Authors: Glenn Stout
Understandably, the primary motivation for virtually all of these changes has been more financial than aesthetic. They were made to boost team revenue through an increased number of higher-priced seats and additional concession options, including bars and restaurants, in order to capture ballpark-generated revenue inside Fenway Park rather than in the surrounding neighborhood. As a result, outside vendors were forced farther away from Fenway Park's front doors, and the ballpark was turned into an ever more efficient delivery system for food, beverages, merchandise, and memorabilia. This change has come at the expense of family-affordable seats: Fenway Park is now the most expensive ballpark in the country, with the average ticket price topping $50. While these changes have unquestionably proven to be a financial boon to the club, at the same time they have priced most middle-class fans out of Fenway Park and done little to address cramped seating in the grandstands and bleachers.
From a purely aesthetic perspective, these changes are something of a mixed bag. Some features, like the Green Monster seats, seem to be an integral part of the structure (at least from the inside). Others, such as the proliferation of rooftop seats, have simultaneously both amplified the out-of-scale, top-heavy design first exhibited by the building of the 600 Club (now called the EMC Club) and, to a degree, helped ameliorate it, since the addition of limited rooftop seating adjacent to the EMC Club has softened the scale issue. Much of the exterior of Fenway Park remains visually unappealing, and the original office facade, the only part of the structure with some charm, is now festooned with all manner of banners and flags that, in combination with construction on the opposite side of the street, make it almost impossible to view the unadorned structure as it was originally intended to be seen. The effect of the adjacent renovations and construction on the Jeano property—which now extends along Brookline Avenue and wraps around Lansdowne Street—is to awkwardly reference McLaughlin's original design without either copying or honoring it.
Perhaps the most jarring and unsightly feature of the park today is the proliferation of signs and advertising, which make it nearly impossible to find a place to rest the eye without being visually bombarded by corporate messages. That, in combination with a relentless barrage of music and audio messages, has utterly changed the emotional experience of attending a game at Fenway Park. The end result is, rather ironically, that today's Fenway Park shares more in common with the retro parks designed to mimic it than with itself. The park that spawned a host of imitators has now evolved and changed to such a degree that it more closely resembles the very ballparks it inspired rather than James McLaughlin's own original design.
In the end, however, nearly one hundred years after the first fans passed through the turnstiles, Fenway Park remains. It has been saved, but it has not, except in the most general sense, been preserved. Very little of the ballpark that opened in 1912 is still visible. What little that does remain has essentially been built over, built under, and built on top of until the original design is almost unrecognizable. Yet because the changes to Fenway Park have taken place over the course of one hundred years, they do not seem as dramatic as they truly are. And what has changed the least is perhaps what matters most—the field itself, those few hallowed green acres upon which some of the greatest players and greatest games in the history of baseball have been played.
The man first responsible for that, chief groundskeeper
Jerome Kelley,
served at Fenway Park for almost another decade before being replaced by Bert Gerioux. According to the
Boston Globe
of June 8, 1921, several Red Sox players complained about the condition of the grounds. Kelley "was evidently provoked at what he considered unfair criticism" and abruptly resigned.
T
HE WORK OF
this book was accomplished over the course of more than two decades and could not have been done without the help and assistance of a number of friends and colleagues, most notably Siobhan and Saorla, who support my work in every way, every day. My biggest thanks go to the staff of the Boston Public Library, particularly Henry Scannell, John Devine, Aaron Schmidt, John Dorsey, and the staffs of the Microtext Department and Print Department, whose collections house the greatest archive of Red Sox history in existence. Thanks also to my occasional researcher and assistant, Denise Bousquet, for her studious fact-checking of numbers, to Jim and Kevin Logue for their cooperation, and my two most trusted readers, my good friends and colleagues Richard Johnson and Howard Bryant. Editor Susan Canavan, production editor Beth Burleigh Fuller, designer Brian Moore, agent John Taylor Williams, and Hope Denekamp of Kneerim and Williams Literary Agency all helped this project evolve from a two-paragraph proposal into a fully realized work.
Writing it has been a privilege.
W
RITING A BOOK
about any aspect of Fenway Park poses some special challenges. While it is a place that many feel they know intimately, it is also a place that few people truly know very well in its original state, which is the main focus of this book. There is no single comprehensive trove of primary resource material in regard to the building of Fenway Park in the form of original architectural drawings or construction notes. Given the length of time that has passed since Fenway Park was built, this is not completely surprising, and it is important to note that it is only in the last forty or fifty years—since 1967—that Fenway Park has been viewed as a special place. Before then, there was little historical interest in the ballpark. James McLaughlin, its architect, is obscure even to local architectural historians, and from what I have been told the Red Sox discarded virtually all files in regard to the first three decades of their history shortly after Tom Yawkey purchased the club in 1933—long before this kind of material was valued by historians, researchers, or memorabilia collectors.
For these reasons my main sources throughout this book, in regard to not only Fenway Park but also the 1912 season and the 1912 World's Series, are newspaper and periodical accounts written during the time period it covers. I consulted thousands and thousands of individual newspaper and periodical stories during this project, which began in earnest in 2008 and occupied the bulk of my time for the next two and a half years.
The major newspapers consulted for this project include the
Boston Globe, Boston Post, Boston Journal, Boston Traveler, Boston Herald, Lowell Sun, New York Times, New York Tribune, New York World, New York Journal,
and
Washington Post,
and I also consulted the weeklies
The
Sporting News
and
Sporting Life
and the monthly
Baseball
magazine. A few of these papers, such as the
Globe
and the
Times,
are available online. Others are accessible through microfilm. In the latter case I have generally used the files maintained by the Boston Public Library, the Widener Library at Harvard University, the W. E. B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, the New York Public Library, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.
