Pinstripe Empire (4 page)

At the “press conference” to announce the team, Gordon was front and center; Farrell and Devery weren’t even present. All of Johnson’s dealings with the team, after these initial meetings, would be with Gordon. Gordon remained on the scene for three years, and then Farrell became the face of the team as the new president.

Devery had little to do with the running of the team, but his celebrity far exceeded Farrell’s and he could occasionally be called upon for a ceremonial first pitch.

“I BOUGHT THE baseball team as a hobby,” Devery told people, “and I never had any intention of making any money from it.”

He didn’t need to, having earned considerable wealth from artful graft during his career with the New York Police Department. In retirement, on an estate in Far Rockaway, Queens, when his wealth was said to grow with healthy real estate investments, he would proudly show off a collection of thirty-six scrapbooks featuring cartoonists and editorialists having at him. He was known far beyond New York’s borders, and for a time was
as recognizable as the various mayors he served. In 1902, the
World
reported that this civil servant was worth $750,000.

For the New York newspapers—the
Times
, the
Herald
, the
Sun
, the
Evening Telegram
, the
Tribune
, the
Press
, the
World
, the
Globe
, the
Journal
, the
American & Journal
, the
Morning Telegraph
, the
Mail and Express
, and the
American
—he was a reporter’s dream.

He’d been born near Third Avenue and East Twenty-eighth Street in 1857 and joined the police department in 1876. He advanced to sergeant in 1882 and captain in 1891, and soon made friends with a powerful political boss, Richard Croker. Croker began to oversee Devery’s rise in the department. It was while he was captain of the West Thirteenth Street police station that he first met Farrell, who had one of his saloons at Thirteenth and Sixth. Devery made sure that the establishment ran smoothly, so long as tribute was properly rendered.

While captain in 1894, Big Bill was arrested for bribery and extortion, fired, and then reinstated when the conviction was overturned a year later. A month later, he was made deputy chief of police. In 1896, the Board of Police, headed by Theodore Roosevelt, filed a complaint against him that should have led to his removal, but he fought it off with a legal maneuver, claiming the board was not bipartisan as required. In 1898, while Roosevelt was running for governor, he became chief of police.

Mayor Robert Van Wyck was under pressure to remove Devery from office in 1901, but Croker arranged for Van Wyck to make him deputy police commissioner.

His greatest strength seemed to be in managing the corruption that had invaded the police department, and then as deputy commissioner, serving as judge at the trials of his cops. “His wonderfully shrewd judgment of police human nature; his accurate knowledge of all the small tricks of the lazy or dishonest patrolman and his frankness in revealing his familiarity with them at trials was at once the joy and the astonishment of the city,” wrote John M. Sullivan in 1904.

Lincoln Steffens, a leading journalist and editor of his day and one of the city’s most famous muckrakers, loved to write about Devery. “As a character, as a work of art, he was a masterpiece,” he wrote. “I think we never printed a paragraph against this crook that did not betray our involuntary liking for his honesty, courage and character.”

Perhaps Devery’s finest hour was in carefully organizing a parade to
honor Admiral George Dewey, the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War. The parade, up Broadway on September 30, 1899, would become the model for the ticker-tape parades that became such a part of New York—and that would later be held many times for championship Yankee teams starting in 1977. (There was one on October 29, 1999, with no one noting the connection to Devery, who had devised the route a century before.)

In 1902, Farrell and Devery purchased Empire City Race Track in Westchester (today Yonkers Raceway), Farrell having purportedly retired from the pool-hall business after the ’01 elections. The same year, Devery quit the police force, his “reputation” secure. The new mayor, Seth Low, who had been president of Columbia University, wanted no part of Devery or his Tammany Hall political connections. Just a few months later, Devery, feeling betrayed by Croker, declared his candidacy to lead the Ninth Assembly District of New York while presiding over his “interests” from a saloon called the Pump on Eighth Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. Once its darling, he was now taking on Tammany Hall.

