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Post by fwclipper51 on May 9, 2024 15:13:35 GMT -5
Yankees Wartime Starter Hank Borowy (1942-1945)
Written by Lyle Spatz, Edited by Clipper
From Babe Ruth in 1920, through Reggie Jackson in 1977, and down to Alex Rodriguez in 2004, when the New York Yankees announce a player transaction, it usually involves a big-name player coming to New York, with large amounts of money going elsewhere. But it was quite the reverse on July 27,1945, when the Yanks had sold Hank Borowy, their best pitcher, to the Chicago Cubs for a sum that turned out to be $97,500. True, Borowy does not rank in the Yankee pantheon with Ruth, Jackson, and Rodriguez, but at the time of the sale he was their best pitcher and by World War II standards, he was a big star.
Yankees Player Photo
Any of the 7 other American League clubs could have had Hank for the $7,500 waiver price, but they had chosen not to claim him. Perhaps they thought the Yankees were not really serious about parting with their ace and would have withdrawn his name had another team claimed him. Nevertheless, Borowy’s sale to the National League-leading Cubs outraged many club owners, particularly Washington’s Clark Griffith, who said of the Yankees: “It’s just one of those things they put over on you.” The Yanks “have been asking waivers on everybody on their ball club trying to get somebody out of the league,” said Griffith, whose Senators were in the thick of the pennant race, trailing the league-leading Detroit Tigers by 3 games.
“I’m going to fight for a return to the old waiver rule which said in effect that you may put a player up for waiver once, but if you put him up a 2nd time he has to go.” Griffith called the 27-year-old Borowy “a real attraction, a great pitcher, and one of the best ball players in the league.” American League President Will Harridge had ruled that the deal was in order, while Yankee President and Co-Team Owner Larry MacPhail dismissed Griffith’s comments saying, “Mr. Griffith’s squawk is nothing more or less than an alibi. As a matter of fact, Mr. Griffith wouldn’t have given up $100,000 for Borowy with the Queen Mary thrown in.”
Henry Ludwig Borowy was born on May 12,1916, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a town situated across the Hudson River, 11 miles west of New York City. Alexander Borowy arrived in America from his native Ostrow, Poland, in 1907; he worked for decades as a hatter. His wife Alberta was also a Polish immigrant. Hendrick, or Henry, was the middle child in a family of 4 boys and 1 girl. Weighing a mere 135 pounds, the scrawny youngster was the star pitcher at Bloomfield High. As a senior in 1935, he established a state record by fanning 27 batters in an extra-inning game while leading his school to the Greater Newark Tournament championship. He was named to the all-New Jersey scholastic team, a team that included 2 other future big leaguers, George Case and Monte Irvin.
As a reward for being voted the town’s most valuable schoolboy player, Hank was able to spend a portion of the summer traveling with the AA Newark Bears, the Yankees’ International League farm team, led by their former Manager and onetime pitching star, Bob Shawkey. The Yankees could have signed Borowy that summer for as little as $5,000, but Shawkey was unimpressed with him and the club never made the offer.
Hank spent the following year at Montclair Academy, while also pitching for the Verona team in New Jersey’s Essex County League, before enrolling at Fordham University. There, under the Rams’ longtime coach, Jack Coffey, he became 1 of the nation’s outstanding collegiate pitchers. In his 3 years at Fordham, Borowy compiled an astonishing 23-1 record, including a no-hitter against Rutgers. The one loss was to Villanova, a game he pitched despite having played 9 innings in the outfield the day before. Following his sophomore year, the Chicago Cubs offered Borowy $7,500 to sign with them, but he refused the offer, hoping to get an even bigger signing bonus later.
During his college years, Borowy did not limit his mound efforts to Fordham alone. In the summers, he pitched surreptitiously under the name Gene Brown for the Brooklyn Bushwicks, 1 of the nation’s strongest semipro teams. The Bushwicks played on Sundays and holidays and in those years just before World War II often had more people at their games than the also-ran Dodgers.
After he graduated in 1939 with a degree in Business Administration, the Yankees came calling. By now, Borowy had grown to 6 feet and 175 pounds and was much sought after by several big-league clubs, including the Dodgers, Red Sox, Giants, Cubs, Athletics and Senators. But Borowy, a bright young man with a good sense of both business and history, had his heart set on the Yankees. Although aware that he could probably get to the big leagues faster by signing with another MLB club, Borowy had grown up idolizing the Yanks and they were his 1st choice. Of greater significance in his decision was the presumption that playing for them would bring him more World Series checks than playing anywhere else.
Yet even though the Yankees were aware of his preference for them, he was still able to negotiate an $8,500 signing bonus for himself. Famed Yankees MLB Scout Paul Krichell had signed Borowy in the Fordham gymnasium. Hank had rejected Krichell’s 1st contract offer, which had him going to their Class-A Binghamton team in the Eastern League, insisting that he was good enough to pitch for the International League team at Newark. The Bears were a Class-AA club, the highest designation at that time and was New York’s top farm club.
Krichell and Borowy had agreed to an $8,000 price, but, so the story goes, before Borowy could sign, Krichell’s pen ran out of ink. While he went to borrow another one, Borowy raised the price $500. Krichell had learned what General Manager Ed Barrow would soon discover-that Borowy was not only a fierce competitor on the mound, but also when it came to negotiating money matters. Often described as cold and unemotional with a burning desire to get to the top, Borowy acknowledged that he planned to make as much money out of baseball as he possibly could. The Yankees agreed to send him to AA Newark that summer, which was close to his home in Bloomfield-so close, in fact, Bloomfield had once been a part of the city of Newark.
In those years, the AA Newark Bears were so strong that many in baseball considered them a better team than some major-league clubs. There were also those who felt that the International League was too high a level of competition for Borowy, or any collegian, at which to begin his professional career. Hank quickly proved the doubters wrong. Making his professional debut on June 11, 1939, he allowed the Toronto Maple Leafs only 4 hits, although he was beaten, 2-0. Pitching in only the 2nd half of the IL season, he had won 9 games and lost 7.
In 1940, his 1st full season, he had a 12-10 record. On October 27th of that year married Katherine Connolly, his high school sweetheart. (The couple would have 3 children.) Borowy was the best pitcher in camp at spring training in 1941. He allowed only 1 run in 17 innings and seemed a sure bet to make the Yankees’ staff. But when the club had left St. Petersburg to barnstorm their way north, Borowy lost his touch and Manager Joe McCarthy sent him back to AA Newark. Borowy had a 1st-rate year for the Bears, going 17-10 with a 2.91 ERA, but his teammate Johnny Lindell did even better. Lindell, The Sporting News‘ Minor League Player of the Year, went 23-4 with a 2.05 ERA as the Bears, under Manager Johnny Neun, won the International League pennant and the Little World Series for the 2nd consecutive season.
The Yankees had expected Lindell to be the only rookie pitcher to make the team in 1942, so they again signed Borowy to a Newark contract. However, he was once more so impressive during training camp that McCarthy decided to bring him to New York. His MLB pitching debut on April 18th, was spectacular: 5 hitless relief innings in a loss to the Red Sox. Five days later, against the A’s, he made his 1st big-league start in a game the Yankees won, though he was not involved in the decision. Borowy got his 1st major-league win on May 5th, with 7 1/3 innings of relief work against Chicago White Sox, during which he allowed only 1 hit and fanned seven. On May 28, he earned his 1st win as a starter, while also earning a spot in the Yankees’ regular rotation.
In all, the 26-year-old Borowy had a marvelous rookie season. He won 10 of his 1st 11 decisions on his way to a 15-4 won-lost record, which gave him the league’s 2nd highest winning percentage (.789). His 2.52 ERA was the league’s 5th best, and only teammate Ernie "Tiny" Bonham, with 6, had more shutouts than Borowy’s 4. On September 2nd, in the 2nd game of a doubleheader against the St. Louis Browns, he came within a questionable scorer’s call of pitching a no-hitter. The play occurred in the 1st inning when Yankees 2nd baseman Joe Gordon mishandled a ball hit by Harlond Clift. Most in the crowd took for granted that any ball the acrobatic Gordon could get his hands on he should have, and so assumed it was an error. The Browns did not get any more hits that afternoon, and because the Yankee Stadium scoreboard in those days did not post hits and errors, the fans believed they were witnessing a no-hitter. They had already run out on the field to congratulate Borowy when the scoreboard posted the totals showing St. Louis with 1 hit. Borowy also thought he had a no-hitter, and was very disappointed to find out after the game that the scorer had awarded Clift, a hit on that 1st-inning play.
America had been an active participant in World War II since December 1941; still, not many players were in the military as yet, so the 1942 AL season was quite different from the 3 wartime seasons that would follow. Led by Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Keller, Bill Dickey, and Joe Gordon, the Yankees ran away with the AL pennant, finishing 9 games ahead of Boston. Facing a young St. Louis Cardinals team, one that had staged a dramatic comeback to win the National League pennant, the New Yorkers were heavy favorites to win another World Series. But after losing the opener to Red Ruffing, the upstart Cardinals swept the next 4 games to give the Yankees their 1st World Series loss since the Cards had upset the Ruth-Gehrig powerhouse of 1926. Borowy started the 4th game and was driven out during St. Louis’s 6-run 4th inning. New York eventually lost the game, 9-6, but because they had rallied to tie the score after Borowy left, the loss went to his replacement, Atley Donald.
Borowy, who always worked out in the offseason to keep himself in condition, spent the winter of 1942-1943 working in a New Jersey defense plant as a Supervisor, a job that had him walking 3 to 4 miles a day. He won 14 and lost 9 in 1943, finishing in the top 10 in the American League in shutouts, strikeouts, and games started. New York romped to another pennant, this time the Yankees had beaten the Cardinals in the World Series, avenging their defeat of the year before. Borowy won Game 3, 6-2, as the Yankees rallied from a 2-1 deficit to score 5 runs in the 8th inning, 3 runs on a bases-loaded triple by Billy Johnson. The crowd of 69,990 at Yankee Stadium set a World Series attendance record, breaking the mark set in Game 4, the year before, a game also started by Borowy. After allowing the 2 runs in the 4th inning, Borowy held the Cardinals to just 1 hit over the next 4 innings. Relief specialist Johnny Murphy pitched the 9th. Hank was pleased that he had avenged his loss to the Cardinals in 1942. “It sure feels good after last year,” he said. “A little revenge.” Making it even sweeter for him was the presence at the Stadium of his brother Bill, on leave from the Navy.
Two months after the Series, in December 1943, Borowy joined a group of major leaguers led by Frankie Frisch and including Stan Musial, Dixie Walker and Danny Litwhiler on a 2-month USO tour that entertained servicemen in Alaska and the Aleutians. Borowy won praise for his work in washing dishes, making beds and preparing breakfast for the troops. But more than anything, the homesick men wanted to hear about baseball and the World Series. Borowy obliged, telling the men that despite his win against the Cards in the Series, he just did not have the stuff he had during the season.
Worthwhile as it was, the trip took its toll. While in the Aleutians, he lost his footing during a windstorm and fell on some rocks, injuring his knee. Overall, the USO tour was physically debilitating. Borowy would report to spring training weighing 160 pounds, 15 pounds below his normal playing weight. Nevertheless, he was the Yanks’ best pitcher during the spring training camp. Manager Joe McCarthy chose him to pitch the season opener against the Red Sox at Fenway Park. He responded with a 5-hit 3-0 shutout, but the Manager was not there to see it. For the 1st time in his 14 seasons as Yankees Manager, McCarthy was not with the club on Opening Day. Coach Art Fletcher managed the team in the opener and for the season’s 1st 2 weeks while McCarthy, suffering with respiratory and gall bladder problems, was recuperating at his home in Buffalo, NY.
After having lost to the St. Louis Browns on August 10th, Hank Borowy had won his final 7 decisions of the 1943 AL season and then followed his triumph in the 1944 opener with 3 more victories. His 11-game winning streak (plus 1 in the World Series, which had extended over 2 seasons, finally came to an end on May 16th in a 10-4 thumping by the White Sox. Manager Joe McCarthy would chose Borowy as the American League’s starting pitcher in that year’s All-Star Game in Pittsburgh. Hank held the National Leaguers scoreless in his 3 innings, but the Nationals pounded his replacements: Boston’s Tex Hughson and Detroit’s Hal Newhouser for 7 runs and a 7-1 victory. Borowy’s 2nd-inning infield single off of Cincinnati’s Bucky Walters drove in Cleveland’s Ken Keltner with the American League’s only run.
The Yankees had stayed in the 1944 AL pennant race all season before fading at the end and finishing 3rd, 6 games behind St. Louis Browns, who won their 1st and only American League pennant. Borowy lost his last 3 decisions, but in those 3 games the Yankees scored a total of 2 runs for him. In his final start of the 1944 AL season, he pitched a 2-hitter against the Browns, but he had lost 1-0 to Nelson Potter.
His record had been 11-4 at the All-Star break, but he’d slumped in the 2nd half and finished with a 17-12 mark. Yet Borowy was clearly the Yankees’ best pitcher. He led the club in wins (17), winning percentage (.586), games (35), games started (30), complete games (19), innings pitched (252 2/3), strikeouts (107), shutouts (3) and ERA (2.64). He was nevertheless dissatisfied with his season, believing that he should have won 25 games rather than just 17. Hank blamed part of the discrepancy in wins on his USO trip to the Aleutians, which he felt took a lot out of him. The pale, slender, frail-looking Borowy also had to constantly battle other physical problems. He had contracted allergies while touring in Oklahoma in the spring of 1941 and the allergies would strike him every May and June after that. Although, he took pills to keep it under control, he felt the allergy attacks had weakened him. He was also subject to recurring blisters on his fingers, which plagued him every summer, especially early in his pitching career. Nevertheless, in 3 full seasons since reaching the majors in 1942, he had won 46 games with only 25 losses.
At Yankees spring training camp at Balder Field in Atlantic City, NJ in 1945, Borowy worked on a new pitch, a knuckleball, but eventually he would abandoned it. He got off to another terrific beginning in 1945, winning his 1st 5 starts, all complete games, but could only split his next 10 decisions. One of the wins came on (June 10th, when he would defeated Dave Ferriss of Boston 3-2, after the rookie Ferriss had won his 1st 8 decisions.)
Due to wartime restrictions on travel, the MLB had canceled the All-Star Game for 1945. Even so, the Associated Press had conducted a poll of managers to see who would have made the team had the game been played, and Borowy was one of the pitchers chosen for the American League squad. So, although he was currently nursing a sore arm (an injury that MacPhail used as part of his rationalization in asking for waivers), Borowy was an All-Star with a solid 10-5 record, factors that made his sale to the Cubs the baseball bombshell of 1945. Columnists and reporters would spend weeks, months- and in some cases, years-trying to make sense of the deal.
MacPhail had a simple explanation. He had been in the park on June 15th, when Borowy had yielded the longest HR of the season at Yankee Stadium to Detroit pitcher Zeb Eaton. It was the 4th of 5 consecutive starts that Borowy had failed to complete. The possessor of an even more mercurial personality than present-day Yankees Owner George Steinbrenner, MacPhail supposedly decided right then that Borowy was finished as a Yankee.
Cubs Player Photo
The co-team owner had claimed that an analysis of Borowy’s record indicated that he lacked the stamina to be a winner in the 2nd half of a season. “I got rid of Borowy, with McCarthy’s approval, because I did not like his record with the New York club,” explained MacPhail. “This year, he had pitched 4 complete games for us after April, none after June 24th. Last season, he won only 5 and lost 8 after July 15th. In short, he has not been, for the Yankees, a pitcher who could be relied on when pitching class was needed most.”
MacPhail went out of his way to emphasize that he had discussed the deal with McCarthy (who was again recuperating in Buffalo after having collapsed) and that McCarthy had given his approval. He said that both he and McCarthy felt that with the return of prewar ace Red Ruffing from military service, Yankees pitching was sufficiently strong, but that other parts of the club needed strengthening. “This deal can be regarded as the 1st step in a general plan worked out by Joe McCarthy and myself to improve the Yankees,” MacPhail said, while suggesting that the Cubs would be sending several players to New York.
But in spite of MacPhail’s claim that McCarthy was in favor of the deal, it now seems apparent it was the loss of Borowy that directly led to the end of Joe McCarthy’s 15-season tenure as Yankees Manager. According to Glenn Stout in Yankees Century, “The manager couldn’t take it. … Throwing away a potential pennant and selling the staff ace in the midst of the race was something he couldn’t understand … McCarthy turned inward. Baseball was everything to him. Even in 1945, wins and losses still mattered. His drinking problem grew worse.” McCarthy soon left the club for 3 weeks and eventually offered to resign. MacPhail held him to his contract for 1946, but that May, he finally had accepted McCarthy’s resignation.
After the 1945 season, MacPhail reiterated his reasons for making the deal. “Borowy had his chance with us and he failed,” he said. Borowy, on the other hand, had reacted with mixed emotions, when his sale to the Cubs was announced. “I hate to leave the Yankees and the American League, where I have spent my major league career,” he said, “but that’s baseball. Of course, in a sense it may be a break for me. I’m going to a club that is leading the pennant fight and I may get into a World Series. I’ll give them my best as I have given it to the Yankees. I hope I can.”
Making the move even more palatable for Borowy was MacPhail’s telling him that the way he was pitching, his $19,000 salary would probably have been reduced to $10,000 in 1946. “Go and beat the Cincinnati Reds a half dozen times and you’ll get another $6,000, making it $25,000 next year.” (The Cubs won a record 21 of 22 from Cincinnati, but could beat the Cardinals, their closest competitors, only 6 times.)
The Cubs did win the 1945 National League pennant, with the acquisition of Borowy no doubt being the major factor. The speculation was that in return one of the Cubs’ legitimate stars, like Andy Pafko, Phil Cavarretta, or Bill Nicholson, would be going to the Yankees after the season. But Chicago would send no players to New York in exchange for Borowy and all the Yankees would ever get from the deal was money, reportedly about $100,000.
MacPhail’s bluster about Borowy’s shortcomings aside, many observers continued to believe that money was the motivating factor behind the deal. In one scenario, he was accused of selling Borowy because he was setting up a new club at Yankee Stadium and needed the $100,000. That may well be; there was not much in the way of chicanery of which MacPhail was not capable. However, many years later, another very plausible explanation surfaced for the Yankees’ seemingly inexplicable sale of Borowy to the Cubs. It was, the theory went, MacPhail’s repayment to Chicago General Manager Jim Gallagher. Four years earlier, Gallagher had sold him future Hall-of-Fame 2nd-baseman Billy Herman, a deal which helped the Dodgers, then run by MacPhail, to win the 1941 National League pennant, their 1st in 21 years.
Borowy, who had a 2-B draft classification, had spent the winter of 1944-1945 working at the Eastern Tool and Manufacturing Company in Bloomfield. The 2-B was reserved for essential workers in war industries, but when Borowy made news by being sold to the Cubs, his local draft board decided to take another look at his status. After their review, they reclassified him as 2-A: “contributing to the war effort, but not actually on the assembly line.”
In late July, the war was very near its end, and the 29-year-old Borowy, married with 1 child at the time, was never called. He made his Cubs debut on the 29th, with a 3-2 win over the Reds before a packed house at Wrigley Field. From that point on, to the end of the season, he was Chicago’s best pitcher. His 11-2 record, combined with his 10-5 Yankees mark, gave him a full-season won-lost record of 21-7. Winning 20 games fulfilled a lifetime ambition of Hank’s, while also making him the 1st pitcher to achieve a 20-win season while pitching in both leagues since Joe McGinnity did it in 1902 with the Orioles and the Giants. Several other pitchers have since accomplished this feat, but only Borowy and Bartolo Colon, pitching for Cleveland and Montreal in 2002, have reached the 20-win plateau by winning at least 10 games in each league. Borowy also led the National League with a 2.13 ERA, giving him an excellent overall 1945 ERA of 2.65 for 254 2/3 innings pitched.
Win number 11 as a Cub was the NL pennant-clincher at Pittsburgh, and as if to refute MacPhail’s claim that he could no longer throw complete games, he completed his 1st 9 starts as a Cub and 11 of the 14, he made for them. He won the only 3 games the Cubs won from the runner-up Cardinals played after he joined them (out of 12 played), twice defeating St. Louis in extra innings. Despite playing less than a half-season with Chicago, the Sporting News chose him as the National League’s outstanding pitcher for 1945, as well as the pitcher on their Major League All-Star team, while the baseball writers placed him 6th in the voting for the league’s Most Valuable Player Award.
The winner of that award was Cubs 1st baseman Phil Cavarretta, who attributed much of the team’s success to their purchase of Borowy. Cavarretta was the National League batting champion and while the team had some other legitimate big-league stars, including Stan Hack at 3rd and Pafko and Nicholson in the outfield, Cavarretta believed Borowy was the key to Chicago’s season: “He won 11 games for us. Three of those were wins over the Cardinals, who we battled for the pennant. If we had not gotten Borowy from the Yankees, which I credit to Charlie Grimm, who was our manager for the 2nd time, we could not have won it.”
