Murder at Fenway Park (24 page)

T
wo days after the close of the regular season, I found myself frustrated and itchy when the Red Sox opened the World Series against John McGraw’s New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. This might have been the closest I would ever come to playing in a World Series, and it was mental torture to end up merely a spectator.

The frustration subsided a bit—just a bit—as the Fall Classic progressed. It quickly developed into the most exciting series ever played, and everyone who followed it became so wrapped up in the games that each fan felt more like a participant than an observer.

As everyone knows by now, the 1912 World Series wasn’t decided until the final pitch of the final game, with Boston taking the championship four games to three in eight contests. That’s right,
eight
contests; the second game of the series was a 6–6 tie when it was called on account of darkness after eleven innings.

The seventh game was an 11–4 rout won by New York to tie the series. The biggest excitement of that contest came just minutes before the game was to start—and it triggered the demise of Robert F. Tyler.

Bob Tyler was in charge of the team’s ticket sales. Somehow, he sold the pavilion seats traditionally allocated to the Boston Royal Rooters. Finding their sacred seats occupied, and no other seating available, the Rooters took over the field itself. Led by Mayor John Fitzgerald, the most ardent Royal Rooter of all, five hundred members of the booster club stormed the playing field just as the game was to begin. With their band blaring, Honey Fitz and the rest of the Rooters paraded across the grounds. They easily repelled foot police who tried to usher them off the field, and grew rowdier with their success. Mounted police were called in, and proved more forceful and eventually victorious. Fans were treated to the bizarre sight of seeing the mayor of Boston rammed and prodded off the playing field by his own police force.

Boston citizens were incensed with the Red Sox management for its treatment of the Royal Rooters, and many of them boycotted the series finale at Fenway. The stands were only half filled when Larry Gardner lifted a sacrifice fly in the bottom of the tenth inning to win the game and the World Series for Boston.

Ty Cobb ended the 1912 season with a .410 batting average—fifteen points higher than Shoeless Joe Jackson. It was his second straight year topping the .400 mark and his sixth consecutive batting championship. I took some consolation in the fact that he finished only third in the league in stolen bases.

A couple of weeks after the series ended, Bucky O’Brien told me that one of the players suggested the Red Sox wear black arm bands during the World Series in memory of Billy Neal. Bob Tyler nixed the idea.

As the month of October drew to a close, my arm and ribs began to heal, and I started to see about playing winter ball to stay sharp for next season—wherever that would find me.

The anger of Boston’s citizenry toward the Red Sox office management didn’t subside with the victorious end of the series. The outraged population accorded Bob Tyler the distinction of being the most despised man in Boston, and demanded that he be fired. By the next season, the fans had their way. Tyler’s interest in the club was bought out and he was purged from the Boston Red Sox organization. Then he quietly vanished.

Most people thought that Tyler skulked out of Boston too ashamed to ever show his face again. I believed differently. I believed that if refrigerators hadn’t come along and made ice farming obsolete, Bob Tyler would have eventually been harvested from Jamaica Pond.

In the spring of 1919, Hal Chase was dropped from the New York Giants and never played another major-league game. After a career of cheating and throwing games, and being quietly dropped by team after team that couldn’t prove he was dishonest, the National League finally obtained hard evidence against him. Though not officially banned, he was out for good. But even without playing, he still managed to taint the game. When the White Sox were found to have thrown the ’19 World Series in exchange for payoffs from Arnold Rothstein, Hal Chase was named as one of the masterminds behind the fix.

To my regret, I don’t know what became of Clyde Fletcher. He just became an early addition to that list that each of us accumulates over the years: the guilt-inducing ledger of people-I-wish-I-had-kept-in-touch-with.

I
stood in front of the colorful array of old tobacco cards, staring at the one artifact that proved I had been a major-league baseball player. After indulging in a lengthy review of
Michael Rawlings,
I took a closer look at the card of
John Corriden, Detroit, 3B,
and then glanced back again at my own. It struck me that, in a way, we looked almost the same. And suddenly everything seemed all right.

For decades, I carried a nagging burden of guilt and frustration about the Red Corriden case. He never did get legal justice—his killer hadn’t even been publicly accused.

Now I realized that it just didn’t matter anymore whether or not Billy Neal had been tried in a court of law for his crime. It wasn’t legal justice that punished Neal for killing Red Corriden and Jimmy Macullar, but it was justice enough. Nothing more could be gained by now accusing a man who was himself long dead.

There isn’t even any lingering public interest to satisfy. No one cares that the murderer of a long-forgotten baseball player was never identified—no one remembers the crime.

