by Marty Appel
While neither man made much money with the team, the sale to Ruppert and Huston presented them with plenty to divide. Despite reports that Devery was worth over $1 million, both he and Farrell were pretty much broke when they died. Devery left $1,023 and Farrell $1,072. As both men liked to wager, Farrell might claim to have won by forty-nine dollars.
THE NEW YEAR’S Eve announcement would have been plenty big with just the sale of the club, but with it went rumors of the new manager to be. And that would be Wild Bill Donovan, who was in the small group rumored to have been considered (a group that included Hughie Jennings, Miller Huggins, Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson, and even Connie Mack). Johnson backed Donovan. Kelley, a future Hall of Famer who had been managing in Toronto, would become a Yankee scout and spring training coach for several years.
Donovan agreed to terms on January 2. Peckinpaugh would return to his role as team captain.
Like Buck Showalter many decades later, Donovan, thirty-eight, would be the manager just as the team was on the brink of success. Donovan would precede Miller Huggins; Showalter, Joe Torre.
(Donovan was not related to another “Wild Bill Donovan,” a contemporary who had starred in football at Columbia and went on to a distinguished military and intelligence career.)
Wild Bill’s initial impact in New York came while pitching for Brooklyn, where he won 25 games in 1901 to lead the National League. After winning 17 in 1902, he jumped to the American League, joining Detroit, for whom he’d win 139 games over the next nine seasons, including a 25–4 record in 1907 and pennants in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In 1913–14 he was the manager and part-time pitcher for the Providence Grays of the American Association, where he managed a twenty-year-old first baseman named Wally Pipp, a twenty-two-year-old pitcher named Carl Mays, and a nineteen-year-old pitcher named Babe Ruth.
Donovan’s hiring was well received, and he said, “I shall treat my players with every courtesy and friendship for I feel that I will always be one of the boys. I shall try to encourage every man of the squad and give all a square deal. I have not the least apprehension that any player will try to take advantage of me.”
Donovan brought back coach Charlie “Duke” Farrell, another Brooklyn alum who had been an early mentor and who had coached for the Yankees in 1909 and 1911, and trainer Jimmy Duggan, who had been with him in Detroit and Providence. Ruppert and Huston named Harry Sparrow as business manager. Sparrow was a popular New York sports figure who had capably served as business manager for the world tour undertaken by the White Sox and Giants after the 1914 season. With Arthur Irwin off to manage Lewiston in the Northeast League, Sparrow was given broad powers and often acted as general manager as we know the job today. Ruppert and Huston came to trust him with their checkbook and with his judgments.
Also brought aboard were Mark Roth and Charlie McManus, the dual traveling secretaries who would come to be known as Nip ’n’ Tuck. Roth, who was also the de facto publicity director (and hence my “great-grandfather” in that position), had covered the team for the Globe since they had played their first game, lived until 1944, and would be the longest-standing insider witness to the team’s history from its inception. (Fred Lieb, the journalist who lived until 1980, did not cover the team until 1911.) Since hotels would often mix up Roth and Ruth when assigning rooms, Mark would sometimes get the luxurious suites saved for Babe; it was said that this led to the practice of traveling secretaries getting suites on a regular basis.
McManus would eventually become an assistant business manager and then the stadium manager when Yankee Stadium opened.
Irwin, it turned out, was a scandal waiting to happen. On July 15, 1921, while managing Hartford, he climbed aboard a steamship headed for Boston. When he went missing on the ship, authorities found the stool from his stateroom on deck and concluded that he had probably committed suicide and jumped overboard. His body was never found.
In sorting out his affairs, it turned out that he had a wife and two daughters in Boston and another wife and son in New York. Managing Hartford must have seemed like the perfect job for him. It was, apparently, all too much.
The new hirings—Sparrow, Roth, and McManus—were an important step in the maturity of the team as a business operation. Offices at 30 East Forty-second Street (telephone Murray Hill 3146) were inherited from Farrell and maintained until 1920 when they moved to the Cohan and Harris Theater Building at 226 West Forty-second Street (Bryant 2300). In 1928 they went to 55 West Forty-second (Pennsylvania 6-9300).