Chicago’s opponent in the World Series was the Detroit Tigers, who had edged Washington Senators to win the American League pennant. Detroit opened with Hal Newhouser, on his way to his 2nd consecutive Most Valuable Player Award. Borowy, having been the Cubs’ best pitcher down the stretch, and having beaten the Tigers 11 times in 14 decisions as a Yankee, was the logical choice for the Cubs. The 1st 3 games would be in Detroit, whereupon the teams would move to Chicago for as many games as was necessary.
Game 1 was all Chicago, as they would blast Newhouser for 7 runs in 2 2/3 innings on the way to a 9-0 victory. Borowy allowed just 6 hits in pitching the shutout, though he did walk 5 Tiger batters. The win, coupled with his victory over the Cardinals in 1943, made Borowy only the 2nd pitcher (Jack Coombs was the 1st) to win a World Series game in each league.
Detroit won 2 of the next 3 to tie the Series, setting up a rematch between Borowy and Newhouser for the crucial 5th game. After 5 innings the score was 1-1, but the Tigers reached Hank for 4 straight hits to start the 5th, leading to his departure and an eventual 8-4 Detroit victory. Faced with elimination, the Cubs rallied to win Game 6, 8-7, scoring the winner in the bottom of the 12th inning. Borowy picked up the win with 4 outstanding innings of relief.
Following a day off, both team managers came back with their aces for the 7th and deciding game. Tigers Manager Steve O’Neill‘s choice of Newhouser was the obvious one, but Grimm raised some eyebrows by coming back with Borowy. Like Newhouser, Borowy had started Game 5, but unlike the Tigers’ ace, he had pitched 4 innings in relief in Game 6. Many baseball people felt Borowy was too frail for such a heavy-duty effort, and they proved to be correct. Borowy had nothing in Game Seven. Skeeter Webb, Eddie Mayo, and Doc Cramer, the 1st 3 Detroit batters, all singled and with slugger Hank Greenberg coming up, Grimm replaced Borowy with Paul Derringer. The Tigers eventually scored 5 runs in that 1st inning in winning the game, 9-3 and the 1945 World Series.
Newhouser’s 22 strikeouts in his 3 starts set a new World Series record. With the loss, Borowy now also holds the distinction of being the last Cubs pitcher to lose a World Series game. He also joined 3 other pitchers, all American Leaguers, who were involved in 4 decisions in a single World Series: Bill Dinneen Boston, 1903; Joe Wood, Boston, 1912 and Red Faber, Chicago, 1917. Borowy, the 1st National Leaguer to accomplish the feat, was 2-2, while the others all had 3 wins and a loss. For his heroic efforts down the stretch and his 2 World Series wins, the Cubs voted him a full Series share ($3,930.21).
By the next season, with all the stars having returned from the military, the Cubs reverted to a so-so team, finishing 3rd, but well behind St. Louis and Brooklyn. Borowy also became a so-so pitcher, winning 12 and losing 10, with an unimpressive 3.76 ERA. Perhaps his most memorable win was his 1st, a 13-1 triumph over the Phillies on May 5th. A lifetime .173 hitter, Borowy batted in 4 runs in this game, all the result of 2 7th-inning doubles.
Going into the 1947 NL season, Cubs Manager Grimm still considered Borowy his ace, chose him as his opening-day pitcher against Pittsburgh. In his only other opening-day assignment, as a Yankee in 1944, Borowy had shut out the Red Sox. He pitched just as well this day, but he lost to Rip Sewell, 1-0, on a run driven in by Slugger Hank Greenberg, making his National League debut. Overall, though, his numbers got worse in 1947, an 8-12 mark and a 4.38 ERA, as Grimm started using him more in relief than as a starter. He was just 5-10 in 1948, but on August 31th, he pitched the best game of his MLB pitching career. In the 1st game of a doubleheader against the league-leading Dodgers, he would beat them 3-0, while facing the minimum 27 batters. Only Gene Hermanski, with a 2nd-inning single, reached base for Brooklyn and he was thrown out stealing. The win evened his record at 5-5, but he dropped his final 5 decisions to finish with the 5-10 mark.
On December 14th, the Cubs had traded Borowy and 1st baseman Eddie Waitkus to the Philadelphia Phillies for Pitchers Dutch Leonard and Walter “Monk” Dubiel. The 1949 NL season proved to be a nice comeback year for Borowy. Used strictly as a starter by Phillies Manager Eddie Sawyer, he won 12 and lost 12. And while his former team, the Cubs, slipped into the National League cellar, the Phillies finished 3rd with their 1st winning season in 17 years. But at age 34, Borowy did not fit into Philadelphia’s plans for 1950, so on June 12th, after having used him just 3 times in relief, Sawyer sold him to Pittsburgh Pirates for the $10,000 waiver price.
Borowy was 1-3 for the atrocious 1950 Pirates, when they sold him on August 3rd to Detroit. “We paid considerably more than $10,000 for Borowy,” said Tigers General Manager Billy Evans, “but we figured it was a pretty good gamble. He still has a lot of good pitching left, and we figure he can help us a lot.”
However, Evans was wrong. Borowy would split a pair of decisions the rest of the season and then split 4 more with a 6.95 ERA in 1951. Oddly, both wins came on consecutive days against Boston, on August 4th and 5th. He made his last big-league appearance on September 14th, pitching an inning of relief at Yankee Stadium, scene of his early glory. In November, Detroit released him, ending his 10-year big-league career. Coincidentally, the release came on the same day the Tigers had released Charlie Keller, his former Yankees teammate. Borowy had been an outstanding 67-32 (.677) after his 1st 4 seasons, but he went only 41-50 over the next 6 years to finish with a 108-82 record (.568).
The AAA Buffalo Bisons of the International League signed him for the 1952 season. He won his 1st 3 starts for the Bisons, but then he got shelled regularly, before finishing the season at 10-12. It was his final MLB season as a player, though one in which he did get to do a stint as Manager. He filled the role for several games in May when regular Manager Jack Tighe was stricken with appendicitis.
Five years later, Borowy did get back in uniform for a while and even briefly considered attempting a comeback. In September 1957, the Yankees were short of batting practice pitchers and Manager Casey Stengel asked the club to hire a new one. They had hired the 41-year-old Borowy. When asked if he was about to make a comeback in 1958, he did not dismiss the idea. “I sure would like to be an active pitcher again,” Borowy said. “Who knows? I’ll see how I react and maybe I will be a candidate next spring.” He wasn’t, but he did stay close to the Yankees, though, appearing regularly at their old-timer games.
After leaving baseball, Hank Borowy owned a very successful real estate and insurance business in his hometown of Bloomfield, NJ for 30 years, before retiring to Point Pleasant, New Jersey, a resort town on the Atlantic Ocean. He was living in Brick Township, New Jersey, when he died at age 88 on August 23, 2004. Borowy, who was buried in Bloomfield, was predeceased by his wife Katherine and survived by his son and 2 daughters. In 1970, Hank Borowy was 1 of the 1st 4 men inducted into Fordham University’s Athletic Hall of Fame.
Lyle Spatz was the Author of "Yankees Coming, Yankees Going" The History of Yankees Player Transactions, 1903-1999
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 10, 2024 17:31:59 GMT -5
Yankees 1914 OF/Pitcher Alexander Thomson Burr
Written by Rory Costello, Edited by Clipper
Eight major-leaguers died while serving in World War I. The third of these casualties, Eddie Grant, had the longest playing career and is also well remembered because he received a plaque in center field at the Polo Grounds. The shortest career on this list belonged to Alexander Thomson Burr, a pitcher who played just 1 inning in center field for the New York Yankees on April 21, 1914. The Williams College alumnus played just one professional season and then went into business. After entering the U.S. Army Air Service, he was killed in an airplane accident on October 12, 1918.
Burr was born on November 1, 1893 in Chicago, Illinois. His father, Louis E. Burr, worked for a firm called Kimball Carriage, which moved from Portland, Maine to Chicago in 1877 and turned to producing automobiles. In July 1892, Louis married Emily Thomson. The couple named their firstborn son for Emily’s father, Alexander MacQueen Thomson, who emigrated from Scotland to the U.S. in 1854 and became a coffee and spice merchant. The Burrs had 1 another child, a boy named Kimball. In 1905, Louis left Kimball Carriage (where he had been secretary, treasurer and manager) and became the president of Woods Motor Vehicle Company of Chicago. Electric and hybrid cars have become a hot item in recent years, but Woods Motor produced battery-driven vehicles between 1899 and 1916 and introduced a hybrid in 1915.
The Burrs must have been well to do, for they could afford 2 servants and to send their sons east to prep school and college. Baseball references have shown Burr’s nickname as Alex, but in the course of this research, nearly all contemporary references showed that the young man was known as “Tom” or “Tommy.” He first spent a year at Hotchkiss School, but in the fall of 1911, he transferred to another academy in Connecticut, Choate. He made the football team in 1911, then he would played shortstop and pitched for the baseball team in the spring of 1912.
In November 1913, a nearby newspaper, the Meriden Morning Record, wrote a feature full of praise for “the pride of Choate School,” looking ahead to the prospects for his collegiate career. The article said, “His record for 1912 was one to be proud of, but in 1913 his performances were even more spectacular.” To summarize, as a senior Burr allowed no earned runs and only 32 hits in 11 games, with 185 strikeouts and just 18 walks. The Morning Record added, “He was the biggest man at Choate this year as its leading athlete.”
As former headmaster George St. John recalled in his 1959 memoir, Forty Years at School, Burr also founded St. Andrew’s Society at Choate in 1913. This was a non-denominational religious group; at the time, the school’s chapel was called St. Andrew’s (Burr probably enjoyed the coincidental link to his Scottish grandfather). Its members- who later included Adlai Stevenson and Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr- “contemplated the meaning of such concepts as sincerity, loyalty, and moral behavior.” The society also operated a camp for underprivileged boys from New York, which was staffed by Choate students. It lasted until 1965.
Of extra special interest in the Morning Record article was the endorsement of Hall of Fame Pitcher Ed Walsh. Walsh, then playing with the Chicago White Sox, lived in Meriden during the off-season. His friends there sent him word of Burr. In the summer after he finished at Choate, the prospect got to work out with the White Sox (they took care not to jeopardize his amateur standing). Big Ed Walsh said, “As he was under my personal supervision, I know pretty well what he has and what he can do, and I do not hesitate to say that he is one of the most promising ballplayers I have ever seen. He is a big, strong boy with a fine arm and lots of stuff. He has, I think, as much speed as anyone I have ever seen. Best of all, he is young, a willing worker, and anxious to learn.”
By then Burr was a freshman at Williams; his choice of colleges may well have been influenced by his coach at Choate, Harry Blagbrough, a 1907 grad. His reputation as an athlete also included swimming and golf.
A couple of months later, in January 1914, Sporting Life carried an item saying, “A.T. Burr, a phenomenal schoolboy pitcher, was also signed by the New York Americans. . .Burr is a right-hander, 6 feet 2 inches tall, and weighs 190 pounds.”
In its next issue, Sporting Life followed up with a snippet saying, “‘Doc’ Barrett, trainer of the New Yorks, is sounding the praises of A.T. Burr, the Williams College pitcher he snared for [player-manager Frank] Chance under the very maws of Hughie Jennings and Connie Mack.” In addition to Philadelphia, reportedly the Chicago White Sox and Boston Red Sox were also bidding for the services of Burr, “who, it is said, has never lost a game.”
Only 9 Williams Ephmen have ever played in the majors, and none since 1934. Yet 4 of those 9 made their debut in a span of just 3 years, from 1911 to 1914. It is no coincidence that 3-Burr, George “Iron” Davis, and Paul “Bill” Otis-played for the Highlanders/Yankees. Charles “Doc” Barrett (a.k.a. “Bonesetter”) served double duty as trainer for both Williams and New York, joining the big-league club in 1910. Barrett only ever saw Burr in practice at college, though, as well as a fall series between freshmen and sophomores. The pitcher turned pro before he got into a college game.
It is also likely that Burr, as a Chicago native, fondly remembered Frank Chance from the 1st baseman’s great days with the Cubs several years before. The Providence Evening News wrote, “He turned down offers from at least 3 major league clubs, to play under Chance’s direction.” That report added, “Arthur Irwin [another Yankees scout] says that Burr is one of the best natural pitchers he has ever seen, and predicts a brilliant future for him.”
Burr didn’t rely on his fastball alone. “According to Charlie Barrett, Burr throws a natural curve on account of a bend in his right arm. This bend is not the result of a break, but is simply due to the fact that the young man’s arm chose to grow in a curve rather than in a straight line. The drop, which most pitchers find difficulty in throwing, is easy for Burr. His team-mates have christened him ‘The man with the bowlegged arm.’”
One of Burr’s personal diaries, with entries for February 27 through June 6,1914, remains in existence. On the site that offered the volume for sale, the description noted, “Because he was a literate writer, Burr conveys what it was like to be brought into the Yanks as a highly sought after prospect, moving around with the team, spending time with his teammates, getting scolded by the team’s manager, getting paid for doing nothing, etc. Burr writes a daily log of what he did, saw and thought, including his growing increasingly tired of sitting on the bench, noting teams and scores of various Yankee games, rainouts, eating out with friends and teammates, batting practice, going to plays, who he is dating, killing time by playing cards, gambling, traveling by train and bus, playing at the Polo Grounds, working out, what time he woke up, etc. At the back, he notes daily expenses such as car fare, haircuts, food, cigarettes, etc.”
Before this remarkable document surfaced, however, glimpses of Burr’s time in pro baseball were visible in the newspapers. The Yankees trained in Houston, Texas in the spring of 1914. Burr caught the team train in Memphis after riding down from Chicago. Even though a sprained ankle sidelined him for a while, the newcomer impressed Chance. In a March game, “under Chance’s personal supervision, the Yannigans [rookies] roasted Houston [of the Texas League] to the tune of 9-4, with Burr, [Ray] Caldwell, and [Marty] McHale as chief undertakers.”
In mid-March, the New York Herald reported, “Charlie Barrett. . .in a letter to the club offices here, says that his protégé, Alexander T. Burr, erstwhile Williams college student, will stick. . .Burr is a right hander who works with a free swing and little wasted motion.” This report was also accompanied by a photo of 12 Yankees pitchers in a line, observing that 10 of them were 6-footers.
Later that month, Chance announced that 2 rookies-Burr and Guy Cooper-had indeed made his club. “I will keep Burr around, as I want to look him over more than I have,” said The Peerless Leader. He added, “I think both Burr and Cooper are good prospects. They may need some experience, but I think it would be a good idea to keep them around to see how things go in the big league. I like their style. Both have speed and seem to know more about pitching than the average hurler breaking into the big league.”
W.J. McBeth of The Sporting News was more critical: “Tom Burr, the Williams College offering, is still too green for fast company. He has a lot of natural ability, but too green to know how to use it. He pitches to all batters alike and keeps too close to the center of the plate. Two years from now he should be a wonder, if he behaves and is properly schooled.”
On April 19th, the Yankees played an in-season exhibition game against the AA Newark Indians of the International League. Burr had lost a 4-2 decision. The very next day, Burr’s namesake grandfather died. The day after that, at the Polo Grounds, Burr made his only major-league appearance. The Washington Senators took a 2-0 lead into the 9th inning, but then the Yankees rallied. With 1 out, Jimmy Walsh walked and pinch-hitter Bill Reynolds singled. Center fielder Bill Holden then brought Walsh in with a single, and Chance inserted 2 pinch-runners, including himself -it was the Hall of Famer’s last action as a player in the majors. New York got the tying run in and with all the substitutions he had made, Chance had to bring Burr off the bench to replace Holden in center. (Ed Walsh had noted that Burr could handle himself in the outfield and at bat.) The rookie did not field any chances, and then the Yankees won it in the bottom of the 10th before his turn in the batting order came up. Burr’s diary entry for the day was brief and matter-of-fact. It started by mentioning “Received wire from Dad about grandpa” and did not go into any detail about his game action. It concluded “Movies and bed early.”
In late May, New London (Connecticut) in the Eastern Association had acquired Burr, as he was sent out with an eye toward rejoining the Yankees later in the season. In his diary entry for May 27th, Burr wrote, “Mr. Chance called me into his office and wants me to go to New London for the summer to get some actual experience and lots of work. Told him I would think it over and let him know to-morrow. . .Think I will go all right.”
Shortly thereafter, Burr returned to Choate. It was Commencement Day, and there was an array of festivities, including a student-alumni baseball game. At first, he “stated to friends in town that he did not care to pitch Saturday’s game but would be pleased to watch it. He may be persuaded to don a uniform for a few innings, however, as his many friends at the school and among the alumni will of course wish to watch him in action.” The coaxing worked, as the young pro got on the mound. “Burr toyed with the students, struck out the 1st 9 batters to face him and knocked out a HR for good measure. There was another large crowd of townspeople on hand to watch the sport and especially to see Burr.”
Burr pitched in at least 1 game for New London, winning a 12-inning shutout on June 11th. Despite walking 4 batters and hitting 3 more, he allowed just 3 hits. In early July, however, Planters Manager Gene McCann returned the prospect to New York. The Sporting News wrote, “Tom Burr, ball tosser extraordinary, who broke into Class B Ball with an auto and a bankroll. . .had the goods, but was unable to deliver.” On July 8th, however, he got into a game as a guest at the Hotel Griswold, a summer resort in New London, coming on in relief after the employees’ team had knocked out the guests’ starter.
After that, Burr was assigned to the AA Jersey City Skeeters of the International League. There he appeared in 7 games, going 0-1 while allowing 10 runs in 19 innings pitched. He struck out 9, but he was quite wild, walking 20. When he walked 6 men and hit 1 in 3 innings in the 2nd game of a doubleheader at Toronto, the Toronto World called him “wilder than the proverbial March hare.” The man who relieved him that day was the great Cuban pitcher Adolfo “Dolf” Luque.
A few days later, when Burr had walked another 6 men against the AA Montreal Royals, the Montreal Daily Mail put it in these elaborate words: “The Pests passed out a pair of very mediocre pitchers, in the persons of Messrs. Bruck and Burr. Neither of these gentlemen were able to puzzle the local batsmen, and their extreme generosity in the matter of free tickets to 1st was of very great assistance to the local cause.”
Information is lacking on Burr’s choice to quit pro ball after 1914. Accounts also differ as to whether he returned to Williams. A Chicago Historical Society publication reported that he was a student there at the time of his enlistment in 1917, but the Williams yearbook for 1915 lists him among “sometime members” of the Class of 1917. In addition, the College’s obituary record for 1918-1919 stated that he entered business in Chicago after his brief experience as a ballplayer. His draft registration also showed that he was working for the American Radiator Company, a forerunner of the well-known plumbing and fixtures company American Standard. His passport application called him a salesman.
Burr entered the First Officers’ Training Corps at Fort Sheridan, on the shore of Lake Michigan near Chicago, but he was discharged after a severe attack of double pneumonia. He tried for the 2nd camp but was rejected because of his age. Nonetheless, he was determined to serve.
Burr’s passport application shows that he was slated to join the American Field Service, one of the units of “gentlemen volunteers” who drove ambulances. The AFS recruited heavily on college campuses, including Williams. Many of the young men had to learn to drive first, but given his father’s background in the auto industry, Burr was prepared already. “Privately financed, he went to France as a truck driver, but finding that older men were doing this work, he felt that it would be unpatriotic to continue and enlisted at once with the American aviation corps.”
The U.S. Army Ambulance Service absorbed the AFS on August 30, 1917. There was already a strong connection between the AFS and both the French and U.S. Air Service. The latter, forerunner of the U.S. Air Force, was then an army unit. Burr was a member of the 31st Aero Squadron. He went first to the American flying school at Issoudun in central France (where “Ace of Aces” Eddie Rickenbacker was the engineering officer). “It is said that he went through his course without bending a wire or breaking an axle.”
Gill Robb Wilson, who later founded the Civil Air Patrol, remembered Burr in his memoir. They and several other pilot cronies “developed a routine of frequently inviting one or the other of our French instructors for dinner at a farmhouse near the tiny French hamlet of Vouvray. The old couple who lived there would roast a half-dozen chickens, fry up a mess of potatoes and come up with truly vintage ‘Vouvray, ’84.’”
Burr also still did a little pitching overseas. In a rundown of military games in 1918, the 1919 edition of Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide showed that on June 23rd, he had struck out 21 batters for the Aviation Instruction Center team, which handed another post team, St. Pierre de Corps, its 1st defeat.
