Pinstripe Empire (13 page)

Yet none of this did much for the hapless ’14 team. Farrell and Devery were not making much money with baseball or any other business. Attendance was lower than the peak years at Hilltop. They were said to be “less chummy” then they had been; some said they weren’t even speaking. They were losing even more with the ill-fated Kingsbridge ballpark project, or with some scheme for a ballpark on a “floating island” off Manhattan.

After a late-season game, the two of them walked into the clubhouse and overheard Chance complaining about them. A losing manager complaining about owners not getting him better players is as old as baseball itself, but this time it became confrontational, and the players had to pull Chance and Devery apart.

It could not have helped matters that at this time, over in the National League, none other than George Stallings was leading his Boston Braves to a “miracle” pennant, coming from last to first in the second half of the season.

Another issue had been Farrell forgiving Ray Caldwell’s various fines for bad behavior, an undermining of Chance’s authority. Farrell had feared that Caldwell would jump to the Federal League if he didn’t get his money refunded, and he gave in. Chance was furious. Plus, Chance concluded that Arthur Irwin was just a lousy scout who hadn’t helped the team at all.

With the team in seventh place, Chance and Farrell worked out a parting of the ways. Chance wanted to be paid in full for his third year. Farrell responded with a diplomatic letter saying no:

Dear Frank: I received your letter yesterday but it was too late to send an answer to Washington. Of course you know it was your own proposition to give up the management of this club on Sept. 15 which I accept much against my wishes. Your request for full salary I cannot see my way clear to grant you, as I know you do not want to take money you do not earn. I will see you after the game.

Very truly yours, Frank J. Farrell.

This great figure of the game, who had won four pennants with the Cubs, could do nothing with this sorry team. It was an embarrassment all around after all the excitement following his hiring.

The remaining twenty games of the season would find the youngest player on the roster, twenty-three-year-old shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, taking over as manager, winning half his games and moving the team up to a sixth-place finish with 70 wins. (The Yankees also lost their postseason exhibition series to the Giants.) The Wooster, Ohio, native remains the youngest man to ever manage a major league team. It was a curious pick, but clearly leadership was seen in this lantern-jawed youngster, who worked up the nerve to ask Farrell for an extra $500 and got it.

I met Peckinpaugh in the early seventies when he was living near the Yankees’ spring training site in Fort Lauderdale. I had invited him to a spring training game, and although he declined, he did invite me to his home one evening.

It had been almost seventy years since he had been a Yankee manager, and he’d gone on to enjoy a nice seventeen-year big-league playing career followed by service with Cleveland as both manager and general manager, taking him up through 1946. He was a proud man, and in making small talk, I tossed out a compliment, saying, “You sure oughta be in the Hall of Fame, Mr. Peckinpaugh!”

That was his opening. “Whaddya mean, oughta be!” he said. And with that he shuffled into his bedroom, rummaged through his sock drawer, and came out with a folded and yellowed newspaper clipping from the twenties, long before the Hall of Fame had been established.

OUR MAN PECK: A HALL OF FAMER FOR SURE, said the headline.

I apologized at once for thinking that somehow he wasn’t in! This was all the proof he needed: Never mind what the Cooperstown folks thought. And we had a great evening together. He told me it was Chance who suggested he ask Farrell for the $500.

He had come to the Yankees in a trade from Cleveland in May 1913 and wound up putting in nine years at short for New York, becoming the team captain in ’14 and the only player from the 1915 club—taken on by new ownership—to make it to a Yankee World Series (1921). While only a .257 hitter in his nine seasons with the Yanks, he did enjoy a .305 season in 1919, which included a twenty-nine-game hitting streak.

With Chance gone, it was again time to take stock. Twelve seasons into
their history and the Yankees were no closer to contending than they had been at their birth. It was easy to conclude that this franchise was still one big flop.

“How much longer shall the American League allow a glaring business blunder to exist?” wondered a writer in
Baseball
magazine.

