Fenway 1912

by Glenn Stout

  A happy ball club boarded the train that night for Chicago, eager to face the White Sox. The Red Sox led by a game and were winners of six of their last seven, including five straight. If the Red Sox could stay hot against the White Sox and take the series, they could take command of the pennant race.

  In the National League there was no race at all, except for the record book. The New York Giants, 36-8, led the second-place Cincinnati Reds by eleven and a half games. The Giants had already run off two winning streaks of nine games each and another of ten, and they were about to take off on a record nineteen straight victories. New York baseball writers were already arguing over who should start in the World's Series, Christy Mathewson, Rube Marquard—who thus far was undefeated for the season—or rookie Jeff Tesreau. Manager John McGraw's biggest worry was staying awake as he watched his team club the opposition senseless, for so far the Giants had outscored their opponents by nearly a two-to-one margin.

  In an effort to boost the gate White Sox owner Charlie Comiskey declared that Flag Day, June 13, the first game of the series against the Red Sox, would also be "Boston Day." The weather cooperated and provided Boston weather—rain—for most of the contest as the umpires didn't even allow players to warm up in an attempt to keep the field playable. As both Ban Johnson and Comiskey looked on, the White Sox tried to kill the Red Sox with kindness before the game. James McAleer was presented with a silver case, Robert McRoy received a gold watch, and Jake Stahl limped off with several enormous floral arrangements.

  Instead, Boston should have just asked the White Sox to pitch anyone but Ed Walsh. He scattered three hits and beat Ray Collins 3–2. The victory pulled the White Sox back into a tie for first place. When game 2 of the series was rained out, manager Jimmy Callahan of the White Sox turned to Walsh once more, starting him for the fourth time in five games against Boston for the season.

  Comiskey Park was nearly overflowing as twenty thousand Chicago fans turned out for the contest, most of them hoping to see the White Sox regain their lead. The concrete-and-steel park had opened in 1910 and featured a double-decked grandstand flanked by two pavilions. The symmetrical field was among the more spacious parks of the day—362 feet down each line and 420 feet to center field. This time Jake Stahl was given a silver case before the game by his hometown admirers and the crowd was serenaded by a band as Chicago, with Walsh on the mound opposite O'Brien, seemed prepared to celebrate. As the big pitcher took the mound to start the game exuberant fans spontaneously broke out in song, singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

  The Red Sox thought he was jolly good as well. They finally solved the spitballer, boxing him around for three runs in the first and driving him from the game after only two innings, then hanging on as O'Brien won his third straight with a 4–3 win, leading Jimmy McAleer to predict that, "if Buck makes good on last year's record with Boston the Red Sox will win the championship." The win pulled them back into first place, but also cost them the services of Bill Carrigan.

  In the fourth inning Carrigan came to bat against Chicago relief pitcher Joe Benz and took an "inshoot," a running fastball, off the side of his head. Carrigan dropped to the ground, almost knocked out, but eventually he sat up, then stood and tried to continue, walking like he was on the deck of the Titanic as it was going down. Stahl wisely pulled him from the game and sent Cady in to catch.

  It was the best thing that could have happened. Cady made a diving catch of a foul ball that Carrigan would not have come close to. Then, in the ninth, with two outs and Boston nursing a one-run lead, Cady gunned out Rollie Zeider trying to steal second base to end the game.

  Cady was behind the plate the next day as well, again catching Joe Wood. He made good once more, making two perfect throws to second to shut down Chicago's running game, blocking a runner off the plate on a play at home, and knocking out a hit to spark the winning rally. And that wasn't the half of it. Wood won again, 6–4, but pitched better than the score: with one bad error and two dropped throws, shortstop Charlie Wagner was responsible for most of Chicago's runs. Wood gave up only five hits, and Tim Murnane noted that over the course of the game, as the pitcher became more comfortable with his catcher, he threw more and more fastballs. Cady clearly had no trouble handling Wood's best pitch. No one realized it yet, but everything was now in place. For the remainder of the season the 1912 Red Sox would play as well as any team in Red Sox history, and Joe Wood was almost unbeatable.

