Fenway Park Page 6

  The decade barely had begun when Harry Frazee made the deal that would be credited—and cursed—for elevating one franchise while eviscerating the other. “You’re going to be sore as hell at me for what I’m going to tell you,” the owner informed Manager Ed Barrow. “You’re going to sell the Big Fellow,” Barrow figured. The price for Babe Ruth was massive for the time—$100,000 from the Yankees, plus a $300,000 loan from New York owner Jacob Ruppert with Fenway Park as security. Frazee insisted that he would have preferred getting players in return, “but no club could have given me the equivalent in men without wrecking itself.”

  While critics then and now claimed that Frazee wrecked his own club for more than a quarter-century, the fact was that the Sox already were headed south in the wake of their worst finish in a dozen years. For all his boisterous brilliance, Ruth hadn’t seemed likely to change that. “What the fans want, I take it, and what I want, because they want it, is a winning team,” said Frazee, “rather than a one-man team which finishes in sixth place.”

  Although the reaction from many journalists and fans ranged from shock and depression to anger and betrayal, those feelings weren’t universal. “Men who have been in the baseball business generally conceded that Frazee was justified in making the sale,” James O’Leary wrote in the Globe. The sellee, however, complained he’d been made the goat for his former club’s failings. “I am going to return to Boston in the near future,” Ruth proclaimed in a telegram printed on the front page of the Globe, “and at that time the fireworks will start.”

  But it was the Sox who provided the pyrotechnics for Ruth’s return, bashing New York, 6-0 and 8-3, in their Patriots Day doubleheader at Fenway and going on to win 10 of their first 12 games of the season. “I do not predict a pennant winner, but surprising things have happened in baseball and I may have a 1920 miracle crew in the present Sox,” said Barrow, whose club was in first place in late May. “Who knows?”

  But when New York returned to sweep their hosts in four games just before Memorial Day, it was the start of a 4-14 slump during which Boston tumbled into fourth place and never recovered. Yet even without the Big Fellow, the Sox still managed a modest upgrade, finishing one place higher than they had the previous year. And Ruth remained immensely popular in the city where he’d made his name. More than 33,000 fans turned up for a “Babe Ruth Day” doubleheader on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend when the Knights of Columbus gave him a set of diamond cuff links between games, each of which Ruth punctuated with a home run.

  The Hope Diamond itself wouldn’t have been enough to lure the man back to Boston, though, and his exodus was only the first in a procession of departures for the Bronx. Next was Barrow, who left after three years to become the Yankees’ business manager and one of the fiscal architects of what would become the game’s greatest dynasty.

  Following him out the door before Christmas were pitchers Waite Hoyt and Harry Harper, second baseman Mike McNally, and catcher-outfielder Wally Schang. Thus continued what Boston faithful still call “The Rape of the Red Sox.” Then outfielder Harry Hooper, who thought he’d be offered the manager’s job instead of Hugh Duffy after wearing the uniform since 1909, departed for the White Sox. Hooper played in Chicago for another five seasons and went on to make the Hall of Fame. “One by one the old stars of the Red Sox leave us,” the Globe observed ruefully.

  By then Boston undeniably was a second-division club. League president Ban Johnson pointedly ignored the Red Sox in his preseason evaluation for 1921 and only 7,500 fans turned up for the Fenway opener on April 21 to see the hosts blank the Senators, 1-0.

  One of the season’s few home highlights was a mid-June sweep of the Tigers, punctuated by the ejection of the combustible Ty Cobb in the ninth inning of the finale. Cobb, who’d been arguing pitch calls from the on-deck circle, berated the umpire, dropped a bat on the arbiter’s foot, and then stepped on the man’s heels as he followed him around the plate and, as the Globe reported without specifying, “did things for which there was no justification whatever, and which led up to another incident as deplorable and more disgusting than anything that Cobb had done.”

  Herb Pennock won 240 games in the major leagues, and was part of two world championship teams with the Red Sox and four with the Yankees.

