Pinstripe Empire (28 page)

Ruth visited the injured at Lincoln Hospital and gave them signed baseballs.

The death of Mr. Carter fit the general demographic of ballpark attendees at the time. Ms. Price’s death was notable in that seventeen-year-old coeds were not commonly seen at baseball games.

ON SEPTEMBER 15, Waite Hoyt was knocked out early while pitching against Cleveland. Art Fletcher had to remove him from the game because Huggins was in the clubhouse, nursing an infected and painful carbuncle on his cheek.

Hug was sitting next to Doc Woods’s training table with a heat lamp pointed at him.

“What happened to you?” he asked Hoyt.

“Oh, Joe Hauser hit one in the seats with a couple on, so here I am,” he said.

Huggins asked Hoyt how old he was. Hoyt said he’d just turned thirty.

“Tomorrow, go down and get your paycheck. You’re through for the season. You just weren’t in shape. Get in good shape this winter, come down next spring and have the year I know you can have.”

The next day, Huggins was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital. He had erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection, often fatal.

On Wednesday the twenty-fifth, with just six games left in the season, the Yankees were in Fenway Park. They were alerted that back in New York, the end might be near for their manager. Visitors at St. Vincent’s included Ruppert, Barrow, and their old scout and St. Paul owner Bob Connery. The three left for lunch and left behind Hug’s brother and sister-in-law, his sister Myrtle (with whom he lived), the wife of Babe Ruth’s agent, Christy Walsh, a minister, and a surgeon. Hug dropped into a coma and passed away at 3:16 P.M.

Back at Fenway, the Red Sox alerted a groundskeeper to lower the flag to half staff as soon as a call came with the news. The flag was lowered in the third inning, but the game continued and no decision was made on informing the players or the fans. Some players figured it out.

In the fifth, the Yankee players assembled in the dugout and were told the news. There was silence, and then Combs broke down and began to cry.
Someone came into the dugout and approached Ruth for a comment but he was waved off.

Before the sixth inning, the players of both teams were summoned to home plate, where they gathered with the umpires and removed their caps. The Red Sox public-address announcer lifted his megaphone and asked “for a minute of silent prayer in memory of Miller Huggins, manager of the Yankees, who has just died.”

Not everyone could hear the announcement, and the news had to be spread back through the crowd. Finally, there was silence.

They finished the game.

The funeral was held on Friday the twenty-seventh at the Church of the Transfiguration, also known as the Little Church Around the Corner, on East Twenty-ninth Street. The team came up from Washington, where they had played on Thursday, and then returned after the funeral to play Saturday. All Friday games in the majors were canceled.

“I’ll guess I’ll miss him more than anyone,” speculated Gehrig. “Next to my father and mother he was the best friend a boy could have. He told me I was the rawest, most awkward rookie that ever came into baseball. He taught me everything I know.

“He gave me my job. He advised me on salary. He taught me how to invest my money and because of him I have everything anybody could ask for in a material way. There never was a more patient or more pleasant man to work for. You can’t realize that he won’t join us again.”

Ruth, who made Hug’s life miserable but who shared in his triumphs, said, “You know how I feel about it. He was my friend. He was a great guy and I got a kick out of doing things that would help him. I am sorry he couldn’t win the last pennant he tried for. We all will miss him more every day.”

Huggins was just fifty-one. His body was taken to Cincinnati for another service and for burial. In 1932, with his sister doing the unveiling, a monument was dedicated to Hug in center field by the flagpole, as Ruppert and Mayor Jimmy Walker looked on. It was modeled, to a fashion, after a monument at the Polo Grounds erected in 1921 for Eddie Grant, a Giants player who had been killed in the Great War. It would be the first plaque or monument for a Yankee, the start of a special part of Yankee culture.

ART FLETCHER MANAGED THE Yanks for the remaining games of the lost season (the Yanks finished eighteen games out), and then the search was on
for the new manager. One who wanted strong consideration was Ruth. Player-managers were common, and he wanted in. He was thirty-four, a sixteen-year veteran, and thought he’d earned the chance. He’d hit his 500th home run on August 11; it was time to think of his future. But Barrow and Ruppert wouldn’t give it a thought. “He can’t even manage himself” hovered in their conversations. Ruth was not happy.

