Pinstripe Empire (7 page)

As for the play on the field, some questioned Griffith’s leadership. The sage eighty-year-old baseball historian Henry Chadwick wrote, “The failure to secure services of a team manager of [Ned] Hanlon-like experience and ability was at the root of their failings.” (Hanlon was the highly regarded Brooklyn manager.)

Chadwick’s dismissal of Griffith’s work could not be taken lightly. No figure in baseball was as respected as the aging Chadwick, despite his being “just” a journalist. “Father” Chadwick was the man whose writings in the annual
Baseball Guide
and in an assortment of newspapers was always taken seriously. He is today the only journalist in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

With Chadwick as the leader and Joe Vila as an early catalyst in the formation of the Yankees, the relationship between the team and the press was established early. From the humble beginnings to the entry of radio, then television, and then the Internet, it has been a marriage of necessity, with the requisite highs and lows of any marriage. Newspapers knew that
coverage of the team would attract more circulation, thus enabling them to sell advertising at a higher rate. Teams knew that the coverage was free promotion for their product, and that they were in a much better position than other forms of entertainment such as Broadway or the cinema, where the show would get a review and then be forced to rely on paid advertising. Baseball, however, received daily free coverage, with each story helping to sell the product by reinforcing its importance and making the players celebrities.

Over the decades, there would be times when the team hated its coverage, and there would be times when the newspapers would want to ignore the team. But in the end they needed each other. It was just good business.

And so the teams regularly paid for the journalists to travel with them, covering most of their expenses. Not until the late fifties did the growing Long Island newspaper
Newsday
, under sports editor Jack Mann and reporter Stan Isaacs, decide that the free perks could be seen as compromising its role and tell the Yankees it would assume all the costs on its own. Other papers followed, with the
New York Times
forbidding its writers to serve as official scorers or to vote for awards or the Hall of Fame, let alone accept travel or Christmas gifts from the teams.

The ’03 Highlanders were 17–23 after a win on June 9 when Ban Johnson helped to implement the first trade in franchise history. New York sent Courtney and Long to Detroit for Norm “the Tabasco Kid” Elberfeld.

Kid Elberfeld, twenty-eight, the youngest of ten surviving children born to German immigrant parents in Pomeroy, Ohio, was a light-hitting shortstop of whom much was expected on defense.

Tabasco sauce, made from spicy tabasco peppers, had been on American tables since 1868, and it provided a fitting nickname for this pepperpot of a figure, a five-foot-seven, 158-pounder who could spice things up.

He was an immediate favorite with fans of the era who liked their athletes rowdy. He was the anti-Keeler, the bad boy that young fans were not supposed to emulate (which of course they did). At the same time, he would be high maintenance for the team and the league: He was known to pick fights, go after opponents with baseball bats, stomp on umpires’ toes, curse loudly, deliberately get hit with pitches and then charge the mound, earn suspension after suspension, and suffer through periods of indifference or questionable injuries.

While he was not what Johnson felt was an American League player, Johnson knew the Kid would spark fan interest, and indeed Elberfeld was much influenced by McGraw himself, for whom he hoped to play in 1903.
However, letting him go from Detroit to the Giants would have been seen as upending the peace agreement between the leagues, so he was forced to remain with Detroit until an intraleague trade beckoned. There he played for manager Ed Barrow, the Yankees’ future general manager. Barrow had just suspended the Kid a week before the trade for “loaferish conduct.” Rejuvenated by the move to New York, Elberfeld gave the team a quick lift and they won five of their first six games with him. In early July they won seven straight, went over .500, and began to play decent baseball, even while failing to move up in the standings.

But the lineup would ultimately fail as often as not. Getting “Chicagoed” (shut out) ten times, they never really contended. The best they could say was that as a new team, finishing in the first division (fourth place, out of eight teams, ten games over .500) was an accomplishment. One newspaper reporter suggested that the failures of the season might be owed to the “unfit physical condition of some players.”

Keeler’s .313 led the team but was well below his National League performances, while Chesbro (21–15), Tannehill (15–15), and Griffith (14–11) were too often just ordinary. Tannehill would be dispatched to Boston after the season and would win 43 games over the next two seasons there.

