Pinstripe Empire

by Marty Appel

  Spitballer Quinn, a right-hander born Joannes Pajkos in Austria-Hungary, was signed by Arthur Irwin after going 14–0 in the minors in 1908. He would have a twenty-three-season pitching career in the major leagues, with two tours of duty on the Yankees. He spent his first four seasons in New York, posting an 18–12 record in 1910, and then returned for three more years, beginning in 1919. He was with the Yankees in 1920 when the spitball was banned, but it was still permitted for those whose career was defined by it. When he appeared in the 1921 World Series at age thirty-seven, he was the only Highlander to have finally made it into the Fall Classic as a Yankee.

  Warhop, a five-foot-eight submariner, was considered a steady yet unlucky right-hander on the team, with a dismal 69–92 career record but a 3.12 earned run average. While he was 23 games under .500 in his Yankee career, the Yankees were shut out when he pitched on twenty-one occasions.

  It was said that a dozen teams sought to sign him after he was 29–7 for Williamsport in the Tri-State League in 1908, but it was Stallings who got him for New York. With a better lineup behind him, he would certainly have had more to show for his eight seasons.

  The ’09 Highlanders didn’t play very well, but they did arouse controversy when the Detroit trainer, Harry Tuthill, discovered that an open or closed O on an outfield sign was tipping off New York hitters whether a fastball or a breaking ball was coming. Some had wondered why the team hit so much better at home, and this may have been the answer. New York had been caught cheating.

  The board of directors of the American League would ultimately exonerate the Highlanders, but said anyone found guilty of this in the future would be “barred from baseball for all time.” For Stallings, who had come to town as a distinguished gentleman of the game, it was an embarrassment.

  The team finished fifth, three games under .500.

  STALLINGS RETURNED IN 1910, with the Yankees now training at his behest in Athens, Georgia, having abandoned Macon after the smallpox episode of 1909. There were four new hurlers on the staff, Ray Caldwell, Ray Fisher, Russ Ford, and Jim “Hippo” Vaughn. The foursome would have to adjust to a redesigned baseball, with a cork center having replaced solid rubber. The Reach Guide called it “the greatest improvement made in the most important part of the game, the baseball [itself].”

  The change was deemed necessary to beef up the hitting. The American League had just two .300 hitters in 1905, Keeler being one of them. The champion White Sox of 1906 hit .230 as a team and were called the Hitless Wonders. The league hit .239 in 1908 and .244 in 1909.

  Ray “Slim” Caldwell put in nine years with the Yankees, and it was always thought that he should have done better than his 96–99 mark, with 37 of the wins coming in 1914–15. But he was forever a discipline problem, both to the team (hard drinking and disappearances) and to police authorities (problems with women and at least four marriages). He learned the spitball late in his career and managed to pitch until 1933, the last eleven years all in the minor leagues.

  Ray Fisher, educated at Middlebury College, was, with Quinn and Caldwell, one of the spitball pitchers allowed to continue throwing the pitch after the 1920 ban. Fisher hurled for the Yankees from 1910 to 1917, was in the army in 1918, and then went to the Cincinnati Reds in 1919–20, pitching in the notorious rigged 1919 World Series. He wound up being banned from the game by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis—not for any betting activity surrounding that series but for leaving the Reds on seven days’ notice to coach at the University of Michigan, instead of providing the required ten days’ notice.

  Ray coached Michigan baseball for thirty-eight years; the ballpark there was eventually named Ray Fisher Stadium. He coached future Mets owner Fred Wilpon in baseball and Gerald Ford in football. In 1980, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn reversed Landis’s ban and called him a “retired player in good standing.” Ray lived to be ninety-five and attended Yankee Old-Timers’ Days as the oldest living Yankee player as late as 1982.

  Russell Ford, master of the illegal “emery ball” (scuffing the ball with an emery board but claiming it was a spitball), was born in western Canada and raised in Minneapolis. He broke in with eight shutouts and a 26–6 rookie season in 1910—still, after more than a century, the American League rookie record for wins.

