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    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans: SABR Digital Library
    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans: SABR Digital Library
    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans: SABR Digital Library
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    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans: SABR Digital Library

    By Society for American Baseball Research

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    The team now known as the Boston Red Sox played its first season in 1901. The city of Boston had a well-established National League team, known at the time as the Beaneaters, but the founders of the American League knew that Boston was a strong baseball market and when they launched the league as a new major league in 1901, they went head-to-head with the N.L. in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. Chicago won the American League pennant and Boston finished second, just four games behind.

    The Boston Americans played in a new ballpark — the Huntington Avenue Grounds — literally on the other side of the railroad tracks from the Beaneaters and they out-drew the Beaneaters by more than 2-1, in part because they had enticed some of the more popular players — player/manager Jimmy Collins, pitcher Cy Young, and slugger Buck Freeman.

    This volume represents the collective work of more than 25 members of SABR—the Society for American Baseball Research. It offers individual biographies of the players, team owner Charles Somers, league founder Ban Johnson, and two of the team's most noted fans: Hi Hi Dixwell and Nuf Ced McGreevy. There is also a "biography" of the Huntington Avenue Grounds ballpark and a study of media coverage of Boston baseball in 1901, and a timeline running from the first spring training through that year's postseason games.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSociety for American Baseball Research
    Release dateApr 22, 2019
    ISBN9781933599595
    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans: SABR Digital Library

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    • 3/5
      In which is chronicled the first season of American League baseball in Boston, under the flag of the Somersets (a/k/a Americans, as relentlessly dubbed by the contributors herein). After sections detailing the formation of the American League and the club itself, most of the remainder of the book is taken up by player profiles and a chronology of the year. The player profiles do not emphasize the 1901 season itself, rather serving as mini-biographies, which makes them longish, and, taken with a goofy emphasis which leads to such anomalies as a nobody who played in one game receiving a longer profile than Old Cy Young, makes them sometimes tedious and weighed down with an avalanche of genealogical detail which would have the head of the LDS genealogical library begging them to stop. The chronology is generated partially from newspapers of the day and is also interesting, if also a bit long. For a book which purports to have four editors, the book is a little sloppy; spelling and usage are acceptable, but paragraphs repeat at times, and different contributors basically go over the same territory in different places. As a reference book, this has worthwhile information, and fans of the Red Sox or of deadball baseball will enjoy it, but any wider audience is difficult to visualize.

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    New Century, New Team - Society for American Baseball Research

    1901_cover_1400x1820

    New Century, New Team

    The 1901 Boston Americans

    Edited by Bill Nowlin

    Associate editors Maurice Bouchard and Len Levin

    Photo editor Dan Desrochers

    Society for American Baseball Research, Inc.

    Phoenix, AZ

    SABRlogo-1inch-300dpi-gray.tif

    New Century, New Team: The 1901 Boston Americans

    Edited by Bill Nowlin. Associate editors Maurice Bouchard and Len Levin. Photo editor Dan Desrochers.

    Copyright © 2013 Society for American Baseball Research, Inc.

    All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.

    Ebook ISBN 978-1-933599-59-5

    Design and Production: Gilly Rosenthol, Rosenthol Design

    The Society for American Baseball Research, Inc.

    4455 E. Camelback Road, Ste. D-140

    Phoenix, AZ 85018

    www.sabr.org

    Table of Contents

    Introduction: Bill Nowlin

    Franchise Firsts: Bill Nowlin

    Team Owner: George Somers: Fred Schuld

    American League President Ban Johnson: Joe Santry and Cindy Thomson

    The Ballpark: Huntington Avenue Grounds: Ron Selter 

    A Fuller Portrait of the First Home Game of the Franchise

    Baseball in the New Century: Following the Boston Americans in 1901: Donna L. Halper

    The Players

    Ben Beville: Bill Nowlin

    Jimmy Collins: Charlie Bevis

    Lou Criger: Steve Krah

    George Nig Cuppy: Charles Faber

    Tommy Dowd: Bill Nowlin

    Hobe Ferris: Dennis Auger 

    Frank Foreman: Jim Elfers

    Buck Freeman: Eric Enders

    Harry Gleason: Jack Morris

    Charlie Hemphill: Paul Wendt

    Charlie Jones: Frank Vaccaro

    Win Kellum: Bill Nowlin

    Ted Lewis: Rory Costello

    Larry McLean: Mike Lackey

    Fred Mitchell: Bill Nowlin

    Frank Morrissey: Bill Nowlin

    Freddy Parent: Dan Desrochers

    George Prentiss: David Forrester

    Osee Schrecongost: Bill Nowlin

    Jack Slattery: Bill Nowlin

    Chick Stahl: Dennis Auger

    Jake Volz: Bill Nowlin

    George Winter: Tom Simon

    Cy Young: David Southwick

    Personality: Hi Hi Dixwell: Joanne Hulbert

    Personality: Mike Nuf Ced McGreevy: Pete Nash

    1901 Boston Americans Season Timeline: Bill Nowlin

    By the Numbers: Dan Fields

    Contributors

    1901 - The First Year of the Boston Red Sox

    It all had to start someplace. The team was known as the Boston Americans at first, to differentiate them from Boston’s venerable National League team. But even just a few months before their first game, it was uncertain there truly would be a team — and on top of that, they didn’t have a park in which to play. They didn’t become the Red Sox until December 1907.

