Pinstripe Empire (33 page)

IN 1938 IT was Gordon at second, already being called the best second baseman in the league. Nicknamed “Flash” after the comic book character, he became the first second baseman to top 20 homers, and his 25 was a rookie record for second basemen until Dan Uggla of Florida broke it in 2006. Gordon was born in Los Angeles but raised in Arizona and Portland, Oregon. He played halfback for the University of Oregon and was signed by Essick after his sophomore year.

As his daughter lovingly explained at her late father’s induction to the Hall of Fame in 2009, Joe was also a classical violinist, a cowboy, and a ventriloquist.

This time the Yanks won 99 and finished nine and a half games on top in winning their tenth pennant. So deep was the Yankee organization by this time that the 1938 “Little World Series” for the minor league championship pitted Newark against Kansas City—both Yankee farm clubs.

Gehrig’s streak passed 2,000 and went to 2,122, although his hitting fell off and he batted under .300 for the first time: .295 with 29 homers. There was no evidence of an illness or an injury, and some spoke of the natural progression of age. But if he was in the early stages of his illness, then it was a remarkable year, playing every game and belting his record 23rd career grand slam.

Henrich took over in right while Selkirk shifted to left. DiMaggio held out almost all of spring training, looking for $40,000, accepting $25,000—and when he signed, he had to miss two weeks of the season to get in shape. The Yanks were 6–6 without him, and when he returned, he collided on a short fly ball with Gordon, knocking out both players. He heard boos when he returned to Yankee Stadium for the first time, but they didn’t last long.

On Memorial Day, May 30, a crowd of 81,841 crammed into the stadium
for the biggest crowd in club history. Fire-safety laws were loosely enforced at the time, and so long as people were lined up for tickets, they were ushered in.

The Yankees held their first Ladies’ Day on April 30, 1938, allowing 4,903 women in for free. (The announced Saturday crowd was sixteen thousand.) Ladies’ Day would continue until 1972, when a few men brought suit against the team, claiming the free admission discriminated against them. They won, and that was the end of Ladies’ Day for everybody.

ON AUGUST 27, Monte Pearson, working on two days’ rest, hurled the first ever no-hitter at Yankee Stadium, with Gordon and Henrich each homering twice in a 13–0 pounding of his old team, the Indians. Pearson, who won his tenth straight and went to 13–5, walked two in the third no-hitter in team history. The thirties was such a hitter’s era that there were only eight pitched in the majors for the entire decade.

Thirty-year-old Spud Chandler was 14–5 in his first full year with the team. A product of Georgia, Chandler had started his minor league career at twenty-four. He was unspectacular in the minors, and his 14–13 record at Newark in ’36 hardly foretold big-league stardom, but the six-foot right-hander was a battler. He had graduated from the University of Georgia and played halfback for the Bulldogs. He lived in Royston, Ty Cobb’s hometown. Chandler had fought his way up the ladder to reach the majors, and by the time he was done, he had the highest winning percentage of any pitcher with 100 victories (he was 109-43, .717), and he would be the only Yankee pitcher to capture an MVP Award, winning in 1943.

If the season had a low moment, it was provided by Jake Powell. With radio still fairly new, Powell agreed to do a pregame interview on Chicago’s WGN with White Sox announcer Bob Elson prior to the July 29 game. Elson asked, “What do you do in the off-season to keep in shape?” Powell, who had barnstormed against Negro League teams in the off-season, responded, “I’m a policeman in Dayton, Ohio, and I keep in shape by cracking niggers off the head with my nightstick.”

Certainly in the all-white clubhouses of 1938, a line like this would have gotten its share of laughter and would have been forgotten. One might even have suspected that a player could get away with such a statement to a broader audience. There was little thought to racial sensitivities. Judge Landis had always maintained that there was no color line in baseball. “If a
Negro player was ever to show the kind of talents necessary to play in the Major Leagues, there is no rule to stop it,” Landis said, in various ways, over the years. But if not under pressure, Landis would probably have ignored Powell’s ill-chosen words. After all, they weren’t recorded, were heard only once, and outright denial or saying it was “out of context” seemed available choices.

But the words were overheard in Chicago, word spread, and outrage grew. A group of negro leaders went to Landis (who was headquartered in Chicago) demanding that Powell be banned for life.

