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night in 1912, which meant home plate had to be anchored in the southwest corner of the park so batters in late innings wouldn’t be staring directly into the western setting sun. That set the fixed line of Lansdowne Street just beyond left field, not much more than 320 feet from home, which meant no room for left field bleachers; no room for anything between the edge of the ballpark and Lansdowne Street but a sheer vertical wooden wall, built over thirty feet high at the insistence of the street’s local business owners, who didn’t want baseballs crashing through their fancy glass storefronts. Soon, plastered with advertising, the left field wall morphed into the biggest billboard in town, and ever since had developed its reputation as the most distinct architectural oddity of any American ballpark.
    During Duffy Lewis’s playing days the ground in deep left field sloped sharply up to meet the base of the wall—ten feet of grade in less than thirty feet of space—from the left field line all the way across to center. So adept had Lewis become in patrolling this perilous chunk of real estate, racing up the slope to pluck line drives off the wall with acrobatic abandon and fire the ball back in with his cannon arm, that fans called the area “Duffy’s Cliff” for years after he left the game. Until, in its entirety, the quirky hillock was removed in 1934 by the man standing next to Duffy Lewis in the owner’s box at Fenway before Game Six that night.
    Thomas Austin Yawkey, seventy-two, had been the sole proprietor of the Boston Red Sox since 1933. He made a handshake deal to buy both the ball club and Fenway Park for $1.2 million only four days after his thirtieth birthday, the moment when the vast timber and mining fortune that had long been held in trust for him came legally under his control. The genesis of the Yawkey fortune reached back into the middle of the nineteenth century, a dynasty built on the paper mills and virgin pine forests of the American and Canadian west, and a story rife with enough family melodrama to fill a dozen potboilers. If Tom Yawkey’s young life had been dreamt up by F. Scott Fitzgerald, that generation’s most eloquent chronicler ofthe moral perils of American wealth and fame, no one would have believed it.
    His mother, Augusta Yawkey, had married a straightlaced insurance executive named Thomas Austin, a match that pleased her conservative tycoon father, William Clyman Yawkey, the reigning patriarch of their clan. But Thomas Austin died suddenly during his son’s first year, and when Augusta proved unable to subsequently cope with the trials of single motherhood, three-year-old Tom was delivered into the care of her brother, Bill Yawkey, a notorious New York bachelor playboy. Under the category of “What were they thinking?” young Tom grew up in his uncle Bill’s Upper East Side penthouse, a madcap whirligig of dissolute socialites, degenerate gamblers, pliable showgirls, and professional wrestlers. Determined to help his wayward son find some semblance of a vocation, William Clyman Yawkey made a bid to buy the Detroit Tigers in 1903 for the baseball-obsessed Bill, but died suddenly before the deal went through. With his share of the family fortune now available to him, Bill Yawkey doubled back and made an even better deal for the Tigers, and quickly decided he had found the millionaire’s ultimate toy train. Ballplayers, he discovered, shared all of Bill Yawkey’s manly interests—hitting, pitching, hunting, drinking, and playing the field, not necessarily in that order—and with Bill writing the checks, the party never ended. A few years later, in 1907, his Tigers rewarded their owner’s largesse by winning the American League pennant and playing in the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. Yawkey enjoyed that ride so much, even though they lost in five games, that he rewarded his Tigers with Series bonuses bigger than the shares received by the winners.
    When Augusta