Pinstripe Empire

by Marty Appel

  But he had a heart disease which may have gone back as far as three years. He just didn’t talk about it with anyone. Still, there were signs.

  Some had heard that he had to sleep standing up. This may have been exaggerated, but he was spotted on sleeper cars fast asleep sitting upright. To lay prone would cause undue stress on his heart. Or so the rumors had it.

  Despite his 19–11 record in 1926 and his 18–6 record in 1927, he was done. But he didn’t level with the team. He was, in fact, angry with the Yankees over not receiving moving expenses when he’d been traded. Huggins at one point offered to pay him out of his own pocket, but Shocker refused. He wanted a Yankee check for $1,500.

  “Shocker is a stubborn chap,” wrote John Kieran of the Times. “Urban took offense at a [Browns] rule which provided that the wives were not allowed to travel with the team. He walked off the mound over it, and appealed … from the league President to Commissioner Landis and he was preparing a brief to submit to the League of Nations … when he was traded to New York.”

  His illness continued at his St. Louis home during the off-season. His weight reportedly slipped to 115 pounds. But he didn’t tell the Yankees. He told them he was going to retire, take up aviation, and open a radio store.

  When he failed to report for spring training, and having not signed the new contract Barrow sent him, the Yankees suspended him.

  On March 8, Huggins said, “I’m not going to waste any more time or telegraph tolls on Shocker. He says he has quit and so I’ll take him at his word. He’s on our voluntarily retired list.

  “Naturally I could have used a pitcher like Shocker this year, what’s the sense of denying that obvious fact? But he is not indispensable, and his place on the roster will be taken by one of my young pitchers who otherwise would have been farmed out. Or maybe I’ll make Wilcy Moore a starting pitcher.”

  Shocker’s spot went to Hank Johnson (14–9), with some starts going to thirty-eight-year-old Stan Coveleski, a 210-game winner and future Hall of Famer who had recorded five 20-win seasons in his illustrious career.

  Shocker, meanwhile, perhaps feeling better, notified the commissioner in April that he wished to come off the voluntary retirement list. He began to work himself back into playing condition.

  But while pitching batting practice at Comiskey Park in May, he collapsed. It went unreported.

  He would pitch in only one game in New York, a two-inning relief effort in a Memorial Day game before seventy thousand fans. It would be his final major league appearance.

  During the July 4 weekend, he did an interview with Bill Corum in the Journal-American and opened up a bit.

  “I’ve had a bum heart for some time. You’ve seen me sitting up late at night in my Pullman berth. I couldn’t lie down. Choked when I did.”

  Corum asked if Huggins knew of his bad heart.

  “Oh sure,” he said.

  Speaking of his long-simmering demand for the $1,500 from the club, he told Corum, “It took me nearly four years, but I got it. My July 1 check squares the promise.”

  Then, tapping his heart, he said, “I’m going to Denver to fight this thing.”

  The Yankees released him on July 6.

  On September 9, he died of complications from pneumonia at the age of thirty-eight. The Yankees were to be in St. Louis on September 15, and the funeral was delayed until the entire Yankee team, along with many Browns, could attend. Hoyt, Gehrig, and Combs were among the pallbearers.

  “Without seeing the reports, it sounds like dilated cardiomyopathy,” said cardiologist Dr. Joe Plantania, who treated Joe Torre. “We sometimes call these one-pillow, two-pillow, three-pillow, or four-pillow cases, depending on how many the patient has to sleep on to breathe properly. Shocker sounds like a four-pillow case.”

  An autopsy showed that indeed his heart was greatly enlarged. He had been mysterious and courageous all at once, and the first of a number of 1927 Yankees to die young.

  DURING THE WINTER of 1927–28, the Yankees extended the grandstand in left field past the foul poles and on into the bleacher area, the first major renovation of the ballpark. The contractor was L.M. Neckermann and Son, who would also handle a 1937 expansion of the left-field grandstand. Included was ornate latticework that “finished” the edges of the structure, a design element that was removed in 1962 for reasons unclear. The park was also the setting for the filming of a silent Buster Keaton film, The Cameraman, in which Keaton’s character lugs his movie camera and tripod around town, including a stop in Yankee Stadium, where he pretends to hit an inside-the-park homer before the empty seats while the camera records it all. It provided a magnificent view of the five-year-old park, including the elevated train going past the bleachers.

