| Title | : | Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0547195621 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780547195629 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 392 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2011 |
| Awards | : | Casey Award (2011) |
In anticipation of the one hundredth anniversary of America’s most beloved ballpark, the untold story of how Fenway Park was born and the remarkable first season ever played there
For all that has been written in tribute to the great Fenway Park, no one has ever really told the behind-the-scenes true story of its tumultuous yet glorious first year. Nineteen twelve was a leap year, the year the Titanic sank, but also the year baseball’s original shrine was "born." And while the paint was still drying, the infield grass still coming in, the Red Sox embarked on an unlikely season that would culminate in a World Series battle against the Giants that stands as one of the greatest ever played.
Fenway 1912 tells the incredible story—and stories—of Fenway, from the unorthodox blueprint that belies the park’s notorious quirks, to the long winter when locals poured concrete and erected history, to the notorious fixers who then ruled the game, to the ragtag team who delivered a world championship, Fenway’s first.
Drawing on extensive new research, the esteemed baseball historian Glenn Stout delivers a rollicking tale of innovation, desperation, and perspiration, capturing Fenway as never before.
A Boston Glebe bestseller and the only book to win both the Seymour Medal as best best of biography or history and the Larry Ritter Awad as best book of the Deadball era by the Society for American Baseball Research
Fenway 1912: The Birth of a Ballpark, a Championship Season, and Fenway's Remarkable First Year Reviews
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As a Detroit Tigers fan, it broke my heart to see Tiger Stadium, which opened the same year as Fenway Park, torn down a few years ago. Make no mistake, Comerica Park, where the Tigers now play, is a beautiful facility. It’s hosted a World Series and an All Star game in its short history; but Tiger Stadium, a.k.a. Briggs Stadium, a.k.a. Navin Field, like Fenway Park, was a throwback to a bygone era.
Jim Thome may have hit his 600th career homerun at Comerica Park this summer, but somehow the significance of his feat pales beside Ruth hitting his 700th at Navin Field on July 17, 1934. I watched Denny McLain serve up a blooper to Mickey Mantle in his last ever at bat, which Mantle hit into the right field seats.
Tiger Stadium was home to some of the greats in the game—Al Kaline, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg, Mickey Cochrane, Hal Newhouser and, to me, the greatest ballplayer of either era, Ty Cobb.
So, while not a Red Sox fan, I am a fan of old ballparks; there just aren’t many of them around anymore. As such, I was curious to read of Fenway’s birth as well as its first year.
Meticulously researched, Fenway describes in detail the architectural design of the park, how much concrete and wood was required to build it, as well as the problems encountered in the weeks prior to Opening Day, when unseasonably cold weather delayed its completion. Some readers may find this portion of the text a trifle tedious.
The narrative really picks up once the season gets underway, at times reading like historical fiction, as author Glenn Stout brings to life the colorful characters of that 1912 Boston Red Sox team. Stout recounts a classic pitching duel between Joe Wood and Walter Johnson at a time when starters routinely threw on two days rest, sometimes throwing out of the bullpen on off days, and throwing four hundred innings a season was common.
Life in the big leagues is accurately depicted. A ten-day road trip is considered long in today’s game; but imagine a three-week road trip, with stops in Washington, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland, as the team travels city-to-city by rail. The petty jealousies and in-fighting between players is brought to life.
We think of baseball today as a business, with occasional squabbles between billionaire owners and millionaire players. Imagine a time, before the Base Ball Players Fraternity, when players divvied up half the gate of the first four games of the World Series and the gate for games five, six and seven (if necessary) all went to the owners and baseball. And not getting paid a dime if a game ended in a tie. Yes, ties were common in the dead ball era, before lighted fields. A game called by darkness merely added another game to the World Series.
Stout makes us aware that baseball has always been a business. The first owners of Fenway were concerned with bottom line from the start, adding seats wherever they could, even if it interfered with the players. Sadly, it’s little different today, if not worse—ownership cares only about one thing and one thing only: parting from its fan base its hard-earned dollar.
Recommended as an entertaining read. -
Although I enjoyed this book, it was marred by poor editing and proofreading. It was obviously rushed into print to take advantage of the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park. It's a shame because Glenn Stout's research and extensive knowledge of baseball and Fenway Park is impressive. I enjoyed reading about baseball in 1912 and how Fenway Park changed and affected the game, except that I more than occasionally got lost in the text due to poor editing and more than once was brought up short by sentences that didn't make sense.
