The WORST World Series: 1918

 

Before the start of the 1918 "Worlds Series" there was joy in Boston and Chicago, but little interest elsewhere.  Due to the war in Europe many baseball fans viewed each team with cynicism, ballclubs that crassly tried to buy pennants with cash with players who dodged military service while their countrymen gave their lives on the battlefield.    

Still, the Cubs were a powerhouse.  Anchored by Jim “Hippo” Vaughn, the Cubs had the best pitching in the National League and were no less successful in the batter’s box, featuring a lineup that feasted in war-depleted pitching staffs.  Despite the presence of players like Babe Ruth on the Boston roster, most observers, like Red Sox partisan Paul Shannon of the Boston Post, gave the edge to the Cubs. 

Shannon was right.  The Cubs should have won the 1918 World Series.  But as modern observers know, in regard to the Cubs, “should win” and “won” are not part of the same language.  Although virtually everything tilted the Cubs way, it would not be enough.  They would squander every advantage, beginning with their home field edge.  With the series scheduled to begin with three games in Chicago, Cubs ownership got greedy and asked the White Sox for permission to use Comiskey Park rather than Weeghman Park due to its larger seating capacity.  Both the home field advantage and the offensive advantage they gained from their home park were gone. 

Both clubs had plenty of time to prepare and set their pitching rotation for the series did not begin until September 4, almost a week after the end of the war-shortened regular season. 

The big surprise in game one was that the Sox chose to start Babe Ruth on the mound.  He’d won only 13 games in 1918 and the smart money believed the Cubs were much better against left-handed pitching.  But Ruth had been Boston’s best pitcher down the stretch and due to Ruth’s recent trouble hitting left-handers, Sox manager Ed Barrow didn’t intend to use him in the Series in the outfield.  Instead he decided to go with minor league journeyman – and right-handed hitter – George Whiteman.

Neither Hippo Vaughn nor Ruth was sharp at the start of game one, but neither team scored until   the fourth inning, when Boston finally broke through.  Dave Shean walked, and after a botched sacrifice attempt, George Whiteman and first baseman Stuffy McInnis both singled, scoring Sheen and giving Boston a 1-0 lead. 

In a contest the Tribune termed “monotonous,” that was it.  The Cubs mounted a mild threat in the sixth, only to have Whiteman end the rally with a running catch to secure Boston’s 1-0 victory. 

Game two was far more engaging as Cubs coach Otto Knabe provided the entertainment, taunting Red Sox coach Heinie Wagner.  After Boston went down in the second inning, instead of returning to the Boston bench, Wagner came looking for Knabe. 

Before anyone realized what was happening, Wagner was in the Cub dugout throwing haymakers.  The Cubs folded in over the two men before Boston‘s reinforcements could cut across the diamond and come to Wagner’s rescue.  After some delay, Wagner emerged muddied but not bloodied from the confrontation.  Baseball Magazine later reported that “fans who could see it [the fight] declared that when they heard two Germans were fighting, they merely encouraged them to beat each other up.”

The battle did ratchet up the intensity of the Series, and the rest of game two was played as if baseball were a contact sport.  In the Chicago third, the Cubs broke through against Sox pitcher Joe Bush.  With one out, Freed Merkle walked, and then Charlie Pick laid down a bunt and beat the throw to first.  Third baseman Charlie Deal popped up a failed bunt attempt, but Bill Killefer proceeded to double to score one run and then Tyler helped himself, driving a single to center that scored Pick and Killefer.  Boston threatened in the ninth when Strunk and Whiteman hit back-to-back triples, but Tyler held on for the 3-1 win as Ruth stayed on the Boston bench and the Cubs knotted the Series.

A victory in game three was critical for Chicago.  Manager Fred Mitchell brought back Vaughn on one day’s rest, while Boston countered with submariner Carl Mays.

Vaughn pitched well, but Mays was even better.  In the fourth Boston scratched across two runs after Vaughn hit Whiteman and the Red Sox added four singles, not one of which was hit hard.  Chicago’s best chance came in the bottom of the inning when Dode Paskert nearly hit a home run only to have George Whiteman, Boston’s best player in the Series, grab the ball out of the front row.  The Cubs scored one run in the fifth on a couple of hits, but May stopped them after that.  The Red Sox won, 2-1.

