Pinstripe Empire (23 page)

John Drebinger, who in his younger days had crossed the country in a covered wagon, would be there taking it in, just a few weeks before officially joining the
New York Times.
John lived until October of 1979 and for a time, after his
Times
retirement in 1964, was part of our public-relations department. He didn’t have many duties, but one was keeping an immaculate box score on Old-Timers’ Day, which the New York papers would run. He wore a hearing aid and would conveniently turn it off if he wasn’t interested in the surrounding conversation. And, oh, he loved baseball and loved to regale people with stories of his unbroken string of covering every World Series game from 1929 to 1963. Always in his storytelling was the magnificence of that opening day in 1923, when baseball seemed to jump from a game to a business. “Imagine, seventy-four thousand people coming to see one event,” he’d say to me. “A lot of American cities aren’t that big!”

Harry M. Stevens produced a commemorative opening-day scorecard, triple the normal price at fifteen cents, which included the message, “The temporary subway station at 161st St and River Ave will be replaced by an appropriate permanent station during this year. All the streets around the Stadium will be paved with asphalt early this season. The very few touches needed to complete the Stadium will be added at once.”

Back by home plate, Huggins received a floral lucky horseshoe, the custom of the day, and Ruppert plucked a rose and put it in his lapel. Governor Al Smith threw out the first ball to Wally Schang.

“I’d give a year of my life to hit the first home run here,” Ruth said.

The gates opened at noon. The game began at 3:30. Bob Shawkey, in his red flannel sweatshirt—and who with Pipp was the senior member of the team—delivered the first pitch to old teammate Chick Fewster of Boston, who grounded to Everett Scott at short. Whitey Witt would be the first Yankee hitter, with Howard Ehmke on the mound for the Red Sox.

The game was scoreless going to the bottom of the third, when Ruth cracked a three-run homer—a line drive twenty rows up in the right-field bleachers, a distance of about four hundred feet—driving in Witt and Joe Dugan ahead of him. The ovation was deafening. It was exactly what the crowd wanted to see.

The Yankees won 4–1 in just over two hours. Their lineup included Pipp at first, Ward at second, Scott at short, Dugan at third, Schang catching, and Meusel, Witt, and Ruth left to right in the outfield. It was a day for firsts, and a day when baseball moved into its next era of what would be “big-time baseball.”

Fred Lieb is believed to have christened the new stadium the House That Ruth Built, although the men in the two rows forming the mezzanine press box behind home plate could all have been verbalizing similar thoughts. Lieb called it a “moment of inspiration.” The fact was, it may have been true financially—Ruth’s presence making such a park possible—but if he’d really built it, it might have looked a bit different. The attractive distance down the right-field foul line notwithstanding, the fences seemed to sprint away from home plate, and the placement of very short foul poles may have cost Babe a lot of homers simply due to poor umpire calls over the years. Given Ruth’s propensity for home runs, on this matter the architects just didn’t get it right.

In early 1927, Ruth told Frank Graham, “All the parks are good [to hit in] except the Stadium. There is no background there at all. But the best of them all is the Polo Grounds. Boy, how I used to sock ’em in there. I cried when they took me out of the Polo Grounds!”

Ruth scholar Bill Jenkinson believes there were many Ruth shots down the foul line that entered the bleachers fair but landed in foul territory, and without the aid of a high foul pole were often mistaken by the umpires. At least at the Polo Grounds, the tops of the foul poles were “extended” by having a rope drawn from them to the second deck. Jenkinson thinks as many as 80 would have met this fate; obviously some were indeed foul, but clearly a great many were lost to this oddity. Nevertheless Ruth loved the Yankees, and the Yankees loved Ruth.

Yankee Stadium was open for business.

THE ’23 YANKEES ADDED YET ANOTHER top Boston pitcher before the season began, obtaining Herb Pennock for three bench players. It was another steal, and it gave the Yanks’ starting rotation a left-hander to augment the right-handed diet of Shawkey (16–11) Hoyt (17–9), Bush (19–15), and Jones (21–8). Mays’s star was fading, as he won just five games in his final season with the team. Of these six pitchers, all but Shawkey had come to New York from Boston.

