Pinstripe Empire (40 page)

Guys who couldn’t hit or field was one thing. If hustling was the issue, that was aimed directly at the manager. McCarthy’s health started to go bad. Gallbladder. Exhaustion. Drinking. He needed to get away. So he took a “leave of absence,” went home to Tonawanda, New York, to rest, and put Fletcher in charge.

While he was gone, MacPhail sold his best pitcher, Borowy, to the Cubs for $100,000.

Borowy, from Fordham University, was 10–5, the ace of the staff, a very serious worker, and a real professional in the old Yankee way. He was twenty-nine and had compiled a 56–30 record for the Yanks, including 17 wins the year before. He’d won a big game for the Yanks in the ’43 World Series. Now he was gone, just like that? This was a most un-Yankeelike roster move.

The sale remained controversial throughout the summer, particularly as Borowy continued to win with the Cubs. Elder statesman Clark Griffith, seventy-five, the Senators’ owner, derided the waiver rule that allowed star players to escape to the other league where they couldn’t hurt the Yankees. He demanded a change, although he acknowledged that he could have claimed the pitcher on waivers but hadn’t bothered since “it was a foregone conclusion the name would be withdrawn.” MacPhail called Griffith’s criticism “silly.”

There was clearly nothing wrong with Borowy, although McCarthy was supposedly grousing about his inability to complete games. He denied the team needed the money, claiming they had “$600,000 in the bank!”

The
World-Telegram
’s Dan Daniel, a good listener, had heard MacPhail say, “Borowy is through around here,” after a bad home outing on July 15 in which he gave up an upper-deck homer to Zeb Eaton of Detroit, hardly a star player. The sale came twelve days later.

Being sold “came as a great surprise to me,” said Borowy. “First thing I heard about it was after today’s game when Larry MacPhail told me the news.”

John Drebinger questioned whether McCarthy had approved it. “We doubt it,” he wrote, “simply because this has never been the way that Joe McCarthy does things, and in the past fifteen seasons this observer has come to know Marse Joe and his way of doing things pretty well.”

Wrote Daniel, “The sale of Borowy to the Cubs marked the end of an era. Col. MacPhail has been waiting for the opportunity to dash in and take hold of his outfit. He got it with Joe McCarthy’s enforced vacation. From now on, MacPhail will make the big decisions, and from now on his opinion of players will dominate the Stadium situation.”

McCarthy returned on August 9 after three weeks. Now he had to make do without his ace, and to top it all, had to watch as Borowy went 11–2 for the Cubs to make him a 21-game winner over two leagues. He even won two World Series games for Chicago, though they lost in the end.

McCarthy had offered to quit while he was home, but MacPhail, knowing the backlash it would have in his first season as owner, refused to accept the resignation.

He would carry on without Fletcher, sixty, who felt chest pains on September 12 and left the team, never to return. This had been his trusted coach since coming to the Yanks in 1927. Rolfe would leave Yale and return in ’46 to replace him as third-base coach.

An exciting element of the strange season was the batting race. Averages were way down, but Tony Cuccinello of the White Sox went into the last day of the season with a .308 average, while Stirnweiss, nursing ulcers, was hanging in there at .306. The White Sox would be rained out on that last day and the game was not to be made up, since it had no effect on the pennant race.

Stirnweiss, at home against Boston, doubled his first time up. In the third he hit a grounder to third that was bobbled by Jack Tobin. Official
scorer Bert Gumpert of the
Bronx Home News
called it an error, which Tobin later agreed with. But hometown scoring was as old as baseball, and other writers who liked Stirnweiss rushed to Gumpert to try to get him to reverse his call. He did; it became a hit.

Snuffy was retired his next two times up, and then on his last at-bat of the season singled to right. He was 3-for-5 and wound up at .3088, rounded off to .309, topping Cuccinello for the title. It was the only day of the entire season he was on top of the leaderboard, and it was the lowest average for a league leader since 1905. Stirnweiss, third in MVP voting, also led the league with 33 stolen bases, and his 22 triples were the most by an American Leaguer since Combs hit 23 in 1927.

The Yankees finished fourth, just six and a half games out of first in the final war year. Every Yankee fan felt that normal life meant a return to the World Series.

