Pinstripe Empire (11 page)

The Giants won the series, four games to two with one tie. The great Christy Mathewson won three of the games and saved the fourth (although it was not a stat at the time) but never managed to pitch at Hilltop Park. A crowd of 27,766 attended game three at the Polo Grounds, larger than any at the 1910 World Series. Warhop and Quinn had the Yankees’ two victories, and the top crowd at Hilltop Park was 13,059. Each Highlander got a $706 bonus check and each Giant got $1,111. Chase’s bold managerial move was having his pitchers hit eighth and infielder Jimmy Austin ninth.

Wrote John B. Foster, “The games … were the most successful in the history of organized baseball.”

The fans loved the event, but when the Giants won pennants from 1911 to 1913, the series was suspended so they could play in the World Series. The New York series was played one last time in 1914, with another Giants win before much smaller crowds.

HAL CHASE’S MANAGERIAL run with the Yankees lasted just one full season, 1911. He brought the team home a disappointing sixth with a .500 record, twenty-five and a half games out of first.
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They lost their last five games to kill a first-division finish. Chase was soft on discipline, including his own, and just didn’t set a good example. Plus, he made 36 errors at first base.

Still, the fans delighted in having Prince Hal as manager. Generally acknowledged as the most loyal of all fans was Edward Everett Bell, a safe
manufacturer, who always closed his office and headed for the Hilltop when the Yankees were at home. He always sat in the same grandstand seat and truly believed he brought the team luck.

Bell was the best-known of a group of die-hards who attended games over the years. There would be Bill “Pee Wee” Scheidt, the savant Bill “the Baker” Stimers, Chris Karelekas (with his YES WE CAN banners in the seventies), “Freddie Sez” Schuman (with his spoon and frying pan), Ali Rameriz, the founder of the Bleacher Creatures, and “Bald Vinny” Milano, who would chant the names of each player (except pitcher and catcher) until they acknowledged him—this “roll call” can be heard in the first innings of Yankee games today.

For many fans who devoted decades of their lives to box scores and baseball cards and stats and autographs, or to following the team by Western Union updates outside newspaper offices, then later by radio, television, and streaming video, their investment in the team was in many ways mightier than that of any player, executive, or even owner who passed through.

The Yankees—and baseball—saw people through illness and through war, provided happy and sad moments, marked births (with baby-size Yankee caps in photos) and weddings, and came to define a person’s very existence to friends and family. When a generation gap might curtail conversation within families, there would still be baseball to share.

The game lent order to the lives of its fans from the beginning of spring training to the final day of the season, and then all over again the next year.

There was a fan named George Raft. Later nationally known as a tough-guy movie star (with a propensity for off-screen association with gangsters), Raft and his pal Charlie Schrimpf were Hilltop Park regulars, sweeping up the bleachers in exchange for game tickets and delivering the dirty uniforms to Charlie’s mom after the games. Raft, about eleven at the time, was a mascot and a batboy and would cart the bats to the dugout in a wheelbarrow. He had a reputation for being the brightest kid in the neighborhood when it came to memorizing baseball statistics.

Raft remained a fan, played baseball and boxed, but drifted off to the stage and then to Hollywood. Ironically, his adult friendship with Leo Durocher (a onetime Yankee player but by then the Brooklyn manager) got Durocher in trouble—some of Raft’s associates were gamblers—and he was ordered to break off the association.

Charlie Schrimpf remained a lifelong fan.

“I worked for Fred Logan in 1912 until they hired a regular bat boy, a guy named Hunchy, to replace me,” he wrote to announcers Phil Rizzuto and Jerry Coleman in 1969.

He got a uniform and all. My brother Bob was assistant ground keeper to Mr. Phil Schenck. George Raft and I had to go over early in the morning, get a broom and sweep up under the bleachers. Then we would secure a slip of paper to get into the game.

After school [PS 169, across the street from Hilltop Park], all the kids would stand on the Ft. Washington Avenue side of the park and wait for a ball to be knocked over—then you took the ball to the man at the little door and he would let you into the game.

My mother did the laundry for the team. She never wanted to see Hal Chase’s uniform because the left leg was so dirty, and let us not forget these all had to done with the washing board. There were no dryers or washing machines in those days, just the old coal stove. George Raft and I had to bring the uniforms to the clubhouse before going to school and collect 35 cents.

