Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  McAleer and company expected a big crowd. The advance sale at Wright and Ditson's was enormous, and the Sox decided to hold back 7,500 tickets to sell on the day of the game so fans who arrived without a ticket would not be turned away, and, just as significantly, to keep the precious tickets out of the hands of speculators.

  But rain that began as a fine mist turned into a drizzle. Just after noon, as the first fans began to show at the park, it became a deluge. McAleer had no choice but to cancel the game. Opening day was a washout.

  McAleer then tried to make lemonade from the cancellation. As Paul Shannon put it in the Post the next morning, evoking the gods, "should J. Pluvius [Jupiter, god of sky and thunder and the sender of rain] conclude to hold the dipper out and sidetrack the downfall that threatened last night to make a swimming pool out of the new Red Sox park," McAleer had a contingency plan. Friday, April 19, was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, a state holiday that commemorated the Revolutionary War battles of Lexington and Concord and was also the traditional date for the running of the Boston Marathon. The Sox were scheduled to play their second contest of the season that afternoon and had already sold thousands of tickets for the holiday event. Rather than turn that contest into a doubleheader, going head-to-head with the marathon and losing out on a full house, McAleer decided to play a morning/afternoon split doubleheader, the first game at 10:30 a.m. and the second contest at 3:15 p.m. That would allow fans from the first game to see the end of the marathon as runners trekked down nearby Commonwealth Avenue toward Copley Square, while the crowd that gathered for the marathon could watch the runners pass and then go to Fenway Park. While a Patriots' Day contest would not become an annual event for the Red Sox until 1959, purely by accident McAleer seemed poised to take advantage of the fortuitous circumstance that paired the holiday with a big crowd just outside Fenway Park. By splitting admission for the two games, he was guaranteed a windfall—if the weather held.

  Tickets that had been bought in advance for the canceled contest the day before would be honored at the 10:30 game, and those who had bought tickets at the park could exchange them for any contest played over the course of the remainder of the season. Stahl announced that Charley Hall would have the honor of being the first Sox pitcher in an official game in their new home and that Buck O'Brien would work game 2.

  Unfortunately, J. Pluvius dropped the dipper. As the sky brightened over Fenway Park on the morning of April 19, it was clear that even if it stopped raining immediately the floodwaters that covered Fenway Park were more appropriate for duck blinds than baseball watching. McAleer and McRoy canceled the morning contest, but McAleer held out hope that the club would get in the afternoon game. While his ball club napped and chewed the fat, wandering back and forth from underneath the stands to the dugout, McAleer paced the grandstand all morning long, looking back and forth from the sky to the field. The rain was intermittent, but the field was a mess. Had the rest of the tarpaulin arrived, the infield might have been playable, but with the one piece of canvas available Kelley could only cover the pitcher's plate and batter's box. Elsewhere, there were puddles and mud where there should have been grass or sand and crushed clay.

  Finally, at 1:20 p.m., he made the call and canceled opening day for a second time. He told the assembled sportswriters that the club would try to play the opener the following afternoon, not a doubleheader but a single contest at 3:15 p.m., both to give the park a chance to dry out and because, with the holiday over, a morning contest no longer made sense, not even on a Saturday, which was still a partial working day for most Bostonians. The players raced back to the Park Riding School, changed out of their uniforms, and dashed to Kenmore Square to see marathon winner Michael Ryan jog by on his way to setting a new course record. Soon after he passed, hundreds of fans abandoned the course for the ballpark, unaware of the cancellation.

  Nearly five thousand made their way to the park, only to find the flag atop the grandstand down and the gates locked. Well, most of the gates were locked. One had been inadvertently left open, and several dozen fans made their way inside and gave themselves a private tour.

  The three cancellations had probably cost the club 60,000 admissions, no small number in an era when 500,000 fans for a season was considered enormous. It was perhaps the first sign that the franchise was not quite the cash cow McAleer had imagined it would be for him when he first purchased the club.

