by Marty Appel
At the end of the season, the Yankees happily re-signed Donovan and announced that they had plans for a fifty-thousand-seat, double-decked ballpark in place for 1919. In the meantime, it would be back to the Polo Grounds, writing out rent checks to the Giants.
War was looming as the 1917 season unfolded, and in fact had been looming since the Lusitania was sunk in May of 1915. But the U.S. did not officially enter the war until April 6, 1917, when President Wilson declared war on Germany. The next day Cap Huston, nearly fifty, reenlisted, offering his engineering skills and effectively ending his day-to-day involvement with the Yankees as he headed off for France. He was the first member of the “baseball family” to enter the war effort; Braves catcher Hank Gowdy enlisted on June 1, making him the first player.
Although ballplayers were not exempt from the military draft, the Yankees lost none of theirs to war service in 1917. But the team did its patriotic part by performing marching drills, bats on shoulders as though rifles, in pregame exercises, a practice designed by Huston. On June 17 they played the Browns in the first-ever Sunday game played at the Polo Grounds—so permitted because the game raised $10,000 for the First Reserve Engineers Regiment of New York, which was soon to deploy. In pregame ceremonies before almost twenty-five thousand, in addition to “The Star Spangled Banner,” singer Harry Ellis sang a new George M. Cohan song called “Over There.”
“Spread the word, spread the word, over there … that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drums drum drumming over there!”
The fans sang along lustily once they learned the refrain, loving the use of the word “Yanks” in the song. Since the Civil War, the word had stood for the north. Now Cohan made it a word of national pride. And the Yankees were proud to seize its patriotic symbolism.
In 1917 the Yanks dropped back to sixth place and attendance fell to 330,294. No pitcher won more than 13, and Maisel hit just .198. Baker hit .282 with just six homers and found himself suspended by Donovan toward the end of the season when he refused to play in a Sunday exhibition game. The headstrong Baker decided to retire, and not until Ruppert intervened did he return. It was a blow to Donovan’s authority.
A rare high point was the first no-hitter ever thrown by a Yankee left-hander. On April 24 at Fenway Park, George Mogridge squeaked out a 2–1 win after a ninth-inning rally and an error. Mogridge, twenty-eight years old and just 9–11 that year, was a journeyman from Rochester whom the Yanks had purchased in August of 1915. Through 2011, Mogridge is the only visiting left-hander to pitch a no-hitter in Fenway Park—and in fact one of only four visiting pitchers to throw a no-hitter there at all. The others, all right-handers, are all Hall of Famers: Walter Johnson, Ted Lyons, and Jim Bunning.
So Donovan had three seasons to impress his bosses, and he didn’t. He needed to improve on his fourth-place finish in 1916, and he failed. Like the others before him, he was shown the door, and the search for the next great hope would begin.
Donovan was a very likeable figure in the game, and had he found a way to stick around a little longer, he could have been the beneficiary of the greatness to come.
He went back to the Tigers to coach in 1918, managed Jersey City in 1920, the Phillies (with outfielder Casey Stengel) for part of 1921, and New Haven in the Eastern League in 1922 and 1923. On December 9, 1923, he and his boss, New Haven president George Weiss, were passengers in a New York Central Twentieth Century Limited train carrying a number of baseball officials from Grand Central Terminal to league meetings in Chicago.
“We had a compartment and Bill was a cigar smoker,” recalled Weiss to sportswriter Harold Rosenthal years later.
I was one of the few people who didn’t smoke in those days. While he was filling up the compartment with tobacco smoke I figured I’d go out into the club car and have a drink. Prohibition? I forgot how, but we managed in those days. I guess I had two or three because by the time I got back Bill had gone to bed. He had taken the lower berth even though it figured to be mine because I was the boss. Since he was asleep I didn’t bother to awaken him. Instead I undressed and hopped up into the upper. In those days it was no problem.
There was this horrible crash that awakened me and when I looked around I realized I wasn’t in any train but lying there on the tracks. I had nothing on except the neck-ring from my pajama top. There were dead and dying people all around me. I learned later Donovan was among them.
