by Marty Appel
At first McGraw thought games could still be played and temporary chairs set up, but that proved impractical and unsafe. So where could they play? It couldn’t be in Brooklyn, because the two teams were often home at the same time. But by design, the Yankees and Giants were never home at the same time, so Hilltop was the logical choice. And it wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience to ask Polo Grounds fans to go the extra ten blocks north.
Farrell and team secretary Tom Davis were in Philadelphia for games with the Athletics. Davis went back to New York the very next morning to offer the Giants use of his field. It was a fine gesture, and of course good news for Phil Schenck and his ground crew, who would now have additional paydays with the field in constant use. John Brush showed the proper amount of appreciation for the offer and accepted at once. It would be the first shared ballpark in major league history.
The Giants played twenty-eight games at Hilltop while the Polo Grounds was repaired, morphing into the fourth version of the field, the one that would last on into 1963—where Bobby Thomson would homer, Willie Mays would debut, and the New York Mets would play.
The first Giants games at Hilltop were against the Brooklyn Superbas, marking the first and only time that Brooklyn would play there. The Giants, with all new bats, drew over fifteen thousand for their first game at Hilltop and won 6–3.
The new Polo Grounds was ready on June 28. Brush called it Brush Stadium, the first use of stadium for a baseball park, and that is what it said on the Yankees scorecards during the first seven years they would play there. The Giants thanked their hosts and returned home to win a pennant and host a World Series. But an important step had been taken; a warm gesture from the Yankees had eased the competitive thaw that still hung in the air, even after the 1910 postseason series. Loyal Giants fans curtailed their Highlander hatred. The Hilltop scoreboard, which now showed out-of-town scores, would evoke cheers from Yankee fans when the Giants were shown to take a lead. On Memorial Day in 1912, the Giants lent the Polo Grounds to the Yankees to help them achieve maximum attendance for a doubleheader, since they had been hurt at home by numerous rainouts all season. When the Giants won the 1912 pennant, the Yankees stayed in town one day extra to work out with them at the Polo Grounds as a World Series tune-up. Farrell had played this well with Brush. “Mr. Farrell’s generosity,” wrote the Times, “will be remembered as the brightest spot in local baseball competition.”
About six weeks after the 1911 season ended, Chase visited Farrell during a break in the Joe Gordon trial, and the two agreed to end his managerial reign. Whether he resigned or was fired was uncertain; the public announcement was that he had resigned and would remain with the team as its first baseman, receiving the same salary he had made as player-manager.
The managing job was then offered to Harry Wolverton, who, like Casey Stengel thirty-seven years later, was managing Oakland of the Pacific Coast League. Baseball magazine called him a “forceful character,” a good credential to succeed Chase. A former major league infielder (he had been captain of the Phillies), he was still a full-time player for Oakland. The thirty-eight-year-old Wolverton would still play a little third base and serve as a pinch hitter for the Yankees, hitting .300 in 50 at-bats.
“I can assure all … that Chase and I agree perfectly and will get along together admirably,” he said. “I consider him the greatest first baseman the game has ever known. He doesn’t want my job, and I couldn’t fill his, so we are both satisfied. I have the friendliest of feelings for him and I know that he has for me. I am sure he will be a great source of strength to the club.”
Wolverton preferred calling his team the Highlanders rather than the Yankees. This would be the final season of the ten-year lease at Hilltop Park, and if it was to be the end, they would go out as Highlanders, at least as far as Harry was concerned. The season gave birth to the Yankee pinstripe look, and they became the first American League team so adorned; Chicago, Boston, and the 1911 Giants had worn it in the National League.
The Highlanders lost the first five games of the regular season and then headed to Boston, where they would serve as visitors for the opening of Fenway Park on April 20, 1912, a 7–6 Boston win. (The Titanic, carrying many New Yorkers, had sunk on April 15.)
