by Marty Appel
THE YANKEES MOVED their spring training site to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1925, in what would become a thirty-six-year stay there, with just a few interruptions. Al Lang, president of the Florida State League, was the former mayor of St. Pete, and he persuaded Colonel Ruppert to try spring training in his city. St. Petersburg would benefit greatly over the years from the presence of the Yankees, hosting the team through the Huggins, McCarthy, and Stengel eras. For the newspapermen and front-office staff who followed the team south each spring, it became a second home.
The team played at Waterfront Park, which was renamed Al Lang Field in 1947. The field would be used continuously until 2008 when the Tampa Bay Rays moved their training site. The Mets trained there from 1962 to 1987, maintaining the New York presence for fans and writers. The field was easy to spot in photos: A wire backstop protected the entire grandstand, not just the area behind home plate, because St. Petersburg was largely populated by senior citizens whose reaction time to foul balls was slow.
Ruth was said to have hit some legendary homers at this field, as he did most everywhere he played. The one most talked about was a batting-practice homer around 1930 that may have hit the West Coast Inn across First Street, which would have made it about 624 feet, a seemingly impossible distance. Logic suggests that it probably bounced on the way to the inn. But late in his life, visiting St. Petersburg one last time, Ruth was asked about his longest home run there, and without hesitation he said, “The one off the [expletive] hotel.” So it was a moment engraved in his memory too, whether real or imagined.
The Yanks would also use Crescent Lake Field, a practice field on Fifth Street North, lined beyond the outfield fence by Australian palm trees. It would be renamed Miller Huggins Field in 1931 and Huggins-Stengel Field in 1962. Phil Schenck came down from New York to personally supervise the field’s construction in ’25.
Crescent Lake itself was 530 feet from home plate, down the right-field line, and on March 6, 1928, Ruth was reported to have hit six batting-practice home runs into the body of water to the amazement of onlookers. He was the only person ever to reach the lake.
The Boston Braves and later the St. Louis Cardinals would share Waterfront Park with the Yanks. The Browns had been the first to train there, going back to 1914, but the arrival of the celebrity-filled Yanks helped put St. Petersburg on the map. From 1920 to 1930, the city’s population tripled.
The Yankees by now were playing exhibition games with the Dodgers while en route north each season, and in Asheville, North Carolina, Ruth collapsed at the railroad station. Several newspapermen abandoned the team and went on a different train to New York with the stricken Ruth, reporting on his condition at each stop. There were rumors of a social disease, as well as rumors that he had died (again!). He was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.
The incident became “the bellyache heard round the world,” a phrase typed by W. O. McGeehan of the Tribune. Babe’s wife, Helen, from whom he was estranged, was admitted to St. Vincent’s too—she had suffered a nervous collapse. And Claire Hodgson, the future Mrs. Ruth and his current mistress, only complicated visiting hours.
He stayed in the hospital into May, not meeting reporters until May 2 when they visited his hospital room. He wasn’t released until the twenty-fourth and didn’t play in a game until June 1. He had lost weight and the team had fallen onto tough times without him. This was going to be just a horrible year in Yankee history, a year when their big stars got old all at once.
Combs took over center and Pee Wee Wanninger replaced Scott at shortstop, with rookie Mark Koenig waiting in the wings. The unhappy Scott’s playing streak came to a close at 1,307 consecutive games when he was benched by Huggins on May 7. It was written that the record would likely never be broken.
Twenty-five days later, June 1, Lou Gehrig batted for Wanninger, and the next day ran his playing streak to two when Pipp, who had been beaned in batting practice, went to Huggins complaining of a headache and was given the day off. Gehrig started at first. He started the next day, too, and the next and the next, and for fourteen years his name was in the lineup every day. The Pipp headache would become a symbol: Stay fit or lose your job. Long after players had any idea who Wally Pipp was, the idea of a regular missing a game and his replacement having a big day came to be considered a potential “Wally Pipp” moment.
