by Glenn Stout
The Red Sox, so suspicious for the last three days, were suddenly giddy, and men who would not look each other in the eye or share a seat on the train a few hours before now laughed and grinned. The heroes of the moment—Speaker, Yerkes, and Engle—were swarmed by a bevy of women and smothered in kisses, which they did not reject.
The World's Series was theirs, and they could hardly believe it. One after the other, they ducked into the dugout and then to the clubhouse. On the field, without the Royal Rooters to lead them, the celebration of the fans soon sputtered out, and as dusk fell they skipped across the field and into the stands, heading for the exits.
Despite winning only two of the five games at Fenway Park and tying another, the Red Sox had prevailed, and the keys to their success had been starting pitching, defense, timely hitting, and the occasional assist from their home field. Over time many of the questions that surrounded games 6 and 7 would fade, and Fenway Park's first season would not be remembered for the squabbles of the Red Sox but for their success, the cheers of the fans who did watch game 8 echoing longer and louder than the cheers of those who did not.
History anointed its heroes and sentenced its villains. In the days after the World's Series, Hugh Bedient, the man who mastered Mathewson and was lauded now as one of the great young pitchers in the game, the near-equal of Wood, received the most kudos, as did Yerkes and Engle and Gardner and Henriksen. But over time other heroes emerged—namely, Harry Hooper, for his superb game 8 catch of Doyle's drive, and Joe Wood, who in the end made most people forget game 7 and who won three games in the Series, a performance that underscored his 34-5 mark in the regular season. With 109 wins, the 1912 Red Sox set a club record that still stands. No Boston team has ever been better.
The goat became not Fred Merkle—who botched the foul pop-up that gave Speaker another chance—but Fred Snodgrass, if only because the loss demanded a scapegoat and the writers, somewhat inexplicably, selected him. The next morning a headline in the New York World read: "A $29,495 Muff Beats Giants in World's Series." Although his own teammates would absolve him of blame, baseball fans far and wide soon began to refer to his sin in shorthand as "Snodgrass's $30,000 muff," the figure representing the monetary difference between winning and losing. For the record, the extra $29,495 allowed each winning Red Sox player to take home $4,025, while each Giant received a check of only $2,566. The error and the phrase were soon carved in stone and have caused later generations to overlook most of what happened in the 1912 Series prior to game 8. By any measure it was one of the most remarkable World's Series in history. Featuring some of the greatest names in the history of the game, it was played in two settings, the Polo Grounds in New York and Fenway Park in Boston, that provided the perfect backdrops to a masterpiece.
Twenty minutes or so after Yerkes crossed the plate, Fenway Park emptied and fell nearly silent, the only sign of victory the muffled sounds of celebration taking place in the clubhouse. Ushers started scouring the stands for garbage, and in the waning light Jerome Kelley and the other groundskeepers gave the field a quick raking and pulled the canvas tarpaulin over the diamond. They would be back in the morning to begin to put Fenway Park to bed for the winter, but for now they only pulled the covers close.
In one season Fenway Park had gone from infancy through adolescence, revealing most of the quirks and much of the character that would serve it well for the next hundred seasons as it grew and evolved, almost every year, in ways both large and small. Although Fenway Park is not now the same place it was when the first fans spun through the turnstiles in 1912, it is nonetheless a treasure, a place where, from April to October each season, the history of a city and a people and a team is written, where legends have walked and legions have watched—a ballpark for the heart and the soul.
The next morning, as all Boston prepared to honor the Red Sox at a reception at Faneuil Hall, the Royal Rooters forgot their differences with McRoy and McAleer for a day and jumped back on the bandwagon. Jerome Kelley and his crew, as they did every other day, arrived at Fenway Park early and got busy.
They stripped the bunting from the stands, uncovered the infield, raked the dirt, pulled a few stray weeds, and filled a few holes here and there as the pigeons watched over them from beneath the grandstand roof. As a cold north wind whipped across Fenway Park and the dark low clouds of winter clamped down on New England, Jerome Kelley, like most other Red Sox fans, was already thinking about next year—and spring in Fenway Park.
There was a lot of work to do.
