Pinstripe Empire (5 page)

The team was also better known as the New York Americans or the Greater New Yorks. On opening day, the
Telegram
called them the Deveryites. Sam Crane in the
Evening Journal
was determined that they be the Invaders. In those days, team nicknames were far less formal. It was, for example, more common to say the Bostons or the Boston Americans than to call them the Red Sox or the Pilgrims.

There was a well-known British military regiment called Gordon’s Highlanders, and some fans thought team president Joe Gordon had suggested it as the team’s nickname. “Hilltoppers” was also used on occasion, and as early as April 7, 1904, the
Evening Journal
used YANKEES BEAT BOSTON in a headline. (“Highlanders” didn’t even appear in the
New York Times
until March 1906.) “Yankees” spoke to patriotism, certainly of northern patriotism (post–Civil War) going back to the Yankee Doodle days of the American Revolution, and baseball executives loved to consider the sport a uniquely American one. This was a particularly nationalistic time in the country’s history, with victory in the Spanish-American War having come in 1898.

Writing for
Baseball
magazine in 1922, Fred Lieb reported,

[Highlanders] was awkward to put in newspaper headlines. Finally the sporting editor at one of the New York evening papers exclaimed “The hell with this Highlanders; I am going to call this team ‘the Yanks,’ that will fit into heads better.”

Sam Crane, who wrote baseball on the same sheet, began speaking of the team as the Yankees and Yanks. When other sporting editors saw how much easier “Yanks” fit into top lines of a head, they too [decided against] Highlanders, a name which never was popular with the fans.

Mark Roth of the
Globe
was an early proponent of “Yankees,” while Jim Price used it in the
Press
.

An irony to all of this is that if the major league baseball cities had been outside of America’s Northeast at the start of the century, and if the team had ever envisioned selling its brand nationally, “Yankees” might have been rejected. Less than forty years removed from the Civil War, with Confederate veterans still in abundance, feelings still ran strong in the South against the term. It might have been considered insensitive.

The year 1903 was itself remarkable in America, with eighty-eight automobile manufacturers opening their doors, including Ford and Buick. Among companies founded that year were Harley-Davidson, Kraft Foods, Steuben Glass, Sanka coffee, and Lionel Trains. On April 22, a magnificent new building opened on Broad and Wall streets to house the New York Stock Exchange. People were running to movie houses to see a twelve-minute silent film called
The Great Train Robbery
. In December, the Wright Brothers made their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk.

Among the people born in 1903 were Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Benjamin Spock, Walter O’Malley, and two who would have strong connections to the Yankees: a future restaurateur named Toots Shor, and a baby named Henry Louis Gehrig, born June 19 at 1994 Second Avenue near 103rd Street, about equidistant from Hilltop Park and the future Yankee Stadium.

FORMER POLICE COMMISSIONER Thomas F. McAvoy headed the construction of the American League grounds, a rush project that needed extensive dynamite work to clear five thousand cubic yards of rock from where the grandstand would sit, the filling in of a swamp that ran near the Broadway side of the park, the uprooting of trees, and the leveling, as best as possible, of the playing surface. The total area of the grounds was 9.6 acres. McAvoy was awarded contracts for both the excavation work and the construction work. Conveniently, he was the Tammany Hall leader of the Washington Heights district.

Much of the construction force was made up of some five hundred Polish, Italian, and Irish laborers, paid $1.50 a day, who were not otherwise part of the twelve-thousand-strong team digging up the subway tunnel. They would work night and day, in rain and chilly weather, with the home opener now moved to April 30.

Farrell and Devery spent $200,000 to level the site and $75,000 in
construction costs for what would be a park with a capacity of sixteen thousand, largest in the league. (The league may have assumed some of the cost.) It was the last “five-figure” ballpark built for a major league baseball team. The two-story clubhouse wouldn’t be ready by opening day, so the players would change in their hotel, two blocks east on Amsterdam Avenue, and would walk to the field amidst admiring crowds. Not only was the grandstand not going to be finished by opening day, there would be no roof over it; only the support posts to eventually support a roof. Plans for a second deck never did materialize, as attendance didn’t seem to warrant it.

