Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  Even as the crowd arrived in a steady stream Kelley's men still circled the field, chalking the foul lines, working with rakes, brooms, wheelbarrows, and shovels, smoothing the ground here, filling a hole there, brushing away a puddle of water or prying up a stone that winter's frost had heaved to the surface. Ready or not—and in many ways it was not ready—Fenway Park was about to host the first game in its storied history.

  In the grandstand, almost oblivious to the crowd, crews of men were still methodically bolting together seats and fixing them to the treads of the grandstand, working from the lowest rows up, but only a few thousand seats were in place. Thousands of permanent seats and seat parts were still stacked on pallets beneath the stands, wrapped and protected against the weather, and would not be installed until after the exhibition game. In the concrete boxes down front, each separated from the next by a pipe railing, workmen carried stacks of opera chairs up the ramps from below the stands, snapped them open, and arranged them in neat rows. There were no fixed seats in the boxes, nor were there ever intended to be any.

  The men worked quickly, but even as the first patrons wandered the stands and took their seats, they were not rushed. Although the Red Sox had optimistically hoped that Boston fans would be so curious about the new park that many thousands would turn out for the first game at Fenway Park—even an unofficial one—by April 9 it was clear that was not going to happen. At Wright and Ditson's sporting goods store on Washington Street in downtown Boston—George Wright of the Red Stockings was one of its founders—and the Harvard Athletic Association in Cambridge, tickets had been on sale for weeks. While the ninety-five private boxes had already been sold for the season at the cost of $250 each, on this day many seats in the first tier of boxes were available for $1.50 and those in the second tier were going for $1.25. A seat in the grandstand cost a dollar, with the first ten rows available for reserve, while a bleacher seat in the pavilion went for fifty cents and a place in the distant center-field bleachers was a quarter. Ushers wearing white jackets and red caps stood at the ready to assist patrons, wiping the moisture from the seats of fans with high-priced tickets while simply pointing the way for those with seats in the pavilion or bleachers.

  INVITE OLD TIMERS TO RED SOX OPENING

  Yet despite the fact that it was the first game and the ball club had touted the appearance of the "Old Timers," a who's who of Boston baseball players, professional and collegiate, from the 1860s onward, the public had evinced little interest in the game. The same men had all been honored at the Huntington Avenue Grounds near the end of the 1908 season with great success, but on this day the presence of men like Tommy Bond, who had starred for Boston in the 1870s, drew few extra fans to the ballpark. McAleer's scheme to milk a big crowd for the exhibition was a financial failure, perhaps the first sign that he would have trouble reading the desires of Boston fans. Most cranks seemed content to wait another week to see a real game that counted in the standings.

  While McAleer might have been disappointed, the men putting the seats together were not. Had anything close to a capacity crowd turned out, thousands of fans would have had nowhere to sit, but with the poor advance sales and even poorer weather, the few seats in place were more than sufficient for the crowd at hand—half the tickets purchased had been for the pavilion and the bleachers anyway.

  Not only were those arriving at Fenway on the afternoon of April 9 dyed-in-the-wool fans, but many of them, wisely, were dressed in wool themselves. Although the weather forecast called for "fair and warmer" conditions, that was a relative description. At any rate, the sky told a different story. The temperature had dropped below freezing overnight and had climbed only a few degrees since, to the mid thirties, and in the stands it was as damp and raw as the deck of a cruise ship dodging icebergs and plowing through the icy waters of the North Atlantic. Nothing about the day indicated that it was adequate for baseball. On any other day, in fact, the game probably would have been canceled.

  None of this made the Red Sox players particularly eager to play. They had arrived in Boston the previous evening after traveling all night by train from Cincinnati. The journey had created some anxiety among the players, for as the train rocketed eastward chunks of broken ice still choked the Mohawk River and the lower valleys were all flooded, the result of a quick thaw and the torrential rains that had inundated most of the country all spring. Even though the sun broke through outside Albany, revealing farms and fields just beginning to turn green, as the train rose through the Berkshire Hills the ground turned white and summer still felt some months off. Not until the train approached Worcester, where native Hugh Bradley had been greeted by a large crowd, did bare ground show itself again. Still, the scene outside the windows of the train gave little indication that they would be playing baseball against Harvard in a little over twenty-four hours.

  When the train finally appeared at Back Bay Station just after 9:00 p.m., nearly an hour late, hundreds of fans had gathered to meet it. A great cheer went up not unlike that which would have greeted a conquering army, a roar that nearly drowned out the sound of the steam engines.

  As each player stepped from the train, carrying his grip, he was surrounded by cheering fans and well-wishers who stuck out their hands, hoping for a handshake and a quick word while offering their best wishes for the upcoming season. The players patiently put up with the reception but at the same time slowly pushed their way through the crowd and out into the street. They were tired of traveling and just wanted to unpack.

