Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  The dour-looking young Speaker was as raw and tough as the leather of a new baseball mitt. He could run but not yet hit. After a brief appearance for Boston near the end of the 1907 season, at age nineteen, when he played tentatively and seemed overwhelmed by both the competition and the city, he was released.

  His career could have been finished, but nothing stuck in Speaker's craw more than failure. In the off-season he tried to latch on to another club, but no one wanted him. He even showed up at the New York Giants' camp in Marlin, Texas, in the spring of 1908, but was rebuffed by manager John McGraw.

  That didn't stop him, for behind Speaker's dour countenance was a true Texan, a man who felt it was his duty, if not his birthright, to succeed. Refusing to accept the end of his career, Speaker boldly showed up at Boston's spring training headquarters in Hot Springs, Arkansas, without an invitation. Even though he wasn't under contract, the Red Sox let him work out with the club and at the end of spring training found a use for him. They essentially used Speaker to settle their debt to the Little Rock team for allowing the Sox to use their ballpark, paying the rent by handing them Speaker. When Speaker flourished later that year, the Little Rock owner graciously allowed the Red Sox to reclaim the player they hadn't wanted a few seasons before.

  Speaker, however, never forgot his shabby treatment in 1907 and used the release as motivation in 1908. When he returned to Boston he was a changed man, both on and off the field. He was now deadly certain of his ability, aggressive in the outfield and at the plate and on the bases, and intimidated no more. In 1909 he earned a starting berth in Boston's outfield, hitting .309, and over the next two years demonstrated all five baseball tools—the ability to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power in an era when doubles and triples mattered more than home runs. Success only increased his swagger, although even teammates who did not particularly like him personally, like outfielder Duffy Lewis, respected him. Lewis called Speaker "the king of the outfield." By the end of the 1911 season Speaker, twenty-three years old and a muscular 5'11", was on the cusp of greatness. Those who had doubted him a few years before now didn't dare touch the chip on his shoulder.

  Another outfielder arrived by a similarly circuitous route. John I. Taylor was married to Cornelia Van Ness of San Francisco, and while visiting relatives in California after the 1908 season he met with Charlie Graham, manager of minor league Sacramento. Graham convinced him to take a chance on young Harry Hooper, a California State League outfielder whom people were comparing favorably to Ty Cobb. That was mostly hype, for Hooper shared neither the Detroit outfielder's abrasive personality nor his monumental talent, but Hooper was still a skilled player, with a superb arm, good speed, and an occasionally potent bat, a table-setter and defensive whiz, the perfect complementary player, and one of the few Red Sox players who got along with almost everyone. While it would not have been possible to win a championship with a team of Harry Hoopers, it was impossible to win without a player like Harry Hooper.

  He was a recent graduate of St. Mary's College with a degree in engineering, had a good job with the railroad, and didn't necessarily need to play baseball. Taylor, who was already thinking of replacing the Huntington Avenue Grounds, helped entice Hooper to sign with the Red Sox in exchange for $2,800—more than his salary with the railroad—and the vague promise of an off-season engineering job working on the plans for a new ballpark. Hooper did the math, signed a contract, and made his Red Sox debut in 1909, one of only a handful of major leaguers at the time from the West Coast.

  The Red Sox had also recently signed another player from the West—Kansas native Joe Wood, who despite going only 7-12 for Kansas City in 1908 had gotten the attention of big league scouts with an impressive performance in an exhibition game he pitched for Kansas City against Washington. And after the 1909 season, during another trip west, Taylor signed a second St. Mary's product, outfielder Duffy Lewis. Pitcher Charley "Sea Lion" Hall, although not originally signed by the Red Sox, was also from California. In fact, his family came from Mexico and his real name was Carlos Luis Clolo, a fact he wisely kept to himself in light of the intolerance of the era.

  By 1911 the addition of these players had changed the face of the organization, which until then had been largely representative of New England. Catcher Bill "Rough" Carrigan was a native of Maine and a graduate of Holy Cross College; a favorite of local fans, he was a man equally comfortable at Mass or in a sidewalk brawl. Pitcher Ray Collins had been raised in Vermont and was a direct descendant of William Bradford, the second governor of Plymouth Colony. He was so proud of his heritage that when asked his nationality on a survey by Baseball magazine he proudly identified himself as "Yankee." Infielder Larry Gardner was born on a dairy farm in Vermont, and first baseman Hugh Bradley was a native of Worcester, Massachusetts. Together, these New Englanders and their western teammates formed much of the core of what would soon become a championship club.

  But this was 1911, not 1912. Despite the presence of some bona fide stars like Speaker, who rapidly became one of the best players in the game and, with Hooper and Lewis, part of the best young outfield in baseball, there were reasons why the team had yet to gel and entered September fighting to play .500 baseball.

  Those reasons had little to do with talent and everything to do with personality and prejudice. The team did not mesh. The club was a minefield of cliques and alliances that divided the squad by age, geography, heritage, and, most notably, religion.

  Carrigan led one faction made up of mostly Catholic, older, eastern, and New England–born players, a group the press referred to as "the KCs," in reference to the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus. The insurgents, known collectively as "the Masons," included the younger, Protestant players primarily from the South and the West.

