Murder at Fenway Park:. Troy Soos

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      I grew up in Raritan, New Jersey. It was perfect for seeing major-league baseball, even though the state itself didn’t have a single team. In a journey of less than two hours I could reach the home grounds of any one of five big league clubs: the Giants in upper Manhattan, the Highlanders—or Yankees as some papers called them—in the Bronx, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Phillies and Athletics in Philadelphia.

      I was raised by my aunt and uncle. Uncle Matt ran a general store in town and taught me baseball. And he gave those tasks about equal priority. My earliest memories are of playing catch with him in the backyard.

      My uncle took me to major-league games whenever he could, usually to the Athletics’ Columbia Park, where I could cheer for my favorite player: Rube Waddell, a hard-throwing eccentric pitcher who spent his off-time wrestling alligators and chasing fire engines.

      As I was growing up, I worked hard to polish the baseball skills I had and learn the ones I didn’t have. I rarely attended school, finding it useful only for rounding up enough other boys to play a full-scale ball game. I tried to get into every baseball game that the boys would organize, though I dreaded the choosing-up-sides ritual. Not once was I the first boy picked. I was smaller than most of the other kids, and despite all my practice, there was always one boy who could throw harder than I could, another who could run faster, and many more who could hit the ball farther. But I was usually the best fielder and best place hitter, so I was never the last picked either.

      When I was fourteen, my aunt died after a brief illness. Uncle Matt didn’t feel like playing catch or doing anything else anymore. With my aunt gone, my uncle totally withdrawn, and school holding no interest for me, I was on my own.

      I always knew that my career would be in baseball. I also knew that I would never be a star. But I figured I could have a pretty good career as a journeyman ball player and then go on to coaching and maybe managing.

      The first teams that paid me to play were factory teams. Many companies would give jobs to men or boys who could play on the firms’ baseball teams. I worked and played for a variety of industries across the Northeast, including a snuff factory in New Jersey and a shipyard in Connecticut. I once took a job with a cotton mill in Rhode Island, but quit after just three days. Most of my coworkers in the mill were children, as young as ten. They labored sixty hours a week for forty cents a day, breathing air that was foggy with lint. I was getting twelve dollars a week to play baseball. My conscience couldn’t reconcile itself with the unfairness, so I left. I knew my departure didn’t help those kids any, but I liked to think that it hurt their employer by weakening the company team.

      During those semipro years, I sharpened my playing skills, learned to get along with different kinds of people, and picked up the rudiments of a dozen industrial trades. My only book-learning came from what I read while killing time in railroad depots: dime novels, The Police Gazette, and The Sporting News.

      I made it to the minors a year ago, and played most of the season with Providence until the Braves bought my contract. To my delight, old hurler Cy Young was on the team, playing his last season after more than twenty years and five hundred victories. The highlight of my stint with the Braves was that someday I could tell my grandchildren that I had been a teammate of Cy Young.

      I had always assumed that once I made it to the majors, I would stay there. It didn’t occur to me that I could head down the system as well as up, and I was devastated when the Braves released me after the season. At age nineteen, I thought my career was over.

      But now the Red Sox were giving me another shot at the big leagues, and I intended to make the most of it.