Pinstripe Empire (14 page)

“He insisted that everything he possessed in the entire world be clean and well groomed,” recalled his later pitching ace Waite Hoyt. “He was the first owner to buy four sets of home uniforms and four sets of road uniforms and insisted that they be dry-cleaned every day so his team would look like champions.”

IN THE LATE afternoon of December 31, 1914, the sale was closed. Ruppert paid his half with a certified check, Huston in thousand-dollar bills. Huston said he would not return to Havana and would stay in New York to attend to the team. A celebratory dinner was offered for the new owners at the New York Athletic Club, with Farrell in attendance.

Ruppert became the team’s president and Huston the secretary-treasurer. Around that same time, on November 25, another key piece of the Yankee future arrived. Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio was born in Martinez, California. People would come to call him Joe.

Farrell and Devery faded into the sunset, no longer on speaking terms. Farrell had at least legitimized his reputation: He was no longer just the Poolroom King of New York. Devery, however, remained identified with his shady police tenure, and his obituaries barely made note of his baseball connection.

Devery died at his home in Far Rockaway, Queens, in 1919, forty-two months after selling his interest in the team. He never lived to see his old team win a pennant, nor did he reconcile with Farrell. He had just returned from a business trip to Washington when he was stricken, the cause of death listed as apoplexy—a stroke. He was sixty-five, and his wife and four grandchildren were at home with him when he collapsed. “No more spectacular policeman than Big Bill Devery ever wore a uniform of the New York Department,” said the reigning police commissioner, Richard Enright.

Neither Farrell nor anyone from baseball attended Devery’s huge funeral, but then again, neither did Mrs. Devery, who was reportedly home and “prostrated by grief.”

Farrell died at sixty of a heart attack on vacation at the Ritz Carlton in Atlantic City in 1926. The press reported that he was a millionaire at the
time of his death. Governor Al Smith called him a “close personal and family friend for more than 25 years,” and he attended the funeral in Manhattan, where Farrell lived on West End Avenue. Farrell lived long enough to see world championships, Yankee Stadium, and Babe Ruth in pinstripes, just not on his watch. Among those at his funeral were Charles Stoneham, who now owned the Giants; Tim Mara, who owned the fledgling football Giants of the new NFL; and Joe Vila. No one associated with the Yankees, present or past, attended.

While neither man made much money with the team, the sale to Ruppert and Huston presented them with plenty to divide. Despite reports that Devery was worth over $1 million, both he and Farrell were pretty much broke when they died. Devery left $1,023 and Farrell $1,072. As both men liked to wager, Farrell might claim to have won by forty-nine dollars.

THE NEW YEAR’S Eve announcement would have been plenty big with just the sale of the club, but with it went rumors of the new manager to be. And that would be Wild Bill Donovan, who was in the small group rumored to have been considered (a group that included Hughie Jennings, Miller Huggins, Joe Kelley, Wilbert Robinson, and even Connie Mack). Johnson backed Donovan. Kelley, a future Hall of Famer who had been managing in Toronto, would become a Yankee scout and spring training coach for several years.

Donovan agreed to terms on January 2. Peckinpaugh would return to his role as team captain.

Like Buck Showalter many decades later, Donovan, thirty-eight, would be the manager just as the team was on the brink of success. Donovan would precede Miller Huggins; Showalter, Joe Torre.

(Donovan was not related to another “Wild Bill Donovan,” a contemporary who had starred in football at Columbia and went on to a distinguished military and intelligence career.)

Wild Bill’s initial impact in New York came while pitching for Brooklyn, where he won 25 games in 1901 to lead the National League. After winning 17 in 1902, he jumped to the American League, joining Detroit, for whom he’d win 139 games over the next nine seasons, including a 25–4 record in 1907 and pennants in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In 1913–14 he was the manager and part-time pitcher for the Providence Grays of the American Association, where he managed a twenty-year-old first baseman named Wally
Pipp, a twenty-two-year-old pitcher named Carl Mays, and a nineteen-year-old pitcher named Babe Ruth.

Donovan’s hiring was well received, and he said, “I shall treat my players with every courtesy and friendship for I feel that I will always be one of the boys. I shall try to encourage every man of the squad and give all a square deal. I have not the least apprehension that any player will try to take advantage of me.”