Epilogue
AFTER WINNING THE World's Series and turning in what is still the best single-season record in Red Sox history, the franchise seemed poised to begin a dynasty. With baseball's best outfield, baseball's best pitcher, two of the best rookie pitchers, emerging stars at third base and behind the plate, one of the youngest rosters in the game, and a new ballpark now fully operational, the 1913 season seemed to promise another first-place finish and appearance in the World's Series for the Red Sox.
Not so fast.
At first, all seemed well as the on-field record was backed up by a mountain of cash. According to Sporting Life, the Red Sox made $450,000 in profit during the 1912 season. Jake Stahl earned upward of $20,000 from his 5 percent stake in ownership, plus nearly another $15,000 in salary and his World's Series check. After making a public apology, McAleer and McRoy survived their run-in with the Rooters, when everyone appeared to forget the shenanigans that had taken place between games 6 and 7 and look toward the future.
But the simmering tensions that had threatened to pull the team apart during the 1912 season were not entirely washed away by the victory. The disagreement between Stahl and McAleer over the game 6 starter revealed a rift between the two, one that took little to reignite in 1913. Stahl, troubled by continuing problems with his ankle, was forced to retire as a player, which both weakened the team offensively and left Stahl with a little less value to the team and a whole lot less leverage. Joe Wood, after spraining an ankle in spring training, got off to a slow start and then pitched inconsistently—good one game and poor the next—as at only age twenty-three the wear and tear on his arm began to show. The Red Sox got off to a poor start, dropping three of four to open the season as the Athletics bolted ahead and everything began falling apart for Boston. After winning the pennant in 1912, the Red Sox did not spend a minute in first place in 1913.
By midseason the Red Sox were out of the race entirely and struggling to play .500 baseball. Joe Wood was on the shelf with a broken thumb, Charlie Wagner had a sore arm again, and McAleer and Stahl were hardly speaking. Stahl's contention that he, not McAleer, should be in charge of the franchise sparked a war among club investors that pitted the Chicago faction against McAleer and the Taylors. In July, soon after Buck O'Brien was sent to the White Sox in a waiver deal at Stahl's behest, the manager lost the tug-of-war. McAleer fired him and named Bill Carrigan manager, a move that put the KCs firmly in control of the ball club. The Sox played a bit better under Carrigan in the second half but still finished in fourth place, 78-71, twenty-five and a half games worse than their record in 1912 and fifteen and a half games behind first-place Philadelphia.
By then McAleer's days were numbered as well. The ticket snafu from the 1912 World's Series was not forgotten by all Boston fans, and the firing of Stahl coupled with the team's poor performance alienated the rest. Attendance dropped from 597,000 fans in 1912 to only 437,000. Investors were not happy. As soon as the season ended Ban Johnson, seeing his own investment at risk, began to engineer a sale. McAleer was powerless to stop him. In December "the assets of all Chicago interests"—meaning those of Stahl, his father-in-law, McRoy, and McAleer—were sold to Canadian Joseph Lannin.
James McAleer retired to his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and washed his hands of major league baseball. He never worked in organized baseball again and died in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. Of all Red Sox owners, he is, despite his long involvement with the game and the 1912 world championship,
perhaps the least well known today.
Robert McRoy was more fortunate. His close ties with Ban Johnson kept him in the game, and after severing ties with the Red Sox, he joined the Cleveland Indians, serving as vice president and general manager before passing away in 1917.
Jake Stahl returned to Chicago and resumed his banking career, and although he was rumored to be part of a group that was interested in buying the Cleveland franchise, Stahl, too, never returned to the game of baseball. In 1917 he went to France to serve during World War I as a second lieutenant in the Air Bombing Division of the U.S. Army. The war apparently took a toll: shortly after he returned in 1919 he suffered a nervous breakdown. He spent two years in a California sanitarium before dying in 1922 of heart disease.
