The Myths of Johnny Pesky

[Baseball Guru]

The Myths of Johnny Pesky
The true stories surrounding a Boston legend


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Print story


Email story


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

by Rob Neyer

Note: The following is an excerpt from Rob Neyer's forthcoming book Feeding the Green Monster, a diary of the 2000 season spent at Boston's Fenway Park. SportsJones will feature portions of Rob's book each week, throughout the 2001 baseball season.

Sunday, May 21, 2000

Detroit’s Gregg Jefferies led off tonight’s game against Ramon Martinez with a line drive that hooked around the right-field fair pole, which rises to the sky from a spot only 302 feet from home plate. Nobody in Boston calls it the right-field pole, though; here, it’s known as “Pesky’s pole” (or, less commonly, “the Pesky pole”).

That’s “Pesky” as in Johnny Pesky (born John Michael Paveskovich, 9/27/19), the same Johnny Pesky who’s been employed by the Boston Red Sox for the better part of the last sixty years. He broke into the majors in 1942, and hit .331 as a rookie shortstop. Pesky spent the next three seasons in the U.S. Navy, but returned in 1946 to hit .335. That fall, he was labeled the goat when the Sox lost to the Cardinals in Game 7 of the World Series. Most serious analysts and historians, however, don’t believe that Pesky could have made any difference … You know what? I’m going to get into this for a moment, so I hope you’ll indulge me. Pesky’s play in the ’46 Series is a key piece of Red Sox lore, and I shouldn’t gloss over it quite so quickly.

It’s Game 7 of the 1946 World Series. The Red Sox have just scored twice in the top of the eighth to tie the score at three runs apiece, and now the Cardinals are batting. Enos Slaughter singles to center field, but he remains planted on first base when Whitey Kurowski pops up trying to bunt, and Del Rice flies to left. But Harry Walker dumps a soft liner into left-center field, and Slaughter – who was running with the pitch, hoping to steal second – sprints through a stop sign from his third-base coach, all the way home to put St. Louis ahead.

Simple enough, right? Except that’s not how most of the men in the press box remembered it. As most of them wrote the story, Sox center fielder Leon Culberson retrieved Walker’s hit, relayed the ball to shortstop Pesky … who hesitated before throwing home, too late to nab Slaughter. “Pesky holds the ball” remains, after all these years, the epitaph for the 1946 Series.

The problem is, the men in the press box didn’t have instant replay to help them out. A careful study of the film, however, reveals that Pesky didn’t hold the ball at all. And as Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson write in Red Sox Century, the best book ever written about the Red Sox,

The truth is Slaughter’s dash surprised everyone, including the writers in the press box. The fiction that Pesky held the ball in the first place reveals their stupefaction at the play. In normal circumstances the hit would have been a single, and in normal circumstances it would have moved Slaughter to third. But this wasn’t normal – it was the last inning of the World Series … As the grainy film shows, Pesky took the throw with his back to the plate, spun toward third, spotted Slaughter, took a quick half windup, and threw home. Catch to throw takes less than a second. He does not pause or freeze with the ball, although his body language exhibits surprise … Pesky, who got all the blame, simply made an average play in a situation that was already lost. Had he eyes in the back of his head and an arm like Bob Feller’s, by the time he got the ball Slaughter still would have scored.

The first two Red Sox hitters reached base in the top of the ninth, but both were stranded. After winning their first five World Series – the last of them way back in 1918 – the Sox had finally lost one. Of course, no one in his right mind would have predicted that they would go the rest of the century without winning another.

Pesky shifted to third base in 1948 and continued to produce – in 1950, his .437 on-base percentage ranked third in the American League – but he got off to a slow start in 1952 and the Sox traded him to Detroit. He played a few more seasons, but injuries severely limited his effectiveness. After retiring as a player, Pesky coached and managed in the Yankees and Tigers organizations before returning to the Red Sox fold, first as manager of their Seattle farm club in 1961 and ’62, and then as manager of the Red Sox themselves in 1963 and ’64. Pesky got fired, of course – the mid-‘60s Sox were a frightful bunch, beyond the help of any mere mortal – and next spent a few years working for the Pirates. He joined the Red Sox again in 1969, and has been with the club ever since, in a variety of capacities. Pesky is now eighty years old, and officially employed as a Special Assignment Instructor (which sounds a hell of a lot like a sinecure to me, but then he’s probably earned it).


------------------
"Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself, but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of a hit-and-run."

LETS GO METS!!!

HELP BE AN ADDICT AND CLICK ON AN AD!!

