Pinstripe Empire (15 page)

Baker, like Keeler a decade before him, was not the player he had been, but his presence indicated that the team could pay top dollar for top-tier players.

But so often, things just didn’t play out right for the Yankees. They signed a catcher named Al “Roxy” Walters from San Francisco, and
Baseball
magazine did a three-page story on “the Yankees’ Great Young Backstop, Who Looks Like the Niftiest Catcher on the Circuit.” “Al should become the Yankees’ first-string backstop next year,” they reported, “and … will be recognized as one of the greatest maskmen in either league … And oh, how that boy could hit!”

Walters spent three seasons with the Yanks but never did become a regular. After hitting .266 and .263, he hit .199 in his last year, and then went to Boston where he hit .193, .198, .201, and .194. He never hit a home run. Just surviving in the majors with that performance was an accomplishment. No star, he.

Then there was Lee Magee. The former Cardinals outfielder had batted .323 in the Federal League in 1915, third in the league, and was considered a hot pickup for the Yankees. He was the first player to return to “organized baseball” from the Feds, and the Yanks paid $25,000 for him. But he hit a disappointing .257 and was gone the following year, and then, along with Hal Chase, was kicked out of baseball for gambling after the 1919 season. (Also kicked out—after 1920—was the Browns’ Joe Gedeon, a second baseman who played for the Yanks in 1916–17 and whose name was linked to meetings with the gamblers who attempted to fix the ’19 Series.)

Gentlemanly Bob Shawkey, on the other hand, burst through with a 24-victory season, tops in his career. He started 27 games, relieved in 26, and was credited with eight saves as we know them today, as Donovan tested a new concept of using pitchers in dual roles.

Ray “Slim” Caldwell’s battles with alcohol continued. This was one of the saddest stories in early Yankee history. His name is barely remembered today, yet he might have been one of the all-time great Yankee hurlers—maybe even a Hall of Famer. “He has one of the best curves in the business, and his fastball is a peach,” said an unidentified star pitcher to
Baseball
magazine in 1918. “He might be the best all-round pitcher in the American
League.” When he died in 1967, he was still ranked seventh all-time among Yankee right-handers with 96 victories. At six foot two and 190, he was a top-tier star on the sports stage of New York.

He was a good hitter too: .248 lifetime.

But alcohol was his ruin. Like many of his contemporaries, he thought imbibing to excess was a sign of “manliness.” Athletes often took measure of each other by whether they could hold their liquor. It was an ongoing problem for baseball from its earliest days. Some handled it better than others. Caldwell did not handle it well at all.

He really tested the patience of the easygoing, player-friendly Donovan. But in midseason of 1916 Donovan suspended him for two weeks, and when the suspension ended, Caldwell didn’t materialize; the suspension was extended until the end of the season. Although the
Sporting News
reported that he was in a St. Louis hospital for alcohol “treatment,” no one could find him during the entire off-season. His wife had to sue him for divorce, charging desertion. When he emerged from wherever he had been, it was due to an arrest for the theft of a ring.

Caldwell reported late to spring training in 1917, and although he’d contribute 13 victories that year, he was again suspended for excessive drinking. He was killing off his own career by the day.

He’d play one more season for New York, 1918, going 9–8 before being traded to Boston, released on August 4, and then signed by Cleveland two weeks later. In his first start for the Indians, he had a lead with two outs in the ninth when he was struck by lightning on the pitcher’s mound. For a time he was unconscious, the hometown fans sitting silently in fear.

“My first thought was that I was through for all time,” he recounted, “living as well as pitching. But when I looked up and saw I was still in the diamond and that fans were in the stands, just as they were before I was hit I just had to laugh with joy. I never was so glad to be living in all my life, and wouldn’t it have been tough luck for me to be stricken just as I had won my first game for a club that was willing to give me a chance when other clubs thought me through. I tingled all over and just naturally sank to the ground. I guess it was almost a minute before I saw Spoke Speaker and the others running toward me and realized the trumpets were not sounding for me yet.”

When he regained consciousness, he insisted on finishing, and he recorded the final out for the victory. What a debut!

