Pinstripe Empire (8 page)

For the game on Friday, October 7, New York arrived home from St. Louis just after noon for the 3:30 game. It had been nearly a twenty-eight-hour trip. New York wore its road dark blues, and Boston, arriving from Chicago, wore their road grays. Boston sent Norwood Gibson (17–13) against Chesbro (40–10).

Over nine thousand fans turned out as New York won its fifth straight to move into first place with a 91–56 record to Boston’s 92–58. The score was 3–2 with Chesbro winning for the 41st time; the fans, totally caught up in the thrill of the race, carried Happy Jack on their shoulders to the outfield clubhouse after the final out. Patsy Dougherty, recovering from malaria, scored twice and drove in what proved to be the winning run in the seventh.

The next morning, the teams boarded New York Central trains for the five-and-a-half-hour trip to Boston and a doubleheader at Huntington Avenue Grounds. (Farrell had rented out Hilltop Park to Columbia University for a football game.) Even though Griffith had told Chesbro he wasn’t needed and should stay home, Jack showed up at Grand Central. He pitched the next game.

Enough tickets were sold in advance that temporary seating had been created to handle the overflow crowd of more than twenty-eight thousand, while thousands more stood downtown in front of newspaper offices, following the game on outdoor scoreboards.

Alas, Chesbro, on no days rest, couldn’t get past the fourth inning, and his reliever, Clarkson, was also ineffective, as Bill Dinneen won, 13–2, to put Boston back in first.

In the third game, thirty-seven-year-old Cy Young, who in May had pitched a perfect game against Philadelphia on these very grounds, stopped New York 1–0, the winning run scoring in the fifth in a game called after seven innings due to darkness.

Now New York would have to win both of the remaining games—a doubleheader on Monday back at Hilltop—to win the pennant.

So this was it, the final day of the regular season, Boston and New York, two must-win games, and the most important ones yet played by the Highlanders. Some two hundred Royal Rooters wearing WORLD CHAMPIONS badges came down from Boston, although if any wore HIGHLANDERS SUCK T-shirts under their suits and ties, it went unrecorded. They were seated together on the left-field side while the rest of the standing-room-only crowd of 28,584 cheered for their New Yorkers.

Someone found a ladder and a lot of fans scrambled up to the grandstand roof only to be shooed back down. Ropes were placed in the outfield to pack extra fans there. One can only imagine the pregame revelry as so many thousands headed up Broadway via buses and on foot for this great final showdown. Streetcar was still the way to go: The 145th Street subway station, the northernmost stop of the IRT, about a mile short of the ballpark, would not open for three more weeks.

The Royal Rooters had adopted a Broadway theme song, “Tessie,” which they delighted in singing but which was quickly taken up in a mocking way by the New York fanatics with rolled-up megaphones whenever their team staged a rally. Dueling “Tessies.”

Boston also brought along a mascot, an “aged Negro” who danced atop their dugout to “Dixie” and “Old Black Joe.”

It would be Chesbro, of course, well rested now with a full day off, taking on Dinneen. So enchanted were the fans with Chesbro’s season that the game would be halted as he came to bat in the third inning, when fans from his hometown of North Adams presented him with a fur-lined overcoat.

New York scored two in the fifth for the delirious faithful, but Boston tied it in the seventh. They went to the ninth tied 2–2.

In an inning for the ages, Boston’s Lou Criger beat out an infield single and was sacrificed to second by Dinneen. On a grounder to Elberfeld at short, Criger somehow sneaked past the ball and got to third. And so with
two out and Criger dancing off third, Freddie Parent at bat, and the count 2 and 2, Chesbro took the sign from his catcher, Red Kleinow, and delivered. The ball sailed over Kleinow’s head and went all the way to the backstop, ninety-one feet behind him. Criger scored standing up and the crowd groaned, then fell silent. Forty-one victories in a season, but a horrific wild pitch in the final inning on the final day had given Boston a 3–2 lead.

In the last of the ninth, Dougherty struck out with runners on first and second and the game was over, making the second game, a 1–0 New York win, meaningless.

