Pinstripe Empire

by Marty Appel

  The movement had its roots with the Carl Mays case, when the autonomous authority of Ban Johnson was first compromised. The trio of defectors from the AL—the Yankees, Red Sox, and White Sox—remained opposed to “BanJo” and were prepared to undermine him as the decision on a commissioner approached. They joined the eight National League owners in supporting the so-called Lasker Plan to overhaul the game’s hierarchy.

  Albert D. Lasker, a Chicago lawyer, had a vision of a new three-man panel, one mightier than the other two, all of them “civilians” with no conflicts of interest. There was even talk of the three AL opponents of Johnson moving into a twelve-team National League, the closest the Yankees would ever come to changing leagues.

  On November 12, the owners instead chose federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the game’s first commissioner. The battle lost, the Johnson loyalists fell in line behind the new authority. Ruppert was the most prominent figure in the group photo hovering over Landis as he signed his contract.

  His first act was to ban for life the eight Black Sox players who, although acquitted in court of charges to fix the Series, were now untouchables in baseball.

  The White Sox wouldn’t win another pennant for forty years.

  EDWARD GRANT BARROW’S arrival at the Yankees’ Forty-second Street office in the fall of 1920 marked the beginning of an association that would ultimately take him to the Hall of Fame as one of the most significant executives in baseball history.

  Variously known as “Simon Legree” and “Cousin Egbert” during his long career, Barrow’s name could evoke fear in the hearts of the innocent ballplayer. “His eyebrows—you never saw anything like them,” Phil Rizzuto said to me. “If you had to go see him, you’d tremble at those ferocious eyebrows.”

  Barrow, son of a Civil War veteran, had as full a career as one could imagine even before he resigned as Boston manager and was named the Yankees’ business manager at the age of fifty-two.

  He’d really done it all: journalist, bare-knuckle boxer, catering partner with Harry M. Stevens, salesman, hotelier, amateur ballplayer, coach, minor league manager, minor league president, major league manager. He even had a hand in the discovery of Honus Wagner.

  In 1898 he bought Arthur Irwin’s shares and became manager and part owner of the Toronto franchise in the Eastern League. He sold his stock and became the manager of Detroit in 1903. After resigning in 1905 over disagreements with Tigers owner Frank Navin, he returned to the minors, managed at Toronto and Montreal, became president of the Eastern League (and renamed it the International League, as we know it today), and finally returned to the majors in 1918 as Red Sox manager, winning the world championship and then converting Ruth from pitcher to outfield.

  Now he would run the Yankees.

  The Colonels, in rare agreement, entrusted him with running both the business and baseball sides of the team. And Barrow was prepared to support Huggins.

  “You’re the manager,” he said to Hug, “and you’re going to get no interference or second-guessing from me. Your job is to win, and part of my job is to see that you have the players to win with. You tell me what you need, and I’ll make the deals—and I’ll take full responsibility for every deal I make.”

  The makings of a beautiful working relationship were in place. With him from Boston came a coach, Paul Krichell, who would become the best-known scout in baseball and who would, within a year, observe a game between Columbia and Rutgers and sign the Columbia first baseman, Lou Gehrig, to a Yankee contract.

  Krichell would build a two-man scouting staff to twenty and go on to sign Rizzuto, Red Rolfe, Vic Raschi, Whitey Ford, and others. It was not the least of Barrow’s contributions to the coming fortunes of the franchise.

  Barrow had no misgivings about ongoing trades with the Red Sox, and Frazee continued as a happy trading partner. On December 15, just weeks after Barrow had settled into his new office, he obtained Waite Hoyt, Wally Schang, Harry Harper, and Mike McNally for Muddy Ruel, Hank Thormahlen, Del Pratt, and Sammy Vick.

  It was hard to part with Ruel, who was occasionally thought of as the best catcher in the league, but Schang turned out to be a fine replacement and was, in fact, first thought to be the key player in the deal.

  But it would prove to be Hoyt, a right-hander, who would emerge as the star of the litter.

  “Wake up, wake up,” shouted Hoyt’s father as he slept in the family’s Brooklyn home. “Your Christmas present is here! You’ve been traded to the Yankees!” Without any pennants to show for their history, this cry of elation wasn’t expressed very often, but by 1921 it was beginning to be heard.