    The team’s first owner — at least on paper — was Charles Somers, but pretty much everyone knew who truly owned the team (and, for that matter, the American League.) That was Ban Johnson.

    It all happened very quickly, almost unbelievably quickly. Just a few months before 1901 Opening Day there was no American League team designated for Boston. For that matter, the American League itself was more a draft plan than a true rival league. The speed with which league architect Ban Johnson built on the framework he had is breathtaking to recount. Somers was key. As Fred Schuld notes in his biography of Somers, the man was known as the good angel of the American League for his financial backing of Johnson and his crucial support in launching at least four of the eight teams in the league: Cleveland, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston. The placement of a team in Boston to go up against the National League’s Boston Beaneaters came relatively late in the process of founding the new league. Initially, as Johnson’s vision began to take shape, there had been no plan to field a team in Boston. A franchise was planned for Buffalo but with only months to go before the season would open, Johnson decided to go head-to-head in Boston instead, and once he did, he acted fast.

    Boston was the eighth and final city selected as home for a club in the new American League. And once they decided to take on the National League in Boston, they had to find a place where they could play. Only by finding an appropriate site for a baseball field would the American League truly decide to place a team in Boston. Had Johnson and his associates not found a good location, the league would have placed its eighth club in either Buffalo or Indianapolis.

    As he relied on Somers to help, Ban Johnson also enlisted Connie Mack’s help in creating the American League — and Mack was initially involved in one way or another with not only his own Philadelphia Athletics, but also with the Boston team. In turn, Connie Mack looked to John S. Dooley and Hugh Duffy for assistance.

    The story, as Dooley set it down, went thus: In the fall of 1900, Johnson came to Boston to see if it were feasible to situate a charter American League franchise in a city already known for its passionate interest in baseball. He set up shop in the Old South building on Washington Street and sought out veteran baseball man Hugh Duffy, holding a number of meetings with him. Dooley was an enthusiast of the game and active in business in Boston. He sat in on a few of the meetings. Lining up the players would be easier than finding a suitable location for the ballpark. Duffy had previously considered a position as a principal with a group which could have frustrated any A.L. effort — a proposed American Association team to be placed across the river from Boston in Cambridge in an attempt to fend off an American League incursion. SABR researcher Doug Pappas found that the National League’s Arthur Irwin had leased the Cambridge property in a pre-emptive move to try and keep out the upstart league, but the lease was structured such that it would expire if the property were sold. Duffy declined to join the effort to head off the A.L., arguing, The grounds are too far out. They are in Cambridge and will not draw from Boston. Harvard students might patronize the club, but that is about all.¹

    I recall Peter Kelley, an old newspaper man, calling on me at my office, Dooley wrote in a brief account he typed up. Kelley was calling on behalf of Cleveland’s Charles Somers, designated as the first president of the Boston American League club. Kelley himself had an option on the old bicycle track across the Charles River in Cambridge, on a lease calling for a yearly rental of $5,000.² Mack and Clark Griffith had recommended the Cambridge location, but neither Johnson nor Duffy found it attractive. Johnson didn’t want a Boston team playing anywhere but in Boston. He kept that sentiment to himself, sharing it only with the small circle of men trying to help situate the team.

    A location deemed more suitable, however, was a site on Huntington Avenue controlled by the Boston Elevated Railway Company. Duffy showed the site to Peter Kelley and they both recommended it to Johnson. Dooley recalled Durand Associates as the actual owners of the land, but they had leased it to the railway, which had envisioned building a terminal there. The car barn was no longer the cards, but the railway was holding out for a $10,000 a year rental.

    Dooley was at the time working for the firm of J. R. Prendergast, brokers in cotton goods and yarn with offices at 87 Milk Street. Prendergast’s brother Daniel was in charge of the real estate department of the Boston Elevated. Dooley learned that the terminal plan was off — it turned out there was an ordinance that prevented the construction of car barns on the land which, even though it had served as a dump, was still across the street from the opera house. He urged Duffy and Kelley to approach Dan Prendergast, offer $5,000 a year and mention my name. Under no conditions, I said, were they to go higher than $5,000.

    The offer was, Dooley said, violently refused and Daniel Prendergast called Dooley to complain about the measly rental the men had offered. If you want my advice, Dooley says he told Prendergast, I’d grab that $5,000 offer because they can get that wonderful site in Cambridge for that figure. You’d better grab them right now before they close with Cambridge.

    Prendergast took the bit and a deal was struck. Dooley later told the Boston Post’s Gerry Hern, I suppose I should be a little sorry for what I did to get the American League in here, but when I sit in Fenway Park these days, I figure maybe the good Lord will forgive me. It was in a good cause.

    In 1956, Gerry Hern of the Boston Post wrote, More than anyone, Jack Dooley is responsible for the American League obtaining the Huntington ave. grounds as their playing field.³ Had Dooley not helped out, there might never have been a Boston Red Sox. The February 2, 1901 issue of The Sporting News records the formal awarding of a Boston franchise to Somers. Three weeks later, the February 23 Sporting Life reported that Somers had said the American League would never have invaded Boston if the National League had acceded to its original request for recognition as a major league.