  Ford picked up his famous emery ball pitching for Atlanta in the Southern Association, when a wild pitch hit a cement upright and came back to him nicely scuffed. His catcher was Ed Sweeney, who would be his Yankee batterymate. After watching the pitch break, he concluded that while he couldn’t hide concrete in his glove, a little emery would do. “The Boy Wonder” or “Matty of the Yankees” would pitch only four full seasons before jumping to the Federal League in 1914 and then dropping into the minors. The secret of his pitch got around the league after his second year, and he ultimately lost his effectiveness.

  Hippo Vaughn, 13–11 for the 1910 Yankees with a 1.83 ERA, went on to win 20 or more games five times for the Chicago Cubs from 1913 to 1921. At six foot four and 215 pounds, the big left-hander from Texas was said to have the best physique in the game and stood out among players of his day for sheer size. His mound presence was not unlike that of CC Sabathia’s a century later. But only his rookie year was distinguished for New York, and he was waived to Washington in 1912 before finding success in the National League.

  Right-hander Tom Hughes, an otherwise middling player on the team, pitched the first no-hitter in Yankee history that year. A later revision of baseball rules invalidated it from being so listed, as he allowed two hits in the tenth and five more in the eleventh innings in losing the game. But through nine, only an error marred what could have been a perfect game.

  IT WOULD BE a season of improved play under Stallings: The team finished second, although it was never in the race after July 4. Most of the drama for the season came in the final two weeks and involved the manager and his star first baseman.

  Stallings openly claimed that Chase, by now team captain, was “laying down” on plays. It would not be the first time that such charges were leveled at Hal, but the whispers usually involved gambling. When you made as many great plays as Chase did, the ordinary ones that got past him were sure to arouse suspicion. His teammates were suspicious. Some felt he was a master at arriving at the base just a moment too late to nail a runner. In this case, some felt he was undermining Stallings in an effort to get him fired and succeed him.

  By mid-July Stallings was increasingly upset by Chase’s play. After two questionable games against the St. Louis Browns, he was replaced in the lineup by John Knight. In the next two series came more Chase errors, and soon Knight was being written into the lineup each day. Starting August 9, Chase went missing for ten days. He claimed to be suffering from dizzy spells. In fact he’d been visiting with Frank Farrell, imploring him to make a managerial change.

  Most of the players, seeing Chase’s work at first, tended to side with Stallings.

  Stallings gave Chase a tongue-lashing but put him back in the lineup. On September 18 at St. Louis, New York lost to the last-place Browns; Chase was hitless and let a throw from Fisher get past him. That was all Stallings needed to see. He directly confronted Chase and accused him of “lying down.” Players had to pull the two apart to keep them from fighting.

  The next day in Chicago, Chase missed a hit-and-run sign while trailing 1–0 in a game they would lose 3–0. An impatient Farrell asked Stallings to take the Twentieth Century Limited back to New York to see him. Stallings turned the team over to the team secretary, Tom Davis, and departed. Davis asked Chase to be the temporary manager.

  Farrell and Stallings met at the Flatiron Building, and Stallings unloaded on Chase. Then Farrell headed to Cleveland to meet with the players and get their feedback. Ban Johnson was there too. The plot thickened.

  Johnson, still closely involved with the fates and fortunes of his New York franchise, didn’t like Stallings much, especially after the sign-stealing scandal from the year before. Stallings had few allies, and Johnso
n demanded his resignation.

  “Stallings has utterly failed in his accusations against Chase,” said Farrell of his onetime close friend. “He tried to besmirch the character of a sterling player. Anybody who knows Hal Chase knows that he is not guilty of the accusations against him.”

  No owner of gambling halls could have stated it better. Stallings was gone; Chase, just twenty-seven, was to be the fourth manager in team history. He got a two-year contract.

  On September 26, Chase officially took over with fourteen games left in the season. In his first game, he was presented with floral tributes and the players on both teams stopped to salute him. He was obviously a popular choice: Stallings’s strategy of discrediting him had failed.

