On FENWAY 1912: A Conversation

How does your book differ from all the other Fenway books coming out to celebrate the ballparks’ anniversary?

Fenway 1912 breaks so much new ground it makes every other account of the building and construction of Fenway Park obsolete. In the context of the times I tell you precisely why Fenway looks the way it does, what architectural styles and influences played a part in its design, exactly how it was built, how it evolved during its first season and how Fenway Park contributed to the Red Sox 1912 world championship. Virtually none of this has appeared in any other book before. Unlike most others books about Fenway Park, which essentially tell a thumbnail history of the franchise through pictures of the ballpark, I tell the story of Fenway Park as an actual story, a drama that over the course of a little more than a year changed the history of the Red Sox and the City of Boston forever. Fenway Park is the main character, but there are many others – architect James E. McLaughlin, contractor Charles Logue, groundskeeper Jerome Kelley, and players like Tris Speaker, Smoky Joe Wood, Duffy Lewis, Royal Rooters like Nuf Ced McGreevey, team owner James McAleer and others. I think I’ve created a living history of Fenway Park.

Is your book illustrated?

Absolutely, there are plenty of photographs and illustrations in my book, most dating to its first season. All were carefully selected for their ability to reveal something new about Fenway Park. I am particularly excited about several period architectural drawings that I uncovered that will be a revelation to Red Sox fans. To the best of my knowledge, these have never been reprinted or even examined by anyone since 1912. I don’t think I am overstating things when I say that after reading Fenway 1912, fans will never be able to look at Fenway Park the same way again. I know I don’t – and I have attended hundreds of game at Fenway and have been writing about the history of this team for twenty-five years. And throughout the narrative I relate aspects of Fenway Park in 1912 to Fenway Park today, so fans can envision Fenway Park in 1912 within what exists today. Personally, I was stunned to discover in the course of my research that there was so much new information I was still able to uncover about a place that everyone thinks they already know everything about. It will be the one gift Sox fans will want this holiday season.

How were you able to discover so much new material?

Twenty-five years ago, on Fenway’s 75th anniversary, I wrote the official history of the park for the Red Sox yearbook. But when I began working on this book over three years ago I started from scratch, researching in period documents, newspaper accounts and other sources. I just don’t accept that something is true because it appeared in some book written decades later. And to do that takes time – literally years of research, months and months of searching through microfilm, old newspapers and magazines, census records, city directories, maps, and old books before I wrote a word. Let me put it to you this way – I think I did more research for Fenway 1912, telling the story of the creation and building of Fenway Park and the 1912 season, than I did for Red Sox Century, a book in which I told the entire history of the franchise.

So the entire book is about 1912, right? There’s nothing about Fenway Park since then?

Oh, not at all. When certain aspects of Fenway Park need further explanation – and when I uncovered exciting new information – I don’t hesitate to tell those stories. For example, when I discuss the left field wall, I track it through history. I uncover the day that the first fans sat where the “Green Monster” seats are today – it was in 1912! And I trace the history and first use of the phrase “Green Monster,” more precisely than anyone else ever has. That’s a great story, because the phrase was first used far earlier than most people realize, yet didn’t come into popular usage until, relatively speaking, quite recently. And here’s something else few people realize – Fenway Park wasn’t the first baseball field in Boston to be called “Fenway Park.” On occasion the Huntington Avenue Grounds, where the Red Sox played before Fenway Park was built, was itself called “the Fenway Park” due to its proximity to the Fens.


How do you manage to tell Fenway’s story while you also tell the story of the 1912 season and the 1912 World Series?

In a sense, that was the easy part of the book, because as I began to research the events of the 1912 season, I quickly realized that the personality of the ballpark was being revealed game by game, from things like the first home run hit over the left field wall (which most fans know was hit by Boston’s Hugh Bradley) to the first home run hit into the stands that was wrapped around the precursor to the “Pesky pole” in right field. Fenway Park had a dramatic impact on the fortunes of the Red Sox in 1912, and was a huge reason why a team that finished in fourth place in 1911 was able to run away with the pennant in 1912 – Tris Speaker emerged as a superstar and had an MVP season, Smoky Joe Wood, helped by some subtle changes no one else has ever recognized, went 34-5, a couple of rookie pitchers had the season of their lives. I point out precisely how Fenway Park provided the Red Sox with a huge advantage. Sort of by accident, they were perfect for the ballpark. Then, just before the World Series, while the Sox were on a road trip, Fenway Park underwent what I would still consider the most dramatic transformation in its history, as over a period of only a few weeks more than 10,000 seats were added, for the first time creating the familiar “footprint” that still remains, more or less, today. Then, during the 1912 World Series, a whole series of new quirks in Fenway’s personality were revealed.