Donovan brought back coach Charlie “Duke” Farrell, another Brooklyn alum who had been an early mentor and who had coached for the Yankees in 1909 and 1911, and trainer Jimmy Duggan, who had been with him in Detroit and Providence. Ruppert and Huston named Harry Sparrow as business manager. Sparrow was a popular New York sports figure who had capably served as business manager for the world tour undertaken by the White Sox and Giants after the 1914 season. With Arthur Irwin off to manage Lewiston in the Northeast League, Sparrow was given broad powers and often acted as general manager as we know the job today. Ruppert and Huston came to trust him with their checkbook and with his judgments.

Also brought aboard were Mark Roth and Charlie McManus, the dual traveling secretaries who would come to be known as Nip ’n’ Tuck. Roth, who was also the de facto publicity director (and hence my “great-grandfather” in that position), had covered the team for the
Globe
since they had played their first game, lived until 1944, and would be the longest-standing insider witness to the team’s history from its inception. (Fred Lieb, the journalist who lived until 1980, did not cover the team until 1911.) Since hotels would often mix up Roth and Ruth when assigning rooms, Mark would sometimes get the luxurious suites saved for Babe; it was said that this led to the practice of traveling secretaries getting suites on a regular basis.

McManus would eventually become an assistant business manager and then the stadium manager when Yankee Stadium opened.

Irwin, it turned out, was a scandal waiting to happen. On July 15, 1921, while managing Hartford, he climbed aboard a steamship headed for Boston. When he went missing on the ship, authorities found the stool from his stateroom on deck and concluded that he had probably committed suicide and jumped overboard. His body was never found.

In sorting out his affairs, it turned out that he had a wife and two daughters in Boston and another wife and son in New York. Managing Hartford must have seemed like the perfect job for him. It was, apparently, all too much.

The new hirings—Sparrow, Roth, and McManus—were an important step in the maturity of the team as a business operation. Offices at 30 East Forty-second Street (telephone Murray Hill 3146) were inherited from Farrell and maintained until 1920 when they moved to the Cohan and Harris Theater Building at 226 West Forty-second Street (Bryant 2300). In 1928 they went to 55 West Forty-second (Pennsylvania 6-9300).

THE REMAINING PIECE of business for Ruppert and Huston was a ballpark of their own. Attention now returned to Manhattan Field, adjacent to the Polo Grounds, also owned by James J. Coogan and also leased by the Giants, who used it as a parking lot. It was still not a great choice because the free view from the top of the hill—Coogan’s Bluff—was a hard thing to accept.

Ban Johnson liked the idea of a ballpark in Long Island City, just across the East River in Queens. The Dodgers waived territorial rights and accepted it. Subways ran there. Yet Johnson was outvoted. Ruppert and Huston felt the Queens site was too removed from the fan base. In July, Houston wrote to Johnson about a site in Forty-second Street, but acknowledged that it would be costly. They made a quick deal with Harry Hempstead to keep the Yanks in the Polo Grounds through 1916 if necessary, and it appeared it surely was. They would keep searching.

THE 1915 TEAM TOOK ITS PINSTRIPES down to Savannah, Georgia, for training camp, and Donovan, going through a messy divorce, was glad to focus his attention on baseball.

As for the five new players he had been promised, Wally Pipp, whom he had managed at Providence, was a nice waiver-price pickup. Pipp had played a dozen games for Detroit in 1913 and then batted .314 at Rochester in 1914 before the Yankees purchased him. At six foot one and 180 pounds, the Chicago native was a big man for his time, and at twenty-two, offered hope for a good long stay at the position.

The others—Bunny High from the Tigers, Walter Rehg from the Red Sox, Elmer Miller from the Cards, and Joe Berger from the White Sox, were onions. Getting five players sounded better than it really was. Nobody was giving away good talent.

The pitching staff would get 73 starts out of its three Rays—Keating, Fisher, and Caldwell. Caldwell, coming off 18 wins in 1914, would win 19 in 1915 and would even deliver consecutive pinch-hit homers. Fisher would go 18–11 with a 2.11 ERA in his sixth Yankee season.

Bob Shawkey, who would go on to become the leading winner (168) in Yankee history by the time he departed, was purchased from the Philadelphia Athletics on June 28. Just twenty-four, he was the kind of prospect the Yankees had been hoping to find for years. The right-hander from Slippery Rock University, usually distinguished by the red sweatshirt he wore under his uniform jersey, had been a 15-game winner for Connie Mack, who
occasionally liked to sell off his players for cash. The Yankees paid $3,500 for Shawkey.

