Baseball

by George Vecsey

  Success begat success. The large population of greater New York engendered ticket sales that led to superior players—even superior managers, who had often learned their craft in the National League: Miller Huggins, the tiny, nervous former infielder with the Cardinals, won six pennants before dying young. Joe McCarthy, who impressed the Yanks from across the field during the 1932 World Series against the Cubs, came over to win eight pennants.

  In 1949, the new ownership of Dan Topping, a wealthy scion, and Del Webb, a hotel and construction magnate, allowed Weiss to hire Charles Dillon (Casey) Stengel, the career National Leaguer who had hit a dashing inside-the-park homer in the 1923 World Series, temporarily upstaging Babe Ruth. Stengel had then managed in the National League, never with success, before going to the Pacific Coast League.

  When Weiss hired him in 1949, Stengel had a reputation as a clown, a busher, a rubbery-faced mugger for the cameras, a mangler of the language. Very shortly, people figured out that the Old Perfesser was immensely smarter than that, that his syntax was an act. As cold-blooded as Ruppert or Barrow or Weiss, Stengel entertained the public at the same time he alternated old hands like Hank Bauer and Gene Woodling, right-handed and left-handed hitters, and made them accept it. He hastened the retirement of the imperious DiMaggio because he could see that the raw Mickey Mantle was going to be just fine in center field. And he won 10 pennants in 12 years.

  Years later, in the age of George M. Steinbrenner, the Yankees would bring in Joe Torre, who had managed three teams in the National League with very modest results. Torre took talented players, restored calm to the clubhouse, and won six pennants in his first nine seasons. Think of it—30 of their 39 pennants were won by National Leaguers with no Yankee roots whatsoever.

  The same magic potion worked with players. After the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955, Weiss organized a shuttle service with the new owner, Arnold Johnson, a Chicago real estate operator who had business ties to the Yankees' co-owner, Dan Topping.

  Sometimes Weiss would salt players in Kansas City and recall them as needed. Roger Maris, a power hitter and superb outfielder, was summoned for the 1960 season and promptly won two Most Valuable Player awards, hitting 61 homers in 1961. According to one count, from 1953 to 1961 the cousins made eighteen deals, with the Yankees winning seven pennants and the A's never finishing higher than sixth. There was very little squawking from the fans in Kansas City, perhaps because their town had previously been a farm team of the Yankees, so all this coming and going of players seemed perfectly normal.

  In some sad, subservient corner of the American soul, the Yankees were accepted as good for the game. Back in those days, the Yankees came to town four times a year, 11 home games per opponent, and they filled the seats. The Yankees made money for everybody in the so-called Brother-in-Law League, leading the league in attendance in 33 of 40 seasons from 1921 to 1960. Rival owners allowed the Yankees to buy or trade for the player who could give them a little pennant insurance. From Johnny Mize in 1949 to Pedro Ramos in 1964, there was always a vital spare part available for the Yankees. A few fans and reporters around the country protested these rather blatant shenanigans, but Congress had already shown its indifference to what would be considered antitrust violations in other industries.

  From generation to generation, the Yankees won World Series in every imaginable fashion. They won with crushing home runs like Henrich's ninth-inning shot off Don Newcombe of the Dodgers in the first game of the 1949 World Series. Four decades later, Henrich returned to Yankee Stadium for an old-timers' celebration, and Newsday columnist Steve Jacobson lamented to Henrich that his tender schoolboy heart had been broken by that 1949 lightning bolt. Henrich, by now a septuagenarian, replied, “Tough!” And they both laughed.

  Other crushing home runs were hit by players not known for their power, including Bucky Dent's three-run shot over the Fen-way Park wall to help beat the Red Sox in the historic 1978 one-game playoff, and Aaron Boone's pennant-winning homer in the 11th inning of the 2003 seventh game of the League Championship Series.

  The Yankees also won with magnificent defensive plays under pressure—Billy Martin's desperate lunge to catch a pop-up in the glare and wind of the 1952 World Series; Lou Piniella's sun-blinded stop of a base hit to slow down a potential Red Sox rally in that 1978 playoff game; and Paul O'Neill's lunge to snare Luis Polonia's screaming line drive, helping to turn around the 1996 World Series in Atlanta.

