Pinstripe Empire (29 page)

“Tony, all I have read in the papers lately is about how smart you are. I just wanted to see what you’d do with the ball when you didn’t expect it.”

I once had to bring a 1932 team photo into the clubhouse to get Pete Sheehy to identify all the players for me. “That would be the year that Gomez and Ruth showed up late for the picture,” he recalled. “No telling where those two were.” He was right. Babe and Lefty, in the middle of row two, obviously just threw their jerseys over their street clothes and ran out for the photo. Their jerseys clearly hang out over their pants, no visible belts. It appears that the Babe may have taken Lefty under his wing for a late night.

Ruffing, from Granville, Illinois, lost four toes on his left foot in a mining accident when he was fifteen. Had it been his right foot, he almost certainly could never have competed in major league baseball. One might never have guessed he’d become the winningest right-hander in team history (only southpaw Whitey Ford, in 1965, would surpass him) and the winningest World Series pitcher, with seven victories, until that too was broken by Ford.

Ruffing, best known to fans as Red but to insiders as Charley, would later reveal that he pitched most of his career with a sore shoulder. “It hurt so much I’d keep going to doctors. But I wouldn’t tell the ballclub. They’d have traded my tail out of there. So I had to spend my own money. I’d pull into a town, pull down the telephone book and look under chiropractors for a likely looking name.”

Unlike Gomez, he was also a terrific hitter, often called upon by McCarthy to pinch-hit. A converted outfielder, he was a .269 lifetime hitter with
36 home runs, and he batted as high as .364, in 1930, his first year with the club.

When I would be responsible for Old-Timers’ Day, Gomez was always a delight, and he would bring along his wife, Broadway actress June O’Dea. Sometimes known as El Goofy, Gomez remained on the baseball scene in his later years, working for Rawlings sporting goods. Ruffing, on the other hand, would grumpily refuse to come because the invitation did not include travel expenses for wives. This was consistent with his annual salary disputes with the Yankees, including one in 1937 in which he wanted to be paid an extra $1,000 for his good hitting. He wound up sitting home until May.

His last baseball job was as pitching coach for the woeful 1962 Mets under Casey Stengel.

MCCARTHY HEADED FOR ST. PETERSBURG for his first Yankee training camp, accompanied by a new trainer, Earle “Doc” Painter, and a new coach, Jimmy Burke, to replace Charlie O’Leary. Joe would initially coach third himself. Burke had been McCarthy’s minor league manager at Indianapolis when McCarthy was a struggling infielder back in 1911. Joe had four pitching mounds added to the training site so relief pitchers wouldn’t throw off game-like “mounds.” He eliminated lunch from training; only two meals a day.

The Yanks’ new practice field was now known as Miller Huggins Memorial Field.

On the way north to open the season, the Yankees stopped in Chattanooga for an exhibition game with the Lookouts, a Southern Association team, where a local seventeen-year-old girl named Jackie Mitchell struck out Ruth and Gehrig on six pitches in the first inning to earn a place in baseball lore.

McCarthy also had a new infielder, Joe Sewell, the onetime replacement for Ray Chapman in Cleveland and now, moving to third, a fine number-two hitter who hardly ever struck out. Sewell, a University of Alabama product, had been released by the Indians and signed with New York as a free agent. Now thirty-two, he would give the Yanks three seasons at third, make 1,753 plate appearances, and would strike out only 15 times. His ability to put bat on ball was uncanny. In the last nine seasons of his career, he never reached double figures in strikeouts; in ’32, he would strike out only three times in 576 appearances. There has never been a contact hitter quite like Joe Sewell.

McCarthy coaxed 94 wins out of his ’31 Yanks, but it was still not good
enough to unseat the Athletics, and they settled for second place. He got 37 wins from Gomez and Ruffing, with Lefty winning 21 at the age of twenty-two.

Outfielder Ben Chapman stole 61 bases, the first of three years in a row he would lead the league. This was the highest total in the league since 1920, and the most on the Yankees since 1914. Chapman “did more to revive the art of base running than any other individual player in ten years,” noted the
Spalding Guide
.

Gehrig finally tied Ruth for the homer championship with 46 (aided by a six-game homer streak in late August), but lost a homer in April when base-runner “Broadway” Lyn Lary (whose 107 RBI, in 1931 remains a Yankee shortstop record) ran to the dugout instead of heading home. Gehrig, circling the bases, was ruled out for passing him. Still, he hit .341 and drove in 184 runs, an American League RBI record. Along the way, Ruth belted his 600th homer.

