Pinstripe Empire (39 page)

MacPhail, now fifty-four, had run the Cincinnati Reds from 1933 to 1937, where he had originated night baseball, hired Red Barber to do broadcasts, and instituted air travel to road games. He moved to the Dodgers in 1938, brought Barber with him, led the team to the 1941 pennant, and then resigned in 1942 to reenlist, serving as a lieutenant colonel in the service of the undersecretary of war, Robert Patterson.

He was no stranger to the military, having served in World War I, and in a memorable act that typified his daring and his flamboyance, he hatched an ambitious plot to kidnap the kaiser shortly after the war’s conclusion. He wanted to turn him over to Allied forces to put him on trial.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany had taken refuge in a chateau in Holland. MacPhail, along with Lieutenant Colonel Luke Lea (a former U.S. senator), reached the castle under the pretense of needing to speak personally to the kaiser. When it became evident they were never going to see him, they decided
to make a run for it. MacPhail swiped an ashtray on the way out as proof that they were there. (The ashtray is still in the family.)

During the years that James Farley had been trying to execute a purchase, $4 to $6 million was the price range bandied about in the press. (Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey was thought to be interested in buying the team as well, but his general manager, Eddie Collins, talked him out of it.)

MacPhail thought the bargain price of $2.5 million would do it, which he estimated to be the value of the real estate on which Yankee Stadium and the two Ruppert Stadiums—Newark and Kansas City—stood. Everything else—the major and minor league players, the office equipment, the playing equipment, the value of having a major league team in the biggest population center of the country—would be a bonus. He even wrote down on his checklist that while the Giants and Dodgers almost always had another team in town when they were home, the Yankee schedule had only about ten conflicting dates a season.

He was also banking on baseball becoming bigger than ever following the Great Depression and the war. June 6 was D-Day. Although Allied forces suffered terrible losses, the result was clear in the minds of Americans: The war was entering its final phase.

(Only one major leaguer was part of the Normandy invasion—or, more properly, a future major leaguer. Seaman First Class Lawrence Peter Berra was on the USS
Bayfield,
providing cover.)

Back on the home front, MacPhail took his lengthy summary of the team’s value to Manufacturer’s Trust, the estate trustee. Inheritance taxes were too great for the team—or even for the brewery—to cover. These laws would be changed over time, and when George Steinbrenner died in 2010, there were no such problems with inheritance taxes. But in the 1940s, these laws were backbreakers. It was reported that the estate owed more than $1 million.

Manufacturer’s Trust was leery that MacPhail himself had the money. Baseball had made few people rich; it was still a very small industry. MacPhail, though, had a partner, John Hertz, who owned taxi fleets in Chicago, thoroughbred horses (his wife owned Triple Crown winner Count Fleet), and the Hertz Drive-Ur-Self Corporation, which would become Hertz Rental Cars. When Manufacturer’s learned that Hertz was involved, the bank seemed ready to approve the sale.

But Hertz’s racing interests were not going to pass muster with Commissioner Landis. MacPhail needed a different partner.

And so at the 21 Club on West Fifty-second Street in New York, he happened upon marine captain Dan Topping, who was on leave from Pacific duty. Topping, always well tanned and handsome, was just thirty-two. He was an heir to a tin fortune and was married to the champion ice skater Sonja Henie (already his third of six marriages, producing nine children).

Dan co-owned the NFL’s Brooklyn Tigers, which had paid rent to MacPhail to play home games in Ebbets Field.

Topping quickly agreed to go into the purchase with MacPhail and suggested that Bing Crosby, the nation’s number-one movie star, might also be interested. Crosby, however, also had racing interests (he owned Del Mar Racetrack) and was no more likely to gain approval than was Hertz. (Crosby did wind up with a piece of the Pittsburgh Pirates.)

It was Crosby, however, who suggested Del Webb, forty-five, as a third partner. The two of them had invested in three films together, including
Abie’s Irish Rose.
Webb was a land developer who had moved to Phoenix in 1928 to recover from typhoid fever and started his construction company there. Webb casually got to know MacPhail when his construction company landed a big contract from the War Department to build a Japanese internment camp near Parker, Arizona. He also owned the Arizona Brewing Company.

