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looking to get out from under their obligations, Tom Yawkey had bought himself a job—and set course on an obsessive quest for the prize that had eluded his uncle and, he declared, would give his life meaning: winning a World Series.
    Yawkey landed in Boston as a complete stranger—worse yet, a lifelong New Yorker—with no connections to its cloistered, tight-knit community; New Englanders greeted him warily. To win them over and demonstrate the seriousness of his intent, Yawkey immediately began a badly needed renovation of twenty-year-old Fenway Park. The park was stripped down to its original steel frames, and out went the old wooden bleachers and the slope on Duffy’s Cliff. Yawkey ordered up a new clubhouse and state-of-the-art amenities for his players, including a bar and a bowling alley in the basement. A new thirty-seven-foot-tall metal-and-steel wall, the exoskeleton of the Monster that stands to this day, went up over the newly levelleft field, sporting the game’s first electric scoreboard. Pouring fifteen thousand cubic yards of concrete, Yawkey added over ten thousand new seats and an expansive press box, employing more Bostonians than any other construction project had since the Crash. Having spent well over a million dollars, he now had the far more difficult problem facing him of a complete renovation of the Red Sox roster, a team that had finished dead last in nine of the last eleven seasons.
    At the first owners’ meetings he attended that winter, Yawkey stunned his conservative old-school colleagues by jumping to his feet and bluntly announcing he was in the market for top-shelf players with which to stock his new ballpark and that money was no object. The other owners, quickly getting over their shock at this impropriety, proved only too happy to help; before the week was out, Yawkey had dropped another quarter of a million on a handful of has-beens and never-would-be’s, who would contribute little to changing the Red Sox’s losing ways. An informal competition developed around the league over the next few years to see who could get the Red Sox to overpay the most for marquee names like Lefty Grove and Joe Cronin, who were past their prime. Even bottom-of-the-roster players earned more than the league average under Yawkey, who proved to be a soft touch above and beyond salary for any of his men who came to him with a hard luck story; players on other teams began calling them the “Gold Sox.” By introducing “checkbook” baseball, Tom Yawkey changed forever the way the game was played in the front office, and his hyperactive turnover of talent, perpetually chasing big names with big bucks without much regard for actual need or overall chemistry, set the mood for much of the team’s next four decades.
    Another destructive team dynamic was set up by Yawkey’s spendthrift tendencies: A long line of competent field managers found themselves constantly at odds with their general manager—all three of the men who ran the team through 1960 were Yawkey cronies, who only sporadically delivered the sort of player the fieldmanager felt he needed to win. When in 1935 he finally landed a future Hall of Famer still in his prime, burly slugger Jimmie Foxx, Yawkey went out almost every night after games pub-crawling with the hard-drinking first baseman. Yawkey began a tradition of taking batting practice with his boys before home games and working out with them in the field, casting himself a whole lot more as a pal than a boss. Borrowing another page from Uncle Bill’s playbook, during spring training he arranged regular visits for his team to a local brothel; decades later a tenacious reporter from the Boston Globe uncovered evidence that Yawkey may have actually owned the brothel. For any manager trying to push, mold, or discipline the owner’s grab-ass buddies, the job was virtually impossible; turnover at the position became a constant.
    Although he anticipated the future of baseball by pursuing