  Chase won ten of his games, including the last five in a row. He was now well positioned to guide the team for 1911 and, he hoped, for many years after. Left unspoken was the fact that Chase was being watched at every turn; it was now suspected that he might “lie down” from time to time.

  But first came one last and very important assignment for 1910. John McGraw and John Brush had at last agreed to a Giants-Yankees series: the championship of Manhattan! It would be a best-of-seven series, played alternately at the Polo Grounds and the Hilltop, and it would prove to be so interesting to fans that many newspapers felt it exceeded the World Series—Cubs vs. Athletics—for national interest.

  The games began on October 13, five days after the regular season ended, with the teams well rested. The World Series didn’t begin until the seventeenth, so attention turned to New York.

  The Times forecast, “New Yorkers will watch with interest the battles between the Cubs and the Athletics for the highest honors in baseball, but they care less for this fight than they do for the battles which will decide the baseball supremacy of Greater New York.”

  The Giants won the series, four games to two with one tie. The great Christy Mathewson won three of the games and saved the fourth (although it was not a stat at the time) but never managed to pitch at Hilltop Park. A crowd of 27,766 attended game three at the Polo Grounds, larger than any at the 1910 World Series. Warhop and Quinn had the Yankees’ two victories, and the top crowd at Hilltop Park was 13,059. Each Highlander got a $706 bonus check and each Giant got $1,111. Chase’s bold managerial move was having his pitchers hit eighth and infielder Jimmy Austin ninth.

  Wrote John B. Foster, “The games … were the most successful in the history of organized baseball.”

  The fans loved the event, but when the Giants won pennants from 1911 to 1913, the series was suspended so they could play in the World Series. The New York series was played one last time in 1914, with another Giants win before much smaller crowds.

  HAL CHASE’S MANAGERIAL run with the Yankees lasted just one full season, 1911. He brought the team home a disappointing sixth with a .500 record, twenty-five and a half games out of first.2 They lost their last five games to kill a first-division finish. Chase was soft on discipline, including his own, and just didn’t set a good example. Plus, he made 36 errors at first base.

  Still, the fans delighted in having Prince Hal as manager. Generally acknowledged as the most loyal of all fans was Edward Everett Bell, a safe manufacturer, who always closed his office and headed for the Hilltop when the Yankees were at home. He always sat in the same grandstand seat and truly believed he brought the team luck.

  Bell was the best-known of a group of die-hards who attended games over the years. There would be Bill “Pee Wee” Scheidt, the savant Bill “the Baker” Stimers, Chris Karelekas (with his YES WE CAN banners in the seventies), “Freddie Sez” Schuman (with his spoon and frying pan), Ali Rameriz, the founder of the Bleacher Creatures, and “Bald Vinny” Milano, who would chant the names of each player (except pitcher and catcher) until they acknowledged him—this “roll call” can be heard in the first innings of Yankee games today.

  For many fans who devoted decades of their lives to box scores and baseball cards and stats and autographs, or to following the team by Western Union updates outside newspaper offices, then later by radio, television, and streaming video, their investment in the team was in many ways mightier than that of any player, executive, or even owner who passed through.

  The Yankees—and baseball—saw people through illness and through war, provided happy and sad moments, marked births (with baby-size Yankee caps in photos) and weddings, and came to define a person’s very existence to friends and family. When a generation gap might curtail conversation within families, there would still be baseball to share.

  The game lent order to the lives of its fans from the beginning of spring training to the final day of the season, and then all over again the next year.

  There was a fan named George Raft. Later nationally known as a tough-guy movie star (with a propensity for off-screen association with gangsters), Raft and his pal Charlie Schrimpf were Hilltop Park regulars, sweeping up the bleachers in exchange for game tickets and delivering the dirty uniforms to Charlie’s mom after the games. Raft, about eleven at the time, was a mascot and a batboy and would cart the bats to the dugout in a wheelbarrow. He had a reputation for being the brightest kid in the neighborhood when it came to memorizing baseball statistics.

