Pinstripe Empire (24 page)

“The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigns, just barely held out under Casey Stengel until he reached the plate, running his home run home,” wrote Damon Runyon in the
New York American.
“Then they collapsed.”

The “lost shoe” home run became part of Casey folklore. Actually, when his teammates helped him up after his ferocious slide, they asked him why he was hobbling so as he ran. “I lost a shoe at second base,” he said.

“Lost a shoe?” said Hank Gowdy. “How many were you wearing?”

It turned out it wasn’t exactly a shoe he lost, but a sponge inside the shoe to protect a blister.

Game two shifted to the Polo Grounds, itself nicely upgraded by Stoneham. Here at his favorite park, it was Ruth’s turn to shine. He became the third player in history to belt two home runs in a World Series game, lifting Pennock and the Yanks to a 4–2 win, evening the Series and ending a streak of eight straight Giant World Series wins (plus a tie).

In the third game, back at Yankee Stadium, it was Stengel again, this time hitting a home run into the right-field bleachers that would be all the Giants needed in a 1–0 win over Jones. Responding to catcalls from the Yankee fans, Casey thumbed his nose at them as he rounded the bases. To the Yankee players, he blew a kiss. Ruppert thought he should be fined or suspended for such behavior. Landis said, “A fellow who wins two games with home runs may feel a little playful, especially if he’s a Stengel.”

Shawkey, who vexingly liked to count to one hundred before each pitch, won game four with relief from Pennock. Bush, his forkball dancing, won game five with a three-hitter; game six, at the Polo Grounds on October 15, would be the possible clincher as Pennock faced Art Nehf. The Giants led 4–1 after seven. But in the eighth the Yanks loaded the bases with the top of the order coming up. Here Huggins sent Bush to hit for Witt, and he drew a walk to make it 4–2. Rosy Ryan relieved Nehf and walked Dugan to make it 4–3 as Ruth came to bat. The crowd was all standing, but Ryan reached back and struck out the Bambino—probably the biggest moment of his career.

Unfortunately for Rosy, Meusel then delivered a two-run single, with a third run scoring on a Giants error. Five runs were in, and the Yankees led 6–4. For one moment, Ryan was on top of the world. Then he handed the Yanks the lead. That’s baseball.

The last six outs would be the responsibility of Jones. He stopped the Giants in the eighth, and in the ninth, with 34,172 holding their breath on each pitch, he retired George Kelly on a pop-up and Frank Snyder on a comebacker. Jack Bentley, an extraordinarily good-hitting pitcher, was all that stood between the Yankees and their first world championship. He would pinch-hit for Ryan.

Bentley hit a grounder to second. Ward, who batted .417 in the Series, fielded it and threw to Pipp for the final out. Pipp jumped in the air. In their twenty-first season, the Yankees were the world champions at last.

The Yankees ran, jumped, and skipped across the outfield to their newly
built locker room, up the stairs in deep center field. Ruth was the first to start hugging Meusel, pulling him, tugging at him, shouting in his ear.

Attention shifted to Huggins. Everyone was pumping his hand, congratulating him over and over again. “This is the day, boys, this is the day!” Hug shouted.

Ruth and Bush jumped on the trainer’s table and asked the players to gather around. Ruth spoke. “Boys, we’ve won the world championship and we owe a lot of the accomplishment to the guiding hand of Mr. Huggins. He has done a great job this year in managing the team, and we want to present you with this ring in token of the esteem in which we hold you.”

Yes, somehow the Babe had arranged for a diamond ring to be “on hand” in case of victory. Huggins was lifted on the shoulders of his players, and the Yanks shouted, “Speech! Speech!”

“Fellows,” Huggins said, “it is a fine thing to win the American League pennant; it is still finer to go out and win the world’s championship, but this ring which you have given me has brought me more real happiness than any of the victories we have won on the diamond. It is the association with such players as you, players who go on fighting in the face of odds and never give up, that brings the most happiness.

“We have had our little arguments during the season, but they were not real hard feelings; they only appeared so at the time. Underneath it all and when it is all over there can’t help but be a great friendship between all of us who have fought the greatest battle of all and come out on top. This token of your friendship is one that I shall always treasure and I want to thank you all for the loyal spirit in which it is given.”