A few hours later, at eight o’clock, both teams boarded the same train for the twenty-seven hour trip to Boston.  Normally, the two clubs would have had little to do with one another, particularly after the bad blood in game two, but the long journey caused tempers to cool and players from both clubs finally had a chance to look over some documents distributed by the National Commission.  By the time they reached Boston they were spitting blood.  Baseball’s ruling National Commission had changed the distribution of World Series money.  Each team was playing for a whole lot less than they thought they were. 

Before 1918 the players had shared 60% of Series receipts but in 1918, the Commission, acting on behalf of the owners, changed the distribution to only 55.75% of the receipts, and then only from the first four games.  That amount would also be shared with the players on the teams that finished second, third and fourth and players would be forced to “donate” another ten percent to war charities.  By the time the two team reached Boston the player of both teams were united and talking about going on strike.  The next morning player representatives told the commission that they had no intention of playing and requested a formal meeting to air their grievances.  They were put off and reluctantly decided to play game four.

The Cubs, in particular, had reason to play.  The night before, as the train chugged its way into Boston, schedule game four starter Babe Ruth had decided to have a little fun punching out straw hats on the train. 

Ruth either miscalculated or punched through a hat and straight into the steel wall of the train, or else someone resisted and Ruth responded with a real swing that missed its target and lost a battle with that same wall. The result was that the middle finger of Ruth’s pitching hand was swollen to twice its normal size.  If he was hampered by the finger, or couldn’t pitch at all, the advantage tilted toward the Cubs.

Ruth had the finger drained but convinced Barrow he could pitch.  He started the game with the finger stained with iodine. 

He could pitch, but just barely.  Unfortunately for the Cubs, Boston’s defense kept bailing him out.  Then in the fourth, after Cubs pitcher Lefty Tyler walked Shean and Whiteman, Ruth came up with two outs.

He fell behind 3-0 then watched two strikes pass by as if he realized he had only one good swing left and was determined to wait for the perfect pitch. 

He got it.   As Boston Post reporter Paul Shannon wrote, “A report like a rifle shot rang through the park.  Twenty-five thousands rose as one man, and while the bleachers shrieked in ecstasy, the Cubs right fielder [Flack] taken unawares dashed madly for the center field stands.”  Shean and Whiteman scored easily and Ruth slid into third for a triple.  Boston led, 2-0.

But Ruth still wasn’t right and in the top of the eighth, the Cubs finally got to him, tying the game and ending Ruth’s scoreless inning streak in Series at 29 2/3 innings.

Cubs’ pitcher Phil Douglas took over for Tyler in the eighth.  Boston catcher Wally Schang led off with a single and advanced to second when a Douglas pitch got away from catcher Bill Killefer.  Harry Hooper then laid down a bunt, which Douglas fielded and promptly threw away, and Schang came around with the winning run.  The Sox hung on and now the Cubs trailed in the Series three games to one.

As soon as the game ended, however, the players again took up their grievance with the National Commission.  Harry Hooper, Heinie Wagner, Leslie Mann and Bill Killefer, went together to the Copley Plaza. Once again the Commission brushed them off like piece of lint.    Later that evening, however, they decided to try to meet once more with the commission the next morning.  Unless the issue was resolved, they were determined not to play game five.

By this time word of the snafu was becoming public knowledge.  The press was four-square on the side of management – the Chicago Daily Journal referred to the players as the “bolsheveki of baseball.”

The next morning the team of revolutionaries went to the Copley Plaza once again.  The Commission again sent them away, saying they could all meet again after game five.

The players knew better.  If Boston won game five, the point was moot - the Series would be over and there would be no meeting.  The representatives went to the ballpark and explained the situation to players of both teams.  They were all in agreement. As far as they were concerned, there would be no game five.

Meanwhile, the commission celebrated their victory over the players in the bar of the Copley Plaza.  But as game time approached and some twenty thousand fans began to pour into Fenway Park, the players remained in the clubhouse, on strike.  When the Commission found out they gulped down one last drink and hustled over to the ballpark.  At 2:45 the commissioners met Hooper, Dave Shean, Mann and Killefer in the umpire’s room as a handful of sportswriters squeezed in behind them.  The players were ready for a sober discussion of the issues.   The commission was incapable of having a sober discussion about anything.

American League president Ban Johnson, drunk and in tears, was in no condition to negotiate anything.  He played the patriotic card, imploring the players to take the field for “the soldiers in the stands,” some of whom were, in fact, now on the field, pressed into service to try to prevent the crowd from rioting.