After completing his acrobatic training at Issoudun, Burr was ordered back to Tours to serve as instructor in preliminary training. From there he became a member of the staff of instructors at Issoudun. He passed his examination for the rank of 1st lieutenant and was on his way to the front. Before that, however, he made a brief but fateful stop. From Issoudun, many new pilots went to Cazaux, in the southwestern part of the country, near Bordeaux. There, amid the pine-covered wastelands of the Landes de Bussac, was a gunnery school called École de Tir Aérien, which supplied additional training to the flyboys in their Nieuport biplanes. Targets were towed across Lac de Cazaux, a 21-square-mile local lake.
Colonel Edgar S. Gorrell’s History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service, 1917-1919 noted, “Several fatal accidents marred the work at Cazaux. . .the school was famous for its many narrow escapes.” The next page revealed how Burr’s life was cut short at the age of 24, just 30 days before the armistice that ended World War I. “On October 12,1918, occurred the worst accident in the life of the school at Cazaux, when pilots Burr and Kennedy collided at an altitude of 4500 feet, while shooting on the sleeve target and fell into Cazaux Lake at its deepest part, each with 1 wing fluttering down after. One fuselage was discovered, and 12 days later the body of Lieut. Burr came to the surface, but neither the machine nor the body of Lieut. Kennedy could be found, although every possible effort was made to locate it, from the air, in boats and by diving.”
George St. John wrote, “When I had to tell Tom’s brother Kim, Kim said, ‘I won’t believe it. That kind of thing doesn’t happen to Tom!’” A letter from one of his comrades echoed the feeling. “At the field, we just can’t believe it. We know it was absolutely unavoidable because Tom was a perfectly wonderful flyer. His skill was the marvel of every man who saw him in the air.”
The Chicago Tribune article describing the accident was published before Burr’s body was discovered. Various baseball reference sites focused on this article, and as a result, the idea persisted that he was never found. In fact, another report in the Tribune the following March described how the Red Cross responded to the pleas of Louis and Emily Burr, locating and decorating their son’s gravesite. This article did not specify the location-but it was almost certainly a spot called Le Natus, between the town of Arcachon and Lac de Cazaux. Two small cemeteries were established there during the war. One held 940 men from Senegal, as well as 12 Russians. The other, American Expeditionary Forces Cemetery No. 29, was for Americans stationed at Cazaux who had died of the Spanish flu or in training exercises. The forested location tallies with the photo accompanying the March 1919 article.
During the years after the end of World War I, the American cemetery was deconsecrated. Some of the bodies exhumed including Burr’s were repatriated, while the rest were re-interred at the American military cemetery of Suresnes, outside of Paris. Tom Burr’s final resting place became Rosehill Cemetery and Mausoleum in Chicago. A marker at the Nécropole Nationale de la Teste de Buch also still commemorates the 87 Americans who gave their lives at Cazaux during The Great War.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 11, 2024 17:19:43 GMT -5
Former Yankees MLB Scout Gene McCann (1927-1943)
This article was written by Jim Sandoval, Edited by Clipper
 Perhaps the least known member of the high-powered scouting department that built the Yankees dynasty, Gene McCann served baseball as a minor- and major-league pitcher, manager, general manager/president of minor-league clubs, owner, and scout. He even was pressed into service as an umpire in a professional game. Gene twice won 20 games as a pitcher in the minor leagues but he could not repeat that success at the major-league level. He was known as a natty dresser, especially famous for always wearing a white tie, hard collar, and “iron” hat.
Henry Eugene McCann was born on June 13, 1875, in Baltimore, Maryland. His parents were Charles William McCann, an immigrant from Ireland and Mary McCann. He had 3 siblings, a brother Charles Andrew, and sisters Elizabeth and Gulema.
He had briefly pitched for the Spring Hill College team before accepting wages with a Hanover Tigers, a semiprofessional team at Hanover, Pennsylvania, in 1895. Moving on to Organized Baseball, McCann pitched on pennant-winning teams for 2 of his 3 seasons with Hamilton of the Canadian League before moving on to Detroit Tigers of the Western League for the last part of the 1899 season. In 1900, he would pitch for the Minneapolis Millers club.
On April 19, 1901, McCann made his major-league debut, pitching for the Brooklyn Superbas (aka Dodgers) against Happy Townsend and the Philadelphia Phillies in a game that the Superbas won, 10-2. He had 2 wins and 3 losses with a 3.44 ERA for Brooklyn in 6 games that season. He also pitched for the Hartford Indians club in the Eastern League that year. In 1902, McCann would pitched for Jersey City Skeeters in the Eastern League, winning 21 games against 12 losses. He also pitched in 3 games for Brooklyn with 1-win and 2 losses. He then spent 1903-1906 seasons with Jersey City, winning 26 games in 1903. McCann suffered an arm injury that cut his playing career short, but he soon would returned to professional baseball in other roles. His final MLB pitching record was 3-5 with a 2.95 ERA in 9 games.
McCann would manage Jersey City Skeeters (International League) in 1908-1909. He also began his MLB scouting career in 1909, serving as a part-time scout for the Yankees along with his managerial duties. He was Manager and an owner of the Bridgeport club from 1910 through 1913, tangling in the last year with the team president and resigning late in the season. He moved on to manage New London in 1914, 1916, and 1917 and returned to Bridgeport to manage from 1921 through 1923. He would end his managerial career at the helm of the Springfield club from 1924 through 1926.
In 1919 and 1920, McCann would become a MLB scout full-time for the Cincinnati Reds. He also served as a MLB coach for the Reds during spring training camp in 1919, helping prepare Cincinnati for its run to the world championship. Late in the season, he had recommended that the Reds acquire the contract of outfielder Pat Duncan from the Birmingham club of the Southern Association. The Reds had a left-field problem that season, beginning with starter Sherry Magee contracting pneumonia and his replacement, Manuel Cueto, injuring a shoulder. The Reds even put a good-hitting pitcher, Rube Bressler, in the slot until Duncan was acquired to solidify the position. Duncan went on to start in left field as the Reds won the tainted Black Sox-scandal 1919 World Series.
In 1927, Gene McCann would begin scouting for the New York Yankees, covering the Eastern region, while also serving as an Executive for their minor-league clubs. He remained in these roles until his death in 1943. At that time, he was listed as the President of Yankees farm clubs in Binghamton and Norfolk. At one point, he was President of 3 Yankees minor-league affiliates. It appeared he was serving as a sort of Farm Director along with his scouting duties.
Gene McCann died on April 26,1943 at the age of 67, in Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, after a long illness. He is buried in St. John’s Cemetery, Middle Village, New York. His wife, Irene, survived him. They had no children. McCann is credited with signing Al Gettel, Eddie Grant, Charlie Keller, George McQuinn, Bud Metheny, Jim Prendergast, Vic Raschi, Buddy Rosar, Hank Sauer and Charlie See for the Yankees and the Reds.
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Post by jiminy on May 12, 2024 9:36:11 GMT -5
New York Post | Ryan Morik: Years ago, Paul O’Neill appeared on an episode of Seinfeld, “The Wink” from season seven. It turns out, Paulie is still receiving residuals from his appearance. It’s not a huge amount of money but, as O’Neill noted, it’s a nice reminder that he appeared on the show. And as Michael Kay quipped to him, it’s at least enough money for a nice glass of wine in a good restaurant.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 12, 2024 12:17:31 GMT -5
New York Yankees Executive and MLB Scout Arthur Irwin 1908-1914
This article was written by Eric Frost, Edited by Clipper
Even for serious fans of early baseball, it can be difficult to know what to make of Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame member Arthur “Foxy” Irwin. On one hand, Irwin popularized the baseball glove, inspired a character in a Zane Grey novel, and served as a team captain, player-manager, manager, scout and minor-league team owner during a career that lasted more than 40 years. On the other hand, few early baseball figures were as polarizing.
In The National Game (1910), Al Spink wrote that there was “no speedier or brainier fielder and batsman” in the 1880s and he said that Irwin was the best scout employed by the New York Highlanders. Referencing Irwin’s time as a manager, writer Roy Kerr described him as “a skinny, bug-eyed Canadian with large, protruding ears and a healthy ego. He was an impeccable dresser, and fancied himself to be a savant in the art of ‘scientific baseball.’” Daniel Levitt has characterized Irwin as “one of the slimier men in baseball,” and pitcher Waite Hoyt said that he was “probably the most disgusting man [he] ever knew.”
Curiously, however, after it was reported in July 1921 that Irwin jumped off a passenger steamer to his death in the Atlantic Ocean, the discussion was not about differing opinions of Irwin’s character. Instead, people argued over the basic facts. One man said that Irwin was still alive, others suspected murder and complete strangers, each claimed to be his wife.
Arthur Albert Irwin was born in Toronto on Saint Valentine’s Day of 1858. His father, who was born in Ireland in 1833 and who was also named Arthur, worked as a blacksmith. His mother, Elizabeth, was a homemaker; census records inconsistently describe her as a native of Ireland or Canada. By 1870, the younger Arthur had 6 siblings, all but one being younger than him.
The Irwin family moved to Boston when Arthur was 6. He grew up playing sandlot baseball in South Boston, where his friends included future major-leaguer Tommy McCarthy. Beginning in 1873 with the Aetna Club of Boston, Irwin spent several seasons as a shortstop in amateur baseball.
On June 2, 1879, Irwin made his professional baseball debut with the Worcester Worcesters of the minor-league National Association in an exhibition against the Chicago White Stockings. Worcester pitcher Lee Richmond also debuted that day, throwing a no-hitter in a rain-shortened 7-inning game. Irwin played 3rd base for that 1st game before he was moved to shortstop and he made 2 stellar plays that day.
Boosted by a 47-win season from Richmond, who also hit .369, the Worcester club played well enough to move into the National League for the 1880 season. This meant that Irwin and the other players received major-league promotions without changing teams. A highlight that year came on June 12th, when Richmond pitched the 1st major-league perfect game and Irwin scored the game’s only run. In 85 games, Irwin would register a league-leading 345 assists.
Irwin missed much of the 1881 season owing to an early-season illness and a broken leg later in the year. The leg injury occurred while Irwin was running the bases, and local sports equipment salesman Martin “Flip” Flaherty was inserted into the game in his only major-league appearance.
The Worcester club would fold after an 18-66 season in 1882. Irwin moved on to the NL’s Providence Grays as a team captain. Gloves were only worn by catchers and 1st basemen at that time, but Irwin needed to play with two broken fingers one day in 1883. He fashioned a padded buckskin driving glove into a mitt and wore the glove even after his fingers healed. Monte Ward also started wearing the glove, and it was standard throughout the league by 1884. Sporting goods company Draper & Maynard produced a model based on “the Irwin glove” and they said that 90% of major leaguers wore its brand by the 1920s.
The 1884 Grays won the precursor to the modern World Series – a best-of-3 series against the AA champion New York Metropolitans. In 1885, the Grays folded after a 4th-place finish and Irwin was looking for a team again. He had not displayed his characteristic speed and defensive range since the 1881 leg injury. The introduction of overhand pitching in 1884 provided another challenge; already light-hitting, Irwin batted under .240 after that point in his career.
In 1886, Irwin had signed with Philadelphia of the NL. For the next 3 years, Irwin played at least 100 games per year. He posted mediocre offensive numbers in Philadelphia, but he led NL shortstops in 1888 with a career-high 204 putouts.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on May 27,1889, that the Phillies had been benching Irwin. He briefly returned to the field after an injury to Ed Delahanty, but his relationship with the team was irreparable after the initial benching. He was sold to the Washington Senators for $3,000 on June 8th and became a team captain. Within a month of Irwin’s arrival in Washington, he was named Player-Manager. It was Irwin’s 1st MLB managerial opportunity. He was the team’s 5th manager in only 3 years. His predecessor had started the season with a 13-38 record and Irwin fared marginally better, finishing 28-45 as Manager for the last-place team.
By this time, many players resented their controlling NL team owners and Irwin was becoming known as a key man in the players union called the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. He helped to organize the Players’ League. He had purchased 12 shares of stock in the league’s Boston club. Irwin had appeared in 96 games for the 1890 Boston Reds. The team won the PL championship, but that league folded, the Boston Reds would join the AA with Irwin as Manager for 1891 season.
More than a year removed from playing in the NL, Irwin got on the bad sides of NL owners. In an era of competition among baseball leagues, a document known as the National Agreement of 1883 restricted how major-league and minor-league teams could pursue players from other leagues. Before the 1891 season, AA teams began disregarding the agreement in the pursuit of NL players. NL Team Executives believed that Irwin had encouraged AA teams to break the agreement. If that wasn’t enough to spark resentment, NL owners also felt that Irwin had convinced Cincinnati Reds Owner Al Johnson to move his team from the NL to the AA. Though Johnson sold the team before the 1891 season had started and the club returned to the NL without having played in the AA, Irwin’s reputation was damaged in baseball’s most powerful league.
Irwin also struggled for the approval of Reds players. In the middle of 1891, when Reds infielder Hardy Richardson was injured and Paul Radford would not play on Sundays, Irwin signed his younger brother, John Irwin, despite John’s known fielding struggles. Teammates and local writers cried nepotism, but John struggled through 19 games over several weeks before the elder Irwin relented and dropped him from the team. Irwin could focus on managing, as he played in only 6 games, and the 1891 Boston Reds won the AA.
That fall, Irwin made headlines after alleging game fixing in the NL pennant race. Irwin said that Cap Anson of the Chicago Colts had agreed to play Irwin’s Reds in an AA-NL championship series, if the teams won their leagues, but he said that the Giants had agreed to throw a late-season series to the Boston Beaneaters so that Boston could beat Chicago to the pennant. Irwin accused Buck Ewing of giving away the Giants’ signs. No one on either team commented on Irwin’s allegations. Once the Beaneaters and Reds won their leagues, Beaneaters manager Frank Selee refused to play a postseason series against the Reds.
In 1892, Irwin returned to Washington to manage the Senators, when Billy Barnie had a disagreement with team owners after the 2nd game of the season. The NL was using a split-season format to determine who would make the league championship. Washington was 35-41 in the first half, earning seventh place, but fans disliked Irwin. When the team started poorly in the second half, he was fired.
Irwin began managing the Philadelphia Phillies in 1894. He had not played in the major leagues since 1891; he played in 1 game for the 1894 Phillies, his last major league playing appearance. He had big shoes to fill as a Manager; baseball pioneer Harry Wright had just managed there for 10 seasons. Wright had been successful with other teams, but his contract was not renewed in Philadelphia because he had not secured any 1st-place finishes. The team had led the league in hitting for in 1893 and again under Irwin in 1894 and 1895. The 1895 team brought in 474,971 fans, a 19th century single-season record.
Despite that apparent success, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September 1895 that Irwin was thinking about leaving. The Inquirer called Irwin “the clearest sighted and coolest headed manager in the business to-day.” In early October, Irwin said he would not return to Philadelphia. He was trying to purchase the Toronto club in the Eastern League.
Irwin had a 149-110 record with the Phillies, but he had irked their personnel and their fans. He meddled in the team’s uniform decisions, resulting in unpopular red and black bars being placed on their leggings. Team Owner John Rogers criticized his lax handling of players, but even the players disliked Irwin, especially in comparison to his predecessor. On the field, Irwin introduced intricate strategy, but these tactics often confused his players.
Irwin had also served as the University of Pennsylvania Baseball Coach from 1893 to 1895. There Irwin coached future author Zane Grey. Grey’s 1st baseball book, "The Short-Stop" (1914), is dedicated in part to Irwin; his 2nd baseball book, "The Young Pitcher," included a character known as Worry Arthurs, a fictionalized version of Irwin.
In the mid-1890s, Irwin became very active outside of baseball. He invented a miniature football scoreboard to reproduce games in faraway cities and he started the short-lived American League of Professional Football, the country’s 1st professional soccer league. He promoted boxing matches and organized roller hockey games and marathon bike races.
Soon after leaving the Phillies, Irwin would become Manager of the New York Giants for 1896, working out a clause with Team Owner Andrew Freedman to ensure that Irwin had complete control of the team. Early on, Irwin showed aptitude for identifying talent, but he may have had less authority than promised. He had scouted future star Nap Lajoie in the minor leagues and he attempted to convince Freedman to pay $1,000 for Lajoie and another player: but Freedman refused.
Irwin created a farm team in Jersey City and he did have enough authority to name his brother John the Manager of those prospects. Irwin created a book of hand signs for his players to study on their own time. He was fired after a 36-53 start, a record that looks worse when compared to the team’s 28-14 finish under his successor, Bill Joyce.
In 1897, Irwin became part-owner of the Toronto club in the Eastern League. During an 1898 dispute with the league’s players over the length of the season and the players’ compensation, Irwin was criticized by The Buffalo Enquirer for assuming “a know-it-all air which oftentimes gives his friends a very severe pain in the neck.”
In 1898, Irwin raised some suspicions by trading away several Toronto players to the Washington Senators before being announced as Washington’s Manager the next year. Irwin and Toronto’s co-owners hired future major-league executive Ed Barrow to manage that team for the 1900 season. After leaving Washington in 1900, Irwin never coached or managed in the major leagues again. He would retained partial ownership in Toronto for at least a few more years.
When the American League was being organized in January 1901, Ban Johnson and Connie Mack sought an AL site in Boston. Irwin owned a potential site known as Charles River Park. Mack visited Irwin’s home to discuss the use of the park. Irwin, who was sick with the flu, hesitated to lease the park to the AL. At the time, the AA was trying to revive itself as a major league and Irwin tentatively controlled the Boston AA team. Irwin said he might lease the park in exchange for a stake in the Boston AL club, but he hesitated to commit to anything. Mack tired of Irwin’s indecisiveness and approached Hugh Duffy, who suggested land off Huntington Avenue that could house a baseball park. The AL signed a lease at the Huntington Avenue Grounds on January 16th. The NL and the Players’ Protective Association reached an agreement a month later that refused to recognize the AA as a major league.
In 1902, Irwin would return as the Penn Baseball Coach and then had a short stint in the NL as an umpire. From 1903 to 1907, he was a minor-league manager for teams in Toronto, Rochester, Kansas City and Altoona. He signed on as manager for the Washington club in the short-lived Union Professional League in 1908. Reports as early as that year refer to Irwin as a New York Highlanders scout. He was described as the team’s “chief scout” by 1909. He attempted to use binoculars to steal signs from New York’s opponents that year, but it did not take long for the opposition to stop the behavior by bringing it to the attention of the league. As an MLB scout, Irwin was persistent. For example, in 1910, he heard about young minor-league pitcher Ray Caldwell in Pennsylvania. Arriving the day after Caldwell had pitched, Irwin stayed until Caldwell’s next appearance. Caldwell was knocked out of that game early, but Irwin liked Caldwell’s mechanics and followed the team for a few more days. Caldwell then threw a 14-inning shutout and Irwin signed him that day. The pitcher won 134 major-league games in 12 MLB seasons, though his potential was somewhat stymied by a drinking problem.
A 1912 Harper’s Weekly piece called Irwin “the dean of scouts.” After that season, the Highlanders made Irwin Business Manager. The next year, columnist Sam Crane wrote that Irwin was a good judge of talent, hampered only by managers who mishandled that talent. Highlanders Manager Frank Chance disagreed; he resigned in 1914 after 2 seasons and said Irwin had failed to find him any quality players. President Johnson seemed to side with Irwin, calling the manager “the biggest individual failure in the history of the American League… Chance failed to develop even one man of class.” Irwin certainly thought outside the box in New York, establishing a spring training site on a cricket field in Bermuda in 1913. Irwin resigned, when the team was sold after the 1914 season. He became Part-Owner and Manager of the minor-league Lewiston Eagles in 1915. Three years later, he began a 3-year stint managing the International League’s Rochester Hustlers. In 1921, he would manage the Hartford Senators of the Eastern League. He would caused Lou Gehrig to lose a year of collegiate eligibility after convincing the Columbia University star to play some games with Hartford.
Irwin had gained a lot of weight after his playing days, but in 1921, he had digestive problems and had dropped 60 pounds in 2 weeks. The illness had forced him to stop coaching. He was hospitalized with stomach cancer that June. The next month, he boarded a steamer from New York to Boston. He told other passengers that he was going home to Boston to die, but he never made it there, and he is thought to have jumped overboard on July 16th.
Things had gotten complicated when Irwin’s son Harold visited him in the hospital and learned of an unknown brother, Herbert, who had also visited. It turned out that Irwin had married Elizabeth in Boston in 1883 and they had Herbert and 2 other children. While coaching at Penn in the 1890s, Irwin had met May. They moved to New York, lived as husband and wife and had a son named Harold.
