Pinstripe Empire (2 page)

The 1943 Frank Graham history.

That era ended with the onset of World War II. In 1943 my father published the first full-fledged history of the Yankees. I had already gone off to war, serving far from home. But the day my copy of his book arrived at mail call and I began to read about the exploits of those fabulous players from the very beginning—the disasters and triumphs of this greatest of baseball franchises, all set down in print by my old man—I was the proudest apprentice seaman in the United States Navy.

I believe my father would be pleased that Marty Appel has used his original history as his own base for continuing this unique saga well into the twenty-first century. The story is still in good hands, written once again by a man who knows much of what he describes from his own deep personal experience.

In the 1940s and 1950s, Putnam published a series of sixteen team histories, of which
The New York Yankees
by Frank Graham was the first and most successful. It was published in 1943 and updated in 1958 after fourteen printings. Graham, who worked at the time for the
New York Journal-American
, “knew people who knew people” who went back to the origin of the team in 1903. When he used “Griff” for Clark Griffith, you knew he wasn’t just making up a nickname.

Graham would not be surprised to learn that the Yankees have maintained their winning ways, but he would be surprised by the internationalism of the “brand” and the enormity of the business. And, yes, by the salaries.

I think he’d also be surprised that in all these years, the Yankee story has yet to be retold in a traditional narrative. It is our hope that this book fills that void.

The best advice I received early in this project came from my friend Darrell Berger, a Detroit Tigers fan who said, “Remember, a down time for the Yankees was a pretty good time for fans of other teams.” That kept my focus on the assignment—to try and tell a story anyone can relate to, not just for the Bronx faithful.

I was privileged to work for the team, and later to produce its telecasts over a span of some twenty-five years, and I was smart enough to appreciate being surrounded by observers who went back to the 1920s. I listened. And I’d like to salute the authors, beat writers, broadcasters, and columnists who chronicled the team over the years and left a trail of information to be combed over by people like me for just such a project. They did their profession proud.

I also had an all-star team gracious enough to read some of this material and lend their thoughts, and I especially wish to cite Doug Lyons, Paul
Doherty, Tony Morante, Rick Cerrone, Jordan Sprechman, Tom Villante, Bob Heinisch, and Bill Madden for their time and counsel.

Others who were gracious enough to help with this project include Maury Allen, Dom Amore, Norm Appel, Peter Bavasi, Mary Bellew, Kathy Bennett, Howard Berk, Yogi Berra, Peter Bjarkman, Arline Blake, Ron Blomberg, Jim Bouton, Ralph Branca, Bruce Brodie, Bill Burgess, Neill Cameron, Bill Chuck, Jerry Cifarelli, Joe Cohen, Dan Cunningham, Pearl Davis, Lou D’Ermilio, Steve Donahue, Frank Fleizach, Whitey Ford, Sean Forman, Steve Fortunato, Bill Francis, Bruce Froemming, Joe Garagiola, Joe Garagiola Jr., Peter Garver, Pat Gillick, Frank Graham Jr., Joe Grant, Ross Greenburg, Bill Guilfoile, Bob Gutkowski, Michael Hagen, Jane Hamilton, Fran Healy, Henry Hecht, Roland Hemond, Dr. Stuart Hershon, Brad Horn, Arlene Howard, Jeff Idelson, Stan Isaacs, Steve Jacobson, Bill Jenkinson, Mark Katz, Lana Kaufman, Pat Kelly, Jason Latimer, Jane Leavy, Mark Letendre, Dan Levitt, Lon Lewis, Terry Lefton, Phil Linz, Lee Lowenfish, Sparky Lyle, Jeffrey Lyons, Nathan Maciborski, Lee MacPhail, Rich Marazzi, Michael Margolis, Tim Mead, Ernestine Miller, Gary Mitchum, Toni Mollett, Gene Monahan, Leigh Montville, Mickey Morabito, Tomas Morales, Craig Muder, Ken Munoz, Kay Murcer, Ian O’Connor, Juliet Papa, Tony Pasqua, Phil Pepe, Fritz Peterson, Dr. Joseph Plantania, Tim Reid, Bobby Richardson, Kurt Rim, Ray Robinson, Mark Roth, K. Jacob Ruppert, Frank Russo, Richard Sandomir, Al Santasierre III, Harvey Schiller, Jerry Schmetterer, Ron Selter, Jay Schwall, Bill Shannon, Danny Sheridan, Tom Shieber, Al Silverman, David Smith, Tal Smith, Jeff Spaulding, Mark Stang, Steve Steinberg, Brent Stevens, Tom Stevens, Sheldon Stone, Bert Sugar, Randall Swearingen, David Szen, Bob Thompson, John Thorn, Dan Topping Jr., Kimberly Topping, Juan Vene, Mike Wach, Larry Wahl, Suzyn Waldman, Willie Weinbaum, Irv Welzer, Bill White, Roy White, Tim Wiles, Bernie Williams, Ralph Wimbish Jr., Bob Wolff, Jason Zillo, and Andrew Zimbalist. Special thanks for extended interviews to Randy Levine, Lonn Trost, Brian Cashman, and Gene Michael.