    Boston it was, and just a little more than three months after the Boston franchise was announced, the Boston Americans were playing baseball at their first home: the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

    Tim Murnane’s view of the forthcoming 1901 season

    Veteran Boston sportswriter Tim Murnane wrote an article in the Boston Globe the day after Boston’s National League team had kicked off their home season with a win, but six days before the American League schedule had begun. He presented his views on baseball in Boston in 1901. His article ran under the headline Play Ball! in the April 21, 1901 issue of the Globe.

    PLAY BALL!

    Season of 1901 Will be a Strenuous One

    Hub Has Two Chances in 16 for Honors This Year

    Many New Names on List of Its Players

    Only Real Thing in Playing Will Make Good

    New Huntington Av. Grounds Nearly Done

    Thirty years ago this spring Boston saw her first professional ball team, and from that day to this Boston has never missed a season with a first-class ball team in the leading baseball organization of the country, and is the only city to claim this distinction. Chicago comes next, having missed but once, owing to the big fire. The great fire in Boston also nearly cut Boston out of a ball team in 1872.

    Twelve times have the local men brought home the championship and they have given, undoubtedly, the greatest exhibition of the game of any club in the country, notwithstanding the fact that the grounds have been a slight handicap in several ways.

    Such remarkable ball players as Geo. Wright, Andrew Leonard, Ross Barnes, James O’Rourke, John Morrill, Jim White, John Burdock, Ezra Sutton, Billy Nash, Dickey, Johnson, Joe Hornung, John Manning, Jim Whitney, Tommy Bond, Charlie Buffinton, Lew Brown, Curry Foley, and A. G. Spalding did their best work at their famous old grounds before the reconstructed league of 10 years ago flooded the country with new faces, but with no better ball players nor any half, as popular with the public.

    Then came such players as Kelly, Clarkson, Duffy, McCarthy, Nichols, Lowe, Long, and an army of the best players the game could produce, until Boston has been given the privilege of cheering for the cream of the profession, until nothing but a winner will satisfy the followers of the sport in this vicinity.

    Championships will often kill the game in some cities, as was the case in Providence, Detroit, Baltimore, and many other places. Boston, however, is not one of those cities, neither is Chicago nor New York, and yet there are no cities that insist so constantly as the three last-named that the team shall be a winner.

    This season Boston will have two chances out of 16 for honors in baseball. The league club will start off with an experiment, and yet, with so many unknown players, surprises are no doubt in order. The new men are little known, with the exception of Kittridge and De Montreville, and the team, as a whole, looks light at the bat, a serious thing in the national league, where you must hit to make runs.

    The triumvirs will not be content with a weak team, should the present aggregation fail to make good, but will keep on hustling for talent that can play baseball, and there are a number of good ones yet in the minor leagues.

    The team this season will contain no less than seven college players, and is altogether the finest-looking club ever photographed in Boston uniforms. That doesn’t mean, however, that they can play ball as well as they dress, although the greater number are known as the real thing in baseball.

    Manager Selee will have a rough road to hoe this season to build up the Boston team, and I doubt if this modest manager will ever again be as lucky in picking up clever young talent as in the past, when he made several successful deals without having seen the men work.

    Selee has the knack of keeping the players good-natured, and this will count for much this year of roast from the fans, for it will be a year of bitter likes and dislikes in the three cities where two clubs are located.

    The National league boys are now at it, and will not be seen here again until May 2, when they return for a two-months’ stay.

    The American league will start the ball a-rolling the coming week, and there is much speculation as to what showing they will make in the east. Boston will be at Baltimore and Washington at Philadelphia. Both Baltimore and Philadelphia are fully ripe for the new order of things, and the boys on the press of those cities are whooping things up in good style — which counts for much at the go-off, or until the teams show weakness, when they gradually become lobsters, and loyalty for local favorites is at a discount.

    Jimmy Collins is quite confident that his boys will do well. With a strong list of pitchers he would surely be in it, but there is the question.

    The Boston fans have faith in Collins, who is one of the biggest favorites ever connected with the Boston club. His name is mentioned more often than all the other players who have done to the American from this city. I never knew what a favorite this player was until this spring, when even the best friends of the old league can say nothing but good for Jimmy Collins. Some doubt his ability to manage a successful ball team, but wish him the best of luck.

    The Boston club has given up all hope of getting back any more of its players and has made no effort in that direction since it landed Vic Willis. Chick Stahl is the only man it would go after.

    I am fully convinced that Stahl has made up his mind to keep away from the league; in fact he was the only player at Charlottesville to openly express himself against his old employers, and that he did in no uncertain way. Still I have heard ball players declare themselves in the most vigorous manner and the next day come to terms with the very men they had roasted. It will be interesting to watch the future work of the Boston league officials in this direction, for they are satisfied that every man they hold an option on belongs to them by every right.

    The public, however, in this city as well as all over the country, is sick of this jumping, and once the season begins we will see but little of it.

    The American league will not be seen here until May 8. By that time the new stand will be ready.

    The bleachers are all up, and the finishing touches are going on with the grand stand. The field looks much larger than the South End grounds, and the spectators have a splendid view from every seat. I doubt if there will be more satisfactory ball grounds in this country after they have been completed than these grounds on Huntington av.

    The Americans will have a great opening, as the fans are anxious to see the new team.

    The boys must now loosen those salary arms, and the fan will again have a chance to hand up that half and quarter to get inside the fence to see the stars of the profession, and a lot of newcomers.

    T.H.M.

