Pinstripe Empire (21 page)

Ruth and Meusel were permitted to train with the team, and Landis even showed up to take in an exhibition game and to buy a signed Ruth ball ($250) for a Salvation Army benefit.

Three former Red Sox players had joined the team. The Yanks preyed on Frazee again in picking up Everett Scott, Joe Bush, and Sam Jones, all twenty-nine, for Peckinpaugh, Quinn, Rip Collins, and Piercy, and they added Whitey Witt from the Athletics to play center.

Sad Sam Jones, a six-foot righty from Woodsfield, Ohio, had gone to Boston in the Tris Speaker trade of 1915 and would eventually pitch for six of the eight American League teams. He was coming off a 23-victory season when the Red Sox shipped him off to New York. He’d pitch until he was forty-three and would win 229 games in the big leagues.

Bullet Joe Bush was a five-foot-nine right-hander from Minnesota, and like Jones was in the 1918 Red Sox pitching rotation with Ruth. He was coming off a 16-victory season in 1921 and his specialty pitch was the forkball.

Shortstop Everett “the Deacon” Scott came to the Yanks with an 832-consecutive-game playing streak, which he would extend to a record 1,307 over the next four seasons. He was just five foot eight and 148 pounds, and he had played for all three Boston pennant winners in the teens, being the last player to go from the 1915 champions.

Witt, just five foot seven, was a product of Goddard Seminary in Vermont and had gone right to the Athletics with no minor league seasoning, putting in five years under Connie Mack before moving to New York.

The Yankees opened their season on April 12 in Washington, with President Harding on hand to throw out the first pitch and Ruth seated in the stands with Huston and Ban Johnson. Harding kept a full box score and stayed until the end.

Fred Lieb wrote, “How many readers have seen the picture of Ruth taken while seated in a box at the opening game of the American League in Washington … Ruth’s face … tells the story of his entire suspension. It is the face of a well-dressed kid, with a nice bow tie and clean collar, watching several of his intimate acquaintances on hands and knees shooting marbles. All the longing to be with them is expressed there, but an irate Mamma
has told him he must stay dressed up, sit on his own stool and not play with those little ragamuffins.”

The home opener, on April 20, also against Washington, marked the first time the Yankees would raise a championship pennant as part of the festivities. Huggins, along with rival manager Clyde Milan, did the honors; the Colonels accompanied the players (including Peckinpaugh, now with Washington, and Ruth and Meusel, in civilian clothes) to the flagpole. “The Star Spangled Banner” was played and the red-white-and-blue flag reading CHAMPIONS AMERICAN LEAGUE 1921 was hoisted. Unfortunately, as Mayor John Hyland prepared to throw out the first ball, the wind caught the huge pennant, took it from its mooring, and it floated down over the bleachers. A glitch in the program; laughter for the fans.

Ruth and Meusel returned on May 20 in front of a sellout crowd at the Polo Grounds to find the Yanks in first place without them. Ruth was even made team captain, but just six days later lost the position as part of disciplinary action by Ban Johnson after he went into the stands to confront a heckler. Scott, a Yankee for just one month, succeeded him.

A KEY PICKUP for the team came on July 23 when Barrow announced another Boston deal, this time getting third baseman Joe Dugan and outfielder Elmer Smith for Fewster, Elmer Miller, Lefty O’Doul (named later), and a rookie shortstop, plus $50,000.

The trade was so one-sided that the moans could be heard around the country. Former Boston mayor John Fitzgerald, grandfather of future president Kennedy, said Harry Frazee “is willing to smash the club and get his money in trades rather than at the turnstiles.” Speaker, managing Cleveland, said, “It’s a crime! The Yanks got all the best of it, as usual.”

The slick-fielding Dugan, a Holy Cross product from the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania, was hitting .287 and would immediately take over at third from McNally. At twenty-five, he was in his sixth big-league season, having broken in with the Athletics in 1917 before moving on to Boston in January. He was known as Jumping Joe, not for his footwork but for jumping the Athletics and going home when the Philly fans were booing him. The
Reach Guide
said, “He was temperamental … and when things did not go to his liking, he would desert the team.” Owner Connie Mack always took him back.

After his departure, though, the Philadelphia fans never let up on him. “I wanna go home,” they’d taunt him through the rest of his career.

