Pinstripe Empire (31 page)

Babe was the best goodwill ambassador the game could ever have, but he kept his Yankee Stadium appearances sparse, not wishing to overstay his welcome. “The only times [Ruth and Ruppert] ever met after the Babe left the Yankees,” wrote Richards Vidmer in the
Tribune
, “was at such affairs as the World Series, the opening game of the season, or at a dinner of celebration. And at those times they merely clasped hands and smiled for the benefit of the photographers.”

Many would feel that not making Ruth manager was wrong, and that Ruppert owed him the opportunity. In talking to Dan Daniel for an autobiography project that was never completed, Ruppert later offered this view:

Ruth could have remained with the Yankees forever. Even if I had had any idea of letting him go, I could not have fought public opinion so strongly.

When Miller Huggins died in 1929, I did not make Ruth the manager because I felt that as soon as he got the reins he would look for an easy seat on the bench and retire as a player. I know that when you make a great player a manager he gets lazy. You lose the great player and get an indifferent leader.

Later on I asked Ruth to go to Newark and work into the trick of running a ballclub. But he unwisely refused, and then asked me to release him to the Boston club of the National League. That was the biggest mistake of Ruth’s life. It was not my fault.

Attendance fell from 854,682 in 1934 to 657,508 in ’35, a 23 percent drop.

THE ’34 YANKEES won 94 games and introduced their trio of players from Newark: Red Rolfe, Johnny Murphy, and George Selkirk. They also signed the forty-year-old spitball pitcher Burleigh Grimes. They released Pennock and made Sewell a coach.

Grimes was not a success with the Yankees—he was signed on May 28 and released on July 31—but it is worth noting that on July 17, he faced eight batters in one inning, and in that inning delivered the last legal spitball in Yankee history. Grandfathered in 1920 as one of those permitted to continue throwing the pitch, he would be the last to retire of those seventeen pitchers, although he went on to pitch in eight more games for Pittsburgh after his Yankee effort.

Rolfe, twenty-five, was a product of Dartmouth and later its baseball coach. He would succeed Harvard’s Charlie Devens on the roster, who with Columbia’s Gehrig was keeping the Ivy League represented. (Yale’s Johnny Broaca was also on the team.) Rolfe hit .287 as a rookie, .300 as a sophomore, and then .319 in his third year. He quickly made a claim to being the best Yankee third baseman to date, and one of the smartest. Red would keep a ledger of every at-bat in his career, who the pitcher was, what pitches he saw, and what he did with them. It was very advanced record keeping for the time. He later managed the Tigers.

Murphy, a local boy who went to Fordham, would evolve into a relief pitcher at a time when such an assignment was seen as second-class. He made it anything but, becoming a key member of the coming championship seasons, frequently lauded by the team’s starting hurlers and happily enjoying the nickname “Fireman Johnny.” Later, as a player rep, he was instrumental in the institution of baseball’s first pension plan in 1947. Murphy would become the general manager of the 1969 world champion Mets.

George “Twinkletoes” Selkirk, called up on August 12, was the man the Yankees had in mind to succeed Ruth in ’35, which he did. He even got Babe’s uniform number 3 a year later. The Ontario native hit .313 in his 46-game debut in 1934, a prelude to a .312 showing in the full season of ’35. Selkirk would later manage Mickey Mantle in the minors and became the general manager of the Washington Senators in 1962.

Finding Selkirk in ’34 helped cover for the loss of Combs, who on July 24 crashed into a concrete wall in St. Louis, broke his left shoulder, fractured his skull, and drifted in and out of consciousness. So frightening was his condition that players from both teams rushed to his aid, and he was hospitalized in critical condition. He was done for the year and finished as a regular. He’d play 89 games in ’35 and call it a career.

1934 would also see the passing of a number of people important in early Yankee history. Among them were:

• John McGraw, a worthy adversary who influenced many of the team’s early decisions. Barrow led the Yankee contingent to St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
  
• Harry M. Stevens, their concessionaire since their first season.
  
• Wilbert Robinson, Huston’s coveted choice for manager over Huggins.
  