  THE CURSE IS BORN

  BY BOB RYAN

  “Let me tell you this. You’re going to ruin yourself and the Red Sox in Boston for a long time to come.”

  —Ed Barrow, Red Sox manager, when owner Harry Frazee told him he was selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees

  The shocking news was delivered in the dead of winter.

  The good people of New England awoke on the morning of January 6, 1920, to discover that the most beloved baseball player in town was now a Yankee.

  Thus was born “The Curse of the Bambino.”

  Now, we all know there is no such thing. It is a whimsical hypothesis, the idea being that selling Babe Ruth was the equivalent of an original sin from which there can never be an absolution. Good throwaway line, that, and nothing more.

  The truth is that it wasn’t just the sale of Ruth to the Yankees that plunged the Red Sox into the abyss (nine last-place finishes, a seventh and a sixth between 1922 and 1933), a situation that wasn’t remedied until Tom Yawkey bought the team and began spending tremendous sums of money.

  It was the sale of Ruth and the subsequent sales and/or trades of catcher Wally Schang, shortstop Everett Scott, and pitchers Waite Hoyt, “Bullet Joe” Bush, “Sad Sam” Jones, and Herb Pennock to the Yankees that enabled the heretofore impotent team in New York to exchange places with the team that had been a four-time world champion between 1912 and 1918. When the Yankees clinched their first world championship by defeating the Giants in Game 6 of the 1923 Series, all seven played in the game.

  That’s the crime. It wasn’t just the idea that owner Harry Frazee sold Ruth to the Yankees. It’s the complete package. What he did was provide New York with the complete foundation of a dynasty. Burt Whitman of the Boston Herald called it “The Rape of the Red Sox.”

  But selling Ruth to New York was the hot-button move for all time. For as big as Ruth was in Boston, over the next 15 years in New York he became more than just a successful baseball player. He became a true American icon.

  Sixty-five years after his last game, he remains the biggest baseball star of them all. He was the sports embodiment of the Roaring Twenties, swashbuckling his way through both American League pitching and life itself. No sports reality has galled Bostonians over the past 80 years as much as the fact that We created him and They—and not just any They but the most hated They of them all—reaped the full benefits, both short- and long-term.

  People were upset at the time, of course, but the feeling wasn’t universal. The soon-to-be 25-year-old Babe was a highly flawed diamond. He was already starting to put on weight, he had a bad knee, and, most of all, he was a thoroughly undisciplined brat whose self-absorption, some said, was running the risk of harming the team. In fact, Frazee employed this last argument as a major rationale for selling his star, pointing out that despite Ruth’s individual heroics in 1919 (a record 29 home runs while leading the league in runs batted in with 114, runs with 103, and total bases with 284—all with the dead ball), the team had finished sixth.

  Citing Ruth’s defiant behavior, which included missing the final game of the season in order to play a lucrative exhibition game in Connecticut, Frazee said, “It would have been impossible for us to have started the next season with Ruth and have a smooth working machine, or one that would have had any chance of being in the running.”

  Baseball historians have spent the past eight decades debating the incident. Was Frazee in serious debt? Did he really, really need the $450,000 he received from the Yankees (there was also a $350,000 loan involved, with Fenway Park as collateral) in order to finance a Broadway musical called No, No Nanette? Or was he to be taken at face value when he said he had made a decision based on what he honestly belie
ved to be in the best interests of the team? One thing is for sure: the musical in question didn’t open until 1925, so it wasn’t the catalyst for the trade.

  Still, Frazee is hard to defend. Ruth was a handful, but rather than spend the Yankee money to acquire more talent, as he promised, all Frazee did was sell, sell, sell. The record is clear. The Red Sox hung on with fifth-place finishes in both 1920 and 1921, but in 1922 they took up what was almost permanent residence in the league basement for the next decade, as the Yankees, utilizing all the aforementioned Red Sox stars, were winning pennants in 1921, 1922, 1923, 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1932.