  The Masons were led by Tris Speaker and Joe Wood. The two young players had become fast friends as soon as they met. They shared a similar background, had strong personalities, carried themselves with the cocksure arrogance of youth, and were clearly the most talented of the younger Red Sox. One rarely saw one without the other, for each had been the subject of some hazing when they first joined the club. While Speaker had been warmly welcomed by veterans like Cy Young and Lou Criger when he first joined the Sox, many other veterans treated the rookie with the traditional disdain and probably found him easy to mock—compared to his eastern teammates, Speaker, although nominally a college man, lacked sophistication and spoke with a pronounced Texas drawl that his older teammates found hilarious.

  Wood had it even tougher. It was widely known that Wood had begun his professional career playing for a barnstorming "Bloomer Girls" team, a club of mostly men in drag, which made the slender, finely featured pitcher an easy target of barbs and teasing. He was thin-skinned and quick to anger and did not shrug off such slights easily. He had, wrote one reporter delicately, only a "fairly cool head."

  In fact, when Wood arrived in Boston in July 1908 after beginning the season with Kansas City in the American Association, his reputation for arrogance nearly matched his reputation on the mound. He knew he was good, and before he had ever won a game in the big leagues he was acting as if he had already won a hundred. He reacted to the hazing and ribbing of veteran players with defiance. "Too much boosting," wrote one reporter, "has had a bad effect on the youngster." Much of his attitude was an act that masked his insecurity, but it made him a target of club veterans, some of whom were already jealous of his talent on the field and his popularity among the young ladies who sat in the stands. Just a glance from the boyish Wood was enough to make a local maiden swoon.

  Although Wood was bright and would later serve as baseball coach at Yale University, as a young man he was hardly an Ivy Leaguer. His father was an attorney with a marked sense of adventure, a man who had dragged his family all over the country and who had even taken a turn as an Alaskan prospector. Wood, who had grown up primarily in western Kansas and Colorado, was himself very much a man of the Wild West. He refused
to take crap from anyone and already had his own ideas about the world. He was suspicious of easterners in general, had little regard for Catholics—unless they were female—and, like many white men of his time, got a kick out of treating African Americans poorly. Even among players of the era, many of whom shared the same ideals, Wood stood out for his cruelty. Veteran sportswriter Hugh Fullerton observed that Wood "talked out of the corner of his mouth and used language that would have made a steeple horse jockey blush.... He challenged all opponents and dilated upon their pedigrees."

  Wood didn't endear himself to his older teammates by his work on the field either. In both 1909 and 1910 he'd missed part of the season because of injury. His absence in 1909 had been self-induced: he hurt his foot wrestling with Speaker during spring training and missed half the year. As he sat out day after day his older teammates concluded that he was soft, and late in the 1910 season there were rumors that John I. Taylor considered Wood a malcontent and was thinking about trading him away. He may have been thinking that again during spring training in 1911 as the team worked itself into shape in Redondo Beach, California, and Wood hurt himself once more—this time while fooling around on the slide at the pool in the Redondo bathhouse. Wood had talent to burn and threw hard, but he was wild. Over his first few seasons he often pitched just well enough to lose, then blamed others for his defeat, and he often complained of a sore arm. Entering the 1911 season, he was at a crossroads in his career—he had yet to back up his tough talk on the pitcher's mound. He was getting a reputation as a player with a hundred-thousand-dollar arm but only a ten-cent head.

  Speaker shared Wood's attitudes and personality, but had an easier time fitting in. At age twenty-two, in 1910, he had hit .340. His stellar play was impossible to deny, and even among the KCs he rapidly earned a kind of grudging respect and was given a wide berth. His friendship with Wood may well have been responsible for keeping the pitcher in Boston after the 1910 season. The two men were roommates, and there was no need to rile the team's best player.

  Not that the KCs were, on the whole, any more endearing. Catcher Bill Carrigan earned his nickname "Rough" by being one of the toughest players in the league. Base runners slid into home plate at their own peril, for Carrigan never gave way, on or off the field. In one celebrated incident Detroit outfielder George Moriarty announced his intention to come home and then did, prompting Carrigan, despite being outweighed by thirty pounds, not only to stop him cold but to spit in his eye afterward for daring to test him.

  Apart from their time on the field, the two groups rarely mingled. They were just different and came from different cultures. The KCs were more working class, went to Mass together, and found Hibernian Boston familiar, while the Masons were more independent-minded and stuck with each other. Still, a few players defied convention. Duffy Lewis, although a Californian, was also Catholic and a rambunctious member of the KCs. Larry Gardner, despite his New England heritage, was aligned with the Masons, and Harry Hooper, a Catholic, had friends in both factions. American League rules at the time disallowed dressing at the ballpark so that the sight of players traveling to the game in uniform would help attract a crowd. Red Sox players generally gathered up Huntington Avenue at the Putnam Hotel—"Put's," a hotel and rooming house where twenty Red Sox players boarded during the regular season—to prepare for the game. They left together but traveled to the ballpark in separate groups, some walking the short distance and others going by carriage, usually divided between the Masons and the KCs. Even the long train rides that marked every road trip failed to bring the players together—compared to the hard-drinking, hard-partying KCs, the Masons were near-teetotalers. The two groups would not even mingle to play cards. The more pious in both groups imagined that only practitioners of their religion could enter heaven and suspected members of the other faction of all manner of diabolical behavior. Virtually every move the team made was seen through this lens by at least a few players in each group, from selecting a team captain to deciding who would pitch or even pinch-hit. They were a team in name only.