Still, I'm glad I read it and I did enjoy it. -
Although those old enough to remember the 1986 World Series may feel differently, many deem the September collapse of the 2011 Boston Red Sox as the worst flop in the history of Major League Baseball. As recently as August of 2011, smart money in Las Vegas put the chances of the Red Sox making the post-season at 99.4%. The Red Sox proved Vegas wrong by utterly blowing the nine game lead the team enjoyed in the American League Wild Card race in early September. Tony Francona fell on his sword and stepped down as Red Sox manager a couple days after the season's disastrous end, emphasizing among other ailments that derailed the team's seemingly assured playoff appearance a locker room teeming with strife and dissension among the players. But author Glenn Stout's excellent new book, "Fenway 1912," gives the lie to the notion that locker room ego clashes preclude championship play on the diamond.
As intimated by its subtitle, Stout's book covers far more than player discord during the 1912 season. Fenway's inaugural season was marked by virtually incessant tumult -- terrible weather; greedy baseball executives; labor unrest; professional gamblers; Boston politics; architectural slapdash; ornery fans and religious intolerance. Each and all of these demanded heavy tolls from the team during a baseball season book-ended by the Titanic's sinking and an attempted assassination of Progressive Party presidential candidate (and former president) Theodore Roosevelt. Given that virtually anyone who personally witnessed Fenway's erection and its first World Series isn't alive anymore, Stout does a superb job sifting through masses of contemporaneous historical records to unveil not only the intricacies of building the park and the team that played in it, but also to imbue the book with a sense of the turbulent social, cultural, political and economic forces roiling America 100 years ago. In that way, "Fenway 1912" appeals more broadly than to only fans of the Boston Red Sox, or of professional baseball. Stout conveys very well a small slice of Americana at a time when the country was undergoing fundamental sociopolitical changes culminated by Woodrow Wilson's winning a ferocious four-party presidential election while the tinder of World War I caught fire in the Balkans.
Before spring training's first pitch the 2011 Red Sox were widely considered a lock to make the post-season, if not win the World Series. Presumably the October 11, 2011 release date for "Fenway 1912" was intended to coincide with the team's predicted march to championship glory. It would be a shame if the team's premature demise dowsed interest in Stout's outstanding new book. The 1912 Boston Red Sox were a team ridden with religious and other schisms so intractable bloody fistfights broke out in their locker room during the World Series they won. Against this backdrop, Stout's book is instructive in making abundantly (though unintentionally) clear that pinning the 2011 team's failure on a vastly pettier brand of interpersonal friction than what rocked Fenway throughout 1912 rings hollow. Good history is illuminative that way. -
I liked this a lot. It seems like it is going to be about Fenway Park, but when you think about it, that doesn't really make sense. It would be a very boring book. Instead, this is about the Red Sox 1912 season, when Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood and the rest beat the Giants in an epic World Series. I actually didn't think the stuff about building Fenway was all that interesting, to be honest. Partly because the park has changed so drastically over the years as to be basically unrecognizable. Though the brick facade is the same, and the dimensions are roughly the same. And obviously Lansdowne St. is still there.
I did find it interesting to learn that the name Fenway was originally (kind of) a form of advertising. I always felt superior to other fan bases with their Petco Parks and Tropicana Fields, but Fenway was originally called Fenway because they were trying to develop the neighborhood. The people who built the park owned a lot of Fenway real estate that was basically filled in swamp...what better way to stimulate some demand than to build a ballpark? Of course "Fenway" is a real neighborhood, look, it's Fenway Park! I also thought it was funny that the builders figured no one would be able to hit a ball onto Lansdowne, and then like three people did it within a month or so. Starting a long and hallowed tradition.
Mainly this was fun because I read it right after another championship season, and so I was comparing. 1912 seems impossibly long ago, and players like Smoky Joe have always seemed so distant as to be not even comparable (though my grandfather remembered this season, as one of his earliest memories. He was born in 1908). But it seems like championship teams have similarities. Every one that I have experienced had that feeling, midseason, where all the players seemed to be happy and getting along, coming up with little dances and jokes, and you think wow, I think they have something this year. This year feels different. That happened in 1912 too, it turns out. -
I found this to be an interesting book about the building of Fenway Park and the inaugural Red Sox season of 1912 in that historical park.
The beginning of the book starts with the journey of sod from Boston's prior park, Huntington Grounds. The groundskeeper removed it after the last game of the 1911 season and transplanted it. The Sox were not expected to do much in the 1912 season, based on how the previous season went, so Fenway was to be the big attracti0n of the season.