  The 1928 season also saw the arrival of two other figures who would one day be Hall of Famers, one as a Yankee and the other for accomplishments elsewhere: Bill Dickey and Leo Durocher.

  Durocher would one day go to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the merits of his managerial career. He was one of baseball’s best-known celebrities during those years, Leo the Lip or Lippy, known even to non–baseball fans. He was a stylish sort, known for his well-tailored suits, four wives, show-business friends, and a propensity to get himself in trouble.

  The fact that his career began in 1925 as a shortstop for Hartford and ran through 1973 as manager of Houston made for an amazing journey. He got to St. Paul in 1927, which had become a bit of a Yankee feeder club, and was sold to the Yanks. His main benefactor was Huggins, who liked his aggressive style a lot. None of the players seemed to, especially when he was accused of stealing a watch belonging to Ruth and Gehrig’s 1927 World Series ring. It was thought that Ruth nicknamed him “the All-American Out.”

  But he got into 102 games as a twenty-two-year-old rookie in ’28, trying to unseat Koenig, and batted a credible .270. He’d play over 100 games the following year as well, but once Huggins was gone he had no allies left, and off he went. He was well suited to the Cardinals’ Gashouse Gang assemblage in the thirties, before he began his long managing career at Brooklyn.

  William Malcolm Dickey would make his Yankee debut on August 15, 1928. “We have bought a young man who is destined to be one of the greatest catchers in the game,” said Huggins.

  Born in Louisiana but raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, he would become the team’s regular catcher in 1929 after Grabowski broke a finger and would catch more than 100 games for thirteen years in a row, a record. The Yankees bought him from Jackson, Mississippi (where he was on option from Little Rock), for $12,500. What an investment that was. Durable, classy, a leader on the field, a brilliant catcher, and an outstanding hitter, he would not only be a key figure on eight championship teams but would in many ways set the standard of professionalism that would come to symbolize the Yankee organization. A lifetime .313 hitter over seventeen seasons, all with the Yankees, he would be in the debate with Mickey Cochrane and Gabby Hartnett over who was the greatest catcher of his time. Others would enter the debate later on, but in his day, Yankee fans knew they were watching an all-time great.

  IT COULDN’T HAVE been easy to be the ’28 Yankees, coming off a season already considered legendary.

  The Yanks won 101 games but didn’t clinch the pennant until the final weekend of the season, finishing two and a half games ahead of the Athletics. The key showdown for the season came in a standing-room-only doubleheader against the A’s at Yankee Stadium on September 9, with the Yanks just a half game ahead going in. They won the doubleheader behind a shutout from Pipgras in the opener; a grand slam by Meusel decided the nightcap. (In ’28 Meusel hit for the cycle for the third time in his career; he is still the only American Leaguer to achieve the feat three times.)

  The team’s sixth pennant under Huggins set the stage for a World Series rematch against the Cardinals, their 1926 opponents.

  The Yanks were hurting in the Series: Pennock was sidelined with a tired arm and Combs had a broken finger, leaving Cedric Durst and Ben Paschal to pla
y center; Lazzeri was nursing a bad arm, allowing Durocher to play the final innings at second; Ruth had a bad ankle. The team used only three pitchers, all hurling complete games—Hoyt, Pipgras, and Zachary, with Hoyt winning twice.

  These were still the Murderer’s Row Yankees, and they had no trouble knocking off the Cards in four straight. As if saving up for a grand finale, the fourth and final game featured Gehrig’s fourth homer of the Series (he had nine RBI) and three homers by the hobbled Ruth, giving Babe and Lou seven homers and 13 RBI in the four games. Ruth’s average was .625, Gehrig’s .545. It was as though a tornado had passed through St. Louis.

  The final blow came in the seventh inning of the last game. After Ruth and Gehrig had homered back-to-back, Meusel singled. Cards manager Bill McKechnie brought in forty-one-year-old Pete Alexander to once again face Lazzeri, restaging the big matchup of 1926.

