Fenway Park

by John Powers

  The Fenway power outage was not unprecedented, though the previous one had gone relatively unnoticed by fans. “It was a weekday day game back in April 1981,” said Josh Spofford, Red Sox director of publicity. “We didn’t have any power the whole game. It was back when we were in the press box that was closer to the field, and Sherm led the crowd in the anthem a cappella and did the lineups with a bullhorn.”

  Players and spectators killed time batting beach balls during the Fenway blackout of May 13, 1991.

  SOX CARETAKER

  When Jean Yawkey died in 1992, John Harrington was entrusted to run the Red Sox. Harrington said that his goal was quite simple. “I just want to honor Jean’s generous legacy—and prove myself worthy of that trust.”

  Harrington grew up in Boston and graduated from Boston College. While working as an accounting professor at BC, he was hired by Joe Cronin, president of the American League, to be the league’s controller in 1970. From there, he was hired by Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey to be the team’s treasurer. He eventually returned to the Red Sox in the mid-1980s and became an important adviser to Mrs. Yawkey.

  After Mrs. Yawkey died, most observers expected that minority owner Haywood Sullivan, a former Red Sox player and executive, would buy out the Yawkey trust’s majority share of the team. Instead, Harrington, acting on behalf of the trust, bought out Sullivan’s general partnership stake in late 1993.

  Sullivan talked about the relationship between Harrington and Mrs. Yawkey. “As the years passed, he became a kind of surrogate son. Certainly she depended on him more and more . . . and when he talked, you knew he was speaking for Jean.”

  Harrington reveled in his role as Red Sox CEO, jesting that “every kid under 12 wants to be Nomar or Pedro, and every kid over 40 wants my job.” He acted as the chief negotiator for MLB owners during the 1994-95 strike, and he helped guide baseball’s divisional realignment to accommodate the wild-card playoff format in 1995. But in 2000—with the team in good financial and competitive shape, and state lawmakers apparently poised to approve funding for Harrington’s new ballpark project—he decided to sell the team on behalf of the trust. It was time to say good-bye.

  “It was the right time for the team and the trust, and I knew I had to sell,” Harrington said.

  But what had seemed a dream to the new manager, who brought back his old skipper Don Zimmer as third-base coach, turned into a summer nightmare in 1992 as the Sox went into a June swoon on the road, falling 9½ games out on the way to their first cellar finish since 1932, the year before Tom Yawkey bought the franchise. “This team isn’t as good as people think,” Morgan had declared on his way out the door.

  With no .300 hitters and Clemens as their only dominant starter, the 1992 Red Sox lost 89 games—the most the franchise had dropped in a single season since 1966—and finished 23 games behind Toronto. It was a rude awakening for Hobson, who had never experienced a losing season as a player. “Maybe I was a little in awe of managing Wade Boggs or having Roger Clemens on my pitching staff,” he said. “That hasn’t sunk in with me.” It was an unsettling year for the franchise, which was thrown into transition when Tom Yawkey’s widow, Jean, died in February of complications from a stroke. John Harrington, Yawkey’s longtime confidant, stayed on as president of JRY Corp., which owned the Sox.

  After another underwhelming campaign in 1993, when the Sox finished 15 games out in fifth place, Harrington shook up both the clubhouse and the front office. Gone after 11 years and more than 2,000 hits was Boggs, who departed for the Bronx. So was Ellis Burks, who changed red stockings for white.

  During the autumn, Harrington bought out Haywood Sullivan’s interest in the franchise. He moved General Manager Lou Gorman to executive director for baseball operations and brought in Dan Duquette from the Expos as GM. The 35-year-old Duquette, a lifelong Boston fan from Dalton, Massachusetts who’d made the most of a shoestring budget in Montreal, arrived with a five-year mandate to make the club better by going both cheaper and younger, and to revamp a clubhouse that had 15 men who were 30 or older. “We’re going to renew the roster with new life,” Duquette vowed during spring training. By August, the Sox had suited up 46 players, half of them pitchers.