Then a funny thing happened throughout the season. The Sox, though not dominating, played pretty well and ended up with the American League Pennant. Along the way, the reader is provided with a deep background of how the park was conceived, built and how it had to be added on to throughout the 1912 season including additions made before the World Series against the New York Giants.
This was an enjoyable book that I would recommend to baseball fans, especially Red Sox fans. This is the type of book that can appeal to all baseball fans and not just Red Sox fans. I know because I am a Yankee fan, and I enjoyed this book. -
An excellent read about baseball's oldest ballpark and it's first season, 1912. From dramatic stories of the park itself and the team that didn't necessarily like each other yet managed to put together the winningest Red Sox record in the first hundred years of the stadium and the longest world series ever (8 games).
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The Boston Red Sox did author Glenn Stout a favor this last season by pulling one of the all-time great collapses in baseball history, a nose dive that will live in infamy. It's much easier for those of us who did not grow up on the Red Sox to tune into the unique lore of this fascinating franchise when we are not being confronted by unstoppable, cash-fueled success.
Stout's Fenway 1912 offers up a stunningly rich buffet of pleasures for the baseball fan, centered around the construction and opening of Fenway Park almost a century ago and the wild season that followed. As Stout notes, the entire renaissance of baseball that ensued from the opening of Oriole Park at Camden Yards was in a sense a tribute to the classic, quirky aura of baseball Fenway style as it had developed by the 1990s.
It's not at all true that the joys of a visit to Fenway Park are reserved for New Englanders. I grew up in California, a lifelong Giants fan, first came to a sense of wonder about Fenway through the New Yorker writing of Roger Angell, and really did have to catch my breath when I came walking through the tunnel at Fenway and saw the inside of the place for myself the first time. (Later, I wrote my own Fenway book, One Day at Fenway, all about a single game between the Yankees and Red Sox in 2003,)
Stout, too, has a personal Fenway story to tell, which he relays in an Introduction that might be my favorite section of the book: "I was poor, but I had baseball," he writes, describing his early days in Boston after moving from Ohio after college, broke enough that if he spilled spaghetti on the floor he ate it anyway.
"Walking up that runway into the bleachers that summer changed my life," he continues. "It was my grad school. I majored in Fenway Park, Kenmore Square, the Del Fuegos, poetry, baseball, and books. I fell in love. I saw, watched, learned, got curious, did research, read, stopped dreaming about writing and started doing it. ...
"None of this would have happened without Fenway Park, none of it at all. And that is what makes a ballpark different, and what makes Fenway Park different, because it is a place that can change your life, and sometimes does. Almost a hundred years ago it changed the lives of almost every baseball fan in Boston, and each season, as another generation of fans discovers it, Fenway Park changes their lives as well."
Stout, series editor of the Best American Sports Writing annual volumes, also edited a posthumous collection of sportswriting by the great David Halberstam, and has authored many books, including Red Sox Century and Yankees Century. He's a crack researcher who digs down to set the record right on many half-truths or misconceptions that had over the years often been repeated. Most of all, though, he has fun in giving us historical tidbit after historical tidbit of the kind to make you shake your head.
For example, most baseball fans know that long before there was a ball club called the Atlanta Braves, there was a team called the Boston Braves. But where did the name "Braves" come from in the first place?
The short answer: Tammany Hall, the New York political machine, one of whose "grand sachems," James Gaffney, bought the team before the 1912 season. As Stout explains, "The Tammany Hall building was in fact named after a Native American, Chief Tammany, and so the political activists who met there and became New York's foremost political machine were called 'Braves.' The nickname continues to this day, used by the Atlanta Braves, although few fans realize that the name originally referred to a machine politician, not a Native American." Gives whole new meaning to the idea of the Chop.
Other revelations include Stout's thorough explanation of just how widespread gambling was around the game in those years shortly before the Black Sox Scandal, including by players betting on their own games. In other words: Stout is no baseball romantic. He will show us both the good and the bad, the weird and the thrilling.
Most of all, of course, we get to know the key figures on the 1912 Red Sox, the future Hall of Famer Tris Speaker, for one, but many whose names are obscure even to Boston fans. For me the most intriguing of all has to be hard-throwing pitcher Joe Wood.
As Stout drily explains midway through the book, "For all his vaunted speed, the man Paul Shannon would later dub 'Smoky Joe' Wood, owing to the speed of his fastball, was a disappointment. An earlier nickname, 'Ozone' Wood, was still more appropriate, for Wood sometimes pitched as if his head was in the clouds."