  The Brooklyn-born Hoyt, a product of Erasmus Hall High School, was signed to a New York Giants contract at fifteen. His father was a fellow member of the Lambs Club with McGraw. But instead of being a local phenom who made good, he shuffled around from minor league town to minor league town, pitching just one game for the Giants in three seasons of generally unimpressive performances.

  But Schoolboy Hoyt was nothing if not cocky and self-confident, and after 1918 he quit. He pitched for an independent team, went to officer’s candidate school, and then in 1919 had his contract purchased from New Orleans by the Red Sox, where he would join Ruth, Sam Jones, and Herb Pennock in the Boston rotation. Then came the trade.

  The big right-hander would find his game under Huggins, put in ten seasons with the Yankees, and make the Hall of Fame largely on his Yankee accomplishments. This included a dazzling 1.64 World Series ERA in 11 appearances.

  Casual on the mound, his work seemed almost effortless. “Always a smooth worker,” wrote Tom Meany, “he didn’t have a great variety of stuff, but from the way he flourished in tight, low-score games and the manner in which he could finish a nine-inning chore in less than two hours, it seemed that he must have had every sort of [trick pitch].”

  New York was his town. He became a vaudeville star in the off-season, using his accomplished singing voice. He would also run a funeral business in Larchmont and became known as “the Merry Mortician.” Cincinnati fans would later know him as a beloved broadcaster of Reds games, famous for filling rain delays with Babe Ruth tales.

  THE YANKS WERE now the biggest draw in baseball, and it was embarrassing to Stoneham, who wanted them gone. That was fine with Ruppert; he’d been thinking like that since the day he bought the team. On Saturday, February 5, 1921, drawings of their new stadium were unveiled (triple-decked all around), with excavation to begin within a few weeks on ten acres between 157th and 161st streets in the Bronx, bounded by Doughty and River avenues, property acquired from the estate of William Waldorf Astor. (Doughty Avenue would later become Ruppert Place.) This would be Yankee Stadium. The cost of the land was a reported $675,000. Currently in use as a lumberyard, it was across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, which was clearly in view. The IRT elevated subway (today the number 4) ran to the park; the IND (today the B and the D) would be built underground ten years later.

  It was, it seemed, a last-minute decision. As early as January, the Colonels were said to favor land between 136th and 138th streets in Manhattan just off Broadway, where the Hebrew Orphan Asylum sat.

  As for the site in the Bronx, the New York Times reported, “An effort will be made by the owners of the team to induce the New York Central Railroad authorities to agree to put in a station near the grounds, which are quite near to the tracks of that line.”

  Just eighty-eight years later, the station, now run by Metro North Railroad, opened.

  The ’21 Yanks featured the return of Home Run Baker, who made arrangements for his daughters to live with him and a housekeeper in New York. He was up there in years now—thirty-five—but his bat was welcomed back.

  It was also the year that Eddie Bennett, an orphan of seventeen, joined the team as a mascot, batboy, and road roommate of Little Ray. Bennett, who barely weighed one hundred pounds, had been a part-time batboy for the notorious Black Sox in 1919 and had moved to his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers in 1920, anoth
er pennant winner. That was all that was needed for players to think he was good luck. Waite Hoyt knew him because they’d both gone to Erasmus Hall. Bennett had a hunchback, and players of that era felt it was good luck to rub his back.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Jack Quinn remained in the starting rotation. He was one of seventeen pitchers permitted to continue throwing the spitball after it was ruled illegal in 1920. Mays, Hoyt, Shawkey, and Rip Collins rounded out the rotation, with Mays’s 27–9 season tops on the staff.

  The infield featured Pipp, Ward, Peckinpaugh, and Baker, and the outfield had Meusel, Ruth, and an assortment of center fielders including the recovered Chick Fewster. Schang was the regular catcher, catching 134 games and hitting .316.

  On June 10, 1921, Ruth hit the 120th homer of his career, a 420-foot liner into the right-field upper deck at the Polo Grounds off Cleveland’s Jim Bagby Sr. It put him one past Gavvy Cravath as the all-time home run champion, a position he would hold until Hank Aaron homered off Al Downing in Atlanta on April 8, 1974, a total of 53 years—19,252 days as the game’s home run king. (Coincidentally, it was Jim Bagby Jr., also of Cleveland, who would be one of two pitchers to stop Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak in 1941.)