• Joe Vila, who had chronicled the team’s growth for more than thirty years, at times influencing their decisions. He was recalled as the man who introduced Farrell and Devery to Ban Johnson. Vila’s funeral was attended by the owners of the Yankees, Dodgers, and Giants, as well as by George M. Cohan, Clark Griffith, Connie Mack, Casey Stengel, Bill Terry, Emil Fuchs, Joe McCarthy, and Ed Barrow.
  

In January 1935, batboy-mascot Eddie Bennett, thirty-one, was found dead in his rented room at West Eighty-fourth Street by his landlady. He’d spent fourteen years with the team. The autopsy cited alcoholism. After reading the account of his sad demise, Ruppert had the Yankees pay for his funeral and burial, and the office staff attended.

LOU GEHRIG WAS named captain by McCarthy in 1935 after winning the Triple Crown in 1934—.363/49/165. It was the only season in which he didn’t share the spotlight with Ruth or Joe DiMaggio. He was the first captain of the Yankees since Everett Scott, but it was an “off-year” for Larrupin’ Lou, who hit .329/30/119.

The 1935 season also saw the breakthrough of radio broadcasting, not just re-creations, in a number of cities. The ’35 Cubs were the first to broadcast all of their games to fans. By 1936, all teams except the three New York
clubs were doing radio. Ruppert was outspoken in opposing broadcasts. Since 1932, all three New York teams were living up to a five-year prohibition of any radio broadcasts coming out of their ballparks, even by the visiting team.

“The idea of spending money to provide a healthful form of outdoor recreation and then let everybody in free, of course, is ridiculous,” said Ruppert.

Radio broadcasting comes under that head. Giving out details of games over the air to thousands of fans who otherwise would pay admission to the Stadium is a menace to the National Game.

All of the clubs in both leagues have invested heavily in real estate and in construction of modern ball parks. They are, like myself, battling with the times. Some of them must economize, which means reductions in salaries and other overhead expenses. Now, can you understand why club owners who want to save money are willing to let broadcasters give away their business for nothing? As far as I am concerned, you can say that there will be no broadcasting at the Stadium next year or at any other time. I simply take this stand for the protection of my investments and I think all of the other club owners should view the situation in the same light.

Similarly, and in conjunction with all the other American League teams, Ruppert voted against installing lights and playing night games. On May 24, the Reds hosted the first night game in major league history. The Yankees were more than a decade away.

IN DECEMBER OF 1935, the first election for the new Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown was held, and Ruth, along with Cobb, Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Wagner, were the first five electees. Although Cobb and Wagner both recorded more votes than Ruth, the Babe had been retired for only seven months, and few questioned his standing in the election.
⁶
It was not seen as a referendum on “greatest player ever.”

THE EARLY DAYS OF THE YANKEES’ player-development operation included the hiring of two scouts to supervise West Coast operations: Joe Devine and Bill Essick.

Devine was the first to witness a teenage prodigy from San Francisco named Joe DiMaggio. Born in Oakland in 1895, Devine served as a scout for the Pirates (signing the Waner brothers, Joe Cronin, and Arky Vaughn), and most recently managed Mission in the Pacific Coast League (1931–32), after which he became a Yankee scout. He knew all the good players in the Bay Area, and he certainly knew about the DiMaggio brothers: older brother Vince, who struck out a lot, middle brother Joe, who seemed to do everything right, and little brother Dominic, who wore glasses, was the runt of the litter, but who could also play the game.

It was still an age when hot prospects could be secretly scouted without everyone knowing about them, but not so in the hotbed of the PCL, a nearly major league–caliber outfit until the majors expanded westward in the sixties. In today’s game, the top 750 baseball players are in the majors. But when there were only sixteen teams and four hundred players, then the next best 350 would be found in the Negro and triple-A leagues.

All teams knew about DiMaggio, who had quit Galileo High School in tenth grade, determined to be a ballplayer and not a fisherman like his immigrant father. In 1932, at eighteen, he signed with Charley Graham’s San Francisco Seals, and after just a brief debut batted .340 in 1933 and compiled a sixty-one-game hitting streak, still a professional baseball record. It made him the talk of the nation. Everybody wanted Joe.

There was talk that Graham could sell him for $100,000—amazing in the throes of the Depression. But the deal suffered a setback in May ’34 when Joe stepped awkwardly from a taxi and tore cartilage in his knee. Suddenly all the scouts went away. The perfect specimen of an athlete was no longer perfect.