Wood would famously finish the season 34-5, but his performance in that year's World Series, alternating between Fenway and the Polo Grounds in New York, would be both commanding and baffling.
To say more would be to give too much away: This book is a must-read for any Red Sox fan and a great choice for anyone who enjoys a dip into baseball history at its best. If the developments of the World Series that year seem too outlandish to believe, blame that on baseball, not the author.
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A good read for any baseball fan, especially a Sox fan. The book is thick with details, particularly in the early chapters. The author hits his stride in the last half of the book when he becomes a story teller rather than an engineer/architectural analyst.
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Meticulously researched and heavy on details, facts and figures. Very interesting read!
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In 1912, the most celebrated ballpark in the history of Major League Baseball opened in Boston. This book serves as a chronicle to that magical season.
Simply put, there are two primary "plots" within "Fenway 1912":
1. The construction of Fenway Park (and requisite maintenance during that inaugural season). If you are fascinated by such things as building schematics, concrete, cement, and general building engineering, these pages will fascinate you. If not, they can easily be skipped over in favor of...
2. The description of the baseball action. As the Boston Red Sox move into their new home, players such as Smokey Joe Wood, Tris Speaker, Jake Stahl, & Larry Gardner lead the way. Famous opposing players of the era also include Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, Ed Walsh, & Christy Mathewson. For fans of baseball history, the goings-on of 100 years ago are eternally interesting in deciphering just now the National Pastime become what it is today.
Overall, "Fenway 1912" is a great read for baseball history buffs, as well as the "niche market" of engineers who want to know exactly how Fenway Park was conceived. It was a bit too detailed in certain areas (hence the docking of a single star in my review) for my tastes, but if your primary goal is to learn about the early days of Fenway, you won't have to read another similar volume. -
So, the 2011 Red Sox season landed on a bad note, to put it mildly. I wrote this review way back in May, and I don't want to change the wording. I like it just the way it is.
Fenway 1912 was a really great, concise history of Fenway Park's first year – both the park and the players who called it home.
It's no secret that I'm a huge Red Sox fan. So, when this book came up for review, I couldn't snatch it up fast enough. Learning about the history of a ball park I love so much was something I hadn't thought about before, but I'm glad I decided to. It makes me look at Fenway in a completely different way.
One of the things I was surprised to find out was the Fenway of today is not the same Fenway that rose from the ground in 1911. If you were to find a time machine and go back in time to the construction of Fenway, you would think you were in a completely different ballpark. However, it was the way it was originally constructed that has made Fenway last so long. The original construction made it possible to add on to the park as time went on.
While Fenway 1912 talks about the history of the park itself, it also talks about the players that played on the 1912 Red Sox. I knew baseball was a different thing back then, but I had no idea how much. The whole 'teamwork' schpeel barely existed. It was amazing that the 1912 Sox didn't kill each other – although, they did get into a few scuffles behind the scenes. Learning about the characters of the team, and the amazing games they played really made the book read fast in some places.
One of the others things I was surprised about, was the way that Fenway and the Sox of 1912 have in common with the Fenway and Sox of today. Namely: the way the ballpark both helps and hurts the Sox. Fenway giveth, Fenway taketh away. Also: never count the Sox out. The gave isn't 'ovah' until the last out is recorded.
The fact that the Sox won the Series in 1912 was pretty amazing. They had it all but lost, but somehow found a way to fight and win. Much like the Sox of today.
Fenway's been around for 100 years and most Sox fans have either already been at least once, or dream of one day going. I've been to Fenway once: September 10, 2007. I was up in the cramped and uncomfortable grandstands in left field with an obstructed view of the pitcher's mound. I wouldn't have traded it for the world. As I walked up to my seat, and caught my first glance at the Fenway grass, I got a bit choked up, I have to admit.
You haven't seen Fenway, if you haven't seen it in person.
Some comments I'm adding right now:
Next year will be a big year for the Sox. There will be tons of ways the team will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of its beloved ballpark. However, there will be lots of changes: a new GM, and new manager, and who knows who will be leaving the team during the offseason. I'd like to think the Sox will start off Fenway's 100th year with a fresh start. Forget 2011, this is a new era. -
This is a very intelligent and detailed look at the construction and first year of Fenway Park. The author's fan profile is interesting because he explains his motives for the book and also describes in a journalistic way the pros and cons of the park and the team.