  On September 15, facing Bill Bayne in St. Louis, Babe hit his 55th home run of the season to set a new single-season mark, breaking his 54 of the previous year. And on October 2, off Curt Fullerton in Fenway Park, he hit his 59th and final home run of the season, which would set the new standard for the record books—at least for the next six years.

  For the season, which may have been his best, he had an .846 slugging percentage, a .378 average, and 129 extra base hits. His slugging percentage was 240 points better than that of the runner-up, Harry Heilmann. He scored 177 times (45 more than the runner-up) and knocked in 171 runs (32 more than the runner-up). In park after park he hit the longest home run ever seen, 16 of them over 450 feet and nine of them over 500 feet, according to research by Bill Jenkinson, a scholar of Ruth’s homers. He hit one about 575 feet to center field in Detroit on July 17 off a Bert Cole fastball, a 1-and-1 pitch, which may have been the longest home run in all of baseball history. No one measured it, but Jenkinson concludes, “There are no other home runs in Major League history that have been confirmed to have flown so far.”

  His on-base percentage of .512 was 60 points higher than runner-up Ty Cobb. He walked 145 times (42 more than the runner-up). His 59 home runs were 35 better than runners-up Bob Meusel and Ken Williams. He even missed the triples title by just two, belting 16, and he was second in doubles to Speaker with 44. Only seven players stole more bases than his 17.

  And no one can be certain that this was yet a lively ball, although it was, of course, thought to be. “The manufacturers [Spalding and Reach] have consistently denied that the ball is any different from what it used to be, except that they admit that the quality of yarn used in winding it may be somewhat better than it was during the war,” reported the Reach Official Guide.

  A decade later, the Spalding Guide looked back at the power revolution and noted, “Beginning in 1921, the managers of major league clubs began to allow more latitude to their batters than they had in the past. They took off some of the shackles of forearm and place-hitting and permitted the batters to take a toehold and a free swing. The result was an immediate increase in the number of home runs and an alarming decrease in the number of sacrifice hits.”

  All of this, it should be mentioned, came in a season in which Ruth was involved in a bad auto wreck. Players were allowed to skip the team train and drive on their own to eastern cities. Babe, accompanied by his first wife, Helen, with teammate Fred Hofmann and coach Charlie O’Leary in the backseat, crashed, the car rolling over twice. O’Leary was tossed from it, and Babe thought he was dead. Miraculously, though, there were no injuries, just another day in the life of Ruth. They resumed their trip to Philadelphia by taxi and saw the headline in the morning paper: BABE RUTH KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT.

  The ’21 Yanks won 98 games, a club record to that point, but didn’t coast to the pennant. On the morning of Sunday, September 25, they were tied for first with the defending champion Indians, with Mays facing their old teammate Ray Caldwell and first place on the line. This was arguably the biggest game the Yankees had played since Chesbro’s famous wild-pitch game of 1904, and an overflow crowd of forty thousand packed the Polo Grounds despite periodic afternoon rain, equaling the record crowd to see a Yankee–Red Sox doubleheader fourteen days before, at which a reported sixty thousand were turned away.

  The team played without Home Run Baker, whose mother had died. Mike McNally, one of the players who came in the Hoyt-Schang trade, played third, and would continue to do so on into postseason games, with Baker’s star clearly in decline.

  The game was a 21–7 Yankee romp, with the Yanks on top 15–4 after four innings and the outcome clear. Mays went the distance for his 26th win, while Caldwell failed to get out of the second inning. Meusel and Fewster homered, Chick hitting his first of the season as he took over for Ruth in left in midgame, allowing Babe to coach third, something Ruth often had fun doing when he wasn’t due to bat.

  The Yanks led by one game.

  On Monday afternoon, the Yanks won again, this time 8–7, with Ruth hitting his 57th homer and Hoyt, in relief of Quinn, beating Coveleski. (It being after September 15, the unofficial end of straw-hat season, the crowd could no longer throw their hats into the air after a Ruth homer.) Mays, with no rest, pitched the last 1⅓ innings for his seventh save of the season. Jake Ruppert couldn’t bear to watch the last batter; he went to the bullpen and let Hofmann update him.