Devine, however, paid twenty-five dollars for an orthopedist to examine him, who determined he could recover. This is where Bill Essick took over.

Essick, the fellow who had recommended Bob Meusel to the Yankees, was now a scout in their employ. A graduate of Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, he was known as “Vinegar Bill” because in German,
essig
was vinegar. Essick had a brief pitching career with Cincinnati but achieved greater success as a manager, winning three straight pennants for Vernon of the PCL. He became a Yankee scout in 1926.

Essick called George Weiss and said, “Don’t give up on DiMaggio. Everyone out here thinks I’m crazy but I think he’s all right. Let me watch him a couple of weeks more.”

“If it had been anyone else but Essick,” said Weiss, “I would have called him off. But I had complete faith in Bill.”

In November 1934, Colonel Ruppert authorized sending five minor leaguers and $25,000 to Graham for DiMaggio’s contract. Joe would play the 1935 season at San Francisco—and bat .398. The kid was going to be fine, and at a bargain price to boot.

DiMaggio was a tribute to good scouting, faith in the scouts, and a commitment to keep signing the best players. Essick and Devine were forever associated with DiMaggio. Devine would later sign Bobby Brown, Jerry Coleman, and Gil McDougald. Essick was involved in the signings of Lazzeri, Crosetti, Gomez, Joe Gordon, and Johnny Lindell.

BY THE TIME DiMaggio got into Lazzeri’s car with Crosetti to drive from San Francisco to St. Petersburg, the whole baseball world knew of him. The game may never have had as heralded a rookie. Radio and newsreels were now making the game more “national” than ever, and smart fans, even those who weren’t reading the
Sporting News
, were becoming aware of players all over the country.

And New York, in the heyday of its daily papers, couldn’t wait. Ten daily papers were filled with biographical sketches, cartoons, and progress reports on Joe, especially after he signed in ’35. Young writers like Tom Meany, Dan
Daniel, Max Kase, Ken Smith, Jimmy Powers, and Louis Effrat were waiting for “their guy,” much in the same way Lieb and Rice and Frick had “owned” the Babe.

DiMaggio had been “schooled” and sophisticated by Lefty O’Doul, the San Francisco native and onetime Yankee who was an enormously influential baseball figure in that part of the country. While Joe had not finished high school and had never been to New York, he would very quickly go from being Joe Di-
madge
-e-o to being Joe Di-
mahj
-e-o, a more polished product than his upbringing would suggest. He had a proud sense of his own value—his holdouts became legendary—and a powerful presence. Lefty Gomez could needle him, but most of his teammates kept a modest distance from him. He would make his own friends on the road. His outfield partner Tommy Henrich would tell people he was never invited to dine with Joe, not once. Phil Rizzuto would talk of the awe in which he was held. “I used to like to just watch him shave,” said Rizzuto.

Whereas Mickey Mantle would suffer for years with media and fan comparisons to DiMaggio, Joe never bore that scrutiny with comparison to Ruth or Gehrig. He was his own man.

Joe would wear the finest clothing. He would marry a movie actress not once, but twice, the second being Marilyn Monroe, the greatest movie star of her day (although the partnership would last only nine months).

He never had to open his wallet. People jumped through hoops to cater to his needs. And while he could feel a slight even when no one else noticed and could hold a grudge for years, the Yankees meant everything to him. By the late sixties, when I was beginning my front-office career, I met many fans who’d lost interest after DiMaggio. He was an era-defining player.

Those close to him could find him prickly, distant, and perhaps a little full of himself. But that didn’t matter to his fans. He was loved and admired, and people could hardly remember him ever making a mistake on the field. He could do it all with style and grace. A poll in 1969, the centennial of professional baseball, named him the greatest living retired player. (Ruth was named the greatest of all.) That sounded just fine to Joe, who requested that it be his introduction whenever an introduction was necessary. Arrogrant? To some. But on the other hand, it was probably true. He was awfully close to perfect. He was, in many ways, the most admired player ever, a hero to the whole generation of fans who came of age in the thirties and forties, a man of dignity and class, one of the greatest Italian-American heroes in the nation’s history, and a player who gave it his all
every day because, in his own words, “There may be somebody in the stands who is seeing me for the first time.”