When we got a broken bat that was like a gift. We would get a two cent roll of tape and a few nails and we were set. And a baseball, when the stitches were broke, we would tape it up and played just fine.

In my time I saw the best—Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb, [Bert] Daniels,
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Chesbro—last but not the least, Hal Chase, the greatest first baseman of them all in baseball.

In the early 1970s, Charlie’s younger brother Frank was still a ticket taker outside gate 4 of Yankee Stadium, the employee with the longest family ties to the franchise.

THIRD BASEMAN ROY HARTZELL, twenty-nine, from Golden, Colorado, was the key new addition to the team in 1911, and he hit .296 and drove in 91 runs (including eight in one inning)—the most by a Yankee third baseman
until Graig Nettles had 93 in 1976. This was Cree’s .348 season, fifth highest in the league, and Chase hit .315 (and starred in a silent movie,
Hal Chase’s Home Run
).

Throughout the season—a sixth-place finish—Farrell pondered that his lease would be running out in another year, and a decision had to be made on where to play his home games. He settled on property known as Kingsbridge Grounds, at 221st Street and Broadway in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan, a plot of land that would require excavation similar to what greeted him in Washington Heights in ’03. (The 225th Street subway station had opened in 1907.) This time, with more time to plan, he had a nice design, featuring an enhanced clubhouse with “shower baths, a plunge and lockers,” as well as club offices. He was anxious to get away from the slow elevator problems at the 165th Street station. The park would be double-decked and hold twenty-two thousand. Work on filling in a creek that ran through the grounds began cautiously in the spring of 1911, and it was hoped the park might be ready in midseason of 1912, with Farrell prepared to jump out of his lease a few months early if he could. But so far it was a lot of talk and no real construction.

The big news of the 1911 season was a terrible fire at the Polo Grounds that forced the Giants to share Hilltop Park with the Yankees.

The fire broke out around 12:40 A.M. on April 14 and began with an explosion. Fred Lieb, in his first season covering the Yankees, wrote that the fire was “one of New York’s biggest and most spectacular … Almost totally out of control, it lit up the night sky in upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and western Queens.”

The flames were nearly one hundred feet high and were brought under control around 2:00 in the morning, when all but the left-field bleachers and the clubhouses had finished burning. The field was not harmed; pitcher Bugs Raymond actually stood at the mound watching the grandstand and dugouts burn.

The fire spread and destroyed thirty elevated subway cars. John McGraw abandoned his late-night billiards game and rushed to the scene. The challenge was just too great for the FDNY, who sped there in their horse-drawn fire trucks. The real cause was never found: Some thought it could be traced to the concession storage areas maintained by Harry M. Stevens, and some thought it was nothing more than smoldering peanut shells from that afternoon’s game, perhaps set off by a cigar ash. Stevens had just stocked a season’s worth of inventory in his storerooms.

At first McGraw thought games could still be played and temporary chairs set up, but that proved impractical and unsafe. So where could they play? It couldn’t be in Brooklyn, because the two teams were often home at the same time. But by design, the Yankees and Giants were never home at the same time, so Hilltop was the logical choice. And it wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience to ask Polo Grounds fans to go the extra ten blocks north.

Farrell and team secretary Tom Davis were in Philadelphia for games with the Athletics. Davis went back to New York the very next morning to offer the Giants use of his field. It was a fine gesture, and of course good news for Phil Schenck and his ground crew, who would now have additional paydays with the field in constant use. John Brush showed the proper amount of appreciation for the offer and accepted at once. It would be the first shared ballpark in major league history.

The Giants played twenty-eight games at Hilltop while the Polo Grounds was repaired, morphing into the fourth version of the field, the one that would last on into 1963—where Bobby Thomson would homer, Willie Mays would debut, and the New York Mets would play.

The first Giants games at Hilltop were against the Brooklyn Superbas, marking the first and only time that Brooklyn would play there. The Giants, with all new bats, drew over fifteen thousand for their first game at Hilltop and won 6–3.