  The situation became so dire between the two groups that the tension may well have played a part in first baseman and Mason Jake Stahl's retirement from the game following the 1910 season, a year in which, at age thirty, he had led the Red Sox in home runs, triples, and RBIs. Although he took a lucrative executive position at a Chicago bank for his father-in-law, the circumstances of his return in 1912 and his dismissal in 1913 suggest that the religious friction on the club may well have played at least some part in his initial decision to leave baseball for banking. At the same time John I. Taylor made several circumspect statements concerning the makeup of his team and his determination to rid the squad of troublemakers, a threat that underscored the level of dissension on the club.

  Yet even in the midst of such disarray, there was some hope. The Red Sox were by far the youngest team in the major leagues. Only one regular, infielder Charlie Wagner, was thirty years of age or older, and entering the 1911 season, only two regulars in the lineup—Carrigan and first baseman Clyde Engle—were over twenty-five. During the 1911 season both Harry Hooper and Duffy Lewis hit .300 for the first time and showed signs of becoming as good offensively as they were defensively, while twenty-one-year-old Joe Wood, although still pitching .500 baseball, stayed relatively healthy all year, twirled a no-hitter, and struck out nearly a batter an inning. If the club could just come together on the field, they seemed destined to continue to improve. There was, at least potentially, a lot to look forward to.

  But John I. Taylor either didn't see it, couldn't see it, or didn't care anymore. For more than a year he and his father had slowly been extricating themselves from active management of the Red Sox. While they didn't want the responsibility of ownership, they did want to retain a chunk of the profits.

  Their solution was ingenious. For several years Ban Johnson had been convincing and cajoling American team owners into building newer, bigger, and safer ballparks. Not only were the old wooden parks safety hazards, prone to fires and increasingly difficult and expensive to insure, but the use of wood restricted the size of the grandstands. Once a wood structure reached thirty or forty feet in height it became so heavy that the need for more support beams and joists dramatically cut into the amount of usable space that could be created. It became ever more difficult to provide more seats where fans wanted them the most—around the infield and behind home plate.

  In the spring of 1911 Johnson gave the press a statement that was more or less a "state of the game" address. He made clear that one of his goals was for each city to have a ballpark that included

  well kept fields of such dimensions that a fast runner may complete a circuit of the bases on a fair hit to their limits in any direction, and sited with mammoth fireproof stands, crowded to their capacity.... In another year—two more at the farthest—every scheduled game in the American League will be contested on grounds owned by the home club and provided with concrete and steel structures for the accommodations of the patrons.

  Less than a week later that desire was underscored when the old wooden park in Washington was severely damaged by a fire.

  The Taylors were more than agreeable to meeting Johnson's goal and building a new ballpark—as his contract negotiations with Harry Hooper intimated, John I., in fact, had been meeting with an architect periodically since at least 1908. Besides, the lease was up at Huntington Avenue, and as Boston sportswriter A. H. C. Mitchell reported earlier in the summer of 1911 in Sporting Life, on some days as many as 5,000 fans turned out for the game and then went home disappointed, for the Huntington Avenue grandstand seated only 2,500 people and many potential spectators refused to attend if they had to sit in open stands elsewhere, exposed to the elements and lower-paying riffraff. On such days, wrote Mitchell, "all the seats were sold days in advance and speculators reaped a harvest."

  In June 1911 Taylor announced that he hoped to build his new park on just over eight acres of land in the Fenway section of Boston,
just east of Brookline Avenue, bounded by Lansdowne Street to the north, Ipswich Street and property owned by the Fenway Garage Company to the east, and Jersey Street to the west, a plot of land first made coherent in 1898 when Jersey Street was first laid out. General Taylor had acquired rights to the property some four months earlier, on February 26, at a public auction for $120,000. Known as "the Dana Lands," the property was part of a parcel that had originally been owned by attorney Francis Dana, a native of Charlestown, a leader of the Sons of Liberty, a delegate to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1774, a member of the Continental Congress in 1777, and in 1778 a signer of the Articles of Confederation. As of yet there was no street bordering the southern edge of the property, nor would there be until Van Ness Street was laid out simultaneous to the building of the ballpark. The first public drawings of the park, in fact, do not show the street at all, as early plans were simply to extend Ipswich Street past the park. John I. Taylor eventually named the new street after his wife, Cornelia Van Ness, but the name would not become official until after the 1912 season. Before that it would be popularly known as "Auto Road": it provided access to what would be a small parking lot used by players and fans. Prior to the Taylors' plan to build a new ballpark, there had been tentative plans to develop the land for residential use by laying several streets between Van Ness and Lansdowne, but the ballpark halted these plans (see illustration 1).