Sometimes, of course, good signings would get away. Take Dazzy Vance. The Yankees bought Vance from Pittsburgh in April, and he was 0–3. They farmed him out for a couple of years, and he returned in 1918 to hurl just two innings. Back to the minors he went, with Brooklyn finally purchasing him as the 1922 season beckoned. He was thirty-one and had yet to win a single game in the major leagues.

Daz would go on to win seven consecutive strikeout titles for Brooklyn and make it all the way to Cooperstown. Nobody on the Yankees saw that one coming.

SADLY, 1915 WAS another well-intentioned season that went nowhere. New ownership, new manager, new players, new hopes—same old results.

The team finished fifth, with one fewer win than the year before. Even worse, despite all the enthusiasm and publicity that went with the changes, the team drew just 256,035—less than four thousand a game. In the remodeled Polo Grounds, capacity thirty-four thousand, one can only imagine what Ruppert and Huston must have been thinking.
“What have we purchased?”
It was said they lost $30,000 in that first year.

There wasn’t a .300 hitter to be found. Only the Giants finishing last (with the same 69 victories as the Yankees) deflected attention away from the lack of progress. It was just a bad year for Manhattan baseball.

As 1916 approached, an important development was taking place in Boston, where star center fielder Tris Speaker was holding out and experiencing a very bad relationship with Red Sox owner Joe Lannin. With no Federal League to use as leverage, Speaker was in no position to bargain, and Lannin was prepared to move him. He was a lifetime .337 hitter for Boston, one of the true talents in the game. For many years, historians would put him in an “all-time outfield” with Ruth and Cobb. His defense was as heralded as his hitting.

Lannin spoke to Huston and Ruppert about him at the American League meetings in February. Rumors made their way to the newspapers. TRIS SPEAKER TO YANKEES IF MAGNATES AGREE TO TERMS, headlined the
Washington Post.

This was the time for Ban Johnson to step in and help make this happen.
After all, he had pledged to the Colonels that he would get them some good players. Here was his moment. This could drive the Yankees to a pennant at last.

Two days before opening day, Speaker wound up traded to Cleveland for Sam Jones, Fred Thomas, and $55,000, the most money ever included in a player deal. The Yankees had been talking about Fritz Maisel and cash, but could certainly have added more. Where was Johnson?

It was complicated. Just a few weeks before, he had helped to find a buyer for the Indians, bailing out his friend Charlie Somers, who had helped bankroll the American League at its start. In finding a buyer—James Dunn—Johnson had apparently made a similar pledge as he had made the year before to Ruppert and Huston: “I’ll get you some players.” Now he used his influence to move Speaker to the Indians, where he continued onward with his Hall of Fame career. Maisel went to center for the Yankees. Unfortunately, the speedy Maisel’s promising career never played out. He broke his collarbone on May 15, and by 1918 he was done.

And Jake Ruppert would remember that Johnson hadn’t come through.

THE YANKS WENT north with Frank “Home Run” Baker, who was no Speaker but still one of the great stars of the American League. Baker, a third baseman with a .321 career average, was celebrated as part of Connie Mack’s “$100,000 infield,” winners of pennants in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914, three of them world championships. Baker hit only 93 career home runs, but he’s the only player so nicknamed in baseball history, partly because of his sense of good timing. He led the league in home runs four times during those years (a high of 12 in 1913), and he hit two big ones in the 1911 World Series against the Giants, one off Christy Mathewson and one off Rube Marquard. He got Marquard again in the first game of the 1913 World Series at the Polo Grounds.

So renowned did those games make him that soon afterward, his monstrous fifty-two-ounce bat was auctioned off for $250 and won by Broadway producer-composer George M. Cohan, a big baseball fan.

After the Athletics lost the 1914 World Series to the Braves, Mack began to sell off his star players. Baker chose to retire, sitting out the 1915 season, playing just Saturday and holiday games with a local team near his Trappe, Maryland, farm.

But in 1916 he decided to return, and working with an agent, a lawyer
named Vernon Bradley, he was sold to New York for $37,500 and signed a three-year, $36,000 deal with the Yankees. The deal was hammered out in Ruppert’s brewery office with Baker, Ruppert, and Mack all present.