home.”
Players trotted into the outfield, gingerly testing their footing in the rain-soaked turf. Others began tossing across the sidelines, stepping back to deeper range, warming up their arms.
“What was it like to play again?” asked Stockton.
“When we finally got back on the field, it was as tough as any Series I played in.” Stockton reminded himself that Kubek had played in six—and won three of them—as part of one of the greatest everyday lineups in history. “All of a sudden we were back out there and it dawned on you exactly how much was at stake. And it got to some people.”
The home team Giants held off the juggernaut Yankees to win that Game Six in 1962 and tie the Series, and Stockton suddenly remembered that Tony Kubek had the next day created the only run of the contest to win Game Seven and the World Series.
“The biggest advantage in sports is playing in your home park, and you can almost double that advantage here,” said Kubek, who had played more than seventy games in Fenway. “But those guys over there…” He nodded toward where some of the Reds—Pete Rose, Bench, Joe Morgan—had gathered around the batting cage. “They know how to play the game.” Tony paused and said it again, with emphasis.
“They know how to play the game.”
As the first crisp cracks of ball on bat and leather filled the air—the relaxed, preliminary rituals of any ball game—Stockton began to feel an expectant buzz build again around the stadium.
Now we’re ready.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON , from all around Boston and surrounding environs, lucky ticket holders for Game Six left home or work to make their way downtown and slowly converge on Fenway Park. Optimists arriving without tickets found scalpers outside offering grandstand tickets for as much as $60—face value of $7.50—while buck-fifty seats in the outfield bleachers were going for $35. Standing room along the top of the grandstands would set you back $25. When all those aftermarket transactions concluded that evening, a capacity crowd of 35,205 had flowed through the turnstiles at Fenway. Another eighty or so, mostly enterprising teenagers, found cheaper seatson the girders of a whiskey billboard atop the roof of a Lansdowne Street building, about five hundred feet from home plate.
In the years to come, the number of people who would later claim to have been at Game Six that night would increase twenty-fold.
TWO
If the Boston fans will bear with me, I think I’ll eventually give them the club they deserve, the finest in the country.
I don’t intend to mess around with a loser.
T OM Y AWKEY , 1932
Tom Yawkey has a heart the size of a watermelon.
T ED W ILLIAMS
B EFORE THEY MOVED DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE PREGAME ceremonies, the two old men, friends for more than forty years, watched the crowd file in from the owner’s box on the roof of Fenway’s grandstand above the first base line. George Edward “Duffy” Lewis, eighty-seven, was the sole surviving member of the “Picket Line,” what had forever been thought of as the greatest outfield in Red Sox history. Playing alongside future Hall of Famers Harry Hooper in right and Tris Speaker in center, Lewis had patrolled left field in Fenway Park from the day it opened in 1912 until he entered the army in 1918 to serve in World War I. Those had been the glory days of the Boston franchise, winning four of its five World Series titles on the strength of that outfield and, during the last two in 1916 and 1918, the left arm of a phenomenal young pitcher named Babe Ruth.
During the intervening fifty-seven years, the World Series had only come back to Fenway Park twice.
Duffy Lewis looked out toward left field and the looming, iconic Green Monster. In his day they hadn’t painted it green yet, or dubbed it a “monster,” but an earlier incarnation of the wall had been there from Opening Day, a quirky concession to the limits of Fenway’soriginal land rights. Baseball was never played at
Players trotted into the outfield, gingerly testing their footing in the rain-soaked turf. Others began tossing across the sidelines, stepping back to deeper range, warming up their arms.
“What was it like to play again?” asked Stockton.
“When we finally got back on the field, it was as tough as any Series I played in.” Stockton reminded himself that Kubek had played in six—and won three of them—as part of one of the greatest everyday lineups in history. “All of a sudden we were back out there and it dawned on you exactly how much was at stake. And it got to some people.”
The home team Giants held off the juggernaut Yankees to win that Game Six in 1962 and tie the Series, and Stockton suddenly remembered that Tony Kubek had the next day created the only run of the contest to win Game Seven and the World Series.
“The biggest advantage in sports is playing in your home park, and you can almost double that advantage here,” said Kubek, who had played more than seventy games in Fenway. “But those guys over there…” He nodded toward where some of the Reds—Pete Rose, Bench, Joe Morgan—had gathered around the batting cage. “They know how to play the game.” Tony paused and said it again, with emphasis.
“They know how to play the game.”
As the first crisp cracks of ball on bat and leather filled the air—the relaxed, preliminary rituals of any ball game—Stockton began to feel an expectant buzz build again around the stadium.
Now we’re ready.
LATE THAT AFTERNOON , from all around Boston and surrounding environs, lucky ticket holders for Game Six left home or work to make their way downtown and slowly converge on Fenway Park. Optimists arriving without tickets found scalpers outside offering grandstand tickets for as much as $60—face value of $7.50—while buck-fifty seats in the outfield bleachers were going for $35. Standing room along the top of the grandstands would set you back $25. When all those aftermarket transactions concluded that evening, a capacity crowd of 35,205 had flowed through the turnstiles at Fenway. Another eighty or so, mostly enterprising teenagers, found cheaper seatson the girders of a whiskey billboard atop the roof of a Lansdowne Street building, about five hundred feet from home plate.
In the years to come, the number of people who would later claim to have been at Game Six that night would increase twenty-fold.
TWO
If the Boston fans will bear with me, I think I’ll eventually give them the club they deserve, the finest in the country.
I don’t intend to mess around with a loser.
T OM Y AWKEY , 1932
Tom Yawkey has a heart the size of a watermelon.
T ED W ILLIAMS
B EFORE THEY MOVED DOWNSTAIRS FOR THE PREGAME ceremonies, the two old men, friends for more than forty years, watched the crowd file in from the owner’s box on the roof of Fenway’s grandstand above the first base line. George Edward “Duffy” Lewis, eighty-seven, was the sole surviving member of the “Picket Line,” what had forever been thought of as the greatest outfield in Red Sox history. Playing alongside future Hall of Famers Harry Hooper in right and Tris Speaker in center, Lewis had patrolled left field in Fenway Park from the day it opened in 1912 until he entered the army in 1918 to serve in World War I. Those had been the glory days of the Boston franchise, winning four of its five World Series titles on the strength of that outfield and, during the last two in 1916 and 1918, the left arm of a phenomenal young pitcher named Babe Ruth.
During the intervening fifty-seven years, the World Series had only come back to Fenway Park twice.
Duffy Lewis looked out toward left field and the looming, iconic Green Monster. In his day they hadn’t painted it green yet, or dubbed it a “monster,” but an earlier incarnation of the wall had been there from Opening Day, a quirky concession to the limits of Fenway’soriginal land rights. Baseball was never played at
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