“Three cheers for Huggins!” shouted the players. “Hip-hip hooray!”

“It’s the happiest day of my life,” said Ruppert to Commissioner Landis, informing him that there would be another celebration that very evening at the Hotel Commodore.

The joy of victory would be increased a day later when the winner’s share was announced: $6,143 per man. For many it was almost a season’s salary. In addition, each player received a gold watch.

The world champion New York Yankees. It would be spoken many times over the course of history, but this day, October 15, 1923, was the first.

THE 1924 ROSTER WAS ESSENTIALLY unchanged, although Mays was presumed finished. He was sold to Cincinnati and he went out and won 20 games for the Reds, and then 19 two seasons later. He would forever be an enigma.

The new center fielder was supposed to be Earle Combs, who didn’t have a great throwing arm but had batted .380 at Louisville the year before and looked ready to replace an aging Witt in the outfield. But Combs, hitting .412, broke his leg sliding home on June 15, the kind of injury from which some players never fully recover. Witt went back to center.

A six-foot product of Kentucky, Combs would resume play a year later and do just fine. After being discovered in an industrial league, he had played two minor league seasons for manager Joe McCarthy in Louisville. Sold to the Yankees, he became the first in a long line of great Yankee center fielders, a stretch of baseball history that would make center field of Yankee Stadium the most hallowed ground in all of baseball. The bleacher fans came to love him; in 1928, they contributed their pennies, nickels, and dimes to purchase an engraved watch for him, which he treasured his whole life.

He also hit leadoff, a strategic breakthrough by Huggins, since the lead-off man was typically under five foot ten and strictly a singles hitter.

Two days before Combs went down, the Yanks got into a massive brawl in Detroit when the Tigers’ Bert Cole threw at Ruth’s head, and then hit Meusel in the ribs. Meusel went after player-manager Cobb with his bat as thousands of fans stormed the field, resulting in a forfeit victory for the
Yanks. It was thought to be a rallying moment and they were tied for first after a win at Chicago on September 15, but ultimately they couldn’t catch up to Washington, who won their first pennant by two games. On that team was Goose Goslin, whose lifetime 32 homers at Yankee Stadium were the most ever by an opposing player. For owner Clark Griffith, it was a long-awaited triumph, and for the “Boy Manager” Bucky Harris, twenty-seven, a terrific accomplishment. Fans across the country were thrilled that the great Walter Johnson would at last get to a World Series.

Pennock, 21–9, was the Yanks’ leading pitcher, while Ruth hit .378 for his only batting championship, adding 46 homers and 142 RBI. The Yankees had managed a strong season; it was just the Senators’ turn.

THE YANKEES MOVED their spring training site to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1925, in what would become a thirty-six-year stay there, with just a few interruptions. Al Lang, president of the Florida State League, was the former mayor of St. Pete, and he persuaded Colonel Ruppert to try spring training in his city. St. Petersburg would benefit greatly over the years from the presence of the Yankees, hosting the team through the Huggins, McCarthy, and Stengel eras. For the newspapermen and front-office staff who followed the team south each spring, it became a second home.

The team played at Waterfront Park, which was renamed Al Lang Field in 1947. The field would be used continuously until 2008 when the Tampa Bay Rays moved their training site. The Mets trained there from 1962 to 1987, maintaining the New York presence for fans and writers. The field was easy to spot in photos: A wire backstop protected the entire grandstand, not just the area behind home plate, because St. Petersburg was largely populated by senior citizens whose reaction time to foul balls was slow.

Ruth was said to have hit some legendary homers at this field, as he did most everywhere he played. The one most talked about was a batting-practice homer around 1930 that may have hit the West Coast Inn across First Street, which would have made it about 624 feet, a seemingly impossible distance. Logic suggests that it probably bounced on the way to the inn. But late in his life, visiting St. Petersburg one last time, Ruth was asked about his longest home run there, and without hesitation he said, “The one off the [expletive] hotel.” So it was a moment engraved in his memory too, whether real or imagined.

The Yanks would also use Crescent Lake Field, a practice field on Fifth
Street North, lined beyond the outfield fence by Australian palm trees. It would be renamed Miller Huggins Field in 1931 and Huggins-Stengel Field in 1962. Phil Schenck came down from New York to personally supervise the field’s construction in ’25.

