The best-of-nine series between Boston and Pittsburgh was tied, one game apiece, when Game Three of the 1903 World Series began in Boston, a city delirious about its new American League team. Third-baseman/manager Jimmy Collins was enormously popular, star pitcher Cy Young was just one of three Boston pitchers with more than twenty wins during the season, and, best of all, tickets to Game Three were only fifty cents. When those were gone, ticket sellers kept selling admission, and when the seats were filled, spectators jumped the ropes to line the baselines. When those became crowded, they lined the outfield, occasionally reaching the diamond itself. The crowd was so large that short fly balls were declared ground rule doubles, as were homeruns, the overly enthusiastic crowd causing Boston to lose the game with its excessive enthusiasm.
Ryan is immensely skillful in bringing the Series alive by characterizing the players for both teams, showing what makes them unusual and memorable. Among these are 36-year-old Cy Young, catcher Lou Criger (sickly already with the early stages of tuberculosis), the elegant and intelligent Jimmy Collins (a consummate player and respected captain/manager), the hot-tempered Hobe Ferris (later infamous for kicking a teammate in the face), and shortstop Freddy Parent of Sanford, Maine, who lived to become a 92-year-old commentator during Boston's 1967 World Series. For Pittsburgh, the legendary Honus Wagner and pitcher Deacon Philippe, who pitched in five of the eight games, sometimes with only one day off, are especially vivid.
He devotes an entire chapter to Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss, "the greatest ball fan on earth," a generous man who declared that he would take no profit from the Series and that every penny would go to his players. Numerous contrasts, both overt and implied, exist between Dreyfuss, whom Ryan believes belongs in the Hall of Fame, and Boston owner Henry Killilea, for whom the team was a business which he oversaw from out of state. Killilea eventually modified his original demands and agreed to a 60-40 split with his players, who as winners of the Series earned significantly less than the losers.
Comparisons and contrasts between between the games of 1903 and the present abound. As early as 1903, Globe writer Tim Murnane suggested a designated hitter. Boston's Royal Rooters began the concept of the traveling fan club, and their use of a song to upset the opposition was a deciding factor in the Series. Scalpers became a major problem in Game 8, the last game of the Series, and Ryan suggests that it was someone in owner Killilea's employ who was responsible. Ryan reminds us of the roots of "the American pastime," more than a decade before Babe Ruth appeared in a Boston uniform, and shows that after one hundred years the game is remarkably unchanged. Mary Whipple
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