Webb, a friend of Howard Hughes, would build the Flamingo hotel for Bugsy Siegel in Las Vegas—it would open in 1946—the Sahara in 1952, and the Mint casino in 1961, receiving “points,” or part ownership, as part of his payment. He would also build the retirement community of Sun City, Arizona, in 1960. He took part ownership of the Flamingo when Bugsy was gunned down in June 1947, owing Webb a lot of money. His partners were Meyer Lansky and Gus Greenbaum, who lost his share of the place when he was found with his throat slit.

“I consulted with [J. Edgar] Hoover for a long time before we went into Vegas,” Webb said, “because we were worried about the gangster element. Hoover encouraged us to go in.”

The irony of baseball turning away people with racing interests while approving Webb despite his mob associations was not lost on critics.

The sale price was $2.8 million. The three Ruppert heirs received $2.5 million of it; $300,000 went to Barrow. George Ruppert retained a 3.12 percent interest in the team until he died in November 1948.

The announcement was made, appropriately, at the 21 Club on January 26, 1945. Topping was not present, having returned to duty in the Pacific,
and was represented by his lawyer, J. Arthur Friedlund, who would become the secretary-treasurer of the team. MacPhail, in uniform, was there, as was the tall and judicious-looking Webb, with Barrow representing the Rupperts. Webb was charming, talking of his days as a pitcher in a California “outlaw league,” while MacPhail, no stranger to anyone in the room, said, “Mr. Barrow and I are in full accord on the policy of the club and he will continue to direct affairs until such time as I can permanently take over my new duties.”

Landis died in November 1944, his views on Webb unknown. The office was now vacant, pending a search for a new commissioner. Webb, however, proved to be a good citizen of the game, truly an absentee owner who was generally seen in New York only on opening day, Old-Timers’ Day, and the World Series. He had no office among the Yankee complex and seemed perfectly content to let others run the team and its business interests and live his life in real estate development out West. The Yankee ownership, for him, was essentially good PR for his other business interests.

MacPhail was clearly going to run the show now, although Weiss was promoted to general manager. Few thought Barrow and McCarthy would get along with him. Barrow, now almost seventy-seven, was mentioned as a possible commissioner, but he recognized that his time to retire had come. He created no controversy in turning over the running of the team to MacPhail, and was named chairman of the board.

“McCarthy and MacPhail are as different as night and day,” wrote Arthur Daley in the
Times.
“They may even be as insoluble as oil and water … But it’s impossible to visualize the tempestuous redhead firing McCarthy as constantly as he fired Leo Durocher in the old days. With Marse Joe that first battle probably would be the last. And McCarthy never would stand for the slightest bit of front-office interference.”

As for an office location, the 55 West Forty-second Street office would hardly do for a big idea man like MacPhail. He leased better space on the twenty-ninth floor of 745 Fifth Avenue (the Squibb Building), across the street from the Plaza Hotel, bringing Barrow’s longtime secretary Elizabeth King (who would assume that job for George Weiss), an office manager (Emmet “Pop” Tuttle, who would retire in January 1946 after thirty years with the team), a bookkeeper, a ticket director, and a telephone operator. It was a good arrangement, allowing MacPhail and Topping to enjoy the finest Manhattan restaurants for lunches and cocktail hours. Barrow would never
have been comfortable in that environment; he usually had lunch, packed by his wife, in the Harry M. Stevens office.

For a showman like MacPhail, a publicist was critical, and there had been no real publicity director to this point. After Mark Roth died, Jackie Farrell answered reporters’ questions, but he was called to be the head of the speakers’ bureau, booking players for appearances or making them himself, telling Babe Ruth stories. People expected John McDonald, who had worked for MacPhail in both Cincinnati and Brooklyn, to become the team’s first official PR director, but instead MacPhail selected former sportswriter Red Patterson, who had been the National League’s PR chief the year before. Patterson, who later served briefly as traveling secretary, was handed the additional role of public-address announcer.