If Pipp had any chance of reclaiming his job, it skittered away a few weeks later when he was again hit in the head in BP, resulting in a two-week hospital stay. First base was all Lou’s. Pipp would finish the season with the Yankees, but then, like Mays, would be sold to Cincinnati. In his eleven years with the Yankees, he had twice led the league in homers, been the regular first baseman on three pennant winners, enjoyed three .300 seasons, and hit 121 triples, first all-time on the Yankees when he left and still fourth behind only Gehrig, Combs, and DiMaggio. Still, he is best remembered today as the man whose headache opened his job up to Gehrig.
And there were some who were still around when I began working there who would laugh and say, “Headache? He wanted a day off to go to the racetrack.”
Wanninger wasn’t going to be a long-term shortstop, so the season also introduced Mark Koenig to fans. Koenig was a late-season addition, obtained in a rare trade with the minor league St. Paul Saints, for whom he had batted .308. The Saints were owned by the old Yankee scout Bob Connery.
Major league teams didn’t often engage in trades with the minors, but the Yanks, acting on Krichell’s advice, sent three players to St. Paul for Koenig, and he played pretty much every day for the rest of September, getting prepared by Huggins to take over the position in ’26.
Koenig, who was a baby during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was just an ordinary player—but fortunate to be with a team destined for greatness. “I was ordinary, a small cog in a big machine,” he told the Sporting News in 1980. He would be the last survivor of these great Yankee teams of the twenties, living until 1993.
A returning face in 1925 was Urban Shocker, who had been traded to St. Louis after the 1917 season following two years with the Yankees. Shocker, now thirty-four, had matured into a quality right-hander with the Browns, winning 20 four times. He was one of the seventeen legally permitted to continue throwing a spitball. Generally considered one of the smartest pitchers in the game, Shocker had not been getting along well with his Browns manager, George Sisler, and word was he was available. The Yanks sent three players to St. Louis, including Joe Bush, to get him.
Huggins always liked Shocker and made him the team’s opening-day pitcher.
Combs, recovered from his broken leg, enjoyed a delayed rookie season by hitting .342 with 203 hits, while Gehrig, in his first full season, hit .295 with 20 homers. Ben Paschal, a rookie outfielder from Alabama, hit .360 in 275 at-bats, which stands as a rookie record for the Yanks. But there wouldn’t be many other bright spots, and fans and reporters began to criticize the team. Babe Ruth was not used to being questioned, and Huggins was not prepared to be second-guessed by his unmanageable right fielder. One could almost feel something big was going to happen. On August 29, it did.
With Ruth hitting .266 and the Yankees in seventh place, the team lost a 1–0 game at St. Louis. After the game, Ruth stayed out all night, enjoying the pleasures St. Louis offered, spending some of his $52,000 salary.
When he arrived late the next day, Huggins told him not to bother getting into uniform.
“What are you talking about?” said the Babe.
“I’ll tell you, Babe, I’ve talked it over, and I’ve come to the decision you’re fined $5,000 for missing curfew last night and being late today. You’re fined and suspended. The suspension runs the rest of the season.”
Furious, Ruth bolted from the clubhouse and took the next train back to New York to see Ruppert. The Colonel supported his manager. Huggins prevailed on all counts, his authority intact. He did relent and let Babe back on the team after nine days, and Ruth hit .345 with 10 homers in his final 29 g
ames to salvage something of the season. He’d been taught a lesson. For now.
The Yankees finished 69–85, in seventh place. The fans knew a lousy product when they saw one; only 697,267 went to the Bronx that year, a drop of three hundred thousand. It was their only second-division finish between 1918 and 1964. Without that, they would have had forty-six consecutive years in the first division.
RUPPERT WAS CONCERNED over the 1925 finish but had confidence that Barrow could remold the team. Barrow in turn had great confidence in his four-man scouting department—Krichell, Joe Kelly, Ed Holly, and Bob Gilks—and in his manager. Knowing he needed to remake an aging ballclub, Huggins rolled the dice in 1926, playing rookies Tony Lazzeri, twenty-two, at second, and Mark Koenig, twenty-one, at short. To take such a chance in the middle of the infield was extreme. Wanninger was traded to St. Paul for catcher Pat Collins, twenty-nine, who would become the regular catcher in ’26. Schang’s time had passed: He was shipped off to the Browns. At this point in Yankee history, Schang was the best catcher the team had ever had, although Huggins would ponder it and sometimes say he quit too soon on Muddy Ruel.
