Pinstripe Empire (35 page)

The stadium ground crew, headed by Walter Owens, lined up respectfully behind the mound.

Held over forty minutes between games, the event included gifts for Lou and remarks by emcee/sportswriter Sid Mercer, Mayor LaGuardia, and others. Ed Barrow, in his first appearance ever on the field at the stadium, announced that Gehrig’s number 4 would be retired, the first time such an honor had ever been bestowed on a player. Lou’s best gift was a trophy from his Yankee teammates with an emotional inscription written by John Kieran of the
New York Times:

We’ve been to the wars together,
We took our foes as they came;
And always you were the leader,
And ever you played the game.
Idol of cheering millions;
Records are yours by sheaves;
Iron of frame they hailed you,
Decked you with laurel leaves.
But higher than that we hold you,
We who have known you best;
Knowing the way you came through
Every human test.
Let this be a silent token
Of lasting friendship’s gleam
And all that we’ve left unspoken

—
Your pals on the Yankee team.

Finally, at McCarthy’s encouragement and with fans cheering “We want Lou!” Gehrig himself stepped up to the microphone.

The PA system’s echo came to be imitated as though part of Lou’s remarks, but the crowd was silent and attentive. No one at the time knew his illness was to be fatal, but everyone knew it was serious, and everyone could see the baggy uniform barely hanging onto his weakening body.

Ray Robinson, later a Gehrig biographer, was a kid in the bleachers that day. He had once sought to interview Gehrig for his school newspaper (it didn’t work out), but had been given free tickets to a game by his hero. Now he was just a face in the crowd, taking it all in.

“Lou had done some radio interviews over the years,” said Robinson, “and he had done that
Rawhide
movie, but by and large, no one really knew what his voice sounded like until that day. I think many were surprised by the pronounced New York accent.”

An exact transcript of Lou’s speech, which was delivered without notes, does not exist. For a fiftieth-anniversary segment on WPIX, director John Moore and I (as producer) visited the archives of Fox Movietone News and found more footage than we previously knew to exist. We pieced together (with other sources) the following:

Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and I have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn’t consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure I’m lucky. Who wouldn’t consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball’s greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with the outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I’m lucky. When the New York Giants, a team you
would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift, that’s something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies, that’s something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter, that’s something. When you have a father and mother who work all their lives so that you can have an education and build your body, it’s a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed, that’s the finest I know. So I close in saying that I might have had a bad break, but I have an awful lot to live for. Thank you.

At that point, Ruth’s sense of the dramatic took hold. He walked to Gehrig and embraced him, holding the pose for the still photographers and newsreel men.

Irv Welzer, later a Tony-winning Broadway producer but then just another twelve-year-old kid in the bleachers, recalled,

I lived two subway stops up from the Stadium. I always tried to make doubleheaders because seeing two games for 55 cents was a good bargain.

So I would have gone anyway, but since it was Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, well, that was a bonus. And really, we knew it was the end of his career, but we didn’t really understand the seriousness of his illness or thought for a moment he might be dying. We just wanted to pay tribute to our guy, a hero to us all.

So I squeezed into the bleachers with all these guys, maybe 100 across, seven hours in the hot sun—all men, mostly white, all smoking. Mostly cigarettes, but a lot of cigars, and the fog of smoke over us was a constant. I always came home feeling ill.

When Lou began to speak, the Stadium fell into a silence that I’d never heard before at a ballgame. People today remember the line, “luckiest man on the face of the earth,” but the line that really got people reaching for their handkerchiefs—was when Lou said, “I might have been given a bad break …” At that moment, the seriousness seemed to hit all of us. Until then, we thought it was some illness that we couldn’t pronounce, but we never thought of the enormity of this until that moment.

