Pinstripe Empire (19 page)

“Many players get hurt in baseball,” said Ruppert, “and I don’t see how they can hold Mays responsible for yesterday’s unfortunate accident. There is no ground for any belief that Mays hit Chapman intentionally. There is not the slightest ground in my estimation for any such action as is reported as being planned by the Boston and Detroit players.”

Mays’s lack of popularity did not help his situation. Four teams, the Red Sox, Tigers, Browns, and Senators, spoke out for going on strike in any game pitched by Mays if he wasn’t thrown out of baseball. Cobb was the leader of the Tigers in this movement.

No one struck, but some reasonable voices thought he might just take the rest of the season off to deal with the emotional incident. Mays wasn’t having any of that. He did agree, though, when Cap Huston asked him not to travel to Cleveland.

The Indians mourned their fallen shortstop and went out and won the pennant “for Chappie.” Umpires began supplying clean baseballs for pitchers from that point on, thinking scuffed balls more easily went out of control and were harder to see. Mays went on to lead the Yankees with 26 victories. But his reputation was made. He would forever be known as the man who killed a batter with a pitch during a game. He would be booed wherever he appeared on the road. He put up borderline Hall of Fame numbers but never got serious consideration.

“My attitude toward the future is very simple,” he said in a story written for
Baseball
magazine. “I have played baseball for all there was in it. I have tried to make myself a successful pitcher and within reasonable limits have succeeded. Even my enemies will admit that. Unfortunately for me, I have never seemed to make friends easily and many people with whom I come in contact have developed a dislike for me … I have been told that I lack tact, which is probably true … If you wish to believe that a man is a premeditated murderer there is nothing to prevent it. I cannot prevent it, however much I may regret it, if people entertain any such idea of me.”

THE 1920 YANKEES won a team-record 95 games, but although favored to win the pennant, finished third, three games out of first. No one was critical; the pennant winners, Cleveland, had become the sentimental favorites after Chapman’s death.

And the Ruth “experiment”? What a success that was! Besides smashing attendance records and stirring excitement (even making a silent movie called
Headin’ Home
), the Babe delivered 54 home runs, including some of the longest ever seen, breaking his own mark of 29 while batting .376, a team record. Throughout his career, whether in spring training, barnstorming, in the regular season, or in the World Series, people were always talking about “the longest ball ever hit in this ballpark” and the thrill of “going to the game and seeing the Babe smash one.” At the Polo Grounds they had to paint white lines on the face of the upper deck to help umpires determine fair or foul.

His slugging percentage was an unimaginable .847, still a major league record, and his on-base percentage equally unimaginable at .532. His OPS—on-base plus slugging—was 1.3791, which stood for eighty-two years as the highest ever until broken by Barry Bonds in what was assumed to be a steroid-aided season. (His 1.1636 career mark remains supreme, even if players of his era were unaware of the stat.) While his strikeouts were legendary and almost as dramatic as his long hits, by today’s standards they were small. He never struck out 100 times in a season—his high was 93—but he did walk over 100 times in twelve different years. Unsophisticated fans, not alerted to watching the fielders, would think every pop-up, every fly ball was going out, and if he’d hit the ball into the air, the reaction from the stands was a spine-tingling “
Ohhhhhh! Ahhhhhh!
”

And all this was taking place without anyone really believing that the
ball had been juiced up. After all, no one else’s output was dramatically increasing. His 54 homers were more than the total of any
team
in the majors except for the Phillies, managed by Gavvy Cravath, who had 64. Cravath, the career home run leader at the time, hit his 119th and final home run that year, making him an easy target for Ruth in ’21.

After the season, Harry Sparrow’s front-office role was filled by none other than Barrow, Ruth’s Boston manager, the man who had moved him to the outfield. Barrow would join the Yankees as business manager, and it was on to glory and the Hall of Fame from there.

As for Huggins and Huston, well, Cap Huston had become a fan. Not so much of Hug’s, but of Yankee baseball and Babe Ruth. He pretty much kept out of the business side now and just sat back and enjoyed his investment.

THE YANKEES AGAIN LOST THE pennant in 1920. Huston was certain that his choice, Wilbert Robinson, was a better manager than Huggins. But he’d lost that battle and was publicly quiet on the subject, knowing that Hug was coming back.