    The Huntington Avenue Grounds

    Ron Selter’s article in this volume goes into depth regarding the team’s first home ballpark. The park was constructed with astonishing celerity. As he notes, plans for the park were completed in February 1901 and groundbreaking was on March 7. The park itself was open for business for the first home game, on May 8. Not everything was ready on time; the Boston Herald mentioned that the dressing room for the players (what we now call the clubhouse) was not completed and the players had to change into their uniforms elsewhere.

    They had a couple of other problems, too, on the actual opening day — May 8. Using a bit of the parlance of the day, the Herald explained, The Boston players had no easy jump to reach the grounds. They let New York in the morning, did not reach Boston until 2 o’clock, and did not have time to partake of dinner, so they fought their first game on empty stomachs. One wouldn’t want a team playing on full stomachs, but apparently this train in 1901 didn’t have an adequate dining car. And the team didn’t even have their own bats, according to the Boston Post. Sports that they were, the Athletics allowed the Bostons to use their bats, too.

    The team had come from Washington where they had played on May 7. The first ten games of the 1901 season were played on the road. They were:

    Date Location Score

    April 26 Baltimore Baltimore 10, Boston 6

    April 27 Baltimore Baltimore 12, Boston 6

    April 29 Philadelphia Philadelphia 8, Boston 5

    April 30 Philadelphia Boston 8, Philadelphia 6

    (in 10 innings)

    May 1 Philadelphia Philadelphia 14, Boston 1

    May 2 Philadelphia Boston 23, Philadelphia 12

    May 3 Washington Washington 9, Boston 4

    May 4 Washington Boston 10, Washington 2

    May 6 Washington Boston 9, Washington 5

    May 7 Washington Boston 7, Washington 3

    Thus, after starting off losing four of the first five games, the Bostons completed their initial road trip with a 5-5 record, coming back to Boston even in wins and losses.

    Something else the Americans faced in returning to Boston was the competition. The National League team, established in Boston since 1876, wasn’t going to arrange their schedule to accommodate the upstarts, the team which had lured away many of its popular players: manager/third baseman Jimmy Collins, outfielders Chick Stahl and Buck Freeman, and pitchers Cuppy and Lewis, credited with 21 of the Beaneaters’ 66 wins in 1900. The 1900 team had four players who hit over .300; Collins and Freeman were two of the four (and Stahl had hit .295.) The two top RBI men on the 1900 Beaneaters had been Collins (with 95 RBIs) and Stahl (with 82.)

    The Nationals had opened their 1901 season at home, on April 19, with a definitive 7-0 shutout of the New York Giants. Attendance was reported at 6,501. Five-year veteran pitcher Ted Lewis sat on the Beaneaters bench — but he hadn’t yet decided for which team he would play. The team’s South End Grounds sported a new fence in left field.

    After planting the flag with their home opener, the Boston Nationals went on the road for five games, alternating losses and wins and returning home with a 3-3 record to play games on May 3 and 4 against the Giants (again) and games on May 6 and 7 against the Brooklyns, the Superbas. They split those, too. Both teams thus had 5-5 records before they went head-to-head in Boston for the first time, on May 8. The Nationals had played five home games, drawing a total of 8,000 fans over the four games after Opening Day.

    The Americans drew over 11,025 fans to their home opener. The Nationals drew almost precisely half that amount — 5,500. Details regarding attendance in the first eight games where the two teams squared off face-to-face are in the timeline. The scales tilted even more heavily in favor of the new team.

    The two games on May 8 were quite different games. The one played by the Nationals at the South End Grounds was a dramatic 7-6 win for the home team which took 12 innings to fight out. Brooklyn scored two in the first, and Boston scored once. In the sixth, Brooklyn scored another, but Boston came back with two to tie it. Then Brooklyn scored yet again in the seventh, taking a one-run lead, only to have Boston score twice in the eighth and take the lead for the first time in the game. Brooklyn scored two in the top of the ninth and the advantage tilted back their way, but Boston scored one to tie it in the bottom of the ninth. And Boston won it in the bottom of the 12th on three consecutive singles.

    The one played by the Americans at the Huntington Avenue Grounds was one-sided. Indeed, the Globe intoned, The game was one of the poorest ever played in this city by the visiting team….The work of the Quakers was worth about 3 cents on the dollar. While Cy Young held the Athletics scoreless through the first six innings, his Boston Americans scored four times in the first, once in the second, once in the third, three times in the fourth, and twice more in the fifth. Poorly played by the Philadelphians, perhaps (they committed six errors, but Boston made four), but most home crowds take a certain pleasure in seeing their team rolling up a 12-0 lead. The final score was 12-4.

    The season was off and running. The Americans won their second home game, too, then ran into a five-game losing streak. It was their longest losing streak of the season, but coming when it did was perhaps not the best timing. They won the final game of their first homestand, for a 3-5 record, and then set out on the road. It was a 6-6 road trip. Their second homestand began with five wins. There was a loss to Detroit, and then Boston won its next nine games. It was a 15-2 homestand. That’s the sort of thing that makes an impression. The team concluded their second stint in the city with a 29-18 record after Cy Young’s 4-2 win over Washington on June 25. They were just one game out of first place, behind Chicago. The Boston Nationals were in fifth place (24-22), though only four games behind the league-leading Pirates.

    The 1901 timeline presented elsewhere in this book provides a look at the complete season through its conclusion and a look ahead to 1902.

