Fenway Park Opens Its Gates
On April 20, 1912 — five days after the Titanic sank — the Boston Red Sox played their first game at Fenway Park.
Five days after the Titanic sank, Boston opened a ballpark — and almost nobody noticed.
On April 20, 1912, the Boston Red Sox played their first regular-season game at Fenway Park, their brand-new home in the city's Fenway neighborhood. Boston's mayor, John F. Fitzgerald — the grandfather of a future president named John F. Kennedy — threw out the ceremonial first pitch. More than 24,000 fans packed the stands, with thousands more standing in the outfield behind ropes; a special ground rule declared any ball hit over the ropes a double.
The game itself was a thriller: the Red Sox beat the New York Highlanders — the team that would soon be renamed the Yankees — 7-6 in 11 innings. But in the newspapers the next morning, the story was buried deep inside. The nation was still transfixed by the Titanic disaster, and a ballpark opening couldn't compete with the century's greatest maritime tragedy.
Fenway had risen fast. Red Sox owner John I. Taylor had broken ground the previous September, and in just over six months architect James E. McLaughlin's concrete-and-steel design was complete, at a cost of about $650,000. Taylor named it for the Fenway neighborhood — though since his family also owned the Fenway Realty Company, some suspected a little free advertising. The park's first game of any kind had actually come eleven days earlier, an exhibition against Harvard played in snow flurries.
That first season set the tone for everything Fenway would become. The 1912 Red Sox went 105-47, the best record in franchise history. Twenty-two-year-old Smoky Joe Wood won 34 games with a 1.91 ERA. Center fielder Tris Speaker hit .383 and won the Chalmers Award, the era's version of the MVP. Hugh Bradley hit the first home run in park history. And that fall, Boston beat the New York Giants to win the World Series.
Here's a remarkable footnote: April 20, 1912, was opening day for two ballparks. That same afternoon, Navin Field opened in Detroit — the park that would become Tiger Stadium. Of the two, only Fenway still stands.
More than a century later, Fenway Park remains the oldest active ballpark in the major leagues — home of the Green Monster, the Pesky Pole, and generations of Red Sox memory. It opened in the shadow of the Titanic, and it outlasted almost everything built in its era. Not bad for a ballpark nobody noticed.
Photo: Tichnor Bros., public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).