At 1:30 in the morning, the train had crashed into a standing train at a crossing in Forsyth, New York (along Lake Erie, south of Buffalo). Blame was put on the engineer. The actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was among the survivors. Weiss, miraculously, survived with just cuts and bruises. Years later, of course, he would become the Yankees general manager.
“The news hits me very hard,” said Colonel Ruppert, who was leaving on another train for Chicago.
I can’t express my sorrow at hearing of Bill’s untimely end. He was still in his prime and one of the greatest managers in baseball. I say this because I know. When he was with the Yankees Donovan had more hard luck than I have ever seen on a ball field. One player after another was injured, but still Donovan kept plugging ahead, and he never forgot how to smile.
He was a wonderful fellow and a great leader. He was our first manager in New York after Colonel Huston and I bought the club and I still think that barring injuries and hard luck Bill Donovan would have brought the Yankees their first pennant. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to release him. Well, Bill died with his boots on. When he died he was on his way to a baseball meeting on business for his club. I think that is the way he would have liked to go.
FINDING A MANAGER for 1918 was complicated by Huston being away in France. He had a first choice and he felt strongly about it: Brooklyn’s Wilbert Robinson. But he wasn’t there to fight for him.
Ruppert’s candidate was Miller Huggins. He gave Robinson a quick interview at the brewery and wasn’t impressed. He thought Robbie, at fifty, was too old. So many managers of that era were playing managers, a move that saved a salary, or at least a full one.
His meeting with Huggins went better, although Hug almost didn’t take him up on the invitation. It took Taylor Spink’s encouragement to get him to take the meeting—Spink was publisher of the Sporting News, which was based in St. Louis, and knew Hug well.
“Uncle Robbie” was a lovable character and a respected baseball man, linked in history to John McGraw, with whom he had played and for whom he had coached. When he moved over to manage Brooklyn, the team became known as the Robins (and for years afterward, the derivative the Flock) and he won the 1916 pennant. He hadn’t done as well in 1917 and Huston thought he could sign him. The two were hunting buddies, brought together through Huston’s friendship with McGraw.
Ban Johnson was encouraging Ruppert to sign Huggins, thirty-nine, who had been manager of the Cardinals. The owner of the Cardinals, Helene Britton, a widow who’d inherited the team from her husband, was looking to sell. She summoned Hug to her home and told him he could get a group together and buy it.
Hug, a Cincinnati native, partnered with yeast magnates Julius and Max Fleischmann, former limited partners in the Reds. But before he could present the proposal, Britton sold the team to a local group and left him in the lurch. He was angry and ready to move on.
On October 26, 1917, Ruppert signed him to a two-year deal. It was the beginning of a frost between Huston and Ruppert that never really melted. Huston was furious, even suggesting that Ruppert had taken advantage of a solider in uniform. Had Huston not been off in France, he might have been better able to argue the issue, and history might have turned in favor of Robbie. Robinson continued to manage the Robins until 1931 and wound up in the Hall of Fame, although the rest of his managerial career was mostly second-division stuff, save for another pennant in 1920.
Huggins was little. There was no getting away from it. Sports people liked their men big; the Reach Guide called Hug “a man of high mentality but of physical inferiority.” F
or most of his playing career, he was the smallest player in the game, a second baseman who stood about five foot five and weighed, by his own account, 120. But to make it to the majors at that size—and to even hit .304 one year—he proved his worth. He played thirteen seasons for the Reds and the Cards, led the league in walks four times, and had been managing the Cardinals since 1913, overseeing the emergence of Rogers Hornsby. In fact, he would bring with him to the Yankees the scout who found Hornsby, Bob Connery, along with Paddy O’Connor to coach.
Despite Hug’s diminutive size, he could hold his own. A thoughtful pipe smoker not given to smiling very much, nowhere near as talkative as Donovan, he went about his job in a businesslike fashion, took the game very seriously, and used his law degree from the University of Cincinnati to argue his points. He was never one of the boys. He had no hobbies, no family, and no business interests. He was all baseball. Grantland Rice thought he was somewhat of a lonely figure, tagging behind his players at train stations rather than leading them. But Huggins commanded respect. Of course, his greatest challenges would lie ahead when a certain incorrigible player named Ruth would come to the Yankees. But for 1918, he seemed like a sound choice.