  But the 1994 season was a lost cause by then. A 12-game home losing streak in June had mired Boston in third place, 10½ games behind. The breaking point came in a 10-4 home loss to New York during which Hobson had a meltdown and was ejected. He was later suspended five games for arguing with plate umpire Greg Kosc and bumping crew chief Larry Barnett after pitcher Sergio Valdez had been warned for throwing behind a Yankee batter. “There is a rage inside the guy [Hobson] that a lot of people don’t know about,” commented slugger Mo Vaughn. “If it goes, it goes. Behind this big job of being a Red Sox manager is a man.”

  On July 22, when his club returned to Boston 13 games behind after having been swept in Anaheim, Hobson passed out towels to his battered ballplayers. “I ain’t throwing mine in,” he told them. “Don’t throw yours in.”

  Three weeks later, the towel was tossed in for baseball itself as the players went on strike for the first time since 1985. “See you at the Patriots games,” Vaughn told sportswriters after the finale at Baltimore had been washed out. The 54-61 record represented Boston’s third straight losing season, its worst stretch since 1966, and it marked the end for Hobson, who was summoned from his Alabama home to be dismissed in September.

  “I believed in my heart that this day would never happen,” said Hobson, who later resurfaced as a scout and minor-league manager in Sarasota. “I’m not going to burn any bridges. When new faces come in, they want to bring in new faces. I know that.” The new face belonged to mustachioed Kevin Kennedy, who’d been Montreal’s minor league field coordinator and bench coach during Duquette’s time there and had just been fired by the Rangers. “This is the first and only place I wanted to be,” said Kennedy, who’d called Duquette as soon as Texas let him go.

  An unprecedented winter of discontent followed the first canceled World Series, with the labor dispute remaining unsettled until March of 1995. It was unclear how the players would be received by fans when they took the diamond on April 26 for Opening Day.

  Knowing the importance of public relations, new Sox slugger Jose Canseco, who’d been acquired from the Rangers in December, was outside Fenway by 8 a.m., meeting and greeting ticket holders. “We can’t forget what really counts,” said his Sox teammate Mike Greenwell, who signed autographs for an hour after batting practice. “It’s the fans.”

  Dan Duquette, a native of Dalton, Massachusetts, achieved his childhood dream of running the Red Sox in 1994. And though the Sox made back-to-back playoff appearances for the first time in more than 80 years on his watch, Duquette’s eight seasons as general manager were ultimately more tumultuous than triumphant. Duquette was considered one of baseball’s brightest young executives when then-CEO John Harrington hired him away from Montreal as the Sox GM. Though he showed some flashes of brilliance, he was fired in March 2002 when the team’s new ownership group led by John Henry decided they wanted their own man. “I’ve never had a bad day at Fenway Park,” Duquette said after his ouster.

  A youngster had nowhere to go but down after making a lunge for a foul ball in a game at Fenway Park against the Chicago White Sox on April 29, 1995.

  Mo Vaughn led cheers as he rode a Boston Police horse, and manager Kevin Kennedy got a ride from players Mike Macfarlane and Tim Wakefield, after the Red Sox clinched the AL East title on September 20, 1995.

  And Sox fans seemed forgiving once their team had crushed Minnesota, 9-0.

  The rebuilt and rededicated club took over first place on May 13 and stayed there for the rest of the season. Duquette, who’d reworked the roster (only three of the original 1994 starters were still in the lineup), kept tinkering, with 53 players (26 of them pitchers) suiting up by season’s end.

  Boston ran away with the AL East, winning the divisional title for the first time since 1990 and clinching at h
ome on September 20 with a 3-2 victory over Milwaukee. For their triumphal procession around the premises, the players mounted police horses—even Vaughn, their resident Clydesdale. “Everyone got on the horse and so I had to get on the horse,” Vaughn said, after John Harrington admitted that he was more worried about the horse than about his top slugger. “That’s the way this team is.”

  The Sox were quickly unhorsed, however, in the playoffs by the Indians, who’d posted the league’s best regular-season record with 100 victories. The 5-4 loss in the 13-inning opener at Jacobs Field was doubly hard to take since the Sox led, 2-0, and then 4-3, in the 11th—and since Tony Pena, their former catcher, clouted the winning homer off Zane Smith with two out. After Orel Hershiser blanked the Sox, 4-0, in Game 2, the season came down to what knuckle-baller Tim Wakefield, who’d won 16 games after being picked up from Pittsburgh, could do with his notoriously unpredictable pitch.