  The White Sox tried Walsh again in the finale, but Boston had broken his spell and knocked him around for thirteen hits in their 4–1 win behind Charley Hall. Hick Cady had two more hits, threw out another base runner trying to steal, and made another spectacular, sprawling catch of a foul ball. The Sox didn't miss Carrigan, who stayed in the game by coaching first, or Charlie Wagner, who had been suspended for three games the day before after dressing down umpire Jack Sheridan in language that left the umpire flushed with anger.

  The Red Sox left the ballpark only ten minutes after the victory and rushed to the station to make their train for New York. They could not wait to play the Yankees. Three wins against the White Sox had left them two games up on their rivals. The Senators, after winning sixteen in a row, had finally lost, giving the Sox even more confidence going into New York, where the Yankees, at 17-36, were doing a fair imitation of the Browns. After New York the Sox would visit Washington, where they hoped to discard the surprising Senators like something on their shoe before returning to Fenway Park to start a home stand with another series against New York. If everything broke right, it was not unthinkable that the Red Sox might open up a double-digit lead on the rest of the league.

  Pitching, which had been the issue when they left Boston three weeks before, was now the least of Boston's concerns. With Cady manning the plate almost every game, it had been two weeks since anyone had scored more than four runs in a game off Boston pitching. The Red Sox suddenly felt so secure that the club worked out a deal to trade Eddie Cicotte to Cincinnati and put him on waivers, hoping he'd clear the league so they could make the transaction and fill a hole. Reserve infielder Marty Krug was hurt, and the Sox needed an experienced man to back up Wagner, Yerkes, and Gardner. But the White Sox, now desperate for a pitcher to take the load off Walsh, put in a claim and blocked the deal. Cicotte remained with Boston, but his status was in limbo. He wasn't needed, not even to mop up. Jake Stahl, like other managers at the time, rarely pulled an effective starting pitcher no matter what the score.

  Over the next five days, as if apologizing for allowing the pitching staff to carry the load on the road trip, the Red Sox offense exploded. After Hugh Bedient won the first game of the series 5–2, Boston made the Yankees look like a semipro club and battered them in the next four games, winning 15–8, 11–3, 13–2, and 10–3 as O'Brien, Hall, Wood, and Collins all collected victories. Cady continued to prove to be a revelation, both at the plate and behind it, and even the loss of Harry Hooper for a few games to a minor injury seemed not to matter to Boston. Although Bill Carrigan was healthy again, Cady was Wood's full-time catcher and split the other duties with Carrigan, who now found himself coaching first base almost as often as he caught. Over time the role of each catcher would become more clearly defined. Just as Cady became Wood's personal catcher, Bill Carrigan would generally catch O'Brien. Boston arrived in Washington with a record of 40-19, the winners of eight straight, and with a four-and-a-half-game lead on the White Sox and a five-game lead on the Senators.

  Jimmy McAleer's former club, which had finished in seventh place in 1911 with McAleer at the helm, had been remade in the off-season, getting younger, faster, and considerably more athletic. Outfielder Clyde Milan was blossoming into a full-fledged star, in the same conversation with Speaker and Cobb, but the real difference was Walter Johnson. In 1911, at age twenty-three, he had won twenty-five games. But he was even better in 1912. He was everything Joe Wood aspired to be.

  Although Johnson, like Wood, was a fastball pitcher, he shared little else with h
is Boston counterpart. Where Wood was cocksure and arrogant and occasionally even cruel, Johnson was even-tempered and polite. Wood later called him, without any irony whatsoever, "a prince among men," a characterization virtually everyone agreed with. Unlike Wood, the right-handed Johnson threw sidearm, a buggy-whip action that was particularly hard on right-handed hitters.

  Yet hitters did not fear Johnson—Johnson feared them, for he knew full well how hard he threw and worried that he might one day hit a batter and kill him. When asked once why he didn't brush hitters off the plate, Johnson replied with uncharacteristic anger: "The beanball is one of the meanest things on Earth and no decent fellow would use it. The beanball is a potential murderer. If I were a batter and thought the pitcher really tried to bean me, I'd be inclined to wait for him outside the park with a baseball bat."