Shortly after the Brooklyn Robins won the 1920 World Series, with most of the year spent in chatter about whether the 1919 one had been cooked, baseball took the bold step of retiring the National Commission and seeking a commissioner with broad oversight—a single figure not tied to any ball-club, with total authority to do what was necessary to restore the game’s integrity.

The movement had its roots with the Carl Mays case, when the autonomous authority of Ban Johnson was first compromised. The trio of defectors from the AL—the Yankees, Red Sox, and White Sox—remained opposed to “BanJo” and were prepared to undermine him as the decision on a commissioner approached. They joined the eight National League owners in supporting the so-called Lasker Plan to overhaul the game’s hierarchy.

Albert D. Lasker, a Chicago lawyer, had a vision of a new three-man panel, one mightier than the other two, all of them “civilians” with no conflicts of interest. There was even talk of the three AL opponents of Johnson moving into a twelve-team National League, the closest the Yankees would ever come to changing leagues.

On November 12, the owners instead chose federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as the game’s first commissioner. The battle lost, the Johnson loyalists fell in line behind the new authority. Ruppert was the most prominent
figure in the group photo hovering over Landis as he signed his contract.

His first act was to ban for life the eight Black Sox players who, although acquitted in court of charges to fix the Series, were now untouchables in baseball.

The White Sox wouldn’t win another pennant for forty years.

EDWARD GRANT BARROW’S arrival at the Yankees’ Forty-second Street office in the fall of 1920 marked the beginning of an association that would ultimately take him to the Hall of Fame as one of the most significant executives in baseball history.

Variously known as “Simon Legree” and “Cousin Egbert” during his long career, Barrow’s name could evoke fear in the hearts of the innocent ballplayer. “His eyebrows—you never saw anything like them,” Phil Rizzuto said to me. “If you had to go see him, you’d tremble at those ferocious eyebrows.”

Barrow, son of a Civil War veteran, had as full a career as one could imagine even before he resigned as Boston manager and was named the Yankees’ business manager at the age of fifty-two.

He’d really done it all: journalist, bare-knuckle boxer, catering partner with Harry M. Stevens, salesman, hotelier, amateur ballplayer, coach, minor league manager, minor league president, major league manager. He even had a hand in the discovery of Honus Wagner.

In 1898 he bought Arthur Irwin’s shares and became manager and part owner of the Toronto franchise in the Eastern League. He sold his stock and became the manager of Detroit in 1903. After resigning in 1905 over disagreements with Tigers owner Frank Navin, he returned to the minors, managed at Toronto and Montreal, became president of the Eastern League (and renamed it the International League, as we know it today), and finally returned to the majors in 1918 as Red Sox manager, winning the world championship and then converting Ruth from pitcher to outfield.

Now he would run the Yankees.

The Colonels, in rare agreement, entrusted him with running both the business and baseball sides of the team. And Barrow was prepared to support Huggins.

“You’re the manager,” he said to Hug, “and you’re going to get no interference or second-guessing from me. Your job is to win, and part of my job is to see that you have the players to win with. You tell me what you need,
and I’ll make the deals—and I’ll take full responsibility for every deal I make.”

The makings of a beautiful working relationship were in place. With him from Boston came a coach, Paul Krichell, who would become the best-known scout in baseball and who would, within a year, observe a game between Columbia and Rutgers and sign the Columbia first baseman, Lou Gehrig, to a Yankee contract.

Krichell would build a two-man scouting staff to twenty and go on to sign Rizzuto, Red Rolfe, Vic Raschi, Whitey Ford, and others. It was not the least of Barrow’s contributions to the coming fortunes of the franchise.

Barrow had no misgivings about ongoing trades with the Red Sox, and Frazee continued as a happy trading partner. On December 15, just weeks after Barrow had settled into his new office, he obtained Waite Hoyt, Wally Schang, Harry Harper, and Mike McNally for Muddy Ruel, Hank Thormahlen, Del Pratt, and Sammy Vick.

It was hard to part with Ruel, who was occasionally thought of as the best catcher in the league, but Schang turned out to be a fine replacement and was, in fact, first thought to be the key player in the deal.