THE REMAINING PIECE of business for Ruppert and Huston was a ballpark of their own. Attention now returned to Manhattan Field, adjacent to the Polo Grounds, also owned by James J. Coogan and also leased by the Giants, who used it as a parking lot. It was still not a great choice because the free view from the top of the hill—Coogan’s Bluff—was a hard thing to accept.
Ban Johnson liked the idea of a ballpark in Long Island City, just across the East River in Queens. The Dodgers waived territorial rights and accepted it. Subways ran there. Yet Johnson was outvoted. Ruppert and Huston felt the Queens site was too removed from the fan base. In July, Houston wrote to Johnson about a site in Forty-second Street, but acknowledged that it would be costly. They made a quick deal with Harry Hempstead to keep the Yanks in the Polo Grounds through 1916 if necessary, and it appeared it surely was. They would keep searching.
Chapter Six
THE 1915 TEAM TOOK ITS PINSTRIPES down to Savannah, Georgia, for training camp, and Donovan, going through a messy divorce, was glad to focus his attention on baseball.
As for the five new players he had been promised, Wally Pipp, whom he had managed at Providence, was a nice waiver-price pickup. Pipp had played a dozen games for Detroit in 1913 and then batted .314 at Rochester in 1914 before the Yankees purchased him. At six foot one and 180 pounds, the Chicago native was a big man for his time, and at twenty-two, offered hope for a good long stay at the position.
The others—Bunny High from the Tigers, Walter Rehg from the Red Sox, Elmer Miller from the Cards, and Joe Berger from the White Sox, were onions. Getting five players sounded better than it really was. Nobody was giving away good talent.
The pitching staff would get 73 starts out of its three Rays—Keating, Fisher, and Caldwell. Caldwell, coming off 18 wins in 1914, would win 19 in 1915 and would even deliver consecutive pinch-hit homers. Fisher would go 18–11 with a 2.11 ERA in his sixth Yankee season.
Bob Shawkey, who would go on to become the leading winner (168) in Yankee history by the time he departed, was purchased from the Philadelphia Athletics on June 28. Just twenty-four, he was the kind of prospect the Yankees had been hoping to find for years. The right-hander from Slippery Rock University, usually distinguished by the red sweatshirt he wore under his uniform jersey, had been a 15-game winner for Connie Mack, who occasionally liked to sell off his players for cash. The Yankees paid $3,500 for Shawkey.
Sometimes, of course, good signings would get away. Take Dazzy Vance. The Yankees bought Vance from Pittsburgh in April, and he was 0–3. They farmed him out for a couple of years, and he returned in 1918 to hurl just two innings. Back to the minors he went, with Brooklyn finally purchasing him as the 1922 season beckoned. He was thirty-one and had yet to win a single game in the major leagues.
Daz would go on to win seven consecutive strikeout titles for Brooklyn and make it all the way to Cooperstown. Nobody on the Yankees saw that one coming.
SADLY, 1915 WAS another well-intentioned season that went nowhere. New ownership, new manager, new players, new hopes—same old results.
The team finished fifth, with one fewer win than the year before. Even worse, despite all the enthusiasm and publicity that went with the changes, the team drew just 256,035—less than four thousand a game. In the remodeled Polo Grounds, capacity thirty-four thousand, one can only imagine what Ruppert and Huston must have been thinking. “What have we purchased?” It was said they lost $30,000 in that first year.
There wasn’t a .300 hitter
to be found. Only the Giants finishing last (with the same 69 victories as the Yankees) deflected attention away from the lack of progress. It was just a bad year for Manhattan baseball.
As 1916 approached, an important development was taking place in Boston, where star center fielder Tris Speaker was holding out and experiencing a very bad relationship with Red Sox owner Joe Lannin. With no Federal League to use as leverage, Speaker was in no position to bargain, and Lannin was prepared to move him. He was a lifetime .337 hitter for Boston, one of the true talents in the game. For many years, historians would put him in an “all-time outfield” with Ruth and Cobb. His defense was as heralded as his hitting.
Lannin spoke to Huston and Ruppert about him at the American League meetings in February. Rumors made their way to the newspapers. TRIS SPEAKER TO YANKEES IF MAGNATES AGREE TO TERMS, headlined the Washington Post.