Seventeen days later, he made his first start in the Polo Grounds against his old teammates, the Yankees. It was enough to attract a big crowd for a
Wednesday doubleheader. Caldwell pitched the opener and proceeded to toss the only no-hitter in the American League that season, a 3–0 victory in which he faced only twenty-nine batters.

“A large and noisy gathering of 25,000 folks saw Caldwell pitch the nohit game with their own eyes,” wrote the
Times.
“If they hadn’t been there in person, many of them would never have believed it … A lot of the electricity is still lurking in Caldwell’s system … At times Slim’s voltage was higher than others.”

Seemingly rejuvenated, the spitballer won 20 for the first time in 1920, helping the Indians to their first world championship and pitching in his first World Series.

And then it all came crashing down on poor Slim Caldwell again. He made only 12 starts in 1921, and manager Speaker had to suspend him yet again. His final big-league appearance was against the Yankees, and he took the loss in a 21–7 drubbing with the teams tied for first late in the season.

And that was it.

He spent most of the rest of that decade pitching in the minors, never to return to the big stage. He was again a 20-game winner at age forty-two with Birmingham. He threw his last game in 1933 at age forty-five. The man could pitch. After his career, he owned a bar, tended at others, and returned to his original profession as a telegrapher. Briefly he was a greeter at the Golden Nugget in the early days of Las Vegas hotels. But mostly he lived quietly with a third wife about sixty miles south of Buffalo. He died in 1967 at the age of seventy-nine.

BY MANY MEASURES, 1916 was a year of improvement. The Yanks were in first place as late as July 30, when a nine-game losing streak ended the temporary trip into rare air. The streak including losing a six-game series to the Browns in St. Louis, in which they scored only four runs in consecutive doubleheaders. With a payroll of $125,000, the Yanks finished fourth, their first first-division finish since 1910. (World Series money didn’t extend to first-division finishers until 1918.) Attendance kicked up to 469,211, although the Giants did 551,000 for
their
fourth-place finish.

At the end of the season, the Yankees happily re-signed Donovan and announced that they had plans for a fifty-thousand-seat, double-decked ballpark in place for 1919. In the meantime, it would be back to the Polo Grounds, writing out rent checks to the Giants.

War was looming as the 1917 season unfolded, and in fact had been looming since the
Lusitania
was sunk in May of 1915. But the U.S. did not officially enter the war until April 6, 1917, when President Wilson declared war on Germany. The next day Cap Huston, nearly fifty, reenlisted, offering his engineering skills and effectively ending his day-to-day involvement with the Yankees as he headed off for France. He was the first member of the “baseball family” to enter the war effort; Braves catcher Hank Gowdy enlisted on June 1, making him the first player.

Although ballplayers were not exempt from the military draft, the Yankees lost none of theirs to war service in 1917. But the team did its patriotic part by performing marching drills, bats on shoulders as though rifles, in pregame exercises, a practice designed by Huston. On June 17 they played the Browns in the first-ever Sunday game played at the Polo Grounds—so permitted because the game raised $10,000 for the First Reserve Engineers Regiment of New York, which was soon to deploy. In pregame ceremonies before almost twenty-five thousand, in addition to “The Star Spangled Banner,” singer Harry Ellis sang a new George M. Cohan song called “Over There.”

“Spread the word, spread the word, over there … that the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming, the drums drum drumming over there!”

The fans sang along lustily once they learned the refrain, loving the use of the word “Yanks” in the song. Since the Civil War, the word had stood for the north. Now Cohan made it a word of national pride. And the Yankees were proud to seize its patriotic symbolism.

In 1917 the Yanks dropped back to sixth place and attendance fell to 330,294. No pitcher won more than 13, and Maisel hit just .198. Baker hit .282 with just six homers and found himself suspended by Donovan toward the end of the season when he refused to play in a Sunday exhibition game. The headstrong Baker decided to retire, and not until Ruppert intervened did he return. It was a blow to Donovan’s authority.