  Finally, on the morning of April 20, dawn revealed baseball weather, the sun blazing and the sky a deep blue. The gates opened at noon, and as soon as they did fans began to fill the stands.

  The Red Sox had been at the ballpark since earlier in the morning, taking batting practice as Stahl worried that after three days of waiting they had lost their batting eyes. As fans milled around the stands the players from both squads wandered the field, playing catch and loosening up according to baseball custom.

  Apart from the bunting that still hung from the stands and the size of the crowd, there was nothing to distinguish the game from any other. The delays had led the team to cancel all inaugural ceremonies. The Letter Carriers' Band and the singing quartet were nowhere to be seen, and many baseball officials who had traveled to Boston for opening day, like Ban Johnson, had grown tired of waiting and returned home.

  Still, the fans were impressed. After seeing so many contests at the Huntington Avenue Grounds or the South End Grounds, Fenway seemed huge to them. They stood pointing and craning their necks to take in as much of the park as possible, waving and hallooing, trying to get the attention of friends they spotted elsewhere in the immense grandstand. The official seating capacity was 24,400—11,400 in the grandstand, 8,000 in the pavilion, and 5,000 in the distant center-field bleachers—standing-room capacity was not included. From start to finish, the park had been built in four and a half months; construction officials calculated that poor winter weather had shut down most work on the park for the equivalent of two months. Seven thousand barrels of cement and 270 tons of structural steel had been used during construction, plus hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber in the concrete formwork, the construction of the bleachers and pavilion, and the fences. All told, the cost was $600,000, a cost per capita of only $24 per seat, making the Fenway Park stands, on a cubic foot basis, some of the most lucrative real estate in the city of Boston. None of those seats, apart from a handful in the bleachers, can be occupied today for even a single game for what it originally cost to construct. Each has earned its cost back many, many, many times over and continues to do so eighty-one times each summer and at an increasing number of special events throughout the year.

  As game time approached and each and every seat was occupied, the team kept selling tickets anyway, filling the promenade along the upper reaches of the grandstand with 2,500 fans willing to stand and watch the game while peering around columns and under the roofline. Then, with the center-field bleachers and the pavilion filled to sardine-can capacity and still more fans pushing their way in, the cramped and claustrophobic fled. First one and then another climbed over the railing and onto the field. Soon dozens and hundreds of fans were fleeing the stands, racing to secure spots on the field, first filling the incline in left field and then staking claim to the nether reaches of the outfield in front of the towering flagpole in the deepest portion of the playing field, on the western edge of the wedge of the bleachers in center field. The club sent ushers and police out to maintain order, and the crowd was hustled behind ropes that were hastily stretched from one foul line to another as fans stood in the outfield six or eight feet deep, just as they had for so many big games over the years at Huntington Avenue. Meanwhile both teams took infield and loosened up, taking time now and again to look around and take in the scene, amused, delighted, and amazed by it.

  After the dull muted tones of winter, the bright blue sky, puffy white clouds, mostly green grass, and red-white-and-blue bunting made it seem as if spring had come on all at once. Atop the grandstand eight color-coded pennants snapped in
the breeze, one representing each team, arranged in the order of the standings. On this day Boston's red-and-white flag led the pack.

  Although Stahl had indicated earlier that Charley Hall would pitch the opener, the delay caused him to change his mind. Buck O'Brien and catcher Les Nunamaker started making their warm-up tosses in foul ground along the first-base line, while their New York counterparts, Ray Caldwell and Gabby Street, did the same along third. As game time approached, umpires Tommy Connolly and Eugene Hart strode onto the field, held a quick conference, and then waved Jake Stahl and New York manager Harry Wolverton to meet with them at home plate to exchange lineups and go over the ground rules. The umpires decided that owing to the close proximity of the overflow crowds there would be no possibility of home runs during the game. Any ball that reached the crowd, either on the ground or in the air, would be ruled a double. By definition that included any ball hit over the fence, but that possibility seemed so remote and unlikely that it was not even discussed.