At Bloomsbury, I would like to thank George Gibson, Ben Adams, Mike O’Connor, Will Georgantas, Nate Knaebel, Michelle Blankenship, and Patti Ratchford; my agent, Robert Wilson, and Team Appel—Brian, Deb, and especially Lourdes, who accepted the hours on the computer and the stacks of reference material cluttering our home.

Thanks too to John Rogers and Will Means at Rogers Photo Archives in North Little Rock, Arkansas, for their newspaper,
Sporting News
, and
Sport
magazine photo files, and to Phil Castinetti of Sportsworld for providing scorecards back to the days of Hilltop Park. Art depicting Yankee Stadium, 1923, was researched and produced by David Kramer, Matt O’Connor, J. E. Fullerton, Michael Hagan, Scott Weber, Michael Rudolf, Dennis Concepcion, and Chris Campbell.

PHIL SCHENCK WALKED GINGERLY across the soupy ground that would soon become Manhattan’s newest baseball diamond. As the newly appointed head groundskeeper of what would be, after all, a major league facility, he had to be intimidated by what lay ahead. Opening day was April 30.

This new franchise had only been approved on March 12, 1903, and a playing field was a hurried afterthought. So difficult had been the struggle to get an American League team stationed in New York that the playing field, with so much barren space available in New York, seemed somehow less important.

Unless you were Phil Schenck.

“There is not a level spot on the whole property,” reported the
Sporting News
in its March 21, 1903, edition. “From Broadway, looking west, the ground starts in a low swamp filled with water, and runs up into a ridge of rocks … The rocks will be blasted out and the swamp filled in.”

Joe Vila, thirty-six, approached Schenck and sympathized with his plight. The
New York Sun
sportswriter had played a significant role in bringing this franchise to reality. Now he wanted to see how “his” field was taking shape.

It wasn’t very impressive. It would be a haul for fans to get to this field, and they would expect something worthy of the journey, worthy of a paid admission. The new team had to give them a product that felt big-time. And the clock was ticking.

Vila was born in Boston and had spent two years at Harvard before quitting
to become a brakeman and baggage handler on the B&O Railroad. He joined the
New York Morning Journal
in 1889, and moved to the
New York Herald
a year later. He had been with the
Sun
since ’93.

As a Harvard man he was well aware that in July, ground would be broken for a grand concrete structure in Allston, Massachusetts. It would be home to the Crimson football team, an edifice worthy of being called a stadium. The idea of building a “stadium” for a baseball team was just silly. The small wooden structures cropping up around the country were not up to the name. Hell, they were burning down with regularity and befit the smaller position baseball held in the American consciousness. College football was the big sport of the land, and Harvard Stadium, the first to be called a stadium in the U.S., deserved it. When it opened in the fall, it would seat more than fifty thousand.

Still, Vila’s enthusiasm was genuine. It was exciting to have played such a prominent role in the birth of a franchise, and he could honestly say he did.

In 1892, he was in New Orleans for the John L. Sullivan–Jim Corbett heavyweight championship fight. It was a most important sporting event, the first staged under the Marquis of Queensbury rules, with both fighters wearing gloves and a sense of civility in the brutal sport. It was the fight that made boxing “acceptable.”

The nation’s newspapers sent reporters to cover the event. There Vila met a stocky, cigar-smoking reporter from the
Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette,
one Byron Bancroft Johnson. The two formed a friendship.

While Vila continued to work as a New York journalist, Johnson, better known as Ban, harbored other ideas. As baseball grew in popularity, he saw an opportunity to develop a second major league that competed with the existing National League, putting franchises in the major cities of the day and winning over enough fanatics (“fans”) to make money for the owners. For the most part, Johnson would hand-pick the owners and put his own stamp on his league.