Wait a minute, Fenway Park was changed during the 1912 season?

Absolutely. And before those changes were made it would have been almost unrecognizable to a contemporary fan. In a sense, the 1912 World Series both christened Fenway and capped things off. The Sox played the New York Giants of John McGraw and Christy Mathewson, and the fortunes of both teams swung back and forth wildly, often during the course of a single game. Series lasted eight games – one was tie – and the Series was marked by fights, arguments, threats of a player strike, charges of gambling, and an on-field riot by the fans. The full story of what took place during those eight games has never been told before because previous accounts failed to recognize the key role Fenway Park played in the Series. That element allowed me to being the Series to life, to put the reader in the stands and on the street, in the dugout and in the clubhouse.


What does Fenway Park mean to you?

It’s hard to put it in words, but in the foreword to the book I try. It’s very personal to me, and I think this is the best book I have ever written. When I was a kid I used to draw pictures of Fenway Park. I moved to Boston after college precisely because of Fenway Park and lived within walking distance of the park for all but the first few months I was in town. If it wasn’t for Fenway Park I may well have never become a working writer. Fenway Park is a place that can change your life – I know it changed mine. By writing Fenway 1912 I hope that in some small way I have repaid the debt I owe to the ballpark. Without Fenway Park, I am a different person, and I don’t think I’m the only one who can say that.

Glenn will be appearing at the Boston Book Festival at the Back Bay Events Center and signing books on October 15 @ 1:00 pm. See http://www.glennstout.net/ for more appearances.

My Piece of Fenway

CHIN MUSIC

My Piece of Fenway

By Glenn Stout


I have long contended that one of the reasons Fenway Park is still with us is not because it has been “preserved” or kept static, but because it has been susceptible to change. This is how what was once the left field wall became “the Green Monster”, why we call the right field foul pole “Pesky’s pole,” and why other areas of the park – “canvas alley” for one – have become named and, in a sense, personalized. This, more than anything else, makes Fenway Park special.

It is particularly special to me, and for a reason that goes beyond the fact that the ballpark - not the ballclub - was the reason I moved to Boston in the fall of 1981, a decision that has determined the course of my life as much as any other I have made. One reason that Fenway Park remains so special to me is that each time I am at the park – or see it on television – there is a small feature that I partly claim as my own.

After the 2002 season the Red Sox, finally succumbing to a modicum of common sense under new ownership, built seats atop the Green Monster in left field. Although this was not the first time fans would be able to watch a game from that vantage point, as I have recently uncovered several references that note that fans watched games from atop the wall in 1912, the “Green Monster seats” are the first legitimate seats in this area.

Now, to place as many seats as possible in such a limited space, the Sox built those seats at a pitch far more severe than elsewhere in the park. While seats in the main grandstand are arranged at a “rising pitch” that increases from 15 degrees from the base to 20 degrees at the back of the stands, the Green Monster seats – like many seating areas in new ballparks, are at a much steeper pitch, approaching 45 degrees.

As workers rushed to finish the seats before the start of the season select VIPs were allowed to take in the view and a few photographs of the new seating area began to appear in print. I saw some of these pictures and talked with some of these people.

The first thing everyone said was how great the view was. The second thing they said was that they hoped no one fell onto the field. It was easy to imagine a fan stumbling headlong down the steep aisle stairs and flipping over the front row and then onto the field, or for a fan in the front row to lean over too far reaching for a ball and fall, or else accidently drop something on Manny Ramirez’s head. While none of these scenarios seemed likely, as the recent tragic fall at Texas’s Arlington Stadium demonstrates, such accidents are not impossible.

In my May column in Boston Baseball that year, I wrote that if the Sox didn’t put up a railing the Green Monster could become a gravestone. When I mentioned this to an attorney friend he stated that once the issue had been raised it put the Sox were on notice in regard to a danger “they know of, or should know of.” If they didn’t take action any of these accidents ever took place they were leaving themselves wide open to a lawsuit.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. At about the same time Jack Curry wrote in the New York Times that there was only “an 18-inch ledge separating you from leaning too far for a baseball and becoming a flying object,” and in the same article Larry Lucchino mentioned there was “the possibility of a protective railing being added to the front row.”