This was the time for Ban Johnson to step in and help make this happen. After all, he had pledged to the Colonels that he would get them some good players. Here was his moment. This could drive the Yankees to a pennant at last.
Two days before opening day, Speaker wound up traded to Cleveland for Sam Jones, Fred Thomas, and $55,000, the most money ever included in a player deal. The Yankees had been talking about Fritz Maisel and cash, but could certainly have added more. Where was Johnson?
It was complicated. Just a few weeks before, he had helped to find a buyer for the Indians, bailing out his friend Charlie Somers, who had helped bankroll the American League at its start. In finding a buyer—James Dunn—Johnson had apparently made a similar pledge as he had made the year before to Ruppert and Huston: “I’ll get you some players.” Now he used his influence to move Speaker to the Indians, where he continued onward with his Hall of Fame career. Maisel went to center for the Yankees. Unfortunately, the speedy Maisel’s promising career never played out. He broke his collarbone on May 15, and by 1918 he was done.
And Jake Ruppert would remember that Johnson hadn’t come through.
THE YANKS WENT north with Frank “Home Run” Baker, who was no Speaker but still one of the great stars of the American League. Baker, a third baseman with a .321 career average, was celebrated as part of Connie Mack’s “$100,000 infield,” winners of pennants in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914, three of them world championships. Baker hit only 93 career home runs, but he’s the only player so nicknamed in baseball history, partly because of his sense of good timing. He led the league in home runs four times during those years (a high of 12 in 1913), and he hit two big ones in the 1911 World Series against the Giants, one off Christy Mathewson and one off Rube Marquard. He got Marquard again in the first game of the 1913 World Series at the Polo Grounds.
So renowned did those games make him that soon afterward, his monstrous fifty-two-ounce bat was auctioned off for $250 and won by Broadway producer-composer George M. Cohan, a big baseball fan.
After the Athletics lost the 1914 World Series to the Braves, Mack began to sell off his star players. Baker chose to retire, sitting out the 1915 season, playing just Saturday and holiday games with a local team near his Trappe, Maryland, farm.
But in 1916 he decided to return, and working with an agent, a lawyer named Vernon Bradley, he was sold to New York for $37,500 and signed a three-year, $36,000 deal with the Yankees. The deal was hammered out in Ruppert’s brewery office with Baker, Ruppert, and Mack all present.
Baker, like Keeler a decade before him, was not the player he had been, but his presence indicated that the team could pay top dollar for top-tier players.
But so often, things just didn’t play out right for the Yankees. They signed a catcher named Al “Roxy” Walters from San Francisco, and Baseball magazine did a three-page story on “the Yankees’ Great Young Backstop, Who Looks Like the Niftiest Catcher on the Circuit.” “Al should become the Yankees’ first-string backstop next year,” they reported, “and … will be recognized as one of the greatest maskmen in either league … And oh, how that boy could hit!”
Walters spent three seasons with the Yanks but never did become a regular. After hitting .266 and .263, he hit .199 in his last year, and then went to Boston where he hit .193, .198, .201, and .194. He never hit a home run. Just surviving in the majors with that performance was an accomplishment. No star, he.
Then there was Lee Magee. The former Cardinals outfielder had batted .323 in the Federal League in 1915, third in the league, and was considered a hot pickup for the Yankees. He was the first player to return to “organized baseball” from the Feds, and the Yanks paid $25,000 for him. But he hit a disappointing .257 and was gone the following year, and then, along with Hal Chase, was kicked out of baseball for gambling after the 1919 season. (Also kicked out—after 1920—was the Browns’ Joe Gedeon, a second baseman who played for the Yanks in 1916–17 and whose name was linked to meetings with the gamblers who attempted to fix the ’19 Series.)
Gentlemanly Bob Shawkey, on the other hand, burst through with a 24-victory season, tops in his career. He started 27 games, relieved in 26, and was credited with eight saves as we know them today, as Donovan tested a new concept of using pitchers in dual roles.