  The visitors were so confident they would finish off the Sox that they checked out of their hotel before the game. They then tagged Wakefield for seven runs in six innings, completing the sweep with an 8-2 triumph while extending Boston’s postseason losing streak to an unlucky 13. “Sometimes I wish I could throw a hundred miles an hour like Randy Johnson,” said Wakefield. Still, there was no disgrace in losing to a Cleveland club that went on to play in the World Series for the first time since 1954. “There are no excuses to be made for this series,” reasoned Kennedy. “We lost, they won, and we’ll be back.”

  But it was the Yankees who were back in 1996, winning their first World Series since 1978. The Sox finished in the middle of the pack after pretty much dooming themselves by losing 19 of their first 25 games, and then falling 17 games behind in early July. Despite posting the best record in baseball over the final two months, Boston ended up in third place. Taking three of four from New York on the final weekend in Fenway provided a small bit of consolation. “It was emotional,” said Kennedy after the Sox had won the finale by a 6-5 count, and then packed their bags for the winter. “Maybe it wasn’t the intensity of winning a World Series game, but it was one we wanted.”

  TED AND JIMMY TOUCH BASE

  He had been a symbol and a secret for a half-century, a New England icon frozen in time, representing all children with cancer. Then, in 1998, the Jimmy Fund logo came to life when Carl Einar Gustafson of New Sweden, Maine, revealed that he was the true “Jimmy.” On July 9, 1999, in a thrill for both of them, he met Ted Williams, the Jimmy Fund’s all-time biggest booster.

  Anyone born in New England in the past 50 years knows of this charity dedicated to eradicating cancer in children. In 1948, Gustafson was chosen by Dr. Sidney Farber, the godfather of modern chemotherapy, to represent stricken kids everywhere on a national radio broadcast. They called him “Jimmy” to protect his privacy. The show was a hit, and the Jimmy Fund was launched.

  As decades passed and treatments progressed, there was less curiosity about what happened to the original Jimmy. It made sense to assume that the child had died—as did almost all cancer patients of that era. A Maine man to the core, Gustafson never bothered to call attention to his role. “In my day, we were taught to keep things quiet,” he explained. “There really was nothing to say about it. That was bragging.”

  In 1997, a year before the 50th anniversary of the fund’s launch, Gustafson’s sister sent a letter to Mike Andrews, the fund’s executive director, explaining that her brother was alive and well. “We’d had a lot of leads like this before,” said Andrews, who temporarily set aside the letter. “They were like Elvis sightings.” An investigation based on hospital records and Gustafson’s correspondence with Farber finally convinced Andrews that Gustafson was the real “Jimmy.”

  Williams finally met Gustafson when he visited Boston for the All-Star Weekend in 1999. They met at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and visited with dozens of patients—people who had a better chance of survival, in part, because of Williams’s tireless efforts, in concert with an army of doctors, nurses, technicians, administrators, and fund-raisers.

  “How are you, Jimmy baby?” Williams asked as Gustafson greeted him. “This is the biggest thrill of my trip, right here! Jeez, you look great! You’re an inspiration to everybody!”

  Gustafson appeared at numerous functions and recorded public service announcements for the Jimmy Fund. His story was featured in People magazine and Sports Illustrated. As for meeting Williams, he said, “I can’t tell you how proud I feel to have met him.”

  Gustafson died in 2001 at age 65 after suffering a stroke.

  “After 50 years, to find out he was alive was a miracle,” said Andrews. “Then he turned out to be the most wonderful man. If we had tried to create a Jimmy, we couldn’t have done better. And he was just thrilled to be part of it.”

  “Guys like George Will and Bob Costas come in and want to romanticize Fenway Park. But how many times have they had to sit in Section 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? You sit in sections 6, 7, 8, or 9, you could get a crick in your neck from having to turn to the left all the time; you’re looking straight at center field.”

  —Ted Sarandis, Boston radio talk-show host

  On Opening Day in 1995, the woman at the center paid a scalper $50 for this obstructed-view seat behind home plate. Today, that would be called a steal.

