Feeding the Monster Read online

  *Before the 2004 Red Sox, none of the 25 Major League Baseball teams that had fallen behind 3-0 even forced a seventh game, and in the four major North American sports leagues, only two out of 239 teams had won a seven-game series after losing the first three games: the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders in 1975 and Toronto Maple Leafs in 1942.

  *Right before the trade deadline in 1990, the Red Sox traded minor leaguer Jeff Bagwell, who had just been named the Eastern League MVP, to the Houston Astros for relief pitcher Larry Andersen. (Houston originally requested minor leaguer Scott Cooper, but the Red Sox offered Bagwell instead.) Andersen pitched in a total of 15 games for Boston. In his seven-season career, Cooper hit a total of 33 home runs and averaged .265. Bagwell, meanwhile, was the 1991 National League Rookie of the Year, the 1994 N.L. MVP, hit 449 home runs through the 2005 season, and is a likely first-ballot Hall of Famer.

  *Most baseball general managers, despite often working seven days a week close to year-round, make under $1 million annually. The game’s best-paid GMs are Atlanta’s John Schuerholz, whose Braves have won 14 consecutive division titles, at $1.6 million per year; the Yankees’ Brian Cashman, who signed a three-year deal for around $5.5 million after the 2005 season; Detroit’s Dave Dombrowski, who was reported to have earned $2 million in 2005 while serving as the Tigers GM and club president; and Oakland’s Billy Beane, who makes over $1 million annually and whose contract includes an ownership stake in the A’s. When the Red Sox tried to hire Beane after the 2002 season, they offered him $13 million over five years.

  Part I

  A Century of

  Boston Baseball

  Chapter 1

  From the Beaneaters

  to the Babe

  IF IT’S TRUE THAT BASEBALL, along with jazz, is one of the great indigenous American art forms, then certainly the story of baseball in Boston has been, for most of its history, one of America’s most compelling tragedies. As John Cheever famously said, “All literary men are Red Sox fans—to be a Yankee fan in literate society is to endanger your life.” The Yankees play on the biggest stage, they’ve fielded the biggest superstars, and, of course, they’ve won the most championships. But it’s the Red Sox who truly represent the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of man as he struggles to transcend the limits of his essential nature.

  The saga of the Red Sox has it all, a rich intertwining of biblical leitmotivs and uniquely American morality tales. There’s the myth of the Original Sin—the supposedly greed-driven sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—which drove the team from the Garden of Eden, or, in the Red Sox’s case, its standing as the best team in baseball. There’s a mirroring of the country’s conflicted relationship with money and power, and an eerily perfect reflection of the damaging effects of the nation’s racist past. There are the cautionary tales about the dangers of hero worship, the always ambiguous relationship between the press and both its subjects and the public, and the specter of political corruption and nefarious back-room dealings. Finally, there’s the Moses-like trip to the Promised Land, a trip that can only be completed when the father figure is banished and an outsider comes in to lead the tribe on the final, triumphant leg of its journey. Since the start of the new century, the Red Sox have been the most enthralling story in all of sports. To truly understand why that is, one needs to go back more than a hundred years, almost to the beginnings of baseball in America.

  The history of professional baseball in Boston can be traced to 1871, when manager Harry Wright and several players from the Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first professional team, joined up with a new semipro National Association team in Boston that, in time, also came to be known as the Red Stockings. In 1876, the disbanding of the National Association led to the birth of the first true professional baseball league, named the National League. The Boston team—usually called the Beaneaters*—was far and away baseball’s dominant force, and over the next 25 years the team won eight pennants, including three straight from 1891 to 1893.

  At the time, Boston was known for having some of the most rabid fans in the country. The city’s white immigrant neighborhoods passionately embraced the city’s rugged ballplayers, many of whom came from the same backgrounds as their fans. The Beaneaters’ most ardent supporters were known collectively as the Royal Rooters, and they, along with many of the city’s sportswriters and the similarly working-class players themselves, gathered every evening in Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevey’s Roxbury saloon, Third Base. (It was so named because McGreevey said it was the last stop on the way home. McGreevy’s own nickname came from his signature exhortations, invoked whenever he felt a debate had reached its natural conclusion.) Politicians and city leaders also assembled at Third Base, including ardent baseball fan John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the future mayor of Boston and grandfather of John F. Kennedy. When they weren’t debating this or that strategy decision or drinking rounds of toasts to the city’s best hitters, the Rooters would sympathize with the plight of the Beaneaters, who played for Boston’s famously parsimonious owner, Arthur Soden. Soden, in addition to forcing his players to pay for their own uniforms, charged fans an outrageous 50 cents for admission at a time when many of the other parks around the country charged only a quarter. Soon, Soden would have competition for the hearts—and dollars—of the Royal Rooters.