There wasn’t much new to the team for 1918, although they did wear red-white-and-blue armbands on their left sleeves in a show of patriotism. Del Pratt was a good addition, coming from the Browns with the great pitcher Eddie Plank on January 22 for five players, including Maisel, who was pretty much done. Pratt would hold out until mid-March in a contract dispute before coming aboard to play second base. (Plank, the game’s oldest player at forty-two, retired after the 1917 season, but it did not cause the trade to be restructured.)
Pratt had spent six seasons with the Browns and was considered the best second baseman in the league except for Eddie Collins. Now thirty, he had tied for the RBI lead in 1916, rare for a second sacker. His .275 in 1918 was the best by a Yankee second baseman since 1909.
“For several years, I had my eye on Pratt,” said Ruppert. “How did I get him? I paid fifteen thousand dollars in cash and gave away a number of good players for him. But what can you do? I needed this player, everyone knew I needed him. One thing was certain; I couldn’t come back empty handed. I had to do something to build up the club after the loss of several valuable men to Army service. And I got what I went after, though I had to pay out of all reason for him.”
The other pickup of note was outfielder Ping Bodie, real name Francesco Pezzolo, of San Francisco, who came from the Athletics in a three-way trade involving Detroit. A colorful player who like Baker swung a fifty-two-ounce bat, the thirty-year-old Bodie was popular with New York’s Italian community, popular with kids because of his nickname and his roly-poly appearance, and would be a Yankee regular in the outfield for three years before going back to the Pacific Coast League. He was considered influential in starting the stream of great Italian Yankees who came from the Bay Area (Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti, and Joe DiMaggio), and is famous for denying that he was Babe Ruth’s first Yankee roommate, claiming, “I only room with his suitcase.”
(In spring training of 1919, Huston, back from the war, arranged for a spaghetti-eating contest between Ping and an ostrich named Percy. It was staged in a boxing ring, and Bodie emerged the winner with the eleventh serving, Percy staggering away from his plate after ten rounds.)
The 1918 season was scheduled to slim down to 140 games, but the war forced a Labor Day cutoff (except for the World Series) and essentially a 125-game season.
On May 23, a “Work or Fight” order was issued by U.S. Provost-Marshall Enoch Crowder, requiring men twenty-one to thirty to either report for duty or take a military-related “essential job.” While those in show business were excluded, War Secretary Newton Baker ruled on July 20 that baseball was not considered essential, and its players not exempt. And so by August, players began deserting their rosters, taking war-related jobs or enlisting. Rosters could be filled with those outside of the twenty-one-to-thirty age group or otherwise exempt.
Fourteen Yankee players went into the service, including Fisher, Pipp, Shawkey, Ward, Sammy Vick, Muddy Ruel, Walter Bernhardt, Neal Brady, Alex Ferguson, Frank Kane, Bill Lamar, Ed Monroe, Bob McGraw, and Walt Smallwood. From other rosters, enlistees included future Yankees Herb Pennock, Carl Mays, Ernie Shore, Mike McNally, Urban Shocker, and Casey Stengel, plus former Yankees Les Nunamaker and Fritz Maisel.
Home Run Baker, because he was thirty-two, was the best player they were able to retain.
The team did its part by turning over 10 percent of profits from games during the July 4 week to the Red Cross, and by contributing $13,000 to the Reserve Engineer Regiment and the benefit of their dependents.
A CURIOUS CASE developed involving the old Highlander pitcher Jack Quinn. Quinn had last been a Yankee in 1912, but he proved resilient in the minors and found himself pitching for Vernon, California, in the Pacific Coast League in 1918. White Sox owner Charles Comiskey got permission from the National Commission chairman Garry Herrmann to make a deal directly with Quinn if he wished, and to pay Vernon the draft price if he was retained after play resumed in 1919. Comiskey followed the instructions.