  The Fenway outfield, where the bullpens are located, has always offered a spectacular view of the park.

  A day later, Kennedy was gone for good, dismissed by Duquette after taking the fall for his club’s wayward start and its perceived lack of cohesiveness. “It hurts,” said Kennedy, whose players were startled by his firing. “I love what I do and I poured everything I had into it. You can ask the players how much I cared and how much they wanted to do well for me.” By the time successor Jimy Williams arrived, Clemens had filed for free agency and then was gone in December, off to Toronto for what was then the richest contract ($31 million over four years) in baseball history.

  When Clemens returned as a Blue Jay on July 12, 1997, after having once vowed that he’d never appear at Fenway in another team’s uniform, he received a decidedly mixed reaction as he strolled out to warm up. Then he blinded his former mates, striking out 16 of them in an overpowering performance that had his former supporters chanting “Roger, Ro-ger.” “He came to make a point and he did,” conceded Vaughn, who whiffed three times.

  Clemens—who had been characterized by Duquette upon his departure from the Sox as being in the “twilight of his career”—was jubilant.

  “It was a special day, a beautiful day,” said the Rocket, who went on to win the Cy Young Award as the league’s best pitcher. The Sox, who were 17 games out and buried in last place that day, ended up fourth despite having a quintet of .300 hitters, including rookie shortstop Nomar Garciaparra.

  The club clearly needed a pitching infusion and Duquette made a trade with his old club for ace Pedro Martinez, who signed a new contract with Boston for six years and $75 million. Martinez won 19 games in his first season in Boston, but it was Vaughn’s bat that set the tone for 1998 with a mighty grand slam that brought his team back from the dead after thousands of discouraged fans had left the premises on Opening Day. “It felt like the World Series,” noted winning pitcher Rich Garcés after the Sox had come from five runs down in the ninth to win, 9-7.

  Vaughn, who’d squabbled with management over his salary during the off-season, became a fan favorite with his game-ending shot off Paul Spoljaric. “Sign Mo Now!” fans chanted as he circled the bases. By early May, the club already had come from behind seven times to win in the final inning.

  MO’S PUZZLING DEPARTURE

  For six seasons, Maurice Samuel “Mo” Vaughn, a native of Norwalk, Connecticut, was the heart and soul of the Red Sox. He twice led the team into the postseason, won an MVP Award and made three All-Star teams. He hit 230 home runs and drove in 752 runs in his tenure with the Sox, and in 1998, the “Hit Dog”—as he came to be known—had a career-best .337 batting average.

  Bu
t following that 1998 season, Mo was gone, signed away by the Anaheim Angels as the Red Sox made a late, low-ball counteroffer that they had to know would virtually guarantee his departure.

  Vaughn’s souring relationship with Sox management had caused it to look past his good work on and off the field.

  Mo’s supporters included the Globe’s Bob Ryan, who wrote in July 1998 as the “Should they re-sign Mo?” debate was raging: “Here was a star player—a star player of color, on top of that—who was reflecting glory on the organization because he really was a man in, and of, the community. Central casting couldn’t have shipped over a better player to the Red Sox. And now Mo is the bad guy? Don’t believe it.”

  For a long time, Ryan noted, the Sox were eager to tout Vaughn’s standing in Boston and his tireless work with youngsters.

  But Vaughn also had gotten into a fight outside a Boston nightclub, and in 1998 he crashed his truck on the way home from a Rhode Island strip club and was arrested for failing field sobriety tests. (He was later tried and found not guilty of drunken driving.) These incidents, along with concerns about Vaughn’s weight, created a growing chorus of Mo detractors.

  As the 1998 season went on, his relationship with Sox management deteriorated, and his decision was made for him by the Angels when they made him baseball’s highest-paid player at the time with an $80-million deal.

  And though Mo appeared to be on the fast track to Cooperstown when he left the Sox, in the five succeeding seasons, he played just 466 games for the Angels and Mets before injuries forced him to retire.

  Still, Vaughn later insisted he had no regrets. “It was just time to move on,” he said. “If I had stayed in Boston, I would have retired as an angry player, and that’s wrong, because I love this game.”