On May 12, Ty Cobb delivered a shocking burst of his legendary temper at Hilltop Park. This time, he couldn’t control himself while being heckled over his ancestry by a fan named Claude Lueker, a pressman at a New York newspaper. Cobb looked for Farrell to have the fan removed and couldn’t find him. Teammate Sam Crawford goaded Cobb, saying, “You going to take that?” In the middle of the game, Cobb ran into the stands to beat up the man. It turned out Lueker had lost one hand and two fingers on his other hand and was defenseless. Heckling, as ugly as it might be, had to be ignored by players.
When Lueker’s handicap was reported, Cobb said, “I don’t care if he got no feet … When a spectator calls me a ‘half-nigger’ I think it is about time to fight.” Cobb was suspended by Ban Johnson, who happened to be at the game. Three days later, his teammates refused to take the field against Philadelphia in support of what they thought was justified action. The result was Detroit fielding a team of amateurs recruited from local sandlots who would lose to the Athletics 24–2. (They all got their names into the Baseball Encyclopedia.) It became an important piece of Cobb’s life story and also led to the establishment of the Base Ball Players’ Fraternity, a labor union headed by the ex-Highlander Dave Fultz. Highlander catcher Ed Sweeney was elected a vice president, along with Mathewson and Cobb.
Wracked by injuries to many of their regulars, devoid of a top scout—Arthur Irwin was now a stay-at-home business manager—and distracted by Hal Chase’s ugly divorce (he’d shed Nellie, found a new girlfriend, and missed three weeks with a nervous breakdown), the team was going nowhere fast. Farrell was concentrating on his new ballpark in the Bronx, and the Wolverton experiment was failing. The team finished in last place, 50–102, fifty-five games out of first and with the lowest percentage—.329—in team history. They drew only 242,294, about a third of what the Giants drew.
The final game at Hilltop Park was played on October 5, the same day the Giants played the Superbas in the final game at Washington Park, prior to the opening of Ebbets Field. This would be the last Highlander game: The team would officially become the Yankees in 1913.
The opponents were the Washington Senators, now managed by one Clark Griffith. Remembering all the pomp and pageantry of the 1903 opener could only have been painful to people who had hoped for so much more from this franchise. And this final game was one of baseball’s sad stories.
Barely five thousand fans turned out to see the 8–6 New York victory. After hearing other scores that rendered this game meaningless in the standings, Griffith sent Nick Altrock and Germany Schaefer into the game, two “coaches” who were really clowns, generally assigned to entertain the fans with zaniness in pregame warm-ups.
Altrock made his only appearance of the season that day, first announcing himself as “batting for Ty Cobb,” then pitching a loony inning in which he was charged with the loss. He was relieved by old man Griffith, forty-two, who pitched in his first game in three years and allowed a home run to Chase, the only batter he faced. It was the last one hit at the Hilltop. At that point, Altrock took out Griffith (his manager) and called on Schaefer, an infielder, who took the mound for two thirds of an inning, his first pitching appearance in fifteen years as a big leaguer.
It might have passed for an exhibition game, but it was an official league game made farcical by Griffith’s actions—and perhaps a bit of payback for perceived slights in New York four years before. After his firing, Griffith surely noticed that his successors—Elberfeld, Stallings, Chase, and Wolverton—had not distinguished themselves.
And that was the end of Hilltop Park and the Highlanders. Ten seasons, best remembered for a wild pitch by Chesbro that ruined their only shot at a pennant. Their best player may have been throwing games, their chief
scout was a bigamist, the owners skirted the law, and maybe the best thing you could say about the ballpark was that it never burned down.
No band played “Auld Lang Syne” as the fans exited one last time. In 1914 the park would be torn down, and in 1928 replaced by a magnificent hospital complex, Columbia Presbyterian. One can still see the hospital today, up on the hilltop, across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. It is two miles and a century away.
In 1993, the Yankees placed a bronze plaque, shaped like home plate, in the spot where home plate would have been in 1903, commemorating the original ballpark. In a ceremony attended by Highlander pitcher Red Hoff, the last surviving Hilltop Park player (1911–13), the plaque was placed in the courtyard garden just outside the Presbyterian Building of the medical complex, where the Yankees of the twenty-first century send their injured players. The garden includes the area where right field—still level—had been.