Devery won the election, but when the Tammany leaders refused to recognize him, he organized a new party, the Independent Peoples Party, and ran for mayor in 1903 following his first season in baseball. He lost badly, despite offering free beer at his rallies.

Given the reputations of Farrell and Devery, a strong commissioner would no doubt have turned them away. But now they were poised to buy into the American League.

The purchase price for the franchise was $18,000 (about $440,000 in 2011 dollars). It remains a question of historical debate whether this was for the ownership of the Baltimore franchise that was to be moved to New York, or whether it was for a brand-new franchise with no Baltimore roots. In either case, it would be replacing the Orioles in the American League.

Devery’s name wasn’t even listed as a stockholder, although he had clearly put a lot of money into the cost of the team and the ballpark site. “Me a backer?” he had said. “I only wished I did own some stock in a baseball club. I’m a poor man and don’t own stock in anything. Besides, how could I pitch a ball with this stomach?”

If it was a franchise shift, it included new owners (as with the St. Louis Browns’ move to Baltimore in 1954), almost entirely new players (unlike the Montreal Expos’ move to Washington in 2005), and a new spring
training site (the Orioles had been in French Lick, Indiana, in 1902; the New Yorkers went to Atlanta in 1903). Though many historians feel the Yankees and Orioles were the same franchise, greats like McGraw, Robinson, Bresnahan, and McGinnity are never listed as Yankee Hall of Famers. There seems little to really connect the two teams other than one replacing the other. The first baseball encyclopedia, published in 1922, makes no connection. The Yankees themselves begin their record keeping with the 1903 season.

On March 14, just six weeks from opening day, the Greater New York Baseball Association was incorporated. The directors were John R. Bushong, Samuel C. Worthen, Jerome H. Buck, Bernard T. Lynch, and Henry T. Randall, names that were seldom heard from again in the operation of the team. A happy group of new “team officials” including Ban Johnson hired wagons to deliver them uptown to survey their soggy new site on that very day.

What would one day be a billion-dollar franchise had been born.

WITH OWNERSHIP SECURED AND a team president in place, Ban Johnson then took personal charge of hiring a well-credentialed manager to run the team. That was thirty-three-year-old Clark Griffith.

Johnson had committed to taking a personal interest in this franchise. Farrell and Devery were neophytes, and Gordon had been out of it since his American Association days.

Among the things that Griffith brought to the table was a dislike of McGraw, which Johnson found appealing. Griffith’s distaste had much to do with on-field incidents, but the chance to compete against him in New York was a strong incentive for Griff to listen to Johnson’s offer.

Griffith, known to baseball people as the Old Fox, owned the Washington Senators from 1919 to 1955 but was still a young fox when he was approached by Johnson.

Born in Clear Creek, Missouri, in 1869, he was raised in a log cabin by a single mother, his father having been killed in a hunting accident when Clark was two. The family had moved west by covered wagon, making this a genuine pioneer tale.

He had been a professional baseball player since he was eighteen, and became a pitcher of note with Cap Anson’s Chicago Colts beginning in 1893. Although only five foot six and 156 pounds, he was a 20-game winner six times, owing largely to a variety of pitches that involved legal foreign substances. He jumped to the Chicago Americans in 1901 and won 20 again, serving as both player and manager and winning the first AL pennant.
Well respected in the game and thought of as one of the bigger stars raided from the National League, Griff had the credentials to be a high-profile leader of the fledgling New York team and still provide a contribution on the field.

Next came the ballpark. Freedman and Brush had outmaneuvered Johnson on several possible locations but had pretty much ignored areas north of the Polo Grounds, an option they thought doomed to failure.

Even as late as March 3, with players beginning to gather for spring training, no site had been announced, although Johnson had promised April 22 as a home opener. Not until March 10 was the area in Washington Heights finally announced, and someone calculated that fifteen sites had been considered in all. “Someone has guessed [the site],” said the
Evening Telegram
, “because every vacant lot has been seized upon by somebody as the available place.” In making the announcement at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan, Johnson said, “If the plan to secure this site had fallen through, we would have leased the Astor estate property at 161st Street and Jerome Avenue.”