  Mays struck him out. The Yanks led by two.

  On Tuesday, Urban Shocker of the Browns shut them out 2–0, and with the Indians idle, the lead was back to one and a half games with four games left in the season. Hearts were racing; could a pennant be at hand? At last?

  The Yanks won every one of the four remaining games, and the pennant clincher came in the first game of a doubleheader on Saturday, October 1, with Mays winning his 27th, tying Shocker for the league lead and topping the Athletics 5–3 before twenty-six thousand delirious patrons at the Polo Grounds, on hand to witness history. Thousands more stood before scoreboards outside newspaper offices in Manhattan, where Western Union reports kept them informed pitch by pitch. The Yanks broke a 3–3 tie in the seventh, with McNally scoring from first on a hit-and-run single by Schang.

  Elmer Miller caught Chick Galloway’s fly ball for the final out, and the Yankees, now in their nineteenth season, became the sixth of the eight American League teams to win a pennant: Only Washington and St. Louis remained winless. Yes, the Yankees had won the pennant!

  Wrote Damon Runyon: “Miller Huggins, the little manager of the New York club, tamped across the yard in the wake of his men, his head bowed in a characteristic attitude. In happiness or sorrow, Huggins is ever something of a picture of dejection. The crowd cheered him as his familiar Charley [sic] Chaplain feet lugged his small body along, and Huggins had to keep doffing his cap.”

  What a moment for Ruppert and Huston in their seventh year as owners. And for Barrow, in his first year as business manager! What a moment for the fans who had been there since ’03, or for Phil Schenck the groundskeeper (who now shared Polo Grounds duties with the Giants’ Henry Fabian), and Pop Logan in the clubhouse, the senior employees, or portly Jack Lenz, the PA announcer with his large megaphone, or Quinn, the only Highlander now on the field. For Ban Johnson, at long last. For Harry M. Stevens, who had been there as concessionaire from the start. The old guys—Farrell, Chesbro, Griffith, Chase—scattered like the wind, what must they have been thinking? And poor Willie Keeler in Brooklyn, suffering from a heart condition, in need of medicine and other necessities of life—so much so that a bunch of Brooklyn baseball guys headed by Charles Ebbets began a fund to raise money to help him.

  And of course the Bambino, who pitched in relief in the second game that day and won it. The big lu
g had been under the pressure of living up to expectations since the day he arrived, and seemed not to have felt any pressure at all. He hit number 59 the next day in the meaningless season finale for his latest new standard. What were Red Sox fans, the Royal Rooters, thinking of all of this!

  The first is always special, but with so many pennants to follow, 1921 sometimes gets lost in the shuffle. It shouldn’t. It was a great pennant race in the season that followed the Ray Chapman death and the banishment of the Black Sox players.

  FOR THE BEST-OF-NINE World Series, with all games to be played in the Polo Grounds, gambling resumed as though nothing had happened in 1919 and ticket scalpers were out in force, getting what they could for $6.60 box seats. This would be the first World Series ever broadcast, with Tommy Cowan in a studio at WJZ in Newark, getting reports by phone and delivering a play-by-play for the few listeners who had wireless sets. Most fans who couldn’t get to the games would again pack the streets outside newspaper offices to follow along on Play-O-Graphs, pitch-by-pitch scoreboards that kept fans posted of the game’s progress, including men on base.

  This was the taciturn Huggins against the outspoken McGraw, the Giants returning for their sixth World Series and first in four years. The legendary McGraw had so far won only one World Series.

  “The Star Spangled Banner” was played before the game, and the crowd included Irving Berlin and George M. Cohan. Frank Farrell was in attendance, as was Arnold Rothstein, who despite his dirty hands in the Black Sox scandal was unpunished and even engaging in business with Stoneham.

  The Yankees won the first two games, getting steals of home (McNally and Meusel) in each one. The Giants took the third, and then Carl Mays had an eighth-inning meltdown in game four, blowing a 1–0 lead, and the Yanks lost 4–2, missing a chance to go up 3–1 in the Series.