  The men dispersed, and the crowd, which was already cheering and chanting and singing the old songs just the way they had at Huntington Avenue, raised the volume another notch. As the Red Sox took their positions on the field, hardly anyone noticed or even saw Les Nunamaker trot over to the third-base line at the front of section J, where John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston, threw him the first pitch.

  Nunamaker caught the ball, and after a quick handshake and an encouraging word, Honey Fitz gave a wave to his constituents and Nunamaker trotted out to his place. O'Brien toed the rubber, raised his hand to his mouth to apply saliva to his fingertips, and made the first of several warm-up throws to his catcher. As he did, Jake Stahl rolled a few ground balls to his fielders—Steve Yerkes at second, Charlie Wagner at short, and Larry Gardner at third, while Harry Hooper in right, Tris Speaker in center, and Duffy Lewis in left all found their places only a few dozen feet from the overflow crowd.

  SOX OPEN TO PACKED PARK

  As O'Brien stood behind the rubber, ball in glove, Tommy Connolly held up his hand, then called out the words so many had been waiting so long to hear.

  "Play ball!"

  New York left fielder Guy Zinn, batting from the left side, stepped into the batter's box and waved his thick, dark bat in the air. O'Brien wound up, stepped toward the plate, and threw the first official pitch in the history of Fenway Park. Nunamaker reached for the pitch, and Connolly kept his right arm at his side, indicating a ball.

  Up in the press box, a club employee manned the keyboard that communicated with the new, two-part, steel-framed "electronic" scoreboard that ran vertically up the full height of the left-field wall. Nearly identical to a scoreboard at Detroit's new park, it was among the first of its kind. Each section of the scoreboard stood nearly twenty feet square and extended out from the wall a few inches. Although the club referred to the scoreboard as "electronic," that did not mean it was solely operated electronically or that it featured lights. While electrically operated scoreboards had been patented and Boston was the home of the Electric Score Board Company, fully operational electric scoreboards, which changed all numbers through the cumbersome use of pulleys and gears, were not yet viable. Instead, the "electronic" designation meant that the press box keyboard operator could communicate some information to the scoreboard operators electronically. Operators stationed on the scoreboard's backside scrambled up and down a network of ladders and steps and benches, out of view of the fans inside the park. While some information may have been conveyed through some kind of electronic device, most was communicated by hand.

  The first of the two scoreboards, only twenty or thirty feet off the left-field line, provided the line score of not only the game currently under way but of other American League contests that day. The operator of this scoreboard probably received his information the old-fashioned way—by way of a runner from the press box who would periodically ferry out scores as they arrived at the park by telegraph.

  The second scoreboard—identical to the scoreboard at Detroit's Navin Field—was located another seventy or eighty feet out toward center field, and had the same dimensions but was somewhat different. At the top were letters three feet high reading "BATTER." Below that word were two rows of slots filled with single digits representing the fielding position of each batter in the lineup, for the players themselves, as yet, did not wear uniform numbers on their jerseys. Already, a large "7" occupied the first slot, letting fans know that the first hitter was the left fielder, Zinn.

  Below that area the scoreboard read "BALL" and "STRIKE," each word above three and two slots, respectively. Below those slots the word "OUT" was flanked by two slots, and below that was the word "UMPIRES," also flanked by a slot on each side, with the word "Plate" above one and "Field" above the other, each already filled with the unique number that represented each umpire in the league.

  In the press box the keyboard operator watched Connolly closely. When he saw the umpire's right arm remain at his side and the scribes in the press box react by offering that the pitch had missed the plate, he reacted and pushed a button. A split second later, the scoreboard operator, sitting at a bench behind the left-center-field scoreboard, paid close attention to an electronic board activated by the keyboard operator in the press box.

  In an instant he had decoded the meaning and slid a marker into a slot on the scoreboard.

  In Fenway Park the eyes of nearly thirty thousand fans were not on the ball that Nunamaker was tossing back to O'Brien but turned toward left-center field. Beneath the word "BALL," they saw one of three dark square slots on the left-field side of the sign miraculously change as a round marker slid into place.

