Pinstripe Empire (38 page)

IN A SHOCKING vote at year’s end, Joe Gordon, who had delivered a fine .322/18/103 season, beat out Triple Crown winner Ted Williams (.356/36/137) for MVP honors. A year after hitting .406 and losing to DiMaggio, this time Williams lost to Gordon by twenty-one points. The vote was hotly debated for months and was the most controversial since the Baseball Writers’ Association began polling in ’31. With Williams also leading the league in runs, walks, and slugging percentage, it seemed clear that a lot of the voting writers simply did not like Teddy Ballgame. Gordon, as some pointed out, only led in strikeouts, grounding into double plays, and errors.

Gordon described himself as “floored” by the award. “It’s an honor I’ve always had ambitions to win, like any other ball player, but I never thought it would come this season,” he said.

In his autobiography, Williams wrote, “The voting tends to go to the team that wins, which is right. But I have to think the reason I didn’t get more consideration was because of the trouble I had with the draft.”

He did spend much of 1942 trying to overturn his 1-A classification, which won him few fans among the press or the public.

____________

THE YANKEES WERE in first place from May on, and won by nine games. They now prepared to face the Cardinals for the first time since 1926. They had managed to avoid playing the Gashouse Gang, the great Cardinal teams of the ’30s, but now faced a young team largely with players in their twenties, including Stan Musial, twenty-one. The Yankees, winners of eight straight World Series showdowns and 24–4 in Series games under McCarthy, were the heavy favorites.

The Series opened in St. Louis with Ruffing beating Mort Cooper, holding the Cards hitless until Terry Moore singled with two out in the eighth. But that was the high point for the Yanks. The Cardinals proceeded to win four in a row, with the finale a 4–2 victory, Johnny Beazley over Ruffing, who had been 7–1 in World Series play going into the game. Rizzuto, in his final game before going off to the navy, hit a first-inning home run, and the score was 2–2 in the ninth when Whitey Kurowski homered with a man on, just inside the left-field foul pole.

In the last of the ninth, the Yanks got two men on, but soon-to-be MVP Gordon was picked off second to end the rally.

To lose like that, in Yankee Stadium, on a pickoff, was a devastating blow.

EVERYTHING FELT DIFFERENT about 1943, starting with traveling secretary Mark Roth missing his first spring training in thirty-five years due to illness. Rex Weyant, Winnie’s brother, assumed his duties and supervised the move to an abbreviated version of spring training at Asbury Park High School in New Jersey. Commissioner Landis had ordered limited travel, and thus the annual spring trek to St. Petersburg was on hold. (The Yankees trained in Atlantic City in 1944 and 1945.) The team headquartered at the Albion Hotel and played only one exhibition game on the high school grounds, against their Newark club. The fans who braved the chilly weather to see the Yankees work out didn’t see DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Selkirk, Hassett, and Ruffing, who went into the service, but guys like Bud Metheny, Bill Zuber, Marv Breuer, Tommy Byrne, Tuck Stainback, and Oscar Grimes. A lot of glamour was missing, and there were a lot of holes for McCarthy to fill.

Ruffing, thirty-eight, a nineteen-year veteran who had lost four toes before embarking on his baseball career, was a surprise inductee, but he was chosen for non-combative duty and worked at an aircraft factory.

DiMaggio’s entry into the army was particularly noted, especially since he could have sought an exemption as married with a son. There was a lot
of confusion over his departure, and it seemed to catch Barrow by surprise. Pictures of Joe being sworn in ran in every newspaper in the country.

Crosetti, thirty-two, took over his old spot at short and Lindell took over in center. A rookie, Billy Johnson, was given third base. A pickup from the Phillies, Nick Etten was handed first. Dickey, at thirty-six, split the catching with Rollie Helmsley and batted .351. Metheny replaced Henrich in right. Patchwork? Sure. But every team had to deal with it. This team didn’t hit much—Dickey was the only .300 hitter. But muscular Charlie Keller (who hated his nickname “King Kong”) belted 31 homers. Etten drove in 107 runs. Gordon fell to .249, and Crosetti, suspended the first thirty days for shoving umpire Bill Summers in the ’42 World Series, struggled and was often spelled by rookie infielder George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss, up from the champion Newark Bears.