Dugan, who lived until 1982, became a great drinking buddy of Ruth’s and was still able to hike his pant legs and delicately hop over the baseline when introduced at Old-Timers’ Days on into the 1970s, accepting his nickname for its alternative meaning.

In 1922, the St. Louis Browns gave the Yanks a good run at the pennant as they sought to do what the Yanks had done the year before—win for the first time. But on September 8, Mays beat Walter Johnson 8–1 while the Brownies lost 8–3 to Detroit, putting New York on top.

Their final regular-season home games in the Polo Grounds were a Sunday doubleheader victory over Philadelphia on September 10 before forty thousand fans. Dugan was the last Yankee to homer in the Polo Grounds in a regular-season game.

On September 16–18, the Yankees took two of three from the Browns at Sportsman’s Park with Shawkey winning his game 2–1 and Bush winning his 3–2, despite George Sisler running his hitting streak to forty.

In the September 16 game, near tragedy unfolded when Witt, in center, was struck between the eyes by a glass bottle thrown from the bleachers. It knocked him unconscious, and he was carried off with a concussion and a deep cut. Ban Johnson offered a $1,000 reward if the person who threw the bottle could be found.

“I never saw the bottle before it struck me,” said Witt. “I was running toward the crowd from which the bottle was thrown when it struck me square in the forehead. It literally knocked me off my feet.”

The shocking incident in the normally great baseball town of St. Louis took the enthusiasm out of the series. Some wanted the game called and awarded to the Yankees. When Witt played in the second game, his head bandaged, he received a great cheer from the crowd. The Browns’ spirits seemed to be broken.

In the end no one was arrested, and, unbelievably, the official finding was that Witt had stepped on a bottle already on the field and had hit himself with it.

Witt delivered an emotional two-run single off Urban Shocker in the ninth inning two days later, where a victory would have left the Browns just a half game behind. Witt’s single was probably the most important hit of the year, starting a string of six straight wins for New York. It was also Shocker’s seventh loss of the season to New York; the Browns were only 8–14 against the Yanks.

Still, the Brownies fought on, Ken Williams socking a league-leading 39
homers to steal the title from Ruth (who hit 35 despite his six-week suspension) and Sisler hitting .420 to capture a rare batting title away from Cobb. The Yankees, who played their final eighteen games on the road, didn’t clinch until Saturday, September 30, the next-to-last day of the season, when Hoyt beat Boston 3–1 at Fenway. The final margin of victory was just one game.

The Yanks drew 1,026,134 in their final year in the Polo Grounds, while the pennant-winning Giants led the National League with 945,809.

The ’22 Series, again, all in the Polo Grounds, would be the first broadcast live on radio, with Grantland Rice and William McGeehan announcing. This time the format was best of seven, as it has since remained, and this time the Giants were dominant, the Yanks managing only a tie in the five games played. (The tie, called with about fifty minutes of sunlight remaining, left fans howling, and the commissioner donated the receipts to charity.) The Yankee bats were dead: only 11 runs in the five games, with Ruth managing just a double and a single in 17 at-bats and the team hitting just .203.

Joe Vila, no fan of the modern game, wrote of Ruth, “The exploded phenomenon didn’t surprise the smart fans who long ago realized he couldn’t hit brainy pitching. Ruth, therefore, is no longer a wonder. The baseball public is on to his real worth as a batsman, and in the future, let us hope he will attract just ordinary attention.”

Bush, the team’s 26-game winner, lost both of his starts and had a 4.80 ERA.
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Huggins, sensitive still to the lasting effects of the 1919 scandal, believed Vila’s claims that Bush may have bet on his games. He put him in a category with Mays and later told Fred Lieb that he’d help any of his old players who were in a jam—except for Mays and Bush. “If they were in the gutter I’d kick them,” he said.

This was a rough one for the Colonels. They felt so puffed up by their apparent supremacy over the Giants—outdrawing them, owning the Babe, being the talk of baseball. But yet when all was said and done, they’d manage to lose two World Series to their rivals, leaving the Giants with bragging rights and the Yanks without a world championship after twenty seasons of play.

Limited to just one at-bat and replaced by Dugan, Home Run Baker
called it a career. Huggins wanted him back for the new stadium—he was sent a contract—but he had remarried, was going to have a new baby, and felt the time had come.