Barrow’s first choice was Donie Bush, who had managed the Pirates to their 1927 pennant. But Bush was already committed to managing the White Sox.

Next it was Eddie Collins, but he chose to coach for Connie Mack and turned it down.

Next it was Fletcher, who had once managed the Phillies. It hadn’t been a good experience and he said he’d never manage again. Fletch would continue to coach for New York until 1946.

So the fourth choice was the winner, and it was Bob Shawkey, the mild-mannered Yankee veteran who had retired after the ’27 season but came back in ’29 to coach the pitchers.

It was announced on the very same day that Bob Meusel had been sold to Cincinnati, ending his ten-year run in the Yankee outfield.

The Shawkey announcement was a well-received choice, but some felt he was too easygoing to handle the job.

It was a transitional year, to be sure. The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, and though the Ruppert family, fortunately, was not invested in the market, the economics of both the nation and of ticket-buying customers would be severely tested.

Harry Frazee had died in ’29, but perhaps in his memory, on May 6 the Yanks robbed the Red Sox one more time, trading outfielder Cedric Durst for Red Ruffing. Ruffing, only 39–96 lifetime, a man who had lost 47 games in 1928–29, would go on to be a stalwart for fifteen years. Lefty Gomez also made the club as a twenty-one-year-old left-hander and would team with Ruffing for thirteen seasons and 408 victories between them.

Ruth, pouting but still producing, went out and hit three homers in Philadelphia on May 21, the only time he ever hit three in a regular-season game as a Yankee.

On June 2, before playing an exhibition game in Cincinnati against Meusel, Durocher, and the Reds, the Yankees visited Spring Grove Cemetery and placed wreaths at Miller Huggins’s grave.

On July 4, the Yankees dropped a doubleheader in Washington. Fans were starting to realize this season might not be working out. One who actually cried that day was a little baby born in Rocky River, Ohio, named George Michael Steinbrenner III. The future impatient owner was born in the midst of a seven-game losing streak.

Three weeks after the Ruffing deal, they sent Hoyt and Koenig to Detroit and installed Lyn Lary at short. Ben Chapman replaced Dugan at third.

Jimmie Reese, born James Herman (“Hymie”) Soloman, also saw time in the outfield. He would much later in life become a beloved coach with the Angels, and another who loved talking about rooming with Babe Ruth’s suitcase. His signing, and his being Jewish, were hardly noted. (The first Jewish Yankee was a 1905 pitcher named Phil Cooney, born Cohen.)

Much more attention was paid to Detroit’s signing of the Bronx’s Hank Greenberg, who would become the greatest Jewish hitter in history. A first baseman, he saw his path blocked by Lou Gehrig and turned down a Yankee offer for a faster path to the majors.

Couple the player moves with the first year of the Great Depression and the nervousness and uncertainty hovering over the business of baseball, and it was not an easy time for Shawkey to take over.

Still, in a year that the major league batting average was .296, the Yanks batted .309. Ruth, now earning his peak of $80,000 a year, also took the mound for the last game of the season and beat Boston 9–3, pitching a complete game. Ruppert, addressing Babe’s salary, said, “This is financial madness. There is no $80,000 player even with the Babe in the field. There never again will be an $80,000 player.”

The Yanks finished a noncontending third, and Shawkey was out after just one season.

I knew Shawkey late in his life, and I could see why people liked him so much. He was a gentleman. One day I asked him about his brief stint as manager.

“I got screwed,” he said. “They gave Huggins four years before he won his first pennant. They gave McCarthy two. Me, I had one year and they fired me. I would have won in ’31. I would have won all those pennants McCarthy won, and I’d still be going … I might have won all those pennants Stengel won too.”

He meant it. He felt genuinely wronged. It was sad to see the old fellow’s hurt feelings come pouring out as they did that day.

Shawkey would manage Jersey City in ’31, Scranton in ’32 and ’33, and would return to the Yankees organization in 1934 as manager of their top farm team, Newark.

JOE MCCARTHY WAS no fourth choice to succeed Shawkey. He was a highly regarded, pennant-winning manager with the Cubs, and before that with Louisville, where he’d managed Combs.

Warren Brown, the Chicago sports columnist, bumped into Barrow at a prizefight in New York in September of 1930. He shared with Barrow his unpublished knowledge that McCarthy was looking to move on. McCarthy felt that Cubs owner Bill Wrigley wanted to install Rogers Hornsby in the job, and McCarthy wanted to walk before he was fired.