Etten, twenty-four, out of Villanova, had played two seasons for the Athletics and two for the Phillies (then called the Blue Jays) before the Yankees sent them two journeymen and $10,000 to obtain his contract. “Christmas came early this year,” he told his wife when informed of the trade. He would give the Yankees four seasons, leading the league in homers one year and RBI another, making him one of the team’s better wartime players. He had an odd batting stance, almost completely facing the pitcher, which he said made it possible for him to follow the pitch with both eyes. He was certainly a good find for the Yankees during these fill-in years. He was classified 3-A in the draft (married with a child, like DiMaggio), which made him a “safe” acquisition.

Johnson, twenty-four, who was born in Montclair, New Jersey, on the same day Ted Williams was born in San Diego, had toiled in the Yankees’ minor league system since he was seventeen, always hitting around .300 or better but never getting “the call.” In ’42 he hit .290 at Newark and was ready. He played every game for the ’43 Yankees, hit .280 with 94 RBI (a new club record for third basemen), and fielded his position well. He finished fourth in MVP voting, a fine rookie accomplishment. But then he too would be off to the military for the next two years. He then returned to play the position regularly for five stellar years, four of them pennant winners.

Snuffy Stirnweiss, also twenty-four, was so named for his fondness for chewing tobacco. The son of a New York City policeman, he stood just five foot eight but played college football at North Carolina and was drafted as a halfback by the NFL’s Chicago Cardinals. Born in Manhattan, raised in the East Bronx, and a graduate of Fordham Prep, he signed with the Yanks in
1940 and moved quickly through the farm system. Snuffy’s draft status seemed secure; he had a wife and a mother to support, and his brother was in the service. He was never called.

The only real tune-up after training in Asbury Park was a three-way doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on April 14, with the Dodgers beating the Yanks in the opener and then the Giants in the second game before 35,301. The proceeds, some $75,000 including radio rights, went to the Civil Defense Volunteer Office.

Attendance fell to 645,006 for the season, the lowest it would ever be at Yankee Stadium, and naturally there was concern about the future of both the game and the country. Drawing nine thousand fans, on average, to a stadium that could hold seventy thousand was distressing. Any thoughts of selling the team were surely on hold now, its postwar value uncertain.

The Yanks were in first place all season and won their fourteenth pennant by thirteen and a half games, winning ninety-eight—seventeen with what are now called walk-off hits. With no Ruffing or Gomez to anchor the staff for the first time since 1929, Spud Chandler stepped up and delivered a 20–4 season with a club-record 1.64 ERA at age thirty-five, sparkling enough to earn himself the MVP Award, the only Yankee pitcher ever to accomplish the feat. He held opponents to a .215 batting average and was 10–2 both at home and on the road. He was only the fourth pitcher in AL history (with Johnson, Grove, and Gomez) to lead the league in both won-lost percentage and ERA.

At the All-Star Game that year, McCarthy, criticized in ’42 for naming nine Yankees to the team (six starters), decided to select six Yankees but to sit them all. He still won 5–3, with not a Yankee in the box score.

The Yankees were delighted that the Cardinals repeated in the National League—a chance to avenge the 1942 embarrassment. With wartime travel restrictions in place, the first three games were in New York, with the next four scheduled for St. Louis. Chandler won the opener, but Barrow was taken to the hospital that day with a heart attack. Robust and vital, baseball people had to be reminded that “Cousin Egbert” was in fact seventy-five years old. But he would recover and return to work in eight weeks.

Bonham lost game two to Mort Cooper, an emotional game in that Mort and his brother Walker, his catcher, had lost their father to a heart attack that very morning. The Cooper brothers chose to play on in his memory, and the nation cheered their win.

Borowy won the third game, aided by a bases-loaded triple from Johnson, to send the teams to Missouri with the Yanks up 2–1.

From there, New York made quick work of it, Marius Russo winning game four and Chandler getting the clinching win in a 2–0 shutout. The old Yanks played key roles in this one, with Dickey, at thirty-six, hitting a tworun homer off Cooper in the sixth for all the scoring. For a final time, Art Fletcher would lead the clubhouse in singing “The Sidewalks of New York,” “Beer Barrel Polka,” and “Pistol Packing Mama” as relief pitcher Jim Turner and Etten hoisted Commissioner Landis onto their shoulders to sing along.

McCarthy was celebrating the team’s tenth world championship—his seventh and last.