  If Yankee prowess did not work, there was always Yankee luck. In 1941, Brooklyn seemed to have tied the World Series at two games each when Henrich (him again!) struck out, only to have the ball squirt away from the Dodgers' catcher, Mickey Owen. (Legend says that Hugh Casey's elusive pitch just might have been an illegal and slippery spitball.) Before you could say “Yankee luck,” the Yanks won in five games.

  In 2000, in the first Subway Series game between the two teams, the Mets made four base-running mistakes and the Yanks won that Series in five games.

  Sometimes the Yankees were even perfect. In the 1956 World Series, Don Larsen, a playboy pitcher with the Yankees, somehow pitched a perfect game—no hits, no runs, no base runners whatsoever. (Yankee fans of a certain age still like to mess with the addled minds of aging Brooklyn fans by volunteering that the final called third strike on pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell was probably outside, but whatever.) Then in the Steinbrenner-Torre age, two gritty and complicated old hands, David Cone and David Wells, pitched perfect games on sunny regular-season Sunday afternoons in Yankee Stadium.

  The Yankees dominated from generation to generation, watching other organizations ebb and flow: McGraw's haughty Giants, Mack's Athletics, the Cardinals with their vaunted farm system, the Red Sox of several generations, Cleveland in 1948 and 1954, the Go-Go Chicago White Sox of 1959. All had their hopes, but could not sustain them. For sheer torment, the Yankees did it most to Brooklyn—beating the Dodgers six times in seven World Series within 16 seasons. When Brooklyn finally won in 1955, fans rejoiced and said, “This Is Next Year,” but as it turned out, it was the only year.

  —

  Finally, the empire faltered. On August 13, 1964, the Columbia Broadcasting System paid a relatively low price of $11.2 million for 80 percent of the Yankees. CBS assigned Michael Burke, a Cold War–era spy who had also run the circus, to guard the little fiefdom. One of the most charming and interesting people ever to run a sports franchise, Burke was out of weapons in this posting. Mantle was wearing down, Maris was injured and unhappy, and the farm system was empty. In September 1966, with the Yankees heading toward last place, CBS bought out Topping and Webb.

  Under Burke's stewardship, Yogi Berra was sacked as manager after losing the 1964 World Series and Mel Allen was dropped as the team broadcaster. In 1966, after Red Barber alluded on the air to a dismal attendance of 413 fans for a September makeup game, Burke dismissed him, not one of the finer moments in Burke's otherwise splendid life.

  On January 3, 1973, the Yankees were purchased by a group that included George M. Steinbrenner, the son of a Cleveland shipbuilder. At the press conference to announce the deal, Steinbrenner gauchely chortled over the low sale price of $10 million. Quickly pushing out Burke, Steinbrenner showed he was the boss—soon to be capitalized on the back pages of the tabloids as BOSS.

  No detail was too small for Steinbrenner, who jotted down the uniform numbers of players he felt needed a haircut and badgered assistants to track down every windblown hot dog wrapper on the field. He bullied secretaries and fired assistants, although people learned to wait him out, since he was known to apologize with flowers or even a raise.

  Steinbrenner was particularly tough on a series of general managers, banishing them to their hotel rooms to ponder a loss. He fired his field managers regularly, although he was known to bring them back, too, particularly the tortured Billy Martin, who won pennants, argued with the Boss, got into fistfights, and died in a car accident on Christmas Day of 1989.

  Why was Steinbrenner like this
? He sometimes explained that his father, the shipbuilder, had been extremely demanding, never satisfied with Steinbrenner's grades or his performance as a track and field hurdler. Steinbrenner apparently was going to take it out on his employees, one humiliation at a time.

  Steinbrenner was also a creature of his time. The old Yankee owners had haughtily operated behind the scenes, with no need to appear in public, but New York in the mid-1970s encouraged more flamboyant magnates. A builder with eccentric orange hair and equally flaming ego, Donald Trump, openly boasted about his real estate prowess. An Australian-born newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch, set off a tabloid war with his formula of sniggering gossip. And Steinbrenner was not shy about playing to the back page of the tabloids.

  The fans, apparently liberated of any inhibitions by the 1960s, were as demanding and mean as the owner, chanting “Boston sucks!” and other niceties. Yankee fans threw batteries at rival outfielders, jumped visiting fans who naively wore the logos of their favorite teams, and in general carried on like mini-Steinbrenners.