  It was then that the Red Sox received word that everything, perhaps, was not quite what they had expected. After hearing all spring about their great new ballpark, they were told not to report to Fenway Park the following day, but to the Park Riding School on Ipswich Street, where their uniforms would be waiting for them. The clubhouse at Fenway Park was still unfinished, and the club had made arrangements for them to dress at the school. For the time being they would walk to the park in uniform, just as they had when playing at the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

  They responded with rolled eyes, tired sighs, and knowing nods to one another—first McRoy loses their bats, and now McAleer was making them change in a stable. With that bit of news stuck in their craw, the players drifted off, some boarding streetcars, others grabbing one of the jitney cabs that waited outside the station, and still others choosing to take grip in hand and walk home in order to work out the stiffness from being cooped up aboard the train for more than twenty-four hours.

  By habit, half the players had already made arrangements to stay at Put's on Huntington Avenue, even though it was not quite as convenient to their new home as it had been to their previous one. A like number, however, had decided that it was time to abandon Put's for something a bit more convenient to Fenway Park. Close to a dozen players had secured accommodations in advance at the Copley Square Hotel; from there they could walk to Fenway in good weather in about twenty minutes or take the trolley, which would deliver them to the ballpark in just a few short minutes.

  On the day of the game, after a late breakfast, most players began making their way toward the riding school a few hours before the game, arriving in groups of two or three, making the somewhat unfamiliar trip for the first time. They were pleased to discover that they would not actually be dressing in the stables; the school, which catered to bluebloods and their offspring, contained sizable and comfortable dressing quarters. Each player found his uniform waiting, and they teased each other as they dressed in their regular-season uniforms for the first time, looking to trade pants and shirts that were too big or too small. They were in no rush and lingered at the school until the last possible moment, playing cards, stuffing their jaws with tobacco, and engaging in the easy banter of the clubhouse. The field was in no condition for much more than a cursory workout, and besides, the Harvard nine were in no rush either. Though they were excited to play on a major league field, the weather was no different in Cambridge, and the team had dressed in uniform at the university before
traveling to Fenway Park. In fact, the contest would be the first time all year that the Crimson had even had the opportunity to play on a real field at all. Thus far most of their practice had taken place indoors or at Soldiers Field. They had yet to play a game outdoors.

  While an editorial in the Globe prophesied that the contest would create "a moving picture worthy of the brush of one of the Old Masters," that was far from the case when the players from both teams took the field for a few minutes of warm-ups, tossing the ball back and forth. The crowd, some warmed by the free coffee the ball club distributed under the stands from enormous urns and others by the contents of the flasks tucked into their coat pockets, gave the players of each team an enthusiastic cheer. The Red Sox were dressed in their home whites, the name "Red Sox" emblazoned across their chests in red, and they wore plain white woolen caps and white socks with a broad red stripe that circled the calf and gave them their name. Not that fans could see any of these details yet, for as the players warmed up most of them also wore heavy, red woolen sweaters to ward off the chill.

  With the regular season scheduled to begin in New York in only two days, on April 11, Stahl selected twenty-five-year-old Casey Hageman, who had joined the team along with Buck O'Brien from Denver late in 1911 and was still fighting for a place on the final squad, to pitch the exhibition. The remainder of the lineup was made up primarily of regulars—Harry Hooper, Steve Yerkes, Tris Speaker, Jake Stahl, Larry Gardner, and Duffy Lewis. Marty Krug played shortstop. In the cold weather Stahl was still protective of Charlie Wagner's arm and did not want to risk injury in a mere exhibition. For the same reason he held Bill Carrigan back and instead penciled Pinch Thomas, the fourth-string catcher, into the lineup. Like Hageman, he was still trying to make the club and was thrilled to have one more chance to prove himself to his manager.

  After warming up for a few minutes with his catcher down the first-base line, Casey Hageman of the Red Sox walked to the pitcher's box at 3:30 p.m. As he stood waiting for the umpire to call for him to throw the first pitch to begin the game, his teammates jogged out to their positions and the crowd cheered them enthusiastically. For a moment or two the players stood and just took in their surroundings, getting their first good look at the park from the perspective they would bring to it for the remainder of the season.

  In front of them sat the immense grandstand, stretching a full 510 feet from one end to the other. The stands held barely a thousand shivering fans, most wearing caps or homburg hats and heavy coats. A mesh screen stretched from the grandstand roof to protect fans in the section of seats immediately behind the plate from foul balls, but it stopped before reaching the box seats. Those fans would have to pay attention to stay safe. The base of the stands did not present a smooth parabola behind the plate, as it does today, but instead formed a series of shallow angles as each section of stand met another.

  Only the lower ten or fifteen rows of the grandstand had seats. In the remainder of the stands the treads, looking like giant stairs, sat empty. In the occupied box seats at the front of the grandstand sat the swells, the VIPs and old-timers resplendent in formal wear and long coats, hands buried deep in pockets.