Gehrig stayed with the team for much of the remainder of the ’39 season, even going on the road with them, but he was just a cheerleader now, watching one of the great teams in history put up a sensational record without him. He was in the 1939 team photo, but wearing only his jersey over his street clothes. In December, in a special election, Lou would be voted into the Hall of Fame. The Yankees offered him no job after ’39, but LaGuardia put him on the New York City Parole Board, and he moved from Larchmont to Riverdale in the Bronx to meet residency requirements.

Gehrig’s streak of 2,130 consecutive games was long considered the one record—perhaps with Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak—that would stand forever. Even in the late eighties, it could be found on such a list. It was a shock to many when Cal Ripken Jr. broke it in 1995. DiMaggio, representing his teammate Gehrig, was there that night in Baltimore when the record fell.

THE ’39 YANKEES, with a hefty payroll of $300,000, would win 106 games and capture their fourth straight pennant by seventeen games. DiMaggio batted .381, a mark higher than Gehrig ever achieved, as he won the batting championship and MVP Award. His 126 RBI was second to Boston rookie Ted Williams. In August, eight days apart, he homered 450 feet into the left-field bleachers, then ran down a Hank Greenberg drive to center, about 455 feet from home, catching it with his back to home plate, past the Huggins monument and flagpole. For years, people would call this the greatest catch ever at Yankee Stadium. As for his .381, an eye infection in September likely cost him a legitimate run at .400. For a long time, it looked as if he might achieve it.

Ruffing had his fourth straight 20-win season. Atley Donald, a twenty-eight-year-old rookie right-hander from Mississippi known for his nervous tics, started the year 12–0 and finished 13–3. (It wasn’t his final contribution to the team: As a scout thirty-two years later, he would sign Ron Guidry.) Another rookie, Marius Russo, from Richmond Hill High School in Queens and Brooklyn College, won the pennant clincher on September 16. Yet another rookie, muscular Charlie Keller, a farmboy from Middletown, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, came up to play 111 games in the outfield and bat .334. Johnny Murphy recorded 19 saves.

Keller’s signing was a good example of the abilities of Yankee scouts to get their man. Barrow, hearing that other teams were interested in him, called Krichell and told him to drop everything and rush to a semipro game
in Kinston, North Carolina, where Keller was playing. He was met there by fellow Yankee scout Gene McCann. The two men took Keller for a walk at six in the morning and told him they would meet his best offer from any other team. They signed him while the other scouts slept.

The Yanks were a combined 55–11 against Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia.

On May 27–28, Selkirk hit four consecutive home runs—against the same pitcher! Poor rookie Bob Joyce started on the twenty-seventh and relieved on the twenty-eighth and had the infamous honor of giving up the blasts.

On Monday, June 26, the Yankees played the first night game in their history, losing 3–2 at Philadelphia in front of thirty-three thousand. It would be seven years before they played one at home.

Two days later, they hit 13 home runs in a doubleheader against the Athletics.

ON JUNE 12, baseball’s attention turned to Cooperstown for the formal opening of the Hall of Fame and the induction of the first four classes of electees. It was the one hundredth anniversary of the “birth of baseball,” although the story of Abner Doubleday and baseball’s invention was by then known to be a myth.

Fifteen thousand people packed the small village for the ceremonies, and Babe Ruth was the principal attraction, stopping at a drugstore to refill his cigar supply and signing autographs while saying, “I didn’t know there were so many people who didn’t have my autograph!”

The fact that these would ultimately sell for small fortunes at auction defied the laws of supply and demand.

Each team sent two players to represent them at the ceremonies and to play an exhibition game—two players removed from their roster for the day, as regular-season games continued to take place. The Yanks sent Selkirk and Jorgens. McCarthy and Barrow accompanied them on the trip.

Ruth, inducted that day alongside the late Willie Keeler, browsed through the museum and spotted Huggins’s uniform, saying, “Gee, he was a tough little guy, and the only one who knew how to handle me.”