Now it could just be a coincidence, but all I know is that lo and behold, a short time after my column was published a solid barricade about eight inches high appeared atop the Green Monster, making it much less likely that any kind of accident would occur.

Call it the “Writer’s Rail, ” but every time I see that barricade on the top of the Green Monster, I feel the same way Johnny Pesky does when he sees the right field foul pole.

A piece of that sucker is mine.

Glenn’s next book, Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net.



from Boston Baseball August 2011

The Four Fenways

In this the one hundredth season of Fenway Park there is a tendency to see the ballpark as a single entity, a place that is somehow timeless, where a bygone era, while not preserved under glass, has nonetheless been protected, uncorrupted by the crass changes that elsewhere have stripped the game of its history. Not so. While Fenway still occupies the same physical space, it is Fenway Park’s ability to absorb change that has allowed it to remain standing to this day, the ballpark equivalent of Faneuil Hall. While that place survives to this day its origins are similarly buried. Wander its space today and it is impossible to imagine that Faneuil Hall itself started out as little more that a glorified sheep barn.

Fenway Park is a historical artifact and to see it clearly today one needs to examine it like an archaeologist. There are, I believe four Fenways, four distinct eras in the history of this place, four layers that history needs to examine and then peel back and remove to understand why it has survived.

At age one hundred, Fenway Park today – let’s call it Fenway IV - is dominated by everything that is now draped over its surface and essential structure. Never before has Fenway been more utilitarian, supporting all the accoutrements – save comfortable seats - that one now expects in any other modern “retro” ballpark. The ubiquitous and unrelenting barrages of piped in sound and signage, the restaurants, food courts, and pedestrian malls today makes the Fenway experience – apart from the actual contest – more like going to Faneuil Hall than going to a ballgame. Since the Henry/Warner group took over a decade ago, Fenway Park, far from clinging to its past, has instead embraced the future so rapidly that the past has become subservient. It’s most genuine elements, once functional features like that ladder on the left field wall, are now vestigial organs without purpose, footnotes of a history long gone.

It is staggering to me to think that fans of recent vintage have no memory of what I think of as Fenway III, classic Fenway which lasted from the re-construction of 1933/34 until the last decade. Fenway III, which bridged the era of Babe Ruth almost to the present, is the ballpark that I discovered and fell in love with when I first came to Boston in 1981. For more than fifty years Fenway was essentially the same, a quiet, solid, stodgy venue that for the most part no one thought of as very special and which stayed in the background, deferring to the game on the field. Watch footage of any game of this era today and one is struck by the starkness of the place, how barren and spare it appears, as plain and understated as Ned Martin. Not that Fenway remained static during this time period; it did not, but change took place at an almost glacial pace – bullpens in 1940, lights in 1947, etc. Fenway III was the ballpark that fathers took their sons to and then watched as those sons grew to fathers who took their sons to Fenway, a cross-generational experience whose essential nature changed only slightly over the years.

But even this classic version is a corruption of what preceded it. Fenway II existed from September of 1912 until Tom Yawkey bought the team and tore most of old Fenway down. This Fenway, much of which was built over a two-week period in September 1912 to increase the parks’ seating capacity for the 1912 World’s Series, spent the next twenty years in a state of decay, baking and bleaching under the summer sun. By the 1930s portions were condemned, making Fenway Park perhaps the most dangerous building in Boston. Its partial burning in the winter of 1933/34 was a blessing; had it not turned to smoke and ash it simply would have rotted away.

No one alive today remembers Fenway I, the infant ballpark, which lasted just less than a season. Consisting only of a simple concrete grandstand that barely extended past the dugouts, a small covered pavilion and a rectangle of bleachers seats isolated in center field, bound together by only a rough plank fence, Fenway I was almost formless. An outpost on outskirts, it was not shaped by the city. Instead, it was a place the city grew to surround and then a place its people eventually embraced on its own, changed to be sure, but somewhere underneath it all, still at the center of something approaching love.


[Glenn Stout’s next book Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway’s Remarkable First Season, will be published in October. To order now, visit www.glennstout.net This essay first appeared in Boston Baseball, May 2011.]