THE WONDER YEAR
There once was a geezer named Ruth
"The Year the Red Sox Won the Series:
A Chronicle of the 1918 Championship Season"
By Ty Waterman and Mel Springer
Northeastern University Press
Boston, Massachusetts
1999, 293 pages, $24.95
By Jack Grinold
Using old newspaper accounts,
Ty Waterman and Ed Springer have reconstructed one of the most important
seasons ever played by "the olde town team," or any professional
baseball team, for that matter. The year in The Year the Red Sox Won the
Series is 1918, yet contemporary readers will anticipate every page as
if awaiting delivery of their morning paper.
The narrative follows the Sox from preseason signings
and trades through the World Series, as they try to build a pennant contender,
handle the complexities created by World War I, and adjust to the headline-making
antics, both good and bad, of their emerging superstar, George Herman Ruth.
Day-to-day accounts from the multitude of competing
Boston newspapers as well as clippings penned by opposition cities' scribes
chronicle the season from December 1, 1917, to September 15, 1918. That
the ink-stained wretches of the era were a colorful lot ensures lively
reading.
However, dyed-in-the-wool Red Sox followers are
advised to accompany their perusal with a heavy dose of Prozac. This was
the time when their team reigned supreme. Remember, they were World Series
champions in 1913, 1915, and 1916. Still, though these were fruitful years,
within them we detect the beginnings of what would become seven decades
in the desert.
Not only are the daily accounts lively and entertaining,
Waterman and Springer supply informative footnotes and updated league standings
and statistics. The book is well illustrated with photographs and, even
more important, the marvelous cartoons that played such an important role
in the period's newspapers.
Baseball fans will enjoy the spicy jargon of the
day: swatting station (home plate), flinging wing (a pitcher's arm), onion
(ball), frank (walk), and Jungaleers (Detroit Tigers). The colloquialisms
were just as colorful: "Harry Hooper was as fast as thought."
"Ruth was as cool as a radiator in an apartment house."
Some writers even sprinkled their copy with poetry:
We know of a geezer named Ruth,
Who slams that old baseball forsooth,
And after the crash
Of aforesaid Ruth smash
You hunt for the ball with a sleuth.
Or:
Indians came to Boston town
Nursing pennant hopes.
Red Sox knocked 'em galley west,
Sent 'em to the ropes.
World War I had a big impact on the pennant race.
The battles in France were raging. Many players were drafted or left to
take jobs in essential industries. In fact, 1918 was an abbreviated season.
Players from twenty-one to thirty-one had to work in an essential industry
or fight, and on July 20 the U.S. secretary of war ruled that baseball
was not an essential industry. The teams threatened to suspend play immediately.
On July 27, the secretary gave baseball a respite until September 1, which
would mark the end of the regular season. Thus, the traditional 154-game
season was cut to 125 games.
The Red Sox were decimated by the military draft
in the early going, losing two mainstays of their second-place 1917 team-manager
and second baseman Jack Barry, and star left fielder Duffy Lewis-plus six
others. However, owner Harry Frazee went on a buying spree, shelling out
over $100,000 for new talent. This energized the Sox into a 60 start
and first place, which they maintained, with the exception of a few dips
into second place, right to the end.
Still, the war was ever present. The season's
first game featured a Liberty Bond drive. Throughout the year, players
were either drafted or about to be drafted. Third baseman Fred Thomas enlisted
in the Navy at mid-season but gained a furlough in September that allowed
him to play in all six World Series games.
The war also diabolically affected the World Series
between the Sox and the Chicago Cubs. As the draft continued, baseball
attendance shrank, and World Series revenues were predicted to be low.
The commissioner's office announced individual players' shares would drop
from the $3,600 earned in 1917 to $900. This precipitated a players' strike
before game five at Fenway Park; the Cubs and the Sox finally took the
field an hour after start time.
The Sox, winners of the series in six games, received
only $1,108 per share and, as punishment from the commissioner's office
for the threatened strike, were not awarded the traditional World Series
emblem-an injustice remedied seventy-six years later at a ceremony held
for relatives of the deceased players.
Given the war's impact, the authors might have
included a few clippings about the conflict, which ended abruptly on November
11, 1918, a few months after the series, to provide a more thorough historical
context for readers.
The emergence of Ruth was the only other development
that approached the war in importance. Before 1918, he had been one of
the game's great left-handed pitchers. In 1918, he became Ruthian.
From 1915 to 1917, Ruth hit nine home runs in
361 at bats and was feared as a good hitting pitcher. Early in 1918, he
was hitting .400. On May 6, he played for the first time as a pure batsman
at first base-and hit a home run. The next game, he was at first again,
this time hitting one off the legendary Walter Johnson and tying a record
with three in three straight games. Weeks later, he surpassed that, with
four in four straight games.
Not only did he shatter home-run records, his
power was astonishing. He was the Colossus of Clouts. "Ruth's slam
was the mightiest ever produced at the Polo Grounds," wrote the Boston
American. The Boston Globe marveled, "They show you the very spot
far out in the bleachers in Detroit where the ball landed, and you wonder
if you are being told the truth."
His behavior was also becoming Ruthian. The Boston
Herald offered a critique of his driving: "The Babe can hit telegraph
poles as hard as he hits horsehides." When his temper got him into
a dispute with team manager Ed Barrow, Babe quit the team, then returned
a day later. He was in the headlines constantly, even when the news was
not of his own making. On August 24, his father was murdered by his mother's
brother, causing Ruth to leave the team for a week during the pennant stretch.
At year's end, Babe sported a .300 average and
eleven home runs in 317 at bats. As a pitcher, he won the first game of
the season and the last, with a 137 record and a 2.22 ERA. In the
World Series, playing only as a pitcher, he won two of the four Sox victories
and in his second outing drove in the winning run. By season's end, the
Babe had become bigger than life, and baseball would never be the same.
We would hate it if Northeastern, the current
landlord of the National League's old South End Grounds (18691914)
and the American League's Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds (19011911),
which hosted the first World Series, had not been a part of the 1918 saga.
It was. If you wished to follow a game by Western Union simulation, you
paid your quarter at the Boston Arena, currently called Matthews Arena.
That's where "Mrs. Babe" followed every away game.
The seeds of sorry days to come are evident when,
in early spring, Frazee admits the Yankees have offered $150,000 for Ruth.
Yet he maintains, "I might as well sell the franchise and the whole
club as sell Ruth." During the next three years, he sold or traded
eleven players to the Yankees, including Ruth in 1920. When he sells the
club in 1923, the Red Sox dynasty has yielded to the Yankees dynasty, year
after year, decade after decade. Invoking the nickname of our team's number-one
fan, Michael T. McGreevy, in vain: "Nuf Ced."
Jack Grinold is the associate athletics director
for communications and the director of sports information.
Pavilion Key:
Isle of Buried Treasure
By Greg Lewbart
Krieger Publishing, 2000
This novel, set in Florida's Ten Thousand Islands, follows the efforts
of game and freshwater fish commission officer Hal Noble as he tries to
foil illegal activities that threaten one of the most endangered reptiles
on earth, the Kemp's ridley sea turtle. Lewbart, MS'85, a veterinarian
and associate professor of aquatic animal medicine at North Carolina State,
has devised a classic page-turner mystery, interlaced with timely themes
related to natural history, ecology, and conservation.
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