Pinstripe Empire (26 page)

Although he was already legendary by the time I arrived in 1968, I am proud of putting him in team photos and suggesting that the home clubhouse be named for him, which came to pass in the remodeled 1976 stadium.

THE 1927 NEW YORK YANKEES.

Even today, the words inspire awe. There may be contenders for the title of “greatest team ever,” and certainly the Yankees’ own squads of 1939, 1961, and 1998 qualify for the discussion, but all baseball success is measured against the ’27 team.

In fact, as early as July that year, sportswriters were already speculating on whether this was the greatest team in baseball history. When they beat the Senators 21–1 on July 4, Washington’s Joe Judge said, “Those fellows not only beat you but they tear your heart out. I wish the season was over.”

They played the whole season with just twenty-five men. Not a single roster change.

So the bench players, who barely seemed needed, should take a bow in the same way that the chorus line goes first after the final curtain at a show. Ladies and gentlemen, a hand for Ray Morehart, Mike Gazella, Cedric Durst, Ben Paschal, Julie Wera, Myles Thomas, Joe Giard, and Walter Beall for being part of the team. And one for a fellow named Don Miller, the greatest gate crasher of all time, who got into the team photo in uniform without ever being part of the team. (He pitched in two exhibition games.) And for the coaches, Art Fletcher and Charley O’Leary, with the presence of Fletcher now freeing Huggins from third-base coaching duties.

There were three catchers: Pat Collins, Johnny Grabowski, and Benny Bengough. Bengough was probably the best of the three, but a sore arm kept him on the bench most of the season as Collins and Grabowski alternated. So one might argue that this great team did lack an all-star-type catcher.
But no matter. They went 110–44, tops in team history. They clinched by Labor Day and finished nineteen games ahead.

Gehrig, Lazzeri, Koenig, Dugan, Meusel, Combs, and Ruth were the rest of the lineup, day after day. And the pitchers—Hoyt, Pennock, Shocker, and Shawkey—were joined by Dutch Ruether, Wilcy Moore, and George Pipgras to round out the roster.

They started the season 6–0 and were in first place wire to wire. They were 57–19 at Yankee Stadium, 53–25 on the road. They won 20 or more games in June, July, and September, 19 in May. They were shut out only one time, by Lefty Grove. They beat the Browns 21 times in 22 games, losing only the final game they played. They were 18–4 against Boston. The team batting average was .307. They led the league in home runs, runs scored (131 more than the runner-up), triples, walks, and slugging percentage. Their pitchers led in ERA, shutouts, fewest hits, and fewest runs.

Ruth led the league in home runs, runs scored, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and walks. Also in salary, signing a three-year, $210,000 contract as spring training beckoned, after first insisting on $100,000 for the year. The grand signing event took place at the Ruppert Brewery offices and orbited Ruth’s income past that of Cobb, Speaker, and even Commissioner Landis.

Gehrig, in his breakout year, led in games played, total bases, extra-base hits, doubles, and RBI. He would win the league’s MVP Award. Combs led in singles, plate appearances, and hits, his 231 a Yankee record that stood for fifty-nine years.

Hoyt tied for wins and led in won-lost percentage; Moore led in ERA and saves.

“You never knew when that batting order was going to push the handle down,” wrote Paul Gallico. “But when it went down, you could hear the explosion all the way to South Albany, and when the smoke cleared away, the poor old opposing pitcher wouldn’t be there anymore. And Yankees would be legging it over the plate with runs, sometimes in single file but more often in bunches or twos and threes as home runs cleared the bases.”

“Just putting on a Yankee uniform gave me a little confidence,” said Koenig. “That club could carry you. You were better than you actually were.”

“The ’27 Yankees were an exceptional team because they met every demand,” said Hoyt. “There wasn’t any requirement that was necessary at any particular moment that they weren’t up to.”

“We never even worried five or six runs behind,” said Ruth. “Ruth-Gehrig-Lazzeri-Combs … wham, wham, and wham!—no matter who was pitching.”

Wrote Richards Vidmar of the
Times
, back in 1927, “As for the Babe and the Buster, they cheer each other’s success as enthusiastically as they enjoy their own. When the Babe hits one for a non-stop flight around the bases, he always finds the Buster waiting with a merry quip and a welcoming hand at the plate. When the Buster hits one with the Babe on base they meet at the last stop and chat gaily as they walk to the dugout arm in arm. It’s the greatest act in baseball.”