Chapter Five
FOUR QUESTIONS FACED THE YANKEES as 1913 dawned: who would manage them, what they would be called, where they would play, and, above all, how they would improve.
On November 6, Farrell fired Wolverton from his only major league managing job. He returned to the PCL the following year, and when his managing career ended, he settled in Oakland and sold automobiles until his death in 1937. Farrell, meanwhile, set about looking for someone new.
As for a nickname, that was the easy part. “Yankees” was now in common use, and the team no longer played in New York’s highlands.
But where would they play? While Farrell had big plans for his park on Broadway in the Bronx, it was a long way from being a reality, and there was already some community opposition to the work ahead, especially filling in the creek. Washington Park in Brooklyn was now available, but that was too far from the team’s fan base. It would be like starting over. The Polo Grounds it would be.
Giants owner John Brush, long in failing health and wheelchair ridden, attended the 1912 World Series, appearing even more feeble following a September auto accident. After the Series, he went west by train for recovery in better weather, but died en route. He was succeeded as club president by his son-in-law Harry Hempstead, who would become the Yankees’ landlord at, ahem, Brush Stadium.
So they would haul their clubhouse safe and equipment and move down to Coogan’s Bluff. (James Coogan owned the land.) Short-term, maybe a year. The detente between the Yankees and the Giants, brokered over the 1911 fire, easily allowed this accommodation. And for the Yankees it meant express trains from Wall Street delivering fans to a park with a greater capacity, with perhaps more celebrities attending their games (though the Giants attracted most of the bigger fish). And of course playing in a newly reconstructed, state-of-the-art facility gave them a more “big-league” home.
The Polo Grounds wound up being the Yankees’ home for ten years, as long as Hilltop Park was. It was never easy being guests in someone else’s home for so long. The Giants enjoyed the rent, which ranged from $50,000 to $100,000 as the years passed, but the field took a beating. By September of each year, there wasn’t much grass left in the diamond. There were few off days to tend to it.
The Polo Grounds was horseshoe shaped: Center field was 460 feet from home, and the foul lines were just 277 to left and 258 to right, making for a very odd configuration. Baseball magazine called it “the greatest ballpark in the world,” “beyond imagination of the baseball enthusiast of the past. It is built entirely of steel, marble and reinforced concrete, and it is fireproof.” (Elevated outfield clubhouses, along with a second-deck outfield grandstand, were added in 1923.)
Part of the rebuild, as a gift to the city by the Giants, was an eighty-step concrete stairway from the high reaches of Coogan’s Bluff to the low ground where the park sat. In 2010, the Yankees and San Francisco Giants both contributed to the restoration of this staircase, which is all that remains there now.
When Farrell heard that “the Peerless Leader,” Frank Chance, was in a salary dispute with Chicago Cubs management, he found his manager. Chance, the man who had won four pennants with the Cubs, was coming to the Yankees.
Johnny Evers, Chance’s second baseman (they were two thirds of the poetically celebrated Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield), said, “A man who can get together a team that has won 530 games in five years and lost but 235 is, in my opinion, the peer of all leaders.”
Wrote Sporting Life, “If you had informed anybody five years ago that in 1913 Chance would be managing the cellar team of the American League you would have been hauled to the batty bungalow. There several doctors armed with all sorts of torture prongs would have picked out your brains and dried them before a gas heater.”
Make no mistake about it, this was big. This was the kick that this valuable franchise in the biggest city in America needed.
ITS MASTER STROKE … LANDING CHANCE IS AMERICANS BIGGEST TRIUMPH … PEERLESS LEADER TO DIVIDE WITH JOHN MCGRAW WORSHIP OF FANDOM IN NEW YORK CITY, headlined the Sporting News.
Added Baseball magazine in a headline to an eleven-page story on the move from the Cubs: A RED LETTER DAY IN THE TRIUMPHANT CAREER OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE! They called it “the greatest deal in baseball history.”