Reporter Nick Flately of the Boston American captured the tone perfectly in his story about the meeting.  According to his description, Commissioner Gerry Hermann piped in, saying, “’Let’s arbitrary this matter Mister Johnson,’ then he launched forth into a brilliant exposition of the history of baseball’s governing board.  Expert reporters took notes for a while, then quit, befuddled.”

So did the players.  There was no sense arguing with three men who were seeing double and slurring every word.  Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald, president Kennedy’s grandfather, took the field and announced to the crowd that the players “have agreed to play for the sake of the public and the wounded players in the stands.”

The crowd booed lustily, and when the players took the field they fielded insults from every direction. Some fans just left, disgusted.

Then came the game.  Boston fans took their anger over the strike out on the Red Sox, cheering Cub pitcher Hippo Vaughn the whole game, and the Red Sox responded by making outs early and often.  The Cubs scored a run in the second and two in the eighth, and just over one hour and forty minutes after it started, game five was history.  The Cubs won, 3-0 and trailed the Red Sox three games to two.  The Chicago press thought it was a great game while Boston sports writers were less impressed and all but wrote that the Red Sox had played to lose.

The end result was that no one cared anymore who won Series anyway.  The strike, which the public didn’t understand, soured the public on the Series.     Fenway Park was only half full on the afternoon of September 11 when Tyler, on one days’ rest, squared off opposite Carl Mays.

There was little glory for the Cubs or anyone else not named George Whiteman.  The journeyman hit a line drive in the second that scored two runs and in the eighth inning made a tumbling catch to save the game.  He left the field to a rousing ovation with a wrenched neck as Ruth trotted out as a meaningless defensive replacement.  One inning later the Boston Red Sox were champions of the world and the Cubs looked to next year.  Most fans yawned at the result. There was only a small subdued on field celebration by the Red Sox as a few hundred die-hard cheered them on. By the end of the series only a few dozen fans were showing up on the streets outside the Chicago newspaper office to watch the game being replayed on the big board.  The Daily Journal reported glumly that “interest was plainly at zero…baseball is not an essential during a time of war.” 

George Whiteman, not Ruth, was heralded as the hero of the Series.  The right-handed hitter had feasted on Tyler and Vaughn while catching everything hit in his direction. 

Depending on which newspaper one believed, the Cubs earned either $574.62 or $671.09 each, while the champion Red Sox took in $1001.52, and each still had to donate a portion to the war charities.  Both figures were the lowest in Series history, as was the total of nineteen runs scored in the Series, ten by the Cubs and only nine for Boston.

Perhaps the worst World Series in history was over.  Baseball took punitive action against the players over the strike and withheld their World Series medallions, the equivalent of today's rings, until 1993. At the time no one could envision that decades later Boston fans would look back on it with nostalgia, for the Red Sox would go 86 years before winning another championship and that Cubs fans, who are still waiting, would one day look back at 1918 as one of the first of many lost opportunities. 

Within days after ended it ended it was almost as if the Series had not been played at all.  Soldiers returning from Europe carried with them Spanish influenza and a few days after the Series scores of people began dying in Boston as the pandemic took hold.   Among its victims would be Series umpire Silk O’Loughlin, and several Boston sports writers who covered the Series.

The disease spread rapidly to Chicago, probably due to the return of soldiers to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, or, perhaps, by fans, sportswriters and players returning to Chicago from Boston.  In October alone more than ten thousand Chicagoans would die of the disease, and by the time the pandemic finally ended in the spring of 1919, more than a half million Americans were dead, 20,000 in Chicago and another 6,000 in Boston.

There was some good news, however.  On November 11, the Great War came to an end. In 1919 baseball would soon return to normal.  Unfortunately for the Red Sox and Cubs, “normal” no longer meant what it once did.  Another World Series victory would prove elusive for both teams. 

 

Adapted from Red Sox Century and The Cubs, copyright Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson. @GlennStout, www.glennstout.net

 

 

IN TRUDY'S WAKE

The Yankees are good, but Trudy was first.

When the New York Yankees celebrate their 27th world championship on Friday with a ticker tape parade, few of the players will realize that they are following in the wake of the reception Trudy Ederle earned in 1926 when she returned to New York after swimming the English Channel.

From Young Woman and the Sea:

"As Trudy stood on the promenade of the Berengaria as it steamed into New York Harbor in mid-morning of August 27, she once again found her self completely taken aback. Since swimming the English Channel only three short weeks before, that was becoming something of a pattern.

