Fenway Park by John Powers

Author:John Powers [Powers, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780762442041
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2012-07-07T01:47:09+00:00

As mediocre as most of the fifties had been for the Red Sox, the club at least had been finishing in the money at a time when that meant that most of its players wouldn’t have to spend the off-season selling tires. But by 1960, the Sox were bouncing around the bottom of the league and their owner was growing exasperated. “Want to buy a ball club?” Tom Yawkey asked broadcaster Curt Gowdy after a 12-3 home loss to the Indians. “I’ll sell it for seven million. Seven million will take it.”

It was early June and Boston already was stuck in eighth place, nearly a dozen games out of first. To shake things up one game, manager Billy Jurges switched Bobby Thomson, who’d hit the “Shot Heard ’Round The World” to win the 1951 pennant for the Giants, from the outfield to first base, where Thomson made two of his team’s four errors in the fourth inning.

“I can’t believe what I saw here tonight,” declared Yawkey, sipping bourbon in his office after the game to blot out the memory. “A guy playing first base in the major leagues with a finger glove on. A finger glove at first base. I’ll sell this club. Take it off my hands. This is the major leagues? THIS is the major leagues?”

And yet more than a million spectators came through the Fenway turnstiles that year, most of them to watch Teddy Ballgame play his final season. After his miserable 1959 campaign, by far the worst of his career, Ted Williams actually demanded that the club chop $35,000 from his $125,000 salary. Though Yawkey had suggested during the off-season that the slugger retire, Williams wanted one more .300 season and to reach 500 career home runs before he put away his bat. He easily accomplished both, batting .316 and hitting 29 homers to finish with a lifetime average of .344 and 521 career homers.

While everyone in the park knew that the midweek game against the Orioles at the end of September would be Williams’s last at Fenway, nobody but he, Yawkey, Gowdy and the clubhouse denizens knew that it would be the last of his career. Williams had a nasty cold and had asked the owner if he could skip the final series in New York. So when he deposited Jack Fisher’s fastball atop the Sox bullpen in the eighth inning, it made for a grand finale and a farewell that was completely in character.

“I thought about tipping my hat, you’re damn right I did, and for a moment I was torn,” Williams later confessed. “But by the time I got to second base I knew I couldn’t do it. It just wouldn’t have been me.” Yet Manager Mike Higgins, who’d supplanted Jurges on June 12, wasn’t going to let him get away without one last ovation. “Williams, left field,” he declared at the top of the ninth—then sent Carroll Hardy out after him once Williams had been saluted for a final time.

The club already had Williams’s successor—there was no replacement—in mind.

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