Crescent Lake itself was 530 feet from home plate, down the right-field line, and on March 6, 1928, Ruth was reported to have hit six batting-practice home runs into the body of water to the amazement of onlookers. He was the only person ever to reach the lake.

The Boston Braves and later the St. Louis Cardinals would share Waterfront Park with the Yanks. The Browns had been the first to train there, going back to 1914, but the arrival of the celebrity-filled Yanks helped put St. Petersburg on the map. From 1920 to 1930, the city’s population tripled.

The Yankees by now were playing exhibition games with the Dodgers while en route north each season, and in Asheville, North Carolina, Ruth collapsed at the railroad station. Several newspapermen abandoned the team and went on a different train to New York with the stricken Ruth, reporting on his condition at each stop. There were rumors of a social disease, as well as rumors that he had died (again!). He was rushed to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York.

The incident became “the bellyache heard round the world,” a phrase typed by W. O. McGeehan of the
Tribune.
Babe’s wife, Helen, from whom he was estranged, was admitted to St. Vincent’s too—she had suffered a nervous collapse. And Claire Hodgson, the future Mrs. Ruth and his current mistress, only complicated visiting hours.

He stayed in the hospital into May, not meeting reporters until May 2 when they visited his hospital room. He wasn’t released until the twenty-fourth and didn’t play in a game until June 1. He had lost weight and the team had fallen onto tough times without him. This was going to be just a horrible year in Yankee history, a year when their big stars got old all at once.

Combs took over center and Pee Wee Wanninger replaced Scott at shortstop, with rookie Mark Koenig waiting in the wings. The unhappy Scott’s playing streak came to a close at 1,307 consecutive games when he was benched by Huggins on May 7. It was written that the record would likely never be broken.

Twenty-five days later, June 1, Lou Gehrig batted for Wanninger, and the next day ran his playing streak to two when Pipp, who had been beaned in batting practice, went to Huggins complaining of a headache and was given
the day off. Gehrig started at first. He started the next day, too, and the next and the next, and for fourteen years his name was in the lineup every day. The Pipp headache would become a symbol: Stay fit or lose your job. Long after players had any idea who Wally Pipp was, the idea of a regular missing a game and his replacement having a big day came to be considered a potential “Wally Pipp” moment.

If Pipp had any chance of reclaiming his job, it skittered away a few weeks later when he was again hit in the head in BP, resulting in a two-week hospital stay. First base was all Lou’s. Pipp would finish the season with the Yankees, but then, like Mays, would be sold to Cincinnati. In his eleven years with the Yankees, he had twice led the league in homers, been the regular first baseman on three pennant winners, enjoyed three .300 seasons, and hit 121 triples, first all-time on the Yankees when he left and still fourth behind only Gehrig, Combs, and DiMaggio. Still, he is best remembered today as the man whose headache opened his job up to Gehrig.

And there were some who were still around when I began working there who would laugh and say, “Headache? He wanted a day off to go to the racetrack.”

Wanninger wasn’t going to be a long-term shortstop, so the season also introduced Mark Koenig to fans. Koenig was a late-season addition, obtained in a rare trade with the minor league St. Paul Saints, for whom he had batted .308. The Saints were owned by the old Yankee scout Bob Connery.

Major league teams didn’t often engage in trades with the minors, but the Yanks, acting on Krichell’s advice, sent three players to St. Paul for Koenig, and he played pretty much every day for the rest of September, getting prepared by Huggins to take over the position in ’26.

Koenig, who was a baby during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was just an ordinary player—but fortunate to be with a team destined for greatness. “I was ordinary, a small cog in a big machine,” he told the
Sporting News
in 1980. He would be the last survivor of these great Yankee teams of the twenties, living until 1993.

A returning face in 1925 was Urban Shocker, who had been traded to St. Louis after the 1917 season following two years with the Yankees. Shocker, now thirty-four, had matured into a quality right-hander with the Browns, winning 20 four times. He was one of the seventeen legally permitted to continue throwing a spitball. Generally considered one of the smartest
pitchers in the game, Shocker had not been getting along well with his Browns manager, George Sisler, and word was he was available. The Yanks sent three players to St. Louis, including Joe Bush, to get him.