“You’ll never get anyone better than McCarthy,” said Brown to Barrow. Prophetic words.

McCarthy resigned on September 25, just before the season ended. At the World Series, Barrow sent Krichell to talk to Joe; a meeting was arranged at Ruppert’s Fifth Avenue apartment. There, a five-year, $30,000-per-year contract was agreed upon.

Again Babe was passed over without much consideration. Ruth and McCarthy would never have a close relationship. But then again, neither did Ruth and Huggins. And for that matter, neither did Ruth and Gehrig, over some slight involving their wives that occurred after Lou married in 1933. And Mrs. Ruth didn’t speak to Mrs. McCarthy.

McCarthy, forty-four, was a minor league infielder for fifteen years, never once playing in a major league contest. He’d managed for ten years in the minors (including seven at Louisville) before being hired by the Cubs in 1926. He won the National League pennant with them in 1929 and finished second in 1930. Some felt Shawkey deserved another year, but few questioned the selection of McCarthy.

Joe made his home in Tonawanda, outside Buffalo, New York. He had his prejudices, including one against southern players, whom he considered hot-tempered and defiant. “They’re all moonshiners back there,” he told Barrow. “And they’re just naturally against the law. They resent any kind of rules or discipline.”

McCarthy brought a work ethic to the Yankees that had not previously been attempted. The ballpark, he felt, was a place of business. Players were not to arrive unshaven or in sloppy dress. They were provided with three
uniforms so that one would always be dry-cleaned and immaculate. (In keeping with tradition, the players had to pay for their uniforms, approximately $30 a set, which was refunded at the end of the season when they turned them in.)

Furthermore, with Ruppert’s blessing, the team traveled in style. Where most teams used a single Pullman car, with the regulars sleeping on the lowers and the reserves on the uppers, the Yankees reserved two cars, always in the rear so as to be undisturbed, and everyone had a lower berth. The manager, his coaches, and trainer had full compartments. The players appreciated the privacy; in an era before air-conditioning, they would enjoy playing bridge in their underwear as the train journeyed to its next destination.

McCarthy himself would wear a long-sleeved jersey, a style that continued among Yankee managers through Stengel’s early years. The team would wear jackets to the hotel dining halls, even for breakfast, and be seated by 8:30. McCarthy eventually banned card playing. He didn’t want the players thinking about card games or the losses they were suffering when their focus needed to be on the game of the day.

With Gehrig now a mature veteran and Dickey a natural leader and wise beyond his years, the personality of the team began to shift to a more corporate style, rather than the good-time days of the Ruth era. That era wasn’t done by any means—Babe and “Marse Joe” would be together for four seasons. But this was now McCarthy’s team, and his ways were not Ruth’s ways.

CHARLEY “RED” RUFFING and Vernon “Lefty” Gomez were a fine inheritance from Shawkey.

Gomez was more of a craftsman on the mound; Ruffing more of a workhorse.

Lefty, born in Rodeo, California, was purchased from San Francisco in 1929 and assigned to St. Paul in ’30 under Bob Connery’s watch. Just twenty-one, he was very thin, maybe 160 pounds on his six-foot-one frame, but he threw hard. His father was born in Spain and his mother in Ireland, so while not Latin American, he could be called the first Hispanic star of the Yankees. A writer once erroneously reported that he was Mexican, which tended to get picked up many times over the years in biographical sketches of him.

Gomez’s teammates loved him. He had a marvelous, self-deprecating sense of humor and could get away with teasing even the biggest stars on the team. He always credited his outfielders for running down his mistakes, his relief pitchers for saving his wins, and his hitting for being “unappreciated.” He was a terrible hitter, but an example of his humor came when Carl Hubbell struck out Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Al Simmons, and Joe Cronin in order in an All-Star game—then allowed a single to Dickey before fanning Gomez.

“That Dickey,” he’d say. “If he’d only struck out too, my name would have been included among all the great hitters he struck out in a row.”

Then there was the time Gomez threw a double-play grounder to Lazzeri, standing some twenty feet from second base, instead of shortstop Frank Crosetti, who was on the base. “Why me?” asked Lazzeri in a quick mound conference.