Fenway 1912 by Glenn Stout

Stahl's father-in-law backed out for any reason, the whole deal could fall apart. In this negotiation Stahl was the hammer and McAleer the mere nail.
    In theory McAleer was receptive to the notion. Stahl was willing to invest as much as $15,000 of his own money in the team. But in addition to sharing in the profits, the banker also wanted a hefty salary as player-manager. McAleer balked at his price.
    Stahl had McAleer by the short hairs, however, and he knew it, for with each passing day it became more and more important to have a manager in place. Although no contracts could be sent out until the team was formally reorganized after the first of the year, Stahl would have a big say in the makeup of the team and his input was vital.
    When McAleer left Chicago for the north woods he claimed to have Stahl all signed up, but when word of that got back to Stahl he denied it, saying, "Matters stand where they did three weeks ago." The two men remained at odds after McAleer returned to Chicago, and in early November he headed back east, still without Stahl's signature on a contract.
    But McAleer was more Red Sox figurehead than the final answer. Ban Johnson still pulled the strings, and soon after McAleer boarded his train Johnson apparently got involved.
    He knew McAleer needed Mahan's investment, and on November 10 he delivered player-manager Jake Stahl—and $15,000 of his money, representing a 10 percent stake in McAleer's ownership group. Even though Stahl would receive much of his investment back in salary, the agreement made his father-in-law happy and kept the sale from falling apart.
    While McAleer was trying to build his team, the Fens echoed with the sounds of construction—hammers and steam engines, saws and steel rivets. Opening day was a little more than five months off, but there had already been a great deal of progress. Ever so slowly, a ballpark was starting to take shape.
    It was important to prepare the playing field as quickly as possible, both in order to allow the ground to settle and to begin seeding before winter set in, and much of the first phase of construction focused on these goals. Even before Jerome Kelley relocated the infield sod from Huntington Avenue, engineers and surveyors had laid out the dimensions of the grandstand and crews had already been at work bringing the field to grade. The property sloped downward from the northwest corner to the southeast, and workers first had to excavate earth from the northwest and northern edge of the property to level the field. Then, before Kelley laid out the infield, a network of drainage ditches had to be put in place beneath the playing field.
    The drainage system made use of the natural fall of the land from the north to the south and sloped toward several catch basins, near the base of where the grandstand would be, that were tied in directly to the city sewer system. Two-inch vitrified-clay drainpipes crisscrossed the outfield, and as the system inclined toward the infield, the size of the pipe increased, eventually feeding into six-inch trunk lines that ran into the catch basins.
    The natural fall of the land is why Fenway's dugouts still often flood after particularly intense downpours. The topsoil sits on a layer of silt approximately twelve feet thick. Beneath the silt is hardpan, a soil layer nearly impervious to water, that slopes from left field toward the first-base line. The hardpan is below the water table, which means that even during dry weather water still seeps along the upper surface of the hardpan, seeking its own level, draining toward the first-base line. Periods of heavy rain can still overwhelm the system, leaving water to back up through drains and flood the dugout and other areas beneath the stands.
    Most of this trenching work was done the old-fashioned way, with picks and shovels and calloused hands accustomed to the labor. Mechanized, gasoline-powered excavation machines were just coming into widespread use, either smaller,