Pinstripe Empire

by Marty Appel

  It was announced on the very same day that Bob Meusel had been sold to Cincinnati, ending his ten-year run in the Yankee outfield.

  The Shawkey announcement was a well-received choice, but some felt he was too easygoing to handle the job.

  It was a transitional year, to be sure. The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and though the Ruppert family, fortunately, was not invested in the market, the economics of both the nation and of ticket-buying customers would be severely tested.

  Harry Frazee had died in ’29, but perhaps in his memory, on May 6 the Yanks robbed the Red Sox one more time, trading outfielder Cedric Durst for Red Ruffing. Ruffing, only 39–96 lifetime, a man who had lost 47 games in 1928–29, would go on to be a stalwart for fifteen years. Lefty Gomez also made the club as a twenty-one-year-old left-hander and would team with Ruffing for thirteen seasons and 408 victories between them.

  Ruth, pouting but still producing, went out and hit three homers in Philadelphia on May 21, the only time he ever hit three in a regular-season game as a Yankee.

  On June 2, before playing an exhibition game in Cincinnati against Meusel, Durocher, and the Reds, the Yankees visited Spring Grove Cemetery and placed wreaths at Miller Huggins’s grave.

  On July 4, the Yankees dropped a doubleheader in Washington. Fans were starting to realize this season might not be working out. One who actually cried that day was a little baby born in Rocky River, Ohio, named George Michael Steinbrenner III. The future impatient owner was born in the midst of a seven-game losing streak.

  Three weeks after the Ruffing deal, they sent Hoyt and Koenig to Detroit and installed Lyn Lary at short. Ben Chapman replaced Dugan at third.

  Jimmie Reese, born James Herman (“Hymie”) Soloman, also saw time in the outfield. He would much later in life become a beloved coach with the Angels, and another who loved talking about rooming with Babe Ruth’s suitcase. His signing, and his being Jewish, were hardly noted. (The first Jewish Yankee was a 1905 pitcher named Phil Cooney, born Cohen.)

  Much more attention was paid to Detroit’s signing of the Bronx’s Hank Greenberg, who would become the greatest Jewish hitter in history. A first baseman, he saw his path blocked by Lou Gehrig and turned down a Yankee offer for a faster path to the majors.

  Couple the player moves with the first year of the Great Depression and the nervousness and uncertainty hovering over the business of baseball, and it was not an easy time for Shawkey to take over.

  Still, in a year that the major league batting average was .296, the Yanks batted .309. Ruth, now earning his peak of $80,000 a year, also took the mound for the last game of the season and beat Boston 9–3, pitching a complete game. Ruppert, addressing Babe’s salary, said, “This is financial madness. There is no $80,000 player even with the Babe in the field. There never again will be an $80,000 player.”

  The Yanks finished a noncontending third, and Shawkey was out after just one season.

  I knew Shawkey late in his life, and I could see why people liked him so much. He was a gentleman. One day I asked him about his brief stint as manager.

  “I got screwed,” he said. “They gave Huggins four years before he won his first pennant. They gave McCarthy two. Me, I had one year and they fired me. I would have won in ’31. I would have won all those pennants McCarthy won, and I’d still be going … I might have won all those pennants Stengel won too.”

  He meant it. He felt genuinely wronged. It was sad to see the old fellow’s hurt feelings come pouring out as they did that day.

  Shawkey would manage Jersey City in ’31, Scranton in ’32 and ’33, and would return to the Yankees organization in 1934 as manager of their top farm team, Newark.

  JOE MCCARTHY WAS no fourth choice to succeed Shawkey. He was a highly regarded, pennant-winning manager with the Cubs, and before that with Louisville, where he’d managed Combs.

  Warren Brown, the Chicago sports columnist, bumped into Barrow at a prizefight in New York in September of 1930. He shared with Barrow his unpublished knowledge that McCarthy was looking to move on. McCarthy felt that Cubs owner Bill Wrigley wanted to install Rogers Hornsby in the job, and McCarthy wanted to walk before he was fired.

  “You’ll never get anyone better than McCarthy,” said Brown to Barrow. Prophetic words.

