IT WAS A HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY
ASSORTED YARNS, CRANKS, AND MUGS FROM BASEBALL'S FIRST WORLD SERIES, WHICH COVERED GROUND YOU KNOW VERY WELL.
By Charles Fountain
Two weeks before the close of the 1903 baseball season, team owners from Pittsburgh and Boston—still a few days away from clinching their respective league pennants—met to arrange a series of postseason exhibition games to determine which team was the best in all baseball.
In one afternoon, working without lawyers, the two men drafted and signed a one-page agreement (left) calling for a best-of-nine series. (A blown-up facsimile of the document is on view today at the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown, New York.)
For players and owners, the series was little more than another way of getting a hand into the pockets of baseball-crazed “cranks,” as fans were called. Similar exhibitions were being arranged between American and National League teams in Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. Soon, however, newspapers had dubbed the Pittsburgh-Boston games the “World’s Championship Series,” and over thirteen days in early October, a piece of Americana was born.
And it happened, of course, at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, on real estate where Cabot Center and Richards, Hayden, and Churchill Halls now stand. So as Northeastern and Major League Baseball prepare to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the modern World Series, consider these snapshots from the start of something special.
What’s in a Name
First things first: The Boston team had no formal nickname in 1903.
They were still four years away from being the Red Sox, which no one was yet calling them even informally. Nor were they the Puritans, the Pilgrims, or the Somersets, which some sloppy historians have called them since; these were merely nicknames coined by sportswriters, who as a class never met a synonym they didn’t like. Newspapers most often referred to the team as the Americans, to differentiate them from Boston’s National League club.
“Pittsburg” (no “h” at the end) was already commonly known as the Pirates.
What’s in a Name, Part Two
Bill Dinneen, the Boston pitching star who won three games in the series, including the game-eight finale, couldn’t get newspapers to agree on his name, either. It was spelled “Dineen” in the Globe and the Herald, “Dinneen” in the Post and the Sporting News.
The discrepancy persists. In his book on the first series, Northeastern law professor Roger Abrams goes with “Dineen.” Boston Globe columnist Bob Ryan, in his book on the first series, opts for “Dinneen.” Look to see it spelled both ways in the many articles written next month about the anniversary.
For the record, The Baseball Encyclopedia—as official a source as we’re likely to get, absent some word from Big Bill himself—spells it D-i-n-n-e-e-n.
Matinee Idols
Look at photos of the 1903 Boston players (right). With the notable exception of graying and portly Cy Young (second row from top, far left), they look much more like Broadway leading men than ordinary faces on baseball cards. Today, People magazine would be all over these guys.
To the Winner Go (Some of) the Spoils
Boston’s winning share was $1,182 per player. Pittsburgh’s losing share: $1,316 per player. The disparity came because Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss put his share of the proceeds into his players’ pool, in gratitude for their play throughout the season.
Boston owner Henry Killilea had no such warm feelings for his players. He was a Milwaukee lawyer who had acquired the team only as a favor to his friend, American League president Ban Johnson.
Killilea was also, by all accounts, a cheap SOB. He squabbled bitterly with his players over how to divide the money for the series, very nearly causing them to boycott the games.
Then, once the series started, he made sportswriters—and Dreyfuss—
pay their own way into the park.
“Nuf Ced” McGreevey
Perhaps the most legendary character in the 1903 series wasn’t a player. He was a saloonkeeper.
Michael McGreevey looked the way a barkeep ought to look—ruggedly handsome, with a thick handlebar moustache and a bowler. He ran a narrow, memorabilia-filled establishment called The Third Base, on the corner of Whittier and Tremont. The saloon got its name, McGreevey explained, “because this is the last place you stop before you go home.”
McGreevey’s nickname (subject to its own spelling variations, as was his surname) followed from the way he got the last word in any argument, by ending all discussions with “’Nough said.”
The Third Base was headquarters for, and McGreevey was prime mover behind . . .
The Royal Rooters
As devoted and maniacal a group ever to hoist a beer and cheer a team.
Beginning in the 1890s, during the Boston Nationals’ championship days, and lasting all the way through the Fenway Park championships of the 1910s, the Royal Rooters were the most raucous and visible fans in the house.
They numbered more than a hundred strong for most home games. With a brass band, they would march from The Third Base to the ballpark, enter through the centerfield gate, and parade around the field to their seats behind home plate. When they traveled to Pittsburgh for the series, they hired a local band, marched through the streets four abreast, and adopted as their theme song the vaudeville tune “Tessie” (still being played at Red Sox games as late as 1940).
After Prohibition shut down The Third Base, the Rooters were never the same.
I Liked It So Much, I Bought the Company
Another rabid and notable fan was John I. Taylor, son of Boston Globe publisher Charles Taylor. John I. wasn’t much interested in the newspaper business, but he was a terrific baseball enthusiast. Six months after the series ended, he took his patrimony and bought the team from Henry Killilea.
Though Taylor kept the team just eight years, he left his mark forever. In 1907, he formally named the squad the Red Sox; five years later, he built Fenway Park.
The First Black Sox?
In their book Red Sox Century, authors Glen Stout and Richard A. Johnson all but conclude the first two games of the first World Series were fixed.