NOT LONG AFTER the 1914 World Series, Ban Johnson and his top aide James Price began to orchestrate the departure of Farrell and Devery and set up the sale of the team. Devery seemed to want out first; the pair had lost about half a million dollars on the franchise. A final issue between them involved Farrell’s securing a $50,000 loan from the league without informing Big Bill.

After twelve seasons, Johnson’s hope for a big-time attraction in New York had been a failure. It was time to start over. He needed new owners, men of means, men who would be taken more seriously than the gambler and the crooked cop. The game had matured, and the quality of ownership needed to reflect that.

Johnson was not only going to find new owners: He was going to provide the Yankees with a new manager, a new business manager, some new players, and plans for a new ballpark. It was to be one grand statement. Of course, at the same time it was going to be 1903 all over again.

Farrell, preparing to exit baseball (there was scant mention of Devery), said, “Certainly I am sorry to retire from the game which I love. But I feel that I have been repaid for all the efforts and disappointments. I confess that my luck as a promoter was not such as I had hoped. For the new owners, I have the warmest friendship.”

JACOB RUPPERT JR. was spending the fall and early winter of 1914 at the resort hotel in French Lick, Indiana where the wealthy would regularly converge to experience “the cure”—a vacation built around the miracle healing powers of the local mineral waters. It was the sort of thing that rich people did, and Jacob Ruppert qualified.

Born in New York City in 1867, Ruppert was the son of Anna and Jacob Ruppert, who had developed a great $30 million brewery on Third Avenue between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets in the German-speaking Yorkville section of Manhattan. His grandfather Franz, a Bavarian, had brought
his brewing skills to New York in 1851 and established the foundation of the family business, a modest beer garden and brewery at First and Forty-fifth.

Junior worked menial jobs and learned the business inside and out until he was made general manager in 1890. He was well prepared to one day succeed his father, but first came the distraction of politics. At twenty-two, he joined the staff of New York governor David Hill, where he took on the honorary title of colonel of the New York National Guard. He kept the position when Governor Roswell Flower assumed office in 1891, and was the principal speaker a year later when the great monument honoring the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the new world was erected at what became Columbus Circle. He was all of twenty-five.

With Tammany Hall backing, Ruppert was elected to Congress in 1898 out of New York’s Fifteenth Congressional District (later the district of Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Rangel), which to that point had normally voted Republican.

While in Congress, he served on the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and the Militia Committee. His first bill was intended to provide tariff relief to Puerto Rico, a newly annexed territory, which brought forth all sorts of questions about the extent of its relationship with the U.S. In a compromise, Ruppert’s bill passed, ultimately leading to no tariffs, a measure in place to this day. In his role on immigration and naturalization, he brought forth a petition to amend immigration procedures at the Port of New York on behalf of immigrant Jews.

He was reelected three times, serving eight years, before he declined to run in 1907. He thus retired undefeated and returned to help run the brewery, the principal product being Ruppert beer.

The brewery of George Ehret was the biggest in New York (Ruppert later bought it), with the Ruppert Brewery second, which probably made both of them among the top five breweries in the nation—sharing honors at various times with Schlitz, Seipp, Engel, Philip Best (later Pabst), and Ballantine. There were no “national” brands as we know them today. In 1917, Ruppert Brewery surpassed one million barrels annually and later peaked at one and a half million.

Jacob Sr. owned trotting horses, but the Colonel preferred thoroughbreds. He also bred champion Saint Bernards, owned yachts, had massive collections of rare first-edition books, jade, and porcelain, and lived in a fabulous fifteen-room mansion at 1120 Fifth Avenue. His twenty-five-room country
estate in Garrison, New York, was also the home to a large collection of monkeys. He had butlers and servants, maids and chauffeurs, the finest silver serving pieces, and a magnificently tailored collection of three-piece suits. He was the very definition of the well-bred fellow who joined all the right clubs and knew all the right people. In 1933, he helped to finance the exploration of Antarctica by Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, whose fleet of cargo vessels included the
Jacob Ruppert.