Sportswriter Mark Roth later told people he saw Chesbro “crying like a baby” on the Highlanders bench after the inning ended, while the Bostons danced in front of their dugout.

“How did I make the wild pitch?” Chesbro told the
Boston Post
in January. “How does any pitcher make one? I used a spitball, but the spitball had nothing to do with it. I simply put too much force into the throw. Dinneen had been using the spitball and had made the ball rather slippery. I am not blaming Dinneen, however. I put too much force into the ball and that’s all. It hit the grand stand and it’s a long story of what happened. We lost the pennant.”

Boston won it by eight percentage points. Had New York won both of those final games, they would have won by six percentage points. There were no plans to replay New York’s four tie games. (It did complicate the understanding of the standings for fans of both teams, who argued all week over what was needed to win.)

Chesbro’s wild pitch was played over and over in people’s minds and discussed for years. Could Kleinow have caught it? Was their some superhuman effort that could have kept the ball from sailing out of range? As years passed, some indeed felt it might even have been a passed ball.

Almost forty years later, writer Fred Lieb ran into Kid Elberfeld and asked what he thought. He’d been at shortstop.

Said the Tabasco Kid, “That ball rode so far over Kleinow’s head that he couldn’t have caught it standing on a stepladder.”

“They said it was a wild pitch, and I’ll let it go at that,” said Chesbro years later. “But I think the ball might have been caught.”

In 1938, Griffith, attending the Winter Meetings in New Orleans, told the press that he always thought it was a passed ball. “Kleinow … was the man who blew the championship,” he said. “[He] had been out celebrating
the night before. His vision was none too keen and he missed the pitch that would have given New York its first American League pennant.”

Like Babe Ruth’s “called-shot home run” in the 1932 World Series, it would be seen differently by every eyewitness and be one of the most debated moments in Yankee history, so long as people who lived through it remained.

It was certainly the most exciting moment of the Yankees’ first seventeen seasons, even if it didn’t work out for them. Boston had maintained bragging rights and would again fly the pennant. But the beginning of a great rivalry was born.

The final attendance for New York was reported as 438,919, fourth in the league, and more than double the 1903 total. The Giants led all of baseball with 609,826, an increase of thirty thousand from the previous year.

DURING THE YANKEES’ FIRST TWO decades, one issue above all stood out in public debate.

Sunday baseball.

All of professional baseball had been dealing with the matter long before the American League came along, so it certainly didn’t catch Farrell and Devery by surprise. But they joined in efforts to reverse the ban on playing games on Sunday, one deeply set in America’s traditional ties to the church. A politician was more likely to win votes with the support of clergymen than with their opposition.

At the start of the twentieth century, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were the only major league towns that allowed Sunday baseball. It was not until the 1910s that Detroit, Cleveland, and Washington joined them, recognizing how wartime workers needed a day at the ballpark to unwind.

But New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh remained holdouts. Bills were periodically introduced in the state legislatures, but they made little progress.

Today, Sundays are the the most lucrative attendance day of the week. It’s the reason that baseball leagues never have an odd number of teams: If they did, someone would be idle on Sunday.

The main argument against Sunday baseball had always been that it distracted people from church attendance. While charging admission was the most severe flaunting of the law, even amateur teams could find themselves under arrest, depending on the passion the local police held for enforcement. It was supposed to be a day of rest. For organized groups like the
Anti-Saloon League and the Sabbatarians, the passion of this fight was equal to today’s polarization over abortion. It would occupy the battlefield of public opinion for decades. The ban lasted in Boston until 1932 and in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh until 1934. Few fans today even know that it was once such a great issue.

Proponents argued that baseball had grown into a wonderful leisure activity, a national pastime that embodied wholesome qualities. Wealthier people were going off to play golf or ride horses on Sunday, but the working class—people who commonly worked six days a week—were being deprived.

It was pointed out that teens could sneak into saloons on Sunday but didn’t have a baseball game as an option. There were cases of arrests and fines for those even caught playing the game recreationally.

Of course, Frank Farrell owned so many saloons, he tended to be quiet on the matter. He was going to be fine either way.