  Despite his future success in New York, Ruth fondly recalled most of his time in Boston, where he first lived in Mrs. Lindbergh’s rooming house on Batavia Street (now Symphony Road); where he met his first wife, Helen Woodford, in a Copley Square coffee shop; where he bought an 80-acre farm in Sudbury in 1916; and where he became established as a star and a World Series hero.

  As for Frazee, he left town on the midnight train for New York, a gesture of infinite symbolism for millions of Sox fans not yet born.

  CHAOTIC KENMORE SQUARE

  When the Red Sox play a home game, Kenmore Square is the conduit for the lion’s share of the more than 35,000 fans who converge on the ballpark. And like the Fenway neighborhood itself, Kenmore Square didn’t exist until the late 19th century.

  The land the square sits on was then called Sewall’s Point, and it was pretty much surrounded by tidal salt marsh. Sewell’s Point was connected to downtown Boston by a narrow road (later to become Beacon Street) that ran atop a dam along the Charles River. When the Back Bay was filled in the late 19th century, the former dam road became Beacon Street, which connected to Brookline Avenue. A short time later, Commonwealth Avenue was constructed, and the three roads converged at what became known as Governor’s Square.

  Governor’s Square (renamed Kenmore Square in 1932) became an important local transportation hub. The Peerless Motor Car Building on the west side of the square now houses Boston University’s Barnes and Noble Bookstore, but its main claim to fame is the Citgo sign on its roof; it was born in the 1950s as a Cities Services billboard, and it became the landmark neon beacon in the 1960s.

  Because of the local college-student population, Kenmore Square and the streets close to the ballpark feature plenty of restaurants, cafes, and music venues. The most famous jazz club was Storyville, which was located at the Hotel Buckminster starting in 1950. Legends such as Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan played the club, which was in the ground-floor space of the Buckminster now occupied by Pizzeria Uno. The legendary rock club The Rathskeller, a.k.a. “The Rat,” played grimy host to some of rock music’s great bands in the 1970s and 1980s as they paid their dues, including The Police, the B-52s, R.E.M., U2, the Ramones, Tom Petty, Blondie, and Sonic Youth. It closed in 1997, and its site is now occupied by the Hotel Commonwealth, which opened in 2003.

  On Patriots Day, more than 20,000 official runners pass through the square on the home stretch of the Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon. Hundreds of thousands of spectators root the runners on, and the square offers a convergence of race day and Red Sox fans spilling out of the traditional 11 a.m. holiday game.

  The square was once noted for its hotels, including the Buckminster, at the corner of Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue, which was designed by Stanford White. It was the site of the first network radio broadcast, and it also played a part in the infamous “Black Sox” baseball scandal. On Sept. 18, 1919, the same day that the Chicago White Sox defeated the Red Sox, 3-2, at Fenway, bookmaker and gambler Joseph “Sport” Sullivan went to the hotel room of Arnold “Chick” Gandil, White Sox first baseman. There they hatched a plot to fix the 1919 World Series, which was to start 13 days later.

  In 1915, the Kenmore Apartments building opened at the corner of Kenmore Street and Commonwealth Avenue. It later became the Hotel Kenmore, an elegant, 400-room operation that was once Boston’s baseball headquarters—at one time in the late 1940s when the Braves still played in Boston, all 14 visiting major-league clubs stayed there. Countless trades were made, managers hired and fired, and post-game parties featured celebrities of the day.

  “As I grew up, I knew that [Fenway Park] was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid at Giza, the nation’s Capitol, the czar’s Winter Palace, and the Louvre—except, of course, that it is better than all those inconsequential places.”

  —Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti

  After key injuries led to a ruined July, the club rallied with a strong finish and flirted with third place before slipping back to fifth. But that would be the best showing for more than a dozen years as the talent exodus to the Bronx continued during the offseason. Frazee swapped shortstop Everett Scott, who’d played nearly 1,100 games for Boston, plus pitchers “Sad Sam” Jones and “Bullet Joe” Bush for shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh and three hurlers. While critics lambasted the owner for continuing his yard sale, his money had paid for the furnishings. “It is Frazee’s team,” the Globe’s James O’Leary reminded readers, “and if he has goldbricked himself he is the one who will suffer.”

