Free Fenway Park by John Powers Page A

marathon. Hundreds of thousands of spectators root the runners on, and the square offers a convergence of race day and Red Sox fans spilling out of the traditional 11 a.m. holiday game.
    The square was once noted for its hotels, including the Buckminster, at the corner of Beacon Street and Brookline Avenue, which was designed by Stanford White. It was the site of the first network radio broadcast, and it also played a part in the infamous “Black Sox” baseball scandal. On Sept. 18, 1919, the same day that the Chicago White Sox defeated the Red Sox, 3-2, at Fenway, bookmaker and gambler Joseph “Sport” Sullivan went to the hotel room of Arnold “Chick” Gandil, White Sox first baseman. There they hatched a plot to fix the 1919 World Series, which was to start 13 days later.
    In 1915, the Kenmore Apartments building opened at the corner of Kenmore Street and Commonwealth Avenue. It later became the Hotel Kenmore, an elegant, 400-room operation that was once Boston’s baseball headquarters—at one time in the late 1940s when the Braves still played in Boston, all 14 visiting major-league clubs stayed there. Countless trades were made, managers hired and fired, and post-game parties featured celebrities of the day.
    “As I grew up, I knew that [Fenway Park] was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid at Giza, the nation’s Capitol, the czar’s Winter Palace, and the Louvre—except, of course, that it is better than all those inconsequential places.”
    —Former Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti
     
    After key injuries led to a ruined July, the club rallied with a strong finish and flirted with third place before slipping back to fifth. But that would be the best showing for more than a dozen years as the talent exodus to the Bronx continued during the offseason. Frazee swapped shortstop Everett Scott, who’d played nearly 1,100 games for Boston, plus pitchers “Sad Sam” Jones and “Bullet Joe” Bush for shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh and three hurlers. While critics lambasted the owner for continuing his yard sale, his money had paid for the furnishings. “It is Frazee’s team,” the Globe ’s James O’Leary reminded readers, “and if he has goldbricked himself he is the one who will suffer.”
    By Opening Day in 1922, nobody from the 1918 champions remained on the Red Sox roster. Even the stockings had been changed to ones with a dark stripe. “Picking red socks for the boys must have been left to someone who is color-blind,” Mel Webb observed in the Globe .
    Though the club won four of five from the Yankees at home in late June, Boston couldn’t replace Jones and Bush, who won 39 games for New York that year. After their rotation fell apart, the Sox quickly sank from sight in July, dropping six in a row to the Indians and Tigers (the last by a 16-7 count). The club ended up losing 93 games, its most in a season since 1905, and finished in the cellar 33 games behind the Yankees. Since 1915, that had been the residence of the Athletics. Except for one season, Boston would be the new annual tenant there until Tom Yawkey bought the club in 1933.
    That was the end for Duffy, who was kept on as a scout and “general all-round man.” In came Frank Chance, the “Peerless Leader,” who as player-manager had led the Cubs to world championships in 1907 and 1908 and to the National League pennant in 1906 and 1910. Chance, who had no illusions about what he was inheriting in the Hub, reckoned that it would take at least three years to transform the Sox into contenders.
    With only a handful of regulars returning, the roster obviously was a reconstruction zone in 1923. And while Frazee predicted that the club “will be the finest, smartest lot of youngsters ever hired by a major-league ball club,” Boston essentially had become a minor-league franchise. After losing the first four games in New York, the Sox had dropped to the bottom by May 12 and never inched higher than sixth for the