1918 Red Sox: The Years That Followed
This article was written by Bill Nowlin
This article was published in 1918 Boston Red Sox essays
After 1918, the Red Sox began to slip — and stumbled badly, winning less than half their games in 1919 and finishing in sixth place, 20 1/2 games behind the league-leading Chicago White Sox, whose World Series performance soon resulted in that year’s team forever being branded the “Black Sox” when it was revealed that eight players had conspired with gamblers to lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
The 1920s were a decade of unmitigated disaster for the Red Sox. It was hardly an improvement that the team finished fifth in 1920; they were 25 1/2 games behind the first-place Indians. From 1922 through 1930, only once did they manage to escape last place, and that was by only one-half game.
It’s a wonder baseball ever recovered in Boston, that fans were willing to wait out the Harry Frazee/Bob Quinn years until Tom Yawkey purchased the team in 1933. Yawkey’s main contribution was his wealth, and that money bought in a lot of great players (Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, and more) and financed a strong farm system that brought players such as Bobby Doerr, Ted Williams, and Johnny Pesky to Fenway Park. It still took a dozen years for a Yawkey team to secure a pennant in 1946 and it would be a full 86 years before the Red Sox reclaimed the title of World Champions.
It was a long time in coming. By that time, the very year of their last championship had become a singsong taunt — “nine-teen eight-teen” — that rained down on Red Sox fans from Yankees partisans not shy about crowing over their own team’s successes and their rival’s disappointments, which were legion.
Then came 2004. Did the Red Sox stage the greatest comeback in baseball history or did the Yankees pull the biggest choke in American sports history? For happy/delirious Red Sox fans, it was both!
Now 1918 becomes a year worthy of a little more appreciation, a look at a distant day that shaped the psyche of many of today’s Red Sox rooters.
BILL NOWLIN is national Vice President of SABR and the author of nearly 20 Red Sox-related books. Bill is also co-founder of Rounder Records of Massachusetts. He’s traveled to more than 100 countries, but says there’s no place like Fenway Park.