A week after the Series, Ruppert re-signed Huggins to a contract for 1923, putting down talk that he would be replaced or would voluntarily retire.

IN MID-DECEMBER, RUPPERT gathered the press at the team’s Forty-second Street office to announce that he was to purchase Huston’s half of the team and become sole owner. The reported price was $1.25 million (about $15.9 million in today’s dollars). “We have had no serious trouble in our seven years together,” said Ruppert. “He simply wants to retire and enjoy himself, believing that he has reached the point where such an action would be most profitable.”

The formality of the sale wouldn’t take effect for some weeks; Huston continued to assist with advice on construction and would be very much a presence for opening day of Yankee Stadium.

Joe Vila tried to read between the lines. “There is no doubt Colonel Ruppert had grown weary of financing the Yankees’ sensational deals for star players and the building of the magnificent stadium … without receiving due credit in the metropolitan newspapers. Colonel Huston manipulates the publicity. He was quoted at length whenever the occasion required. He was pictured as the chief rooter for the Yankees … But all the time Colonel Ruppert handled his check book … and prevented the railroading of Miller Huggins … I understand that Colonel Ruppert always has regretted the row over Carl Mays and the personal attacks made on President Johnson in connection with that affair.”

Years later, Dan Daniel reported that Ruppert had actually given thought to selling out around 1922—before Yankee Stadium opened—receiving an offer from E. F. Simms of Simms Petroleum of Texas. “But the transaction fell apart,” wrote Daniel.

THE BUYOUT DIDN’T happen until the spring. The deal fell apart not over money, but over a clause restricting Huston from buying into another team. On opening day of the new stadium, Huston was still half owner and very much part of the festivities.

The buyout became final on May 24. The new officers would be Ruppert as president, his younger brother George as vice president, Barrow as secretary, and a Ruppert relative, John Gillig, as treasurer. The board of directors would include the Ruppert brothers, Barrow, Ruppert’s lawyer Ed Grant, and, to some surprise, Huston, who was left with this nugget.

Cap Huston lived another fifteen years. He wanted to buy the Dodgers, but Charlie Ebbets wasn’t selling, and so Huston remained a gentleman farmer on his plantation in Brunswick, Georgia. He was seventy-one when he died.

WEE WILLIE KEELER died of heart failure in Brooklyn on New Year’s Day, 1923. He was only fifty. His real estate business had fallen on hard times, and so had he. Wid Conroy, his Highlander roommate, was the most prominent Yankee figure present as Keeler was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery in Brooklyn. Mark Roth was there from the Yankees’ front office; McGraw, his old Orioles buddy, was there to see him off as well. The departures of Huston and Baker, and to a lesser extent the passing of Keeler, felt like a changing of the guard; the 1923 Yankees were already a far cry from their hapless beginnings on the Hilltop, but that year was to be the beginning of something more.

ALL THROUGH THE 1922 season, eyes were on the construction of the new ballpark across the Macombs Dam Bridge in the Bronx.

While Osborn Engineering designed the new stadium, the White Construction Company, headed by James Escher, received the contract for the labor, and ground was broken on May 5, 1922—almost a year later than hoped. (Ruppert and Huston had wanted the 1922 World Series played there if the Yanks got in.) Construction began on May 10. On peak days, some five hundred men worked on the project. Two million pounds of structural steel, a thousand tons of reinforcing rods, and more than forty-five thousand barrels of cement were employed. There were ninety-three subcontractors, including Allied Window and House Cleaning, which stayed on for nearly eighty years, contracted by the Yankees to provide the ground crew and maintenance workers. (They ultimately became Ogden Allied.)

The park would be ready in 284 working days, a remarkable accomplishment after a late start, particularly with delays awaiting street closings,
strikes, and late changes slowing the process considerably. Closing Cromwell Avenue and 158th Street took a full year for approval.

Not only was the timeline rough, but heavy rains prevented the timely curing of the concrete, a railroad strike slowed shipments of materials, and there were political difficulties in condemning roads at the site. The Yankees were also slow to pay, according to the Escher family.

The triple-decked ballpark would be the first in the country, although the architects insisted that it was double-decked, plus a nineteen-row mezzanine. “A triple-decker would have required a much greater height, which would have been prohibitory,” they declared. It was also a defense against the city’s refusal to approve a triple-decked stadium.