PHOTOS
Gar Kearney
Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the July/August 2008 edition of Good Times magazine.
Scranton has had a lot of professional baseball teams in the past 100 or so years, but few have generated the excitement and yes, even the loyalty, than those that bore the name "Red Sox" for a dozen years starting in 1939.
The young players who carried the Scranton colors into Eastern League competition in those years were farm hands of the Boston Red Sox, all hoping to someday win a starting spot at Fenway Park. A good number of them did. Many didn't make it to the bigs, but their names were not soon forgotten.
The Red Sox ended their formal affiliation with Scranton in 1951, but they left behind a legion of fans who to this day wear caps emblazoned with the Boston "B" and never miss an opportunity to see their favorites play, especially against their archenemies - the New York Yankees.
The Sox arrival in 1939 came 52 years after the city made its professional baseball debut with the Scranton Indians in the International League, a team that finished eighth in 1887.
The team came here from Hazleton after that city's team folded, bringing with it players who are still remembered fondly. Among them were Eddie Popowski, a 5-foot-5-inch second baseman; Alex Mustakis, a big right-handed pitcher from Chelsea, Mass., who would make Scranton his home; and Pat Colgan, a feisty catcher from Brooklyn who later managed Carbondale in the North Atlantic League and made that city his permanent home.
The Red Sox played their first year here at Brooks Field, later to become Athletic Park and now Memorial Stadium. Phillips J. Butler, retired Scranton Times photo director and son of the late Joe M. Butler, sports editor for the paper, recalls that the season's paid attendance topped 300,000.
On May 4, 1940, they moved into a brand-spanking new home, Dunmore-Scranton Stadium in the 1100 block of Monroe Avenue where a Price Chopper now stands. Eighteen thousand rabid fans passed through the turnstiles, climbed around unfinished fences or otherwise "sneaked" in to see the Red Sox take on the Wilkes-Barre Indians in an afternoon doubleheader. Hundreds of others watched from nearby streets.
Burgess Tommy Ferguson declared a legal holiday in Dunmore and Scranton Mayor Fred J. Heuster urged businesses to close early so employees could attend the game. Parades that began in Dunmore and Scranton merged in front of the yet unfinished ballpark.
The Sox had played the first seven games of the season in Albany and Binghamton, winning four.
Mustakis, who won two of those road games, had the honor of pitching the home opener. He beat Wilkes-Barre, 13-7. The second game was called because of darkness after five innings with the visitors leading, 6-2.
The stadium was not yet completed when the opening day's first pitch was thrown. Fences still were to be finished and the lighting system was not complete. Still, many called it the nicest ballpark in the minors and for most games the sprawling grandstand arching around the infield was filled or nearly filled. So too were the bleachers.
One who still sees that stadium in his mind's eye is retired Times sportswriter and copy editor Jack Kelly, who once reminisced: "The new stadium, painted mostly in your basic house-trim green, was symmetrical and generally pleasing aesthetically as such construction went in that era. The distances down the left- and right-field foul lines were 350 feet; those to left- and right-centerfield, 370 feet, and that to the corner in centerfield, 390 feet. The roof of the Gilsonite Company building not far beyond centerfield, if a home run could be launched onto it, was considered a slugger's supreme feat. Few made it that far."
Kelly also wrote: "There was parking, supposedly, for 4,000 cars, most of it across Monroe Avenue where a medical services building and a borough park are now situated. Most baseball fans in those days were unable to afford cars and came by bus, streetcar or in surprisingly large numbers - on foot. There was something almost magical in walking north or south on Monroe Avenue and feeling the pull of excitement from that inviting expanse of wood and steel, and the swelling murmur of the expectant crowd."
After a few years the crowds became so large that bleachers on the other side of the right-field fence augmented seating. That area became the domain of "The Knot Hole Gang," youngsters admitted free or at reduced rates. The place was filled, or close to it, for most games. Kelly said estimates of the stadium capacity ranged between 10,220 and 13.500, "depending upon whose ‘official' version you believed."
When they were completed, immense light towers shone an afternoon luster for night games. The park became a pioneer of night baseball and teams remarked often on the great illumination.
They also had praise for the turf and infield kept meticulously groomed by venerable groundskeeper Denny Baskerville and his crew that included Joe Mooney, a Dunmorean who virtually lived at the park. He became so skilled under Baskerville's tutelage that he was later invited to work at Fenway Park, where he reigned as head groundskeeper for many years.
Another retired local sports editor, Guy Valvano of The Scrantonian-Tribune, also has memories of the old park, especially the times he and other youngsters were recruited after games by concessionaire Joe Cohen to clean up debris left behind by the huge crowds. For their efforts Cohen rewarded each with a hot dog and soda.