  McCarthy resigned on September 25, just before the season ended. At the World Series, Barrow sent Krichell to talk to Joe; a meeting was arranged at Ruppert’s Fifth Avenue apartment. There, a five-year, $30,000-per-year contract was agreed upon.

  Again Babe was passed over without much consideration. Ruth and McCarthy would never have a close relationship. But then again, neither did Ruth and Huggins. And for that matter, neither did Ruth and Gehrig, over some slight involving their wives that occurred after Lou married in 1933. And Mrs. Ruth didn’t speak to Mrs. McCarthy.

  McCarthy, forty-four, was a minor league infielder for fifteen years, never once playing in a major league contest. He’d managed for ten years in the minors (including seven at Louisville) before being hired by the Cubs in 1926. He won the National League pennant with them in 1929 and finished second in 1930. Some felt Shawkey deserved another year, but few questioned the selection of McCarthy.

  Joe made his home in Tonawanda, outside Buffalo, New York. He had his prejudices, including one against southern players, whom he considered hot-tempered and defiant. “They’re all moonshiners back there,” he told Barrow. “And they’re just naturally against the law. They resent any kind of rules or discipline.”

  McCarthy brought a work ethic to the Yankees that had not previously been attempted. The ballpark, he felt, was a place of business. Players were not to arrive unshaven or in sloppy dress. They were provided with three uniforms so that one would always be dry-cleaned and immaculate. (In keeping with tradition, the players had to pay for their uniforms, approximately $30 a set, which was refunded at the end of the season when they turned them in.)

  Furthermore, with Ruppert’s blessing, the team traveled in style. Where most teams used a single Pullman car, with the regulars sleeping on the lowers and the reserves on the uppers, the Yankees reserved two cars, always in the rear so as to be undisturbed, and everyone had a lower berth. The manager, his coaches, and trainer had full compartments. The players appreciated the privacy; in an era before air-conditioning, they would enjoy playing bridge in their underwear as the train journeyed to its next destination.

  McCarthy himself would wear a long-sleeved jersey, a style that continued among Yankee managers through Stengel’s early years. The team would wear jackets to the hotel dining halls, even for breakfast, and be seated by 8:30. McCarthy eventually banned card playing. He didn’t want the players thinking about card games or the losses they were suffering when their focus needed to be on the game of the day.

  With Gehrig now a mature veteran and Dickey a natural leader and wise beyond his years, the personality of the team began to shift to a more corporate style, rather than the good-time days of the Ruth era. That era wasn’t done by any means—Babe and “Marse Joe” would be together for four seasons. But this was now McCarthy’s team, and his ways were not Ruth’s ways.

  CHARLEY “RED” RUFFING and Vernon “Lefty” Gomez were a fine inheritance from Shawkey.

  Gomez was more of a craftsman on the mound; Ruffing more of a workhorse.

  Lefty, born in Rodeo, California, was purchased from San Francisco in 1929 and assigned to St. Paul in ’30 under Bob Connery’s watch. Just twenty-one, he was very thin, maybe 160 pounds on his six-foot-one frame, but he threw hard. His father was born in Spain and his mother in Ireland, so while not Latin American, he could be called the first Hispanic star of the Yankees. A writer once erroneously reported that he was Mexican, which tended to get picked up many times over the years in biographical sketches of him.

  Gomez’s teammates loved him. He had a marvelous, self-deprecating sense of humor and could get away with teasing even the biggest stars on the team. He always credited his outfielders for run
ning down his mistakes, his relief pitchers for saving his wins, and his hitting for being “unappreciated.” He was a terrible hitter, but an example of his humor came when Carl Hubbell struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin in order in an All-Star game—then allowed a single to Dickey before fanning Gomez.

  “That Dickey,” he’d say. “If he’d only struck out too, my name would have been included among all the great hitters he struck out in a row.”

  Then there was the time Gomez threw a double-play grounder to Lazzeri, standing some twenty feet from second base, instead of shortstop Frank Crosetti, who was on the base. “Why me?” asked Lazzeri in a quick mound conference.

  “Tony, all I have read in the papers lately is about how smart you are. I just wanted to see what you’d do with the ball when you didn’t expect it.”

