Jason Varitek
"Varitek - Foulke Embrace" is top photo
When the Boston Red Sox won the World Series in the dusk of Sept. 11, 1918, it was before the days of regular sports action photography in newspapers. There was no celebration photo on the top of that day's Boston Evening Globe, only a headline and article about what then was just another world championship for the Red Sox.
Flash forward, many decades after flash photography was invented, to Oct. 27, 2004. Under the lights of Busch Stadium and a blood-red moon, Jed Jacobsohn, poised beside the St. Louis Cardinals' dugout on the first-base side, aimed his Canon EOS 1D Mark 2 with a 300mm lens set at 640th/second shutter speed and an f-stop of 2.8.
He took the photo that Red Sox fans for generations have been waiting to see -- the kind of celebration photo that no Red Sox fan had ever seen. It was Jason Varitek jumping into Keith Foulke's arms after the final out, two batterymates celebrating the team's first World Series title in 86 years, and that lasting image has been voted by fans as the MLB.com 2004 Photo of the Year.
Nearly 85,000 fans voted for their favorite choices from 10 selected photographs, and it speaks volumes that Red Sox photography actually finished a landslide 1-2 in this race. Jacobsohn's photo for Getty Images gained 29,990 votes (35 percent), and finishing second with 18,981 votes (22 percent) was Al Bello's closeup shot for Getty of Curt Schilling grabbing at his bleeding right ankle during a courageous Game 6 performance against the New York Yankees in the American League Championship Series. No other photo received a voting percentage in double figures.
It was another Sox sweep, symbolic of how 2004 ended.
"To have there be that many votes cast makes this truly an honor," Jacobsohn said. "To be recognized by the public and readers of MLB.com, who are obviously baseball knowledgeable people, makes it even more special."
Jacobsohn said he appreciated the magnitude of that opportunity to photograph history at Busch. The Red Sox had won the first three games of the World Series, and this possibility before him simply never existed before. In that baseball era of 1918, it was not uncommon for a photographer to set up a camera on the field -- famous baseball photographer Charles Conlon stood near third base as he captured a classic shot of Ty Cobb sliding into the base
-- but there was no race yet for newspaper photographs from games. The modern flash bulb was not invented by General Electric until 1927; the 35-mm still camera (Leica) was developed around 1913-14, but was not used in this setting yet; the Speed Graphic camera had been introduced in 1912, but would not become standard for newspapers until much later.
Throw in the fact that (a) the 1918 clincher in Boston would have started around 3 p.m. ET and ended as light began to fade, (b) victors did not routinely swarm each other in celebration and were more businesslike in the days before television, and (c) the Red Sox had won more titles than any other team at that point, so it was old hat -- and one can see why there was so much historical significance on the line for a 2004 photographer at Busch.
"The entire ALCS against the Yankees, and then the ending with a four-game sweep was truly a magical couple of weeks for baseball," Jacobsohn said. "The buzz during that couple of weeks was something special. Witnessing the curse being reversed and knowing what that means to so many fans was amazing.
"Photographically speaking, the pressure was on to get the celebration shots during the fourth game. At that point, the series was over and covering the action was not that important. It was all about the 'jubo' now.
"I was positioned in a small photo well on the first-base side next to the Cardinal dugout. This was the eighth World Series that I have covered, and you never know how the end of the game is going to turn out. Ideally, you want a strikeout for the last out because then the catcher usually runs to the pitcher and then everything converges around the center. This rarely happens, and didn't on this occasion either -- but that was the shot I was looking for, and fortunately it still lined up that way.
"Everything happens so quickly, and you have to be prepared for anything -- but still have an idea of the type of shot you want to get."
Jacobsohn grew up in Berkeley, Calif., and started shooting baseball back in high school. Now based in San Francisco, he photographs a wide variety of sports and was on his way to Seattle to shoot the NFL playoffs when contacted by MLB.com with this news. "For me personally, baseball is my favorite sport to shoot, having grown up there and being a huge A's fan," he said.
Bello is based in New York, and he was shooting from the third-base side at Yankee Stadium when the Schilling photo happened. Bello's story is a dramatic example of what good photo cropping can do.
"It was pretty important," Bello said of the Game 6 situation. "Schilling got bombed the last time he had played the Yankees. He came back after they sutured his tendon on that ankle, and I was just watching him the whole game from the third-base side, and thought to myself, 'At some point he's going to blow out.' And he didn't. In the fourth inning, he had been forced to cover first on Bernie Williams' grounder, but he hung in there. At some point in the sixth inning, he bent over and grabbed his ankle. I knew that was pretty important.
"I was like, 'At some point, he's going to grab his ankle or check his foot. At some point, he's not going to be comfortable.' So I was looking out for that, and he did it. I took the photo and didn't think about it again. The full image that I photographed included nearly his whole body. We transmitted that picture, as-is. I obviously wasn't watching TV or listening to the radio during the game, so you don't really know what's going on, that he's bleeding. Right after that photo was transmitted, we realized that Schilling had been bleeding, so we pulled the picture up a little bit, and saw the blood on the sock. The editor cropped it more, and sent it out.
"It's more of a storytelling picture rather than a good picture," Bello added. "I didn't think twice about it the next day. I then realized how important it was."
This was the third year that fans at MLB.com have voted for a Photo of the Year, as part of the annual This Year In Baseball Awards. For 2003, fans chose a photo of the late Darryl Kile's young son, standing in a line of Cardinals players before a pregame ceremony. For 2004, fans chose a photo of Sammy Sosa's helmet being shattered by a pitch in Pittsburgh.
The Varitek/Foulke and Schilling photographs each can be ordered as an 8 x 10 or 16 x 20 from the MLB.com Photo Store. There are many more photos there from the last postseason, as well as featured collections and 2004 images categorized by clubs.
"The moment captured in the Foulke/Varitek picture will inspire hundreds and thousands of people in the time to come, because of the long story and the many people that it represents," said MLB.com user Zachary Hynes of Yarmouth, Maine.
"Who could not be stirred by the story of a selfless, unified team that had hit so many bumps in the road, had fallen into so many holes, and yet had stayed loose and battled back like no team had ever done before?" Hynes added. "The bliss on the face of a man who has gone through so much is so much more than the bliss on the face of a man who has had the easy ride. For these reasons, the Foulke/Varitek picture is the Photo of the Year -- and the photo that should forever signify the idea that if one can only 'keep the faith,' everything will turn out fine in the end."
Finishing third in the 2004 voting was an artistic, stop-action photo of Randy Johnson pitching (6,755 votes, eight percent), followed by a wide-angle shot of Steve Finley's dramatic division-clinching walk-off grand slam against the Giants (6,715 votes, eight percent).