  They roared at the majesty it represented, a feat of technology that almost seemed magical. Even patrons in the most distant reaches of the park could know with certainty that the first official pitch thrown in the new ballpark was a ball.

  The game had begun. The 1912 season was under way.

  Winter was over, and Fenway Park was open for business.

  5. The Wall and the Cliff

  From the ponderous horseshoe of the big grand stand the prairie spreads out several miles, more or less, to the fences. There is room in the playing field for a hit of any caliber, and so much room in the stands that the crowd of yesterday rattled around like a squadron of lima beans in a number 8 hat ... Few of the fans who have been to Fenway Park believed it possible to knock a ball over the left field fence.

  —R. E. McMillen, Boston Herald

  IT MAY HAVE been a simple case of nerves from pitching before such a large crowd, the adjustment to throwing from the mound at Fenway Park for the first time, or the number of friends and family members who had made the trip up from Brockton. Then again it may have been the fact that he had not pitched in eight days and felt too strong or that his spitball was breaking too much. Or it may have been that after a wet spring he found sunshine to be distracting, but whatever the reason, Buck O'Brien couldn't find the plate.

  The first four official pitches thrown in Fenway Park were all balls, and Yankee left fielder Guy Zinn trotted down to first with the honor of becoming the first official base runner.

  Harry Wolter, batting second, took a half-swing and became the first player to strike a ball at Fenway when he tapped it halfway to the box. Both Stahl and O'Brien went for the ball. O'Brien got there first, but there was no one covering first base. Steve Yerkes, for some reason, covered second. Hal Chase dropped a sacrifice to move both runners up a base, and then shortstop Roy Hartzell drove a ball between third and short toward Duffy Lewis in left field. Zinn, one of the first Jewish players in the major leagues, made it home easily, scoring the first official run in Fenway Park.

  Just as the number "1" slid into place next to "New York" on the scoreboard, Bert Daniels hit a comebacker to O'Brien, but he didn't find it any easier to find the plate as a fielder than he did as a pitcher. He threw the ball past Nunamaker, scoring Wolter and forcing the scoreboard operator up out of his seat on
ce more. The catcher recovered the ball in time to catch Hartzell at second, but O'Brien, as if determined to put a man on base by every way possible, then beaned Cozy Dolan. Earle Gardner singled to knock in New York's third run, and as Paul Shannon noted in the Post, New York catcher Gabby Street "ended the agony by fanning." It would not be the last time an inning at Fenway Park would seem like torture to devoted Boston fans.

  But even on its first day this was Fenway Park, where no lead would ever, ever be safe. Harry Hooper led off for Boston against Ray Caldwell and tapped back to the pitcher for the first out, bringing up Steve Yerkes.

  A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Yerkes had signed with the Red Sox in 1909, spent one year in the minors, and earned a starting job in 1911, playing shortstop while Wagner nursed his arm. A cerebral man who would later become a minor league manager and deliver impromptu lectures to his players on topics like Russian literature, Yerkes, although considered a solid if unspectacular fielder, was otherwise of limited ability. Nevertheless, his name would be on the lips of fans during both the first and last games of the 1912 season played at Fenway Park.

  Yankee left fielder Guy Zinn and Yerkes would be the first two men to realize that Fenway Park was unlike any other ballpark in the major leagues. In his first official Fenway Park at-bat Yerkes hit one of the longest drives of his career, smacking the ball on a line to left, over the head of Zinn and just to the left of where the crowd standing behind the ropes in center merged into the crowd on the embankment. The outfielder tracked the ball back, and as he reached the fans standing shoulder to shoulder behind him, the mob parted slightly. Zinn, stepping up for the first time, stretched for the ball, then stumbled on the embankment as the ball landed just past his reach. The crowd scattered for a moment as some grabbed for the ball and others fled, and everyone had a hard time staying in place on the earthen slope, which was still wet and slippery from rain the day before.