    Notes

    1 Boston Herald, January 29, 1901.

    2 Dooley’s papers were made available to the author by his daughter Katherine Dooley in 2001.

    3 Boston Post, May 13, 1956.

    Intro%203%2cConnie%20Mack%2c01%2007%201911%20loc%20.tif

    Connie Mack assisted the team in locating a suitable location for its first home ballpark, the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

    Intro%204%20Jack%20Dooley%2006_06_000052%20-.tif

    Jack Dooley — John Jack Dooley (front row center) at a 1913 Winter League meeting with fans, players, ex-players and other baseball luminaries. Boston Royal Rooter Michael T. McGreevy sits to the left with his hat in his hand.

    Intro%207-%20Boston%20Amer.%20Team%2c%20BPL%2c%201901%2c%20formal%20attire%20-%20B%20-%20Copy.tif

    Top, left to right: Fred Mitchell, pitcher; Ambrose Kane; Tommy Dowd, left field.

    Middle row: Charlie Hemphill, right field; Freddy Parent, shortstop; Kit McKenna, pitcher; Hobe Ferris, second baseman;

    Win Kellum, pitcher; Nig Cuppy, pitcher; Buck Freeman, first baseman.

    Bottom row: Osee Schrecongost, catcher; Lou Criger, catcher; Larry McLean, first baseman; Jimmy Collins, third baseman; Cy Young, pitcher; Chick Stahl, center field.

    Intro%208%2c%20BPL%2c%201901%2c%20Ground%20Breaking%20Ceremony%20%20-%20Copy.tif

    First Spadeful - Baseball dignitaries gather on March 7, 1901 for the groundbreaking ceremony of the construction of the Huntington Avenue Grounds. Prepared to remove the first shovel of dirt at the former Huntington Carnival Lot is Arthur Hi-Hi Dixwell, Boston’s Chief Crank, surrounded by the likes of Mike Sullivan, former pitcher and Massachusetts State Senator, the Roxbury Royal Rooters, including Charlie Lavish and Michael T. McGreevy, and Boston Globe reporter Timothy Murnane. The park opened two months later serving as the home field for the Boston Americans through the 1911 season.

    Intro%205%20Beacon%20st%20Feb%201901_.tif

    Scene on Beacon Street, Boston, February 1901. In another section of the city, construction was underway on building the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

    Intro%206.tifm.jpg

    Boston Nationals Infield of 1900

    Clockwise from left, second baseman Bobby Lowe, first baseman Fred Tenney, shortstop Herman Long and third baseman Jimmy Collins. Collins became player/manager for the 1901 Americans.

    Some Franchise Firsts — An Overview

    By Bill Nowlin

    The first spring training and the first home runs

    The very first games the Boston Americans played against an opponent preceded the regular season. They came in spring training. The team trained in Charlottesville, Virginia and the team never left its Charlottesville base. The first 12 members of the team showed up on April 1 to begin the first spring training of the franchise and held a light workout on the grounds of the local YMCA. Four more players arrived the following day and that constituted the full contingent, as the plan was to field 14 players on the roster. Though the term racially diverse would not be used at the time, there were both black and white spectators at some of the early workouts.

    There were a few intrasquad regulars vs. subs games and a lot of bad weather. The April 18 Boston Globe reported that manager Collins is disappointed with the south as a training ground. In addition, the Globe remarked that the team was unfortunate in not having any strong team in this section against whom they can play.

    The only two teams the club played against opponents were both shutouts, so Boston concluded its first spring training with an aggregate score of 36-0.

    4/5 @ Charlottesville VA: Boston 13, University of Virginia 0

    4/11 @ Charlottesville VA: Boston 23, University of Virginia 0

    The first game was clearly an easy win, but the second one was even more lopsided. It was in the second of the two games that the first home runs in franchise play were hit. Both came in the April 11, 1901 exhibition game against the University of Virginia team, the 23-0 win. The homers were hit by Jimmy Collins and Hobe Ferris.

    Tim Murnane covered spring training for the Boston Globe and it’s likely he who wrote the account: Everyone but Hemphill hit the ball. Ferris led with a home run and two singles. Close behind came Parent, with two screeching doubles and a single, and Dowd with four singles. Collins lifted the leather over the palings, besides singling.

    It’s virtually certain that the pitcher who surrendered the first homer was Stearns, since he pitched into the fifth — by which time Boston had already scored at least 17 runs. Stearns was Virginia’s first baseman, who tried his hand at twirling, and the professionals batted him all over the lot according to the Washington Post.

    Franchise Firsts

    All of the first ten games in franchise history were away games, played on the road. The first two games were April 26 and 27, 1901 against Baltimore (the team that became the New York Highlanders in 1903, later known as the New York Yankees). Boston lost both of its two games against the future Yankees, and lost its first game against Philadelphia as well, before winning for the very first time in a 10-inning game, 8-6, on April 30. Here are some of the firsts rung up before the team found its way to its home park, the Huntington Avenue Grounds. All firsts happened in the April 26 game unless otherwise noted.

    First franchise game: April 26, 1901 (Baltimore Orioles 10, Boston Americans 6)

    Starting pitchers: Iron Man Joe McGinnity (Baltimore) vs. Win Kellum (Boston)

    Managers: Jimmy Collins (Boston) and John McGraw (Baltimore)

    First pitch by a Boston pitcher: Win Kellum

    First hit off Boston pitching: leadoff batter John McGraw doubled to right field

    First run scored off Boston pitching: Turkey Mike Donlin followed McGraw’s double with a triple to right. 1-0, nobody out and Donlin on third.