The motivation, they speculate, was extending the series and enhancing the gate. Players’ shares were based on gate receipts, and those receipts would naturally be quite a bit larger for an eight- or nine-game series than they would for five or six games. The teams might have decided that if they threw one game each and played the others straight up, there would be no bearing on the series outcome, but substantial bearing on their bank accounts.
In support of the fix theory, Stout and Johnson point to the first inning of game one. After two outs, Cy Young fell uncharacteristically wild, a setback abetted by four Boston errors. Game two’s suspicious moment came when Pittsburgh player-manager Fred Clarke brought his least-experienced pitcher in on relief, and a close game didn’t remain close for long.
The fix rumors got limited play in press coverage of the series, and the open and widespread gambling on the games certainly didn’t quell suspicions. Some gamblers, in fact, were celebrities at the ballpark, none more so than . . .
“Sport” Sullivan
Newspapers noted the presence in the stands of a rakish young gambler named “Sport” Sullivan, who had reportedly bet $2,500 on Boston to win.
But Sullivan’s greatest impact on baseball would come years later. In August 1919, when the White Sox were in town to play the Red Sox, Sullivan had a private meeting with Chicago player Chick Gandil in the first baseman’s room at the Hotel Kenmore. Their talk set in motion events that led to the White Sox’s throwing the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
Versatile Cy
During the third game, when starting pitcher Long Tom Hughes got into a spot of trouble, Boston manager Jimmy Collins called Cy Young to come in on relief.
Only Cy wasn’t on the Huntington Avenue playing field. He was in the business office under the stands, helping to tally the receipts from a crowd in excess of 25,000—more than twice the park’s seating capacity. Since players’ shares came from gate receipts, the veteran pitcher was making sure none of the enormous pile of bills and silver got stuffed uncounted into owner Henry Killilea’s satchel.
When duty called, Young grabbed his cap and glove, walked out to the mound, and began pitching. (He never took warm-up throws anyway, claiming he only had so many pitches in his arm and didn’t want to waste them practicing.)
Don’t Tell Me What’s a Strike
When his playing career ended in 1909, Bill Dinneen moved from throwing strikes to calling them. Dinneen asked American League president Ban Johnson if he could remain in the game as an umpire; Johnson agreed to give him a yearlong trial.
Dinneen lasted twenty-seven years, retiring in 1937 as one of the most respected umps in baseball.
He was not, however, the only member of the Boston pitching staff with major league umpiring experience. Early in the 1903 regular season, an umpire was late showing up for a game. Cy Young, not scheduled to pitch that day, donned mask and chest protector and called a couple of innings—without apparent complaint from either side—until the regular ump arrived.
And What about the South End Grounds?
Pity the poor, forgotten, architecturally magnificent South End Grounds.
This fall, Northeastern will flaunt with fuss and ballyhoo its centennial connection with baseball history. But the Huntington Avenue Grounds wasn’t the only ballpark located on land that is now campus.
From 1888 to 1915, Boston’s National League team—sometimes called the Red Stockings, sometimes the Beaneaters, and finally the Braves—played at the first South End Grounds, located across the railroad tracks, where the Columbus Avenue parking garage and the new squash facility stand today.
It may have been the prettiest ballpark ever built, featuring a steeply pitched, two-decker grandstand with Churchill Downs–like spires. That park burned in 1894, and its more modest replacement fell to the wrecker’s ball in 1915, when the Braves moved to a new location near Boston University.
Today, the memory of the Huntington Avenue Grounds lives on, thanks to the first World Series and the continuing presence of the team that won it. The South End Grounds—alas, like the team that played there—will forever be an understudy to a more glamorous dame.
You Can Go Home Again
The only known instance of a 1903 World Series player returning to the site of the Huntington Avenue Grounds after it became Northeastern University came in May 1956, when the university commemorated the first series by affixing a plaque to Cabot Center.
Former Boston shortstop Freddie Parent was among the honored guests, sharing the dais with baseball commissioner Ford Frick, Boston mayor John Collins, and Northeastern president Carl Ell. Parent became the longest-surviving member of the 1903 team; he died just weeks shy of his ninety-seventh birthday, in 1972. During his final years, he was a sportswriters’ favorite, happily declaiming on the superior skills and desires of players back in his day.
In 1993, thirty-eight years after his death, Cy Young returned to campus in the form of a statue commissioned by Northeastern and sculpted by artist Robert Shure. Bronze Cy stands on a knoll in front of Churchill Hall, not far from where the original Cy stood on the pitcher’s mound in 1903.
A Little Legacy at Fenway
When the Huntington Avenue Grounds closed in 1912, the infield dirt and what little infield grass remained was moved to Fenway Park.
Isn’t it nice to imagine it’s still there, a few layers down? And the next time the Red Sox win it all, it’ll be on the same soil once marked by the spikes of Cy Young, Jimmy Collins, Big Bill Dinneen, and all the other men who got the World Series off to a colorful start a full century ago.
Charles Fountain is an associate professor in the Journalism department. On October 1, Northeastern will host a free daylong conference to celebrate the series centennial. For more information, visit <www.worldseries.neu.edu>.
