Authors: Glenn Stout
In 1911 relatively few Rooters had managed to make the long trip to California for spring training, but now that the club was back in Hot Springs, dozens made the journey and more were showing up every day. After all, that was where the action was, and on March 5 they got plenty as Hot Springs provided a graphic reminder that it was still equal parts Old South and Wild West.
Late that morning, while the kitchen staff at the Arlington Hotel cleared tables, washed dishes, and began winding down breakfast service in order to prepare lunch, an African American kitchen worker began to argue with a white coworker over a late breakfast order, a dangerous undertaking for an African American in the South. The fight seemed to be over when the African American, who had left the kitchen, suddenly returned with a shotgun. He blasted his white coworker and then fled as the rest of the staff ducked for cover.
According to one newspaper, word that a black man had killed a white man "brought out infuriated white residents en masse," including every Red Sox player in town, the Rooters, and a larger contingent of players from Brooklyn and Philadelphia, who had already started formal practice. Angry residents, players, and fans congregated on the street outside the hotel, then fanned out into mobs of vigilantes and raced through the woods on the outskirts of town, rousting law-abiding African Americans from their homes and chasing after a phantom no one could find. It was a minor miracle that no one was killed as ballplayers and Royal Rooters alike, wading through the thickets, sometimes emerged to find themselves looking at the barrel of a rifle pointed at their heads. When they all grew tired and bored after a few hours, they trudged back to town in search of a hot meal, a drink, and a place to tell tales of personal heroism. The suspect, who had been hiding in the hotel the entire time, turned himself in before he could be lynched.
Larry Gardner, Buck O'Brien, Hugh Bradley, and Olaf Henriksen and even more Royal Rooters all gathered in Boston on March 7 and left together for Hot Springs on a train with team secretary Robert McRoy, with stops scheduled for New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Cincinnati, where they expected to pick up a dozen other players on the way. But poor weather was slowing train travel, and their arrival in Hot Springs was delayed until the evening of March 10.
They were not particularly happy when they disembarked. Not only were the players cranky from the trip and disappointed in the damp Arkansas weather, but the Hotel Eastman was packed to the gills, forcing the players to bunk three or four to a room. They exercised together on the lawn of the hotel the next morning to work out the kinks caused by several days of train travel, and they finally took the field together for the first time on March 12. The players were so anxious to get started that they talked Stahl into a scrimmage the next day matching the "Regulars" against the "Yannigans," even though a few regulars—stars like Hooper, Lewis, and Joe Wood—sat out and Tris Speaker had yet to show. Nevertheless the Regulars escaped with an 8–6 win. As the weather allowed, Stahl planned to hold both morning and afternoon workouts so the players could catch up.
Only two days later they played their first spring contest against the Phillies, losing 12–2, a performance that surprised no one, for the players had barely unpacked and most were still sore from the first few workouts. The contest shared little with spring training games of today. Only a few hundred fans showed up to watch, some sitting in ramshackle bleachers and the rest scattered around the perimeter of the field. Some fans were so close that just about any drive that split the outfielders reached the crowd for some kind of ground rule hit.
Perhaps the most intriguing spring participant was thirty-eight-year-old Jack Chesbro. The one-time star for the New York Highlanders had pitched and lost to Boston on the final day of the 1904 season, throwing the wild pitch that, despite his record 41 victories that season, delivered the pennant to Boston. The wear of pitching more than 454 innings that season had left Chesbro lame, and he never again approached that standard. In recent years the Massachusetts native had been reduced to playing semipro ball for spare change. But when he asked for a spring tryout with Boston, the Sox agreed. Stahl and McAleer both hoped he would return to form, but after only a few days it became obvious that Chesbro was better off staying in the bush leagues. Not only did he pitch poorly, but he hardly put in any effort. He flatly refused to break into a trot while flagging balls during batting practice, hardly a way to impress Stahl.
