Pinstripe Empire (12 page)

The final game at Hilltop Park was played on October 5, the same day the Giants played the Superbas in the final game at Washington Park, prior to the opening of Ebbets Field. This would be the last Highlander game: The team would officially become the Yankees in 1913.

The opponents were the Washington Senators, now managed by one Clark Griffith. Remembering all the pomp and pageantry of the 1903 opener could only have been painful to people who had hoped for so much more from this franchise. And this final game was one of baseball’s sad stories.

Barely five thousand fans turned out to see the 8–6 New York victory. After hearing other scores that rendered this game meaningless in the standings, Griffith sent Nick Altrock and Germany Schaefer into the game, two “coaches” who were really clowns, generally assigned to entertain the fans with zaniness in pregame warm-ups.

Altrock made his only appearance of the season that day, first announcing himself as “batting for Ty Cobb,” then pitching a loony inning in which he was charged with the loss. He was relieved by old man Griffith, forty-two, who pitched in his first game in three years and allowed a home run to Chase, the only batter he faced. It was the last one hit at the Hilltop. At that point, Altrock took out Griffith (his manager) and called on Schaefer, an
infielder, who took the mound for two thirds of an inning, his first pitching appearance in fifteen years as a big leaguer.

It might have passed for an exhibition game, but it was an official league game made farcical by Griffith’s actions—and perhaps a bit of payback for perceived slights in New York four years before. After his firing, Griffith surely noticed that his successors—Elberfeld, Stallings, Chase, and Wolverton—had not distinguished themselves.

And that was the end of Hilltop Park and the Highlanders. Ten seasons, best remembered for a wild pitch by Chesbro that ruined their only shot at a pennant. Their best player may have been throwing games, their chief scout was a bigamist, the owners skirted the law, and maybe the best thing you could say about the ballpark was that it never burned down.

No band played “Auld Lang Syne” as the fans exited one last time. In 1914 the park would be torn down, and in 1928 replaced by a magnificent hospital complex, Columbia Presbyterian. One can still see the hospital today, up on the hilltop, across the Harlem River from Yankee Stadium. It is two miles and a century away.

In 1993, the Yankees placed a bronze plaque, shaped like home plate, in the spot where home plate would have been in 1903, commemorating the original ballpark. In a ceremony attended by Highlander pitcher Red Hoff, the last surviving Hilltop Park player (1911–13), the plaque was placed in the courtyard garden just outside the Presbyterian Building of the medical complex, where the Yankees of the twenty-first century send their injured players. The garden includes the area where right field—still level—had been.

FOUR QUESTIONS FACED THE YANKEES as 1913 dawned: who would manage them, what they would be called, where they would play, and, above all, how they would improve.

On November 6, Farrell fired Wolverton from his only major league managing job. He returned to the PCL the following year, and when his managing career ended, he settled in Oakland and sold automobiles until his death in 1937. Farrell, meanwhile, set about looking for someone new.

As for a nickname, that was the easy part. “Yankees” was now in common use, and the team no longer played in New York’s highlands.

But where
would
they play? While Farrell had big plans for his park on Broadway in the Bronx, it was a long way from being a reality, and there was already some community opposition to the work ahead, especially filling in the creek. Washington Park in Brooklyn was now available, but that was too far from the team’s fan base. It would be like starting over. The Polo Grounds it would be.

Giants owner John Brush, long in failing health and wheelchair ridden, attended the 1912 World Series, appearing even more feeble following a September auto accident. After the Series, he went west by train for recovery in better weather, but died en route. He was succeeded as club president by his son-in-law Harry Hempstead, who would become the Yankees’ landlord at, ahem, Brush Stadium.

So they would haul their clubhouse safe and equipment and move down to Coogan’s Bluff. (James Coogan owned the land.) Short-term, maybe a year. The detente between the Yankees and the Giants, brokered over the
1911 fire, easily allowed this accommodation. And for the Yankees it meant express trains from Wall Street delivering fans to a park with a greater capacity, with perhaps more celebrities attending their games (though the Giants attracted most of the bigger fish). And of course playing in a newly reconstructed, state-of-the-art facility gave them a more “big-league” home.