    First base on balls issued by Boston pitching: Kellum walked Jimmy Williams, the third batter up in the first inning.

    First strikeout: Win Kellum struck out Cy Seymour in the first, the first out recorded by Boston.

    First out by a defensive player: Buck Freeman recorded the putout when Jim Jackson followed Seymour’s strikeout with an out at first base

    First Boston batter: Tommy Dowd, who grounded out to the Baltimore pitcher, 1-3.

    First Boston hit: Jimmy Collins, who doubled in the top of the fourth

    First Boston run scored: Jimmy Collins

    First RBI: Buck Freeman, who singled in Jimmy Collins in the fourth

    First multiple-hit game: Collins and Criger both had two hits for three total bases apiece

    First double: Collins, in the fourth inning

    First triple: in the sixth game of the season, May 2, Chick Stahl tripled in the third inning

    First home run: in the fourth game of the year, on April 30 in Philadelphia, Buck Freeman hit a two-run homer off Billy Milligan in the top of the ninth to send the game into extra innings.

    First player to hit two home runs in the same game: Buck Freeman (June 1, 1901 in Chicago) — Freeman was the first to do so in the American League.

    First Boston batter to work a base on balls: Buck Freeman, in the second inning

    First hit by a Boston pitcher: Win Kellum

    First extra-base hit by a Boston pitcher: Ted Lewis, on May 2

    First Boston pinch-hitter: Larry McLean, who doubled, batting for Kellum in the top of the ninth.

    First futile Boston rally: Despite scoring two runs in the eighth and three in the ninth, Boston still lost the game, 10-6.

    First double play by Boston: Parent to Freeman, in the bottom of the first

    First triple play: August 7, 1901 at Baltimore: Roger Bresnahan of the Orioles hit into a 1-5-2-6-1 triple play. With runners at the corners, he bunted to Boston pitcher Ted Lewis, who looked to third and had the runner, Steve Brodie, caught off the bag. Lewis threw to third baseman Jimmy Collins. In the meantime, the runner on first base had run all the way to third and the batter to second base, but when Brodie was forced back toward third in a rundown, the other runners both had to retreat. Brodie was tagged out at the plate by catcher Osee Schrecongost, who fired the ball to shortstop Freddie Parent. He tagged Jim Jackson at second and then threw to Lewis, who tagged Bresnahan before he could get back to first.

    First stolen base: none in the first two games, but Dowd walked and stole second in the first inning on April 29, then stole third and scored on a bad throw to third — all before the second batter completed his at-bat.

    First Boston catcher to throw out a baserunner: unclear. It was either April 29 or 30, 1901. Criger got an assist on April 29, but contemporary news accounts don’t make it clear how he earned it. He had three assists in the April 30 game, and two of them were throwing out runners. In the third inning, Criger threw out Phil Geier.

    First Boston error: Jimmy Collins

    First win by a Boston pitcher: Cy Young, beating the Athletics, 8-6, in 10 innings on April 30, 1901, despite giving up 12 hits and walking one.

    First loss by a Boston pitcher: Win Kellum pitched a complete game loss, 10-6, on April 26.

    First spring training game: April 5, 1901, at Charlottesville VA: Boston 13, University of Virginia 0.

    First midseason exhibition game: April 28, 1901 at Weehawken NJ: Boston 5, Weehawken 2.

    First extra-inning game: April 30, 1901 at Philadelphia, an 8-6 win in 10 innings.

    First postponement: May 5, 1901 due to rain.

    Finally, home to Boston

    After scoring 79 runs in its first 10 games (but only recording a 5-5 mark on the road), the team played its first home game on Huntington Avenue, on May 8, 1901. Cy Young won a 12-4 victory over the Philadelphia Athletics.

    A few other franchise firsts

    First ejection: Buck Freeman on May 11, 1901, by umpire John Haskell. Nabbed off second base after doubling in the bottom of the second inning, Freeman ran at the umpire and grabbed him by the two shoulders. His ejection may have spelled the difference in a 3-2 loss to Washington. Freeman was later fined $10.

    First shutout: a 4-0 loss to the Washington Senators, in Boston, on May 15, 1901. It capped the first sweep by an opponent in a series in Boston, as the Americans lost four games in a row to Washington.

    First shutout win: May 25, 1901 at Cleveland, a six-hit 5-0 shutout by Ted Lewis.

    First sweep of a homestand of more than two games: June 7-11, 1901. Boston swept all five games from the visiting Milwaukee team. Between June 17 and 20, Boston swept five games in a row from the visiting White Sox. In fact, Boston beat Chicago every one of the 10 games that the White Sox played in Boston in 1901. And beat Milwaukee every one of the 10 games the Brewers played in Boston. Chicago won the pennant but Milwaukee came in last.

    First postseason game: an exhibition game held on September 30, 1901 at the Huntington Avenue Grounds: Boston Americans 7, Chicago White Sox 5.

    Ballparks

    The team has only had two home ballparks in its century-plus history, though a handful of home games were played at Braves Field in days long gone by.