Bill Carrigan took over the Red Sox for Stahl and managed to keep his job even after the team was sold to Joseph Lannin. When the Federal League was created in 1914, an event that weakened rosters in both the American and National Leagues, the Red Sox, rejuvenated by some young pitching talent, including Babe Ruth, suddenly found themselves competitive again. They finished second under Carrigan in 1914 and bounced to the top of the American League in both 1915 and 1916, winning the World's Series each time, but using the new Braves Field, with its higher seating capacity, instead of Fenway Park. Carrigan then chose to go out on top and retired to go into banking in Maine. He was talked into returning to the Red Sox as manager in 1927, 1928, and 1929, but the team was dismal, the game had passed him by, and the ball club finished last all three seasons, making Carrigan both one of the most and least successful managers in club history. Following the 1929 season, he returned to Maine. Over the next few decades he occasionally made appearances at Fenway Park, a symbol of days gone by, before passing away on July 9, 1969.
The influence and popularity of the Royal Rooters, and the personal fame of Nuf Ced McGreevey, peaked during the World's Series of 1912. The story of the ticket debacle before game 7 was reported in papers from coast to coast. McAleer and McRoy were both forced to make a formal apology, and despite their game 8 boycott, the Rooters had still led the celebration at Faneuil Hall.
Although the Rooters were still influential enough to receive more World's Series tickets in 1914, 1915, and 1916, their preeminence among Boston fans began to wane as their members got older and were not replaced by younger Rooters. When Honey Fitz was forced to drop out of the 1914 mayoral race after a scandal over his relationship with a cigarette girl named Toodles, the group lost a staunch ally, and the opening of Braves Field moved the center of Boston's baseball universe a bit farther away from McGreevey's saloon. Without the baseball crowds, business slowed, and after the 1915 season McGreevey was forced to close the tavern at 940 Columbus Avenue. He reopened several blocks away where he owned some property, at 1153 Tremont Street, on the corner of Ruggles Street, but it wasn't the same. The Rooters attended their last World's Series en masse in 1917, but by then the group was down to only about one hundred members. When the Red Sox appeared in the 1918 World's Series the Rooters were nowhere to be found. Lamented the Globe's Edward Martin, "The crowd did not come up to expectations ... It is the first time any Boston club has been in a series that 'Tessie' had not been heard from good and proper." Indeed, only six years after the debacle of 1912, the Royal Rooters were not even mentioned by the press during the Series.
On August 1, 1918, the U.S. Senate adopted the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcohol. The House followed suit on December 17, and the amendment, after being quickly ratified by the states, became law on January 29, 1919. Regrettably, Nuf Ced McGreevey closed his tavern, and he eventually donated the bulk of his collection of baseball photographs to the Boston Public Library. He died of heart failure on February 2, 1943, and with his death a chapter of Boston baseball history also passed, although the recent opening of McGreevy's, a Boylston Street bar and restaurant thoughtfully modeled after the original saloon, has once again made Nuf Ced and the Rooters household names.
Hugh Bradley, the man who hit the first home run over the left-field wall in Fenway Park, never hit another, and after the 1912 season he never made another appearance in the major leagues. Sold to Jersey City after the end of the season, he resurfaced in the Federal League in 1914, hitting .307 for Pittsburgh but failing to hit a home run. After appearing with both Pittsburgh and Brooklyn in the Federal League in 1915, Bradley returned to the minor leagues in 1916 and played for a variety of clubs before he retired after the 1923 season. He settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, near his hometown of Grafton, and died in 1949.
Although Hick Cady never quite lived up to the promise of his rookie season, he remained a backup catcher for the Red Sox through 1917. Then, after injuring his shoulder in a car accident, he was traded with Larry Gardner to the Athletics. He did not appear in a game in 1918 but did appear in thirty-four games in 1919, then played six more seasons in the minor leagues before retiring and becoming a minor league umpire. He died in a hotel fire at age sixty in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1946.