For the most part the book follows the established lead of Devil in the White City, where it is non-fiction written as fiction, although the plot is the baseball season and the World Series that follows. The writing is dense and the scope is fairly narrow, and this works for the book. I enjoyed the attempts at suspense, and the overall way the book flows. I say attempts because in this day and age, it isn't difficult to check Wikipedia to find out that the Sox won the WS in 1912, nor would it be too hard to determine through Google how Fenway has evolved and changed over time. That said the book works really well at keeping the readers attention and not encouraging you to stray. -
Glenn Stout is a good writer who had a great idea: write an account of the first baseball season at Fenway Park in 1912, which also happened to be a magical year for the Red Sox. The 1912 Red Sox was the winningest in team history and shocked the powerhouse NY Giants in a memorable 8 (yes 8) game World Series. What I loved about this book was that I didn't know what was going to happen. Even knowing that they win the series I did not know how. And the account is so crazy that you swear they are going to lose. This is a pre-Babe Ruth team, the team of Tris Speaker and Smoky Joe Wood. This 100 year old story reminds us how much the game has changed (no night games or pitch counts, games that end in a tie) and how much it remains the same (pitching and timely hitting win). Early in the book he talks too much about the construction of Fenway but once the season starts its all baseball.
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An exhaustive (to the brink of being exhausting at times) account of the 1912 season and the opening of Fenway Park. I'd recommend this book only to those baseball fans who desire to know the minutiae of events (like me), because vast portions of this book involve in-game accounts and details that I could easily picture a layman fan finding to be incredibly boring.
Often, when authors take on historical baseball topics, they wisely choose to include larger news events and analysis of the times as a means of expanding the prism of study. Stout keeps this book pretty much straight baseball down the line, and I'd hesitate to recommend it to any reader without reservation the way I would Tim Wendel's "Summer of '68". -
Stout is an excellent writer, and how much you enjoy the book will depend on your specific interests. As a Massachusetts native and casual Red Sox fan, I thought Stout was at his best when he nested the ins-and-outs of Red Sox baseball within a broader narrative about the game, the politics, and the history of Boston. However, when Stout spent pages narrating the minutiae of which players made which plays in every game, I was bored to tears and started skimming. I would have preferred more of the sociology and public history, and less of the painstaking recreation of individual games- but other readers' preferences may differ!
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Was a little leery about this book. Seems like every book in the baseball section these days is either related to the Yankees or the Red Sox.
So I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this book. The details of construction were very interesting and the author does a good job of recreating the flavor of baseball in the early 1900s.
The 1912 World Series is among the most famous, but even so, the accounts of the games still leave the reader in anticipation of the next pitch.
Very highly recommended. -
I'm not a Red Sox fan, but this was an enjoyable and informative read, written an expert, Glenn Stout. Fenway was one several new stadia -- including Shribe Park in Philly, among others -- that used concrete and steel in construction. This was a huge leap forward from the wooden stadiums of the earlier era; these were flimsy and often burned down. The new parks were better suited to what baseball was becoming in the modern age: mass entertainment. Perfect timing: Fenway turns 100 this year!
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Nice, but not a lot more than that. Probably should be either 30-40 pages longer, for a real read, or 30 pages shorter, for a real light read. Ideally, 3.5 stars. I learned a bit about Boston at this time, the Red Sox at this time, and baseball at this time, but not a lot. Hence my "longer" comment, or else tighten the focus and go shorter.
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This was ok. If you're a Boston fan, you'd probably like it more. The story of the first year in Fenway was interesting, but I think I'd be more into details about the park and less about one season of the team. The epilogue rushed through a lot of cool facts about the park, and I think I'd have enjoyed a more fleshed out version of that than what this is.
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Slow starting but by the time you reach the World Series accounts...you can visualize what it's like going to Fenway or the Polo Grounds for games. End of book has every players stats for season and Series...very informative.
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An ok read. Parts were tedious, especially the description of life on the road. The beginning held my attention, however, and it was worth reading about the construction of a new ball park in early 20th century Boston
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I will give it a 3 since it was well-researched. The First Fall Classic was a much better book about the 1912 World Series. It's probably my fault for being a fan/student of the early days of Major League Baseball, but no new ground was covered in this novel....
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First baseball book I've ever read despite being a baseball fan on and off since i was a kid. Ive been to Fenway and sat on the monster. This book is a great portrait of the building of a legendary ballpark, and the 1912 season of the red sox.