Dugan, twenty-nine, would be the senior member of the infield, holding down third, while Gehrig, just twenty-three, was at first. Combs, twenty-seven, was in center, with the old men Meusel (twenty-nine) in left and Ruth (thirty-one) in right. And so the team that would become the legendary 1927 Yankees was fully assembled in ’26 and ready to return to contention.
The kids in the infield were doing the job. On one day’s coverage, the Times reported that Koenig “ran over near second and excavated the grounder at top speed, but if you think that was handsome, examine what Signor Lazzeri did in the second. Tony dashed almost behind second base, stopped Luke Sewell’s hopper with his bare hand, took a header and leaped up in time to nail his man at first.”
The next day: “Dugan is also no wooden Indian around third. He ran over to his left, and broke down [Bucky] Harris’s hot grounder, then whizzed a throw to Gehrig that nailed the Senator as he slid madly into the bag.”
Tony Lazzeri was the first great Yankee of Italian heritage. He was a physically tough kid with little schooling, often getting into scrapes, and considered a boxing career. He was quiet but comfortable needling Ruth, to his teammates’ delight. He had forearms that revealed his work as a union-member boilermaker. He was, almost overnight, the second-most popular player on the team, and wherever the Yankees traveled, Italian-American clubs would hold banquets in the rookie’s honor. In an age before political correctness, he was called Poosh ’em Up, owing something to fans encouraging long drives to clear the fences.
He’d been a much-heralded rookie, having blasted 60 home runs the year before for Salt Lake City, where he played shortstop in 197 games on the endless Pacific Coast League schedule, scoring 201 runs and driving in 222.
There was one problem: Lazzeri suffered from epilepsy. Other teams passed on him. “Without that disease,” wrote Barrow, “I doubt that he ever would have come to the Yankee Stadium.” The Yankees got glowing reports from their scout Ed Holly. To confirm, Barrow asked Bob Connery to leave St. Paul and check him out in Salt Lake. Again the reports were glowing. “I don’t care what he’s got,” said Connery. “Buy him. He’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” The Yankees paid $50,000 for him, along with future players. As for the epilepsy, according to Koenig, “it was never a problem when he was on the field.”
Koenig was rooming with Lazzeri one day when “he was in the bathroom, naked, combing his hair. The comb went whipping out of his hand and he went down and started having convulsions. I was stripped naked and I ran out into the hallway looking for Hoyt. He was an undertaker in the off-season. Hoyt took care of him.”
Barrow said he had one seizure on a train coming north from spring training in ’26, and another one in the clubhouse before a game in St. Louis. “I heard of a couple of others, secondhand,” he added. The Yanks were able to get a good-sized insurance policy on him; the trainer, Doc Woods, learned how to deal with an attack; and the fans by and large never knew of the affliction. Writers never mentioned it in their Yankee coverage.
SHOCKER WAS 19–11 for the ’26 Yanks, while Pennock, with 23, was the biggest winner. This club would not only bounce back in the standings but would bring fans back to the Bronx. To assemble a roster so formidable this quickly was a tribute to Barrow’s work as business manager and to Huggins for bringing along young players in a hurry.
The Yankees won the 1926 pennant by three games over Cleveland, rebounding with a 91–63 record. They didn’t clinch until the final weekend, but a sixteen-game winning streak in May, the longest in the league in thirteen years, pretty much silenced all who doubted that the team could return to former heights.
Ruth hit 47 homers and batted .372, and despite his bad publicity of ’25 was again cheered by fans in all ballparks. Gehrig hit .313 with 16 homers, but it was Lazzeri who really dazzled, as the rookie came through with 18 homers (third in the league) and 114 RBI (second in the league) at a position from which such offense was not expected.
Having won their fourth pennant, the Yankees were poised to meet the Cardinals, who’d just won their first. This would be a World Series with more than its share of memorable moments.
The days of crowding City Hall Park and other haunts to watch the pitch-by-pitch outside newspaper offices were pretty much over. Now fans were buying radio sets like mad along Radio Row—Greenwich, Fulton, Liberty, and Nassau streets. (The stores would make way for the World Trade Center forty years later.) The way to follow the World Series action now was by listening to the radio, available coast-to-coast, with play-by-play delivered by Graham McNamee. Game one was said to have had fifteen million listeners, and when a Yankee got a hit, you could hear shouts of joy from open windows all around town.