It would be an exaggeration to say that Irwin lived an intricate double life. Rather than rushing between 2 families in separate cities, Irwin spent almost all his free time and money on May and Harold, visiting Boston so infrequently that no one in New York suspected another relationship. When he visited Boston, he often misspoke, referring to Herbert as Harold. Elizabeth’s family had long suspected that Irwin had another woman. Shortly before his death, Irwin had sent Elizabeth $500 in revenues from his scoreboard enterprise, enclosing a note saying, “God bless you all.” Irwin indicated that he could not send more money because his bills had been very costly, but the destitute Elizabeth had been surprised even by the money he did send. Finances aside, Elizabeth said she was happy to know that Irwin had been en route to Boston to be with her in the end
Elizabeth was accepting of suicide as her husband’s cause of death, but the circumstances still inspired conspiracy theories. Some people wondered the possibility of murder and 1 player said that he saw Irwin in Oklahoma, after he was said to have died. Irwin was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 12, 2024 13:28:13 GMT -5
Former Yankees Team 1st President Joseph Gordon (1903-1906)
 Joe Gordon was the 1st Yankees Team President serving from 1903 to 1906. AL President Ban Johnson was sought out by Joseph Gordon, a coal merchant with some history in New York baseball. Gordon had just lost his job as Deputy Superintendent of Buildings and was well plugged into New York City real estate. Gordon claimed he knew of an available site. In return he wanted the franchise. Johnson, though he needed the site, recognized that Gordon didn’t have the wealth to build and run a franchise in Gotham and insisted on “seeing the man with the money.” Gordon introduced him to Frank Farrell, still excited about owning a baseball team and also feeling betrayed by McGraw, though Farrell and Johnson had conceivably met previously through influential New York Sun sportswriter Joe Vila. Farrell purportedly showed up with a certified check for $25,000. When he proved amenable to paying both $18,000 to cover salaries advanced to players by the league and some nominal reimbursements to Baltimore’s minority stockholders, and willing to spend the funds necessary to build a ball grounds and assemble a team, Johnson awarded Farrell the franchise. Farrell also assured him he didn’t have to bring in any partners: “I didn’t propose to let anybody carve me if I went into this thing.” The AL president, who prided himself on being squeaky clean, had little choice but to accept a well-connected Tammanyite of his own. To front for the franchise, Farrell and Johnson allowed Gordon, generally unconnected to Tammany Hall, to act as Team President.
New York Yankees Team Owners; A-Frank Farrell B-Bill Devery
On March 14, 1903, the Greater New York Baseball Association was incorporated to operate New York’s American League baseball franchise. Gordon was clearly the face of the new team, and several days later he publicly announced the stockholders, who included Farrell. The AL Baltimore Orioles franchise ceased to exist. Despite Farrell’s earlier protestations, he brought in his longtime friend Big Bill Devery as a partner. Devery was a shady ex-Police Chief with his own Tammany connections, who had escaped conviction despite a couple of indictments. Devery had walked the beat of one of Farrell’s 1st gambling parlors and the 2 had been friends ever since. Devery had accumulated a nice nest-egg by 1903, but he had lost his position and clout within the Tammany political machine. Devery’s connection with the team remained obfuscated for many years and for a short time he even denied being an Owner. Farrell later became the face of ownership, and over time his press became more sympathetic, focusing on baseball, not his gambling connections. He was now a “sportsman,” not a “gambler.”
Even with their Tammany and real-estate connections, the New York club could do no better than Gordon’s marginal site just west of Broadway between 165th and 168th Streets at the far north end of Manhattan in Washington Heights. It was leased for a 10-year term from the New York Institute for the Blind. The lease was executed on March 12,1903, giving the team only 7 weeks to build the ball grounds in time for the April 30th home opener. Fortunately, the erection of the modest wood-frame stands of the era could be accomplished relatively quickly. As a backup Johnson and the new owners had identified a site in the Bronx owned by the Astor estate at 161st Street and Jerome Avenue — a site that 2 decades later would be purchased by a different set of Yankees Owners for a new stadium.
HillTop Park
Still, getting the ballpark built in time would be a close race due to the physical configuration of the location. The work to level and prepare the rocky, uneven site cost roughly $200,000, while construction of the 16,000-seat ballpark cost approximately $75,000, bringing the total investment for Farrell and Devery in their new grounds to around $275,000, an outlay larger than typical for ballpark erection at the time, though they may have received some assistance from the league. The new ball grounds were christened Hilltop Park and the team became informally dubbed the Highlanders because the location was one of the highest points on Manhattan and Gordon’s Highlanders (in an allusion to the team’s president) were one of the most famous regiments in the British Army. New Yorkers did not immediately flock to see their new American League entry. Despite a sold-out Opening Day, the team drew just over 210,000 fans, the 2nd lowest in the league and well behind their crosstown rival Giants, but it turned a small profit. The team more than doubled its attendance in 1904 as the Highlanders were in the AL pennant chase until the last day of the 1904 AL season.
Over the next several years the club generally fell in the middle of the league in attendance and while financial information is sketchy, when the Highlanders finished 2nd in 1910 with mediocre attendance, they reportedly turned an $80,000 profit. In part, this was because Farrell abandoned his pledge of no advertising in Hilltop Park and sold billboard space on the outfield fences. In 1907, Frank Farrell would bounce President Joe Gordon and took over the role himself, explaining, “I decided that I should get some of the glory. I had put up the money and done a lot of the work.” Gordon had snagged much of the spotlight late in the 1904 AL season, when he chided the NL champion Giants for their reluctance and subsequent refusal to participate in the World Series against the upstart American League. As the publicity available to a baseball owner in New York became more apparent, Farrell no longer wanted to remain in the background. When he let Gordon go, Farrell offered his one-time president the dividends on $10,000 worth of stock, but no right to sell, transfer, or vote the stock. Gordon refused to go quietly. He claimed he had been promised a 50% share of the team when originally incorporated and that he was due half the profits after Farrell received the return of his initial capital. He also claimed that the team had been making significant profits based on recent average revenues of $240,000 and expenses of $80,000; accordingly, he demanded an accounting, as the rightful beneficiary of half of these profits. It’s highly unlikely the team was anywhere near as profitable as Gordon had alleged and in the end the court ruled against his improbable, undocumented claim for half the franchise.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 12, 2024 18:37:51 GMT -5
Edward Barrow Yankees President and General Manager 1920-1945
This article was written by Daniel R. Levitt, Edited by Clipper
Ed Barrows HOFMost famous for his wildly successful tenure in the New York Yankees front office from 1920 through 1945, Ed Barrow left his mark on the Deadball Era as well. Though he never played a game of professional baseball, the ubiquitous Barrow was a key participant in the careers of countless players and a major actor in many of the era’s biggest controversies. The man who scouted Fred Clarke and Honus Wagner, moved Babe Ruth from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield, and managed the Red Sox to their last world championship of the 20thcentury also experimented with night baseball as early as 1896, helped Harry Stevens get his lucrative concessions business off the ground and led an unsuccessful campaign to form a 3rd major league with teams from the International League and American Association. In his official capacities, he served as field manager for both major and minor league teams, owned several minor league franchises and served as League President for the Atlantic League (1897-1899) and the International League (1911-1917).
Hot-tempered and autocratic, over the years Barrow crossed swords with Kid Elberfeld, Frank Navin, Babe Ruth, and Carl Mays, among many others. Harry Frazee, owner of the Red Sox during Barrow’s managerial tenure with the club, jokingly referred to his skipper as “Simon,” after Simon Legree, the infamous slave-driver from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “Big, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, dark-haired and bushy-browed, [Barrow] had been through the rough-and-tumble days of baseball,” Frank Graham later wrote. “Forceful, outspoken, afraid of nobody, he had been called upon many times to fight, and the record is that nobody ever licked him.”
Edward Grant Barrow was born on May 10,1868, in Springfield, Illinois, the 1st of 4 sons of Effie Ann Vinson-Heller and John Barrow. John and Effie met in Ohio after the Civil War, and the young couple decided to head west for the greener land-grant pastures of Nebraska; Edward’s birth came during that arduous journey.
The Nebraska land the Barrows settled proved unproductive, and the family left for Iowa after 6 bleak years. The family finally put down roots near Des Moines. At 16, Ed went to work as the mailing clerk for a local paper and when later promoted to city circulator, Barrow found himself in charge of the newsboys. A large, strapping, generally good-natured but hot-tempered lad who had some ability as a boxer, Barrow surely had the right attributes for his new job. A baseball enthusiast as well, Barrow pitched on a town team, but his playing career quickly ended when he critically injured his arm pitching in a cold rain. His baseball spirit remained intact, however, and he soon organized and promoted his own town teams. After accepting a more senior position at another paper, Barrow discovered future Hall of Fame outfielder Fred Clarke among his newsboys and recruited him for his ballclub.
After a brief foray into the sale of cleaning products and time as a hotel clerk, in 1895 Barrow returned to baseball when he bought into the Wheeling franchise in the Inter-State League. At mid-season when the league collapsed Barrow moved his franchise into the Iron & Oil League. Baseball management now in his blood, Barrow acquired (with a partner) the Paterson, New Jersey franchise in the Atlantic League for 1896. Just after his acquisition of the Paterson club, Barrow had signed the player he would later call the greatest of all-time, Honus Wagner. The following year, Barrow sold Wagner to the major league Louisville club for $2,100, a high price for the time.
The contentious Atlantic League had elected Barrow as President for 1897 and for the next 3 years until the league folded after the 1899 season, Barrow oversaw the inter-owner squabbles, dealt with numerous player disputes, and managed the umpires. As League President during the Spanish-American War, he championed a number of marketing gimmicks to help keep the fan’s interest: he brought in a woman, Lizzie Stroud (she played under last name Arlington) to pitch in exhibition games and heavyweight champions John L. Sullivan and James Jeffries to umpire. Another heavyweight, Jim Corbett, often played 1st base in exhibitions, mostly in 1897.
For 1900, Barrow had purchased a 1/4 interest in the Toronto franchise in the Eastern League and became its Manager. With little inherited talent, Barrow brought the club home 5th in his 1st year. Barrow acquired some better players for the next season, including hurler Nick Altrock, and finished 2nd. Despite losing a number of players to the fledgling American League, Barrow’s club captured the pennant in 1902.
With the tragic suicide of new skipper Win Mercer in January 1903, Detroit Tigers Owner Sam Angus hired Barrow as Manager on the recommendation of AL President Ban Johnson. Bolstered by 2contract jumpers from the NL, pitcher Bill Donovan and outfielder Sam Crawford, Barrow brought the team in 5th, a 13-game improvement over the previous year. In one of the year’s most notorious controversies, Barrow was forced to suspend star shortstop Kid Elberfeld in June after some outlandishly lackadaisical play. The St. Louis Browns were actively tampering with Elberfeld and encouraging him to maneuver for his release. The Giants, too, were likely interfering with the unhappy Elberfeld. Barrow claimed he would see Elberfeld out of baseball before sending him to 1 of these 2 teams, and charged “that in 3 of the last 6 games lost to St. Louis, Elberfeld made a muff fumble or wild throw at the moment of a critical stage.” Ban Johnson intervened and engineered a trade of Elberfeld to the new AL franchise in New York.
After the season, Angus sold the franchise to William Yawkey after 1st offering it to Barrow and Frank Navin. The latter, soon promoted to Secretary-Treasurer, ingratiated himself with Yawkey, becoming his right-hand man. Barrow continued his effort to improve the club by adding several players that would contribute to the Tigers pennant 4 years later. Not surprisingly, however, Navin and Barrow, both young and ambitious, could not co-exist; with the Tigers at 32-46, Navin gladly accepted Barrow’s resignation.
Following his stint in Detroit, Barrow began a 2-year odyssey managing in the high minors. Montreal, in the Eastern League, recruited Barrow right after his resignation to come finish out the 1904 season as their manager. For 1905, he was hired by Indianapolis in the American Association, and 1906 found him back in Toronto. Disheartened with his baseball career after his 1st-ever last-place finish that year, Barrow left baseball to run Toronto’s Windsor Hotel.
Four years later in 1910, Montreal offered Barrow the manager’s post and a chance to get back into baseball. Barrow happily accepted, and after the season he was elected league president. In recognition of the 2 Canadian franchises, Barrow persuaded the Eastern League to change its name to the International League (IL) prior to the 1912 season.
In January 1912, Barrow had married Fannie Taylor Briggs whom he had met in Toronto many years earlier. It was the 2nd marriage for both and would last until Barrow’s death many years later. Fannie brought her 5-year-old daughter, Audrey, into the union and Barrow raised her as his own. In his many autobiographical writings, Barrow never mentioned his 1st wife, whom he had married in 1898.
When the Federal League (FL) challenged Organized Baseball as a self-declared major league in 1914, the most severe hardship fell upon the high minors, particularly Barrow’s IL, which lost numerous players to the upstart league. The FL also placed teams in the IL’s two largest markets, Buffalo and Baltimore, significantly affecting attendance. To better position the IL for the struggle, Barrow tried to obtain major league status for his league or some eight-team amalgamation of the IL and the other affected high minor league, the American Association. Not surprisingly, nothing ever came of these efforts.
After holding the league together through the difficult 1914 season, 1915 proved even more challenging. The FL invaded Newark as well, and with Canada now fully engaged in the World War, the Toronto and Montreal franchises operated under wartime conditions. Before and during the season, moves and rumors of moves of IL franchises dominated league business. The financial strain forced the Jersey City and Newark (transferred to Harrisburg) owners to forfeit their franchises to the league, leaving Barrow to run both clubs until new owners could be found.
With the collapse of the FL after 1915, the IL received a brief respite in 1916. In 1917, however, America also entered the 1st World War, bringing financial hardship back to many of the beleaguered franchises. Barrow again battled to keep his league from folding, while at the same time striving to create a 3rd major league of four IL and four AA franchises. After 4 extremely difficult years, a number of disagreements and bad feelings had developed between the authoritarian Barrow and several franchise owners, particularly those left out of the 3rd major league scheme. When the owners voted to drastically cut his salary from $7,500 to $2,500, Barrow resigned.
For 1918, he eagerly accepted the Boston Red Sox managerial post offered by team owner Harry Frazee.
The Red Sox were less affected by war losses than most teams, and Barrow successfully guided the club to the pennant despite a showdown with his star player Babe Ruth in July. Earlier in the year, on the advice of outfielder Harry Hooper, Barrow had shifted Ruth to the outfield to take full advantage of his offensive potential. But when hurler Dutch Leonard left the team due to the war, Barrow looked to Ruth to pitch. Ruth begged off due to a sore wrist. The tension between the 2 erupted in July, when Barrow chastised Ruth after swinging at a pitch after being given the take sign. When Ruth snapped back, the argument escalated, and Ruth left the club and returned to Baltimore, threatening to join a shipbuilding team. Ruth of course soon realized he’d gone too far and wanted to come back. Hooper and Frazee helped mediate and appease the furious, stubborn Barrow. The chastened Ruth ended up pitching a number of games down the stretch. Owing to complications from the war, in mid-year the season was shortened and adjusted to end on Labor Day, at which point the Sox found themselves 2½ games ahead of the Cleveland Indians. In the World Series, the Red Sox defeated the Chicago Cubs, 4 games to 2.
Falling attendance and much lower receipts than anticipated from the World Series put additional financial burdens on Frazee. He now became a seller rather than buyer and sent 3 players to the Yankees for $25,000 prior to the 1919 season. During the year, Barrow became embroiled in 2 player controversies. The Babe spent the start of the season living the high life in Ruthian fashion beyond even his own standard. One morning on a tip, Barrow burst into Ruth’s room at 6 a.m. right after the latter had snuck back in and caught Ruth hiding under the covers with his clothes on. The next morning in the clubhouse, Ruth confronted and threatened to punch Barrow for popping into his room. Barrow, well tired of Ruth’s shenanigans, ordered the rest of the players onto the field and challenged Ruth to back up his threat. Ruth backed down, put on his uniform, and trotted out with the others. Barrow and Ruth eventually reached an unconventional detente: Ruth would leave a note for Barrow any time he returned past curfew with the exact time he came in.
The other hullabaloo began when star Boston pitcher Carl Mays refused to retake the mound after a throw by catcher Wally Schang to catch a base stealer grazed Mays’ head. Barrow intended to suspend the dour Mays, until Frazee quickly quashed any suspension so as to possibly trade him. After listening to several offers, Frazee sold Carl Mays to the Yankees for $40,000. AL President Johnson voided the sale and suspended Mays, arguing Frazee should have suspended him. In contrast to his Elberfeld machinations, Johnson now argued that a player should not be able force a favorable outcome through insubordination. The Yankee owners went to the courts, which upheld the sale. Boston would finish the 1919 AL season tied for 5th, 20½ games back.
Babe Ruth, Jacob Ruppert, Ed Barrow (Standing)
That off-season, when Frazee sold Ruth to the New York Yankees, Barrow grimly told him, “You ought to know you’re making a mistake.” Frazee tried to placate Barrow by promising him that he would get some players in return for Ruth, but Barrow snapped back, “There is nobody on that ball club that I want. This has to be a straight cash deal, and you’ll have to announce it that way.” Yankee Owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston paid $100,000 – $25,000 down and 3 installments of $25,000 and Ruppert agreed to personally lend Frazee $300,000 to be secured by a mortgage on Fenway Park.
Frazee desperately needed the money. When Frazee had purchased the Red Sox in 1916, he and his partner paid Joseph Lannin $400,000 down and assumed $600,000 in debt and preferred stock, including a $262,000 note from Lannin. With the Federal League war over, Frazee assumed he could pay the interest and principal out of the team’s cash flow. Attendance, though, collapsed in 1917 and 1918, and Frazee could not afford to carry both his ball club and his theater productions.
By the end of 1919, Frazee’s financial situation had become particularly acute. The principal on Lannin’s note was due and Frazee was in the process of purchasing a theater in New York (the sale price of the theater is unavailable, but it cost $500,000 to build). Shortly after the Ruth sale, Frazee pleaded with the Yankee owners to help him borrow against the 3 $25,000 notes because he needed the money immediately. He further implored Ruppert to advance the funds from the promised mortgage loan quickly. With the money from the Ruth sale Frazee could meet his immediate financial obligations but showed little interest in reinvesting in his ball club.
The death of Yankee Business Manager Harry Sparrow during the 1920 season created an opportunity for the 2 sparing Yankee owners to bring in a strong experienced baseball man to run the team and thus help alleviate the friction between them. After a 3rd-place Yankee finish in 1920, Huston and Ruppert plucked Barrow from Boston to run the baseball operation, technically as manager, but practically in a de facto general manager-type role. While not technically a promotion, Barrow must have been relieved to escape a deteriorating situation in Boston to join well-capitalized, competitive owners.
One of his 1st orders of business with the Yankees was to hire Red Sox Coach Paul Krichell as a scout. Krichell would actually outlast Barrow as a Yankee, and along the way develop one of baseball’s best scouting organizations. Barrow also quickly reassured Manager Miller Huggins of his support despite Huston’s known aversion to his diminutive skipper: “You’re the manager, and you’ll not be second guessed by me. Your job is to win; mine is to get you the players you need to win.” And Barrow lived up to his half of the bargain: he found the necessary players and he did not interfere with his Manager.
Forceful and competitive, yet optimistic by nature, Barrow actively sought to solidify his new club. At first, this mainly involved going back to his old boss Frazee with Ruppert’s money and acquiring the rest of Boston’s stars. Yankee co-owner Ruppert was willing to spend money to acquire players when many other owners were not, despite the threat to his livelihood as a brewer from Prohibition. With his owners’ encouragement, Barrow spent more and more wisely, to build the Yankee dynasty.
In Barrow’s 1st season at the Yankee helm, New York won its 1st pennant before losing to the Giants in the World Series. After the season, Ruth left on an off-season barnstorming tour in defiance of an old rule and Commissioner Landis‘s warning. Barrow needed to aggressively lobby the furious Commissioner to limit the Babe’s suspension to the 1st 50 days of the 1922 AL season.
After the 1922 AL season, Barrow had to referee a disagreement between his 2 owners. Huston had blamed Manager Huggins for the World Series loss and wanted to fire him. Ruppert (and Barrow) supported Huggins, and Barrow helped instigate a relatively amicable solution: Ruppert would buy out Huston’s interest in the franchise. When Ruppert purchased Huston’s 50% ownership for $1.25 million, he allowed Barrow to buy a 10% interest in the club for around $300,000.
In 1923, the team opened Yankee Stadium, one of the great ballparks of American history. Several years earlier the New York Giants had informed the Yankees’ owners that they were no longer welcome to remain as tenants in the Polo Grounds (the Giants stadium). Ruppert and Huston then initiated a site search for a new stadium. Business Manager Barrow played a subsidiary, but active role in this politically sensitive project.
Bolstered by the nucleus of the team Barrow had managed in Boston, the Yankees won their 1st World Championship in 1923. The Yankees’ 3 straight pennants after Barrow joined the team foreshadowed the effectiveness of the Ruppert-Barrow team. The perfectionist Ruppert provided the capital and positive reinforcement to support Barrow’s own competitive desire and competence. Barrow proved able to impose his will on the Yankee front office to direct his team-building plans. And due to his good judgment, these were typically sound.