Chance issued a statement for the press:
The contract existing between Mr. Farrell and myself is for three years. The terms of this contract have been widely discussed, and I may say they were entirely satisfactory to us both. I can give little information as to the make-up of my team until I have had an opportunity to try out the material at hand.
We shall train this season in Bermuda. I believe it will offer an almost ideal climate. As for my connection with a new organization, I can say that I always wanted to work for the American League, and have long considered New York the best town to work in. I shall give my players a fair and equal opportunity and the good people of New York may count to the full upon my giving them the best I have in me.
Chance wanted the team named simply “New York,” and to display it on their home uniforms just that way. But “Yankees” won the day. The fifteen-year veteran had been an elite player, but he was really done a year earlier following a beaning that caused him great headaches. He played just a dozen games for the Yanks. He’d been a player-manager since he was twenty-eight, a total of eight seasons. In his first full season in charge, the Cubs had won 116 games, producing the highest winning percentage in baseball history. And he was a symbol of success, residing in the off-season at his “Cub Ranch” in Glendora, California.
Sportswriter Joe Vila would again play an intermediary role in securing Chance, first reporting it as a rumor in late December of 1912. Farrell gave Chance a three-year deal at an almost unimaginably high $25,000 a year. (It may have been less, and enhanced with attendance incentives.)
That left just one big question: how to improve on the 1912 disaster. The team didn’t make any great additions that year. A twenty-two-year-old shortstop named Roger Peckinpaugh came over from Cleveland on May 25, and on August 20 they outbid a couple of other teams and paid $12,000 for a hot Baltimore third baseman named Fritz Maisel. Ed Sweeney, the team’s regular catcher since ’08, was really the only regular to last through the season without turning over his position. Forty-four different players wore the uniform that year. The team had a new trainer in Charlie Barrett, succeeding Harry Lee.
The biggest addition may have been the subtraction of Hal Chase. Almost at once, Chance and Chase clashed. Chase took to making fun of Chance’s mannerisms, including his being deaf in one ear. Chance began to scrutinize Chase’s play in minute detail, suspecting that the rumors around him were true. He came to believe that the man was throwing games.
“I want to tell you fellows what’s going on,” Chance told a couple of sportswriters, including Fred Lieb. “Did you notice some of the balls that got away from Chase today? They weren’t wild throws; they were only made to look that way. He’s been doing that right along. He’s throwing games on me!”
Hal Chase’s days as a
Yankee were done. He was batting in the low .200s. A few times, although he threw left-handed, he even played second base, with Chance playing first. On July 1, Chase was traded to the White Sox for Babe Borton and Rollie Zeider. Borton, in the lingo of the day, was an “onion,” an insignificant player. Zeider suffered from bunions on his feet. It was too much to resist. Mark Roth, writing in the Globe, said the Yankees had “traded Chase to Chicago for a bunion and an onion.” Everyone loved that line.
Chase, the former manager, the most popular player in the team’s history, had put in nine years for the Yankees, batted .284, and stole 248 bases—and maybe a few victories—along the way. His hitting improved in the National League: He won a batting title with the Reds in 1916, but in 1918 the Reds charged him with throwing games, and he went before the National League president for a hearing. He played one more year, 1919, and then he was done. He wasn’t banned from the game with the Black Sox (all of whom played in 1920), but his reputation was such that it was time to go, and everyone knew why.
Chase never really denied his gambling habits, and after his playing days often spoke of them with regret. Still, he was a baseball outcast. He returned to California, worked menial jobs, and died penniless and repentant in 1947 at the age of sixty-four, hopeful of clearing his name but realizing that it wasn’t likely to happen.
Despite all these changes, the 1913 Yankees moved up only to seventh place, losing 94 games. They lost their first seventeen games at the Polo Grounds and didn’t have a home victory until June 7. They were in last place all summer. They hit only eight home runs. Farrell was grinding his teeth. A $25,000 manager, and now this.
The Yanks drew 357,551, while the Giants won another pennant and led the majors in attendance with 630,000. It was also clear to Farrell that his great new ballpark was not going to be ready for 1914, and so he needed another season of shared quarters. The Giants were fine with it. The rent checks were clearing.