There was also an expectation that Red Barber would come over, but he made a new deal with the Dodgers and stayed. (He moved to the Yanks in 1954.) Rex Weyant, Winnie’s brother, stayed on as traveling secretary but would be succeeded in 1946 by MacPhail’s son Bill, later the head of CBS and then CNN Sports. His other son, Lee, would operate the Kansas City Blues following his military discharge, and after 1947 became the farm director. Lee went on to become general manager of the Orioles and the Yankees, a top aide to Commissioner Spike Eckert, American League president, and head of the Players Relations Committee. He would eventually join his father in the Baseball Hall of Fame: the only father-son pairing in the Hall.

Faced with moving all the team’s files to the new offices, MacPhail made a decision to toss almost all of it into the trash. This would not have only been the Barrow files, but all the records back to the Highlanders that had been maintained by the Yankees.

While there was hardly a “collector’s market” in the mid-forties, the maintenance worker whose job it was to toss the trash spotted the endorsed checks and knew a good thing when he saw it. He sold off most of the haul to a book dealer and gave a lot of the canceled checks to friends. He also sold a lot of items to a former news editor for the
World-Telegram
, and eventually the material trickled into a larger marketplace. The early records and letters from Ban Johnson involving the formation of the team would vanish, but some material did survive, including letters involving the purchase of Ruth and the Carl Mays case.

Barrow moved from Larchmont to Rye, New York, and settled into retirement. He was seldom seen at baseball gatherings, although one Old-Timers’ Day was staged in his honor by the Yankees. His personal life had not been
free of tragedy. A son-in-law, Coca-Cola vice president Frederick Campbell, had committed suicide in 1933 by consuming carbon monoxide fumes in his New Rochelle garage. Frederick’s widow, Audrey, the Barrows’ only child, left with two small children, married for a fourth time in 1940, but this husband died in 1950 of a heart ailment. She then committed suicide herself in 1951, leaping to her death from an eleventh-floor window at 1161 York Avenue in Manhattan.

Barrow himself died on December 15, 1953, at the age of eighty-five, three months after his Hall of Fame election. He received a plaque to match Ruppert’s on the outfield wall in 1954. He was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, near Ruppert and Gehrig.

THE 1945 SEASON was another for playing 4-Fs, hoping for early discharges, and trying to stay competitive. Spring training was again held in Atlantic City and the team went “north”—126 miles—with an opening-day lineup of Stirnweiss at second, Hersh Martin in left, Russ Derry in right, Lindell in center, Etten at first, Joe Buzas at short, Don Savage at third, Mike Garbark catching, and Atley Donald pitching. These were hardly major leaguers, but they were determined to do the best they could. Derry actually hit four homers, two of them grand slams, in April and briefly got people excited about him.

On the roster with Bill Dresher, Herb Crompton, Mike Milosevich, Al Gettel, and Bill Zuber was Paul Schreiber, forty-two, the team’s batting-practice pitcher since ’37. He was on a big-league roster for the first time since 1923, a twenty-two-year gap between appearances. Zuber, from a German-speaking farming family in Iowa, could barely speak English, something McCarthy had to overcome. Tom Villante, a batboy on the team and later the head of broadcasting and marketing for Major League Baseball, recalls a day that “McCarthy was concerned that Zuber might lose his concentration after six innings, which had happened before.”

When Zuber headed for the mound in the seventh, he forgot to pick up his glove on the way. Players would leave their gloves on the field in those days, and there was Zuber on the mound, with his glove sitting on the grass between the foul line and the dugout.

So Zuber pretends to tie his shoelaces, but broke one, so he had
to come in for a new pair. On the way back, he would pick up the glove and no one would notice.

But McCarthy never missed anything. He sat there shaking his head. This was wartime baseball.

World events in 1945 overwhelmed baseball, making some wonder why they were even bothering with it. The death of President Roosevelt in April postponed games and left the nation in mourning. But there had been jubilation with V-E Day as there soon would be with V-J Day, marking the end of combat and, for baseball fans, the eventual return of the players. It was not an overnight process, of course, and some teams—like Detroit, getting Hank Greenberg back early—fared better than others. Greenberg’s homer on the last day would win them a pennant.

Instead of gaining players, the Yankees actually lost Lindell, who was inducted in June while fighting continued in the Pacific. And then came something from the front office that McCarthy had never heard once from Barrow.

“The players aren’t hustling,” said MacPhail.