    Huntington Avenue Grounds

    The first home of the Boston Americans (from 1908, the Red Sox) was the Huntington Avenue Grounds. Many ballparks of the era were simply known as league park or the National League grounds, but the ballpark where the Red Sox first began was the Huntington Avenue American League Base Ball Grounds. It was constructed very quickly, on the former Huntington Carnival Lot, with groundbreaking on March 7, 1901. Longtime Boston baseball fan Arthur Hi Hi Dixwell turned the first shovelful of dirt. The first home game for Boston was played on May 8, just two months later. Dixwell threw out the first pitch.

    Boston already had a major-league team — the National League’s Boston Beaneaters. The competition between the Americans and the Nationals was accentuated by the proximity of the two parks. It was approximately 600 feet as the crow flies from home plate at the South End Grounds to home plate of the Huntington Avenue Grounds. It was even closer between the outside perimeters of the two parks. In between lay the tracks of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and a couple of repair sheds used to service the trains.

    When the Red Sox later moved to Fenway Park in 1912, they moved less than half a mile away from the Huntington Avenue Grounds, effectively just across the Muddy River and the Fens.

    The architect of the American League, Ban Johnson, had a willing financier in Cleveland magnate named Charles Somers, who not only provided initial funding for the Cleveland Indians but the Boston Americans as well. Somers was active in shipping on the Great Lakes, in coal, and in lumber. Frederick Lieb writes that Somers also advanced $10,000 to Charles Comiskey to help him finance the Chicago White Sox and was Connie Mack’s original backer in the Philadelphia Athletics. So Somers had his financial fingers in four of the eight original American League clubs. Connie Mack, owner of the Athletics, was involved with the Boston Americans, too; he headed the small group selected to find a suitable site for the AL’s Boston franchise. They visited possible locations in Cambridge, Charlestown, and Boston, but finally settled on a site not far from the National League park, the South End Grounds.

    The site was owned by Durand Associates and leased to the Boston Elevated Railway Company. Mack’s committee (which comprised Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy) asked John Dooley to speak with his partner in the J. R. Prendergast Company, a cotton brokerage. Daniel Prendergast was also a director of Boston Elevated Railway, and Dooley recalls an old newspaperman named Peter Kelley coming to his office on behalf of team owner Charles Somers to ask that Prendergast help convince the railway company to accept a ballpark on the site. Dooley says he prevailed upon Prendergast to have the Elevated accept the offer of $5,000 for the rights to use the land. It was Connie Mack who signed the lease on the Huntington Avenue land.

    John Dooley was involved in many Boston baseball booster organizations, from the Royal Rooters to the Winter League to the Half Century Club and, finally, the Bosox Club. He was father to loyal and longtime devoted Red Sox fan Lib Dooley.

    To say the site was unimproved was an understatement. It was, in the words of Ed Walton, no more than an expansive wasteland made up of heavily weeded bumps and lumps. It had been used as a circus lot — even the temporary home to Buffalo Bill’s traveling Wild West Circus — when a show would come to town. There was a fairly large pond on the property that children would splash into during summer months from a number of chutes they would slide down, as a water slide. In the winter, of course, people could ice skate there, but this was no high society skating pond. The area was largely bounded by rail yards, a huge Boston Storage Warehouse behind the length of the left-field bleachers, some stables, breweries, and a pickle factory. The United Drug Company was situated near enough to the park that one could often smell the chemicals at work. Oddly, perhaps, the opera house was across the street.

    The park had a very large footprint. It seated around 9,000 fans at first; more seating was added in later years. On the busiest days, several thousand more simply watched from the field itself, standing behind ropes, necessitating a change in ground rules for the day. Typically, a fair ball hit into the crowd was ruled a double, but the rules did vary some from day to day. It was 350 feet to the left field corner, 440 feet in left-center field, and some 530 feet to straightaway center. Right field was close, though, just 280 feet down the line. An expansion in 1908 pushed the right-field fence out to 320 feet, but took center field out to a staggering 635 feet. After terming it the most mis-shapen of all the big league ballparks, Michael Gershman further emphasized the unusual center field as the most challenging in major league history, since it featured hip-high weeds and was dotted with slippery patches of sand left over from the circus. In addition to being vast, center field sloped uphill and was made even more treacherous by the presence of a sizable tool shed in deep center. The shed was in play, though by the time any ball might have traveled that far, the batter would surely have himself an inside-the-park home run. [Gershman, Diamonds, p. 70]

    A statue of Cy Young is positioned today on the Northeastern University campus on the very spot understood to be where the pitcher’s rubber had been, facing toward home plate some 60 feet, six inches away.

    The field was indeed a rough one, and Philip Lowry’s Green Cathedrals also noted the large patches of sand in the outfield where grass would not grow. The facility itself was striking, built with expanded metal and roughcast cement, with a light grey tone. The roof rested on columns 28 feet in the air, hipped on all four sides, in the words of Alan E. Foulds, who quoted the Boston Globe as saying the structure was covered with granite felting, toned to a soft crimson. The interior was all of pine. There were three sections of grandstands arranged in a semi-circle, each seating nearly 800 people, and large bleachers at each end. A brand new facility, the park lured patrons away from the less-attractive South End Grounds.

    There were limitations, though. Gershman quotes an Associated Press article which said the wooden seats were rickety, soot from trains in neighboring yards filled the area, and the saloon next door was a beacon for bored players — during the games.