  I once had to bring a 1932 team photo into the clubhouse to get Pete Sheehy to identify all the players for me. “That would be the year that Gomez and Ruth showed up late for the picture,” he recalled. “No telling where those two were.” He was right. Babe and Lefty, in the middle of row two, obviously just threw their jerseys over their street clothes and ran out for the photo. Their jerseys clearly hang out over their pants, no visible belts. It appears that the Babe may have taken Lefty under his wing for a late night.

  Ruffing, from Granville, Illinois, lost four toes on his left foot in a mining accident when he was fifteen. Had it been his right foot, he almost certainly could never have competed in major league baseball. One might never have guessed he’d become the winningest right-hander in team history (only southpaw Whitey Ford, in 1965, would surpass him) and the winningest World Series pitcher, with seven victories, until that too was broken by Ford.

  Ruffing, best known to fans as Red but to insiders as Charley, would later reveal that he pitched most of his career with a sore shoulder. “It hurt so much I’d keep going to doctors. But I wouldn’t tell the ballclub. They’d have traded my tail out of there. So I had to spend my own money. I’d pull into a town, pull down the telephone book and look under chiropractors for a likely looking name.”

  Unlike Gomez, he was also a terrific hitter, often called upon by McCarthy to pinch-hit. A converted outfielder, he was a .269 lifetime hitter with 36 home runs, and he batted as high as .364, in 1930, his first year with the club.

  When I would be responsible for Old-Timers’ Day, Gomez was always a delight, and he would bring along his wife, Broadway actress June O’Dea. Sometimes known as El Goofy, Gomez remained on the baseball scene in his later years, working for Rawlings sporting goods. Ruffing, on the other hand, would grumpily refuse to come because the invitation did not include travel expenses for wives. This was consistent with his annual salary disputes with the Yankees, including one in 1937 in which he wanted to be paid an extra $1,000 for his good hitting. He wound up sitting home until May.

  His last baseball job was as pitching coach for the woeful 1962 Mets under Casey Stengel.

  Chapter Fourteen

  MCCARTHY HEADED FOR ST. PETERSBURG for his first Yankee training camp, accompanied by a new trainer, Earle “Doc” Painter, and a new coach, Jimmy Burke, to replace Charlie O’Leary. Joe would initially coach third himself. Burke had been McCarthy’s minor league manager at Indianapolis when McCarthy was a struggling infielder back in 1911. Joe had four pitching mounds added to the training site so relief pitchers wouldn’t throw off game-like “mounds.” He eliminated lunch from training; only two meals a day.

  The Yanks’ new practice field was now known as Miller Huggins Memorial Field.

  On the way north to open the season, the Yankees stopped in Chattanooga for an exhibition game with the Lookouts, a Southern Association team, where a local seventeen-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig on six pitches in the first inning to earn a place in baseball lore.

  McCarthy also had a new infielder, Joe Sewell, the onetime replacement for Ray Chapman in Cleveland and now, moving to third, a fine number-two hitter who hardly ever struck out. Sewell, a University of Alabama product, had been released by the Indians and signed with New York as a free agent. Now thirty-two, he would give the Yanks three seasons at third, make 1,753 plate appearances, and would strike out only 15 times. His ability to put bat on ball was uncanny. In the last nine seasons of his career, he never reached double figures in strikeouts; in ’32, he would strike out only three times in 576 appearances. There has never been a contact hitter quite like Joe Sewell.

  McCarthy coaxed 94 wins out of his ’31 Yanks, but it was still not good enough to unseat the Athletics, and they settled for second place. He got 37 wins from Gomez and Ruffing, with Lefty winning 21 at the age of twenty-two.

  Outfielder Ben Chapman stole 61 bases, the first of three years in a row he would lead the league. This was the highest total in the league since 1920, and the most on the Yankees since 1914. Chapman “did more to revive the art of base running than any other individual player in ten years,” noted the Spalding Guide.

  Gehrig finally tied Ruth for the homer championship with 46 (aided by a six-game homer streak in late August), but lost a homer in April when base-runner “Broadway” Lyn Lary (whose 107 RBI, in 1931 remains a Yankee shortstop record) ran to the dugout instead of heading home. Gehrig, circling the bases, was ruled out for passing him. Still, he hit .341 and drove in 184 runs, an American League RBI record. Along the way, Ruth belted his 600th homer.