The way the weather was behaving, there was precious little time for batting practice, for it rained nearly every day and Stahl felt fortunate if he got the team onto the field at all. His biggest challenge was keeping his squad busy, and he scrambled to find outlets for their energy. Early workouts often consisted of hiking, playing catch, taking spring baths, and pursuing pastimes like bowling, billiards, and skeet shooting. Those activities did not do much to get the team in shape but did help the otherwise divided squad forge some slender bonds of trust that had been lacking the previous season. Meanwhile the Royal Rooters whiled away the hours in gambling parlors and brothels or spent their time kibitzing in the hotel lobby, pastimes they liked nearly as much as baseball. Things could have been worse, though. Down in Augusta, Georgia, floodwaters encircled the city, leaving the Boston Braves temporarily isolated, with no way to leave town.
When the weather finally began to improve somewhat in Hot Springs, another cold snap in Boston caused a temporary halt to all pouring of the concrete treads at Fenway Park. As Murnane noted, "As soon as it stops freezing nights work will be rushed 24 hours a day." They had little choice, for a portion of the old grounds had already been sold by the Boston Elevated Company to a real estate developer who planned on erecting apartment buildings where Cy Young had once been acclaimed "the King of Pitchers." Fenway Park had to be completed, or else the Red Sox would have to go begging to the Braves for a place to play, something certain to make Ban Johnson apoplectic. Fortunately, the freeze let up after only a few days, and work at the park took on a more frantic pace.
About the only real concern the club had was over outfielder Tris Speaker. When he had received his contract at his home in Hubbard, Texas, he had snorted and sent it back unsigned. He was fully aware of his worth and didn't entirely trust McAleer. Some years before, when Speaker was playing in the Texas League and McAleer was manager of the St. Louis Browns, McAleer had expressed some interest in the outfielder, only to conclude that Speaker wasn't ready for the big leagues. While McAleer's snub eventually helped Speaker land with Boston, the outfielder still remembered the slight and wanted to make sure McAleer knew it.
Yet even a player as great as Speaker had little leverage, and as A. H. C. Mitchell of the
Boston Journal
reported in
Sporting Life,
Speaker "likes a little talk about himself." There was plenty of that before he finally made a leisurely arrival in Hot Springs on March 18, met with McAleer, and after a bit of public grousing signed a contract worth around $9,000 a season.
Although the weather continued to be problematic, the pitchers at least were able to get in their work, something that might have been a blessing in disguise. Unlike 1911, when several players left California with sore arms, everyone was still sound. When the weather cooperated the Yannigans faced the Regulars, and the club paired off with the Phillies for several more games, but it was not until the final few days of March that Stahl finally had the time to do some fine-tuning.
One cause for concern had been his pitchers' appalling lack of concern over stolen bases. In an era when nearly every player in the league was a threat to steal and two hundred stolen bases for a team was about average, in 1911, under manager Patsy Donovan, Red Sox pitchers had concluded that holding runners on was not worth worrying about. Stahl thought otherwise.
On March 28, with the field too wet to hold a full workout but the slick infield perfect for sliding, he ordered a special workout for pitchers and catchers. Duffy Lewis, Steve Yerkes, and a few others whom Paul Shannon described as "not chiefly remarkable for high speed," took turns attempting to steal second. As they did, Stahl instructed pitchers on "a movement that would keep the runner from getting a flying start." In other words, he had the pitchers practice throwing from the stretch position.
The strategy was apparently almost foreign to Joe Wood, and one that he saw little need to master. As Stahl worked with the pitchers, Wood hardly paid attention. When it was his turn to take the mound, he didn't hide his disdain and loafed through the drill. After all, he was the great Joe Wood. What did Jake Stahl know about pitching, except that he couldn't hit it?
While statistics of records such as stolen bases by opponents are incomplete, the fact that Wood reportedly exhibited little concern about base runners may well have been a contributing factor to his relatively disappointing performance thus far in his career. Before 1912 a disproportionate number of runners Wood allowed on base scored, possibly owing, at least in part, to his indifference to holding runners close.
The rest of the staff, cowed by Wood's brashness, followed his lead and also loafed through the practice session. Meanwhile Lewis, Yerkes, and a few others were running themselves ragged, and Cady and Carrigan and the other catchers were growing tired of wasting their time.