After the 1912 World's Series, Buck O'Brien, the man who pitched the first official game in Fenway Park, seemed poised for greatness. He pitched well at the start of the 1913 season, but then faltered. When the war between Jake Stahl and James McAleer broke out into the open, O'Brien was a casualty. According to one news report, O'Brien "hadn't been strong with the Boston manager for a long time. Buck is said to have committed the indiscretion of having smeared his fist over Joe Wood's classic countenance last fall.... So Stahl sent O'Brien to Chicago." On July 2, 1913, O'Brien, with a record of 4-11, was acquired by the White Sox on waivers for only $5,000. He failed to win a game for the White Sox and later that year was sold to Oakland in the Pacific Coast League. After a brief stint with Memphis in the Southern Association in 1914, O'Brien eventually returned to Boston and for much of the next decade was a familiar face on semipro teams in the Boston area, pitching primarily for the Dilboy Club. He passed away on July 25, 1959, and on Fenway's golden anniversary on April 21, 1962, O'Brien's grandson, nine-year-old Tom O'Brien, threw out the first pitch.
Hugh Bedient, the hero of the 1912 World's Series, never recaptured his 1912 magic either, although he did manage to stay with the Red Sox for two more seasons, going 15-14 in 1913, then 8-12 in 1914. In 1915 he jumped to the Buffalo franchise of the Federal League and compiled a record of 16-18, but when the league folded Bedient was unable to make it back to the majors, and in 1917 he developed arm trouble. After sitting out several seasons, he returned to the minor leagues, where he spent most of his time pitching for Toledo in the American Association, before retiring after the 1925 season and returning to his hometown of Falconer, New York. There he lived on a farm and worked for the Harbison-Carborundum Corporation. He died in 1965.
Charlie "Heinie" Wagner's arm gave out during the 1913 season, and he was never the same player again. Released during the 1916 season, Wagner briefly returned during 1918 when the Red Sox were caught short during World War I, and he subsequently served several stints as a Red Sox coach, the last time for his friend Bill Carrigan. Wagner took over for Carrigan as Red Sox manager in 1930, but after the team finished last, he resigned and went to work as a supervisor in a lumberyard in New Rochelle, New York. He died of a heart attack in 1943.
After being dumped by the Red Sox in 1914 when he failed to hit, University of Pennsylvania graduate Steve Yerkes jumped to the Federal League and played two seasons. He then made a brief appearance with the Chicago Cubs in 1916 before returning to the minor leagues. He retired as a player after the 1923 season. Yerkes later managed in the Canadian American League, and in 1940, before buying and operating a bowling alley, he managed the Yale freshman baseball team. He appeared at Fenway Park's golden anniversary in 1962 and passed away in 1971.
Ray Collins was the only member of the 1912 starting rotation to pitch well in 1913, winning nineteen games, and he remained effective in 1914, when he won twenty games. But when he pitched poorly in 1915, he decided to
retire at age twenty-nine. Collins returned to his family dairy farm in Colchester, Vermont, which he operated for most of the remainder of his life. He briefly coached the University of Vermont baseball team and served in the Vermont legislature and on the board of trustees for the University of Vermont. He died of complications following a stroke in 1970.
Larry Gardner played another dozen years in the major leagues. In 1918 he was dealt with Hick Cady to the Philadelphia Athletics, and in 1919 he was traded to Cleveland, where he was reunited with Tris Speaker and Joe Wood. Gardner enjoyed his greatest success as an Indian, knocking in more than one hundred runs in both 1920 and 1921, and proved to be a very good, but not quite great, ballplayer. After spending several seasons as a minor league manager, he returned to Enosburg Falls, then moved to Burlington, Vermont, where in 1932 he became head baseball coach at the University of Vermont. After he retired, he worked in a camera store and passed away at age ninety in 1976. Sadly, the University of Vermont baseball program, which contributed both Gardner and Ray Collins to the 1912 Red Sox, was dropped by the university after the 2008 season.
The best outfield in baseball remained intact for the next three seasons as Duffy Lewis, Harry Hooper, and Tris Speaker all turned down entreaties from the Federal League and in turn were able to squeeze big contracts out of Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin. But when the Federal League collapsed, Lannin wanted to roll back salaries and cut Speaker's $18,000 salary in half. Speaker held out, and Lannin traded him to Cleveland for Sam Jones, Fred Thomas, and $55,000. Once in Cleveland, Speaker continued to forge a Hall of Fame career. He retired after the 1928 season with a career batting average of .355 and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1937. Following his retirement, Speaker had an eclectic career as a minor league manager, executive, broadcaster, and coach before dying of a heart attack in 1958.