  Raft remained a fan, played baseball and boxed, but drifted off to the stage and then to Hollywood. Ironically, his adult friendship with Leo Durocher (a onetime Yankee player but by then the Brooklyn manager) got Durocher in trouble—some of Raft’s associates were gamblers—and he was ordered to break off the association.

  Charlie Schrimpf remained a lifelong fan.

  “I worked for Fred Logan in 1912 until they hired a regular bat boy, a guy named Hunchy, to replace me,” he wrote to announcers Phil Rizzuto and Jerry Coleman in 1969.

  He got a uniform and all. My brother Bob was assistant ground keeper to Mr. Phil Schenck. George Raft and I had to go over early in the morning, get a broom and sweep up under the bleachers. Then we would secure a slip of paper to get into the game.

  After school [PS 169, across the street from Hilltop Park], all the kids would stand on the Ft. Washington Avenue side of the park and wait for a ball to be knocked over—then you took the ball to the man at the little door and he would let you into the game.

  My mother did the laundry for the team. She never wanted to see Hal Chase’s uniform because the left leg was so dirty, and let us not forget these all had to done with the washing board. There were no dryers or washing machines in those days, just the old coal stove. George Raft and I had to bring the uniforms to the clubhouse before going to school and collect 35 cents.

  When we got a broken bat that was like a gift. We would get a two cent roll of tape and a few nails and we were set. And a baseball, when the stitches were broke, we would tape it up and played just fine.

  In my time I saw the best—Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, [Bert] Daniels,3 Chesbro—last but not the least, Hal Chase, the greatest first baseman of them all in baseball.

  In the early 1970s, Charlie’s younger brother Frank was still a ticket taker outside gate 4 of Yankee Stadium, the employee with the longest family ties to the franchise.

  THIRD BASEMAN ROY HARTZELL, twenty-nine, from Golden, Colorado, was the key new addition to the team in 1911, and he hit .296 and drove in 91 runs (including eight in one inning)—the most by a Yankee third baseman until Graig Nettles had 93 in 1976. This was Cree’s .348 season, fifth highest in the league, and Chase hit .315 (and starred in a silent movie, Hal Chase’s Home Run).

  Throughout the season—a sixth-place finish—Farrell pondered that his lease would be running out in another year, and a decision had to be made on where to play his home games. He settled on property known as Kingsbridge Grounds, at 221st Street and Broadway in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan, a plot of land that would require excavation similar to what greeted him in Washington Heights in ’03. (The 225th Street subway station had opened in 1907.) This time, with more time to plan, he had a nice design, featuring an enhanced clubhouse with “shower
baths, a plunge and lockers,” as well as club offices. He was anxious to get away from the slow elevator problems at the 165th Street station. The park would be double-decked and hold twenty-two thousand. Work on filling in a creek that ran through the grounds began cautiously in the spring of 1911, and it was hoped the park might be ready in midseason of 1912, with Farrell prepared to jump out of his lease a few months early if he could. But so far it was a lot of talk and no real construction.

  The big news of the 1911 season was a terrible fire at the Polo Grounds that forced the Giants to share Hilltop Park with the Yankees.

  The fire broke out around 12:40 A.M. on April 14 and began with an explosion. Fred Lieb, in his first season covering the Yankees, wrote that the fire was “one of New York’s biggest and most spectacular … Almost totally out of control, it lit up the night sky in upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and western Queens.”

  The flames were nearly one hundred feet high and were brought under control around 2:00 in the morning, when all but the left-field bleachers and the clubhouses had finished burning. The field was not harmed; pitcher Bugs Raymond actually stood at the mound watching the grandstand and dugouts burn.

  The fire spread and destroyed thirty elevated subway cars. John McGraw abandoned his late-night billiards game and rushed to the scene. The challenge was just too great for the FDNY, who sped there in their horse-drawn fire trucks. The real cause was never found: Some thought it could be traced to the concession storage areas maintained by Harry M. Stevens, and some thought it was nothing more than smoldering peanut shells from that afternoon’s game, perhaps set off by a cigar ash. Stevens had just stocked a season’s worth of inventory in his storerooms.