  Lazzeri got his revenge with a double to left center in what would wind up being a four-run inning to set up the championship celebration. The Yankees had now won eight straight World Series games.

  On the victory train ride home, Huggins, who seldom overdid the alcohol (this was, after all, the Prohibition era), managed to overindulge just enough to lose his false teeth somewhere on the train. For what would be his last World Series, it was a small price to pay.

  The players voted $4,800 of their World Series money to Urban Shocker’s widow in St. Louis. All the players received wristwatches, since most had rings from ’27. Joe Dugan’s watch was also a parting gift; he was sold to the Braves on Christmas Eve after an injury-riddled season.

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to the 1929 season, Colonel Ruppert created a stir by announcing that the Yankees would wear “football-style” numbers on the backs of their jerseys for the season. Because Yankee Stadium was so large, distant fans could not always tell who was who. The numbers would help, and perhaps boost scorecard sales.

  “Colonel Ruppert’s innovation will be watched with interest and may some day be universally adopted if it is a help to the man who makes the game possible, the turnstile spinner,” noted the Reach Guide for 1929.

  And so the first assignment of numbers reflected their normal starting lineup: 1—Combs, 2—Koenig, 3—Ruth, 4—Gehrig, 5—Meusel, 6—Lazzeri, 7—Durocher, 8—Grabowski, 9—Bengough, 10—Dickey, 11—Pennock, 12—Hoyt, 14—Pipgras, and on through the coaches, 33—O’Leary, and 34—Fletcher. Huggins didn’t wear one. Nobody got unlucky 13 until Spud Chandler in 1937.

  The Indians and the Cardinals had experimented with numbers on their sleeves in years past, without it catching on. This new idea certainly took hold. By 1931 the rest of the league had all followed up, and the National League fell in line a year later.

  On a technicality, the Indians actually wore numbers first. The Yankees’ opener was rained out, and the Indians, who donned them on home uniforms only, played that day and got to claim the “first,” even if they had jumped in after the Yankees’ announcement. The idea belonged to the Colonel.

  ON SUNDAY, MAY 19, about fifty thousand people braved a bad forecast to see the Yanks take on Boston at the stadium. After just fifty minutes, with the Yanks leading 3–0 on homers by Ruth and Gehrig, a ferocious thunderstorm struck. There was no time for fans to duck out of the impending rain, and instead a stampede took hold, with fans in the right-field bleacher section clawing over each other to flee. Across the river at the Polo Grounds, the Giants had introduced the majors’ first public-address system on July 5. It could have been something that helped with crowd control on this day, but the Yankees didn’t have one until the 1936 World Series.

  At the gate leading to River Avenue, under the elevated train, the terrible tragedy unfolded. Two fans were killed and seventeen hospitalized. The dead were Eleanor Price, a seventeen-year-old student at Hunter College, and Joseph Carter, a sixty-year-old truck driver.

  According to the Herald-Tribune, Ruth, playing right, went into the stands and was found sitting on the ground, holding Ms. Price.

  An eyewitness said the gate was closed and guards refused to open it. Ruppert refuted that, and the district attorney, John McGeehan, agreed, calling it a “wild rush of people down a narrow chute.” “It is one of those unfortunate things that cannot be helped,” said Ruppert. “Sudden thunder showers have sent crowds rushing from the bleachers many times before. This time, the shower was unusually sudden, but even then, there would have been no casualties if persons in the crowd had not fallen down.”

  Ruth visited the injured at Lincoln Hospital and gave them signed baseballs.

  The death of Mr. Carter fit the general demographic of ballpark attendees at the time. Ms. Price’s death was notable in that seventeen-year-old coeds were not commonly seen at baseball games.

  ON SEPTEMBER 15, Waite Hoyt was knocked out early while pitching against Cleveland. Art Fletcher had to remove him from the game because Huggins was in the clubhouse, nursing an infected and painful carbuncle on his cheek.

  Hug was sitting next to Doc Woods’s training table with a heat lamp pointed at him.

  “What happened to you?” he asked Hoyt.