In the end, Elberfeld was a bright spot, hitting .287, exceeding expectations at the plate.

The Highlanders drew 211,808, seventh among the eight teams in the league, a disappointment after the big opening day. It meant they averaged just about 3,400 per game. (They played nine doubleheaders.) The euphoria of opening day faded.

The Giants, meanwhile, with 61 victories from Christy Mathewson and Joe McGinnity combined, led all of baseball with 579,530, and one could say successfully headed off the American League’s threat to their territory.

The Highlanders were just not a very exciting ballclub. And with only one exception, almost all of their next seventeen seasons would feel like 1903—some better than others, some disasters, but just not very exciting. Certainly it would be the case throughout the Farrell-Devery years, and of course through the years at Hilltop Park.

The one exception was 1904.

IN 1904, THE Highlanders made their home caps all white and put horizontal stripes on their socks. Like their annual spring training sites that
were ever shifting (Atlanta in 1903–04, Montgomery in ’05, Birmingham in ’06, Atlanta in 1907–08, Macon in ’09, Athens in 1910–11, Atlanta in ’12, Bermuda in ’13, Houston in ’14, Savannah in ’15, Macon in 1916–18, Jacksonville in 1919–20, Shreveport in ’21, New Orleans in 1922–24), so too were tweaks to the uniform an annual event.

In 1905 they had an awkward interlocking “NY” on both home whites and road grays. In ’06 they were back to their original look. In ’07, gray replaced navy as the road color. In ’08, a navy cap appeared for the first time. In ’09, the now familiar interlocking NY debuted on the sleeve. In 1910, the NY appeared for the first time on caps—red on navy at home, blue on gray for the road. In 1911 the words “New York” first appeared on road jerseys. In 1912, a pinstriped home uniform looking much like today’s debuted, accompanied by a pinstriped cap with a blue brim. But the pinstripes were replaced in 1913–14 by a solid white with the interlocking NY over the heart, and for the first time, the “New York” road grays were worn all season. In 1915, the pinstripes returned for good, but by 1917 the NY on the chest had vanished, not to reappear until 1936. (Babe Ruth never wore it.) The navy caps with the NY were used for a time only on the road, and full-time starting in 1922.

The interlocking NY was designed by Tiffany and Company for the New York Police Department in 1877: It was used in a medal for a fallen police officer, John McDowell. Police symbolism was appropriate to Bill Devery’s legacy. There was a long-standing admiration between the New York police and fire departments and the Yankees, no better demonstrated than when George Steinbrenner created the Silver Shield charity to look after the families of fallen police and firemen.

1904, THE FIRST year of a 154-game schedule, would produce the franchise’s first pennant race and the first great New York–Boston rivalry. Had New York won the pennant in ’04, it would have been an enormous triumph for Johnson and by extension Griffith, accomplishing so much so quickly.

But they didn’t win, so it didn’t become a year of great Yankee history, distantly connected to all the other championship teams. But it was the best of all the pre–Babe Ruth teams.

Rumors that Griffith might be replaced by the Cubs’ Frank Selee were put to rest when Selee signed a new contract with Chicago in July. With that tension removed, New York and Boston battled back and forth, New York
never going ahead by more than two games or falling behind by more than a game and a half.

Al Orth, thirty-one years old and the man who beat New York in their first-ever game, came over from Washington to pretty much replace Griffith as a starting pitcher, going 11–6 while Griffith limited himself to just 16 starts. The spitball was Orth’s signature pitch, and some credited him with being one of its originators. He certainly helped to popularize it, along with Chesbro.

An interesting pickup that season was forty-year-old Deacon McGuire, purchased from Detroit. He was the oldest player in the league, having debuted in 1884. The onetime Brooklyn star caught 97 games for New York, with Red Kleinow handling 62, including most of the final month.

On June 17, Boston traded popular outfielder Patsy Dougherty to New York to play left field. The trade raised eyebrows: New York had surrendered only a utility infielder named Bob Unglaub. Was this the hand of Ban Johnson working to strengthen New York again? Dougherty, who had been feuding with Boston management, was the league’s leading run scorer, a statistic rated only below batting average by fans and players. Unglaub played only nine games for Boston. (He would briefly manage the club in 1907 and then was replaced by Deacon McGuire, whom by then New York had released.)