This demand actually gave Landis wiggle room. He could reject the demand and still punish Powell, winning on all scores. That he did punish Powell was seen by some as no less than startling, giving his previous lack of any sensitivity on matters of race.

He suspended Powell for ten games, the first time that a major league player had ever been suspended for a racist remark. Furthermore, Barrow and Ruppert, after hearing talk of a possible negro boycott of Ruppert’s beer, ordered that Powell make an “apology tour” of black newspapers and black-owned bars in Harlem. As outrageous as Powell’s remarks were, it was equally surprising that Landis and the Yankees then did what was viewed as the “right thing.” It would still be eight years before the Dodgers would sign Jackie Robinson, but the Powell affair was a stepping stone, a moment when the white press had no choice but to visit bigotry in the game.

After the 1940 season, the Yankees sent Jake Powell to the minors, although he would later return to play during the war with the Senators and Phillies.

In November of 1948, he and his girlfriend were brought in for questioning over a bounced check at a Washington hotel. He asked if he could speak to his girlfriend alone, at which point he apologized for the bad check and asked her to marry him. She told him no, admonished him for getting into the mess, and went home. He gave her taxi money and shouted at her, “To hell with it. I’m going to end it all.”

And he did. He took out a handgun and shot himself in the right temple. He was forty.

THE ’38 WORLD SERIES was again against the Cubs (marking Powell’s return to Chicago), and this time the Yanks gave them a 4–0 pasting in rapid style, with Ruffing, Gomez, and Pearson winning the first three and Ruffing
winning the finale at Yankee Stadium. Frankie Crosetti became a hero in game two when he took Dizzy Dean deep in the eighth inning at Wrigley Field to give the Yanks the lead, although DiMaggio added a two-run homer in the ninth for dessert.

The Yankees, in winning their seventh world championship, became the first team to win three in a row, and “Break up the Yankees!” was a cry gaining more momentum. They were just too good.

Playing in his final World Series, Lou Gehrig played errorless ball at first but managed only four singles with no RBI.

THE YEAR 1938 HADN’T BEEN A healthy one for Colonel Ruppert. He wasn’t in the clubhouse to celebrate the World Series victory; he listened at home over the radio. His old partner, Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, died on his plantation on Butler Island near Brunswick, Georgia, on March 28. The Colonel issued a statement remembering the man with whom he’d entered baseball, but he couldn’t attend the funeral.

In April he had some setbacks, notably phlebitis, that began to confine him to his 1120 Fifth Avenue apartment. He went to opening day, but only one other game all season. In November he had to skip his usual winter trip to French Lick, Indiana, and was treated at Lenox Hill Hospital. He got through Christmas and New Year’s, but then deteriorated rapidly. News stories alerted people that his final days might be near. He was seventy-one, and had owned the Yankees for twenty-four seasons.

Babe Ruth, keeping posted via the newspapers, was just leaving the hospital himself after some heart tests.

On Thursday, January 12, 1939, Ruth phoned Al Brennan, the Yankees’ treasurer and the Colonel’s secretary of twenty-seven years.

“I want to see the Colonel,” he said.

“Come right up,” said Brennan. It was around 7:00 P.M., and Ruppert had been in an oxygen tent since 4:30. It was removed for the Ruth visit.

He managed to tell his nurse, “I want to see the Babe.” But Ruth was already in the room. He held and patted Ruppert’s hand.

“Colonel,” he said, “you’re going to snap out of this and you and I are going to the opening game of the season.”

That got a faint smile out of the old brewmaster, and as Ruth prepared to leave, the Colonel was heard to say, “Babe …” and nothing more.

Ruth left in tears. It was the only time the Colonel had called him that. Ruppert called everyone by his last name, and in his German accent, Babe had always been “Root.” That evening, Ruppert was given Last Rites of the Catholic Church.

On Friday the thirteenth, Ruppert awoke, drank some orange juice, and fell into unconsciousness. At his bedside were Brennan, his brother George, his sister and her son, and his late sister’s daughter. He died at 10:28 A.M.

Barrow took Brennan’s call at the Yankees’ Forty-second Street office and began alerting the world. Within minutes, messages of condolence were being read on the radio. Ruppert had been so many things—a baseball man, brewer, patron of the arts, real estate investor, and more.