  The Boss did spend money. It is unclear whether he anticipated the rising tide of cable television riches in New York or just lucked into it, but either way he spent fortunes on players, good and bad. Among his better investments were Jim Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Dave Winfield, who helped win pennants in 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1981.

  The Boss seemed to take his cue from having been born on the Fourth of July, surrounding the Yankees with patriotic rituals involving flags, anthems, military choruses, and, for playoff games, trained American eagles soaring around Yankee Stadium. The patriot also was convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, receiving no prison time and ultimately being pardoned by President Reagan. Later he was suspended from baseball for surreptitiously having paid a shady character for possible dirt on Winfield, with whom he had a feud.

  Steinbrenner's suspension was the best thing that could have happened to the Yankees. He had stopped winning pennants after 1981 because of his addiction to buying expensive aging players from other teams. With Steinbrenner banned from running his ball club, executives like Gene Michael patiently nurtured an unprecedented crop of young talent—Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte.

  Reinstated, Steinbrenner let Arthur Richman, an independently wealthy and fearless old sportswriter turned éminence grise, talk him into hiring Joe Torre, a former player whose main assets seemed to be that he was a New Yorker—and a pal of Richman's. Once again, it was impossible to tell whether Steinbrenner was crafty or flat-out lucky, but under Torre the Yankees were back, cheered on by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who rooted from a seat alongside the Yankee dugout, with the city's modern anthem, “New York, New York,” blaring nightly from the loudspeakers. Jeter, a mixture of the old-fashioned dignity of DiMaggio and the contemporary cool of a movie star, was named captain. In a new millennium, the Yankees filled the need for a glamorous and talented team to walk roughshod over baseball.

  They expanded their horizons in 2003, signing Hideki Matsui, the leading slugger in Japan, who was known as Godzilla because of his powerful build. The first time Matsui put on the striped uniform he became a classic Yankee, perhaps not a DiMaggio or a Mantle but a terrific clutch hitter, a worthy successor to Henrich, Piniella, and O'Neill, the old reliables of their generations.

  —

  The rich got richer. After New York City renovated Yankee Stadium in 1974–75, the Yankees reached a season attendance of 2 million for the first time since 1950. But Steinbrenner was not satisfied, portraying the Bronx as dangerous, much the way Walter O'Malley had campaigned against downtown Brooklyn two decades earlier. The Boss threatened to move his team to either the West Side of Manhattan or New Jersey. Despite Steinbrenner's maligning of the Bronx, fans continued to pour in from affluent sections, reaching 3 million for seven straight years, setting a franchise record in 2005 with 4,090,692.

  How much were the Yankees worth? On January 6, 2005, Richard Sandomir of the New York Times put together a few indications of vast income—the 3.77 million fans in 2004, the $64 million in cable fees from the YES Network, which the Yankees controlled, plus income from sponsors like Adidas. Balancing the income was a payroll of $187.9 million, the largest in baseball. Under new rules, designed to control owners' excess spending, Steinbrenner had to pay $63 million to the revenue-sharing fund and another $25 million in luxury tax payments.

  “That meant,” Sandomir wrote, “that $276 million went to players and less-wealthy teams, from total revenue estimated at $315 million to $350 million, before Manager Joe Torre, the coaches, the front office, the minor league system and the rent were paid.”

  In May of 2006, Forbes magazine estimated that the Yankees' value had reached $1.026 billion, the first American sports franchise to hit $1 billion. The magazine based its calculations on revenue of $354 million in 2005 and expenses of $77 million in revenue sharing and $34 million in luxury tax. Forbes also claimed that the Yankees showed a $50 million operating loss before interest, income taxes, depreciation, and amortization. However, Rob Manfred, base-ball's executive vice president of labor relations, called the Forbes figures “not real in any sense of the word.”

  Any way you look at it, the Yankees' annual profit would seem to be in the millions, in a period when many teams insist they are losing money. The Yankees might even be more valuable, considering the future value of the YES Network.

  Steinbrenner, who turned seventy-five on July 4, 2005, tended to stay closer to his home base in Tampa, Florida, behind layers of officials, publicists, bodyguards, and handlers. His two sons did not seem eager to take over the club, and he sometimes referred to his son-in-law, Stephen W. Swindal, as his heir apparent. The Yankee organization suffered from the impractical tilt of two poles of power, the Tampa faction and the Bronx faction, but nothing happened at Yankee Stadium that did not have the approval of the Boss.

