entrance on Opening Day, clouting a grand slam in a 6-2 decision over Toronto, his new comrades were all but buried by midsummer, falling nine games behind after the Twins swept them by a 33-6 aggregate.

  The Sox made a heroic late run, winning 12 of 14 in August and 17 of 21 in September, and found themselves only a half-game out of the lead on September 21 in the wake of hammering the Yankees, 12-1, at Fenway. “It’s not over yet,” cautioned Clark. “We’re still in second place.” That proved to be the summit for the Sox, who dropped 11 of their final 14 games to tumble out of contention. They came home to Yawkey Way for a somber farewell weekend. “Have a good autumn, a good winter and we’ll have a better year next year,” Morgan promised the fans before the Sunday finale against the Brewers.

  Two days later, Morgan was gone, replaced by Butch Hobson, the Pawtucket skipper and former Sox third baseman the front office feared it would lose without a promotion. Morgan shrugged off his dismissal. “I think they just wanted a change, that’s all,” said the man who’d been the only manager other than Bill Carrigan to direct the Sox to the postseason twice in three years. “If they thought I wasn’t doing the job, they had every right to fire me.”

  Hobson, who’d been in Winter Haven with the instructional team, was startled to learn he’d been upgraded.
“I can’t believe this is happening to me,” he said following his Fenway introduction. “This is the greatest feeling in the world.”

  LIGHTS OUT

  Red Sox outfielder Ellis Burks was standing in the batter’s box, awaiting a 2-2 pitch from Chicago’s Jack McDowell, when Fenway Park did its best imitation of Boston Garden.

  The Garden was where Bruins fans had seen games interrupted by blackouts, fog, and an occasional stray rodent on the ice, and where Celtics fans had seen games suspended by condensation on the court and interrupted by a pigeon on the parquet. But no such incidents interrupted the national pastime at 4 Yawkey Way. At least, not until the blackout of May 13, 1991.

  As the Red Sox were waging a futile battle to erase a 2-0 deficit with two outs in the third, a power outage plunged Fenway Park and its crowd of 31,032 spectators into darkness for 59 minutes.

  When the park went dark at 8:45 p.m., it was as though someone had begun a New Year’s Eve-style countdown. The blackout touched off a raucous ovation and created a rock concert atmosphere, complete with flickering lighters and a battery of flashbulbs.

  The likely cause was a blown manhole cover that cut through a power line and knocked out electricity to several buildings in the area, including Fenway Park.

  Radio station WRKO and cable TV channel NESN lost their broadcasts. Auxiliary power illuminated the seating areas, but the rest of the park remained shrouded in darkness.

  Public address announcer Sherm Feller, in a partially lit press box, played to the fans as though he were doing a vaudeville routine in a dimly lit nightclub. Announcing to the crowd that the power outage was the result of a problem outside the park, Feller cracked, “Boston Edison’s working on it right now. If they send us a bill, we’ll pay it.”