Additionally, Farrell set up an office in the new Flatiron Building at Twenty-third and Broadway, where Ban Johnson also would maintain an office (and where, coincidentally, the publisher of this book would be housed more than a century later). He later moved the team office to the Reed and Barton Building at 320 Fifth Avenue.

The park was made almost entirely of yellow pine and spruce wood, which remarkably never burned. Most wooden ballparks eventually met this fate: Parks in Philly, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago all burned in one season in 1894. The first row was sixteen inches higher than the playing field, the twentieth and last row thirty-four feet above field level. Six aisles in the grandstand separated the sections and provided access to the field. After games, fans could exit through these aisles and across the field, a practice the Yankees maintained until 1966 wherever they called home.

When the clubhouse was ready, Gordon hired a young man to manage it named Fred Logan, twenty-three, who had been working for the Giants since he was ten but now switched over. He would remain with the Yankees until his death in 1947, the last original team employee.

Another part of the original cast was Harry Mosley Stevens, who had been selling scorecards and snacks at Giants games and now added the Hilltop to his growing concession business. Considered by some to have introduced hot dogs to ballparks, Harry M. Stevens Inc. would be the concessionaire for the Yankees on into the early sixties, with the team continuing to assign the rights until 2008, when it formed a partnership with the Dallas Cowboys football team to operate its own concessions.

Stevens produced the official scorecard for the team (five cents), calling the team the American League Base Ball Club and its field American League Park. There was no reference to Highlanders or Hilltop. The twelve-page program, with rosters and room to score in the centerfold, included
advertising for such products as Philip Morris cigarettes, Dewar’s scotch, Coca-Cola, Horton’s ice cream cones, automobile oils and greases from Atlas, Pommery champagne, and Henry Rahe’s Café just opposite the 168th Street subway station, where you could order Jac. Ruppert’s Extra Pale, Knickerbocker, and Ruppiner.

There was also an ad that said, “Any baseball player who will hit the ‘Bull’ Durham cut-out sign on the field with a fairly batted ball during a regular scheduled league game will receive $50.00 in cash.”

On the front of the scorecard was a notice from the telephone company stating that “Public Telephone Booths on Grand Stand, rear aisle, northerly end. Patrons expecting inward calls should leave their seat number with the operator.”

While the Giants used Pinkerton agents to police the Polo Grounds during games, the Highlanders, with Devery’s connections, chose to use retired policemen.

Joseph Gavin was hired as team secretary, charged with making travel arrangements, paying the players, counting the gate, keeping the books, and answering the occasional question from the press. His duties would be assumed a year later by Abe Nahon, Farrell’s right-hand man throughout his gambling-hall days and a man Farrell trusted with the team’s checkbook and to make immediate business decisions. Nahon, a Columbia Law School graduate known as “On the Level Abe” by racetrack acquaintances, was officially the team’s secretary-treasurer.

Team finances were not complicated. Income came from ticket sales and concessions. Expenses were salaries, travel, and rent, plus assorted clubhouse purchases including a large iron safe made by Mosler, which would house the players’ personal “valuables” during the games—their wallets, jewelry, and keys. Once you opened the master door to the safe, which was about four feet high, you would find twenty-four small drawers, each stenciled with a player’s name: Chesbro, Keeler, and so on. The safe, bearing the original names, would ultimately be the last vestige of the Highlander years, kept at Yankee Stadium before disappearing during renovations in 1973.

By then I was working for the Yankees and knew the importance of the safe. It had been moved to the Polo Grounds when the team relocated there, then hauled to Yankee Stadium in 1923. And there it rested, first in the original clubhouse and then in the “new” clubhouse built in 1946. I spoke to Pete Sheehy about it. Pete was the clubhouse man, an employee since ’27; Logan’s assistant and then successor.

“Pete, they will be tearing down this place in two weeks. Do you think we should get this moved out early to protect it?” I asked.

I think he nodded. He was a man of few words.

Sadly, the safe never made it to Shea Stadium, where the rest of the team’s belongings were being stored during the construction.

The worst part of the new ballpark was surely the mess in right field. Try though he might, poor Phil Schenck could do nothing about this less-than-big-league condition. Willie Keeler, it was reported, “had to stand on a wooden platform placed over the impromptu ravine.”