Ray “Slim” Caldwell’s battles with alcohol continued. This was one of the saddest stories in early Yankee history. His name is barely remembered today, yet he might have been one of the all-time great Yankee hurlers—maybe even a Hall of Famer. “He has one of the best curves in the business, and his fastball is a peach,” said an unidentified star pitcher to Baseball magazine in 1918. “He might be the best all-round pitcher in the American League.” When he died in 1967, he was still ranked seventh all-time among Yankee right-handers with 96 victories. At six foot two and 190, he was a top-tier star on the sports stage of New York.
He was a good hitter too: .248 lifetime.
But alcohol was his ruin. Like many of his contemporaries, he thought imbibing to excess was a sign of “manliness.” Athletes often took measure of each other by whether they could hold their liquor. It was an ongoing problem for baseball from its earliest days. Some handled it better than others. Caldwell did not handle it well at all.
He really tested the patience of the easygoing, player-friendly Donovan. But in midseason of 1916 Donovan suspended him for two weeks, and when the suspension ended, Caldwell didn’t materialize; the suspension was extended until the end of the season. Although the Sporting News reported that he was in a St. Louis hospital for alcohol “treatment,” no one could find him during the entire off-season. His wife had to sue him for divorce, charging desertion. When he emerged from wherever he had been, it was due to an arrest for the theft of a ring.
Caldwell reported late to spring training in 1917, and although he’d contribute 13 victories that year, he was again suspended for excessive drinking. He was killing off his own career by the day.
He’d play one more season for New York, 1918, going 9–8 before being traded to Boston, released on August 4, and then signed by Cleveland two weeks later. In his first start for the Indians, he had a lead with two outs in the ninth when he was struck by lightning on the pitcher’s mound. For a time he was unconscious, the hometown fans sitting silently in fear.
“My first thought was that I was through for all time,” he recounted, “living as well as pitching. But when I looked up and saw I was still in the diamond and that fans were in the stands, just as they were before I was hit I just had to laugh with joy. I never was so glad to be living in all my life, and wouldn’t it have been tough luck for me to be stricken just as I had won my first game for a club that was willing to give me a chance when other clubs thought me through. I tingled all over and just naturally sank to the ground. I guess it was almost a minute before I saw Spoke Speaker and the others running toward me and realized the trumpets were not sounding for me yet.”
When he regained consciousness, he insisted on finishing, and he recorded the final out for the victory. What a debut!
Seventeen days later, he made his first start in the Polo Grounds
against his old teammates, the Yankees. It was enough to attract a big crowd for a Wednesday doubleheader. Caldwell pitched the opener and proceeded to toss the only no-hitter in the American League that season, a 3–0 victory in which he faced only twenty-nine batters.
“A large and noisy gathering of 25,000 folks saw Caldwell pitch the nohit game with their own eyes,” wrote the Times. “If they hadn’t been there in person, many of them would never have believed it … A lot of the electricity is still lurking in Caldwell’s system … At times Slim’s voltage was higher than others.”
Seemingly rejuvenated, the spitballer won 20 for the first time in 1920, helping the Indians to their first world championship and pitching in his first World Series.
And then it all came crashing down on poor Slim Caldwell again. He made only 12 starts in 1921, and manager Speaker had to suspend him yet again. His final big-league appearance was against the Yankees, and he took the loss in a 21–7 drubbing with the teams tied for first late in the season.
And that was it.
He spent most of the rest of that decade pitching in the minors, never to return to the big stage. He was again a 20-game winner at age forty-two with Birmingham. He threw his last game in 1933 at age forty-five. The man could pitch. After his career, he owned a bar, tended at others, and returned to his original profession as a telegrapher. Briefly he was a greeter at the Golden Nugget in the early days of Las Vegas hotels. But mostly he lived quietly with a third wife about sixty miles south of Buffalo. He died in 1967 at the age of seventy-nine.
BY MANY MEASURES, 1916 was a year of improvement. The Yanks were in first place as late as July 30, when a nine-game losing streak ended the temporary trip into rare air. The streak including losing a six-game series to the Browns in St. Louis, in which they scored only four runs in consecutive doubleheaders. With a payroll of $125,000, the Yanks finished fourth, their first first-division finish since 1910. (World Series money didn’t extend to first-division finishers until 1918.) Attendance kicked up to 469,211, although the Giants did 551,000 for their fourth-place finish.