  Under his stewardship, the Yankees became ever more entrenched as the signature team of the United States—with touches of power, patriotism, quasi-religion, commercialism, dignity, and bad taste, often linked together in mind-boggling sequence.

  For example: in the days after the attack of September 11, 2001, all baseball teams made the patriotic gesture of playing “God Bless America” during the traditional seventh-inning stretch. Years later, Steinbrenner was still observing this gesture, followed by a version of the secular baseball anthem “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” itself followed directly by the squawking video of what is apparently a drunken cowboy lurching to the jangled cadence of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.”

  Yankee Stadium has become a sacred place, like Westminster Abbey, with its memorials to ancient heroes tucked into Monument Park behind the left-center-field fence. The dignified side of the stadium was permanently set by the nonagenarian public address announcer, Robert Leo Sheppard, a speech teacher and lay Roman Catholic lector, who delivered the lineups for a full half century. Sheppard's august tones were balanced immediately by the blatant cheesiness of mustard commercials, cartoon subway train races, electronic burps and tics, plus the vulgar chants of the Bleacher Bums.

  Despite Steinbrenner's earlier campaign to discredit the Bronx, the Yankees seem destined to remain in that borough for a long time. A deal with New York City, announced in 2005, approved a new Yankee Stadium, just to the north of the old one, opening in 2009. The Yankees would pay for the stadium itself and the city would pay for the roads and parking, while taking away a park that had long been used by the community. The new stadium would retain many familiar features and angles but would be placed behind walls, like a theme park—a totally American dichotomy of dignity and bad taste, something for everybody. Yankeeland.

  XVI

  THE WORLD CATCHES UP

  Ichiro arrived in America with a request. He wanted to be known, like a rock musician or Brazilian soccer star, by his first name only. He had left his family name, Suzuki, with his old team, the Orix Blue Wave. When he spoke at all, Ichiro spo
ke in brief riddles, almost like Buddhist koans, presenting himself to North America as a mystic from the Kabuki or Noh theater. He was also a control hitter, somewhat of a baseball throwback, not only to left-handed sluggers like George Sisler and Stan Musial but also to Wee Willie Keeler, a full century earlier.

  How do you say “Hit 'em where they ain't” in Japanese?

  He joined the Seattle Mariners in 2001, the first significant Japanese hitter ever to take his cuts in the so-called major leagues of North America. Sadaharu Oh never came. Shigeo Nakashima never came. But Ichiro came.

  Slender and small, Ichiro arrived in a time of bulging muscles. Clearly, this was a man with nary a steroid in him. He trained on rice balls, bringing his own stash to the clubhouse, to the amusement of his burger-eating teammates. They did not smile patronizingly after he took his first swings, slashing the ball past infielders, racing to first base, stealing bases. In right field, he threw out runners like a latter-day Roberto Clemente.

  By the turn of the new century, the game was thriving in two very disparate places, Asia and Latin America, not because of overt proselytizing like the Spalding barnstorming tours but because the game was fun to play. Ordinary people, often starting as students in America, had carried the game overseas with them. To baseball's credit, it had leaped the oceans, proved as attractive in Havana or Tokyo as it did in Boston or Chicago.

  Baseball went first to Asia, starting in China in the international commercial city of Shanghai, where the Shanghai Baseball Club was formed around 1863. The sport arrived in Japan shortly afterward. The Japanese credit Horace Wilson, an American English professor at Kaisei Gakkô, now Tokyo University, with teaching the game between 1867 and 1873.

  The first baseball game recorded in Japan was on September 30, 1871, between expatriates living in the international section of Yokohama and the crew of the U.S. battleship Colorado. In 1878, a railway engineer, Hiroshi Hiraoka, who had attended college in Boston and was said to be a Boston fan, organized the first Japanese team, the Shinbashi Athletic Club Athletics. As contact between the United States and Japan grew in the early twentieth century, the American leagues sent barnstorming teams. The A. J. Reach Co., rivals of Spalding, sent New York Giants and Chicago White Sox stars for nineteen games in 1908.