Sporting Life
and
Baseball
magazine are also accessible through the LA84 Foundation's online library. I accessed other newspapers from other areas of the country through
newspaperarchive.com
. In most instances I used this source to access wire and syndicated reports in regard to the 1912 season and the World's Series, as well as most of the reports by newspaper reporters like Sam Crane, Hugh Fullerton, Ring Lardner, and Grantland Rice, whose stories were distributed nationally and appeared in many newspapers all around the country. Rather than select from one of several obscure sources, I instead reference the date of their report in the text, which is more useful to researchers. I also conducted more contemporary newspaper research through
newslibrary.com
and
proquest.com
. I consulted the microfilmed scrapbooks of Duffy Lewis, Joe Wood, and Nuf Ced McGreevey held by the Boston Public Library, the Bill Carrigan scrapbook in the archives of the Sports Museum of New England, and my own archives created over the last twenty-five years during the writing of numerous books and articles on baseball history—including my collection on Fenway Park, which began in earnest in 1987 when I was asked to write the official seventy-fifth anniversary history of the park for
The Official 1987
Red Sox Yearbook.
In regard to newspaper reports, I tend to source the most important stories directly in the text itself, referring to either the newspaper or the reporter by name (for example, "according to Paul Shannon in the
Post
..."). For readability, as this is a popular history and not an academic one, I do not always source the precise date of the newspaper account used, but researchers who wish to track down these stories should be aware that most useful game stories, then as now, appear in print the day after the date of the game in question.
Particularly important sources and stories are listed individually in the chapter notes, but I have made no attempt to create a bibliographic citation for every story consulted or to create formal footnotes. In most instances—and particularly for the World's Series—I re-created the games by using multiple newspaper accounts, sometimes from as many as a dozen sources or more. Thus, a specific accounting would have been both challenging and confusing—sometimes I would have had to cite a half-dozen or more sources for a single sentence. As such, these accounts are composites—multiple original accounts of the same events and rarely 100 percent consistent with one another. To the best of my ability I have tried to be as accurate as possible, but it is certainly possible that another author, using these same sources, would arrive at a slightly different interpretation of events. That is the nature of the process. Although retrosheet.org and
baseball-reference.com
do not yet maintain "game logs" and box scores for regular-season games during the 1911 or 1912 season, both do maintain substantial day-by-day accounts of the regular season. I consulted these accounts throughout the book for scores and schedules, game logs of the World's Series, and various other statistical information.
All dialogue used in this book is taken from a previously published source. Anything that appears in quotation marks is from a written document. Absolutely no dialogue has been created, invented, or surmised, although in a few instances in which different sources reproduce dialogue about a specific event that is not identical, I have used my own judgment to create a composite statement. Neither have I made significant use of the ghostwritten player accounts that appeared in most newspapers during the 1912 World's Series. As noted in more detail in my chapter notes, with few exceptions (such as those authored by Christy Mathewson and Eddie Collins), the veracity of such accounts, most of which were written by newspaper reporters with little to no input from the bylined author, should be considered dubious at best.
Selected Books
A. J. Reach and Company.
The Reach Official American League Baseball Guide.
Philadelphia: A. J. Reach Company, 1912.
Alexander, Charles.
John McGraw.
New York: Viking Press, 1988.
———.
Our Game: An American Baseball History.
New York: MJF Books, 1991.
Angell, Roger.
Season Ticket.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Benson, Michael.
Ballparks of North America: A Comprehensive Historical Reference to Baseball Grounds, Yards, and Stadiums, 1845 to Present.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 1989.
Berry, Henry, and Harold Berry.
The Boston Red Sox: The Complete Record of Red Sox Baseball.
New York: Macmillan, 1984.
Boston Red Sox.
Official Media Guide,
various editions.
———.
Official Scorebook Magazine,
various editions.
———.
Official Yearbook,
various editions.
Cobb, Ty.
Busting 'Em and Other Big League Stories
. New York: Edward J. Clode, 1915.
Gay, Tim.
Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend.
Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press/University of Nebraska, 2007.
Ginsburg, Daniel E.
The Fix Is In: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals.
Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland Publishing, 1995.
Golenbock, Peter.
Fenway.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1992.
Hirshberg, Al.
The Red Sox: The Bean and the Cod.
Boston: Waverley House, 1947.
———.
What's the Matter with the Red Sox?
Cornwall, N.Y.:
:
Dodd Mead and Company, 1973.
Johnson, Dick, ed., text by Glenn Stout.
Ted Williams: A Portrait in World and Pictures.
New York: Walker and Company, 1991.
Johnson, Dick, and Glenn Stout.
Red Sox Century.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
———.
Yankees Century.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Jones, David, ed.
Deadball Stars of the American League.
Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006.
Kaese, Harold.
The Boston Braves.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1948.
Keene, Kerry, et al.
The Babe in Red Stockings.
Champaign, Ill.: Sagamore Publishing, 1997.
Lieb, Frederick.
Connie Mack: Grand Old Man of Baseball.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1945.
———.
The Boston Red Sox.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947.
———.
Baseball as I Have Known It.
New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977.
Lowry, Philip.
Green Cathedrals.
Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1992.
Macht, Norman L.
Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.