Upon arriving at the stadium, the players who had passed those tryouts and made the team began to warm up, many wearing heavy wool sweaters to fight the cold. Those in the crowd—which, according to the Boston Globe’s Mel Webb, consisted of a “lust-lunged following” from Harvard—were also able to literally warm up thanks to the free coffee, heated by large urns, that was being distributed below the stands.

***

Hageman, a 5’10”, 186-pound hurler, was in mid-season form following Spring Training in Arkansas. The righty continued to mow down the Crimson as the game wore on, holding Harvard hitless through four.

“He was throwing fastballs by the Harvard players,” Stout says.

But Felton held his own against the Red Sox hitters, keeping his team down just a run as the game moved to the fifth.

“The Boston men were not able to hit Felton very hard,” Webb wrote the next day. “While he was always at odds with the plate and had the short end of the corner decisions that were made by Umpire Jack Stafford, Felton had [a] deceptive change of pace.”

In the fifth, Harvard got its first hit when captain and second baseman Robert Potter, class of 1912, struck a well-placed single through the hole between short and third. But Hageman picked off Potter after he had stolen second and got out of the inning unscathed. The pitcher then added another RBI hit following a Larry Gardner single and a Krug walk in the bottom of the inning to give his team a 2-0 lead.

The Crimson nearly got on the board in the top of the sixth, but after walking and taking second and third on passed balls, centerfielder Richard Bowditch Wigglesworth, class of 1912, was gunned down at the plate trying to score on a double steal.

By that time, the snow was falling more heavily, and a cold wind had begun to blow in from the northwest.

***

Above the grandstand directly behind home plate was a wooden press box that contained accommodations fit for up to 16 telegraph operators. Inside sat writers from the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Boston Journal, and the Boston Post. Beside them was a keyboard that would be used to operate the new electric scoreboard in left field that—like so much else on that opening day—had yet to be fully installed and would not be utilized until April 20.

Past first base sat an open-alley pavilion about 10-to-15 feet wide where another 1000 or so fans crammed together in the lower section of the wooden bleachers. The area was tilted towards the field so its most distant corner created the start of the outfield wall that down the line was only 300 feet away.

From the pavilion’s front end, a bare wooden fence of eight-foot-tall vertical planks angled back and met the centerfield bleachers more than 400 feet from home plate. The bleachers, rectangular in shape, contained over 40 rows of seats and extended almost as far back as Lansdowne Street, which ran behind them. There were no advertisements hanging anywhere, a fact that would change by the end of the season.

A large flagpole just a few feet from the back fence towered over the bleachers. In dead center field sat an open area in the shape of a triangle, and at its peak the park was at its deepest, 488 feet from home plate.

“Though it was the dead-ball era, a ball could roll a long way under the right conditions,” Bresciani says.