The Series opened at Yankee Stadium, its seats freshly repainted grass green after just four years. Phil Schenck led Commissioner Landis on a tour before game one. More than sixty-one thousand turned out to see Pennock hurl a three-hitter and win 2–1. In game two, old Grover Cleveland (Pete) Alexander turned the tables, stopping the Yanks on four hits and winning 6–2. The scene shifted to Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis.
Game three was a Cardinal win and game four was epic, as Babe Ruth slammed three home runs, scored four times, and led the Yanks to a 10–5 win. Two of Ruth’s homers were said to travel 515 and 530 feet, respectively, the second of them breaking a window in a Chevrolet dealership across Grand Avenue. Babe was the first player to ever hit three in a Series game.
One of the radio listeners was Johnny Sylvester, eleven, hospitalized with osteomyelitis in Essex Falls, New Jersey. During game two, Johnny’s father, a vice president of National City Bank, contacted both teams to request autographed baseballs for his son. Both teams sent team-signed balls and on the Yankee one, Babe wrote, “I’ll knock a homer for you in Wednesday’s game.” The balls were air-mailed to Johnny at the hospital. Miraculously, he returned to health while listening to the Babe’s big game on a radio. Alerted to the story, the press covered it widely, and it became part of Babe’s biography forever after in books and film. Babe went to visit Johnny in his hospital room right after the Series ended, where he was “at a loss for words.”
Sylvester not only recovered but went on to graduate from Princeton, serve in World War II, and work for a machinery company. In 1947 he visited a dying Ruth in Babe’s Riverside Drive apartment to wish him well. He brought the signed ball from 1926 with him. Johnny Sylvester lived until 1994, when he died at age seventy-eight, forever part of Yankee lore.
The fifth game was a ten-inning thriller with both Pennock and Bill Sherdel pitching the distance. In the top of the tenth, Koenig singled and Ruth walked. Huggins then had his cleanup hitter, Meusel, sacrifice them into scoring position. Lazzeri hit a sacrifice fly and the Yanks led 2–1. Pennock set the Cards down in order in the last of the tenth, and the Yankees took a 3–2 lead in the Series, heading home.
/> The Cardinals won game six in a blowout, 10–2, with Pete Alexander going the distance for another big win at age thirty-nine. Like Lazzeri, Alexander suffered from epilepsy, but his more immediate problem was the pleasure of good whiskey. And after such a big win in the World Series, he felt entitled to celebrate on Broadway long into the night and then sleep it off in the bullpen the next day.
On October 10, Hoyt took the mound against Jesse Haines for game seven. Heading into the last of the seventh, the Cards were leading 3–2, with Ruth having hit his record fourth Series homer in the third inning.
The Cardinal runs were unearned. With one out in the fourth, Koenig couldn’t handle a grounder, and his fourth error of the Series put a man on first. Two batters later, Meusel messed up an easy fly ball, scoring one and loading the bases. Then Tommy Thevenow singled to right, scoring two. Despite the two errors, Hoyt had otherwise been brilliant.
Combs led off the seventh with a single and Koenig sacrificed him to second. Ruth was intentionally walked. Meusel forced him at second, with Combs, the tying run, going to third. Gehrig walked, and the bases were loaded for Lazzeri.
At this point Rogers Hornsby, the player-manager, came in from second base and decided to relieve Haines with Alexander. (Adding to the drama, Hornsby’s mother had died on the eve of the Series, but he chose to play on.) Pete had to be briefed on the situation as he arrived on the mound, as the game couldn’t be seen from the bullpen. Reports said he staggered in. He was not expected to be called on, but Hornsby went with his hunch against the Yankee rookie.
Ruth would later say, “Just to see Ol’ Pete out there on the mound, with that cocky little undersize cap pulled down over one ear, chewing away at his tobacco and pitching baseballs as easy as pitching hay is enough to take the heart out of a fellow.”
With 327 career victories, Alexander took his warm-ups and got ready to pitch. On a 1-and-2 offering, Lazzeri swung and missed for strike three. Ol’ Pete had fanned Tony and held on to the 3–2 lead.