Boston is not in this year’s Major League Baseball World Series — that honor is going to the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies. But the city will forever have the honor of hosting the first-ever World Series back in 1903, in front of a crowd of 16,000 on what is now the campus of Northeastern University. Richard A. Johnson, a curator at the Sports Museum in Boston, joined GBH’s Morning Edition hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel to talk about it. This transcript has been lightly edited.
Jeremy Siegel: Let's start our trip all the way back to 1903 —119 years ago. Boston's subway system had just begun expanding its Tremont Street trolley. The first transatlantic broadcast was made from Cape Cod, and Boston was represented in that first World Series. But they were playing a different team out of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Pirates. And Richard, Boston's team at the time was not the Red Sox and we did not have Fenway, right?
Richard A. Johnson: No, they were known as the Boston Americans. And they played at the Huntington Avenue grounds, which were across the width of a train track from their competition, the Boston Nationals. So it was like a McDonald's next to a Burger King. And of course, the Americans had stolen the Nationals' best player, Jimmy Collins, and it made him player-manager of the team. So it was really quite a statement by them two years before they played in the first World Series. The team was only three years old at this point.
Paris Alston: This was the first World Series. But where does it fall in the place of American sports championship series? Was this the first one or had there been something like that prior to?
Johnson: Well, there had been an event called the Temple Cup, which was played by National League teams before as a post-season series. But it was not ever to be sort of placed on the same platform as the World Series once that took hold. The Boston Nationals had played in the Temple Cup five years before. So we were used to these post-season series prior to the advent of the World Series.
Siegel: Do we know at all, from photos or anything written about it, what it was like at this first World Series? Because it's in a part of Northeastern — there's no baseball field there now, right?
Johnson: No. In fact, there is the Cabot Cage, which is the indoor sports facility at Northeastern. And there's actually a life-sized statue of the great Cy Young approximately where the mound would have been at the Huntington Avenue Grounds. So there is sort of a vestige of the footprint of the ballpark there. But probably the best pictorial record of this event is in the McGreevy collection, which is this fabulous photography collection at the Boston Public Library. And Nuf Ced McGreevy was a saloon keeper whose saloon, Third Base, so-called because it was the last place you went before you went home, was a place where the players, politicians, sort of everyone in Boston hung out. And he had a virtual museum of baseball within the tavern. And the framed photographs from that collection, most of them now reside at the BPL and they're fabulous. They're really great.
Alston: So, Richard, we are unfortunately not lucky enough to be hosting a World Series for our team this year. But I can only imagine if we were, all the fanfare that would be around Fenway Park and everyone crowding around and the city just being really energized. But back in 1903, what was the mood then? How was this received?
Johnson: Well, the mood then, it was very interesting because in the lead-up to the first World Series, the big stories — and they started about two weeks prior to the event — was a labor story that the Pirates players, their opposition, were under contract until October the 15th. The Boston Americans were under contract until the end of September. They wanted to get paid their fair share. Ownership stood in their way. And for roughly 10 days, the story went from being about a paragraph on page three to being front-page news, because the players at one point threatened not to play in the World Series and instead go on a barnstorming tour of New England. They wanted to get paid, and at the last minute they agreed to a deal where they would split the proceeds with ownership and get two weeks extra pay. But it was at the last minute and it became a very big story. And in fact, one could argue that this first World Series, at least the Boston end of it, was very much responsible for sports coverage going from the back page to the front page.
The other storyline that was very significant in this event were the gambling stories. There was a lot of gambling going on, and Boston was known as probably the most notorious city in the country for sports betting at the time.
Alston: That's kind of ironic.
Johnson: In August of that year, American League President Ban Johnson had forbidden gambling in ballparks in the American League. Well, this was totally ignored in Boston. And in the days leading up to the first game that was played here, the Hotel Vendome in Boston was gambling central. In fact, news reports were on the day before the first game of the World Series, over $50,000 were exchanged in bets betting on that first game. It was a big deal.
Siegel: What a fascinating history. Before I let you go, if you were betting, like during that series here, would you be betting on for this one?
Johnson: I would be betting on the Astros just because they seem to be such a better team. I mean, there may be some magic left in the Phillies, but when you're no-hit in a World Series, it almost seems to be a predetermination. But we'll see. The beauty of sports is that you have to play the games.