  At the base of the stand on each side of the infield was a concrete dugout, Boston's on the first-base line and the visitors' on the third-base side. Each dugout was only forty feet long, five feet wide, and three and a half feet deep, which put the floor of each dugout well below field grade. On this very first day those floors were already covered with water, reflecting a drainage problem that has not fully been resolved to this day. The roof of each dugout was cantilevered reinforced concrete, with no external support. A long slat-style bench ran the length of each dugout, a concrete support column in the center nearly divided it in two, and an open pipe rail fence in front of the dugout prevented fielders from falling in when pursuing pop flies. A set of concrete steps at the far end led to the field, and the near end was open to the space between the stands. Once the clubhouse was finished, the players would be able to go back and forth without mingling with the fans. For now there was barely enough room for everyone to sit.

  Atop the grandstand, directly behind home plate and looking somewhat like a covered bridge, was a wooden press box, about the same length as the dugout, containing accommodations for up to sixteen telegraph operators. Access to the press box was gained by a set of stairs at the back of the grandstand, the only stairs, apart from those in each dugout and those in between sections of the stands, in the entire park. Inside sat the pioneers of Boston sportswriting—Tim Murnane and Melville Webb of the Globe, Walter S. Barnes and Ralph McMillen of the Boston Herald, Herman Nickerson and A. H. C. Mitchell of the Journal, and Paul Shannon of the Post, all staking out the seats they would occupy for the remainder of the season. The press box also contained—or would soon—a desk and a keyboard that would be used to operate the new electric scoreboard, which had yet to be installed in left field. Although the players could not tell from the field, the roof of the grandstand sloped back toward the street, where the outside facades created a four-foot parapet designed to prevent foul balls that landed on the roof from rolling to the street. At the time most foul balls, even those hit in the stands, were retrieved by ushers and put back in play. The ball quickly turned dark from grass stains, dirt, and spit, a factor that was often taken into consideration when selecting a starting pitcher—the combination of cloudy days and dark baseballs made the ball hard to see, and fastball pitchers harder to hit.

  Past first base was the open-alley firebreak some ten to fifteen feet wide between the grandstand and the pavilion, where another thousand fans or so sat crammed together in the lower sections of the wooden bleachers. Nearly 250 feet long, the pavilion itself did not precisely parallel the first-base line but was tilted slightly toward the field, so the most distant corner of the stands (section 6 in Fenway today) encroached on the field and created the beginning of the outfield wall. By today's standards, it was not far off—barely 300 feet, if that, from home plate down the line. At the front end of the pavilion a bare wooden fence of vertical planks only about eight feet tall angled far back and then turned and met the center-field bleachers more than 400 feet from home plate. Commenting in the Post that the right-field fence was "even farther" away than the fence at Huntington Avenue, which was at least 320 feet down the line, Paul Shannon was referring to the distance in the power alley. He also made the claim that the distance to the center-field bleachers was "essentially the same" as Huntington Avenue. But true and accurate measurements to the fences at Fenway Park at the time the ballpark opened may never be known unless precise architectural plans dating to the construction surface. Even then, these distances may never be known with absolute certainty. In the era before the home run, there was no real need to know precisely how far each fence was from home plate. The urge to pin down distances would arrive with the long ball.

  The center-field bleachers faced the infield, were roughly rectangular in shape and approximately 140 feet in length, and contained more than forty rows of seats. The far end extended almost to the property boundary on Lansdowne Street, while the backside of the bleachers was hard against the property of the Fenway Garage Company, almost filling the triangle between Lansdowne Street, Ipswich Street, and Fenway Park. Between the bleachers and the center-field end of the left-field wall, in dead center field, was an open area of fair ground shaped roughly like a triangle. At the back of this open space the park was at its absolute deepest, reportedly 488 feet from home plate, and an enormous flagpole just a few feet from the back fence towered over the bleachers.

  From the deepest part of the park ran the left-field fence—neither green yet nor a monster—fronted by an earthen embankment not unlike that in Cincinnati, which extended from the end of the bleachers to the property line, paralleling Lansdowne Street. In an oddity, the rise drew no comment on this first day, perhaps because it had been visible in the plans for Fenway Park since at least 1911 and was considered so far from home plate that
few believed it would ever come into play on a regular basis.

  Although this rise—which would eventually be nicknamed "Duffy's Cliff" after Sox left fielder Duffy Lewis—would soon be turned over for use by standing-room crowds or to support temporary bleachers, this usage was incidental. The purpose of the hill was purely structural—and economic. Since the plot of land on which Fenway Park was built was higher on the Lansdowne Street side, that end of the field had been brought down to grade to make it level with the remainder of the park. To accomplish this the grade of the field was lowered along Lansdowne Street, leaving the street itself ten to fifteen feet above field grade.

  To make up the difference architect James McLaughlin essentially had two options, for no one ever even gave a thought to moving Lansdowne Street. A poured reinforced-concrete fence, built atop piers built on hardpan, like that which surrounded Shibe Park, would have been sufficient both to "hold back" Lansdowne Street and to create a barrier for the ballpark. But it also would have had to be at least twenty or twenty-five feet tall to accomplish the task. At a length of nearly four hundred feet, stretching to the corner of the property (below what is now the very back of section 38 of the bleachers), such an edifice would have been extremely costly and would have used nearly as much concrete and reinforcing steel as the grandstand itself.