Babe was the last to take the microphone that day. “They started something here, and the kids are keeping the ball rolling. I hope some of you kids will be in the Hall of Fame. I’m very glad that in my day I was able to
earn my place. And I hope the youngsters of today have the same opportunity to experience such a feeling.”

In the “celebrity game,” Babe popped out to the catcher (Jorgens) as a pinch hitter. But everybody cheered.

Cooperstown would remain a joyous place to visit as the years rolled on, and with more Yankee players inducted than any other team—and New York the closest major league city—there would always be a strong Yankee connection to the Hall.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL’S All-Star Game was played at Yankee Stadium for the first time on July 11, 1939, with Gehrig in uniform as the American League’s honorary captain. Manager McCarthy had six Yanks in the starting lineup, and the American League won 3–1 in front of 62,892 as DiMaggio homered in the fifth inning to give the hometown fans a treat.

The ’39 World Series gave the Yankees four straight world championships, along with their record eighth overall. This time the Yankees faced the Cincinnati Reds, whose traveling secretary was Gabe Paul, many years later to be the Yankees’ team president. The Reds also featured Willard Hershberger as a backup catcher. Hershberger had come up through the Yankee system and had played for their great Newark teams. He’d been traded to the Reds in December of ’37.

Ten months after the Series, in the midst of the ’40 season, it was Gabe Paul who was summoned back to the Reds’ hotel in Boston, where he found Hershberger had taken his own life. While best remembered as a Cincinnati Red, he had been a minor league teammate of more than a dozen Yankees, and the Yanks as a team took the news hard as well.

As for the ’39 Series, Ruffing, Pearson, Hadley, and Murphy (in relief of Oral Hildebrand, who thought the Yankees were prejudiced against Protestants) were the four winners as the Yankees swept again, winning the clincher 7–4 at Crosley Field as Reds fans sat quietly watching the inevitable unfold. Pearson’s win was a gem, a no-hitter for seven and a third innings, just five outs from history. Reds catcher Ernie Lombardi broke it up with a single to center.

The most memorable play of the Series came in the tenth inning of that final game, when DiMaggio singled, scoring Crosetti to give the Yanks a 5–4 lead. But when Ival Goodman bobbled the ball in right, Keller (who hit .438 with three homers in the Series) also scored, crashing into Lombardi
as the ball arrived. His slide stunned Lombardi. He dropped the throw and seemed to lie unconscious. That let DiMag score, too, in what came to be known as Lombardi’s Snooze.

“I’ll give you the true story on that one,” teammate Johnny Vander Meer told author Bill Gilbert years later. “The throw from the outfield came in a short hop and hit Lom in the cup. You just don’t get up too quick. Somebody put out the word that Lombardi went to sleep, took a snooze. But he was paralyzed! He couldn’t move. With anybody but Lombardi, they’d have to carry him off the field.”

Coach Art Fletcher, who received his eleventh World Series check, led the singing of “The Beer Barrel Polka” and “Sidewalks of New York” as the team, including Gehrig, celebrated its triumph.

The Yanks had begun the season with a trip to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of General Abner Doubleday. They ended the year on a “snooze” from Lombardi. In between, it was perhaps the most news-filled season they ever experienced.

AT THE LEAGUE meetings after the season, a piece of legislation was introduced by Washington owner Clark Griffith, the Yanks’ original manager, designed to do something—anything—to halt the Yankees’ success. Griffith proposed that no rival American League team be permitted to trade or sell anyone to the defending championship club. Only a waiver purchase would be permitted. This was the first attempt to stop the Yankees by edict, and the measure passed. It would be a short-lived and weak effort to break up the Yankees.

TALK OF SELLING THE YANKEES began early in 1940 and waxed and waned over the next five years. The name most associated with the purchase was former postmaster general James Farley, a one time amateur first baseman from Haverstraw, New York, who went on to become the chairman of the Democratic Party and a close associate of Franklin Roosevelt. And so when Farley spoke of his interest, it was news.