Stahl was steamed. Coming into spring training, he had been concerned that because many of his players still knew him as a former teammate they would fail to give him their full respect as manager. Now Wood's insolence was making it abundantly clear that Stahl had been right to worry.
He had seen enough. Yet he did not challenge his player with words or threats of violence. Instead, like a football coach teaching his team a new play, he just kept ordering Wood and his teammates to do the drills over and over and over again, daring them to refuse. Eventually the displeasure of the base runners and the catching staff shamed Wood and the other pitchers into taking the workout more seriously. Shannon reported that it took Stahl "a half an hour" to get through to Wood before he finally began following instructions. That was important, not only for teaching Boston pitchers a better way to
deal with base stealing but for demonstrating that even though Stahl was a former player, he was first and foremost the manager of the team and the players—even the almost great Joe Wood—had to listen to him. As Shannon noted, "It was rather disagreeable medicine for some twirlers who have had their own way of doing things in the past, but it showed pretty plainly that Stahl means business."
Stahl found it necessary to put his foot down once more the next day when he started working with his team on signals, not only to the batters but to base runners, fielders, and pitchers. Once more, the pitching staff, apparently following Wood's lead, seemed indifferent to his instructions and tried to test Stahl. This time, feeling more secure, the manager dressed everyone down, as Shannon reported, "calling the men into account."
He also made an important decision. According to custom at the time, apart from selecting the pitchers, setting the batting order, and giving signals to the hitters, many managers exerted little authority on the field during the game. The team captain was usually responsible for making defensive decisions, such as whether to play in or out, and the positioning of players.
Another player-manager would unquestionably have taken that authority himself. After all, Stahl was going to be on the field anyway.
Instead, Jake Stahl made a decision that was both political and, from his perspective, sensible. Charlie Wagner was the most experienced man on the team, and now that his arm was working again, he would be in the lineup every day at shortstop. No one else on the club—and few others in the game—knew the American League as well as Wagner. Stahl defied convention by naming Wagner team captain and made him solely responsible for giving signals on the field.
No one in baseball had ever heard of such a thing. A writer in
Baseball
magazine commented, "Memory fails to recall a duplicate.... As all men know, a playing manager is always captain of the team as well." The decision was emblematic not only of Stahl's willingness to flaunt convention but of his desire to bring the team together. By both asserting his authority and then ceding some responsibility to Wagner, Stahl was letting his team know that he was focused solely on winning, not on who was in charge, and that even he, the manager, was willing to take orders if it would help the team. And if the team came first, how could Joe Wood or anyone else take a different approach?
Stahl's recognition that he needed to bring a divided club together would soon pay dividends. By the end of the month both the craps games and the harlots had grown old and tired, and everyone who had been so eager to get to Hot Springs only a few weeks before was now eager to leave and start the season. Paul Shannon's April 1 report reflected the dreary mood at the Hotel Eastman. It began: "More rain, more profanity, more vain longings for the getaway ... No chance for practice, no opportunity to leave the hotel. More enforced confinement to the lobby and the air is charged with electricity ... there is more grumbling now than ever the much maligned Redondo Beach Hotel provoked." Indeed, the Mississippi River was at flood stage, and the Sox, who were scheduled to leave by train for an exhibition in Nashville and then Dayton before going to Cincinnati to christen the Reds' new park, had to stay put. The games in Nashville and Dayton were canceled, and the game scheduled for April 2 in Cincinnati was postponed because most of the field was underwater.
The team stayed three extra days in Hot Springs, waiting for the weather to clear. Over the final week Stahl and McAleer had made most of their final roster decisions, which had included cutting loose the pitching dentist, Fred Anderson. But Stahl was still expected to lop off another two or three of the remaining players before opening the season. In something of a surprise, Stahl was still carrying ten pitchers, including Hugh Bedient, and all four catchers. Some observers thought that slugging first baseman Hugh Bradley, who hit .406 with four home runs in the spring, had played well enough to earn a starting berth, but Stahl himself had responded to the challenge by hitting a robust team-high .514 with eight extra-base hits, second only to Speaker.