By 1925, the Yankees had fallen to 7th. Ruth’s illness and antics made the year especially frustrating. Barrow began the season by extricating an incapacitated Ruth- he had succumbed to his world-famous “stomach ache”- through the window of a train car. Later in the year, Huggins had fined Ruth the then exorbitant sum of $5,000 after a confrontation regarding his off-field self-indulgence and tardiness to the ballpark. Ruth threatened to quit unless Huggins backed down, but Barrow stood behind his Manager.
The team returned to the top of the AL in 1926 behind a number of young stars including future Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Earle Combs, and Tony Lazzeri. The world champion 1927 ball club is considered by many to be the greatest team of all-time. Ruth and Gehrig were at the top of their game and the club boasted a crack pitching staff as well. The Yankees repeated in 1928 despite a summer charge from the Philadelphia A’s.
Huggins died at the end of the 1929 season, and the club fell to 2nd. At a game in May, 2 people died and many more were injured when fans tried to exit the right-field bleachers during a rainstorm. Barrow publicly defended the safety rules at Yankee stadium and showed little sympathy for the trampled fans amid accusations that particular doors were improperly locked. After a drawn-out legal process, the Yankees were eventually found partially liable, but damages were reduced well below what the injured plaintiffs were seeking.
To replace Huggins, Barrow eventually settled for his 3rd choice, former Yankee pitcher Bob Shawkey. After Shawkey brought the team home 3rd, a frustrated Barrow jettisoned Shawkey in favor Joe McCarthy. McCarthy proved a brilliant choice and would go to win 7 World Series with the Yankees.
By 1932, after paying $125,000 for minor leaguers Lyn Lary and Jimmie Reese, neither of whom turned into stars, the success of the Cardinals minor league operation and changes to the player limit and option rules, the Yankees recognized that they needed to develop a farm system. Following the acquisition of the Newark International League franchise, the club hired another future Hall of Fame executive, George Weiss, to run it. Barrow actually wanted to hire Bob Connery of the St. Paul Saints with whom the Yankees had a long relationship, but Ruppert insisted on Weiss. Barrow and Weiss soon fell into a smooth working relationship and created one of baseball’s most efficient farm systems. Krichell’s wide network of scouts fed Weiss’ well-run minor league clubs to produce some of the greatest teams in minor league history and several Hall of Fame ballplayers.
In McCarthy’s 2nd season, on the back of 2 last hurrah from Ruth and a typically great season by Gehrig, the Yankees again won the World Series. Over the next 3 seasons, however, the Yankees could not recapture the pennant. The clubhouse atmosphere was further eroded by an aging and dispirited Ruth. Frustrated by his declining skills and salary, Ruth desperately wanted to manage the Yankees, causing anxiety for McCarthy and a headache for Barrow. Barrow shrewdly engineered a move of Ruth to the Boston Braves, temporarily soothing Ruth and preventing the public relations nightmare of a disgruntled Ruth in New York.
Armed with a recommendation from his excellent scouts, in late 1934, Barrow took a chance on young west-coast star Joe DiMaggio despite a knee injury. The future Hall of Famer spent 1 final season in San Francisco before debuting with the Yankees in 1936. With DiMaggio on board and several other prospects emerging as well, the Yankees began another run of dominance as they won the next 4 World Series and 7 of the next 8 pennants.
During the Yankees string of titles, an incident in Chicago testified to the racism and race insensitivity in mainstream America. Before a July game in 1938, Yankee outfielder Jake Powell was asked on the radio how he kept in shape over the winter. “Oh, that’s easy, I’m a policeman,” Powell replied, “and I beat N______ over the head with my blackjack.” When first publicized, the baseball establishment, the mainstream press, and Yankee management (including Barrow) were little exercised by this remark. The Black press, however, jumped on this egregious, racist remark and argued that Powell and his comments should be censured. Barrow tried to mitigate the fallout with the Yankees Black fans by ordering Powell on an apology tour of Black newspapers and establishments. In a reflection of their growing clout, Landis suspended Powell for 10 days. Unfortunately, the lesson the baseball establishment and mainstream press learned from this sorry episode was simply that players should be more careful when speaking on the radio.
Ruppert died in January of 1939, and his will had left the team (along with his other holdings) to a trust for the benefit of his 2 nieces and a young female friend. As expected, the trust named Barrow the new Yankees President; he had reached the pinnacle of his baseball career. His autonomy, particularly in financial matters, however, was limited by the estate tax requirement that tied up much of the team’s capital.
After the 1939 AL season, Barrow further found himself hamstrung in his team building efforts because of a startling rule introduced by his American League rivals. He lacked the political skill necessary to counter the anti-Yankee sentiment and at the winter meetings the league passed a rule prohibiting the league champion from making trades (unless the player(s) cleared waivers) until it was no longer the champion. Clearly (but not publicly) directed at the Yankees after their 4 straight pennants, the decree seemingly achieved its unspoken objective as the Tigers broke the Yankees streak and won the 1940 AL pennant.
Barrow’s Yankees returned to the top in 1941 and continued to win during the 1st years of World War II with generally the same players (until they went into the military, of course) as during the late 1930s. But the replenishment of young stars slowed through this period. Naturally the war claimed healthy young men, but a couple other factors were at work as well. The push to the background of all non-military related activities during World War II leveled the economic playing field in baseball. In addition, the Yankees were now run as a trust, not as wealthy sportsman’s hobby, cutting into the franchise’s financial flexibility.
In early 1945, the Yankees were sold to a triumvirate of Larry MacPhail, Del Webb, and Dan Topping. Barrow disliked the flashy MacPhail and tried to interest his hunting buddy and Boston owner Tom Yawkey in purchasing the club. The trust, however, needed money to pay its taxes, and the war-depressed sale price of only $2.8 million was well below the pre-war value estimate. Selling to an old rival and receiving no more for his interest than he originally paid 20 years earlier must have greatly annoyed Barrow. After the sale, the new ownership kicked Barrow upstairs with a title of Chairman of the Board, but it was a purely symbolic position, because MacPhail was running the Yankees.
Barrow’s daughter Audrey lived an unhappy and unlucky life. She was 1st married in the mid 1920s and shortly thereafter she had 2 children, a girl and a boy. Unfortunately, thenceforth her life began to spiral downhill. In 1933, her husband committed suicide by running his car in a closed garage under the house. In the process, he nearly asphyxiated the 2 children as well. A young mother with 2 young children, Audrey fell back on her parents for financial support.
Ed's Wall plaque Yankee Stadium 1953
In 1940, Audrey remarried an older man, but it didn’t take, and less than 3-years later she moved out to Reno to get a Nevada divorce. Shortly thereafter she married the nephew of the late Jacob Ruppert. Her new husband promptly joined the air force and headed off to WWII, leaving Audrey and her 2 children in their new waterfront home not far from the Barrows. Sadly, this marriage didn’t last either. In the late 1940’s, Audrey tried marriage 1 more time and wedded an executive at a real estate agency. Tragically, in 1950 her 4th husband died at home from a heart ailment. A year later a despondent Audrey jumped (or fell) to her death from her 11th floor suite.
Barrow officially retired in 1946 but he remained fairly active in baseball. He participated in several ceremonial events and served on the Hall of Fame old-timers committee, the body responsible for inducting players passed over by the baseball writers or excluded from their purview. Barrow had survived a heart attack during the 1943 World Series, but in December 1953 at age 85 Barrow would passed away after several years at home in ill health, just 3 months after his election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was buried in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 12, 2024 19:19:05 GMT -5
New York Yankees Team Ownership History
This article was written by Mark Armour - Daniel R. Levitt, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in the Team Ownership History Project
In over a century of existence, through 2016 the New York Yankees have been run by only 5 different ownership groups. To their great fortune and that of their fans, the 3 longest tenured were well-capitalized and committed to winning. They also had a terrific knack for finding great baseball men to work for them. During these 3 ownership regimes the Yankees (as of 2017) have won a record 40 American League pennants and 27 world championships.
New York Enters the American League
American League President Ban Johnson knew that for the long-term success of his new major league, which began in 1901, he would eventually need a franchise in New York. Among his circuit’s four Eastern clubs — Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington-Baltimore was Johnson’s preferred candidate for relocation: It was smaller than Boston and Philadelphia, and he liked having a team in the nation’s capital. Though many of Baltimore’s syndicate of owners were locals who considered their city major league-caliber the Baltimore National League squad of the mid-1890s had been baseball’s best before being amalgamated into the Brooklyn Dodgers-Johnson, at least as early as the 1902 preseason, had begun secretly talking with Baltimore Manager John McGraw about shifting the Orioles franchise to Gotham.
Johnson’s biggest challenge to putting a team in New York would be finding a place to play. The National League’s Giants were owned by Andrew Freedman, a wealthy, well-connected real-estate tycoon, who was also a confidant of Tammany Hall boss Richard Croker. At the time, as urban America exploded in population, municipal governments often couldn’t cope with the influx of immigrants and rural migrants; into this vacuum stepped party organizations, often called “machines” that were run by “bosses.” These organizations doled out favors to businessmen competing for construction projects and other municipal licenses, gave city jobs to their supporters, and addressed many of the needs of working-class ethnic communities. Urban machines were notoriously corrupt but often remained in power for decades with the support of the voters and a frequently corrupt judiciary. The most notorious of these organizations, dubbed Tammany Hall, was a Democratic political machine that controlled New York City for many years. Freedman used his connections with Tammany Hall to block the few available suitable sites.
John McGraw, ambitious, driven, and mercurial, liked the idea of running a team in the nation’s largest metropolis and covertly traveled to New York early in the 1902 season to scout out potential ballpark locations. He met with Frank Farrell, himself a well-connected Tammanyite and boss of much of the City’s high-end, illegal gambling and horse-race betting, and an associate of Tammany’s Big Tim Sullivan. Most famous for his palatial gambling establishment, the House with the Bronze Door, Farrell and his syndicate oversaw roughly 250 gambling enterprises. With Farrell’s support, McGraw thought they had lined up a position on the East Side around 112th Street, but the city turned the site into a park, frustrating their plan.
McGraw and Johnson, however, couldn’t coexist in the same league. One of Johnson’s key tenets in starting his new league had been to clean up the hooliganism, dirty play, and umpire abuse that had been rampant in the National League during the 1890s. McGraw, aggressive and willing to do just about any of those now-forbidden deeds to win, was suspended several times early in the 1902 season for his abusive actions. Upon the last suspension, McGraw later claimed Johnson told him that he would not be allowed to stay on as manager of the team when it moved to New York.
Shortly thereafter McGraw entered secret negotiations with Freedman and 2 engineered a scheme to get McGraw to New York and deal the AL a significant blow. In July, McGraw contrived to get released from his Baltimore contract and was promptly signed by Freedman to manage the Giants. Freedman, using a front man to purchase the stock, then acquired a controlling interest in the Baltimore franchise and released all the team’s capable ballplayers, who were then scooped up by the Giants. Johnson, who had some inkling of the plan and was not altogether taken by surprise, quickly grabbed back control of the franchise and cobbled together a roster to play out the season.
If he hadn’t been fully committed before, Freedman’s treachery cemented Johnson’s determination to field a team in New York in 1903. The league voted in August to stake the up-front costs necessary to plant their flag in Gotham for the next season, a price that included signing a number of players from the National League’s Pirates. Of course, as emissary for his league Johnson faced 2 significant hurdles: He needed to find a well-heeled ownership group he liked, and he needed a place to play. And the two were not unrelated: Though Freedman had sold the Giants in September 1902, because of his enmity with Johnson and his support for the NL, he continued to use his connections to block the American League’s search for suitable stadium locations. His influence over land sites and their potential assemblage through his association with the Interborough Rapid Transit system only added to the new league’s difficulties. Johnson’s dilemma became fully apparent when a site he thought he had assembled at 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue was blocked, apparently due to the influence of Freedman. Fortunately for Johnson, he was sought out by Joseph Gordon, a coal merchant with some history in New York baseball. Gordon had just lost his job as deputy superintendent of buildings and was well plugged into New York City real estate. Gordon claimed he knew of an available site. In return, he wanted the franchise. Johnson, though he needed the site, recognized that Gordon didn’t have the wealth to build and run a franchise in Gotham and insisted on “seeing the man with the money.” Gordon introduced him to Frank Farrell, still excited about owning a baseball team and also feeling betrayed by McGraw, though Farrell and Johnson had conceivably met previously through influential New York Sun sportswriter Joe Vila. Farrell purportedly showed up with a certified check for $25,000. When he proved amenable to paying both $18,000 to cover salaries advanced to players by the league and some nominal reimbursements to Baltimore’s minority stockholders, and willing to spend the funds necessary to build a ball grounds and assemble a team, Johnson awarded Farrell the franchise. Farrell also assured him he didn’t have to bring in any partners: “I didn’t propose to let anybody carve me if I went into this thing.” The AL president, who prided himself on being squeaky clean, had little choice but to accept a well-connected Tammanyite of his own. To front for the franchise, Farrell and Johnson allowed Gordon, generally unconnected to Tammany Hall, to act as team president.
On March 14, 1903, the Greater New York Baseball Association was incorporated to operate New York’s American League baseball franchise. Gordon was clearly the face of the new team, and several days later he publicly announced the stockholders, who included Farrell. The AL Baltimore Orioles franchise ceased to exist.
Despite Farrell’s earlier protestations, he brought in his longtime friend Big Bill Devery as a partner. Devery was a shady ex-police chief with his own Tammany connections, who had escaped conviction despite a couple of indictments. Devery had walked the beat of one of Farrell’s 1st gambling parlors and the 2 had been friends ever since. Devery had accumulated a nice nest-egg by 1903, but had lost his position and clout within the Tammany political machine. Devery’s connection with the team remained obfuscated for many years and for a short time he even denied being an owner. Farrell later became the face of ownership, and over time his press became more sympathetic, focusing on baseball, not his gambling connections. He was now a “sportsman,” not a “gambler.”
Even with their Tammany and real-estate connections, the New York club could do no better than Gordon’s marginal site just west of Broadway between 165th and 168th Streets at the far north end of Manhattan in Washington Heights. It was leased for a 10-year term from the New York Institute for the Blind. The lease was executed on March 12, 1903, giving the team only 7 weeks to build the ball grounds in time for the April 30th home opener. Fortunately, the erection of the modest wood-frame stands of the era could be accomplished relatively quickly. As a backup Johnson and the new owners had identified a site in the Bronx owned by the Astor estate at 161st Street and Jerome Avenue — a site that 2 decades later would be purchased by a different set of Yankees owners for a new stadium.Still, getting the ballpark built in time would be a close race due to the physical configuration of the location. The work to level and prepare the rocky, uneven site cost roughly $200,000, while construction of the 16,000-seat ballpark cost approximately $75,000, bringing the total investment for Farrell and Devery intheir new grounds to around $275,000, an outlay larger than typical for ballpark erection at the time, though they may have received some assistance from the league. The ball grounds were christened Hilltop Park and the team became informally dubbed the Highlanders because the location was one of the highest points on Manhattan and Gordon’s Highlanders (in an allusion to the team’s president) were one of the most famous regiments in the British Army.
New Yorkers did not immediately flock to see their new American League entry. Despite a sold-out Opening Day, the team drew just over 210,000 fans, the 2nd lowest in the league and well behind their crosstown rival Giants, but turned a small profit. The team more than doubled its attendance in 1904 as the Highlanders were in the pennant chase until the last day of the season. Over the next several years, the club generally fell in the middle of the league in attendance, and while financial information is sketchy, when the Highlanders finished 2nd in 1910 with mediocre attendance, they reportedly turned an $80,000 profit. In part, this was because Farrell abandoned his pledge of no advertising in Hilltop Park and sold billboard space on the outfield fences.
In 1907, Farrell had bounced President Gordon and took over the role himself, explaining, “I decided that I should get some of the glory. I had put up the money and done a lot of the work.” Gordon had snagged much of the spotlight late in the 1904 season when he chided the NL champion Giants for their reluctance and subsequent refusal to participate in the World Series against the upstart American League. As the publicity available to a baseball owner in New York became more apparent, Farrell no longer wanted to remain in the background. When he let Gordon go, Farrell offered his 1-time president the dividends on $10,000 worth of stock, but no right to sell, transfer, or vote the stock. Gordon refused to go quietly. He claimed he had been promised a 50% share of the team when originally incorporated and that he was due half the profits after Farrell received the return of his initial capital. He also claimed that the team had been making significant profits based on recent average revenues of $240,000 and expenses of $80,000; accordingly, he demanded an accounting, as the rightful beneficiary of half of these profits. It’s highly unlikely the team was anywhere near as profitable as Gordon alleged, and in the end the court ruled against his improbable, undocumented claim for half the franchise.
In 1909, as teams throughout baseball began opening the next generation of concrete-and-steel ballparks, Farrell resurrected his search for a suitable location for a new ballpark. Moreover, the New York Institute for the Blind seemed reluctant to extend the land lease, which would expire prior to the 1913 season. For a new, modern ballpark, Farrell and his proxies uncovered a site in the Bronx just north of the Harlem Ship Canal. The overall area under the land assemblage included the old Spuyten Duyvil Creek and surrounding marshy regions. Dewatering this site sufficiently to allow the construction of new ballpark would prove an engineering nightmare. Nevertheless, Farrell outwardly expressed optimism. “In my new site,” he said, “I believe I have secured an excellent location, and I shall erect a series of stands that will afford spectators every comfort and convenience that the up-to-date baseball fan has learned to expect as his right. It will be fireproof, which in itself will relieve every officer of the club of much worry and responsibility.”
Early in the 1911 season, Farrell had a chance to offer a courtesy to his crosstown rivals when the Giants ballpark, the Polo Grounds, suffered significant fire damage. Farrell offered up Hilltop Park to accommodate the Giants games until the Polo Grounds repairs were finished. When the Giants moved back into the rebuilt Polo Grounds in late June, Giants Owner John Brush would remember the consideration shown by Farrell.
Despite the outlay of considerable sums on engineering his new ballpark in the Bronx, Farrell’s project was plagued with water and construction difficulties, sapping much of his focus and energy from his team on the field. Moreover, Farrell proved a poor judge of baseball executive acumen and integrity. Late in the relatively successful 1910 season, he sided with crooked star 1st baseman Hal Chase over Manager George Stallings, bouncing the latter and installing Chase as Player-Manager. After one season, Farrell replaced Chase with the overmatched Harry Wolverton; Chase remained as the 1st baseman and the team struggled on the field.
The ballpark situation, too, remained an ongoing headache. With their 10-year lease nearing expiration and the New York Institute for the Blind unwilling to renew it- thinking they could get more than the $10,000 per year the Highlanders were paying -Farrell needed a new venue quickly. Fortunately for Farrell, Brush allowed the Highlanders to share the Polo Grounds. Under the terms the new lease, the team paid the Giants $55,000 a year for the 1st 2 years and the Giants were responsible for maintenance and expenses. The AL club would also be allocated a small share of the concession revenue. After 1910 with the team consistently in the 2nd division, the losses associated with the Bronx stadium fiasco and now having to pay significantly higher rent, Farrell and Devery were beginning to feel the financial pinch.
The Two Colonels Take Over
In 1914, Organized Baseball was challenged by a new competitor when the upstart Federal League declared itself a major league. Both the major and minor leagues as well as the Federal League suffered huge financial losses during the 2-year conflict. As the leagues battled for players over the winter of 1914-1915, Ban Johnson and Federal League President Jim Gilmore, both understood the importance of shoring up their league’s weakest franchises, and both wanted the same man for a New York franchise, Jacob Ruppert. One of New York’s most eligible bachelors, Ruppert ran his family’s brewery operation and had accumulated a significant fortune. Well dressed and at home in upper-class society, Ruppert occasionally lapsed into a German accent when agitated, despite his native birth. Ruppert also dabbled in exotic hobbies: He collected jade, Chinese porcelain, and oil paintings; for a time, he kept a collection of small monkeys, and he raised St. Bernards. Like many of the upper class at the turn of the last century, he also raised and raced horses.
Popular, wealthy, and well-connected to the German-American community, Ruppert was a natural for politics. In 1886, he joined an upper-class regiment of New York’s National Guard. A few years later he was appointed aide de camp to Governor David Hill and given the rank of colonel, a largely ceremonial title. Ruppert took great pleasure in this title and for the rest of his life liked to be addressed by it.
Late in the 1880s, Tammany Hall tapped Ruppert to run for city council president, but they withdrew his candidacy due to various political machinations and miscalculations. The Democratic organization later sponsored him to run for the US Congress in 1898 in a generally Republican district. Ruppert won in a mild upset and served 4 terms. After 8 years in Congress, Ruppert concentrated most of his energies, aside from all his hobbies, on the brewery business. Moreover, Ruppert had loved baseball since his youth. In 1914, Ruppert began talking to people in and around baseball, inquiring about buying into the game. Both Gilmore and Johnson remained in close touch with Ruppert, hoping to entice him into his league.
