World Series (1915)

Lore & Background

In their only World Series before, the Phillies won Game 1 before being swept the rest of the way. It was 65 years before the Phillies won their next Series game. The Red Sox pitching was so strong in the 1915 series that the young Babe Ruth was not used on the mound and only made a single pinch-hitting appearance.

Reader's Guide

Series arrangements were made on October 2, 1915, in a meeting of the team owners, league presidents and the National Commission at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, New York City. Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin lost the coin toss for home field advantage, and Phillies owner William F. Baker chose to have the first two games of the Series in Philadelphia. The league presidents selected the umpires, and it was announced that J. G. Taylor Spink would be one of the official scorers.

One controversy surrounded the allocation of tickets to the Red Sox' Royal Rooters fan club. Each visiting team was allocated 200 tickets, but the Red Sox requested an additional 400 on behalf of their supporters. The Phillies' National League Park sat only 20,000, and their owner, William Baker, refused to allocate additional tickets for visiting fans. The matter was resolved by National Commission chairman Garry Herrmann, who gave the Red Sox tickets from the Commission's own Series allocation.

The Phillies won Game 1 3–1. The Red Sox swept Games 2–5, all by one run, and by identical scores of 2–1 in Games 2–4. In Game 2, Woodrow Wilson became the first U.S. President to attend a World Series game, and first to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. This was the second straight year that a Boston team beat a Philadelphia team in the World Series after the Braves had swept the Athletics the year before.

The Red Sox played their 1915 Series 'home' games in the brand-new Braves Field to take advantage of its larger seating capacity. In the top of the third inning of Game 3 at Boston, with two out, one run in and two runners in scoring position, Phillies' slugger 'Cactus' Gavvy Cravath hit a line drive to deep left field which was caught for a harmless inning-ending out in the spacious Braves Field outfield. The Phillies had packed some extra outfield seats into their already-small bandbox of a ball-field, shortening the distance from home to the outfield wall even more.

This proved crucial in the decisive Game 5, in which Boston's Harry Hooper twice homered over the moved-in center field fence and Duffy Lewis followed suit. Both of Hooper's hits, including the eventual game-winner in the top of the ninth, actually bounced over the fence and were home runs by the rules of that era although they would have been only ground-rule doubles by present-day rules.