Pennock was twenty-nine and yet was a ten-year veteran, having come up as an eighteen-year-old without any minor league experience when he joined the Athletics in 1912. He came from Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, close enough to be a “hometown” player for the Athletics. Claimed on waivers by Boston in 1915, he was 62–59 with the Red Sox and had gone 10–17 in 1922. No one thought of him as an elite pitcher.

But in his first year with the Yankees, he led the American League in winning percentage with a 19–6 mark.

The gentlemanly Pennock was a perceptive and devoted student of the game, even serving as an unofficial hitting coach for the Yankees. He regularly invited players to accompany him and his treasured hounds in hunting silver foxes on his estate, a very upscale pastime for a ballplayer. His nickname was “the Squire of Kennett Square.”

Baseball people loved Pennock, who later had a five-year career as general manager of the Phillies at the time Jackie Robinson broke in. There, his reputation was somewhat sullied as he allegedly told Branch Rickey that his Phillies would not take the field if Robinson was playing. Jackie played;
the Phillies took the field; the crisis passed. At his passing less than a year later, it was his Yankee years that were remembered, and with great fondness. His Robinson misstep would attain greater notoriety some years later when historians looked back on the burdens of Jackie’s entrance into the major leagues.

AFTER THE DRAMA and excitement of opening day, the second game of the season more or less set the tone for the year: a Yankee win before a reported ten thousand fans. “Looking at the crowd and then at the wide expanse of vacant seats, you might have guessed that 3,000 or 4,000 were there,” reported the
Times.

“All the clamor and color of opening day were only memories … the umpires had to throw out the first ball themselves. The American flag was pulled up by as humble a personage as the groundkeeper and there was no band to play the national anthem while the flag was going up. The only parade was the one that the Yanks staged around the bases in the sixth.”

Indeed, for the balance of the season, the team averaged less than thirteen thousand per date (including two September doubleheaders that drew an estimated 110,000) and barely topped a million for the year—1,026,134. And while they were the only team in baseball to draw a million, it was a drop of some two hundred thousand from the last year in the Polo Grounds. They wouldn’t get back to their peak Polo Grounds attendance until 1946. Perhaps that extra five minutes on the subway into the Bronx was more daunting than imagined. But Ruppert expressed no disappointment, at least not publicly.

For those who wondered why the president of the United States hadn’t chosen to attend opening day: Not to worry, Warren Harding attended a week later, Tuesday, April 24, and had a special box designed for him with presidential bunting draped over the front. He saw Sam Jones beat Washington 4–0. And that may have been why he didn’t attend opening day—he was waiting for the Senators to play.

ALTHOUGH HUSTON-RUPPERT DISAGREEMENTS were minor, Ruppert was too gentlemanly to ever let them detract from the team or become overtly obstructive. Still, with Huston departing the scene on May 24, a sort of peace was felt in the organization. It was an era of good feeling. It was an era of relief for Miller Huggins.

(Dan Daniel later reported that Ruppert, in the interest of peace, was finally prepared to give in to Huston’s desire for Wilbert Robinson. But Robinson had no desire to step into that situation and instead used the offer to get a new five-year deal to manage Brooklyn.)

The team was good and they knew it. And as the
Reach Guide
reported, “The team changed completely from a tempestuous go-as-you-please mob of stars to a harmonious and well disciplined team which played the game with excellent system and was entirely amenable to discipline. One of the big factors in the complete reversal of Yankees team form was Babe Ruth who amply made good on his promises of reform … [after his] inadequate [1922] World Series showing.”

The Yankees took over first place on May 5 and led the rest of the way. They finished sixteen games ahead of the Tigers and won fifty-two of their seventy-six road games.

At Yankee Stadium on June 15, the Yanks beat the Browns 10–0, and in the ninth inning, Huggins sent a rookie in to play first base for Pipp. Thus Lou Gehrig, four days shy of his twentieth birthday, made his major league debut, recording a putout but not going to bat. Three days later, he pinch-hit for Ward in the ninth, and, after hitting a hard foul down the first-base line, struck out. No one could realize the significance of his arrival. The first signing of note by scout Paul Krichell, he would just play a bit in ’23: 13 games, 26 at-bats, a homer, and nine RBI.

The Paris-born Krichell, forty, who had caught two seasons for the Browns, had watched Gehrig play for Columbia in a game at Rutgers. According to Gehrig biographer Frank Graham, he told Ed Barrow, “I saw another Ruth today.”