  Ruppert was pleased. McCarthy let it be known that to him, second place wasn’t good enough.

  Attendance was off about a quarter million, reflecting an adjustment to the Great Depression that the whole baseball industry would feel throughout the thirties, as the game did its best to provide affordable entertainment and present an attractive product to cash-strapped fans. The effects were surely felt. National unemployment would reach nearly 25 percent. There were about five thousand apple sellers working New York City streets. In ’33 Yankee attendance would fall under 750,000, and in ’35 under 660,000, an average of just 10,436 per date. (They played fourteen home doubleheaders that year.)

  On September 24, the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers played a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds to aid the city’s unemployed. More than forty-four thousand turned out to see Brooklyn beat the Giants in the first game, a series of relay races, throwing and running and fungo-hitting contests between games (the latter won by Ruth), and then it was Brooklyn vs. the Yankees in the second game, with the Yankees declared the champions and $48,135 raised for the charity.

  On October 20, in the northeast corner of dust bowl–ridden Oklahoma, a baby boy was born. His dad, a big fan of the Athletics’ catcher Mickey Cochrane, decided to name his son Mickey Mantle.

  BRANCH RICKEY BEGAN the farm system for major league teams to develop prospects more cost-effectively, with the parent team’s oversight. It was seen by Rickey as better than purchasing players from independent minor league operators. St. Paul had been an accommodating partner for the Yanks in securing players, thanks to their relationship with Connery, but by 1932 Barrow was seeing the merits of Rickey’s innovation. Although not as strong a proponent of the system as Rickey (he loved tryout camps run by Krichell), he saw the game trending that way and went with it.

  Ruppert was all for the new system. “We paid $103,000 for Lyn Lary and Jimmie Reese and that deal has taught me a lesson,” he said.

  To implement the system, Barrow hired George Weiss, who, while operating New Haven, had survived the train wreck that took Bill Donovan’s life. Weiss had proven himself a tough operator and had even battled Barrow over an exhibition game at his park, for which Babe Ruth failed to show up. It was the only traveling exhibition game Ruth ever missed, and it embarrassed Weiss in front of his customers. He let Barrow know it and withheld the Yankees’ money.

  By the 1931 Winter Meetings, Weiss was general manager of the International League’s Baltimore Orioles. Barrow was sitting with Ruppert in the hotel lobby when he spotted Weiss, nudged Ruppert on the
shoulder, and said, “That’s our guy.”

  Weiss, thirty-seven, born in New Haven and a graduate of Yale, was all business and hardworking. He would spend twenty-eight years with the Yankees, eventually succeeding Barrow as general manager. A tough negotiator, he was no favorite of the players. But he was a tireless employee who hired good scouts and pushed the right buttons.

  The Yankees purchased the Newark Bears franchise in 1932 and renamed their ballpark Ruppert Stadium. They added the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland Oaks in 1935 for three years, and the Kansas City Blues of the American Association in 1937, also calling their park Ruppert Stadium.

  That original Yankee farm team in Newark featured George Selkirk, Red Rolfe, and Johnny Murphy. Shawkey managed them in 1934, and before the thirties concluded, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller, and Babe Dahlgren were also maturing there. The Oakland team produced Spud Chandler, Ernie Bonham, and Joe Gordon. Kansas City would deliver Phil Rizzuto, Johnny Lindell, and Johnny Sturm. It was an affirmation of a good farm system taking hold.

  By 1932, the Yankees’ farm system also included teams in Springfield, Massachusetts; Binghamton, New York; Cumberland, Maryland; and Erie, Pennsylvania. The system would grow to as large as twenty-four teams after World War II before settling into a more manageable seven or eight clubs.

  The Bears, wearing hand-me-down pinstriped uniforms and playing just a short train ride from Manhattan’s Penn Station, were almost joined at the hip to the parent club. It was easy for Weiss and Barrow to watch players there anytime they felt like it. From 1932 to 1942, the Bears won the International League pennant seven times and are still considered one of the great minor league franchises in history.

  “When I lived in Newark,” recalls Yankee fan Irv Welzer, “we would get seven games at Ruppert Stadium for a nickel, all the tickets printed on perforated paper, torn off one at a time. Now that was a terrific bargain!”