Pinstripe Empire (49 page)

The book was made into a Broadway musical in 1955 called
Damn Yankees
, and into a movie in 1958. Wallop, who died in 1985, was never embraced by the Yankee organization, who found nothing amusing about losing.

The 103 victories had only been bettered three times in team history, but it was Cleveland’s year, as the Indians went 89–21 against everyone but the Yanks and White Sox, and won 111 in all. New PR man Bob Fishel even prepared a four-page handout for fans for the final weekend, featuring the five straight team photos and a “letter of apology” of sorts for failing to win a sixth straight.

One could hardly find fault with this team, but Stengel refused to take a salary increase in a new two-year contract that was paying him $80,000 annually. Even as late as September 5, the Yanks were just three and a half back. But on September 12, they lost a doubleheader at Cleveland before 86,563 fans. After that, they knew it was time to roll press with the “apology brochure.”

The brochure was one of Fishel’s first suggestions. He had a strong
moral compass and a promotional sense from his days as Bill Veeck’s publicist with the Browns, where he had helped sign the midget Eddie Gaedel to a one-day contract. Gaedel signed the pact in the backseat of Fishel’s Packard.

An advertising executive by training in his native Cleveland, Fishel was a very well-liked and respected figure by the press, an old-world gentleman whose Christmas-card list topped nine hundred. After the Browns left for Baltimore, Bob was a good baseball man with no job. The timing was perfect for the Yanks to grab him.

“I think I was hired because we had a lot of Jewish writers covering the team, and Weiss thought it would be good to have a Jewish PR director,” Fishel told me. What Weiss (who wasn’t Jewish) didn’t know was that Fishel was a non-practicing Jew, and that it was irrelevant—he had a wonderful relationship with all newspaper guys, whether they were named Dan Daniel (real name Markowitz), Ben Epstein, Hy Goldberg, and Milton Gross or Joe Trimble, Kenny Smith, and Til Ferdenzi. Dick Young was half Jewish and liked Fishel just fine.

Red Patterson’s time with the Yankees came to a close on July 27 when he had a dispute with Weiss, allegedly over free tickets for an elevator operator at 745 Fifth Avenue. He quit and went to the Dodgers, first as assistant general manager and then as PR director. He stayed with the Dodgers on to Los Angeles, then became president of the Angels to round out his distinguished career. With the Yankees, he had created their first yearbook (called a Sketch Book) in 1950, “invented” the tape-measure home run, served as PA announcer, and produced the annual Old-Timers’ Days. He initiated a monthly four-page newsletter called
Yank
, a nice summary of news, photos, and ticket information that would run for twenty years and eventually morph into
Yankees
magazine, a high-end monthly produced by a separate publications department in the front office.

Fishel would create the Yankees’ first press guide in 1955. He was a lifelong bachelor who enjoyed Broadway and great restaurants. Mantle loved to tease him with practical jokes, especially if they shocked his sensibilities.

The mild-mannered Bob tore off his glasses and was ready to jump into a fight when the Yanks toured Japan after the ’55 season, even though they staged it just to get his reaction. When the team visited Venezuela in spring training in 1972, Bob and White Sox traveling secretary Don Unferth were held hostage until a ransom of phony “taxes” was paid to the government. Lee MacPhail left him a blank check to assure his return. He was never far
from adventure, but always a wise presence in the Yankee camp. And of course he brought me to the Yankees when he hired me in 1968. When he died twenty years later, a memorial service was held on the field at Yankee Stadium, with most of his Christmas-card list in attendance.

RED BARBER, DEFECTING from Brooklyn, joined the Yankee broadcast team in ’54 (Jim Woods had come aboard the year before), leaving behind a young Vin Scully to carry on. Barber had been disappointed over not getting better support from Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley in seeking a higher World Series fee in ’53. He would provide a reportorial style in contrast to Allen’s more home-team enthusiasm for the next thirteen seasons.

THE 1954 SEASON saw the debut of Bill “Moose” Skowron at first base. An altar boy and marbles champion from Chicago, the gentle giant had been nicknamed “Moose” after Italian dictator Mussolini because he wore his head closely shaven. But he was also a “big Moose” character without the World War II reference; he had the look of a guy who spent a lot of time in locker rooms.