Valvano also recalls waiting outside the gates during the first games of doubleheaders in hopes of being "gifted" with pass-out tickets from fans who did not plan to stay for the second games. Pass-outs were given to departing fans between doubleheader games in case they changed their minds and wanted to re-enter for the second game. More times they did not and handed their passes to the waiting youngsters.
Others from that era remember the annual visits by the parent club to play their farmhands in exhibitions. Hall of Famer Ted Williams played on those teams. In order to accommodate overflow crowds, a chicken wire barrier was erected in the outfield, a few feet from the fence, stretching from right field to left for standing-room-only spectators. Usually Boston won those games, except in 1948, when Scranton first baseman Ralph Atkins homered over the right field fence in the bottom of the ninth to win the game, 1-0.
After they opened the new stadium in 1940, the Red Sox played in Scranton for 11 more years, winning championships in 1940, '43, '46 and '48.
The best season recorded by the local Red Sox came in 1946 when they finished 90-43, earning them mention among the all-time Top 100 Minor League Teams by baseball historians Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright. They ranked the Scranton club 90th on the list of 100 and wrote a
story about that season that can be found at
www.minorleaguebaseball.com.
"In 1946," the story says, "the Red Sox won the Eastern League pennant with ease, finishing 18.5 games ahead of Albany. The club finished the regular season with a league-best team batting mark of .276 and a league-high 789 runs scored. After the season, Scranton beat third-place Wilkes-Barre four straight in the first round of the playoffs as fourth-place Hartford eliminated Albany. The Red Sox then defeated Hartford, four games to one for the championship."
September of '51 dawned dreary and foreboding. American troops, who had marched home victorious from World War II just six years earlier, were now fighting the Communists in Korea. The weather too was dismal, unseasonably cold and rainy, a harbinger of winter fast approaching. And the Scranton Red Sox were fading fast in the once-torrid pennant race with the hated Indians from Wilkes-Barre.
"The holiday weekend was anything but fruitful for Scranton's Red Sockers," The Scranton Times reported after one weekend series. "Defeat in three of four games with the Wilkes-Barre Indians dropped the Sox five games off the pace and practically sewed up the second straight Eastern League pennant for the Cleveland farmhands."
Though it was not a championship season, the Sox did finish a strong second to Wilkes-Barre in the regular season, a bitter disappointment for the home crowd. Second place did just not cut it with the Sox faithful, especially trailing the hated Indians (earlier called the Barons). Worse it marked the third consecutive season out of first place. Ironically, in the playoffs, Scranton won eight straight games under manager Jack Davis, sweeping the Hartford Senators and Elmira Pioneers to capture the Governor's Cup, symbolic of Eastern League supremacy.
Worse yet, rumblings persisted that the parent Boston team was about to pull the plug on the locals after 13 seasons, the longest affiliation in Red Sox history to that time.
The reasons were many:
- A glut of baseball talent fueled by the return of young men from World War II enticed many Major League teams to jettison their farm affiliations to cut costs.
- Attendance at Scranton had been dropping since the club's last championship season, 1948. Where once thousands crammed the beautiful grandstand and bleachers, hundreds, sometimes fewer, showed up.
-"Scranton's tough. Folks here won't support a loser" was the familar lament, and in the eyes of demanding fans, anything other than first place was just not good enough. Second place was for losers.
- Television hurt, too. Folks finished supper and cleaned up in time to sit around the 8- or 10-inch set watching snowy pictures from Channel 12 in Binghamton. When they were glued to the TV for John Cameron Swayze with the news, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Dinah Shore and Milton Berle, they weren't at the ballpark in Dunmore's Dundell Section, where the lights were beaming brightly.
- Finally the Boston hierarchy had enough and pulled out, despite the locals' second-place finish and remarkable performance in the playoffs. The next year, the St. Louis Browns, managed by Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, took over the Scranton club and renamed it the Scranton Miners, a name it had bore eight times since pro baseball made its debut here in 1888.
In midsummer the Browns played an exhibition here against the Scranton team and one of the St. Louis pitchers was the legendary Leroy (Satchel) Paige. The Browns installed former major league catcher Zack Taylor as manager. The team finished seventh in the eight-team league.
St. Louis stayed just a year and in 1953 the Washington Senators took over the franchise, keeping the Miners nickname. Morrie Aderholt, a former Senator infielder, managed the team to a sixth-place finish.
The year the Miners played under the umbrella of Washington, the Senators signed one of Northeastern Pennsylvania's great scholastic and college athlete, pitcher Owen (Onions) Dougherty. He had starred on the gridiron and diamond at Dunmore High School and then played both sports at Penn State, serving as captain of the football team. Although he was in the Air Force, he managed to pitch in eight games while off duty. When his Air Force enlistment ended, there was no team waiting for him here.
Like the Red Sox, the Miners were gone. So was the stadium in Dunmore. The steel was sold to Atlantic City, N.J., the grandstand to a team in Richmond, Va. The lights would fade on baseball here until the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons came in 1989.