  In 1901, Byron “Ban” Johnson renamed his amateur baseball league the American League and took aim at the National League, telling owners he didn’t intend to honor their reserve clause, which essentially tied a player to the same team for the duration of his career.* Johnson had already started teams in Cleveland and in Chicago’s South Side, and had moved others to Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. On January 28, 1901, Johnson announced he intended to open an American League club in Boston, which came to be known as both the Boston Americans and the Boston Somersets. The Somersets signed some of baseball’s biggest names, including hard-nosed third baseman Jimmy Collins and Denton True “Cy” Young, already renowned as the best pitcher ever to grace a baseball diamond.

  In 1903, the Boston team, by now more generally known as the Pilgrims, inaugurated what remains the greatest rivalry in sports. That year, on May 7, the American League team from Boston met the American League team from New York, then called the Highlanders, for the first time. Even before a pitch was thrown, the two teams had reason to dislike each other. The cities themselves already had a natural rivalry: New York had been steadily eclipsing Boston as the country’s seat of culture and business for decades. What’s more, the Highlanders were born from the ashes of Boston’s National League team’s former rivals, the old Baltimore Orioles.* Boston won two out of the first three games, which, in what would become commonplace in Boston–New York contests, featured plenty of offensive fireworks, a bench-clearing argument, and a pitcher being knocked nearly unconscious after being run over while covering first base.

  For the rest of the 1903 season, the New York Highlanders, to say nothing of the other American League teams, were no match for the Pilgrims, who ran away with the pennant. That fall, after the National League’s owners finally resigned themselves to the fact that the American League was around to stay, the American and National Leagues brokered a peace, and Boston’s owners and the owners of Pittsburgh’s pennant-winning National League team agreed to meet for a best-of-nine-games world championship series, which Boston won, 5-3.

  A year later, in 1904, General Charles Taylor, already a legendary newspaperman and the owner and publisher of The Boston Globe, bought the Pilgrims for around $150,000. Taylor gave the team to his ne’er-do-well son, John I. Taylor, so the boy would have something to occupy his time. John Taylor’s tumultuous reign as owner of the team was, for the most part, a disaster. Still, Taylor did leave an indelible mark on the team’s history. In 1907, Taylor decided his players would start wearing red socks and trim, and beginning with the 1908 season, the Pilgrims became known as the Red Sox. Taylor was also responsible for building what has b
ecome associated with the Red Sox above all else: Fenway Park. Taylor broke ground in the winter of 1911, and by 1912, the Sox had a new home.†

  At the time, Fenway bore only a passing resemblance to the park nestled in Boston’s Kenmore Square area today. There was only a single-deck grandstand, with wooden bleachers in left and way out in right and center fields. The left- and right-field fences were just over 300 feet away from home plate—in those days, at the height of the dead ball era, batters rarely hit balls out of the park—and the center-field fence was 390 feet away. There was a 10-foot embankment built out in left; that way, overflow spectators could be seated in the outfield and still see the action. It wouldn’t be for another two decades that the Fenway spectators know today would take shape.

  Fenway’s first years saw the appearance of another of the Sox’s most enduring icons, a loud-mouthed young player with questionable work habits named George Herman “Babe” Ruth. The 19-year-old Ruth was acquired from Baltimore in the middle of the 1914 season, and for the first several years of his career, he was used almost exclusively as a left-handed starting pitcher. Within days of his arrival on the club, he rubbed some of the Red Sox veterans the wrong way. “He had never been anywhere, didn’t know anything about manners or how to behave among people,” said Sox outfielder Harry Hooper. “[He was] just a big, overgrown ape.” Referring to Ruth’s transformation into the best baseball player in the history of the game, Hooper said, “If somebody had predicted that back on the Boston Red Sox in 1914, he would have been thrown in a lunatic asylum.”

