(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[T]he Red Sox’s recent winning ways have helped fans forget the painful decades, which threatened to stretch into a century, when they watched their team fail year after year to win a World Series. When, after a drought of 86 years, the team finally won a championship in 2004, some diehards claimed the Sox had finally reversed “the Curse.” By Curse, they meant the so-called Curse of the Bambino, which had supposedly haunted them since their cash-strapped owner made the ill-advised decision to sell a skilled young player, Babe Ruth, to the New York Yankees in 1919 for $100,000.
The sale of Ruth was certainly a terrible piece of business and probably a leading reason that what had been the most dominant team in baseball — it won World Series in 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918 – suddenly lost its mojo.
But Red Sox fans who were paying attention started worrying about the team’s direction when management traded away Larry Gardner following the 1917 season. Little remembered today, the Vermonter was the sturdy third baseman who anchored the Red Sox in the years before Ruth’s arrival. Gardner helped the Sox win three World Series championships in just five seasons.
Gardner had put in his usual solid performance during the 1917 season. But had had turned 31 that year, so perhaps Sox management thought his play was sure to decline quickly. If that was their thinking, they were wrong. Like Ruth, who went on to enjoy a storied career, Gardner didn’t suffer from being traded. He took his good play and good luck with him and soon was helping the Cleveland Indians win the Series.
Growing up in a different time or town, Larry Gardner might have been an ice hockey star. He was, after all, captain of his high school’s hockey team. But Enosburg Falls was a baseball town.
In 1905, Gardner’s pitching helped lead Enosburg Falls High School to an unofficial state championship. Gardner looks out of place in the team photo from that year. Around him are skinny kids dressed in turtlenecks. Gardner, with muscular arms and a thick neck, looks like the college athlete he would soon become.
After high school, Gardner spent the summer playing semipro ball in the newly formed Franklin County League, which was peppered with college players – many playing under assumed names to protect their amateur status. Good baseball and decent money were the draw for these players.
The teams were apparently known officially only by the towns they represented, but local newspapers gave them nicknames as colorful as many of the players. Newspapers were full of accounts of games played by the Enosburg Falls Liniment Makers, named after the local horse salve manufacturer; the Swanton Fish Hatchers, after the local fish hatchery, or Swanton Bullpouts, as locals called a type of catfish; and the Richford Chinese Spies, an unfortunately moniker related to the town’s U.S. Customs office that sometimes detained illegal immigrants.
Gardner impressed many with his play that summer, so much so that University of Vermont players in the league persuaded him to attend UVM in the fall and play ball there. Gardner would go on to become arguably the school’s greatest baseball player.
After his first college season, UVM Coach Tom Hays picked Gardner to play on Burlington’s team in the competitive Northern League – UVM was liberal in its interpretation of “amateur status.” In a league full of past and future major leaguers, Gardner started in right field, batted a respectable .296 and helped Burlington win the pennant.
His second college season was cut short by injury when he broke his collarbone colliding with a teammate. UVM’s student newspaper, the Cynic, bemoaned his loss: “He was strong at the bat and wonderful at base running, his fielding was well nigh errorless, while his throwing was swift and sure as fate.” Gardner recovered in time to play in two leagues that summer, which had him playing in games across northern New England.
Major league scouts took notice and pro teams began trying to lure him away from UVM. Connie Mack, manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, offered to pay Gardner $300 a month, with an extra month’s pay as a signing bonus. If Gardner was worried about not being allowed to finish his college season, Mack wrote, “it will not be necessary for anyone but you and I to know that you have signed.”
But Gardner rejected the offer. He kept playing for UVM and turning down repeated offers that were now coming from Boston. When UVM’s 1908 season ended, he finally relented and signed with the Sox.
Gardner’s professional career started auspiciously. In his first at-bat for the team, in an exhibition game, he homered. He entered his first major league game during extra innings and, in his first at-bat, smacked a game-winning double.
But Boston was stocked with veterans and Gardner didn’t win a starting job until 1910, when the regular second baseman was injured. He’d never played the position before, but by season’s end he was “one of the best second basemen in the country,” in one baseball writer’s estimation. The next year, Gardner was shifted to third base, causing legendary sportswriter Ring Lardner to comment: “He was certainly a success as a second sacker, but right now it would be hard to convince the uninformed observer that he hadn’t been playing third for years.”
The Red Sox proved unstoppable in 1912, and so did Gardner. He hit .315 and led the team with 18 triples. Boston won the American League pennant and faced the New York Giants in the World Series.
Each team had won three games when they met at Boston’s Fenway Park to decide the Series. The game went to extra innings. In the 10th, with the bases loaded and one out, it was Gardner’s turn to bat against the great Christy Mathewson. Gardner, who had driven in a run earlier in the game, knew that Mathewson wanted him to hit a groundball so the Giants could turn a double play and get out of the inning. But Gardner managed to lift an inside pitch deep into right field for a game-winning sacrifice fly. When he saw the winning run score, Gardner said, “I realized it meant $4,024.68 (in World Series winnings), just about double my earnings for the year.”
The Red Sox rewarded Gardner by signing him to a three-year deal. Fame and relative fortune didn’t spoil him. Boston Globe baseball writer Tim Murnane described Gardner as having “a disposition as sweet as the wild flowers that grow on the mountains of Vermont.” If Gardner was known for anything other than his kindness and good play, it was his intellect. While other players might talk about baseball, he would rather curl up with a book on Shakespeare.
The Sox returned to the World Series in 1915 and beat the Athletics. The following year, Gardner finished the season fifth in batting average in the American League, behind such immortals as Ty Cobb and Shoeless Joe Jackson. He had also helped Boston return to the Series, this time to face the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Gardner hit poorly in the first two games. It seemed his slump was continuing in the third game. During one at-bat he took a swing at what seemed to be a bad pitch. “I even had my eyes closed,” he later recall. “When I opened them, I saw the ball going over the wall. Can you believe that – hitting a homerun with your eyes closed?”
The next game, he hit a three-run, inside-the-park homerun. The hit prompted sportswriter Grantland Rice to write: “That one blow, delivered deep into the barren lands of center field, broke (Giants pitcher Rube) Marquard’s heart, shattered Brooklyn’s wavering defense, and practically closed out the series.” The Sox won the next game and clinched the Series, its third championship in five years.
After the 1917 season, Boston management apparently believed it was time to cash in a valuable commodity that was sure to decline, so it traded the 31-year-old Gardner to Philadelphia. A Boston Post writer predicted that “the going of Gardner, one of the most powerful hitters on the team for years, one of its most dependable members and a model player in every way, will be severely felt.”
Indeed, Gardner put in four excellent seasons after leaving Boston. By one popular baseball statistical metric, “wins above replacement,” Gardner was a more valuable player between the ages of 32 and 35 than a more recent Red Sox great, David Ortiz, was at the same ages.
The Sox, behind the strong pitching of Ruth, won the World Series the year after trading Gardner. Then Ruth was packed off too, and the Sox went nearly nine decades without winning another Series.
Ruth helped the Yankees win four of the seven Series in which he played. And Gardner? His teams fared even better in the World Series, winning all four he appeared in — three with Boston and one later with the Indians after Philadelphia traded him to Cleveland.
When his skills inevitably declined, Gardner left the major leagues and returned to UVM, where he became a much-loved baseball coach for two decades, capping a career as probably the greatest baseball player Vermont has produced, so far.