Ruppert was pleased. McCarthy let it be known that to him, second place wasn’t good enough.

Attendance was off about a quarter million, reflecting an adjustment to the Great Depression that the whole baseball industry would feel throughout the thirties, as the game did its best to provide affordable entertainment and present an attractive product to cash-strapped fans. The effects were surely felt. National unemployment would reach nearly 25 percent. There were about five thousand apple sellers working New York City streets. In ’33 Yankee attendance would fall under 750,000, and in ’35 under 660,000, an average of just 10,436 per date. (They played fourteen home doubleheaders that year.)

On September 24, the Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers played a doubleheader at the Polo Grounds to aid the city’s unemployed. More than forty-four thousand turned out to see Brooklyn beat the Giants in the first game, a series of relay races, throwing and running and fungo-hitting contests between games (the latter won by Ruth), and then it was Brooklyn vs. the Yankees in the second game, with the Yankees declared the champions and $48,135 raised for the charity.

On October 20, in the northeast corner of dust bowl–ridden Oklahoma, a baby boy was born. His dad, a big fan of the Athletics’ catcher Mickey Cochrane, decided to name his son Mickey Mantle.

BRANCH RICKEY BEGAN the farm system for major league teams to develop prospects more cost-effectively, with the parent team’s oversight. It was
seen by Rickey as better than purchasing players from independent minor league operators. St. Paul had been an accommodating partner for the Yanks in securing players, thanks to their relationship with Connery, but by 1932 Barrow was seeing the merits of Rickey’s innovation. Although not as strong a proponent of the system as Rickey (he loved tryout camps run by Krichell), he saw the game trending that way and went with it.

Ruppert was all for the new system. “We paid $103,000 for Lyn Lary and Jimmie Reese and that deal has taught me a lesson,” he said.

To implement the system, Barrow hired George Weiss, who, while operating New Haven, had survived the train wreck that took Bill Donovan’s life. Weiss had proven himself a tough operator and had even battled Barrow over an exhibition game at his park, for which Babe Ruth failed to show up. It was the only traveling exhibition game Ruth ever missed, and it embarrassed Weiss in front of his customers. He let Barrow know it and withheld the Yankees’ money.

By the 1931 Winter Meetings, Weiss was general manager of the International League’s Baltimore Orioles. Barrow was sitting with Ruppert in the hotel lobby when he spotted Weiss, nudged Ruppert on the shoulder, and said, “That’s our guy.”

Weiss, thirty-seven, born in New Haven and a graduate of Yale, was all business and hardworking. He would spend twenty-eight years with the Yankees, eventually succeeding Barrow as general manager. A tough negotiator, he was no favorite of the players. But he was a tireless employee who hired good scouts and pushed the right buttons.

The Yankees purchased the Newark Bears franchise in 1932 and renamed their ballpark Ruppert Stadium. They added the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland Oaks in 1935 for three years, and the Kansas City Blues of the American Association in 1937, also calling their park Ruppert Stadium.

That original Yankee farm team in Newark featured George Selkirk, Red Rolfe, and Johnny Murphy. Shawkey managed them in 1934, and before the thirties concluded, Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller, and Babe Dahlgren were also maturing there. The Oakland team produced Spud Chandler, Ernie Bonham, and Joe Gordon. Kansas City would deliver Phil Rizzuto, Johnny Lindell, and Johnny Sturm. It was an affirmation of a good farm system taking hold.

By 1932, the Yankees’ farm system also included teams in Springfield, Massachusetts; Binghamton, New York; Cumberland, Maryland; and Erie, Pennsylvania. The system would grow to as large as twenty-four teams after
World War II before settling into a more manageable seven or eight clubs.

The Bears, wearing hand-me-down pinstriped uniforms and playing just a short train ride from Manhattan’s Penn Station, were almost joined at the hip to the parent club. It was easy for Weiss and Barrow to watch players there anytime they felt like it. From 1932 to 1942, the Bears won the International League pennant seven times and are still considered one of the great minor league franchises in history.

“When I lived in Newark,” recalls Yankee fan Irv Welzer, “we would get seven games at Ruppert Stadium for a nickel, all the tickets printed on perforated paper, torn off one at a time. Now that was a
terrific
bargain!”