Johnson’s mortal enemy, New York Giants Manager John McGraw, may have inadvertently helped Johnson in his quest. McGraw was a close friend of Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, another wealthy investor looking to buy into baseball. An engineer by training, Huston had remained in Cuba after fighting in the Spanish-American War and started an engineering and construction company. By 1914, he was a rich man, near the level of most baseball owners, but well below Ruppert’s fortune. Huston reportedly secured an option to purchase the Chicago Cubs for $600,000 in 1914 and planned to bring along his pal McGraw as manager and part-owner. McGraw initially expressed an interest but soon claimed he was tied to New York by his multiyear contract. In reality, he probably did not want to leave New York and simply wanted an excuse so as not to embarrass his friend. Without McGraw on board, Huston allowed the option to lapse.
Ruppert and Huston did not know each other but the baseball ownership fraternity was small, and once they met- probably through McGraw- the 2 agreed to join forces for the right opportunity. McGraw suggested that the Yankees might be available, and the two reluctantly agreed to look into what was generally regarded as one of baseball’s most hapless teams. Adding to their trepidation, the team’s books were a mess and Ruppert and Huston were more than a little leery about what they were getting into.
In Johnson’s eyes, though, the Yankees were the perfect franchise for the duo. Ruppert was a well-connected New Yorker without too much Tammany baggage, and Frank Farrell and William Devery, always of suspect character, were out of money. As an inducement, Johnson persuaded the American League’s owners to make some decent players available to the Yankees immediately after the 2 gained control the club.
Farrell, however, didn’t really want to sell the Yankees. He liked all the perks that came with owning a major-league baseball team in New York. Farrell dragged out the sale by lingering over minor contractual matters in the hope that something might change. The team had accumulated losses of $83,273 and debts of around $285,000, however, his partner, William Devery, who generally liked to stay behind the scenes, was ready to cash out.
In late 1914, while Ruppert was reconsidering, Gilmore and Chicago Federal League owner Charles Weeghman traveled to French Lick, Indiana, the resort community where Ruppert spent a portion of his winters. They hoped to tempt Ruppert into purchasing the Indianapolis franchise, which he would move to New York or its environs.
Once Ban Johnson realized how close the Federals were to landing Ruppert, he snapped back into action. On Saturday, January 30, 1915, as negotiations remained stalled, Johnson had finally had enough of Farrell’s procrastination. He put Farrell and Devery in 1 conference room, Ruppert and Huston in another, and trusted the lawyers to hammer out the final document. In the end the new owners closed on the team for $463,000.
Once, they purchased the franchise, their fellow American League magnates generally forgot their pledge to make players available to the Yankees. Only Detroit President Frank Navin honored the promise of players: He allowed the Yankees to purchase 2 reserves, outfielder Hugh High and 1st baseman Wally Pipp, for $5,500.
New Yankee Team Owners: Jacob Ruppert and Col. Huston
In July, the team purchased budding star pitcher Bob Shawkey for only $3,000 from Philadelphia Athletics owner Connie Mack, who, in a financial bind because of the Federal League, was selling players. In another arrangement to find players, Ruppert had reached an agreement with Richmond in the International League through which for a payment of $3,000 the Yankees would get 1st dibs on selecting any player they wanted from the Richmond roster for the payment of an additional $2,500 per player.
Resentful but still determined, Ruppert and Huston hoped to purchase some of baseball’s better players as they became available in the aftermath of the Federal League war. They spent $40,000 to purchase 4 mediocre players controlled by Federal League magnate Harry Sinclair. More successfully, they paid Mack $37,500 for future Hall of Fame 3rd baseman Home Run Baker, who had held out during 1915 while demanding his contract be renegotiated. The Yankees owners felt frustrated and further betrayed that same offseason at their exclusion from the Tris Speaker sweepstakes when Ban Johnson engineered the sale of the all-time great center fielder from Boston to Cleveland for $55,000.
Huston hoped to prove his baseball smarts as a front-office executive and actively supervise baseball personnel decisions on the model of Charles Comiskey in Chicago or Barney Dreyfuss in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately for Huston, in one of his 1st high-dollar recommendations the Yankees purchased pitcher Dan Tipple from Indianapolis for $9,000-a considerable sum for the time, particularly in the midst of the Federal League war. Tipple’s failure to perform and progress as expected led quickly to Huston’s eclipse as a baseball insider.
The partnership of Huston and Ruppert was strained from the start. Neither man had the temperament or desire to share authority. Nevertheless, the Two Colonels both tried hard-and with some success- to make the marriage work. Both were extremely competitive and driven. Ruppert played the hard-driving perfectionist, while Huston was the high-spirited, socially active partner. The Yankees hired Wild Bill Donovan as their manager, but let him go after 3 years at the helm on the heels of a 71-82 finish in 1917. Huston wanted to hire his buddy and current Brooklyn Manager Wilbert Robinson. Ruppert, who did not really know Robinson, interviewed him and came away unimpressed. Furthermore, signing Robinson would have caused some friction with Dodgers Owner Charles Ebbets, though the Yankees could have maneuvered through this had Ruppert really wanted Robinson.
Huston, who had joined the war effort and was in France (he would return a lieutenant colonel, leading many to call the owners the Two Colonels), could not exert the influence he wanted or deserved. Ruppert remained resistant to Robinson and consulted Ban Johnson for advice. Johnson reportedly recommended the St. Louis Cardinals’ diminutive manager, Miller Huggins, whom he considered the best manager in the National League behind John McGraw. Ruppert was favorably impressed with Huggins and hired him without consulting Huston. Huston was naturally furious that while he was away, Ruppert had spurned his candidate and signed another. Ruppert’s unilateral hiring of Huggins led to the most serious and longest-lasting disagreement between the 2 owners. Huston’s anger at the Huggins hiring ripened into an excessive dislike of Huggins and a hatred of Johnson for his perceived interference with his team’s internal affairs. Even after he returned from France, Huston never reconciled himself to Huggins. Until he sold out his interest in the Yankees a number of years later, Huston unrelentingly worked to undermine and replace him.
In the middle of 1919, the Yankees owners found themselves at the center of a controversy that would eventually topple the National Commission, baseball’s ruling body. Carl Mays, one of the American League’s top pitchers, jumped the Red Sox in July and as the other league owners began offering packages of players and money for Mays, Boston owner Harry Frazee looked to cash in. Johnson argued that an insubordinate player should not be able to force a trade and demanded that the Red Sox instead suspend Mays. Frazee and the Two Colonels ignored Johnson’s edict: The Yankees bought Mays for $40,000 and 2 players. Johnson ordered Mays suspended and decreed that he could not play for New York. The Yankees owners disregarded Johnson’s directive and obtained a court injunction permitting Mays to play. With this act of defiance, the Yankees owners, allied with Frazee, became the focus of Johnson’s enmity. Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, also feuding with Johnson, joined Frazee and the Yankees owners in a triumvirate committed to the dismissal, or at least neutering, of Johnson- 1st among equals on the 3-man National Commission.
The other 5 American League owners, however, remained loyal to Johnson, creating a precarious stalemate. Albert Lasker, a prominent Chicago businessman and a Cubs minority stockholder, proposed a plan to replace the old Commission system with a 3-person triumvirate of neutrals with no financial interest in baseball. The National League generally supported the plan, but the 5 Johnson loyalists in the American League objected, mainly because Johnson would be forced to relinquish his power. After much posturing and politicking, the issue came to a head in November. At a meeting in Chicago on August 8th, the 3 disgruntled American League franchises threatened to jump to the National League, forming a 12-team New National League. (Another team would be added later.) The Johnson loyalists eventually backed down, and the owners brought in Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball’s 1st commissioner.
The Yankees owners continued their big spending after the 1919 season when they splurged for Babe Ruth. With the financial squeeze mounting on Boston owner Harry Frazee, on January 5,1920, the Yankees and Red Sox announced the sale of Ruth from Boston to New York. The Yankees paid a record sum of $100,000: $25,000 up front and 3 promissory notes of $25,000, each at a 6 % interest rate, due in November 1920, 1921, and 1922. In addition, Ruppert gave Frazee a 3-month commitment that he would lend him $300,000 to be secured by a 1st mortgage on Fenway Park.
Notably at this time, the constitutional amendment banning the sale of alcoholic beverages was taking effect. The new law would clearly have a significant adverse impact on Ruppert’s brewery operation- his main source of income. The purchase of Ruth and the large loan to Frazee testified to Ruppert’s willingness to take considerable financial risks in order to construct a winner.
With Ruth on board, in 1920 the Yankees produced 1 of their best seasons to date and with 1,289,422 fans set an attendance record that would stand nearly a decade. Sustained by the Babe’s heroics, Huggins led the Yankees to 95 wins and a 3rd-place finish. The team was on the cusp of greatness with owners willing to spend. When Business Manager Harry Sparrow died in May 1920, the 2 owners were forced to take on a larger hands-on role that they didn’t really want. Moreover, as the owner of a large brewery operation, Ruppert recognized the importance of sound oversight and professional administration. After the season they reached out to Ed Barrow, manager of the Boston Red Sox, to oversee their front office. Technically hired as Business Manager, Barrow was 1 of the 1st men to take on the role of the modern General Manager. A brilliant hire, the introduction of this new front office position and Barrow’s grasping of both its potential and its boundaries was 1 of the foundations of the coming Yankees dynasty.
Barrow also introduced another of the keys to the Yankees long-term success, amassing possibly the greatest assemblage of scouts in baseball history. During his tenure, Barrow expanded and reorganized his scouts, creating arguably the 1st modern scouting department. He had hired Vinegar Bill Essick to scout the West and Eddie Herr, a former Detroit Tigers scout, whom he assigned to the Midwest. Bob Gilks and Ed Holly focused on the South and East respectively. Super scout Paul Krichell was principally responsible for the colleges and acted as Barrow’s right hand.
Through their relationship with the cash-strapped Frazee, the Yankees owners had a unique pipeline to major-league talent. Ruppert was willing to part with his money for top talent, and Frazee was more than happy to sell his remaining stars. That offseason the Yankees sent $50,000 and a couple of players to Frazee for 4 players including Hall of Fame hurler Waite Hoyt and star catcher Wally Schang. In 1921, with this new talent on board, a historic season from Ruth and a league-leading 27 wins from Mays, the Yankees finally won their 1st pennant. Although they lost the World Series to the Giants, the pennant represented vindication for all the effort and money expended by the 2 owners.
Over the next several years, Ruppert bought the rest of Frazee’s stars. In 1 transaction after the 1921 season, he and Huston acquired 2 of the league’s best pitchers, Sam Jones and Joe Bush, along with star shortstop Everett Scott for 4 players and $150,000 -the highest dollar amount ever included in a player transaction up to that point and one that would not be exceeded until the Cubs bought Rogers Hornsby from the Boston Braves near the end of the decade. In total the Yankees owners paid Frazee roughly $450,000 over a 5-year period to build the team that captured 3 straight pennants from 1921 to 1923.
Ruppert and Huston could afford to spend because profits for the Yankees exploded after the Great War. The overall jump in baseball attendance coupled with the legalization of Sunday baseball in New York in 1919 and a Yankees ticket-price increase led to profits averaging $300,000 per year in 1920 and 1921, though much of this was paid to the government as part of the wartime excess profits tax controls. Once the tax was repealed in1921, the Yankees owners could keep more of their profits, which exceeded $300,000 in 1922.
Furthermore, Ruppert and Huston were not taking distributions from their franchise; they were reinvesting all the profits. From 1920 through 1924, for example, 4 American League clubs distributed at least $200,000 to their owners, reducing the funds available for investing in minor-league talent. In contrast, the Yankees plowed over $1.6 million in profits back into the franchise; no other American League team retained even $700,000.34
The disappointment over the 1922 World Series debacle prompted the final divorce of the Two Colonels. The hated crosstown Giants swept the Series in 4r games, with hurler Bullet Joe Bush openly disrespecting Huggins during the final game, convincing Huston that the Manager could not control his players. Back at the Commodore Hotel after the game, Huston let out a wild yell, sending drinks and glasses flying with a wide sweep of his right hand and bellowing: “Miller Huggins has managed his last Yankee ballgame. He’s through! Through! Through!” When tracked down for his reaction, Ruppert backed Huggins, announcing, “I won’t fire a man who has just brought the Yankees 2 pennants.”
As long as the Yankees were unmistakably New York’s 2nd team, Giants Manager John McGraw was happy to allow his friends Huston and Ruppert to lease his home ballpark. Owner Charles Stoneham, too, liked the income generated by the lease. With the coming of Ruth, however, the Yankees boasted the league’s biggest draw and began to win as well. McGraw and Stoneham began to have 2nd thoughts regarding the stadium arrangement and decided they wanted the Yankees out. Ruppert also suspected that Ban Johnson hoped to see the Yankees evicted-this was at the height of the Johnson/Yankee feud- as a way to revoke their league charter, which required having a venue in which to play. In May 1920, it came out that Stoneham had given notice to the Yankees that he would not renew their lease after the season. He eventually relented, however, and extended the lease for another 2 years through 1922. Stoneham made it clear, though, that this was only a short-term accommodation unless the Yankees were permanently willing to pay an exorbitant rent.
Ruppert and Huston naturally recognized that they needed their own ballpark, and needed it soon by Opening Day 1923. A new ballpark would obviously provide many benefits beyond simply freeing themselves from the Giants control. The club would generate the ancillary revenue associated with a ballpark at the time, including concession revenue, rent from hiring out for football games and boxing matches and storage income. Huston estimated the annual receipts from these sources at $325,000.
In early 1921, Ruppert announced that the club had secured an option on a site in Manhattan. He assigned Charley McManus, a one-time executive in the real-estate department at Ruppert’s brewery and current Yankees front-office employee, as the point man for the stadium project. (When it was completed, McManus became Superintendent of Yankee Stadium, a position he held for many years thereafter.) As with the Yankees’ previous site searches, this one proved quite difficult as well - even without obstructions thrown up by a political machine, finding and assembling a suitably large, accessible site in New York was far from a simple task. The first and then several additional sites fell by the wayside for various reasons; the Yankees eventually struggled through 6 potential alternatives before finally settling on their current site in the Bronx. Ruppert and Huston purchased the majority of the site from Vincent Astor. They wrangled a key corner from a florist for only $14,000 before he discovered the true reason for the acquisition. In total the Yankee owners spent close to $600,000 to acquire the entire site and the construction cost of Yankee Stadium totaled about $1,600,000, bringing the all-in expenditure to roughly $2,200,000.
Once construction began in April 1922, Huston, the engineer, embraced the task of overseeing its construction. To help defray the cost, the American League loaned the Yankees owners $400,000 on a 10-year term at 7 % interest. The new stadium was clearly the preeminent and most majestic baseball venue in America and would hold this distinction for many years.
Ruppert Takes Sole Ownership
In the wake of the 1922 World Series sweep, Huston wanted out and Ruppert was tiring of the partnership as well. Huston was frustrated by his inability to bring in a Manager, he respected, and highly frustrated with Ruppert’s high-handed approach to running the ballclub. “We went into the business on a 50-50 partnership basis,” Huston wrote to his partner, “but now you have arrogated to yourself so much authority and doing continually so many things without consulting me that it is becoming a 1 man show.” Along with his frustration over Huggins, Huston resented what he considered Ruppert’s co-opting of Barrow, that the blame over the Mays imbroglio fell disproportionately on himself and what he considered Ruppert’s overall belittlement. Regarding several payments coming due, Huston added that he was ready to ante up his share, but “I will participate in no financing whatsoever until the affairs of the club are put on a truly partnership basis.” Perhaps just as importantly, Huston, who was not in the same financial class as his partner, felt nervous having essentially his entire net worth tied up in the team and the new Yankee Stadium.
As the partnership deteriorated, the Two Colonels entertained the possibility of selling the franchise, going so far as to negotiate a tentative sale for $2.5 million. When the sale fell through, Huston found a buyer for his half-interest. Ruppert, not interested in a new partner, decided to buy out Huston himself. The two negotiated a buyout of Huston’s half for $1.175 million: $450,000 in cash and the remainder in 9 annual principal payments beginning in June 1925 (the 1st payment was for $85,000 and the remaining 8 for $80,000) at 6 % interest. The transaction was finalized in May 1923.
With the buyout completed, Ruppert later offered Barrow the opportunity to buy a 10 % share of the Yankees for $300,000. Barrow did not have anything close to that amount and turned to his old friend and one-time partner Harry Stevens, the concessionaire, to lend him some of the money.
In the early 1930s, Ruppert quickly recognized that changes in the roster rules altered the practicality and usefulness or creating a farm system. In late 1931, he paid $250,000 for the Newark franchise in the International League, 1 step below the majors. In February 1932, Ruppert announced that the Yankees intended to own or control 4 minor-league franchises in different classifications. He hired future Hall of Fame executive George Weiss to run it, and by the mid-1930s the Yankees rivaled the Cardinals for baseball’s best farm system.
With the onset of the Depression, profits fell off dramatically for all teams, and several suffered staggering losses. In 1933, in aggregate, American League teams lost in excess of $1 million. The Yankees’ revenue advantage slipped as well, as 4teams fared better financially that dismal season. Profits declined from $271,028 in 1929 to a loss of $98,126 in 1933, yet the team’s payroll of $294,982 was still the highest in baseball. In fact, no other AL team had a payroll greater than $188,000. By 1939 Ruppert’s payroll was back up to $361,471, still the highest in the game.
In early 1938, Ruppert received treatment for phlebitis, an inflammation of the veins, in his left leg. Although the malady was not thought to be serious at the time, Ruppert was confined to his home for several days. The illness forced him to skip traveling to the Opening Day festivities for his newly acquired farm club in Kansas City. Throughout the year Ruppert struggled with the condition and its complications. On January 13,1939, after dropping in and out of a coma for several days, Ruppert died at age 71.
Meanwhile, the struggling Brooklyn Dodgers franchise had brought in the iconoclastic Larry MacPhail to run their organization. Two new economic opportunities (or challenges) faced baseball as World War II approached: radio and night baseball. In December 1938, MacPhail announced that he was pulling out of the no-radio agreement among the 3 New York teams, and that he would broadcast all Dodgers games. In response to MacPhail’s decision, the Giants began to waver on their pledge. Ruppert, ill, but still obsessed with his baseball team, encouraged Barrow to put the Yankees on radio as well. The Yankees and Giants always worked their schedule to minimize conflicting home dates. In the same spirit, the 2 agreed to team up for their radio broadcast rights in 1939. Each would broadcast only home games to minimize the risk of cutting into the other’s stadium attendance.
Not surprisingly, sponsor demand was intense for the inaugural New York broadcast rights. The 2 teams executed a 2-year contract with General Mills for Wheaties. Procter & Gamble also signed on to pitch Ivory Soap. From the 2 corporate sponsors the Yankees and Giants each received $110,000. The Dodgers, in a smaller market, received $87,500 despite broadcasting road games as well. [At the time announcers did not travel on the road; they broadcast re-creations based on wire reports.] The rights fees received by the New York clubs were significantly more than those received by the other franchises, which typically ranged from $30,000 to $60,000. By midseason 1939, Yankees attendance lagged 1938 by a significant margin. Team executives suspected both radio and the New York World’s Fair for the decrease in patronage. In total, attendance fell by over 100,000 from 1938 to 1939, despite a dominant team trying for its record-tying 4th consecutive pennant.
The sponsors fared poorly as well. Overall, between 3 P.M. and 5 P.M., baseball had about a 33% share nationwide. In Chicago the percentage of radios tuned to baseball was estimated slightly higher. In New York, however, baseball received only a 12 % share. Some of this was blamed on Yankees announcer Arch McDonald, a capable announcer from the South who may have been a little too laconic for the taste of New Yorkers. Because of the low 1939 ratings the teams voluntarily agreed to reduce their fee to $75,000. The clubs also brought in a new announcer, Mel Allen, to be the lead for both the Yankee and Giant broadcasts. For 1941, the Yankees and Giants held out for $75,000 again. But this time no sponsor could be found at that level. Neither team felt it worthwhile to put the games on for a lesser rights fee and withheld their games from radio in 1941.
In 1942, the Yankees and Giants were back on the air, and Allen returned as the lead announcer. In 1943, the 2 teams again failed to reach an agreement with a sponsor and neither the Yankees nor Giants games were aired that season. Finally, in 1944, Gillette stepped up as a sponsor. The Yankees would never again play a season without radio coverage.