She’d never seen anything like it. No one on board the ship ha ever seen anything like it. No one in New York had ever seen anything like it. As the Manhattan skyline came into focus and began to grow tall, the boat was greeted from all directions as vessels of every size and shape came out to meet it - fire boats spraying water high into the air, tugboats, cutters, motor boats, private launches and yachts, all with their sirens tied down wide open, creating the loudest din anyone on the water ever recalled hearing before.

At first Trudy didn’t understand, but as the Berengaria drew closer and Trudy saw banners flying on the boats that said “Welcome home Trudy,” and “Queen of the Seas,” she began to realize it was all for her, every bit of it. A few moments earlier, she’d been asked to go the upper deck. Once she arrived two bi-planes circling the ship dropped flowers overhead, their petals falling like rain all around her, the sky raining flowers.

It was all for her.


The greeting was organized by a man known as “Mr. New York,” Grover Whalen, the city’s official greeter, who liked to refer to himself as the “doorman to the western hemisphere.” In 1919, when Whalen was put in charge of the city’s reception for the Prince and Princess of Wales, he came up with the notion of the ticker tape parade. Although the first few such parades were relatively modest, since then Whalen’s efforts had become ever grander. They culminated in the reception afforded Trudy, and, a year later, Charles Lindbergh. The scene Trudy was watching unfold in New York Harbor was just the beginning.

New York came to a stop. Nothing else mattered. America’s foremost film star, Rudolph Valentino, had died of peritonitis on August 23 and ever since his body had lain in state at Campbell’s Funeral Parlor under 24-hour guard by a phalanx of New York City police officers. But on the day of Trudy’s arrival, the bulk of the guard was transferred to Trudy’s home, and the crowd that had gathered around the funeral home for days suddenly disappeared. Trudy was bigger than any motion picture star.

New York was gaga for Trudy and in the days prior to her arrival Whalen and the New York press, particularly the Daily News, had whipped the city into frenzy. Now that the day arrived Whalen rounded up Trudy’s entire family – forty-two strong including aunts and uncles and cousins – and divvied them up aboard two tugs owned by the city, the Riverside and the official VIP vessel, the Macom. As the Berengaria approached, the Macom made it way alongside the gigantic vessel.

From aboard the Macom Mrs. Ederle spotted her daughters first, standing in an open window on the promenade deck, and began waving her arms back and forth, trying to get her their attention. She did, and Trudy nearly jumped out of the window to reach her. “Mamma,” she cried, “Mamma!” Even amid the din in the harbor, everyone aboard the Macom could hear Trudy’s voice above the tumult.

Trudy wouldn’t have to wait for the big ship to dock. A few minutes later the Macom pulled along side the big ship and Trudy and her entourage came aboard the Macom to be ferried ashore, reunited, at last, with her mother. She left in such a rush that she left all her bags behind and nearly knocked her mother to the ground as they met and hugged, tears streaming down both of their faces, Trudy wearing blue serge coat and a lavender felt hat, clutching her doll, her hair bronze from the summer sun, and her face tanned and healthy.

After the Macom docked at Pier A in the Battery on the southern tip of Manhattan, the same place Trudy’s swim for Sandy Hook had begun in virtual anonymity only a few months before, Trudy was hustled through a crowd numbering in the thousands, then into an open car for a procession to City Hall Plaza, but the crowds were so immense the car barely moved as everyone pressed forward to get a glimpse at Trudy. At City Hall Plaza the scene was even wilder, as ten thousand people crowded into the plaza and the surging crowd threatened to turn into a dangerous crush. Trudy and her family were pushed inside by a phalanx of police and the big iron doors of the City Hall closed and locked to prevent hundreds of onlookers from crashing the reception.

Trudy, her family and other VIPS were escorted to the Mayor’s reception room, where New York Mayor Jimmy Walker paid tribute to Trudy. “When history records the greatest crossings, they will speak of Moses crossing the Red Sea, Caesar the Rubicon, and Washington the Delaware, and frankly, your crossing of the English Channel will take place alongside these.”

Trudy hardly had the time to take a breath before she was taken back outside steps for a photo op. The flash of the cameras had barely gone off when the crowd surged, sending people tumbling up the steps, swamping over Trudy. A bulky policeman grabbed Trudy with both arms and lifted her in the air and carried her back inside the building as Mayor Walker called for reinforcements.