Just a year after the Corbett-Sullivan fight, Johnson was elected president of the Western League, placed there by John T. Brush, the owner of the Cincinnati Reds, and by Charles Comiskey, the manager of the team. He would lead that minor league for six years, giving up his conflicting role as sports editor of the paper after the first one.

With his wide girth, Johnson looked every bit the picture of prosperity as the nineteenth century drew to a close. The U.S. presidents of the era—McKinley, Cleveland, Roosevelt, and Taft—all looked well nourished and
prosperous. It was a look that represented success and confidence, recaptured years later by George M. Steinbrenner III, who would not have been Steinbrenner in Woodrow Wilson’s frail frame.

Disgusted by the National League’s inability to curtail drinking and gambling in the ballparks, by the blatant abuse of umpires by rowdy fans, and by the ballparks themselves offering environments unfriendly to women and children, Johnson saw the opportunity for a more civil league with a friendlier ballpark atmosphere, and enough star players for a second major league.

By 1899, his Class A Western League included Buffalo, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and St. Paul.

In 1900 he renamed it the American League, replacing Columbus and St. Paul with Chicago and Cleveland. It was still a minor league but Johnson had the full intent on converting it to a major league by raiding National League players for 1901.

Showing no fear of Johnson’s ambition, the twenty-five-year-old National League decided to establish a salary cap at this time. The league’s wage ceiling was $2,400 (around $60,000 in 2011 dollars), small even by 1901 standards.

This was the opening Johnson needed. He declared his league to be major and induced players like Cy Young, Nap Lajoie, and Clark Griffith to jump leagues for higher pay. Baltimore and Washington replaced Buffalo and Indianapolis. Connie Mack came in to manage Philadelphia; John McGraw Baltimore.

The league was an immediate hit. In 1901, the American League drew a reported 1,683,584 fans without even having teams in New York or Brooklyn. The National League, with New York and Brooklyn, drew a reported 1,920,031. It was a remarkable success story.

Then as now, New York was the biggest city in the country. More than 3.4 million people resided there, 1.8 million of them in Manhattan. Philadelphia, with almost 1.3 million in the 1900 census, was the second-biggest city. New York was a glaring absence if the American League was to be big-time.

The history of New York and baseball had been charmed. The “New York Game” was the dominant amateur game as rules began to take form in the mid-eighteenth century. Firemen from Manhattan would sail across the Hudson and play at Elysian Field in Hoboken, New Jersey, likely the true birthplace of the game. The ninety-foot distance between the bases, about as perfect a concept as mankind has ever produced, was established in New York. The game’s first superstar was Jim Creighton of the Excelsior team of Brooklyn. Candy Cummings, also an Excelsior, is generally credited with
discovering the curveball—a tactic that relied on the seams on the baseball, making one wonder whether the game’s creators stumbled onto it by accident or had planned it all along. The first great chronicler of the game, the inventor of the box score, was Henry Chadwick, a New Yorker.

The National Association, both amateur and pro, started in 1857 and featured teams largely based in Brooklyn. (Brooklyn was incorporated into New York City in 1898.) The National League was formed in 1876, and the New York Giants joined in 1883. The American Association, born in 1882, featured the Metropolitans.

But of course one didn’t need rules to pick up a wooden stick and hit a round object, as many children did in the streets of New York, inventing their own versions as fit the terrain. New York was in love with base ball. (It was two words back then.)

In his American League, the problem franchise for Johnson proved to be Baltimore. It was not a city he truly wanted, with its population of only half a million. In its favor was its rich tradition: The Baltimore Orioles had been a great championship name while playing in the National League and included John McGraw, Wilbert Robinson, Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Hughie Jennings, and Kid Gleason. Johnson managed to bring Robinson back into the fold for his American League entry in 1901 and tapped McGraw as manager.

But McGraw’s legendary temper and antics, popular with the rowdy fans of the day, translated poorly into what Johnson sought to accomplish with his more genteel game. His scrapes with umpires and incitement of the fans played poorly with the American League’s aspirations.

Frequently Johnson had to suspend McGraw for inciting riots against the umpires. On June 28 he again went into a crazed argument, and was again suspended, this time indefinitely.

Incensed, McGraw asked for his release. “Johnson’s down on Baltimore and would like to see it off the map,” he said. “I am sick and tired of the whole business, and I don’t care if I never play in the American League again.”

He was playing both ends. He had been negotiating with the New York Giants to manage their team, and in a sense arranging for his own departure. But Johnson was glad to see McGraw get his release and depart for New York. “Let the National League have this maniac,” he must have thought. “It better makes my point.”