Skowron caught Stengel’s eye in a pregame high school contest at Comiskey Park in 1950, and Stengel told him he’d make a Yankee out of him in three years. Moose walked away from a Purdue football scholarship and signed a $22,000 bonus contract with the Yanks. He hit .328 in three minor league seasons, then joined the Yanks in ’54 to platoon at first with Collins. Fans started chanting
Moooooose
when he came to bat, which to strangers sounded like booing. It wasn’t. Fans really took to him, especially when he hit .340 as a rookie and over .300 in his first four years.

Bob Grim was a twenty-four-year-old rookie right-hander in 1954 who replaced Raschi in the starting rotation and posted a 20–6 record to earn Rookie of the Year honors. He was the first Yankee rookie in forty-four years to win 20. Grim had gone 16–5 at Binghamton in 1951 but then went off for two years of military service, so no one saw this coming. Alas, although he would have some fine days out of the bullpen, he never truly reclaimed his magic, as arm trouble curtailed his career.

Oakland’s Andy Carey, twenty-two, became a regular at third and responded with a .302 average, while Irv Noren got in enough outfield platooning to bat .319 in 125 games. Noren, twenty-nine, had come to the
Yanks in 1952 in a trade with Washington for Jensen and Spec Shea, and this was a breakout season for him. Cardinals star Enos Slaughter, a hero of the ’46 World Series, was obtained on April 11 for three Yankee farmhands (including Bill Virdon) and would go on to two tours of duty in New York. He was one of the few players who ever shed tears when he learned he was traded to the Yankees. His Cardinals stay had been a very satisfying one.

Stengel did the best he could. He sent 262 pinch hitters to the plate and they responded with a .292 average. The other seven clubs’ pinch hitters combined to hit .198. It was just the Indians’ year.

ARNOLD MILTON JOHNSON, born in 1907, was a Chicago-based businessman, one of those gifted people who knew how to buy things with other people’s money. At one point he owned as many as twenty companies, but he was never on anyone’s wealthiest-Americans list. He just knew how to do deals, and he became an important figure in Yankee history.

J. Arthur Friedlund, secretary–general counsel of the Yankees, brought Johnson together with Topping and Webb, getting them all to purchase the Automatic Canteen Company, a vending company for candy and cigarettes. (Not surprisingly, Automatic Canteen grew into the concession business and would replace Harry M. Stevens as the Yankees’ concessionaire in 1963, ending an association that went back to 1903.)

In December 1953, in what was called the “biggest real estate deal in baseball history,” Topping and Webb sold Yankee Stadium and its land to the Arnold Johnson Corporation for $6.5 million.
¹³
Johnson then leased Yankee Stadium back to the Yankees for a total of $4.85 million spread over twenty-eight years. He sold the land on which Yankee Stadium stood for $2.5 million to the Knights of Columbus, finding it cheaper to lease the stadium than to pay taxes on it. The Knights, tax-exempt, paid no property taxes.

Johnson set up a matching twenty-eight-year lease arrangement with the Yankees totaling $11.5 million, netting him a profit of $6.65 million.

(Topping and Webb also dissolved the corporation that owned the Yankees
in favor of a two-man partnership between them, a move designed to permit them to personally benefit from capital gains.)

In November 1954, Johnson purchased the Philadelphia Athletics from the Mack family and moved them to Kansas City. At the time Johnson’s hope, with Webb’s encouragement, was to move the team to Los Angeles. Webb always had his eyes on the L.A. market.

The Yankees aided Johnson’s purchase by refusing to move the Blues out of Kansas City unless the city bought Blues Stadium. That ploy worked, giving him a home for the Athletics. The Yanks then waived any reimbursement for their territorial rights to the market, but got Johnson to reimburse the Western League $56,843 so that the Yankees could sell the Blues to Denver for $78,000 and make the team part of the American Association.

Not everyone was thrilled with Johnson’s purchase. Walter Briggs of the Tigers was very vocal in calling it a conflict of interest, so long as Johnson owned Yankee Stadium. Clark Griffith agreed. Topping defended it, saying, “We hold a long-term lease with him and it is on a flat rental basis. A percentage arrangement might cast a different light on the lease.” Commissioner Frick concurred.

Still, Johnson needed to win the votes of Briggs and Griffith, so he promised to sell off Yankee Stadium within ninety days. He didn’t meet that deadline, but he did finally sell the ballpark to Texas businessman John W. Cox just before the 1955 season. Cox, who owned the General Packaging Company, was a Rice University graduate. In 1962 he donated Yankee Stadium to his alma mater, stating, “I hope that my gift will encourage others to support Rice.”