Krichell followed Gehrig to a game against Penn on the Columbia campus. There, “Lou hit a ball out of South Field with such force that it cleared 116th Street, the northern boundary of the field, and struck on the steps of the library across the street.

“ ‘I was right,’ [Krichell] yelled exultantly over the telephone to Barrow after the game. ‘He’s another Ruth!!’ “

He was Ruth without drama, Ruth without nightlife, Ruth without scandal. He lived with his parents. He said things like “swell” and “gosh.” He had muscles to spare when players did no weight training and tended to be lean and lithe. He could read and write in German. Lou Gehrig would become the idol of every boy who loved baseball for his quiet presence, clean standards, and heroic deeds. He was polite and humble. He would park his car
three blocks from Yankee Stadium to avoid notice. Graham would eventually write
Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero
, and if you were a boy growing up and loving baseball in the forties or fifties, you read it. Many people became Yankee fans because of what Lou Gehrig meant to the Yankees.

Wrote Paul Gallico, “There is no greater inspiration to any American boy than Lou Gehrig. For if this awkward, inept, and downright clumsy player that I knew in the beginning could through sheer drive and determination turn himself into the finest first-base-covering machine in all baseball, then nothing is impossible to any man or boy in the country.”

He did, of course, play in the shadow of the Babe, but it wasn’t as though he competed for attention. The less he had the happier he was. Ruth and Gehrig could never be close friends—they had little in common. But together they were the greatest one-two punch a baseball lineup would ever see.

ON SEPTEMBER 4 in Philadelphia, Sam Jones hurled the third no-hitter in Yankee history, beating the A’s 2–0 in eighty-three minutes and allowing just a first-inning walk.

Jones then pitched the pennant clincher on September 15, beating Chicago 10–4. There was still more in the tank, though; on September 28, the Yanks recorded a team record 30 hits in beating Boston 24–4, scoring 11 runs in the sixth inning.

RUTH HIT A club record .393 for the season, with his home run output at 41. Another four hits would have put him at .400. The reduced number of home runs had a certain appeal to the old-time purists, who saw him as a more complete player. He was unanimously elected winner of the League Award, which predated the baseball writers’ Most Valuable Player Award that began in 1931. It was the only MVP award he ever won, since the rules were that a player couldn’t win it twice. It was chosen by a vote of the Trophy Committee, a single writer in each American League city, eight in all.

There was to be a $100,000 monument erected in East Potomac Park in Washington on which the winning player—only for the American League—would have his name inscribed each year. The player himself would receive
a replica trophy and a medal. But by 1924 the plan was scrapped; it required congressional approval and spending, and never found enough votes to pass.

FOR THE THIRD year in a row, the Yankees and the Giants would meet in the World Series, this time in their own respective ballparks across the Harlem River. Game one, the first World Series game in Yankee Stadium, drew 55,307 fans—the biggest crowd since opening day. American flags flew proudly, draping the three decks. (In later years, the championship pennants would be hung over the frieze at the annual Old-Timers’ Day.) Sadly, the infield grass was a dried-out yellow, having been destroyed by a rodeo that had played there in August.

Would Ruth hit the first World Series home run in Yankee Stadium? No, that honor, with great irony, would fall to the aging reserve outfielder Casey Stengel, a McGraw favorite. Stengel, thirty-three, was in his twelfth year and had played just 75 games in the regular season. But McGraw had him batting sixth and playing center field, and with the score 4–4 in the ninth, Casey lined a changeup from Joe Bush deep to left center. As Witt and Meusel chased it down, ol’ Casey put it into high gear and headed around the bases. As he rounded second, his shoe seemed to fly off his foot. Now running with a hobble to slow him down even more, he rounded third and headed for home as Meusel’s throw came in. “You could hear him yelling, ‘Go Casey, go, go go, Casey, go,” said third baseman Joe Dugan. “It was the damnedest thing.”

He eluded Schang’s tag and scored. The first World Series home run in Yankee Stadium was an inside-the-park job, and it was hit by perhaps the slowest man on the field that day, the man who would one day manage the Yankees in ten World Series. The Giants won, 5–4, on a play that was the stuff of legend.