My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park: From Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts

Abstract

My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway ParkFrom Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts Larry Ruttman (bio) Many people would say that Harvard University, founded in 1636, is the premier university in Massachusetts, the United States of America, and maybe even the world. Most people would also say that the Boston Red Sox, founded in 1901, and now an independent nation within a commonwealth, is one of the most storied athletic enterprises in America. Few, if any, people would say these two institutions are linked in history. But they are. How? In 1912, the year Fenway Park, the home of the Boston Red Sox from then to now and going forward, was erected. There, on a cold, blustery and snow touched early April day, the Red Sox took on their first opponent. New York? No. Then who? The Harvard Crimson, that’s who! My God! The seats were still being riveted into place and the clubhouses not yet ready when the appropriately named Harvard leadoff hitter and third baseman, Dana Joseph Paine Wingate, stepped in against plainly named Sox pitcher Casey Hageman and promptly fanned. Arrayed in the field that day against the Harvard boys were such players as Hall of Famers Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper; Duffy Lewis; manager and first sacker, Jake Stahl; and a keystone combination of Marty Krug at short and Steve Yerkes at second. Yerkes’ first-inning single was Fenway Park’s first hit. The less elegantly named Robert Potter of the Harvards singled through the hole into left field in the fifth for his team’s only hit that day, demonstrating not only Harvard’s gamesmanship, but also the democracy starting to prevail [End Page 150] in its ranks. Dusk, cold, snow, and the muddy ball forced the game to be called after the top of the seventh, the Red Sox winning by a modest 2–0 score, which hardly foreshadowed the World Championship they would win in the fall of that year, but was prescient of Harvard’s 1–0 victory over the Sox in an exhibition game at Fenway three years later in 1916, another Red Sox championship season. The Boston Red Sox and Harvard University have been trading blows ever since to lay claim as world class Boston’s most revered institution. The winner is still in doubt. Some years ago, I happened on a book published by the American Institute of Architects in which they listed the many notable buildings in Boston. I looked for Fenway Park and didn’t find it. I thought it was an error because there can be no question that Fenway Park is one of the most revered structures in Boston. A lot of baseball history has been made there, millions of people have memories of what has taken place there, and that is important and significant considering the central place baseball occupies in the American psyche, including my own as a citizen of Red Sox nation. In fact, shoehorned as it is into a relatively small and roughly parallelogram shaped plot of land in the center of Boston, architecturally significant for its celebrated plethora of eccentric on- and off-field nooks and crannies multiplied over its now 106-year history, and the site of many of my most thrilling moments, Fenway Park is as animate to me as any of the good friends I am lucky to have. I was born in February 1931. I first set eyes on Fenway Park in 1936, on a bright summer day when a sellout crowd overflowed onto the field of play as the Boston Red Sox squared off against the vaunted New York Yankees. My father Morris (Moe to everybody who knew this gentle gentleman) took me by the hand to watch the game, beginning a now 80-year-plus love affair with that evergreen arena. At that time there were no bullpens in right field, and that side of the field was a huge expanse which I can remember was roped off to accommodate the standing room crowd. That is where my dad and I stood. Of course, at five years old, I can’t remember specifics of the game, but stuck in my...