  “Oh, Joe Hauser hit one in the seats with a couple on, so here I am,” he said.

  Huggins asked Hoyt how old he was. Hoyt said he’d just turned thirty.

  “Tomorrow, go down and get your paycheck. You’re through for the season. You just weren’t in shape. Get in good shape this winter, come down next spring and have the year I know you can have.”

  The next day, Huggins was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection, often fatal.

  On Wednesday the twenty-fifth, with just six games left in the season, the Yankees were in Fenway Park. They were alerted that back in New York, the end might be near for their manager. Visitors at St. Vincent’s included Ruppert, Barrow, and their old scout and St. Paul owner Bob Connery. The three left for lunch and left behind Hug’s brother and sister-in-law, his sister Myrtle (with whom he lived), the wife of Babe Ruth’s agent, Christy Walsh, a minister, and a surgeon. Hug dropped into a coma and passed away at 3:16 P.M.

  Back at Fenway, the Red Sox alerted a groundskeeper to lower the flag to half staff as soon as a call came with the news. The flag was lowered in the third inning, but the game continued and no decision was made on informing the players or the fans. Some players figured it out.

  In the fifth, the Yankee players assembled in the dugout and were told the news. There was silence, and then Combs broke down and began to cry. Someone came into the dugout and approached Ruth for a comment but he was waved off.

  Before the sixth inning, the players of both teams were summoned to home plate, where they gathered with the umpires and removed their caps. The Red Sox public-address announcer lifted his megaphone and asked “for a minute of silent prayer in memory of Miller Huggins, manager of the Yankees, who has just died.”

  Not everyone could hear the announcement, and the news had to be spread back through the crowd. Finally, there was silence.

  They finished the game.

  The funeral was held on Friday the twenty-seventh at the Church of the Transfiguration, also known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East Twenty-ninth Street. The team came up from Washington, where they had played on Thursday, and then returned after the funeral to play Saturday. All Friday games in the majors were canceled.

  “I’ll guess I’ll miss him more than anyone,” speculated Gehrig. “Next to my father and mother he was the best friend a boy could have. He told me I was the rawest, most awkward rookie that ever came into baseball. He taught me everything I know.

  “He gave me my job. He advised me on salary. He taught me how to invest my money and because of him I have everything anybody could ask for in a material way. There never was a more patient or more pleasant man to work for. You can’t realize that he won’t join us again.”

  Ruth, who made Hug’s life miserable but who shared in his triumphs, said, “You know how I feel about it. He was my friend. He
was a great guy and I got a kick out of doing things that would help him. I am sorry he couldn’t win the last pennant he tried for. We all will miss him more every day.”

  Huggins was just fifty-one. His body was taken to Cincinnati for another service and for burial. In 1932, with his sister doing the unveiling, a monument was dedicated to Hug in center field by the flagpole, as Ruppert and Mayor Jimmy Walker looked on. It was modeled, to a fashion, after a monument at the Polo Grounds erected in 1921 for Eddie Grant, a Giants player who had been killed in the Great War. It would be the first plaque or monument for a Yankee, the start of a special part of Yankee culture.

  ART FLETCHER MANAGED THE Yanks for the remaining games of the lost season (the Yanks finished eighteen games out), and then the search was on for the new manager. One who wanted strong consideration was Ruth. Player-managers were common, and he wanted in. He was thirty-four, a sixteen-year veteran, and thought he’d earned the chance. He’d hit his 500th home run on August 11; it was time to think of his future. But Barrow and Ruppert wouldn’t give it a thought. “He can’t even manage himself” hovered in their conversations. Ruth was not happy.

  Barrow’s first choice was Donie Bush, who had managed the Pirates to their 1927 pennant. But Bush was already committed to managing the White Sox.

  Next it was Eddie Collins, but he chose to coach for Connie Mack and turned it down.

  Next it was Fletcher, who had once managed the Phillies. It hadn’t been a good experience and he said he’d never manage again. Fletch would continue to coach for New York until 1946.

  So the fourth choice was the winner, and it was Bob Shawkey, the mild-mannered Yankee veteran who had retired after the ’27 season but came back in ’29 to coach the pitchers.