Also new to the team in 1904 was an outfielder named John Anderson, who accidentally gave his name to baseball slang when he tried to steal second base with the bases loaded. On into the 1930s, such a boneheaded play would be called a John Anderson. Mercifully for his family, the expression eventually faded from use.

The roster also included a couple of fresh-faced pitchers of diverse backgrounds. The team signed one of the nation’s most heralded amateur prospects, Harvard’s Walter Clarkson, brother of the great nineteenth-century star John Clarkson. He was immediately banned from Harvard’s team after signing, so he went right to the major leagues, debuting on July 2 with a 3–2 loss. He won only one game that year, and only 18 in five big-league seasons.

Then there was Ned Garvin.

Garvin joined the team from Brooklyn with a month left in the season and was an undistinguished 0–1 in two games. But Garvin had an amazing history of barroom brawls, some involving gunplay, while on more sober days he wrote poetry. Known as “the Navasota Tarantula” (he came from Navasota, Texas), he made Elberfeld seem like a choirboy.

Ten days after the 1904 season ended, Garvin was involved in another
assault, this time beating up an insurance salesman who wouldn’t engage him in conversation. So seventy-five years—almost to the day—before Billy Martin fought a marshmallow salesman and got fired as Yankee manager, this marked the end of Garvin’s major league career. He died less than four years later at age thirty-four, a victim of consumption.

The season also saw the first appearance on the field of photographer Charles Conlon, who would become a fixture at New York baseball games on into the 1940s, shooting posed photos and occasional action pictures onto glass negatives and providing the earliest looks at American League Park and its players that we know.

KEELER AND CHESBRO, of whom so much was hoped for in 1903, delivered in ’04. Keeler played as he had in his National League days, batting .343, while Happy Jack had the winningest twentieth-century season of any man who stepped onto the mound, recording 41 victories in 51 starts, tossing 48 complete games and 455 innings—including 44 consecutive shutout innings—and posting a 1.82 ERA (although that statistic was not officially recorded until 1912). His 239 strikeouts would be a team record for 74 years until Ron Guidry broke it in 1978. His 14 straight victories was a team record until Roger Clemens won 16 straight 97 years later. While pitch counts were certainly not kept, one can assume he threw about 150 pitches a game, often with only a day or two off. Most of his pitches were spitballs, which were no less taxing on the arm than fastballs or curveballs were.

What a finish the 1904 season provided! A “death struggle,” said Irving Sanborn of the
Chicago Tribune
. For excitement, rivalry, star power, competitiveness, and the total engagement of fans of the two cities, one could truly place the final contests with all the great Yankees–Red Sox games that would follow over the next century. Not only were the rivals geographically close, but their cities were hotbeds of the game’s very origins and their fans among the most rabid and knowledgeable. Boston, managed by Jimmy Collins, was the defending World Series champion; New York, the team built to contend for this honor in a hurry.

“There may be closer races … in future years,” wrote Sanborn, “but there can be no pennant battle which will have more to enthuse over and less to regret than did the American League’s of 1904.”

This had everything that Ban Johnson could have dreamed up, except that Brush and McGraw of the Giants, who had clinched the National
League championship weeks before, were not about to do what Barney Dreyfuss had done in 1903—play a World Series. Pittsburgh had lost to Boston in ’03, an embarrassment to the National League, and they would have no more of it. The Giants’ excuse was that their opponents would be cheated out of playing against champions should they lose a World Series, as Pittsburgh had the year before, devaluing their appeal. A number of angry Giants players, looking to bag the extra money a Series would bring, spoke out against McGraw’s position and offered to play all the games at Hilltop Park. A petition signed by ten thousand New Yorkers demanding a series was presented to the Giants, but there would be no postseason as long as McGraw had his way.

AFTER THE GAMES of Wednesday, October 5, Boston led New York by half a game. Five games against each other remained on the schedule, three in New York and two in Boston. It was, essentially, a best-of-five playoff series for the American League pennant.