MACPHAIL’S BODY OF work in remaking Yankee Stadium was breathtaking. While Topping and Webb agreed to the expenses, it was all Larry’s show.

He built a new home-team clubhouse, taking the Yankees from a street-level clubhouse on the third-base side to one on the lower-level, first-base side. It was carpeted and had a large trainer’s space, a player lounge, a good-sized office for the manager, and plenty of storage space. It easily led to the first-base dugout, to which the Yankees moved in ’46, at which time the bullpens also shifted, the Yankees now in right field.

MacPhail had new, permanent, curved-back box seats installed. The new seats were painted a lighter green than the ones that were scheduled to be upgraded later, marking the only time that there was “color coding,” so to speak, in the stadium. Eventually, all would be the lighter green. He renumbered the sections so that lower numbers indicated choicer seating around the infield. (The original numbering system was restored when the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009.) The loose Windsor chairs were painted a lighter green and scattered throughout the inner workings of the ballpark. As a general rule, collectors who purchased curved-back seats after the 1973 season were buying seats installed in 1946. The straight-back seats, located in the last rows behind the pillars, went back to 1923 (with some from 1928 and 1937).

There was a new press dining area near the Yankee clubhouse, where the food and drinks were always on the house.

A private restaurant called the Stadium Club was opened on two levels—the street level (the former Yankee clubhouse) serving a full menu for season box holders or VIPs, while a private room for parties or press conferences opened on the mezzanine level. That room was said to have the longest bar in New York. MacPhail had historic Yankee photographs blown up to serve as decor throughout these rooms and in fact throughout the stadium, so that Ruth, Gehrig, et al were never far from view.

He added a great deal of storage space and working space for the concessions business; built shops for the plumbers, electricians, painters, and carpenters; and had large storage rooms for old photos, trophies, pennants, even uniforms—except for the ones passed down to the minor leagues.

(“We never gave a thought to taking home uniforms after the season,” Yogi Berra said years later. “What would we need them for?” So they went down to the minors where they sewed on the Newark name, or whatever. Minor leaguers would wear DiMaggio’s uniform.)

A smaller, electric scoreboard to the left of the existing one, paid for with advertising for Longines watches, was added because of the necessity of having a countdown clock for football games, including those played by Topping’s New York Yankees football team, which played in the All-American Football Conference from 1946 to 1949.

MacPhail never got around to replacing the original scoreboard from 1923—that didn’t happen until 1950, when the hand-operated classic was replaced by a $100,000 all-electronic board, paid for by Ballantine Beer.

MacPhail commissioned a new Yankee logo to complement the interlocking NY. This alternate logo, designed by Spencer Marketing graphic artist Lon Keller, would first appear as the script word
Yankees
, the “k” in the shape of a bat, topped by a red-white-and-blue Uncle Sam hat.

An early version may have been sketched on a napkin at the 21 Club by in-house portraitist Sam Friedman. It appeared on the 1946 spring training roster. Friedman’s family said he drew it at the bar for Topping and Sonja Henie. If accurate, his version was embellished by Keller, circled by a baseball. It first appeared on the 1946 scorecard and throughout the stadium.

As expected, MacPhail soon put light towers on the roof of the stadium and put the team in the air for road trips, although after he departed, the Yankees returned to rail travel more than most clubs.

The addition of lights was especially welcomed by the New York
Daily News
, which called itself “New York’s Picture Newspaper” and prided itself on spectacular action photos in its centerfold and on its back page. The
Daily
News
made a deal with the Yankees to pick up the electric costs for any day games in which the lights would be turned on, ensuring them better photos. The deal lasted almost twenty years. The
News
also used homing pigeons to pick up film at the stadium and fly it down to their Forty-second Street building.

With spring training never having been much of a moneymaker, MacPhail scheduled exhibition games in Panama and Texas to pick up a large guarantee and at least make training camp a break-even venture.