The new Polo Grounds was ready on June 28. Brush called it Brush Stadium, the first use of
stadium
for a baseball park, and that is what it said on the Yankees scorecards during the first seven years they would play there. The Giants thanked their hosts and returned home to win a pennant and host a World Series. But an important step had been taken; a warm gesture from the Yankees had eased the competitive thaw that still hung in the air, even after the 1910 postseason series. Loyal Giants fans curtailed their Highlander hatred. The Hilltop scoreboard, which now showed out-of-town scores, would evoke cheers from Yankee fans when the Giants were shown to take a lead. On Memorial Day in 1912, the Giants lent the Polo Grounds to the Yankees to help them achieve maximum attendance for a doubleheader, since they had been hurt at home by numerous rainouts all season. When the Giants won the 1912 pennant, the Yankees stayed in town one day extra to work out with them at the Polo Grounds as a World Series tune-up. Farrell had played this well with Brush. “Mr. Farrell’s generosity,” wrote the
Times
, “will be remembered as the brightest spot in local baseball competition.”

About six weeks after the 1911 season ended, Chase visited Farrell during a break in the Joe Gordon trial, and the two agreed to end his managerial reign. Whether he resigned or was fired was uncertain; the public announcement was that he had resigned and would remain with the team as its first baseman, receiving the same salary he had made as player-manager.

The managing job was then offered to Harry Wolverton, who, like Casey Stengel thirty-seven years later, was managing Oakland of the Pacific Coast League.
Baseball
magazine called him a “forceful character,” a good credential to succeed Chase. A former major league infielder (he had been captain of the Phillies), he was still a full-time player for Oakland. The thirty-eight-year-old Wolverton would still play a little third base and serve as a pinch hitter for the Yankees, hitting .300 in 50 at-bats.

“I can assure all … that Chase and I agree perfectly and will get along together admirably,” he said. “I consider him the greatest first baseman the game has ever known. He doesn’t want my job, and I couldn’t fill his, so we are both satisfied. I have the friendliest of feelings for him and I know that he has for me. I am sure he will be a great source of strength to the club.”

Wolverton preferred calling his team the Highlanders rather than the Yankees. This would be the final season of the ten-year lease at Hilltop Park, and if it was to be the end, they would go out as Highlanders, at least as far as Harry was concerned. The season gave birth to the Yankee pinstripe look, and they became the first American League team so adorned; Chicago, Boston, and the 1911 Giants had worn it in the National League.

The Highlanders lost the first five games of the regular season and then headed to Boston, where they would serve as visitors for the opening of Fenway Park on April 20, 1912, a 7–6 Boston win. (The
Titanic
, carrying many New Yorkers, had sunk on April 15.)

On May 12, Ty Cobb delivered a shocking burst of his legendary temper at Hilltop Park. This time, he couldn’t control himself while being heckled over his ancestry by a fan named Claude Lueker, a pressman at a New York newspaper. Cobb looked for Farrell to have the fan removed and couldn’t find him. Teammate Sam Crawford goaded Cobb, saying, “You going to take that?” In the middle of the game, Cobb ran into the stands to beat up the man. It turned out Lueker had lost one hand and two fingers on his other hand and was defenseless. Heckling, as ugly as it might be, had to be ignored by players.

When Lueker’s handicap was reported, Cobb said, “I don’t care if he got no feet … When a spectator calls me a ‘half-nigger’ I think it is about time
to fight.” Cobb was suspended by Ban Johnson, who happened to be at the game. Three days later, his teammates refused to take the field against Philadelphia in support of what they thought was justified action. The result was Detroit fielding a team of amateurs recruited from local sandlots who would lose to the Athletics 24–2. (They all got their names into the
Baseball Encyclopedia
.) It became an important piece of Cobb’s life story and also led to the establishment of the Base Ball Players’ Fraternity, a labor union headed by the ex-Highlander Dave Fultz. Highlander catcher Ed Sweeney was elected a vice president, along with Mathewson and Cobb.

Wracked by injuries to many of their regulars, devoid of a top scout—Arthur Irwin was now a stay-at-home business manager—and distracted by Hal Chase’s ugly divorce (he’d shed Nellie, found a new girlfriend, and missed three weeks with a nervous breakdown), the team was going nowhere fast. Farrell was concentrating on his new ballpark in the Bronx, and the Wolverton experiment was failing. The team finished in last place, 50–102, fifty-five games out of first and with the lowest percentage—.329—in team history. They drew only 242,294, about a third of what the Giants drew.