At 2:30 p.m. with a gauntlet of police protecting her, Trudy, with Dudley Field Malone at her side, was put into another open car in the midst of a motorcade. As the entourage made the turn from 9th street to Fifth Avenue, torrents of paper fell from the sky as New York witnessed its first, gigantic, no holds barred ticker tape parade. This was no modest celebration that lasted only a few blocks, like that which greeted the Prince of Wales. This celebration lasted all the way uptown, before crowds unlike any the city had ever seen as hundred and hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers lined the streets. At times onlookers rushed the car, stopping it in its tracks, rushed at Trudy and knocked her from her feet, backwards into the seat of the car, desperate for souvenirs. The crowd even tore a bracelet from her wrist and grabbed at her coat and hat, before police, mounted and armed with billy clubs, managed to free her.

Trudy stood in the car, her face tilted upward and spinning back and forth as if her eyes alone were not sufficient to see the entire scene, waving a flag, dizzy from the attention, absolutely, totally, and completely overwhelmed. Trudy waved and laughed and cried and looked up in wonder, almost drowning in the attention, knowing that the crowds, later estimated as at least a quarter of a million strong, were cheering for her, but barely able to hear them herself.

The motorcade finally made it way to its destination, Trudy’s home on Amsterdam Avenue, where 4,000 people crammed the single block that contained the Ederle’s home and butcher shop. Trudy’s family decorated the tenement in bunting and American flags, and a huge banner that said “WELCOME HOME TRUDY” hung from the sills. In the front window of the shop was a sort of diorama, an imitation of the English Channel cut from green cardboard, complete with cut-out waves powered by an electric motor that lifted and fell, and a cutout of Trudy, an automaton bobbing though the “water,” her arms fixed in the crawl stroke, a smile frozen on her lips. Along the side was a copy of poem that read “Pop Ederle by cutting meat made for himself a name,/His daughter Trudy by cutting waves won victory and fame./You see her now she fights the seas, and how she puts it over./ Hurrah for her, first of her sex to swim from France to Dover.”

Finally, at last, Trudy’s car pulled up before the house and the police cleared the crowd so she could get out, but before she did a young girl selected by the neighborhood stepped forward, climbed aboard the car, and tried to place placed a gold and white satin crown on Trudy’s head. Trudy didn’t want it, and pleaded, “I’m tired,” but when the little girl looked heartbroken, she finally agreed, and, as the cameras of news photographers flashed over and over again, turning Trudy nearly blind as well as deaf, someone draped a blue sash over her shoulders that read “Queen Gertrude the First.” Almost as quickly as the crown went on, Trudy took it off as the crowd of friends and acquaintances of a lifetime chanted “Trudy, Trudy, Trudy!” over and over and over, suddenly star struck.

Police made a corridor through the crowd and Trudy was hustled inside, Dudley Field Malone pushing her from behind, then Trudy upstairs to her family’s apartment. There, the scene was only somewhat less frenetic as dozens of people were crammed into an apartment that comfortably held only eight or ten people, but now, for the first time in three months, at least she was finally surrounded by people she knew. But when the crowd failed to disperse the police asked her to stand before the window for a while and wave to see if that would satisfy them. For the next hour and a half she periodically pulled the curtains back, and gave a short wave, but no one on the streets below budged. Almost lost in the frenzy was the red roadster, the promise of which had helped Trudy across the Channel. It had actually been waiting for her at the pier in the Battery, gleaming in the sun, but the crowds had been so large that Trudy had not seen it. It was a Buick, precisely the one she wanted, painted fire engine red with a big comfortable rumble seat in back. In exchange for a testimonial from Trudy, Dudley Field Malone had asked the automaker not only for the car, but $50,000. Buick found the price too steep, and offered Malone the car plus only $1000, which he turned down. For a time it appeared that the roadster would have to wait for Pop Ederle to open his own wallet but at the last minute the Daily News stepped in and bought the car for Trudy.

As the crowd finally began to thin out as New York’s finest urged everyone to move along, the roadster seemed to magically appear, parked along the curb on Amsterdam Avenue in front of the Ederle’s building. Dudley Malone had to remind Trudy it was there, asking her “Do you really want that car?”