  As a result Johnson rarely pitched inside, preferring to stay away from hitters. Had he been more aggressive, batters would have had no chance. As it was, their chances were still somewhere between slim and none. All by himself he made the Senators, who otherwise were a .500 team at best, a bona fide contender.

  His only other weakness was that he could not pitch every game, something every team in baseball knew when they faced the Senators. Just as Jake Stahl had maneuvered his pitching rotation to avoid putting an ace opposite Ed Walsh, many Washington opponents took the same approach in regard to Johnson. Stahl, in fact, planned to do just that, particularly after Bedient beat the Senators in the first game of the series to give Boston its fourteenth win out of the last fifteen. Rather than pitch Wood opposite Johnson, he opted for O'Brien. The defeat took some air out of both the Senators and their fans, who had turned out in force and were finally starting to believe in their ball club. But while the Washington crowd had the upper hand at the start, by the end of the game the big noise in the ballpark was being made by a contingent of nearly one hundred Royal Rooters who had made the trip from Boston.

  The rabid bunch of fans had been leading the way back in Boston while the Red Sox mopped up on the road, and they simply couldn't wait for the team to come home. Dozens had boarded trains for Washington, where they hoped not only to see the Sox dispatch the Nationals but also to take some money from overly optimistic Washington fans.

  The Red Sox players welcomed their arrival. After spending weeks together in hotels and trains with only each other for company, it was nice to see a few familiar faces. Besides, the Rooters were always good for a free meal and a few drinks when they were in town.

  Unfortunately, the Rooters were disappointed in game 2. Walter Johnson and Buck O'Brien were scheduled to square off, but Johnson had a touch of tonsillitis, and when Washington manager Clark Griffith saw that it was raining, he called the game off, causing a doubleheader to be scheduled for the following afternoon. Jake Stahl was out with indigestion, leaving management of the club to Charlie Wagner and Bill Carrigan, whom the press had dubbed Boston's "Board of Strategy." Now that Wood and Johnson were going to pitch on the same day anyway, they saw no reason to hold Wood back from pitching opposite Johnson. He did not need to be coddled. Besides, with a six-game lead over the Senators, Boston was going for the throat.

  The Senators felt the same way. Before the game Washington owner Griffith offered the opinion that Johnson was pitching so well that he did not think his ace would lose another game all season. So far it had been a season of streaks, for apart from the Senators' own recent winning streak and those of the Giants, New York pitcher Rube Marquard, at 17-0, had not lost all year.

  In the meantime the Red Sox made a move. With Marty Krug still laid up, the club purchased infielder Neal Ball from Cleveland. Considered a fine fielder, Ball was beginning to show his age and had become expendable when he lost the shortstop job to young Roger Peckinpaugh. Ball was best known for turning a line drive by Charlie Wagner into an unassisted triple play three years earlier. But the Sox weren't asking him to repeat that miracle. They just hoped he could give Wagner and Gardner the occasional rest and provide some insurance against injury, but the deal was telling. It was the kind of move made by a good team beginning to look forward, trying to anticipate a need before it became apparent and picking up a veteran who could be counted on during a pennant race—or in the World's Series.

  When the players awoke on the morning of June 26, the rain that had washed out the game the day before was gone and it was already hot, with the kind of humidity that made the act of breathing akin to chewing the air. By the time the ballplayers reached the ballpark the temperature was above ninety degrees and rising, but there was still a crowd of more than twelve thousand. All through the stands fans loosened their collars and fanned each other with hats, while the players dabbed their foreheads with ammonia water and tucked cabbage leaves under their caps to keep cool. Washington's season was on the line. The club simply could not afford to be swept by Boston.

  Buck O'Brien, who looked haggard on a good day, took the mound in game 1 opposite Washington's Buddy Groom. By the end of the game he looked completely wilted as the home crowd got what it wanted. With the score tied 2–2 in the bottom of the tenth, O'Brien, his wool uniform heavy and sagging with sweat, opened the inning by giving up a base on balls to Tilly Walker, his eighth free pass of the game. Eddie Forster then stepped in and smacked the first pitch he saw hard to left.