New York’s teams sought ways around the ban. A ten-thousand-seat field in Ridgewood, Queens, called Wallace’s Ridgewood Grounds was a place to play on Sunday, even if the games were billed as exhibitions. It was located at the crosshairs of Wyckoff and Irving avenues and Weirfield and Covert streets. Teams would get around the no-admission rule by allowing everyone in for free but requiring that they purchase a scorecard for the equivalent of a ticket. Ordinarily a scorecard was five cents. At Ridgewood, it could be as much as seventy-five cents. And there you might see the Highlanders take on a team like the Brooklyn Field Club, or whatever team was available to face Keeler and Chesbro and the rest. The players would share in the proceeds of the Sunday games. On occasion the local gentry protested, sometimes even getting Griffith himself arrested.

In 1909, the Highlanders played a Sunday exhibition in Jersey City, and the club owners handed out notices to fans not to cheer, so as not to arouse suspicion among the local police. The game was played in silence.

The Brooklyn Superbas (forerunners of the Dodgers), claiming they had territorial control over Ridgewood, tried to stop the Highlanders from playing there, forcing them to appear only when Brooklyn was out of town. Ultimately, the Highlanders ceded the territory to the Superbas and found other places to play. But for New Yorkers, Ridgewood Field was ground zero for the Sunday baseball feud, largely because Queens judges had a more enlightened interpretation of the Sunday laws. (Brooklyn twice played regular-season Sunday games there: The first, in 1904 against Boston, produced no
arrests, but the second, against Philadelphia, featured several arrests of players, ending the “experiment.”)

A Sunday exception was granted for a benefit exhibition game in April of 1906, played at Hilltop Park before fifteen thousand fans and raising $5,600 for San Francisco earthquake relief. The game was played between New York and the Philadelphia Athletics—two American League opponents—and many in the stands were not sure whether it was an exhibition or a league game. It was an exhibition, and it was pitched by Louis LeRoy, New York’s first Native American Player.

In 1908, Father Thomas McLoughlin of New Rochelle reported on a meeting he had with President Theodore Roosevelt, claiming that the president “fully approved” of Sunday baseball.

“I told the president that I did not see how there could be any harm in persons playing baseball or attending the National game on Sunday, after their religious duties had been discharged,” he said. “The president replied, ‘That is the kind of talk I like to hear from a clergyman.’ “

The Giants also played the Yankees in a Sunday exhibition game at the Polo Grounds in 1912, a benefit for survivors of the
Titanic
, which raised nearly $10,000 in program sales without charging admission. Farrell jumped on the PR benefits of the endeavor, hoping to win favor with politicians. “I am pleased to say that the men who devote their time and talents to the national game are always ready to give freely of both time and talents … in the case of a national disaster.”

In 1915, state assemblyman Martin McCue told his colleagues, “I live up to my religion as well as any practical man can, and there is nothing in my religion that says I can’t go to a baseball game Sunday afternoon if I go to church in the morning. I think if I watch the Giants perform on a bright Sunday afternoon I am keeping the day holy as the Master intended it should be kept holy.”

But shortly after his speech, a bill to allow Sunday baseball was defeated.

“I shall try again!” he said. “It’s sunshine, outdoors and peanuts against dives, gambling and vice!”

In April of 1919—after the war had relaxed some of the more rigid standards in society—the New York State Senate and Assembly finally passed a Sunday baseball (and movies) bill, stating that no game could begin before 2:00 P.M. The bill was led by state senator Jimmy Walker, the future mayor of New York. Governor Al Smith, a devout Catholic, signed the bill, which allowed for a local opt-out. It was done.

On May 4, 1919, both the Giants and the Dodgers played Sunday home games against National League opponents. The Yankees followed a week later, Sunday, May 11.

And the earth didn’t tremble.

THE 1905 HIGHLANDER season, a sixth-place finish, saw the debut of first baseman Hal Chase, who was drafted from the Pacific Coast League. His comings and goings from California “outlaw” leagues to the American League would, over the years, test the patience of the major leagues and their willingness to put up with players spending the off-season in makeshift West Coast leagues.

It was just one of a number of issues that made Hal a controversial figure.