Ruppert’s death on January 13,1939, threw the ownership of the Yankees into flux. He left the bulk of his estate in 3 equal shares to 2 nieces and Helen Weyant. Upon learning of her inheritance, Weyant expressed surprise and trepidation. She was a longtime acquaintance and the daughter of a deceased friend. Her brother Rex had been the Yankees Assistant Road Secretary for the past 3 years. Full control over the estate fell to the “executors and trustees for the lifetime of the beneficiaries, who are to receive the entire proceeds during their lives.” Initially Ruppert’s wealth was estimated at $40 million to $45 million, of which about 60% would have to be paid in estate taxes. The Yankees organization was valued at around $10 million, requiring a tax payment of $5 million to $7 million. In other words, the estate would have to monetize many of the assets to pay the taxes and distribute the value of the estate to the beneficiaries.
Ruppert had designated 3 trustees for the bulk of the estate: his brother-in-law, H. Garrison Sillick Jr.; his brother, George Ruppert; and his longtime attorney, Byron Clark Jr. Clark also became the Estate’s Executor. Ruppert had added Barrow as a 4th trustee for the Yankee corporation and he was named the team’s president. Although the beneficiaries ultimately would command the proceeds of the estate, Ruppert left the decision-making authority in the hands of the trustees. George Ruppert sought to reassure Yankee fans that Ruppert had provided for the Yankees, and that the team’s management and operation would not change.
Almost immediately rumors of a sale emerged. Despite George Ruppert’s assurances regarding the safeguards built into Ruppert’s will, payment of the estate’s tax burden weighed heavily on the trustees.
As early as July 1939, Clark disclosed that in response to the many sale inquiries, Barrow had informally valued the organization at $7 million.45 By March 1940 Barrow felt he needed to respond to the many rumors of an impending sale: “I have had several legitimate offers for the sale of the club, which I am not at liberty to mention just now, but this is not one of them. It would take a lot of money to buy the Yankees. I estimate the club to be worth roughly $6,000,000. Anybody who has that kind of money and is ready to put it up, can buy the Yankees.”
The price continued to fall as the tax matter dragged. The asking price was actually closer to $4 million, and the Yankees received no bona-fide offers over $2 million. Clark, George Ruppert and Barrow were all discussing the sale with several potential suitors, including Joseph Kennedy (patriarch of the Kennedy clan), with little success. In July 1940, George Ruppert acknowledged that the franchise had been offered to Democratic Party bigwig and Postmaster General James Farley for $4 million. To line up the capital, Farley was struggling to assemble a syndicate of moneyed investors. The trustees required that he muster a down payment of at least $1.5 million. In December 1940, Clark traveled with Barrow to the winter meetings in Chicago reportedly to facilitate the sale. But raising the down payment proved more difficult than expected, and Farley’s money-raising road show dragged on for nearly a year. In the end, he could not round up the necessary funds.
In the meantime, Ruppert’s estate turned out to be worth much less than originally estimated. The trustees placed the overall value at only $7 million, a fraction of the earlier approximation. They valued the brewery stock at $2.5 million, the ballclub at $2.4 million, real estate at $600,000, and additional disparate items at $1.45 million, including miscellaneous securities, furniture, jewelry, paintings and a $50,000 yacht. Of course, the trustees naturally had reason to value the estate as low as possible to minimize taxes. Nevertheless, the value of Ruppert’s holdings was clearly below expectations. It turned out that Ruppert owned only a portion of the brewery stock. In the real estate, he so prized, he owned only a minority position, and, furthermore, the value of many of the properties had declined during the Depression. Magnifying the trustees’ predicament, the taxing authorities placed a much higher value on the estate than did the trustees. For example, the government valued the baseball operation at roughly $5 million as opposed to around $2.4 million by the estate. To settle the value disagreement, the estate decided to litigate the issue, which also had the advantage of postponing any tax payment until a resolution had been achieved. Regardless of the outcome of the litigation, it was now unmistakable that either the team or the brewery would have to be sold to pay the estate tax. Because the team was more liquid than the brewery and theoretically a less stable income generator, the Yankees organization seemed the more reasonable disposition.
As the dispute dragged on, the trustees grew weary of the wrangling in which they had little financial stake and they had no desire to oversee all the complicated negotiations. On July 29, 1941, as permitted in the trust documents, they turned the administration of the estate over to the Manufacturers Trust Company. Barrow also had to sue the estate to preserve the rights to his 10 % ownership in the team. The original loan from Harry Stevens to purchase his share had been amended in 1938 to reflect a principal amount of $250,000 and an interest rate of 3½ %. In his settlement with the estate, Barrow received a 10 % interest in the team for $305,000 under the same terms as the original agreement with Ruppert.
MacPhail Puts Together a Syndicate
Del Webb and Dan Topping
After the Pearl Harbor attack and America’s entry in World War II, non-war-related economic activity quickly came to a standstill. Barrow and Manufacturers Trust both received a number of inquiries, but none at a level they felt reasonable. In 1943 Larry MacPhail, now unemployed in baseball and serving in the War Department, put together a 10-person syndicate to purchase the team. His lineup of investors included construction magnate Del Webb and sportsman Dan Topping. Topping owned the Brooklyn Tigers of the National Football League. Because the team played in Ebbets field, he was effectively a tenant of MacPhail’s once he took over the Dodgers in early 1938, and the two became friendly. When they ran into each other in California during the war - MacPhail was there on War Department business, Topping with the Marine Corps-MacPhail invited him to join his syndicate. At the time Topping was having difficulty negotiating a lease renewal with Dodgers President Branch Rickey. Assuming he could get permission from the NFL to move to Manhattan (the New York football Giants already played there), owning Yankee Stadium would give him a playing venue he could control.
MacPhail first met Webb, a Phoenix-based millionaire in the construction business, in Washington during the war. MacPhail worked as an assistant to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, while Webb frequently traveled to Washington to negotiate war-related construction work. At the time, Webb was considering the purchase of the Oakland Pacific Coast League team for $60,000. When MacPhail contacted him regarding the Yankees opportunity, he quickly changed his focus. Other investors included Chicago taxicab magnate John Hertz and New York sanitation commissioner Bill Carey.
Barrow hated the idea of the boisterous, aggressive and spotlight-seeking MacPhail taking control of “his” team. He went so far as to state that MacPhail would only gain control of the Yankees “over his [Barrow’s] dead body.”
MacPhail offered $2.8 million for 96.88% of the stock ($2.5 million for the 86.88 % owned by the 3 Ruppert beneficiaries and $300,000 for the 10 % controlled by Barrow). The remaining 3.12 % was owned by George Ruppert and 2 others. In February 1944, despite Barrow’s distaste for MacPhail, acceptance by the trust company of the offer appeared imminent. Barrow managed to delay the sale, most likely because the estate received another extension on its tax bill. Commissioner Landis helped slow MacPhail down, when he ruled Hertz, who was involved in horse racing, persona non grata in baseball ownership. Landis’s edict forced MacPhail to restructure his ownership entity.
His delay in hand, Barrow sought to drive up the price or find another buyer. But finding a willing buyer with available cash under the wartime circumstances was highly problematical. In 1 scheme, Barrow hoped to steer the franchise to his friend, Tom Yawkey. This plan suffered from several shortcomings, most notably that Yawkey would 1st have to find a buyer for his Red Sox. In addition, Yawkey’s finances were potentially in limbo due to a recent divorce. Barrow also held out hope that James Farley could reformulate his syndicate, but that idea, too, came to nothing.
With little hope of either an alternate buyer in the short term or a delay until the end of the war and a reinvigoration of the civilian economy-which still seemed a long way off--Manufacturers Trust was becoming impatient. Furthermore, Webb and Topping, both now awakened to the availability of the team and their own interest in acquiring it, continued to pursue the club. The trust company attempted to reinstate MacPhail’s original terms by contacting Webb. They let him know that the estate might now be willing to sell at the original terms. The estate was also actively selling off some of its real-estate holdings, but the war depressed prices in real estate as well. Only a fraction of the tax burden could be raised through the liquidation of real-estate assets.
Independent of Webb, Topping learned through his society connections that Manufacturers Trust was getting antsy. In late 1944, when Topping again encountered MacPhail in New York, he proposed that they try to revive the deal. MacPhail needed little prompting, and the 2 decided that they would simplify their proposed ownership by narrowing the syndicate to include only Webb in their reformulated venture. Topping, through his numerous connections, took the lead in contacting Barrow. Topping’s father and Harry Sillick had been friends, and through H. Garrison Sillick III, he had become friendly with Barrow’s daughter, who was married to Garrison. She acted as an intermediary and set up a meeting between Barrow and Topping. Once Barrow realized the hurriedness with which Manufacturers Trust planned to dispose of the franchise, he merely hoped to preserve as much of his legacy as possible. He met 1-on-1 with both Topping and Webb. With both he stressed the importance of maintaining the status quo and running a 1st-class, well-respected and championship organization. Both gave him enough assurance that he could sell without too much trepidation-although he had little choice, in any case.
In late January 1945, MacPhail, Webb, and Topping finally purchased the team, split evenly so that each owned 1-3rd. They put $250,000 down with the remainder to follow in March. Prior to their final payment, the trio also agreed to purchase George Ruppert’s and associates’ 3.12 % interest, giving them complete ownership of the team. Webb and Topping supplied the majority of the capital, lending MacPhail much of his obligation and MacPhail became President under a 10-year contract. The final transfer of operational control occurred in late February.
When MacPhail took over the Yankees, he was already famous within baseball circles, having run the Reds and Dodgers with some success. His fame came from his game promotions and events, his installation of lights in both cities to allow night games and his embrace of radio. He had hired the unknown Red Barber to broadcast Reds games and later brought him to Brooklyn. MacPhail and his 2 partners had clearly made a good buy. Even in 1945, the financial potential of the Yankees shined through. The Yankees turned a profit of just over $300,000 on $1.6 million in revenues. Though the farm clubs showed a slight loss of just over $100,000, overall, the organization made $202,000 during a wartime season. With even a normal uptick from a return to peacetime, revenues and profits should soar.
And in fact, that’s what occurred. Nearly all teams drew spectacularly in 1946, led by the Yankees. The club’s attendance of 2.27 million obliterated the previous major-league record, as the Yankees became the 1st team to draw over 2 million fans. The Yankees made $808,866 in profit that year, surely an all-time record to that point, and nearly 1-3rd of the purchase price just 1-year earlier. And as with Ruppert, the Yankee triumvirate did not take any dividends-they reinvested all the profits into the ballclub. In 1946, the Yankees spent $583,989 on their “player replacement program,” including scout salaries, scout travel, baseball schools, newspaper and statistical services, bonuses to amateur free agents and an allocation of the team’s general administrative costs among other items. This amount increased every year for the remainder of the decade.
MacPhail also pushed the business potential of the club by ending the club’s radio partnership with the Giants and exploiting radio’s possibilities. The Yankees became the 1st major-league team to have the announcer travel with the team on the road, eliminating the campy recreations. With Mel Allen as the lead announcer both home and away, the Yankees jumped to the forefront of capitalizing on the medium. Further modernizing the organization, MacPhail introduced lights and night baseball to Yankee Stadium (as he had in Cincinnati and Brooklyn) for the 1946 season.
Webb and Topping Jettison MacPhail
After 3 years of running the Yankees, the pressure and constant limelight began to unhinge MacPhail. Near the end of the 1947 season, he arranged an initial public stock offering of shares of the Yankees franchise through a New York investment bank. MacPhail and the bankers worked out an IPO that would make just under 50 % of the club available to the public. The bankers estimated that this stock offering would raise about $3 million, implying a franchise value of roughly $6 million. MacPhail contrived the transaction to cash out part of his investment. Topping and Webb, however, had no desire to come under the scrutiny and reporting requirements of the public market. The 2 quickly resolved to buy out their partner. Just before the start of the World Series, Topping and Webb reached an agreement to acquire MacPhail’s 1-3rd interest for around $2 million, a huge profit over his initial investment, most of which he had borrowed. Despite selling his ownership interest, MacPhail would remain as President and de-facto General Manager.
The agreement to sell did not calm MacPhail. Just the opposite: His decision to surrender his ownership in baseball’s most popular franchise further troubled him. Rumors persisted that MacPhail feuded with other members of the Yankees executive team, most of whom had been in place for many years and were protégés of Ruppert and Barrow. MacPhail’s maniacal behavior culminated with his breakdown at the Yankees victory celebration dinner in the Biltmore hotel after they won the 1941 World Series. He stumbled around the dining room, alternating between bouts of sentimental crying and irrational raging. He saved his most vile epitaphs and anger to denigrate Brooklyn’s Branch Rickey, whose club the Yankees had just defeated. When John McDonald, MacPhail’s former employee in Brooklyn (against whom MacPhail still harbored a grudge for a magazine story), defended Rickey, MacPhail punched him in the eye.MacPhail next lurched over to George Weiss’s table and berated his work. The rest of table watched in horror as MacPhail told Weiss he had “48 hours to make up your mind what you are going to do.” Weiss remained as calm as possible and suggested: “Larry, I don’t want to make a decision here tonight. We have all been drinking. I would like to wait until tomorrow and discuss this with you.” MacPhail, in no condition to be mollified, responded by firing Weiss on the spot. As MacPhail walked away, Weiss’s wife chased after him to appeal for her husband’s job, but he just ignored her. A shaken Weiss went outside to cool down and commiserate with top scout Paul Krichell. Weiss’s wife returned to the table in tears.
Topping finally seized control of the situation. He tried to calm MacPhail down only to be told he had “been born with a silver spoon in [his] mouth.” Topping then guided the still crazed MacPhail into the kitchen where the two huddled alone. After calming him down somewhat, Topping ushered MacPhail out a side door so he could gather himself. Topping and Webb accompanied Weiss up to his hotel room to reassure him of his position with the Yankees. MacPhail actually returned later, still combative, but no longer unglued. Webb and Topping, naturally, had no intention of leaving their $6 million operation in MacPhail’s hands and quickly worked to quietly terminate his Yankee contract. To run the club the duo promoted Weiss to General Manager, Topping assumed the Presidency and Webb a key role on the Ownership Councils.
Dan Topping enjoyed a “sportsman” lifestyle that we seldom see any more in America, one founded on inherited wealth, some athletic ability, and active involvement in professional or other sports. Topping’s life also often entailed a playboy youth and multiple attractive socialite wives. His maternal grandfather amassed a fortune in the tin-plate business, started the American Can Company and had interests in railroads, tobacco, and banks. He left virtually his entire fortune of $40 million to $50 million to Dan’s mother. His paternal grandfather was a longtime president of the Republic Iron and Steel Company.
His parents gave him the education befitting a young aristocrat. He attended the Hun School, an expensive boarding school in Princeton, New Jersey, where he starred in football, baseball, and hockey. He had attended the University of Pennsylvania and played both baseball and football. Topping took up golf and became a top-notch amateur, winning several tournaments. After finishing school, Topping spent 3 years working at a bank, but quickly realized that the life of toiling for a dollar wasn’t for him.
In 1934, the 22-year-old Topping purchased a partial interest in the Brooklyn Dodgers of the fledgling National Football League. He soon acquired a majority ownership and spent some money to improve his club. By 1940, he had assembled a decent squad, but with the coming of World War II, most of the Dodgers’ best players entered the military and the team fell back in the standings.
Del Webb had survived a near-fatal bout of typhoid fever in his late 20s to build one of the West’s great construction and homebuilding empires. After he finally recovereding from his illness, his doctor advised Webb to move to a dry climate. Webb and his wife took their $100 in savings and moved to Phoenix, Arizona. In Phoenix, he began building grocery stores and when the Depression came, he managed to secure large government projects to keep his company afloat and even thrive. Webb’s contacts eventually included President Franklin Roosevelt, oil millionaire Ed Pauley, and Democratic power broker Robert Hannegan. The government contracts Webb landed during World War II made his company one of the country’s largest contractors.
Webb and Topping owned the Yankees equally. Both were wealthy and independent and neither liked or had experience with equal partners. Moreover, their personalities and backgrounds were diametrically opposed: “Webb is the Far Westerner who looks as though he just shucked off his cowboy stuff,” wrote Harold Rosenthal. “Topping is an Easterner in the yachts-polo-anyone-for-tennis mold. Unless Webb has known you a long time, you’ll get a ‘yes,’ ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ from him. Topping is the open, friendly type, the kind the headmaster tells you your boy will turn out to be when you enroll him in one of the more fashionable Eastern prep schools.” Nevertheless, the duo made a surprisingly long-lasting and effective team.
The Yankees owners’ next high-profile baseball involvement came in December 1950, when baseball’s owners were considering extending the contract of Commissioner Happy Chandler. Webb detested Chandler and considered him rather a prude and prone to offer opinions and decisions without all the facts. Webb also had a more personal reason to dislike the commissioner. “His construction company built the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas and I investigated to make sure that Webb’s involvement with the gambling center ended there,” Chandler recalled. “This seemed a sensible and understandable precaution, but Webb was furious.”
Webb and Topping proved adept at working the backrooms of baseball ownership. Despite initial support for Chandler among many of the owners, the Yankees duo, supported by St. Louis Cardinals Owner Fred Saigh, maneuvered the vote away from Chandler. Webb was not reticent about his involvement: “If I’ve never done anything else for baseball, I did it when I got rid of Chandler.”
In late 1953, Del Webb and Dan Topping Topping sold the franchise’s real estate, including Yankee Stadium and the minor-league Kansas City Blues stadium, to Chicago-based businessman Arnold Johnson for $6.5 million, a tidy profit considering that their total investment in the team was roughly $4.225 million after their buyout of MacPhail. The Yankees signed a 28-year lease with Johnson with rents starting at $600,000 a year and declining to $350,000 a year by the last year of the lease. As part of the deal and to help Johnson finance the transaction, Webb and Topping took back a 2nd mortgage on Yankee stadium for $2.9 million. Johnson then flipped Yankee Stadium to the Knights of Columbus for $2.5 million, leasing the stadium back from them for 28 years at rates significantly less than what he was lease it to the Yankees for.
The next year, helped by some behind-the-scenes politicking by Webb and Topping, Johnson bought the Philadelphia Athletics and moved them to Kansas City. Several AL owners expressed objections to his financial relationship with the Yankees-both the sandwich lease, making him effectively the Yankees’ landlord, and the 2nd mortgage between the owners. At the time of Johnson’s purchase, he was given 90 days to work these issues out, a time period that was eventually indefinitely extended.
During the 1950s baseball’s owners spent considerable time and energy mulling over the geographic future of their sport. After 50 years of franchise stability, many began to salivate over the potential huge payday in untapped metropolitan areas. Webb believed in realignment as opposed to expansion, as there were still plenty of struggling 2-team cities that could no longer support 2 teams.
By the end of the 1950s, it was clear to most observers there were more major-league-ready cities than there were franchises to go around. Business interests and politicians in those cities were pressing baseball for expansion. The inherently conservative baseball owners, however, continued to resist growing beyond 16 franchises. Ironically, the greatest pressure came in New York. To rectify having only 1 team after the departure of the Giants and Dodgers, well-connected New York lawyer Bill Shea, with the support of New York politicians and the possibility of a new stadium in Queens, began canvassing the country for potential investors and cities in a new, 3rd major league, dubbed the Continental League.
After fighting a cagey rear-guard action for a roughly a year, Webb eventually realized he had little choice but to accept a National League expansion team in Queens as the least bad option. He was also the driving force in directing American League expansion into Los Angeles. Although other cites appeared to have more support, Webb wanted an American League team in California and if the National League was going to force a 2nd team on his city, he could do the same in Los Angeles.
On the field the team dominated in the 1950s like no other team in the history of the sport. But in the aftermath of the 7-game loss to the underdog Pittsburgh Pirates in the 1960 World Series, Topping and Webb eased both Manager Casey Stengel and Weiss out of their positions. “A contract with Casey didn’t mean anything,” Topping complained. “Casey was always talking about quitting. For a couple of months there [late in the 1958 season] we didn’t know whether we had a manager or not. We decided right then that we would never be put in that position again.”59 Topping also wanted to get more directly involved in the operation of the franchise, something that would have been much trickier with the imperial Weiss still in charge.
Topping quickly took to his activist role. When the Yankees won the World Series in 1961 after a 2-year drought, The Sporting News named Topping its Executive of the Year for making “a radical change in the leadership of the Yankee club.” The Sporting News further touted his “courage,” and emphasized that he had become the key man running the franchise. “Had this bold move failed,” opined the paper, “Topping’s own position could conceivably have become untenable.”
CBS Gets a Baseball Team
In August 1964, the Yankees announced the sale of the franchise to CBS, which dragged on throughout the offseason, troubled by additional revelations and commentary. Webb and Topping had first seriously considered selling the team a couple of years earlier, when Topping went through some health problems. Topping felt he could no longer run the team and sounded out Webb about buying him out. Topping eventually rebounded but needed the money a sale could bring, and the 2 owners agreed to explore selling the team. With his many ex-wives and children to support, the proceeds from the sale of the team would ease Topping’s financial burdens.