The Polo Grounds wound up being the Yankees’ home for ten years, as long as Hilltop Park was. It was never easy being guests in someone else’s home for so long. The Giants enjoyed the rent, which ranged from $50,000 to $100,000 as the years passed, but the field took a beating. By September of each year, there wasn’t much grass left in the diamond. There were few off days to tend to it.

The Polo Grounds was horseshoe shaped: Center field was 460 feet from home, and the foul lines were just 277 to left and 258 to right, making for a very odd configuration.
Baseball
magazine called it “the greatest ballpark in the world,” “beyond imagination of the baseball enthusiast of the past. It is built entirely of steel, marble and reinforced concrete, and it is fireproof.” (Elevated outfield clubhouses, along with a second-deck outfield grandstand, were added in 1923.)

Part of the rebuild, as a gift to the city by the Giants, was an eighty-step concrete stairway from the high reaches of Coogan’s Bluff to the low ground where the park sat. In 2010, the Yankees and San Francisco Giants both contributed to the restoration of this staircase, which is all that remains there now.

When Farrell heard that “the Peerless Leader,” Frank Chance, was in a salary dispute with Chicago Cubs management, he found his manager. Chance, the man who had won four pennants with the Cubs, was coming to the Yankees.

Johnny Evers, Chance’s second baseman (they were two thirds of the poetically celebrated Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield), said, “A man who can get together a team that has won 530 games in five years and lost but 235 is, in my opinion, the peer of all leaders.”

Wrote
Sporting Life,
“If you had informed anybody five years ago that in 1913 Chance would be managing the cellar team of the American League you would have been hauled to the batty bungalow. There several doctors armed with all sorts of torture prongs would have picked out your brains and dried them before a gas heater.”

Make no mistake about it, this was big. This was the kick that this valuable franchise in the biggest city in America needed.

ITS MASTER STROKE … LANDING CHANCE IS AMERICANS BIGGEST TRIUMPH … PEERLESS LEADER TO DIVIDE WITH JOHN MCGRAW WORSHIP OF FANDOM IN NEW YORK CITY, headlined the
Sporting News.

Added
Baseball
magazine in a headline to an eleven-page story on the move from the Cubs: A RED LETTER DAY IN THE TRIUMPHANT CAREER OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE! They called it “the greatest deal in baseball history.”

Chance issued a statement for the press:

The contract existing between Mr. Farrell and myself is for three years. The terms of this contract have been widely discussed, and I may say they were entirely satisfactory to us both. I can give little information as to the make-up of my team until I have had an opportunity to try out the material at hand.

We shall train this season in Bermuda. I believe it will offer an almost ideal climate. As for my connection with a new organization, I can say that I always wanted to work for the American League, and have long considered New York the best town to work in. I shall give my players a fair and equal opportunity and the good people of New York may count to the full upon my giving them the best I have in me.

Chance wanted the team named simply “New York,” and to display it on their home uniforms just that way. But “Yankees” won the day. The fifteen-year veteran had been an elite player, but he was really done a year earlier following a beaning that caused him great headaches. He played just a dozen games for the Yanks. He’d been a player-manager since he was twenty-eight, a total of eight seasons. In his first full season in charge, the Cubs had won 116 games, producing the highest winning percentage in baseball history. And he was a symbol of success, residing in the off-season at his “Cub Ranch” in Glendora, California.

Sportswriter Joe Vila would again play an intermediary role in securing Chance, first reporting it as a rumor in late December of 1912. Farrell gave Chance a three-year deal at an almost unimaginably high $25,000 a year. (It may have been less, and enhanced with attendance incentives.)

That left just one big question: how to improve on the 1912 disaster. The team didn’t make any great additions that year. A twenty-two-year-old shortstop named Roger Peckinpaugh came over from Cleveland on May 25, and on August 20 they outbid a couple of other teams and paid $12,000 for a
hot Baltimore third baseman named Fritz Maisel. Ed Sweeney, the team’s regular catcher since ’08, was really the only regular to last through the season without turning over his position. Forty-four different players wore the uniform that year. The team had a new trainer in Charlie Barrett, succeeding Harry Lee.