[Baseball Guru]

Now, to the matter at hand ... The following quote appears in a wonderful contraption called Fenway Park: A Stadium Pop-Up Book, written by John Boswell and David Fisher:

"The careers of several Bosox favorites are commemorated in Fenway Park. The bullpen area added to the front of the right field bleachers to provide a closer home run target for Ted Williams is called “Williamsburg.” ... At one time the right field foul pole was called “Pesky’s Pole” because Johnny Pesky often hit it for home runs. A section of the center field bleachers was known as “Conig’s Corner,” after the late Tony Conigliaro. Black dots and dashes running vertically on the manual scoreboard spell out in Morse code the initials T-A-Y and J-A-Y in memory of the late owners of the team Tom A. Yawkey and Jean A. Yawkey."

It’s a wonderful book, because when you open it, Fenway does indeed pop up before your very eyes. The historical text is somewhat questionable, as evidenced by the above citation. We’re apparently to believe that people still call the bullpens “Williamsburg,” and that “Pesky’s Pole” is some sort of verbal relic. The reality is exactly the opposite. I’ve been in Boston for two months, and I’ve yet to hear anyone utter “Williamsburg,” but “Pesky’s Pole” is murmured throughout the stands, every time a home run comes near the right-field pole.

The claim that Pesky “often hit (the pole) for home runs” pops up in other books, too … but I wondered, how many times could Pesky really have hit the right-field pole? After all, you can go through a whole season and never see anybody do it. What’s more, Pesky hit only seventeen home runs in his entire career, and just thirteen of those came as a Red Sox. To narrow it down further, I e-mailed a friend, Eric Enders at the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, and asked for the dates on which Pesky hit home runs at Fenway Park.

There were six.

Now, how many of those six might we realistically expect to have actually hit the pole? I don’t know, either, so I went searching for evidence. Below, I’ve listed the dates of those six Pesky-at-Fenway home runs, along with the geographical destinations of each, as reported in both the Globe and the Herald.

8/18/42
“nearness to the foul line” (Boston Globe)
“barely penetrated the stands” (Boston Herald)

4/20/46
“into the second or third row” (Globe)
“a few feet … fair” (Herald)

8/08/46
“three feet inside the foul pole" (Globe)
“into the right field … grandstand” (Herald)

6/11/50
“into the right field pavilion” (Globe)

6/18/51
“a good way beyond the foul pole” (Globe)
“into the right field grandstand” (Herald)

8/02/51
“into the right field grandstand” (Globe)
“into the right field stands” (Herald)

Six home runs, eleven accounts from a pair of reputable newspapers … and not one mention of a baseball actually hitting a pole. So the reported origin of “Pesky’s pole”? It’s a myth. But how did the myth begin?

Pesky was (and is) not a particularly small man. At five feet, nine inches and 170 pounds, he was right around average for a ballplayer of his era. But as we’ve seen, Pesky didn’t have much power, only seventeen career homers. (After Pesky’s first home run in 1951, the next day’s Globe referred in jest to “his annual homer.”) Given his lack of power, just about the only chance the left-handed-hitting Pesky had for a home run at Fenway Park was to hit a line drive or foul ball down the right-field line, because of course the fence angles out sharply from the corner.

The accounts are clear about this: Pesky never hit a home run into the center-field bleachers, and he never hit one over The Wall in left field. So all six of his Fenway Park homers did land in the right-field seats, which means, by definition, that they didn’t come far from hitting the pole.

So again, how did the myth begin? Here’s what Pesky told Bill Nowlin: “When (ex-Red Sox pitcher) Mel Parnell was here working with Coleman and Martin, broadcasting, there was a ball hit down the right field line, and I guess it won a ball game. Parnell comes on as the jock and he says, ‘Johnny hit a few home runs down there. As a matter of fact, he hit a home run to win a ball game for me.’ That’s how that name began. They started calling it Pesky’s Pole. I don’t know how long they’re going to keep doing that. It’s very flattering.” Good story. It does not, however, fit the facts.

Of Johnny Pesky’s six Fenway home runs, only one came in a game pitched by Mel Parnell. On June 11, 1950, Pesky hit a two-run shot in the first inning. Parnell started that game for the Sox, but lost when Tigers right fielder Vic Wertz hit a three-run homer in the fourteenth inning.

And that was it. So either Pesky’s story is off, or Parnell’s memory was off. Either way, the mystery lives.

Anyway, Jefferies’s brush with Pesky’s Pole represented Detroit’s only damage in the first inning tonight, but the Tigers scored another run in the second, and then five more in the third to drive Ramon from the mound. Meanwhile, Tigers right-hander Hideo Nomo was befuddling Sox hitters with his made-in-Japan wind-up and his downward-diving change-up; after five innings, the Tigers led 7-0. The Sox, thanks to the typical great bullpen work, did mount a comeback, but fell short in the eighth when both Daubach and Stanley struck out on full counts, with runners aboard. Final score: Tigers 7, Red Sox 5.



------------------
"Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself, but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of a hit-and-run."

LETS GO METS!!!

HELP BE AN ADDICT AND CLICK ON AN AD!!

[Baseball Guru]

Bring this back top for all the new members to see....