Before Fenway, Before They Were Red Sox, They Were Winners : Baseball: In the first World Series in 1903, the author’s grandfather was a batboy.

Those of us who dared to hope that baseball’s league playoffs might produce a rematch of the first World Series rivals, Boston and Pittsburgh, were done in by the Oakland Athletics.

Ah, well. The record books are one thing, but an oral history is something more personal. Boston fans, such as myself, younger than 80 will not remember 1918, the last time the Red Sox won a World Series.

But between that 1903 series and 1918, Boston won five of them, and that generation, of which my grandfather was a part, actually was raised on the unheard-of notion of regular championship teams. He was present at the beginning, a 13-year-old batboy on the Pittsburgh bench in Boston in 1903.

The Baseball Encyclopedia dutifully records that Boston defeated Pittsburgh, five games to three, in that classic, which began on Oct. 1. It was a best-of-nine series, with three games played in Boston, then four in Pittsburgh, and one back in Boston.

My uncle, Raymond A. FitzGerald Jr., now of New York, jotted some notes when his father, my maternal grandfather, Raymond A. FitzGerald, was near the end of a long and colorful life at 93.

In that conversation, my grandfather crossed decades of wars and depression to recall the names of the entire Boston team, as if they were lifted from yesterday’s box score. My own check of the Baseball Encyclopedia bears out the accuracy of that lineup, but in fact, there was a bit more detail in those all-too brief late-life recollections, such as exactly what positions the three outfielders played (not in the encyclopedia), and which player served as both manager and captain (answer later).

Baseball fans today can be certain that the curtain’s fall on Comiskey Park in Chicago at the end of this season will only add to the growing legend of Fenway Park in Boston as a grand and fabled old sporting place on America’s landscape. But a measure of how long ago 1903 was in baseball time is that there was not yet any Fenway Park for that World Series. The games in Boston actually were played at a field on Huntington Avenue.

The prestigious assignment of batboy, which would quicken the hearts today of many a kid from coast to coast, was simply a matter of getting to the game early and managing to be the first to grab the team bats off horse-drawn carts when they arrived. It was not a chore that many turn-of-the-century youngsters even thought to seek; and its glamour is conveyed mostly by the passage of time.

It did not seem at all to be that big a deal to my grandfather, who in similar fashion as a boy had managed to duck past the assembled dignitaries at a ceremony to ride aboard the first subway car ever to run in America, from Harvard Square to Park Street. As for the self-appointed role of batboy, connections with the high and mighty in the baseball front office, which seem today to be the ticket of admission to batboy status, mattered not a hoot.

Any 13-year-old could have done what my grandfather did in the 1903 World Series, which was simply to get there on foot with a buddy early enough, and then to say the right thing or wink the right way at the guy driving the horses. These simple credentials were a mixed blessing, for they ensured also that exalted batboy status for Game 1 on Oct. 1 of that year would have to be earned again for subsequent games. After Games 2 and 3 on Oct. 2 and 3, the series moved to Pittsburgh for the next four games, where presumably, some kids would reenact their own similar ritual.

So a batboy took what he got. If that meant being a Boston kid working the Pittsburgh bench, so be it. And with such a front-row view of the game, what mattered? The memory lingered on.

After 80 years, my grandfather recited for my uncle the Boston squad: “Cy Young, pitcher; Lou Criger, catcher; Bill Dinneen, pitcher; Candy LaChance, first base; Hobe Ferris, second base; Freddy Parent, shortstop; Jimmy Collins, third base, (and we learn from the oral history, also captain, and manager); Patsy Dougherty, left field; Chick Stahl, center field; Buck Freeman, right field.”

And on the Pittsburgh bench with my grandfather was “the Flying Dutchman,” the great shortstop Honus Wagner.

I got to chat a lot with my grandfather about baseball over the years, and savored what memories he could share as a vital link in the passage of generations. His generation passed from the scene with the warm memory of Boston victories--for Boston did win that year, and again in 1912, 1915, 1916 and 1918 (and the National League Braves, then in Boston, won in 1914).

In those heady, boyhood days, the team was not yet even called the Red Sox--they were the Boston Pilgrims, a name short on gut inspiration--and he opined to me later that the team in New York had a much lesser claim than Boston would have had on the name, “Yankees.”

My grandfather’s coming of age was a time when Yankees were the dominant group in the cultural and institutional life of Boston, and he remembered the signs around town intended for him and his batboy friends that said, “No Irish need apply.” Basketball fans of Irish-American descent were to get their Celtics, and there was a certain logic in his eyes that a New England baseball team should have been called the Yankees.

My uncle, who describes himself as a member of the Jimmy Foxx generation, and I, an eyewitness from the bleachers on a wonderful October night in 1975 when Carlton Fisk kept America up late, and my 2-year-old daughter, whose Red Sox teddy bear was her first toy and who went out to Anaheim this summer to see Roger Clemens pitch, have all come up dry in three subsequent generations.

We who are the pained Red Sox fans of today have lost more than our dear relatives and their first-hand recollections. We have lost the living memory of longed-for victory.