When the Red Sox Ruled: Baseball’s First Dynasty, 1912–1918 (review)

In the seven seasons that ran from 1912 through 1918, the Boston Red Sox won four pennants and four world championships, but does that make them more of a dynasty than the Philadelphia Athletics, who won four pennants in five years and three world championships, neatly overlapping Boston’s 1912 campaign? Were the Athletics not truly baseball’s first twentieth-century dynasty? The Red Sox were arguably not even Boston’s first baseball dynasty; the Beaneaters won five National League pennants in eight seasons between 1891 and 1898. In fact, author Thomas J. Whalen waits no longer than page one to contradict his book’s subtitle: “Indeed, it was in Boston that the first full-fledged dynasty in baseball history was born: the Red Stockings of 1872–1875.”

Whalen recovers quickly from the subtitle stumble, however, and has created a book dealing with the sometimes-overlooked glory days of the early Red Sox, a time when they truly did rule. During the seven years in question, the Red Sox won the World Series in 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918 under three different ownerships and three different managers (catcher/manager Bill Carrigan won the back-to-back titles in the middle). The “Miracle Braves” had won the Series in 1914, so this was a Golden Era for baseball in the Hub, although the 1914 Series is only mentioned tangentially as part of an explanation for how the Red Sox came to acquire second baseman Jack Barry before the 1915 season.

This is a very readable book, which often demonstrates an economic instinct for hitting the right notes. When the Red Sox Ruled provides a good introduction to the era, one which will surely be sufficient for most general readers, but the book falls short of fully satisfying students of baseball history who would like to dig deeper. There are a couple of reasons why.

First, the book is too short. There are 208 pages of basic text (illustrated by a fair number of lesser-known photographs of the day), but there are 25 pages of preamble and more than 30 of aftermath, leaving just 147 pages for the meat of the book, the years 1912 through 1918. That’s just a bit more than 20 pages to cover each of the seven seasons, not to mention the four resulting World Series. Another 50–100 pages would have been welcome, to offer a little more depth.

Secondly, the works suffers from the total absence of any footnotes. The lack of clear attribution is particularly frustrating because Whalen has done a good job of scouring newspapers of the day and other source materials (an extensive bibliography is presented), and several times this reviewer wished he could consult the source for quotations which seemed particularly apt or insightful. On several occasions these quotations seemed to offer more than the standard telling of the story in other books that cover these years. Whalen has done the work and dug out some good material, but he doesn’t let the reader readily know from whence it came. One would need to slog through the 126 references provided.

There are some oversights and omissions and a few minor errors, though none egregious. In telling the story of Buck O’Brien who failed poorly in Game Six of the 1912 Series, Whalen never mentions (not even as a rumor) that O’Brien—never expecting to be asked to start the game—had apparently been partying into the morning hours the previous night. And when the Royal Rooters were unable to occupy their regular seats for Game Seven, since their tickets had been sold to others, a game-delaying disruption occurred. Boston’s most loyal boosters tangled with the police and boycotted the decisive Game Eight (there had been a tie earlier in the series), but Whalen writes, “They were scarcely missed” (60). A look at attendance figures, however, shows 32,694 at Game Seven and only...