But it would prove to be Hoyt, a right-hander, who would emerge as the star of the litter.

“Wake up, wake up,” shouted Hoyt’s father as he slept in the family’s Brooklyn home. “Your Christmas present is here! You’ve been traded to the Yankees!” Without any pennants to show for their history, this cry of elation wasn’t expressed very often, but by 1921 it was beginning to be heard.

The Brooklyn-born Hoyt, a product of Erasmus Hall High School, was signed to a New York Giants contract at fifteen. His father was a fellow member of the Lambs Club with McGraw. But instead of being a local phenom who made good, he shuffled around from minor league town to minor league town, pitching just one game for the Giants in three seasons of generally unimpressive performances.

But Schoolboy Hoyt was nothing if not cocky and self-confident, and after 1918 he quit. He pitched for an independent team, went to officer’s candidate school, and then in 1919 had his contract purchased from New Orleans by the Red Sox, where he would join Ruth, Sam Jones, and Herb Pennock in the Boston rotation. Then came the trade.

The big right-hander would find his game under Huggins, put in ten seasons with the Yankees, and make the Hall of Fame largely on his Yankee
accomplishments. This included a dazzling 1.64 World Series ERA in 11 appearances.

Casual on the mound, his work seemed almost effortless. “Always a smooth worker,” wrote Tom Meany, “he didn’t have a great variety of stuff, but from the way he flourished in tight, low-score games and the manner in which he could finish a nine-inning chore in less than two hours, it seemed that he must have had every sort of [trick pitch].”

New York was his town. He became a vaudeville star in the off-season, using his accomplished singing voice. He would also run a funeral business in Larchmont and became known as “the Merry Mortician.” Cincinnati fans would later know him as a beloved broadcaster of Reds games, famous for filling rain delays with Babe Ruth tales.

THE YANKS WERE now the biggest draw in baseball, and it was embarrassing to Stoneham, who wanted them gone. That was fine with Ruppert; he’d been thinking like that since the day he bought the team. On Saturday, February 5, 1921, drawings of their new stadium were unveiled (triple-decked all around), with excavation to begin within a few weeks on ten acres between 157th and 161st streets in the Bronx, bounded by Doughty and River avenues, property acquired from the estate of William Waldorf Astor. (Doughty Avenue would later become Ruppert Place.) This would be Yankee Stadium. The cost of the land was a reported $675,000. Currently in use as a lumberyard, it was across the Harlem River from the Polo Grounds, which was clearly in view. The IRT elevated subway (today the number 4) ran to the park; the IND (today the B and the D) would be built underground ten years later.

It was, it seemed, a last-minute decision. As early as January, the Colonels were said to favor land between 136th and 138th streets in Manhattan just off Broadway, where the Hebrew Orphan Asylum sat.

As for the site in the Bronx, the
New York Times
reported, “An effort will be made by the owners of the team to induce the New York Central Railroad authorities to agree to put in a station near the grounds, which are quite near to the tracks of that line.”

Just eighty-eight years later, the station, now run by Metro North Railroad, opened.

The ’21 Yanks featured the return of Home Run Baker, who made
arrangements for his daughters to live with him and a housekeeper in New York. He was up there in years now—thirty-five—but his bat was welcomed back.

It was also the year that Eddie Bennett, an orphan of seventeen, joined the team as a mascot, batboy, and road roommate of Little Ray. Bennett, who barely weighed one hundred pounds, had been a part-time batboy for the notorious Black Sox in 1919 and had moved to his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers in 1920, another pennant winner. That was all that was needed for players to think he was good luck. Waite Hoyt knew him because they’d both gone to Erasmus Hall. Bennett had a hunchback, and players of that era felt it was good luck to rub his back.

Thirty-seven-year-old Jack Quinn remained in the starting rotation. He was one of seventeen pitchers permitted to continue throwing the spitball after it was ruled illegal in 1920. Mays, Hoyt, Shawkey, and Rip Collins rounded out the rotation, with Mays’s 27–9 season tops on the staff.

The infield featured Pipp, Ward, Peckinpaugh, and Baker, and the outfield had Meusel, Ruth, and an assortment of center fielders including the recovered Chick Fewster. Schang was the regular catcher, catching 134 games and hitting .316.