The biggest addition may have been the subtraction of Hal Chase. Almost at once, Chance and Chase clashed. Chase took to making fun of Chance’s mannerisms, including his being deaf in one ear. Chance began to scrutinize Chase’s play in minute detail, suspecting that the rumors around him were true. He came to believe that the man was throwing games.

“I want to tell you fellows what’s going on,” Chance told a couple of sportswriters, including Fred Lieb. “Did you notice some of the balls that got away from Chase today? They weren’t wild throws; they were only made to look that way. He’s been doing that right along. He’s throwing games on me!”

Hal Chase’s days as a Yankee were done. He was batting in the low .200s. A few times, although he threw left-handed, he even played second base, with Chance playing first. On July 1, Chase was traded to the White Sox for Babe Borton and Rollie Zeider. Borton, in the lingo of the day, was an “onion,” an insignificant player. Zeider suffered from bunions on his feet. It was too much to resist. Mark Roth, writing in the
Globe
, said the Yankees had “traded Chase to Chicago for a bunion and an onion.” Everyone loved that line.

Chase, the former manager, the most popular player in the team’s history, had put in nine years for the Yankees, batted .284, and stole 248 bases—and maybe a few victories—along the way. His hitting improved in the National League: He won a batting title with the Reds in 1916, but in 1918 the Reds charged him with throwing games, and he went before the National League president for a hearing. He played one more year, 1919, and then he was done. He wasn’t banned from the game with the Black Sox (all of whom played in 1920), but his reputation was such that it was time to go, and everyone knew why.

Chase never really denied his gambling habits, and after his playing days often spoke of them with regret. Still, he was a baseball outcast. He returned to California, worked menial jobs, and died penniless and repentant in 1947 at the age of sixty-four, hopeful of clearing his name but realizing that it wasn’t likely to happen.

Despite all these changes, the 1913 Yankees moved up only to seventh
place, losing 94 games. They lost their first seventeen games at the Polo Grounds and didn’t have a home victory until June 7. They were in last place all summer. They hit only eight home runs. Farrell was grinding his teeth. A $25,000 manager, and now this.

The Yanks drew 357,551, while the Giants won another pennant and led the majors in attendance with 630,000. It was also clear to Farrell that his great new ballpark was not going to be ready for 1914, and so he needed another season of shared quarters. The Giants were fine with it. The rent checks were clearing.

1914 AGAIN FAILED to provide any new star-quality players while the Federal League began its first of two seasons, with a team in Brooklyn, the Tip-Tops, playing at Washington Park. Said Jimmy Gilmore, the president of the Feds, “New York is the largest city in the country and a great baseball city, but we are aware of the conditions. The New York Americans have never succeeded in getting more than a foothold in New York, as New Yorkers can see nothing but their Giants. We would not place a team in Manhattan and know enough about baseball to know that we cannot get New York fans to go to the suburbs while the Giants and New Yorks are playing in the Polo Grounds.”

Fritz Maisel, perhaps the most heralded player on the team, stole 74 bases in 1914, still the most ever for a third baseman. It would be the single-season Yankee record for seventy-one years, until Rickey Henderson swiped 80 in 1985. The Yankees, of course, became known for power hitting and never really sought base stealers.

Chance took to relying on his many superstitions, like rubbing a rabbit’s foot on his players’ bats. It usually failed to work. The Peerless Leader had peers after all.

Infielder Angel Aragon, from Havana, Cuba, came up on August 20 and got into six games. He would be the first Latin American player in the franchise’s history. (A more substantial contributor would be Cuban outfielder Armando Marsans, who played for the Yankees in 1917 and 1918 at the end of an eight-season career, appearing in 62 games.) Aragon and Marsans were, of course, light-skinned Cubans; no dark-complexioned players would enter the major leagues until 1947 or join the Yankees until 1955.

Then there was catcher Pius “Pi” Schwert, a Wharton School product
who got into a dozen games over two years. Schwert wasn’t much of a baseball player, but in 1938 he would be elected to his first of two terms in the U.S. Congress, representing the Buffalo area. He remains the only Yankee player ever elected to Congress.