After the season, a contingent of big leaguers headed for the Pacific theater to play games for U.S. troops, and the Yankees on the team included Chandler, Johnson, Keller, Dickey, and Gordon. Along with Marius Russo, all of them would find themselves in the service in ’44.

DESPITE ALL OF these roster losses, no one would dare speak of this in the face of the greater good of serving the country. Every team was affected, and no one questioned the commitment to the nation. It was just the way it was.

And so whatever 1944 would bring, baseball was happy to still be going. Whatever the attendance would be (789,995 in the Yankees’ case), it was great relief and entertainment for the war workers, and that overrode anything else.

1944 would not produce a fourth straight pennant. In the final year of the Ruppert estate ownership, there was a resumption of radio broadcasting, with Don Dunphy and Bill Slater on WINS, but no champions to cheer for.

On January 28, Mark Roth died at sixty-two. He had been traveling secretary since 1915; first as a teen newspaperman and then in his current position, he had seen almost every game the team had played since its founding. He could have written the team’s history, because he had a great knowledge of it, and Frank Graham’s well-received 1943 book
The New York Yankees
leaned heavily on his memories.

His replacement, Rex Weyant, led a small contingent to Atlantic City to inspect the makeshift training facilities the team would encounter. Barrow wasn’t yet ready to travel and McCarthy had dropped a log on his foot in
Buffalo and couldn’t make the trip either. So the farm director, Weiss, went there along with Jackie Farrell, who ran the team’s speakers’ bureau; Charley McManus, the stadium manager; and Walter Owens, the head grounds-keeper. Owens would supervise conversion of Bader Field from football to baseball, but the bad weather allowed the Yanks only six outdoor sessions all spring, including games against the Phillies and Dodgers. The indoor practices were held in an armory, and the team stayed at the Hotel Senator. The following year, the Red Sox would join them and share the facility.

Apart from his log accident, McCarthy missed the first three weeks of the season with a gallbladder attack. Fletcher managed the club.

This was an almost unrecognizable Yankee team. Stirnweiss took over at second, Etten manned first, but there was Mike Milosevich and Crosetti sharing short, Metheny, Lindell, and Hersh Martin in the outfield, Oscar Grimes at third, Mike Garbark and Helmsley catching, and even oldsters like Paul Waner, forty-one, Johnny Cooney, forty-three, and Jim Turner, forty, getting action. Dickey had gone off to the navy.

The pitching was a little more recognizable, as Borowy, Bonham, and Donald made 74 starts. Rookie Walt “Monk” Dubiel, up from Newark, was 13–13.

On June 26, 1944, the Polo Grounds hosted a most unusual exhibition game: Yankees vs. Giants vs. Dodgers. A different team took the field each inning. The Yanks and Dodgers shared the visiting dugout. In the end, with a truly bizarre scoring system, the Dodgers won 5 to 1 to 0.
⁹
The most emotional part of the afternoon was a wonderful ovation for Dickey, now a naval lieutenant, who managed to be at the ballpark.

And Dickey lived up to his billing—an officer, gentleman, and ballplayer. A newspaper conducted a popularity poll to select a favorite all-time player, with each vote costing $25 to buy a war bond. Lou Gehrig won with 320 last-minute votes: Dickey had wired a pledge of $8,000 and cast all his 320 votes for his old pal.

The ’44 Yanks, a shadow of their former selves, still found themselves in first place for a week after Labor Day. On Friday, September 29, they were in Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis, trailing the Browns and Tigers by three games with four games left on the schedule. A “crowd” of 6,172 turned out for the biggest games in Browns history as Bonham and Borowy went down in a
doubleheader loss, 4–1 and 1–0, to eliminate the Yankees. The Browns won the only American League pennant in their history. (They moved to Baltimore in 1953.)

It was tough to lose to the Browns, and McCarthy saw no good side to it. To have won with his makeshift lineup would have been quite a feat, and certainly would have set aside his “push-button manager” knock. The Yanks finished third, six games out.

LARRY MACPHAIL BEGAN THINKING about buying the Yankees in March of 1944. They had been, in his mind, “available for the right price” ever since Ruppert’s death. He felt that ownership couldn’t go on forever under the arrangement in Ruppert’s will.

MacPhail was an unlikely man to own the Yankees. They were as conservative an organization as existed in sports, and the tone set by Barrow and McCarthy was all business: Give the fans a good team, and they will come. There would be no place for the flamboyance of a MacPhail, who was always thinking promotion.