A rare high point was the first no-hitter ever thrown by a Yankee left-hander. On April 24 at Fenway Park, George Mogridge squeaked out a 2–1 win after a ninth-inning rally and an error. Mogridge, twenty-eight years old and just 9–11 that year, was a journeyman from Rochester whom the Yanks had purchased in August of 1915. Through 2011, Mogridge is the only visiting left-hander to pitch a no-hitter in Fenway Park—and in fact one of only four visiting pitchers to throw a no-hitter there at all. The others, all right-handers, are all Hall of Famers: Walter Johnson, Ted Lyons, and Jim Bunning.

So Donovan had three seasons to impress his bosses, and he didn’t. He needed to improve on his fourth-place finish in 1916, and he failed. Like the others before him, he was shown the door, and the search for the next great hope would begin.

Donovan was a very likeable figure in the game, and had he found a way to stick around a little longer, he could have been the beneficiary of the greatness to come.

He went back to the Tigers to coach in 1918, managed Jersey City in 1920, the Phillies (with outfielder Casey Stengel) for part of 1921, and New Haven in the Eastern League in 1922 and 1923. On December 9, 1923, he and his boss, New Haven president George Weiss, were passengers in a New York Central Twentieth Century Limited train carrying a number of baseball officials from Grand Central Terminal to league meetings in Chicago.

“We had a compartment and Bill was a cigar smoker,” recalled Weiss to sportswriter Harold Rosenthal years later.

I was one of the few people who didn’t smoke in those days. While he was filling up the compartment with tobacco smoke I figured I’d go out into the club car and have a drink. Prohibition? I forgot how, but we managed in those days. I guess I had two or three because by the time I got back Bill had gone to bed. He had taken the lower berth even though it figured to be mine because I was the boss. Since he was asleep I didn’t bother to awaken him. Instead I undressed and hopped up into the upper. In those days it was no problem.

There was this horrible crash that awakened me and when I looked around I realized I wasn’t in any train but lying there on the tracks. I had nothing on except the neck-ring from my pajama top. There were dead and dying people all around me. I learned later Donovan was among them.

At 1:30 in the morning, the train had crashed into a standing train at a crossing in Forsyth, New York (along Lake Erie, south of Buffalo). Blame was put on the engineer. The actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. was among the survivors. Weiss, miraculously, survived with just cuts and bruises. Years later, of course, he would become the Yankees general manager.

“The news hits me very hard,” said Colonel Ruppert, who was leaving on another train for Chicago.

I can’t express my sorrow at hearing of Bill’s untimely end. He was still in his prime and one of the greatest managers in baseball. I say this because I know. When he was with the Yankees Donovan had more hard luck than I have ever seen on a ball field. One player after another was injured, but still Donovan kept plugging ahead, and he never forgot how to smile.

He was a wonderful fellow and a great leader. He was our first manager in New York after Colonel Huston and I bought the club and I still think that barring injuries and hard luck Bill Donovan would have brought the Yankees their first pennant. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to release him. Well, Bill died with his boots on. When he died he was on his way to a baseball meeting on business for his club. I think that is the way he would have liked to go.

FINDING A MANAGER for 1918 was complicated by Huston being away in France. He had a first choice and he felt strongly about it: Brooklyn’s Wilbert Robinson. But he wasn’t there to fight for him.

Ruppert’s candidate was Miller Huggins. He gave Robinson a quick interview at the brewery and wasn’t impressed. He thought Robbie, at fifty, was too old. So many managers of that era were playing managers, a move that saved a salary, or at least a full one.

His meeting with Huggins went better, although Hug almost didn’t take him up on the invitation. It took Taylor Spink’s encouragement to get him to take the meeting—Spink was publisher of the
Sporting News
, which was based in St. Louis, and knew Hug well.

“Uncle Robbie” was a lovable character and a respected baseball man, linked in history to John McGraw, with whom he had played and for whom he had coached. When he moved over to manage Brooklyn, the team became known as the Robins (and for years afterward, the derivative the Flock) and he won the 1916 pennant. He hadn’t done as well in 1917 and Huston thought he could sign him. The two were hunting buddies, brought together through Huston’s friendship with McGraw.

Ban Johnson was encouraging Ruppert to sign Huggins, thirty-nine, who had been manager of the Cardinals. The owner of the Cardinals, Helene Britton, a widow who’d inherited the team from her husband, was looking to sell.
She summoned Hug to her home and told him he could get a group together and buy it.