But people will see the cards: those scuffed pieces of cardboard that portray a couple of eager young ball players named Red Corriden and Mickey Rawlings. What happened since those cards were first issued can’t change the way we appear on them. In the baseball shrine at Cooperstown, we will be frozen in time, looking quaintly old-fashioned with outdated haircuts and collars on our uniform jerseys. No one will remember that one of us has been dead since the Taft administration, nor care that the other is still walking the earth. Images on baseball cards—that’s all that will last.

I decided it was best to leave the tragedies of the past buried in the thickening dust of failing memories, and I resolved never to tell what I knew about Billy Neal.

I lingered for quite a while in front of the exhibit of old baseball cards, insatiably drinking in my own former likeness, and relishing the warm memories stirred up by the pastel portraits of almost-forgotten heroes and friends. Eventually, I pried myself away from the display. With some time remaining before the exhibition game was to begin, I began to explore more of the museum.

In the Baseball Through the Ages room, I saw marvelous relics of the game bursting with the power to spark magical images and glorious memories. There was Walter Johnson’s purple-trimmed Washington Senators uniform ... Ty Cobb’s sheepskin sliding pads ... the bat Nap Lajoie used to crack out his three thousandth hit.

A tiny old baseball glove caught my eye. It was a dark mummified piece of leather, with a tear at the crotch where the thumb joined the palm. There was no webbing at all on the primitive five-finger glove. The wording on the card next to the mitt read:
Worn by Waddell on July 4, 1905 when he defeated Cy Young, 4–2, in 20 innings at Boston.
Rube Waddell! There was a sepia photo of Waddell in the case, too, showing him at the peak of his strength and glory. For a joyous minute or two, I was a hero-worshipping boy again.

I progressed further through the baseball generations, quickly reviewing Babe Ruth’s locker from Yankee Stadium—his uniform still hanging in it, the number 3 carefully displayed; a photo of the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals—Dizzy, Pepper, Frankie, and the rest of the Gas House Gang; the ball Ted Williams hit for a home run in the 1946 All-Star game when Rip Sewell served up his Eephus blooper pitch; the glove used by Willie Mays to catch Vic Wertz’s drive in the ’54 World Series; the neat line-up of four baseballs from Sandy Koufax’s no-hitters—and the even longer row produced by Nolan Ryan.

I saw, too, the awed reverent faces of the visitors who stood entranced by the displays. And I listened to the harmony of personal reminiscences being shared with eager youngsters.

“You see that glove? I was at the game when Willie made that catch. The first World Series game I ever went to. It was at the Polo Grounds, and I was up in the left field bleachers. I was just about your age then ...”

“You were probably too young to remember it now, but
you
saw Nolan Ryan pitch once. It was back when he was with the Mets at Shea Stadium. Steve Carlton was pitching against him for the St. Louis Cardinals ...”

“You know, I think we have an old program at home from a game Babe Ruth played in. Grandpa saw him play all the time when he was a boy. He has some great stories about the Babe. First thing when we get home, we’ll give Grandpa a call ...”

There was a reassuring continuity here, in the memories and lore of a woven succession of generations.

I thought that I had completely lost touch with the game, left behind by the new players, the revised rules, and the modern ballparks. But these changes now seemed trivial, at worst no more than minor annoyances. The important things about the game were essentially still the same, and probably always would be.

Somehow I felt myself connected with baseball again. Maybe I had left the game for a while, but having once held a horsehide in my hands its special magic of summer and youth and vitality had seeped into my bloodstream, so the game never really left me.

It was almost time for the exhibition game to begin at Doubleday Field, so I reluctantly left the Hall of Fame building. I hadn’t had a chance to look for him, but I knew that Jimmy Macullar was somewhere in the museum, too, if only on the brittle browning roster of a forgotten National League baseball team called the Syracuse Stars. The sun seemed warmer now, and the sky bluer, as I sauntered over to Doubleday Field.

I heard once that if you grow old with someone, nature has a charitable way of making you both always look the same to each other: as one of you gets more wrinkles, the other’s eyes get worse, so the aging is never noticed. Baseball and I must have caught up to each other now, because when I arrived at Doubleday Field and looked for the old-timers, I discovered that this happy trick of nature is not restricted to a loving couple. Among the Hall-of-Famers standing along the foul lines, I saw not one paunchy midsection nor one graying head. Each player magically looked like the image on his plaque.

And I myself felt more vertical and vigorous than I had in a long, long time. I threw out the opening pitch with the same effortless zip that I had when playing catch with Uncle Matt.

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Copyright © 1994 by Troy Soos

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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8739-7