    It worked, though, and from the very first day, fans flocked to the Huntington Avenue Grounds rather than its older neighbor, the South End Grounds. It didn’t hurt that the American League franchise priced its tickets at half-price (25 cents instead of 50 cents), and that Jimmy Collins and several of the National League stars had been lured to the new league.

    Huntington Avenue Grounds — firsts before the home crowd

    First home game: May 8, 1901 (Boston Americans 12, Philadelphia Athletics 4)

    All firsts cited here happened in the May 8 game, unless otherwise noted.

    Starting pitchers: Cy Young (Boston) and Bill Bernhard (Philadelphia); Cy Young got the first win.

    Managers: Jimmy Collins (Boston) and Connie Mack (Philadelphia)

    First pitch: Cy Young

    First out recorded: Athletics leadoff batter Jack Hayden, who grounded out to third base, Collins to Freeman.

    First strikeout: Cy Young struck out the second batter in the inning, Phil Geier.

    First hit: Dave Fultz (a two-out single) off Cy Young in the first inning.

    First Boston batter: Buttermilk Tommy Dowd

    First Boston hit: Tommy Dowd, a first-inning leadoff single to left field

    First Boston bunt: Charlie Hemphill, to sacrifice Dowd to second. Hemphill reached safely on a Philadelphia error, one of nine Athletics errors in the game.

    First run scored: Tommy Dowd, in the bottom of the first

    First RBI: Jimmy Collins, who drove in Dowd with a single

    First home run: Buck Freeman, also in the bottom of the first inning, an inside-the-park homer that got by Geier in center. Freeman tripled and singled later in the game.

    First triple: Charlie Hemphill in the fourth inning, his first of two triples on the day

    First Boston double: Jimmy Collins smacked a double in the bottom of the first inning of the May 9 game.

    First hit by a Boston pitcher: Cy Young, singling to lead off the second inning after Boston had scored four runs in the first.

    First extra-base hit by a Boston pitcher: Cy Young tripled into the crowd in the fifth.

    First double play by Boston: Parent to Ferris to Freeman (6-4-3), in the second inning

    First stolen base: Charlie Hemphill (Freeman was caught stealing in the third)

    First Boston catcher to throw out a baserunner: Lou Criger threw out Fultz trying to take second base in the top of the first inning.

    First Boston error: Buck Freeman, third inning

    First run scored off Boston pitching: an unearned run in seventh inning off Young, marring the 11-0 shutout he had going.

    First ceremonial first pitch: General Arthur Hi Hi Dixwell

    Umpire for the first home game: John E. Haskell

    First base on balls issued by Boston pitching: none in the first home game, but Nig Cuppy walked one batter in the May 9 game.

    First hit batsman: Doc Powers hit by Cuppy on the same date — May 9, 1901.

    First wild pitch: Philadelphia pitcher Chick Fraser, also on May 9, 1901.

    First crowd to go home disappointed: May 11, 1901, in the third home game for the franchise, Washington beat Boston, 3-2.

    First shutout: Washington pitcher Watty Lee on May 15, 1901.

    First shutout win for the home team: Cy Young on July 6, 1901, shutting out Washington, 7-0.

    First grand slam: the first one hit at Huntington Avenue was hit on July 8, 1902 by Philadelphia’s Harry Davis, part of a 22-9 Athletics win.

    First grand slam by the Boston Americans: on July 25, 1902, Jimmy Collins hit a ball to the clubhouse for an inside-the-park four runs in the fourth off Jack Harper of the St. Louis Browns. The phrase appears not to refer to a particular clubhouse — the Huntington Avenue Grounds clubhouses were underneath the grandstand behind home plate — but to be a generic phrase of the day meaning a very long drive.

    First balk: as best we can tell, it came from Boston’s Tom Hughes on July 10, 1903.

    First ballpark vendor memorialized in print

    The first vendor at a Boston American League game memorialized on a newspaper page remains anonymous. Of the May 8, 1901 opening game, the Boston Globe noted, It was a regular holiday attendance and the peanut man was in high glee as he sailed his paper bags among the joyous throngs in the bleachers.

    Coda for the Huntington Avenue Grounds

    The last game at the Huntington Avenue Grounds was an 8-1 win for Patsy Donovan’s Red Sox over the Senators, pitched by Charley Hall before a small October 7, 1911 gate of 840 fans. Carl Cashion was the losing pitcher. The last batter up was Kid Elberfeld. He hit into a force out.

    The last run scored (and the last RBI) came on the last home run hit in the park, an inside-the-park home run hit by Boston’s Joe Riggert off Charlie Becker in the bottom of the eighth.

    The Red Sox began to play at Fenway Park in April 1912. Even though the Huntington Avenue ballpark had only been used for 11 seasons, it was already the oldest park in use in the American League — only because the Tigers played their last 23 games of 1911 on the road, last playing at Bennett Park on September 10.

    After the move to Fenway Park, Roger Abrams writes, the Huntington Avenue Grounds ballpark was demolished and the lot on which it stood reverted to occasional use for traveling circuses and shows, such as annual visits by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus. Abrams reports that the Reverend Billy Sunday, himself a former ballplayer, built a terra-cotta brick and steel structure on the field for his evangelical crusades of 1916 and 1917. The new building had a capacity of 18,000 and cost $45,000 to erect. More than 1.5 million people attended Sunday’s riveting sermons, almost sixty-five thousand of whom came forward to declare themselves converted.¹

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