  By Opening Day in 1922, nobody from the 1918 champions remained on the Red Sox roster. Even the stockings had been changed to ones with a dark stripe. “Picking red socks for the boys must have been left to someone who is color-blind,” Mel Webb observed in the Globe.

  Though the club won four of five from the Yankees at home in late June, Boston couldn’t replace Jones and Bush, who won 39 games for New York that year. After their rotation fell apart, the Sox quickly sank from sight in July, dropping six in a row to the Indians and Tigers (the last by a 16-7 count). The club ended up losing 93 games, its most in a season since 1905, and finished in the cellar 33 games behind the Yankees. Since 1915, that had been the residence of the Athletics. Except for one season, Boston would be the new annual tenant there until Tom Yawkey bought the club in 1933.

  That was the end for Duffy, who was kept on as a scout and “general all-round man.” In came Frank Chance, the “Peerless Leader,” who as player-manager had led the Cubs to world championships in 1907 and 1908 and to the National League pennant in 1906 and 1910. Chance, who had no illusions about what he was inheriting in the Hub, reckoned that it would take at least three years to transform the Sox into contenders.

  With only a handful of regulars returning, the roster obviously was a reconstruction zone in 1923. And while Frazee predicted that the club “will be the finest, smartest lot of youngsters ever hired by a major-league ball club,” Boston essentially had become a minor-league franchise. After losing the first four games in New York, the Sox had dropped to the bottom by May 12 and never inched higher than sixth for the duration. After a brutal 27-3 loss at Cleveland on July 7—when reliever Lefty O’Doul gave up a club-record 13 runs in the sixth inning—Chance knew that the task exceeded his enthusiasm and endurance. “I have a one-year contract and that is enough,” he told a former Cubs director.

  Michael William “Leaping Mike” Menosky played left field for the Red Sox after Babe Ruth was sold to the Yankees. He was with the Red Sox for four years, during which time he hit a total of nine home runs.

  HARRY FRAZEE: THE MAN BEHIND THE CURSE

  BY DAN SHAUGHNESSY

  On Monday, January 5, 1920, the Harvard University football team, still celebrating its New Year’s Day, 7-6, Rose Bowl victory over Oregon, rolled eastward into Chicago on the California Limited. In Washington, D.C., in a 5-4 decision rendered by Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court upheld the right of Congress to define intoxicating liquors, sustaining the constitutionality of provisions in the Volstead Act. Elsewhere, the last of the U.S. troops in France made their way home across the Atlantic, and a New York Supreme Court justice ruled that it was not immoral for women to smoke cigarettes.

  There was one more bit of news that day. Late in the afternoon, Harry Frazee held a press conference
and announced that slugger-pitcher George Herman “Babe” Ruth had been sold for cash to the New York Yankees.

  “The price was something enormous, but I do not care to name the figures,” said Frazee that day. “No other club could afford to give the amount the Yankees have paid for him, and I do not mind saying I think they are taking a gamble.”

  Prohibition was 11 days away when Frazee made this move, which would drive Sox fans to drink.

  There was some outrage when the Ruth transaction was announced but none of the hysteria that would accompany such a transaction in today’s age of media overkill. The sale of Babe Ruth to Gotham was front-page news in all the Boston papers. John J. Hallahan of the Evening Globe led his story with: “Boston’s greatest baseball player has been cast adrift. George H. Ruth, the middle initial apparently standing for ‘Hercules,’ maker of home runs and the most colorful star in the game today, became the property of the New York Yankees yesterday afternoon.” A newspaper cartoon showed Faneuil Hall and the Boston Public Library wearing “For Sale” signs.

  In his autobiography, Ruth admitted, “As for my reaction over coming to the big town, at first I was pleased, largely because it meant more money. Then I got the bad feeling we all have when we pull up our roots. My home, all my connections, affiliations and friends were in Boston. The town had been good to me.”