The Boston Red Sox: 100 Years Ago

Written by: Josh Wilker on 3rd April 2009

The Boston Red Sox: 100 Years Ago | read this item

The 1909 Red Sox clubhouse was something of a cradle of future championship managers. One has to think that the unexpected success of the 1909 team, which finished a strong third in the league, was due in part to the fact that, although young, the squad was loaded with leaders. The team boasted Tris Speaker, who would manage the Cleveland Indians to a World Series title in 1920, Bill Carrigan, who would be at the helm of the Red Sox championships in 1915 and 1916, and Jake Stahl, who was, by the light of his franchise record for highest lifetime winning percentage, the most successful manager in Red Sox’ history.

Jake Stahl, no relation to Chick Stahl (a rite of passage of any historical-minded Red Sox fan is getting straight which Stahl was which), was the sole member of the 1903 Boston champions to play on the 1909 squad, but he had neither been a primary member of that title-winning team nor someone who had been continually employed by the team since then. After appearing in just 40 games with the team in 1903, he was sold to the Washington Senators, where he played for three seasons, the last two while serving as the youngest player-manager the fledgling league had ever seen. When he was replaced as manager prior to the 1907 season he asked to be traded to Boston. When his request was refused he spent an entire year out of the majors, returning in 1908 for a half season with the New York squad before being sold to Boston.

In a later era, Stahl seems as if he would have been a renowned power hitter. Unfortunately for him, he played at a time when the longball was a seldom, freakish occurrence, and so his formidable strength as a hitter was dulled considerably. Still, as pointed out in Stahl’s biography on The Biography Project, a writer from his time was moved to write of Stahl that “there was no young player in the American League whom pitchers feared more.”

The second and last of the two Stahls to play for Boston’s American League franchise contributed mightily to the team’s efforts to climb out from the dark shadow cast by the recent suicide of the team’s first Stahl. Though his numbers—a .294 average with 6 home runs and 60 RBI—seem modest on first glance, the overbearingly stingy context in which Jake Stahl did his damage shows his output to be MVP-caliber. His OPS+ (an offensive statistic designed to adjust for league and park factors) of 154 placed him third in the league behind only future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Eddie Collins. The 154 OPS+ was also the exact equal of the mark recorded by fellow “feared” Red Sox slugger Jim Rice seventy years later, in 1979, when Rice hit .325 with 39 home runs and 130 RBI.

Stahl had a successful life outside of baseball, as a banker, and in fact he had to be lured out of baseball retirement to return to the team in 1912 as a player-manager of the squad of young leaders that had first started to spread its wings in 1909.

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Topics: Bill Carrigan, Jake Stahl, Jim Rice, Tris Speaker