  Ruth was clearly a talented pitcher, and for a while, seemed destined to go down as one of the game’s better southpaw hurlers. That changed with America’s involvement in World War I. Suddenly, teams had barely enough players to suit up a full team, and the 23-year-old Ruth began taking turns in the field. Nineteen-eighteen marked Ruth’s emergence as an offensive talent, as he batted .300 and smacked 11 home runs in an era when players frequently led the league with fewer than 10.

  Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, meanwhile, was engaged in a feud with American League president Ban Johnson that would eventually help drive both men from baseball. Frazee had purchased the Red Sox for $400,000 in 1917, and began squabbling with Johnson over power and control almost immediately. The feud deepened when Frazee fought Johnson’s plans to stop play during the war. In 1918, Johnson threatened to terminate the Red Sox’s membership in the league due to gambling in Fenway’s stands, despite the fact that Boston’s gambling problem was no worse than any other city’s. In 1919, when Frazee sold pitcher Carl Mays to the Yankees, Johnson attempted to void the deal. Frazee responded by calling the league president’s actions “a joke.”

  In 1919, as the Red Sox returned to mediocrity due to an abundance of aging players, virtually the only exciting thing about the team was the unprecedented emergence of Ruth, who clouted 29 home runs that year, setting an all-time record. All the while, the already burly slugger continued to pack on more weight. When the season ended, Ruth, less than one year after threatening to walk out on the team during negotiations for a three-year deal, once again announced his intention to walk out unless his salary was doubled to $20,000 a year. Soon, other Boston players began grumbling as well.

  While facing Ruth’s threats, Frazee was also preparing for what he feared could be a lengthy—and costly—battle with Ban Johnson. Looking to shore up his cash reserves and tired of Ruth’s behavior, on December 26, 1919, Frazee sold Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000, at the time the most lucrative deal in the history of the game. Frazee, knowing he’d be criticized for selling one of Boston’s most popular players, released a statement as soon as the deal hit the papers. Ruth, Frazee wrote, “had become impossible and the Boston club could no longer put up with his eccentricities.” He was “one of the most inconsiderate men that ever wore a baseball uniform” and was “taking on weight tremendously” and “doesn’t care to keep himself in shape.” Fair-minded parties, Frazee concluded, “will agree with me that Ruth could not remain in Boston under existing conditions.” There was an outcry, to be sure, but Boston’s regard for Ruth was by no means unanimous. In any case, the Yankees didn’t seem to be much of a threat; in the seven years since they’d changed their name from the Highlanders, they’d averaged a fifth-place finish, while the Sox had won three championships.

  Harry Frazee held on to the Red Sox until 1923, and his remaining years with the team were notable mostly for his colorful squabbles with Johnson. But at the time that Frazee sold Ruth, he did not, contrary to what’s become accepted as fact, face serious financial difficulties, nor did he need the money he got from the sale to finance No, No, Nanette. Frazee’s mistake—and the cause of the fossilization of his legacy as the man responsible for the media-constructed Curse of the Bambino—had everything to do with his failure to ally himself more strongly with the local press. Many of Boston’s sportswriters were already friendly with Ban Johnson, and Frazee, in taking away some of the perks (like free booze and food) the writers had grown used to receiving at Fenway, gave the city’s scribes further reason to line up against him. There was also the lingering suspicion that Frazee was Jewish (he wasn’t), a definite black mark in early-twentieth-century, heavily Irish-Catholic Boston. This wouldn’t be the first time the members of Boston’s sporting press would take it upon themselves to decide the proper way to run the Red Sox.* That had been going on since the days when the Royal Rooters and the city’s sportswriters took on Arthur Soden.

  After Ruth’s sale to the Yankees, the Babe, of course, went on to hit 665 more home runs, cementing his place as the sport’s most famous player of all time. The Red Sox, meanwhile, were about to begin an epically barren stretch. After winning more World Series than any other team in its first two decades, the Red Sox and their fans would soon learn what it was like to truly suffer.

  *In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, team names, or nicknames, were not as important or as immutable as they are today.