The
Times
reported that he was one of the richest men in the world, despite going through Prohibition and then the Great Depression. They estimated an estate at up to $100 million, where it had been $60 million before the crash. They attributed this good fortune to his real estate investments, said to be worth $30 million. These included the thirty-six story Ruppert Building at Fifth and Forty-fourth St., a thirty-five-story building at Third and Forty-fourth, and a twenty-three-story building at Madison and Fortieth. In 1915, when Ruppert had inherited his estate from his father, it was valued at just under $6.5 million.

Ruppert’s place among the wealthiest Americans was a tribute to fortitude. He had survived anti-German feelings in the throes of World War I. He had survived Prohibition and laid off few workers by making near beer (sold at the stadium), producing syrups and sweeteners, and bottling soda. He had survived the Great Depression by quietly selling off his rare book collection, many of his racehorses, and the Hudson River Stock Farm/Driving Park (where Poughkeepsie Speedway now sits).

Funeral services were first scheduled for Monday at St. Ignatius Loyola on Eighty-fourth and Park, but it was clear they had to be moved to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which held so many more. The police estimated that some fifteen thousand lined the streets along Fifth Avenue and across the street into Rockefeller Center to watch the spectacle of this famous man on his final journey.

From baseball, Ruth represented former players and Gehrig the current team. Honus Wagner was there, as was Clark Griffith, Barrow, Weiss, McCarthy, tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (who used to dance atop the dugout to entertain the fans), Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Al Smith, Senator
Robert Wagner, former mayor John Fitzgerald of Boston, Horace Stoneham of the Giants, Marie Mulvey of the Dodgers, as well as the owners of Schaefer and Rheingold breweries and William Burckhardt, a forty-nine-year employee of Ruppert Brewery.

A fifty-car motorcade departed St. Patrick’s for Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, about a forty minute drive into Westchester County. There he was interred in the family mausoleum along with his parents.

He was laid to rest as defending world champion. He would have liked that. He was a man who liked winning a World Series in four straight, never mind the extra revenue the additional games might bring.

Barrow said he had no knowledge of what Ruppert’s wishes were for the team, “but I know that whatever they are, he wanted the Yankees to go on, and that we will do.”

On opening day of the 1940 season, a plaque honoring Jacob Ruppert was hung on the center-field wall behind the Huggins monument, saying GENTLEMAN-AMERICAN-SPORTSMAN, and of course the Seventh Regiment Band played Ruppert’s favorite, “Just a Song at Twilight.”

BARROW WAS RELIEVED to see how careful Ruppert was with the Yankees. He appeared to have taken better care of them in his will than any of his other holdings. He instructed his estate to pay all inheritance taxes on the Yankees and to furnish the necessary funds to continue to run the team at existing levels. Of all his holdings, only the Yankees were left “intact and inviolate.”

However, it took almost six years to settle the estate, and it wasn’t anywhere near as good as expected.

He did a most unusual thing with the ownership and management of the team. He left the club to three women in his life—his nieces, Helen Ruppert Silleck-Holleran and Ruth Rita Silleck-McGuire (the married daughters of his sister Amanda Ruppert Silleck Jr.), and a “friend,” Helen Winthorpe Weyant.

The nieces lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and had shown little interest in baseball, occasionally attending an opening day or a World Series game and asking little about the club.

“Winnie” Weyant, on the other hand, was a constant companion to the Colonel. Journalist Dan Daniel visited Ruppert at his estate in upstate Garrison and found Miss Weyant very much engaged in the team’s operation, very much a student of baseball.

“She wasn’t sure about Gordon succeeding Lazzeri,” recalled Daniel. “When I told her Gordon would jump right in and make good, she laughed, and doubted it,” he wrote.

“So many people are worried about Tony,” Ruppert chuckled.

Weyant, thirty-seven, was a former actress who had last acted off-Broadway in 1929. She never attended a game with Ruppert but was seen with him at social events, notably at the announcement that the Colonel was to help fund Admiral Richard Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition in 1934. She was clearly the woman of the house at the four-hundred-acre estate in Garrison, walking the Saint Bernards and guiding Daniel around.

Informed by reporters at her West Forty-fifth Street apartment of her inheritance, she was described by the
Times
as having spent a “semi-hysterical day.” She said she had “no idea why so much money had been left to her.”