OCTOBER CLASSIC First World Series was 100 years ago

Cy Young threw the first pitch in the first game.
BOSTON (AP) -- Cy Young leans in, his left hand on his left knee, wearing an old-time glove. His other arm is bent behind him, and in his mammoth right hand is a baseball ready to be launched toward the batter. His lips are pursed and his bronze eyes stare straight ahead, waiting for a sign from a catcher who isn't there.
Hasn't been for a century now.
The first World Series began 100 years ago this month at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, the former home of the future Boston Red Sox. All that commemorates the site on what's now the Northeastern University campus is a granite slab in the shape of home plate and, 20 paces away, the statue of Young, ready to throw the first pitch and inaugurate baseball's fall classic.
On Oct. 1, 1903, the Pittsburgh Pirates played the Boston Americans in Game 1 of a best-of-9 series that offered a sneak peek at just about everything in a century of baseball to come. There was labor unrest, nail-biting suspense, backroom dealing and a mixture of sometimes spectacular play with other times suspiciously shoddy play.
Most importantly, though, the 1903 "world's series" provided a glimpse of the national pastime in its infancy.
"You can date the beginning of modern baseball from the first pitch of the first game of the first World Series," said Roger Abrams, a Northeastern law professor whose book, "The First World Series," is one of at least three on the event to come out in its centennial year.
Simple agreement
The American and National Leagues agreed in January, 1903 to stop player raids and accept each other as equals. But the peace agreement didn't mean much until Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss and Boston owner Henry Killilea decided -- with a remarkably simple, seven-paragraph contract -- to settle things on the diamond.
The event was an immediate hit with crowds spilling out of the stands. It was a peek into baseball's future potential of huge TV contracts, multimillion-dollar salaries and even the car-tipping mayhem that can result when a town goes nuts for its team.
"Everybody seemed to be at the game. Business men rubbed shoulders with their clerks, and City Hall 'pols' and their heelers were on an equal footing," the Boston Post, one of the city's 10 newspapers, reported after the first game. "Like a Harvard-Yale football game, almost everyone of any importance was to be seen."
John L. Sullivan, who turned down an offer to play for the Cincinnati Red Stockings to pursue the more popular sport of bare-knuckle boxing, showed up on Boston's bench, chatting with the players before the first game.
The stands offered a melting pot of cultures, where Catholics sat with Protestants and Jews -- though not for Game 1, which was played on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur -- while immigrants from Ireland and Germany mixed with blue-blood Brahmins.
Royal Rooters
But the true royalty of the ballpark was a semi-organized collection of Boston bar-crawlers called the Royal Rooters, who may very well have hollered and sung their team to victory.
Organized by local tavernkeeper Mike "Nuf Ced" McGreevey -- the nickname came from the way he settled all arguments in his bar -- the Rooters brought along their own band, and they used it to drive Pittsburgh to distraction.
No bleacher bums were they: The Rooters came dressed in black suits and white shirts with high collars, with their tickets stuck in the bands of their derbies.
Latching onto a popular show tune of the time, "Tessie," they came up with the rally monkey of their day; lyrics such as, "Tessie, you know I love you madly," became "Honus, why do you hit so badly," when Honus Wagner came to the plate.
It had every bit the impact the Rooters desired.
"I think those Boston fans actually won that Series," Pittsburgh third baseman Tommy Leach said in the book "The Glory of Their Times," by Lawrence Ritter. "We beat them three out of the first four games, and then in the fifth game of the Series the Royal Rooters started singing 'Tessie' for no particular reason at all. ... Sort of got on your nerves after a while. And before we knew what happened, we'd lost the Series."
Rumors
Other authors suspect that something more sinister was responsible for the quick turnaround by the Americans, who were also sometimes known as the Pilgrims or Puritans but wouldn't become the Red Sox for another four years.
"The very first game of the very first 'world's series' was, in all likelihood, thrown by Boston," according to "Red Sox Century," a history of the team written by Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson.
Contemporary accounts of the game questioned Young's sudden and uncharacteristic loss of control, and the series of errors committed by the Americans in the early going that put Boston in a 4-0 hole after the first inning.
The motivation for the fix would be money, of course -- more specifically, the desire to keep the Series going for as many games as possible to expand the players' take from the revenues.