Harry Hooper’s spirit must have been with the Boston Red Sox
during this magical season.
Harry Hooper’s spirit must have been with the Boston Red Sox during this magical season.
If you can blame the Curse of the Bambino for the Red Sox’ decades-long struggles, then just as surely their improbable resurrection this season can be credited to Hooper’s Blessing.
The Hall of Fame right fielder, who played on four Red Sox world champions in the early 20th century, would have loved watching his team pull off the greatest upset in baseball history over the hated Yankees, then win its first World Series title in 86 years.
During his stellar career, Hooper rose to the pinnacle of success with the Sox, who were baseball’s finest franchise back when he played, and then witnessed the great unraveling of the team as it descended into the depths of despair at the beginning of what would turn out to be nearly a century of frustration.
I had the good fortune to meet Hooper once, though I had no idea what a unique opportunity it was at the time.
Growing up in the hills above the tiny hamlet of Soquel, I learned how to play baseball from my grandfather, playing hours of catch with him in the early 1970s. It was during those treasured hours that I learned to love the game above all others, a love I still have today.
One day, while tossing the ball around, I asked my grandpa who was the greatest ballplayer he knew of.
Hooper, he said, Harry Hooper.
Who?, I asked. Who’s he?
Hall of Famer, he said.
Was he as good as Willie Mays?, I asked.
Pretty good, he said.
Later, on one of my trips around town with my grandpa, a realtor for years who seemed to know everyone in town, he introduced me to Hooper, who served as Capitola’s Postmaster for decades. I wasn’t impressed.
I was when I figured out who he was, years later.
Hooper grew up in the South Bay Area but learned to play baseball on trips to visit relatives in New England.
After graduating from Santa Clara University with a degree in engineering, Hooper used his considerable baseball skills to land a job in Sacramento that allowed him to work as an engineer and play baseball in the flourishing California League.
By all accounts, Hooper had no plans to play pro ball.
Then a Red Sox scout attended one of Hooper’s games and noticed his impressive combination of blazing speed, gap power and outstanding defensive skills. Hooper was signed and went back East.
The rest is baseball history, and Hooper was in the midst of some of the sport’s most momentous events of the era.
Starting in 1909, Hooper manned the difficult Fenway Park right field and batted lead-off on arguably the greatest outfield in Red Sox history, which included HOF Tris Speaker and Duffy Lewis.
With staff ace “Smoky” Joe Wood, the outfield trio helped lead the Sox to World Series titles in 1912 and 1915.
Speaker was traded to Cleveland in 1916, but Hooper and Lewis led the Sox to the 1916 world championship, too.
By that time, a young, raw southpaw named Ruth had joined the Sox rotation and become a bellwether of the staff, setting a number of World Series pitching records. He was so young and so raw that he earned the nickname “Babe,” and the veteran Hooper was obliged to take the teenager under his wing.
Despite the loss of Lewis and Wood after the 1916 season, but Hooper and Ruth led the team to another World Series win in 1918.
And, in spite of Ruth’s emergence as one of the finest pitchers in the game, it was Hooper who managed to convince the Boston manager to allow Ruth to play fulltime in order to get his potent bat in the lineup every day.
In 1919, while still handling his pitching duties, Ruth slammed a then-astounding 29 home runs – more than twice the previous record.
But Ruth’s legendary appetites were just emerging into full bloom, and Sox owner Harry Frazee found the fledgling star’s behavior a convenient excuse to sell him to a very average New York Yankees franchise. At the time, Frazee acknowledged that Ruth was one of the game’s brightest young stars but reasoned publicly that Ruth’s refusal to follow his manager’s orders made it impossible for him to stay with the Sox.
It was a choice that immortalized both men and drove the two franchises inexorably in opposite directions.
While the Yankees rode Ruth’s prodigious ability, and personality, to greatness, Frazee used the proceeds of Ruth’s sale to finance a Broadway musical.
Looking back decades later, Hooper mused in sincere amazement in Ruth’s rise from a clueless bumpkin to “something approaching a god.”
But Ruth’s exodus from Boston was just the beginning of the Sox’s deconstruction. Boston became a kind of talent pipeline for the Yankees, who siphoned off nearly all of the best Sox players.
Hooper, usually reserved, was quoted in the papers fairly spitting out his contempt for the way such “a fine team” was being unceremoniously broken up.
Hooper himself might well have ended up in New York but he lasted in Boston until the 1920 season, after the whole Black Sox scandal busted baseball wide open.
When several Chicago White Sox players were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis asked that Hooper be traded to the Southside team, reasoning that Hooper’s squeaky clean reputation would help restore the club’s badly damaged image.
Despite a broken hand, Hooper hit .327 for the ChiSox in 1921, and ended up playing four more seasons in Chicago before retiring.
During his playing days, Hooper’s success never went to his head, and in the offseason he often returned to the resort town of Capitola, a place he visited with his parents as a youth. And, when he visited he liked to play baseball for the local club team, the Soquel Giants. He was then, and would always be, considered one of the guys.
So for all those who celebrated, are still celebrating, the Red Sox’ triumph over years of frustration, take a moment to remember Harry Hooper. His Sox have finally won again.