A lifelong bachelor, he frequently escorted Helen “Winnie” Weyant to social events; she was often at his side at his Fifth Avenue or Garrison homes. When he died, the
Times
obituary, perhaps mindful of rumors that accompanied lifelong bachelors, made a point of saying, “He was distinctly of the masculine type, and this was reflected in his business office, which was paneled in dark wood. There were no curtains. The only ornaments were two bronzes of American Indians, a bronze of an American eagle and a gold-fish aquarium. They all stood on marble pedestals.”

Ruppert eventually sold off his rare book collection, some buildings, and his racing and breeding interests, in part out of recognition that Prohibition would cut back on his brewery profits. He laid off very few employees and produced a legal “near beer” during its time. He sold his near beer at Yankee Stadium, and the brewery continued to other syrups, soda-bottling services, and a sweetener called Maltone. The closing of half the city’s breweries meant greater market share for Ruppert.

In 1915, Jacob Sr. died and the Colonel took over the family business, expanding it to 1.25 million annual barrels of Knickerbocker, Ruppert’s Extra Pale, and Ruppiner beer by 1917. Jacob Jr.’s younger brother George became vice president.

Sizing up the Colonel in a 1915 interview in
Baseball
magazine, their reporter said, “Col. Ruppert is in every sense a man of big business, quick of speech, decisive in his statements, yet courteous and discriminating in his treatment of the men who approach him in a continual stream on a thousand varied errands.”

Ruppert’s new business partner was Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, two years younger than Ruppert and a man clearly in need of a nickname. He would answer to Til and would sometimes be called Cap (his rank in the Spanish-American War while serving in Cuba) and later Colonel (his rank while serving in France during the Great War). When people wanted to refer to him and Ruppert together, it was the Colonels. If referring to one and not the other, it was the Colonel and the Captain.

While Ruppert looked like the sort of fellow who expected to be handed a towel each time he washed his hands, Huston looked more like a fellow who would give a quick glance toward the sink and decide he could skip it.

Both were season-ticket holders at the Polo Grounds but did not know each other. And so as Christmas 1914 approached, Huston set off for French Lick to meet his potential partner in this baseball investment. The meeting was arranged by John McGraw, who was a member of the Havana Club with Huston and the Lambs Club with Ruppert.

Huston, stout and outspoken, dowdier than the elegant Ruppert, was a civil engineer and, in his earlier years, a railroad developer in his father’s employ. He had made his fortune in Cuban land development after the Spanish-American War. He remained in Cuba for nearly a decade, developing harbor fronts and learning his way around the political minefields of the country.

McGraw mentioned him to Ruppert as a man who might make a good baseball owner (both would have preferred the Giants). They split the $460,000 sale price of the Yankees and pledged to go out and purchase better players, with Johnson lobbying the seven opposing teams to make some good ones available.

Johnson also believed that the Yankees would have a home of their own, ready to go, sometime during the 1916 season. It wasn’t going to be the property in Kingsbridge, however: That plan was now dead.

“Many said that we were buying a ‘pig in a poke,’ “ said Ruppert, “and that it was unwise to make such an investment with the Great War bearing down upon our country. At that time, they were certainly a poor team, but we believed that by acquiring a smart manager and good ball players, we could make the New York Yankees into a top-notch baseball club. We knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible to draw the fans away from the Giants, but we hoped that we could offer New York an answer to the otherwise unanswerable Giants.”

Ruppert spoke with a German accent that would become more pronounced as his voice rose. Some thought that surely he had been born in Germany, not realizing that he was a second-generation, American-born industrialist. In manner and bearing he looked the part of a man of prosperity and was every bit the sportsman, philanthropist, and patron of the arts—one of those arts being baseball.

“There was anti-German sentiment in America at that time,” notes K. Jacob Ruppert, great-grandson of Jacob Sr. “I’m sure he suffered considerably,
notwithstanding his strong political ties with Tammany Hall and Washington from his congressional days. The family has said that during this time he ‘dropped’ his German accent. He never really had one, but did speak German fluently. He just used the accent when it was favorable to do so.”