He also instituted Old-Timers’ Day as an annual event, beginning in 1947. He called that one the “second annual,” making Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day of 1939 the first. They have been held continuously ever since. Other teams have tried them, but all eventually ceased, while the Yankees’ event has succeeded largely on the fans’ enduring interest in the team’s past. For many years there was a “theme,” and the invited guests included both Yankees and opponents. Always on the field were Yankee owners and officials presenting gifts to the attendees. (When Gabe Paul went to the field in 1974, he encountered too many old-timers who had experienced nasty contract disputes with him on other clubs. It was decided that no team officials were necessary on the field.) Later on it evolved into an all-Yankee event. But over the years no less than Cobb, Mack, Griffith, Young, Speaker, Hornsby, Baker, Terry, Sisler, Frisch, Ott, Traynor, Robinson, Feller, and a long roll call of immortals made their way to the event, often en route to Cooperstown, where annual induction ceremonies followed a week later. Thus each year’s new Hall of Fame class was also included.

Lucy Monroe remained a fixture performing the national anthem, and Yankee Stadium would be her ticket to fame, at least among Yankee fans. She sometimes played to mixed reviews. Wrote
Newsweek
in 1958: “The National Anthem is meant to rouse feelings of pride and re-dedication in American listeners, not to provoke laughter. It is our duty to report that the Lucy Monroe public address system version of
The Star-Spangled Banner
at the World Series in Yankee Stadium last week was a musical fright which brought embarrassment, smirks and giggles to attending thousands and listening millions across the country. It’s time to send Lucy to the shower.”

MacPhail never tinkered with the Yankee uniform, and brought Mel Allen back in ’46 after his discharge to work both home and road games with Russ Hodges on WINS, replacing Bill Slater and Al Helfer, who did the ’45 broadcasts.

Among people he brought over from his Brooklyn days was a top scout, Tom Greenwade, signing him to a contract on December 5, 1945, not long after he had scouted Jackie Robinson for the Dodgers. Greenwade would be the scout who discovered Mickey Mantle.

MacPhail’s modernization helped the Yankees draw 2,265,512 in 1946, a new major league record and the first time the Yankees had topped a million since 1930. (On August 4, 74,529 paid to see Chandler beat Feller 2–0, a gate called the largest “accurately-counted crowd ever to see a baseball game.”) Of course, the end of the war was the big reason, but MacPhail made sure that returning servicemen saw a greatly improved stadium over the one they remembered.

If there was one area where MacPhail showed no progress, though, it was in integrating the roster. As early as opening day 1945, his first game as owner, picketers marched around the stadium with signs saying IF WE CAN PAY, WHY CAN’T WE PLAY? and IF WE CAN STOP BULLETS, WHY NOT BALLS?

MacPhail, hardly alone in his thinking, met with the protestors, who said that negro fans constituted 25 percent of attendance, yet there were no negro employees in the Yankee organization. (Apart from service staff in the restaurants and maintenance, Pearl Davis, a secretary to Howard Berk, broke the color line in the front office in the sixties, and Doris Walden did it at the switchboard in the seventies.) MacPhail heard them out but made no hires. He later said that “agitators” who were just after their own self-interests were creating the clamor.

When NYU sociologist Dr. Dan Dodson, serving as executive director of the Mayor’s Committee on Unity in New York City, tried to meet with the Yankees, MacPhail called him a “professional do-gooder” who didn’t know anything about baseball.

A Major League Committee on Baseball Integration was formed in 1945, which included black sportswriter Sam Lacy, Branch Rickey of the Dodgers, MacPhail of the Yankees, and Joseph Rainey, a magistrate from Philadelphia. MacPhail never attended a meeting and the committee disbanded. Rickey, of course, was already thinking of signing a black player, and within months would meet with Jackie Robinson and begin the process of integrating first the International League in ’46—and then in ’47, the National League.

MacPhail, carrying forward accepted major league standards, earned no plaudits for his work in this area. His public position was that efforts to
integrate the major leagues would undermine the Negro Leagues, perhaps putting them out of business. (That did, of course, happen.) He wanted no part of “political and social-minded drum beaters.”

Besides, the Yankees had been collecting rent checks from the Negro Leagues, leasing the stadium since July 5, 1930, including a 1939 competition of five doubleheaders between Negro National League teams, with the ultimate winner to receive the Ruppert Cup. All the great stars of the Negro Leagues passed through Yankee Stadium, and Josh Gibson may have even hit a fair ball out of the stadium, a story undocumented but often told. The last recorded Negro League game was an East-West All-Star matchup at Yankee Stadium on August 20, 1961, with Satchel Paige pitching.