Schenck was unable to get sod over the muck that was right field, and so after a good rain there was a big mud puddle, and it was anything but level. The only good news for Schenck was that the first homestand lasted just six games, and by the time the team got back from its road trip, green paint had been applied to the grandstand, a roof was added, and, remarkably, right field was level and sodded.

Left field was 365 feet and right field began as 385, but was reduced to 290 for the balance of the first season before being restored to 385 (1904–06) and then 365 (1907–12). Right-center field was the deepest part of the field at 424, with center field at 420. The fence in left was eight feet high, then twelve feet in center and right. A modest scoreboard in left field stretched for some twenty-five feet near the foul pole, providing a line score along with the scores of other American League games, while an adjacent board labeled “National League” kept a line score of the Giants game. In 1907 the Bull Durham tobacco sign was placed in center (later shifted to right). The sign was not unique to New York but was part of the origin for the term “bullpen,” where relief pitchers could warm up.

Of course, the dimensions were fairly meaningless in the deadball era. Few home runs ever cleared the fences. Hitters of the time adjusted to placing the ball between fielders as best they could. Although a muscular male athlete might be expected to try and hit the ball as hard as possible, the futility of having it caught on the fly made the practicality of good placement the secret to success.

Hilltop Park would in fact be a haven for inside-the-park home runs and a nightmare for over-the-fence ones. In its first eight seasons, before center field was shortened, only 23 balls cleared the fences on the fly (15 of them in 1903 when the right field fence was 290), while 175 inside-the-parkers were achieved. According to research reported in
Ballparks of the Deadball Era
by Ronald Selter, 61 percent of home runs in the American League were inside-the-parkers
between 1904 and 1910, but 95 percent of home runs hit at the Hilltop failed to clear a fence.

The first two over-the-fence homers at Hilltop were hit by Buck Freeman of Boston on the same day, June 1, 1903. Ernie Courtney hit the first for New York in the ninth inning of the same game. Of the 23 over-the-fencers, just 12 were hit by Highlander players in those eight seasons—five of them by pitchers (Jack Chesbro two, Griffith, Harry Howell, and Jack Powell one each), with the others by Herm McFarland (four, all in 1903), Jimmy Williams, and John Ganzel. Between 1904 and 1910, there were only eight over-the-fence homers at Hilltop Park.

APART FROM GRIFFITH, the most prominent new member of the team was Wee Willie Keeler, who had batted an amazing .371 during twelve National League seasons. This included a .424 year for Brooklyn six years earlier, with 239 hits, 199 of them singles, and a forty-four-game hitting streak. His move to New York was engineered by Johnson, who “found him an easy man to deal with.”

Of course he was easy. Keeler was given a $10,000 contract, making him the highest-paid player in the game.

A native of Brooklyn, a student at PS 26, and then a lifelong bachelor who lived with his father at 376 Pulaski Street, Keeler’s lifetime Highlander average, .294, would fall far short of what he had accomplished earlier on. He would choke up on his twenty-nine-ounce bat and smack the ball pretty much wherever he wanted it to land. He was also known to have some sort of no-strikeout streak covering perhaps 700 at-bats during the 1890s, although the actual mark is not researchable.

“As I recall it,” said Keeler, “I started my record the tag end of the season of 1895, went through the entire season of 1896 without whiffing, and played a number of games in the spring of 1897 before I was retired over the strikeout route.”

At five foot four, and 140 pounds, Keeler contributed one of the best-known expressions to the game’s legend. Asked his batting secret, he told Abe Yager of the
Brooklyn Eagle
, “Keep your eye clear and hit ’em where they ain’t.”

“He was a nice little guy, very friendly, always laughing and kidding,” recalled Sam Crawford to Lawrence Ritter in
The Glory of Their Times
.

Until Lou Gehrig came along, Keeler was certainly the best native New York player in major league history.

Of course, Keeler probably didn’t expect to be starting the season negotiating mud puddles and standing on planks of wood. In fact, on the very first play of the very first game, Keeler was almost lost to the team attempting to make a play in right with sordid consequences.