OPENING DAY WAS the first regular-season Yankee game ever heard on radio, as Graham McNamee did the game over WEAF and WJZ—the only broadcast until the World Series. Broadcasting opening day would remain a tradition for eleven years.
⁵
Mark Roth helped set up a broadcast location within the press area behind home plate—the “press coop,” it was sometimes called, being behind the wire backstop.

Some seventy-two thousand showed up on opening day, buying up Harry Stevens’s specialties that included ginger ale, sarsaparilla, “charged” mineral water, hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jack. The menu did not include popcorn or, of course, beer.

The Yanks were good and they knew it. After another win, they’d walk down the tunnel toward their clubhouse singing, “Roll out the barrel, we’ll have a barrel of fun.” “The Beer Barrel Polka” was a theme song for them, a song of delight and merriment usually led by Fletcher.

The Yankees of that era came to be known as Murderer’s Row. Not surprisingly, the term had its roots in the Tombs, New York’s notorious prison from the mid-nineteenth century, where those charged with murder were placed all in a row on the second floor.

Ironically, the first use of the term in baseball came in 1918 and was applied to the Yankees in Huggins’s first year as manager. A newspaper article said, “New York fans have come to know a section of the Yankees’ batting
order as ‘murderers’ row.’ It is composed of the first six players in the batting order—[Frank] Gilhooley, Peckinpaugh, Baker, Pratt, Pipp, and Bodie. This sextet has been hammering the offerings of all comers.”

Working from that, the cartoonist Robert Ripley (of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
), portrayed Pratt, Pipp, Bodie, Baker, and Peckinpaugh all in single jail cells, side by side. So the use of the term in the late twenties was actually a revival. And the things that it led to! “Break up the Yankees” was first uttered by sportswriters and fans. “Five o’clock lightning” came to symbolize Yankee victories late in the afternoon. It quickly became the most awe-inspiring team yet assembled.

Charles Lindbergh came to Yankee Stadium on June 17, three days after his ticker-tape parade on Broadway to salute his Atlantic flight to Paris. Five hundred policemen led him to his seat—
five hundred
—where he was greeted by Colonel Ruppert as the fans yelled, “Lindy! Lindy! Lindy!”

Oh, was Yankee Stadium the place to be on a holiday weekend. On July 5, 71,641 packed the place, all there for a doubleheader sweep of the Senators. On another patriotic occasion, the Yankees traveled to West Point to play Army, something they went on to do twenty-one times between 1927 and 1976 (winning them all).

It was almost a miracle that the Yankees added Wilcy Moore to their roster in ’27. What an unlikely hero he was.

A tobacco-chewing dirt farmer from Hollis, Oklahoma, he’d been pitching in the minors for six years. He was twenty-eight, or maybe thirty; no one seemed to know for sure. Even after going 30–4 for Greenville of the Sally League in 1926, he didn’t expect to go to the majors. He was pretty much resigned to throwing his sinker at some other distant locale in ’27.

But Barrow read about his season in the
Sporting News
and then bought a mail-order subscription to the Greenville newspaper to follow him more closely. He bought him for $3,500. If you go 30–4, he figured, you must have something. Who ever heard of a record like that?

Moore did not disappoint. He appeared in 50 games—12 starts, 38 in relief, of which he finished 30. He was 19–7 with a league-leading 2.28 ERA and an additional win in the World Series. And he had 13 saves by today’s measurement. The term was indeed used by John Kieran in the
Times
, who wrote, “He has saved more games than half the pitchers in the league will win this year.” Who was this mystery man who pitched 213 innings?

He never had a year like it again. He pitched only six seasons, including 1931–32 for the Red Sox before returning to New York. He never showed the
brilliance of that rookie season. “Brilliance” was an understatement—he was probably the best pitcher on the 1927 Yankees. This was a time long before relief pitchers were ever thought of as stars. Rarely did they come into a game—starters were expected to stare down the final out no matter how many pitches had been thrown. There was little appreciation of the job that evolved to be a glamorous “closer” position.

Yet people spoke of Moore that year almost with the reverance reserved for Mariano Rivera eighty years later.

And so Moore, at least for that one year, would become the first in a long line of great Yankee relief pitchers, long before teams even thought like that.

