Photo colorized, but otherwise real.
October 10, 1904: For the first time, and not for the last, an American League Pennant comes down to New York and Boston. The last day of the season features a doubleheader at Hilltop Park, at 165th Street & Broadway in Manhattan's Washington Heights.
The New York Highlanders, forerunners of the Yankees, need to sweep the Boston Americans, forerunners of the Red Sox, in order to win. Otherwise, Boston will win it. Hilltop Park seats about 16,000, but there's perhaps 30,000 jammed into the confines, including thousands of standees roped off in the massive outfield area.
Pitching the 1st game for the Highlanders is Jack Chesbro, who has already won 41 games, which remains the single-season record for pitching from 60 feet, 6 inches away. And that's pronounced CHEESE-bro, not CHEZ-bro.
With the score 2-2 in the top of the 9th and Lou Criger on 3rd base, Chesbro throws a spitball – then a legal pitch – but it's a wild pitch, going over the head of his catcher, Jim "Deacon" McGuire, and Criger scores the Pennant-winning run. The Yankees win the nightcap, 1-0, but it's meaningless, as the Red Sox-to-be win the Pennant.
But, faced with the prospect of losing a postseason series not just to the champions of what they view as "an inferior league," but to the other New York team, the National League Champion New York Giants refuse to participate in the World Series. Manager John McGraw, on this day, issues a statement that it was his decision, not that of owner John T. Brush, to refuse to play the AL Champions, regardless of who they turned out to be. The 1904 World Series is called off, and it will be 90 years before such a thing happens again – over a very different kind of stupidity, and a more egregious one at that.
Brush and McGraw were so shamed in the press for chickening out that they agreed that they would participate in any future World Series – and they participated in 14 before moving to San Francisco, their total now 20.
Brush and McGraw were so shamed in the press for chickening out that they agreed that they would participate in any future World Series – and they participated in 14 before moving to San Francisco, their total now 20.
Today, over a century later, the Red Sox organization does not claim a forfeit win and call themselves the 1904 World Champions, which would give them 9 World Championships, rather than 8. But they might as well -- after all, who can stop them, and how? Certainly, they have a more legitimate claim to the title of 1904 than they do to those of 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018.
And yet, the plaque at Polo Grounds Towers lists the Giants as World Champions for 1904, as well as for 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933 and 1954 -- but not for 1888 and 1889, possibly because those titles were not won at that location, but rather at a different location with a facility called the Polo Grounds.
After 1904, the Americans/Red Sox would win 4 more Pennants in the next 14 seasons. The Highlanders/Yankees would have to wait another 17 years before winning their 1st, but then, they would pretty much keep winning them for the next 43 years.
John Dwight Chesbro, a.k.a. Happy Jack, won 41 games that season, and 198 in his Hall of Fame career for the Pirates and the Yankees (and, for the very last game of his career, the North Adams, Massachusetts native came home and pitched and lost one for the Red Sox). Sadly, he is mainly remembered not for all the games he won, but for one he lost, basically for one bad pitch that he threw. He died in 1931, age 57.
A shocking percentage of the 1904 Americans died young, what with that being the pre-antibiotic era, although the man named Denton True Young, a.k.a. Cy Young, lived to be 87. The last survivor of the 1904 Americans, and the 1903 team that won the 1st World Series, was shortstop Freddy Parent, a New England native, from Biddeford, Maine, who lived on until 1972, at the age of 96. The last surviving 1904 Highlander was 2nd baseman Jimmy Williams (no relation to later Red Sox manager Jimy Williams), who died in 1965.
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October 10, 1904 was a Monday. This was before what became North America's other major sports, football, basketball and hockey, really went professional. There were only 2 other games that day in what would later be called Major League Baseball, and they were a doubleheader.
It was played at Boundary Field in Washington, D.C. The host Washington Senators lost the opener to the Philadelphia Athletics, 7-6. Then they were leading the nightcap, 4-3, when the game was called after 5 innings, due to darkness, as no ballparks had lights in those days.
Boundary Field burned down early in the 1911 season, as did the Polo Grounds in New York. Both were quickly rebuilt. The new Washington ballpark was named National Park, until 1922, when Clark Griffith -- the 1st manager of the Highlanders/Yankees and also a pitcher for them -- bought the Senators, and renamed it Griffith Stadium. Baseball continued to be played there until 1961. It was demolished in 1965, and Howard University Hospital was built on the site.
The Highlanders became the Yankees in 1913. That same year, they moved into the Polo Grounds, invited to do so as a return courtesy for the Yankees letting the New York Giants use Hilltop Park while the Polo Grounds was rebuilt after their fire. They moved into the original Yankee Stadium in 1923.
Hilltop Park was torn down in 1914. For a while, Billy Sunday, a former major league pitcher turned nationally-known evangelist, had a church on the site. In 1928, the site of Hilltop Park, like that of Griffith Stadium, had a hospital built on it, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. At each hospital, the location of home plate is marked with a plaque.
And the home of the Americans/Red Sox? The Huntington Avenue Grounds didn't last much beyond the team moving to Fenway Park in 1912. Northeastern University built athletic facilities on the site. A statue of Cy Young now stands where the pitcher's mound once stood.