The Yankees wanted Quinn too, and decided to acquire his rights directly from the Vernon club. Quinn reported to the White Sox and went 5–1 down the stretch for them before the National Commission ruled, on August 24, that the Yankees were entitled to him. The season was pretty much over by then, but since both teams were in the American League, Ban Johnson stepped in and ruled that the Yankees had the clearer title to Quinn for 1919 and should prevail.
This caused a permanent rift between Comiskey and Johnson, but it kept Quinn off the 1919 Black Sox and returned the ancient spitballer to the Yanks for three more seasons, including a pennant-winning one.
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IT IS HARD to pass judgment on any team’s 1918 performance, but the Yanks did return to the first division, finishing fourth despite a 60–63 record. They were tied for first place going into July 4, but were badly outplayed in the second half. Baker hit .306 and Pipp .304 before he departed, and Mogridge led the team with 16 wins.
In December of 1918, the Yankees made their first trade with Harry Frazee, who had purchased the Red Sox twenty-five months earlier. They dealt Caldwell and three lesser names, along with a reported $15,000, for pitchers Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard and the popular outfielder Duffy Lewis, who had been part of the great Harry Hooper–Speaker–Lewis outfield in Boston for six years. (Leonard refused to report and instead went to Detroit.) This did not turn out to be a blockbuster deal in any sense, but the relationship between Frazee and Ruppert was soon to take on monumental importance.
Huston returned from his war duty right after New Year’s and met Huggins for the first time at the club’s office on Forty-second Street. It wasn’t warm or cordial. He seemed determined not to like Huggins.
“I wouldn’t go through again, for all the money in the world, the years from 1919 to 1923,” Huggins would later say, talking about the time Huston remained on the scene.
THE YANKS WRAPPED up spring training of 1919 by playing thirteen games with Brooklyn en route north, winning ten of them.
While most fans remember 1919 for the Black Sox and the damage the fixed World Series did to the game, most of the final months of the regular season were dominated by news of the Yankees’ purchase of pitcher Carl Mays from Boston.
Not only did this continue a process of obtaining big stars from the Red Sox, but it also launched the era when the Yankees’ ability to outspend others would be realized, when the power of the Yankees seemed to surpass the power of the league president, and when the still pennantless Yankees began to see good times on the horizon.
Mays, twenty-seven, was a submarine pitcher who threw with great speed and liked to pitch high and tight. He may not have been a very popular player, but he was a good one. He’d joined the Red Sox in 1915 and had helped them to two pennants, winning two games in the 1918 World Series
. He had 61 regular season victories from 1916 to 1918 and had led the league with eight shutouts in ’18 despite the abbreviated season.
While the scouting report on Mays was “surly and ill-tempered,” his teammates thought of him as more of a loner. He once explained that his teammates were better educated than he was, and he was more comfortable retreating from them than engaging them in conversation. He was, by most accounts, a clean-living, highly competitive guy who was frustrated by pitching problems in 1919. Working on a 5–10 record when he took the mound on July 12 in Chicago, he left in the second inning, trailing 5–0, four of the runs unearned.
He lost his temper when manager Ed Barrow came to take him out. Startled fans saw him throw the ball against the backstop and storm into the clubhouse. Was he angry at his teammates who had made errors behind him? Whatever it was, it was a final straw. He swore to never pitch for the Red Sox again.
Barrow suspended Mays once he learned that he had headed back to Boston, cleaned out his Commonwealth Avenue apartment, and drove to his in-laws’ home in Pennsylvania with his wife, Freddie. The Boston newspapers were ravaging him, and it helped not at all that Mays was of German descent and anti-German sentiments were still strong in the country.
Barrow decided to get rid of Mays. He viewed it as an opportunity to clear himself of a problematic player and to exert his authority for future benefit. Either Barrow or Frazee called the Yankees to see if they had interest in him.
They sure did. They were in a pennant race, and this would be a player from the defending champions. According to Mays, he got a long-distance call on July 29 that went like this: “Carl, this is Cap Huston of the Yankees. I called to find out if you would be interested in pitching for the Yankees. If you are, there’s a good chance of my swinging a deal for you tonight, but I didn’t want to get all tangled up in negotiations if you wouldn’t pitch for us.”