The 1904 American League Pennant Race
Looking through the lens of old newspapers
The 1904 American League Pennant
I can’t remember how old I was when I first read about the 1904 American League pennant race.
Baseball history trivia buffs remember that 1904 was the famous season without a World Series. John McGraw, whose willingness to sign with (and manage) the 1901 Baltimore Orioles helped greatly in making the American League legitimate, was so upset with the upstart organization that he refused to play against the American League champions. You can read more on Wikipedia — and I’ll eventually get around to digging deeper into that McGraw-Johnson story.
However, we often forget about the 1904 American League pennant race, which is the first of the great Yankees - Red Sox races.
I can remember reading somewhere about this race as a kid, but I didn’t know much about it. We’ve got access to a number of newspapers from that time now, though. Let’s take a look and see what we can find.
The Final Series
Boston and New York played a pretty odd 5 game series to close out the 1904 season.
New York hosted the first game on Friday, October 7. Boston then hosted a doubleheader on Saturday, October 8, and then the two teams moved to New York for another doubleheader on Monday, October 10.
It wasn’t designed to be like this, actually. The two teams played 22 times in 1904 (technically 24, but 2 games in September ended in ties and were replayed). Boston hosted 12 of the games, and New York hosted only 10.
The reason for the discrepancy is apparently that the Highlanders allowed Columbia University to play a football game at Hilltop Park on October 8th. From Pinstripe Alley:
This apparently wasn’t decided until right before that final series, however. I haven’t looked deeply into this, but it does seem that there was some confusion right before the final series:
And then there was this the next day:
Can you imagine that? Not knowing for sure what the final series of the season is going to look like until the day before?
Anyway, the American League standings before that game on October 7 looked like this:
October 7
As for the games themselves, I’ll let the newspapers do most of the talking.
Here is that October 7th game:
And in Boston:
That, of course, was Chesbro’s 41st win.
What many fans forget, though, is that Chesbro had 2 starts after this one in 1904.
You bet there was hype for the double header in Boston the next day:
And, in case you were wondering, here’s the proof of that Columbia football game:
October 8
Chesbro started the first game of the doubleheader in Boston, but didn’t fare quite as well.
Now, the coverage from The Boston Daily Globe is even more interesting than what you see above. Here are a few other sections:
Of course, you’re probably wondering how Columbia did:
That attendance of 3,000 pales in comparison to what a New York - Boston game would have drawn.
October 10
The build up for this game was intense — well, in Boston, at least.
Comparatively speaking, the hyped up coverage in the New York papers I have access to basically didn’t exist. There was at least a small sign that something was going on:
Part of the reason why I can’t find more exciting coverage is because I don’t have access to the New York World Sunday pages from 1904. Maybe those will surface in some archive somewhere.
The doubleheader itself, of course, got quite a bit of coverage.
Meanwhile, in Boston…
And, finally, there is this spread from that same paper:
The moral here, of course, is that you shouldn’t confine your newspaper research to merely The New York Times. There’s a lot of great old stuff out there.