  *At the time, baseball players had almost no control over where they played. Once a contract expired, the rights to that player were retained by the team that had initially signed him. If the player didn’t want to re-up for what his club was offering him, he could choose to sit out and not play; he did not, however, have the right to sign with another team. Teams, of course, had the right to trade players—they could even trade or sell the rights to players they no longer had under contract but still controlled.

  *The Orioles were reborn as an American League team when the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore after the 1953 season.

  †The Red Sox beat the Highlanders, 7–6, in Fenway’s major league opener.

  *So deeply rooted was the press’s antipathy toward Frazee that they continued to slander him in death. As Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson write in Red Sox Century, “Paul Shannon’s obituary of Frazee in the [Boston] Post is most notorious for its inaccuracies, and he again raised questions over Frazee’s religion…. The [New York] Times made a particularly egregious error, reporting that Frazee died nearly broke.” The Times corrected its obituary shortly thereafter, but the first, inaccurate one was usually used for reference.

  Chapter 2

  Tom Yawkey’s Team,

  Ted Williams’s Town

  IN 1923, Bob Quinn, a Ban Johnson ally, led a consortium that bought the Red Sox for $1.15 million. By the end of the decade, the Red Sox had become the biggest joke in baseball, and Fenway, devoid of fans and sorely in need of upkeep, took on the appearance of a haunted house. In 1932, the Red Sox finished the year at 43-111, drawing fewer than 200,000 fans. The Yankees, meanwhile, were well on their way to building a reputation as one of the twentieth century’s greatest dynasties. In 1932, powered by Ruth and Lou Gehrig’s combined 75 home runs (the entire Red Sox team had only 53), the Bronx Bombers went 107-47, swept the Cubs in the World Series, and drew almost a million fans, tops in the league.

  During the nine full seasons in which he owned the Red Sox,
Quinn led the team to a 483-897 record, one of the worst stretches in baseball history.* Before the 1933 season, despondent and desperate to sell, Quinn finally found a suitable buyer. New York millionaire Tom Yawkey had been casting about to buy a baseball club, and, when one of Yawkey’s confidants, former Philadelphia A’s star Eddie Collins, introduced Quinn and Yawkey, the two men struck a deal. In February 1933, just days after his thirtieth birthday, Yawkey bought the Red Sox and Fenway Park for $1.2 million.* Since Yawkey had no experience running a baseball organization, he named Collins the team’s vice president and general manager.

  Yawkey was born Thomas Austin in 1903. His mother, Augusta Yawkey, was an heir to the Yawkey lumber and mining fortune; his father, also named Thomas Austin, was an insurance executive. The elder Thomas Austin died of pneumonia when his son was less than a year old, and the young Tom Austin was brought into the household of Augusta’s brother Bill Yawkey, who had used some of his share of the family fortune to purchase the Detroit Tigers. When Tom was 15, his mother died, and he was formally adopted by Bill Yawkey; when Bill died a year later, Tom, who had by then changed his last name, had an inheritance that was estimated at around $20 million. Growing up, Yawkey constantly tried to prove himself on the athletic fields, where he often fell just short. By the time he reached his twenties, Tom Yawkey had grown into a young man who both jealously guarded his privacy and desperately wanted to make his mark in the world. In 1924, he met a young dancer, Elise Sparrow; the two married a year later.

  Yawkey wasted little time before making it clear that he intended to use his money to make the Red Sox relevant—and victorious—once again. When a fire wiped out Fenway’s new left-field bleachers in 1934, Yawkey took the opportunity to give the park a major renovation, adding new grandstands and a second deck and covering the 37-foot wooden wall that rose over left field with sheet metal. In 1935, desperate to land the league’s best player, Yawkey purchased Washington Senators shortstop Joe Cronin, who became the Red Sox player-manager. Cronin, a slick-fielding, two-time All-Star, was, to be sure, a good ballplayer, but he was far from the most powerful or talented player in the game. For the next quarter century, Cronin, for better and worse, would come to define Red Sox baseball in his various stints as a player, manager, and member of the team’s front office. For years, he selfishly insisted on forcing other, better players out of position so he could remain at shortstop. In 1939, a year in which he made 32 errors in the field, Cronin told Yawkey to sell a highly touted shortstop prospect in the Sox’s farm system named Pee Wee Reese. Yawkey did. Reese, of course, would play on 10 All-Star teams and seven pennant winners as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.