He was describing the land that two decades later would become the site of Yankee Stadium.

Griffith met his men at Union Station in Washington on the seventeenth, and they headed to Atlanta together. On March 25, the day of their first workout at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, blasting began to eliminate the rocks of what would be known as Hilltop Park. The excavation, estimated at $200,000, was far more expensive than the cost of constructing the park. Spring training moved ahead with no sign of what the home ballpark would ultimately look like. They would find out on opening day.

The area north of the Polo Grounds was not quite wilderness in 1903, but it was far enough north, and seemingly so unusable, as not to be considered prime real estate or a threat to Giants ticket sales.

A subway was being planned, and the 157th Street station of the Inter-borough Rapid Transit Company, by the Polo Grounds, would be opening in the fall of 1904. (It is today the 1 line.) The stop at 168th Street, where the Americans would play, would not open until March of 1906. So the new team would spend three seasons way uptown, counting on people either taking surface transportation like trolley cars, available at 125th Street (horse-drawn buses were being phased out and replaced by double-decker, electric-engine models), or trying out one of those new motorcars seen on occasion up and down Broadway. The streetcar lines that traversed Broadway would run special cars on game days, and the Third Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines
would also take fans to within walking distance of the park. By opening day, most people had decided to use the streetcars and walk two blocks.

The ten-minute walk from the Polo Grounds stop, beginning in ’05, was no big deal really, particularly in the company of fellow fans who shared the fun of the new underground experience. So high was the hilltop and so submerged was the subway that the 168th Street station, then as now, required an elevator from platform to street; there were no stairs. Even when the line was built, some fans chose to walk to 157th Street to avoid the slow and crowded elevators to the subway platform.

Broadway was on the eastern side of the hilltop property; Fort Washington Avenue was on the west, with West 168th Street at the north and West 165th Street at the south. St. Nicholas Avenue, another main street, converged with Broadway at 168th. You could look over the third-base line and over the top of the Deaf and Dumb Institute on Fort Washington Avenue and see the Palisades on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. It was a beautiful, pastoral view, an absolutely wonderful backdrop, unexpected in site selection, that would turn an afternoon at a ballgame into a true escape from the daily rigors of city life. “It is useful rather than ornamental,” wrote
Sporting Life
, “and the view is a visual treat.” Games were always over before the beautiful Palisades sunset, but the whole experience nevertheless contributed to what was being recognized as our “national pastime.”

The entrance would be on Broadway, about ninety feet south of the end of the right-field foul line, where large painted letters said N.Y. above the team’s office windows and AMERICAN LEAGUE. below, above three turnstiles, a period following “League.” From there fans would walk along a passageway behind the seats, as far as the left-field bleachers, passing fifty-two private boxes. There was a little room left on the 165th Street side for a modest parking lot to accommodate carriages and, in just a few years, more motorcars. The words AMERICAN LEAGUE PARK. appeared again in six-foot letters on the wooden walls on either side of the entrance.

The land itself was leased to the baseball team for ten years by the New York Institute for the Blind, which was also known as the Blind Asylum. Public School 169 rested across Broadway at 168th and was a quite visible landmark beyond right-center field. A series of three five-story apartment buildings, still standing, loomed over dead center field on 168th.

The neighborhood was called Washington Heights, with the Hudson River just two blocks west. The George Washington Bridge would be constructed ten blocks north in about twenty-five years. Alex Rodriguez would
be born in this neighborhood in 1975, when it was becoming largely populated by Dominican immigrants. In 1903, it was made up largely of Irish immigrants.

TODAY WE THINK the field was commonly called Hilltop Park, and the team commonly called the Highlanders. But in the first decade, while actually in use, the park was better known as the American League Grounds, sometimes just as “up on the hilltop” or “up the rockpile.” Sometimes newspapers called it “the American Park.”