And so rent checks from the Yankees became payable to Rice University. (In March of 1971, New York City exercised its right of eminent domain and paid Rice $2.5 million to take over the ballpark in anticipation of remodeling it.)

In the meantime, Johnson hired Lee MacPhail’s brother Bill, the former Yankee traveling secretary, to be his PR director and hired Parke Carroll as general manager. Carroll too had worked for the Yankees for years, serving as business manager in both Newark and Kansas City. And to improve Blues Stadium to major league needs, he convinced the city council to hire the Del Webb Company to reconstruct it into Municipal Stadium. Between Johnson, Carroll, MacPhail, and Webb, there were plenty of incestuous relationships to go around.

Johnson would die of a cerebral hemorrhage in March 1960, with his
estate eventually selling the Athletics franchise to Charles O. Finley. Johnson was only fifty-three, and he owned the team for only five seasons. Parke Carroll, fifty-six, died eleven months later.

In those five seasons, the Yankees and Athletics would make sixteen trades involving fifty-nine players, with the Yankees basically giving up players who were no good to them and obtaining players who were. Observers hated this cushy arrangement and called the Athletics little more than a Yankee farm club. Over the years the Yankees obtained Art Ditmar, Bobby Shantz, Clete Boyer, Ryne Duren, Harry Simpson, Duke Maas, Virgil Trucks, Murray Dickson, Hector Lopez, Ralph Terry, and finally Roger Maris, all of whom contributed to pennant winners. When he took over, Finley declared war on all that the Yankees stood for and stopped the pipeline, although his new general manager, Frank Lane, did let Bud Daley join the list and go to the Yankees in June 1961. But Finley meant business, and he fired Lane a few weeks later. The pipeline was cut.

ON NOVEMBER 17, 1954, the Yankees completed the biggest trade in baseball history, with seventeen players changing teams. But it wasn’t with the Athletics—it was with the Orioles, following their first season in Baltimore. The key additions to the Yankees were Don Larsen, Bob Turley, and shortstop Billy Hunter, while the Orioles received Harry Byrd, Jim McDonald, Miranda, Hal Smith, Gus Triandos, and Woodling. The trade took two weeks to complete in full.

REYNOLDS RETIRED AFTER the ’54 season. Like Raschi, he too had his salary fights with Weiss. He had to get Stengel to intervene to assure him that his salary wouldn’t be cut when he took on bullpen responsibilities, knowing his victory total would fall. Allie had hurt his back in a bus crash and found the very act of conditioning to be a challenge. He said he pitched one year longer than he wanted to anyway.

He was 131–60 for the Yankees with 41 saves, and 7–2 in World Series play.

A bright fellow (he was the American League’s player representative), Reynolds became successful in the oil-field business and later president of the American Association. But in 1984, his son and grandson were killed in a plane crash. He lost his wife of forty-eight years, Earlene, and then developed lymphoma and diabetes.

Allie received a plaque in Monument Park in 1989 and died in 1994.

Lopat would thus be the last of the great starting trio to retire. The 1955 season would be his final one for the Yanks, who traded him to Baltimore on July 30 to reacquire Jim McDonald. When he walked off the Yankee Stadium mound on July 27, an era ended. Steady Eddie was 113–59 for New York over eight seasons, and 4–1 in the World Series. He would be a baseball lifer, working as a pitching coach, a major and minor league manager, and a scout before passing away in 1992.

THE 1955 SEASON would mark the last time that the Yankees ended spring training with a week of games against southern minor league teams as they worked their way north. The practice went back to the Ruth-Gehrig days and was lucrative for the Yanks, who kept 60 percent of the receipts. Stengel had gone along with it, but preferred spending the final week in Florida.

Hastening the decision was a ruling by the Southern Association to end these games in their parks. And the reason was likely the Yankees’ addition of Elston Howard.

In their fifty-third season, the Yankees were ready to integrate.

The Yanks were the thirteenth of the original sixteen teams to have an African-American player on their team, with the Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox still to come. Aside from Howard and Power, and Austin, Marquez, and Wilson back in 1949, the Yanks had signed Bob Thurman and Mickey Taborn from the Kansas City Monarchs, but observers thought those men never had a chance.

(In 1953, Bill McCorry, a scout who passed on Willie Mays and who was by then traveling secretary, told John Drebinger, “I don’t care what he did today or any other day. I got no use for him or any of them. I wouldn’t want any of them on a club I was with. I wouldn’t arrange a berth on the train for any of them.”)