THE 1932 YANKEES won 107 games and their seventh American League pennant. Only eight players remained from their ’28 World Series team; the rest of the roster was newly crafted by McCarthy and included a shortstop from the San Francisco Seals, Frank Crosetti, twenty-one. He’d been playing there since he was sixteen.

McCarthy knew it was a tall assignment to put a 135-pounder like Cro into a pennant-contending lineup. Just meeting Babe Ruth was a dream come true for him. And when Ruth said to him, “Remember, when you hear me boom ‘my ball!’—get out of the road!” Crosetti answered, “Yes sir, Mr. Babe.”

Crosetti became a master of the “hidden ball trick,” picking runners off second when they thought the pitcher had the ball, something you’d expect to see on a sandlot. Later on, Crosetti passed on the skill to Gene Michael. Crosetti put in a remarkable thirty-seven years with the Yankees, first as a regular, then as Rizzuto’s mentor and backup, and then as the team’s third-base coach. He picked up twenty-three World Series checks, seventeen of them winning shares, for about $143,000 in total earnings. With those checks, he became the symbol of the value of being in the organization and being a good company man.

I knew Crosetti late in his coaching career, and I knew him to be a play-by-the-rules guy. When batting practice began, prior to the gates opening, only the early-arriving concession people would be in the stands. Crosetti was in charge of the ball bag—the supply of BP baseballs. If a ball went into the stands and a concessionaire pocketed it, Cro would jump the fence and run the guy down to get the three-dollar baseball back. No foul balls were
lost before the gates opened. That was the rule. It said a lot about him. He could follow McCarthy’s rules, play his game as best as he could, and yes, he could be the team’s regular shortstop at twenty-one. It would work.

The ’32 Yanks won by thirteen games and were never shut out all season. Ruth, at thirty-seven, showed little sign of slowing down—his 41 home runs may have been off his peak years, but he batted .341 and drove in 137. His weight, 225, was down nineteen pounds from 1928, twenty-six from ’27, and thirty-one from 1925, mostly due to Artie McGovern’s tough three-times-a-week winter workouts. He gave up in-season golf. Gehrig hit .349/34/151 and became the first twentieth-century player—and the only Yankee in history—to hit four home runs in a game. Making the day even more remarkable was that on his final at-bat of the afternoon, Lou hit his longest shot, 450 feet to dead center, but the ball was caught by Al Simmons a few steps from the wall. (Later that year, Gehrig posed with sixty-eight-year-old Bobby Lowe, who first accomplished the feat in 1894.)

Gehrig, so often overshadowed by Ruth, even had this big game overshadowed—by the announcement at the Polo Grounds that John McGraw was retiring as Giants manager.

It was a big year for Gomez, who started 13–1 and finished 24–7. Rookie right-hander Johnny Allen went 17–4, including a ten-game winning streak, to lead the league in winning percentage.

The product of an orphanage, Allen had a terrible, almost frightening temper that McCarthy couldn’t stand, and he was shipped out after just four years. But he was 50–19 as a Yankee, a .725 percentage. Later, when he pitched for Cleveland, his manager Lou Boudreau would say, “He was just plain mean … You never wanted to go near him anytime anything went wrong.”

At home, the Yankees were a remarkable 62–15. This would prove to be a pattern during the McCarthy years. For his run as Yankee manager, he was 704–365 at home, a .659 winning percentage. Between 1936 and 1943, he would be .707. And those were the post–Babe Ruth years.

IN THE NATION’S capital on July 4, the Senators’ Carl Reynolds slid hard into Dickey at home plate. It was bad timing on Reynolds’s part—Dickey had been knocked unconscious on a similar play just the day before in Boston. Dickey, infuriated, flattened Reynolds with a sock to the jaw, breaking it in two places. It was a shocking incident, all the more so because Dickey,
while a strong presence on the field whenever he was out there, was not known to be hot-tempered or excessively emotional. He wound up with a thirty-day suspension and a huge $1,000 fine.

It did give his understudy, Norwegian-born Arndt Jorgens, a rare chance to play. Because of Dickey’s durability, Jorgens was seldom used. In eleven years as a Yankee, he got into just 307 games. He was on five world championship teams without ever appearing in a World Series game, Dickey catching every inning.

THE 1932 WORLD Series, which would turn out to be Babe Ruth’s last, was sweet revenge for McCarthy, who would have been fired by Cubs owner William Wrigley had he not resigned at the end of the 1930 season. It was the only pennant the Yankees won between 1929 and 1935, and almost certainly it kept McCarthy from being fired.