The Yankees also gave 26 starts to left-hander Dutch Ruether (13–6) and 21 to rookie George Pipgras (10–3). Ruether, thirty-three, had been around since 1917, and the Yankees were his fifth team. He’d been a star for the 1919 world champion Reds and he’d won 21 for Brooklyn in ’22. He’d won 18 for the ’25 Senators, and had come to the Yanks in the midseason of ’26, starting one of the World Series games against St. Louis.

Pipgras, who was right-handed, had briefly pitched for the Yanks in ’23 and ’24, then went back to the minors and won 22 for Connery’s St. Paul Saints in ’26. Now he was back with the Yankees, on the big stage in a very big year. (After his career, he became an American League umpire.)

With not much of a pennant race to focus on in September, the nation’s attention turned to Babe Ruth’s pursuit of his own home run record of 59. It hadn’t been talked about all summer because he entered September still 17 shy, and no one had ever hit that many in a month. But what a month he had, enjoying, perhaps, his new gift from Ruppert—his own suite on road trips. His roommate days were over. Ruppert thought a suite might keep him in the hotel.

The Yankee team was on its way to 158 homers—more than one a game—a new record. Lou Gehrig came into his own by slugging 47 and driving in 175 runs, and Lazzeri hit 18, third best in the league (including three in one game, the first Yankee to do so in the regular season).

Ruth was sitting on 59 on the next-to-last day of the season, September 30. He came up in the eighth inning to face Washington’s Tom Zachary and hit a liner into the right-field bleachers, about halfway up and close to the foul pole. Most of Ruth’s homers were high arcs, but this one was a solid line drive, estimated at 435 feet.

“The demonstration which followed was the greatest seen in New York in years,” wrote Fred Lieb. “Everyone was on his feet, cheering and yelling …
When Ruth went out to his position in the 8th, it started all over again. This time the rightfield bleacherites welcomed their own and started a new demonstration.”

“Sixty!” Ruth said in the clubhouse. “Let’s see some son of a bitch try to top that one!” He had hit 59, and may have thought he’d hit 61 one day, but there was something nice and round about the number 60, and maybe he knew that was the limit.

The nation, awed by his prowess, felt much the same way. Imagine! Sixty in one season! Few could have imagined that it would be baseball’s magical number for the next thirty-four seasons. Twice players got to 58—Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg—but nobody made it to 60, and certainly not in Ruth’s lifetime.

Zachary, meanwhile, would come to the Yankees in ’28, win a World Series game, and then go 12–0 for them in ’29, the best-ever perfect record in baseball history.

Even at this stage, deep into Ruth’s career, with everyone focusing on the long ball, there were enough champions of “old school” baseball to cast disdain on playing the game “that way.” The publication
Who’s Who in Baseball
, issued by
Baseball
magazine, waited until 1939 before listing home runs among a player’s stats. And that wasn’t the burden of redoing the format; they added other columns along the way, just not home runs.

THE WORLD SERIES was anticlimactic, of course. The opponent was the Pittsburgh Pirates in what would be their last Series appearance until 1960. Legend has it that they were so intimidated watching the Yankees take batting practice in Forbes Field before game one that they mentally lost any hope of winning.

The outcome fit well with the tale. The Yankees took the Series in four straight, with Hoyt and Pipgras winning the first two (Shocker, ill, was unable to do more than pitch batting practice), and then Pennock hurling 7
⅔
perfect innings before yielding a single to Pie Traynor in the eighth, but winning game three 8–1 on a three-hitter. Then Hug handed the ball to Wilcy Moore for the clincher, which he delivered with a 4–3 victory in Yankee Stadium.

The Yanks were not without their defensive gems, a part of their game seldom talked about. In the seventh inning of the third game, Dugan at third made as dazzling a play as most could remember seeing. Wrote Ed
Pollock in the
Philadelphia Bulletin
, “As [Hal Rhyne] choked up on the bat, Dugan leaped into action. It was a perfect bunt. The ball rolled close to the foul line and obviously it would remain in fair territory. At a full gallop, Dugan stopped and snatched the ball. At this point he was flying through the air, horizontally. Without looking and with the continuation of the same motion used in picking up the ball, he fired under his body and then sprawled in the dirt base path. The runner was out by a clear margin.”

The Yanks hit only two homers in the Series, both by Ruth, including a two-run blast in the fifth inning of the finale. For all the power of the Yanks, they actually won the final game in the last of the ninth on a wild pitch by Johnny Miljus, scoring Combs with the winning run while Lazzeri was at bat.