Free Fenway 1912 by Glenn Stout Page B

McAleer to put together an all-star squad to scrimmage the A's, and McAleer asked both Larry Gardner and Joe Wood to play for a team that also included such luminaries as Tiger outfielder Ty Cobb, Yankee first baseman Hal Chase, and pitcher Walter Johnson of the Washington Senators.
    It was quite an honor for each player to be selected for the team, which had the added benefit of giving McAleer a chance to get to know each man a bit better heading into the 1912 season. Each player made the most of it. Gardner more than held his own at third and knocked a series of hits off the champions, and even though Joe Wood was defeated, 3–2, in his only pitching appearance, he held the champions to only five hits, a performance that seemed to underscore his late-season surge. After the A's beat the Giants in the World's Series, four games to two, Wood's stock rose even higher, since his effort compared favorably to those of the Giants' pitchers in the Series, even the great Christy Mathewson.
    The A's six-game victory was no upset, but the Giants, behind combative manager John McGraw, had usurped the Cubs as the National League's best club, and baseball reporters considered them to be a team on the way up. The Red Sox, however, were not overly impressed. Speaker, Wood, pitchers Ray Collins, Charley Hall, and Eddie Cicotte, and a few other Sox had faced the Giants in 1909 in a postseason series that Boston had won handily, four games to one. Although Wood had been Boston's only losing pitcher, he had actually earned a draw with Mathewson in the first game, giving up only six hits to the ten Boston earned off Mathewson, and he lost only because of Boston's porous defense. Speaker had been particularly impressive, hitting .600 for the series and battering Mathewson as if he were a rank amateur. Murnane called him the "twinkling star" of the contests and offered that the Sox had outplayed the Giants "in every department." Just as the Red Sox had believed that they were better than the Athletics at the end of the regular season, Speaker let his teammates know after the 1911 Series that the Giants were intimidating in name only.
    As the last leaves dropped off the trees, the attention of Red Sox fans, management, and players now turned to other matters. Charley Hall had fallen for a Roxbury girl, Marie Cullen, and they married in mid-October. At the reception at the bride's home the guests were entertained by the Red Sox Quartet, a barbershop singing group made up of Buck O'Brien, first baseman Hugh Bradley, and pitchers Marty McHale and minor leaguer Bill Lyons, who were filling in for occasional tenor Larry Gardner, already back home to Vermont. Later that fall the quartet played the New England vaudeville circuit, including B. F. Keith's theater in Boston, where a receptive reviewer noted that "if they wish to foreswear baseball as a livelihood there is a rosy career awaiting them as singers."
    While the players whiled away the winter, Red Sox management was focused on building—both the ball club and the ballpark. Shortly after the end of the World's Series, McAleer traveled to Chicago, a trip that served two purposes. There was that annual hunting trip with Johnson and about three other baseball big shots, which always included attending to a bit of baseball business beforehand. But Chicago was also the home of Jake Stahl, the man McAleer wanted to manage his ball club. Before leaving for Wisconsin McAleer met with Stahl and tried to convince him to sign on.
    McAleer wanted Stahl both to manage the team and to play first base. In theory Stahl was not averse to either proposition, but he demanded some extra incentive to leave the cushy and cash-rich confines of his Chicago office. Namely, he didn't want to be McAleer's employee as much as he wanted to be a partner—he wanted a piece of the team. His father-in-law was already on board to be a part owner, and Stahl knew that McAleer was still a bit stretched financially. Besides, if