The question startled Trudy – that’s how crazy things were - she had nearly forgotten the only thing she had hoped for when she swam the Channel. “Yeah,” she responded, sounding far more weary than excited. She went downstairs for a few moments, climbed in the car and sat back, spinning the steering wheel and fiddling with the dashboard, but there were still too many people on the street for her to take the car for a drive, and the crowd made her feel claustrophobic and she fled back upstairs.

For Trudy, it was all running together, the crowds, the parades the gifts and autographs and hand shaking, everything, but it still wasn’t over. She was placed in another motorcade and ushered to a dinner sponsored by the Mayor at the Roosevelt Hotel and made her first and only public statement of the day, speaking for all of twenty seconds. “My dear friends,” she said, “after all that has been said I must be polite and thank the Mayor and Grover Whelan for the wonderful reception that has been given to me. It will be remembered during my whole life. All the kind things that have been done and said have shown such a delightful appreciation of my efforts to make the Channel crossing for the sake of my country’s flag. I love you for it.” After the crowd watched the British Pathe newsreel footage of her swim, Trudy was then whisked off to a show at the Globe Theater featuring the Ziegfeld Follies and finally to the Club Lido where she danced with the Mayor before more cameras. At every stop she had to run a gauntlet as New York came to a standstill wherever she appeared."

That Time Again

I love it. I hate it.

I love it.

For eleven months of the year I am a fairly reasonable person, outwardly responsible, usually calm and composed, and able to keep things in perspective. Baseball is in my life, but it is not my life, at least not the way it was when I was younger. Nowadays I don’t stay awake staring at the ceiling after a meaningless game in May wondering why someone threw a slider over the plate on an 0-2 count, or took a hanging changeup for strike three with two outs and all the runners moving. I stopped beating myself up over stupid stuff like leaving a game early. If I fall asleep watching and wake up to the infomercials, I’ll turn the TV off and go to bed without checking on the score, and in the morning it is sometimes ten or eleven a.m. before I even think to check the games on the west coast.

When my wife and I receive an invitation to do something, or my daughter has an evening concert at school, I never even consider checking the schedule ahead of time – I’ll miss the game. On long car trips, if someone wants to listen to another station or play a cd instead of listening to the game, I’m fine with that. When the TV in the bedroom goes on the blink, I change the channel and let everyone watch Glee on the good set. I skip past Baseball Tonight, I’ll go a couple days sometimes without checking in on the message boards, and I hardly ever buy the Sunday Globe anymore. Baseball is still out there, I know it, but it is a luxury and an indulgence, not a necessity.

Then the page on the calendar flips over and word at the top says “October.”

Uh-oh.

Goodbye, peace. Hello, anxiety. See you later, common sense. Distraction, my old friend, where you been keeping yourself? The playoffs are here and minute by minute my façade of indifference crumbles. The twenty-fifth man on the roster is more important to my life than anything Barack Obama is going to do. I scour the internet for umpire ball/strike ratios. I forget to let the dogs back in, decide the car can go another month before I fix the muffler, and let God rake the leaves.

Dinners out can wait. We see the neighbors way too often. I never liked the movies that much anyway. Sleep is overrated. So is exercise. Forget supper – I’m running to the corner for a six pack. And some Doritos. And some Tums.

I buy the papers. I get a new TV for the bedroom. I give each of the cats a full can of food whenever they want it. I steal my daughter’s laptop, keep it next to my chair and hit refresh every ten seconds. I agree with everything my wife says. I dig out the lucky hat, the one I wore the last time they… you know, the last time they did the thing that you’ve talked about all summer like it was nothing but that you can’t say out loud now because you’ll jinx it. You know, the best of seven thing, that thing.

I’m a mess. I squeeze the anxiety ball, bite my nails, check my pulse obsessively, eat an aspirin every day, and try to stay hydrated. I watch the post game, and the post, post game, and the press conferences. I read the game threads - ours when we win, theirs when they lose.

I cheer. I cry. I scream. I gloat. I lose my voice. I throw the remote across the room. I jump out of my chair and wake up the neighborhood. I put my fist through the wall. I slump to the floor.

October – I hate it.

I can’t wait.


from Boston Baseball, October 2009. The photo shows the way fans used to have to watch the post-season in pre-TV, pre-radio days.

Glenn Stout will be appearing the Boston Book Festival on October 24. His latest books are Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World, and The Best American Sports Writing 2009. Contact Glenn on Facebook, at glennstout.net, or on his blog, http://verbplow.blogspot.com.