  Duffy Lewis moved in on the ball. The layout of Washington's ballpark, later known as Griffith Stadium but in 1912 simply known as American League Park, was nearly the mirror image of Fenway Park. The right-field fence was only 280 feet from home down the line, but in left it was more than 400 feet to the wall. As a result Lewis was playing much deeper than in Fenway Park. He had to because in Washington, with no Duffy's Cliff or fence close behind, any ball that got past him was an extra-base hit.

  When the drive hit the ground and skipped toward him, Lewis bent and reached down to field the fast grounder ... then watched it bound between his legs. Walker was already tearing around second. Lewis spun and began to run after the ball but stopped after a few futile steps, saving what energy he had left for the next game. Walker raced across the plate as the Washington crowd roared in approval. They had barely let up when they started roaring again as Walter Johnson strolled out of the dugout to begin warming up for game 2. As Joe Wood soon followed him onto the field Washington fans began to dream of a sweep.

  The game was important to Wood, and he knew it. His ball club was in first place, but it went far beyond that. Johnson had the respect of every man in the league and every fan in the game. That was the kind of recognition Wood wanted for himself. As Tim Murnane commented later, "Wood was hungry for a little glory and the scalp of one of the big guns." Johnson was the biggest gun of all, and a victory over baseball's best pitcher could give Wood the boost he sorely needed.

  Only ten minutes after the end of the first game umpire Fred Westervelt called out, "Play ball," and game 2 began as Johnson, his uniform already dark with perspiration, poured the first pitch over the plate. Even for himself, Johnson was in rare form from the start, his fastball a blur and his sweeping curve a knee buckler. But so was Joe Wood. As the Washington Post noted the next day, "Walter Johnson and Joe Wood hadn't gone more than an inning each in the second game before it was apparent that the winner wouldn't need more than a run or two, and probably that some break in the luck of the game would decide it."

  Johnson retired the first nine Boston hitters in order, and Wood nearly matched him. But with two out in the third, Johnson, like Wood a fine hitter, hit a fly to right that Harry Hooper misplayed into a double. Wood then escaped without further damage.

  Boston didn't even have a hit through the first four innings. But with one out in the fifth, Gardner singled to right field. Now came that "break in the luck of the game." It was Washington right fielder Tilly Walker's turn to make a mistake, and he overran the ball. Gardner kept running, and when the throw to third was high and wild he lit out for home. The throw beat him there, but catcher Eddie Ainsmith dropped
the ball. Boston scored a run it did not earn but was glad to accept nonetheless.

  On the mound, Johnson's expression did not change. He never showed up his own players by expressing displeasure at their mistakes. He knew that even he was not infallible, and in the sixth inning he proved it.

  Hick Cady was facing Johnson that day for the first time in his career. Johnson should have had the advantage, but Cady, overmatched like almost every other hitter in the league, did the wise thing in his second appearance. He kept his bat on his shoulder and managed to draw a walk. Wood then swung through three straight pitches to strike out, but Hooper singled to left, and Yerkes flied out to center, bringing up Speaker.

  Speaker was the exception. He was not overmatched by either Johnson or anyone else. Knowing that Johnson would not pitch inside against him, he gave up all thought of pulling the ball and instead looked up the middle and to left. In a later era Johnson might have chosen to pitch around Speaker, who was batting nearly .400, or even intentionally walk him to face Larry Gardner, a good hitter but no Tris Speaker. But that strategy was considered a sign of cowardice and rarely used. Baseball's best pitcher went after baseball's best hitter without a moment's hesitation.

  There was no mystery when a hitter faced Johnson, particularly a good hitter. It was simply Johnson's fastball against the batter's reflexes, the speed of the ball and the speed of the bat. This time Speaker won the battle, squaring up a fastball and driving it deep to left-center, splitting the outfielders and bounding up against the fence. Cady and Hooper both scored as Speaker, who loved playing in the hot weather, which reminded him of home, raced to third base with a triple. Now Boston led 3–0.