The 2 initially reached an agreement with Lehman Brothers, then a large investment house. The sale was dependent on some complex tax angles, and while the lawyers and accountants were working them out, CBS Chairman William Paley called his friend Topping to see if the team was available. Topping told him they were already committed in another direction, but that if something changed, he would get back to him. When the sale fell through, Topping called Paley on July 1, 1964, to see if he was still interested. Paley was and the 2 began negotiations.
On August 14th, Topping and Webb agreed to the final deal, selling 80% of the Yankees to CBS for $11.2 million. Additionally, Topping would stay on as the operating partner. Topping later testified that he had received offers as high as $16 million, “but they wanted to run the whole show, and I preferred a deal where I could remain active.”
It is hard to overestimate the outcry generated by the sale of the Yankees to a television network. Up to this point baseball teams rarely had true corporate ownership. More importantly, in 1964 television was rightly seen as a large and growing phenomenon in American life, and its ultimate impact was not yet fully understood. The sale of America’s number-1 baseball team to its number-1 television network appeared to foreshadow grave consequences.
Many criticized the process as much as the substance. Fearing just this sort of reaction, Webb and Topping persuaded American League President Joe Cronin to get league approval by telephoning the league owners rather than calling a meeting. The owners approved the sale 8 to 2, but the 2dissidents, Charles Finley of the Kansas City Athletics and Arthur Allyn of the Chicago White Sox, went public with their opposition. Eventually Cronin felt compelled to call a league meeting to confirm the sale, but the vote remained the same, and the sale was finalized on November 2,1964. Webb had little desire to remain in a ceremonial position; in March he sold his remaining share for $1.4 million. Topping stayed on as Team President.
Topping was soon overmatched without a strong baseball executive as Manager. After a slow start in 1966, with encouragement from CBS, Topping shook up his staff. But the team just wasn’t good enough and finished last. Topping resigned on September 19th, selling his remaining 10 % share to CBS. Topping publicly stated that he had resigned for personal reasons, but there can be little doubt that CBS wanted little to do with the men, who had sold them a now struggling club for a record price. To replace Topping, CBS would appoint Mike Burke, who had been an executive at CBS for several years and on the Yankees board for the past 2.
Not surprisingly, a large conglomerate like CBS, with vast business holdings in a variety of industries, turned to a versatile business executive like Burke to run the Yankees. Burke, who wore tailored suits made in Rome, was a dashing figure, especially compared with the staid and conservative Yankees. He had been a football star at Penn, a war hero, a drinking buddy of Ernest Hemingway, an OSS agent and an executive with Ringling Brothers circus, before joining CBS. His job now was to restore a legendary baseball team to its proper place of glory. “I won’t be satisfied,” he said, “until the Yankees are once again the champions of the world.”
Once in charge, Burke and General Manager Lee MacPhail (Larry’s son) smartly rebuilt the organization’s talent level. Nevertheless, despite several years of slowly improving talent, CBS decided to sell. Having purchased the most famous franchise in sports just 8-years earlier, CBS was reportedly losing money on the Yankees, though that was not the primary motivation for selling. CBS had bought the team for its famous brand, in order to bring additional prestige to its hugely successful media company. Instead, the team fell from glory and many fans tended to blame the largely unseen corporate managers for the change in fortune. “CBS came to the conclusion,” said a spokesman, “that perhaps it was not as viable for the network to own the Yankees as for some people. Fans get worked up over great men, not great corporations. We came to the realization, I think, that sports franchises really flourish better with people owning them.”
George Steinbrenner Takes Center Stage
George and Mike Burke, 1973 Press Conference
In mid-1972 CBS chairman William S. Paley asked Burke to put together a group to buy the club and Burke looked for a purchaser that would allow him to continue running the team. Cleveland Indians General Manager Gabe Paul introduced Burke to George M. Steinbrenner, the 42-year-old CEO of American Shipbuilding Company who had recently come very close to purchasing his hometown Indians. A decade earlier Steinbrenner had taken over the small Great Lakes shipping company from his father, bought out most of his competitors and built an empire.
Although hardly a household name, Steinbrenner had been involved with sports teams for many years. Once a track star at Williams College, he was later a football graduate assistant to coach Woody Hayes at Ohio State and had held football coaching positions at Northwestern and Purdue. In the early 1960s, he bought the Cleveland Pipers, a team in the short-lived American Basketball League and made an immediate splash by signing the most coveted college player in the country, Ohio State’s Jerry Lucas. The league soon folded, but a few years later Steinbrenner bought a stake in the Chicago Bulls and began acquiring racehorses.
Burke and Steinbrenner came to a deal quickly, and the formal announcement was made on January 4, 1973. Steinbrenner and several other general partners put up $10 million, $4 million less than CBS had paid 8 years earlier. With the stadium about to be substantially renovated, a team coming into contention, decades of tradition to fall back on, and sitting in the biggest market in the country, it was an extraordinary deal. Burke reportedly could have received more money from other bidders, but with Steinbrenner’s group, he would be a General Partner. More importantly, Burke was led to believe he would continue to run the club as Chief Executive. GM Lee MacPhail and Manager Ralph Houk, also remained in their posts.
Just six days after the deal was announced, Steinbrenner held a press conference to introduce the other limited partners, including Gabe Paul, who had been running the Cleveland Indians. The news stunned Burke, who realized that Paul, with more than 3 decades of experience running baseball teams, would be no mere adviser. Steinbrenner had withheld the news of Paul’s inclusion from Burke, without whom he would not have secured the team. Burke resigned a few months later, after it had become clear that his control would be much more limited than he anticipated. He would not be the last person to underestimate George Steinbrenner.
Burke made his most lasting contribution to the future of New York and the Yankees when he came to a deal with Mayor John Lindsay for the city to thoroughly remodel Yankee Stadium. The 50-year-old ballpark had been deteriorating without significant upkeep for many years until Burke had the interior and exterior painted in 1967. Five years later he made a deal to have the city back a $24 million renovation, the same cost the city had borne to build Shea Stadium for the Mets in 1964. Burke had been aggressively pursued by the officials building new facilities right across the Hudson River in New Jersey and smartly used this leverage with the city. The football Giants, the Yankees’ co-tenants in Yankee Stadium, ultimately decided to abandon New York and move to New Jersey, but Burke had no desire to do so. “Yankee Stadium is the most famous arena since the Roman Colosseum,” he said.
The renovation ended up costing the city more than $100 million (largely due to major road redesign), but Burke can be said to have saved the Yankees for New York. He worked out a deal to play both the 1974 and 1975 seasons in Shea Stadium, allowing the contractors nearly 2½ years for construction. Ultimately the renovation removed the 105 columns that reinforced the 3-tiered grandstand (which had obstructed many views), replaced the roof and all the seats. The stadium reopened on time in 1976, but by then another man was in charge to reap the benefits. The additional revenues from the revamped ballpark would be critical in helping underwrite the team’s aggressive approach to the coming free agency.
Steinbrenner, meanwhile, spent the 1974 season dealing with his own serious legal difficulties. In April, he was indicted on 14 felony charges, most stemming from his illegal contributions to the re-election campaign of President Richard Nixon. Although Steinbrenner tried to whitewash his offenses in later years, the facts of the case were pretty clear then and now. In order to circumvent campaign donation limits, Steinbrenner devised a fraudulent laundering scheme at American Shipbuilding: the company gave large “bonuses” to several employees, who were then required to donate that money (less taxes) back to Steinbrenner to funnel to Nixon’s people. Furthermore, Steinbrenner coerced these same employees to lie to the FBI investigators and illegally destroyed documents related to the case. When a couple of his workers made full confessions to the grand jury, the indictments followed. He faced 6 years in federal prison.
In late August, Steinbrenner’s lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, worked out a generous deal for his client. In exchange for pleading guilty to both authorizing $25,000 in illegal campaign contributions and conniving to cover up his crimes, Steinbrenner paid $15,000 in fines, but he avoided jail. In November, MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended Steinbrenner from day-to-day operations of the Yankees for 2 years. The suspension had little teeth- Steinbrenner could not represent the club at league meetings, or conduct business deals with other teams, but he remained very much in charge. “Unless Bowie Kuhn has the telephones bugged,” wrote Red Smith, “there will be nothing to prevent him from consulting with Gabe Paul every hour on the hour.” Kuhn himself recognized this: “Of course I knew, and I couldn’t object to his involvement in big money decisions. So long as he didn’t flaunt it.” Nevertheless, during his “suspension,” Steinbrenner sat in his owner’s box at Shea Stadium and could be seen yelling into the dugout ,if he disagreed with something Manager Bill Virdon was doing.
When Steinbrenner acquired the Yankees for $10 million, the purchase included 2 parking lots that the club flipped to the city, leaving a net purchase price of $8.8 million. At the time of his acquisition, Steinbrenner initially secured a controlling interest and 20 percent of the stock for a cash outlay of only $168,000, raising the rest from a number of limited partners and loans. Along with Paul, his partners included a hodgepodge of wealthy investors, including oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt; Tom Hunt, a classmate at Williams and a law partner and backer of Richard Nixon; and John DeLorean, the automobile executive and innovator.
The team was not profitable during the early years of Steinbrenner’s ownership, particularly before the renovation of Yankee Stadium, and the team found it necessary to make capital calls to meet the team’s obligations. Over the 1st 3 years under Steinbrenner, the Yankees owners had to ante up an additional $3.69 million. Finally, in 1976 with the return to the World Series, the team reported a net income of $0.23 million and the capital calls ended. From 1977 through 1979, however, the team again reported losses, though relatively small-less than $1 million per year.
Naturally several limited partners did not wish to fund their capital calls. In the troubled New York of the 1970s not only was it not obvious that that the team would eventually be highly profitable, but some were also leery of potential liabilities under the loan that helped fund much of the purchase. Like nearly all partnership agreements, the one covering the Yankees had a dilution provision- if an investor didn’t fund when called, he was diluted by twice the amount of the unfunded capital call. When Steinbrenner or other investors funded capital calls on behalf of those who didn’t, their share of the team expanded. By the end of the 1975 season Steinbrenner had increased his ownership interest to around 26.5%. Some limited investors chafed at Steinbrenner’s management style. He generally did not feel it necessary to keep the limited partners up to speed on the Yankees’ ever-evolving circumstances, both on and off the field. One of Steinbrenner’s original partners, John McMullen, who later owned the Houston Astros, famously quipped, “There’s nothing so limited as being a limited partner of George’s.”
By the early 1980s, Steinbrenner had expanded his share of the ownership to 55%, which grew further to around 60% by the late 1990s, and roughly 70 percent at the time of his death. Of the original limited partners, the only 1 left as of this writing (due to transfers and death) was Lester Crown and his family, who own around
13%.
As Managing General Partner, Steinbrenner had veto power over who could buy the limited-partnership interests in the event a limited partner wanted to sell. Occasionally, a limited partner would complain of this restriction, though the club defended this as necessary to help protect the integrity and reputation of the franchise. The limited partners who chose to stay benefited enormously from the massive increase in the value of the franchise over the 4-plus decades with the Steinbrenners at the helm.
Kuhn reinstated Steinbrenner on March 1,1976, perfect timing for the owner. After 2 years of being substantially outdrawn by the Mets while sharing Shea Stadium, in 1976, the Yankees led the league in attendance as the only AL team to attract over 2 million fans. With free agency being institutionalized in the new collective-bargaining agreement signed during the season, the Yankees were uniquely poised to take advantage of the new state of affairs. They now had a refurbished stadium and the best-drawing team in the league situated in the media capital of the nation. Over the next 40 years, Steinbrenner and his front office would use this advantage to unremittingly land many of baseball’s most coveted free agents.
With his aggressive, demanding posture on player acquisition, Steinbrenner was a formidable owner, and when teamed with a quality, assertive General Manager the Yankees would continue to deliver as baseball’s winningest franchise, often despite incredible interpersonal drama both in the front office and with the players. When it came time to replace his original GM, Gabe Paul, after winning his 1st World Series in 1977, Steinbrenner would promote Cedric Tallis and the Yankees repeated in 1978. But the owner soon tired of Tallis too, and there followed a parade of Yankees General Managers, 10 in all over the next 14 years, each one needing to respond to the boss’s temper and whims. Despite a huge monetary advantage, the talent in the Yankees organization slowly slipped away, not to return until the 1990s. In fact, it took a 2nd Steinbrenner suspension, this 1 lasting from 1990 to 1993, to allow another General Manager (Gene Michael) to keep the job more than a couple of years and when Steinbrenner returned the club was back in contention again.
In December 1986, a man named Howie Spira called George Steinbrenner to peddle dirt on Yankees star outfielder Dave Winfield, with whom Steinbrenner had been feuding for several years, most recently over Steinbrenner’s contractual obligations to make contributions to Winfield’s charitable foundation. Spira, who for a time had access to Winfield through his friendship with Winfield’s former agent Al Frohman, had developed a hatred for the outfielder after his exile from the inner circle. A free-lance radio reporter, who would often show up at Yankees and Mets games and a self-proclaimed gambler in debt to loan sharks, Spira claimed he had evidence of shady activities on the part of Winfield’s associates and his foundation.
After several more calls with Spira, mostly through Steinbrenner’s proxies, the owner and his legal team decided to use Spira’s allegations against the foundation in their legal wrangling with Winfield. All this remained behind the scenes, and Spira, who believed Steinbrenner had promised him $150,000 and a job for his evidence, began to hound Steinbrenner and his associates aggressively to honor the alleged commitment, bemoaning that he was desperate for money to cover gambling debts. Eventually, Steinbrenner capitulated and on January 7, 1990, paid Spira $40,000 in exchange for an agreement that Spira would keep their relationship and payment confidential. (A year later Spira would be convicted for extortion for his threatening harassment of Steinbrenner.)
Unfortunately for Steinbrenner, Spira remained bitter over the settlement and pushed his grievances in the press: In March the story of Steinbrenner’s payment broke in the New York newspapers. In addition, several recordings made by Spira of his telephone calls became public. Almost immediately Commissioner Fay Vincent opened an investigation into the payment and Steinbrenner’s association with Spira, assigning MLB Investigator John Dowd, famous for investigation of Pete Rose’s gambling, to examine the case.
After a roughly 4-month investigation, Vincent concluded that Steinbrenner had maintained an “undisclosed working relationship with a known gambler,” and that he had paid Spira for “negative information” to use against 1 of his own players. Vincent ruled that such actions violated the rule prohibiting conduct “not to be in the best interests of baseball.” Vincent intended to suspend Steinbrenner for 2 years, with a 3-year probationary period thereafter.
Steinbrenner, however, didn’t want the term “suspension” to be used on any punishment as it would jeopardize his position as Vice President on the US Olympic Committee. Alternatively, Vincent and Steinbrenner agreed that he could step down as the managing general partner with “no further involvement in the day-to-day operations of that club … and will be treated as if he had been placed on the permanent ineligible list with 2 exceptions.” He would be allowed to “participate in major financial and business decisions of the New York Yankees solely in his capacity as a limited partner,” and he would be able to attend a limited number of major-league games with the commissioner’s approval. Steinbrenner also agreed not to sue. Additionally, Steinbrenner was required to reduce his percentage of ownership from roughly 55% to less than 50 %.
Steinbrenner initially proposed that his oldest son, Hank, then 33 years old, take over as managing general partner. Hank, however, likely because he didn’t want to appear to be just his father’s vehicle for running the team and the less than unanimous preliminary reaction from the team’s limited partners, declined. Vincent vetoed Steinbrenner’s next suggestion, Yankees executive Leonard Kleinman, due to his own taint from the Spira affair. The Kleinman nomination had come at the recommendation of Steinbrenner’s attorney as a way around the agreement not to sue, which Steinbrenner had quickly begun to chafe at; once rejected by Vincent - which they fully expected-Kleinman could sue.
In the meantime, the Yankees still needed a managing general partner, finally settling on Robert Nederlander, 1 of a group of 3 brothers who were among Steinbrenner’s initial limited partners. Upon his approval by Vincent, the 57-year-old theatrical producer and theater owner took charge of the Yankees. And though Steinbrenner continued to find ways to make his wishes known, Nederlander clearly held the reins. On baseball matters he generally deferred to his baseball operations team, and GM Gene Michael was given enough independence to begin rebuilding the ballclub with a new generation of younger ballplayers.
In December 1991, Nederlander, who had accepted the head job more as a favor to Steinbrenner than any real desire for the role and had tired of the Boss’s constant carping, resigned to concentrate on his theatrical interests. In his stead Yankees named Daniel McCarthy, another limited partner and a tax attorney for both Steinbrenner and American Shipbuilding. Vincent had little appetite for McCarthy, who had sued Vincent, when he bounced Steinbrenner- alleging a potential loss of value to the franchise without Steinbrenner at the helm-and quashed his nomination. Finally, Vincent and the Yankees agreed upon Steinbrenner’s 31-year-old son-in-law Joe Molloy, who was married to his daughter Jessica. Perhaps surprisingly, Molloy ran the Yankees with some independence and skill, while letting his baseball people do their jobs. “He knew what his strong suits were,” remembered Mitch Lukevics, who was the Yankees’ Minor-League Director. “When he didn’t know something, he asked a lot of questions. He listened to a lot of opinions, and made educated decisions. Bottom line, he gave us the necessary resources to do the job.”
In July 1992, the commissioner’s office notified Steinbrenner that it was ending his exile, but held off permitting him to retake control of the franchise until March 1st, 1993. Vincent, beleaguered and under pressure from the Kleinman lawsuit and other controversies within major-league baseball’s ownership fraternity, likely hoped that reinstating Steinbrenner would release some of the pressure. His rupture with the owners soon became hostile and dysfunctional, however, and in September 1992, Vincent resigned. When Steinbrenner returned in March his reappearance was celebrated on the cover of Sports Illustrated with the Boss sitting on a horse dressed as Napoleon. He was back in all his glory.
As Steinbrenner increased the team’s payroll for his championship teams in the late 1990s, he began looking for additional sources of revenue. The club had made a meaningful profit in 1996, when it won the World Series, reporting a $1.4 million net income, but in 1997, when the Yankees lost in the divisional round, they showed an $8.6 million net loss. That year Steinbrenner announced a 10-year, $95 million promotional deal with Adidas, alarming the other baseball owners and the commissioner, especially considering that in 1997 a half-dozen teams had total revenue from local sources below $30 million-the Yankees would get nearly a 3rd of this amount per annum in just one licensing deal. Major League Baseball quickly ruled this deal invalid, and declared that it, not the individual teams, held the rights to all logos. Steinbrenner aggressively sued his fellow owners and numerous others, eventually settling several months later. Adidas was admitted as an official Major League Baseball sponsor, and Steinbrenner was allowed to keep his windfall.
In 1988, the Yankees had signed a 12-year local television deal with the MSG Network for $483 million, by far the largest local television deal up to that time. By the late 1990s, as this agreement neared its expiration and with the Yankees again baseball’s best and most prominent franchise, it became clear that the Yankees broadcast rights were worth even more. Rather than boost the rights fees to the Yankees, during 1998 Cablevision (the MSG Network’s principal owner) negotiated to purchase a 70 percent interest in the team for between $350 million and $368 million, implying a total franchise value of between $500 million and $525 million, well above the previous record when the Los Angeles Dodgers were sold for $311 million. The deal fell through, though, after several months of wrangling, reportedly because the 2 sides could not agree on the level of control Steinbrenner would retain over the operation of the team.
Through these and other conversations Steinbrenner came to realize the value of his team to a regional sports network, and he began to consider the possibility of forming his own.
Simultaneously, the owners of the New Jersey Nets of the NBA were hoping to enhance the value and prestige of their franchise. Moreover, one of the Nets owners was a philanthropist who donated large sums to charitable causes in his disadvantaged hometown of Newark. He hoped the Nets’ resurgence could help generate the momentum necessary to build a downtown arena. In one of the more unique deals between sports teams, in February 1999, the Yankees and Nets agreed to merge their franchises into a 50/50 joint venture christened YankeeNets, an entity perfectly aligned for a regional sports network, as the Nets would provide the network with additional winter programming. Under the formation agreement, the Yankees were valued at $600 million and the Nets at $150 million; therefore, the Nets owners contributed another $225 million to balance the books, which was distributed to the Yankees owners. Each controlling partnership continued to run its respective franchise. The Yankees had seemingly hit upon on the next generation of professional sports team ownership-multiple local teams under 1 umbrella to bolster their local television potential.
A year later YankeeNets raised additional funds by taking on $200 million in high-interest-rate debt: $15 million to cover team operations, $80 million to a debt-service fund to help cover the next 3 years of interest, and most of the remainder to be distributed among the owners. The debt-service fund was needed because the combined operation was hemorrhaging money, mostly due to huge losses from the Nets. For the 12 months ended September 30, 1999, the combined operations had revenues of $241 million and a net loss of $98.2 million. Of course, much of this was non-cash, but even on a cash-flow basis the new entity was $4.2 million in the red before interest on its then existing debt. For just the Yankees, in 1998 the team reported a net income of $12.7 million on operating earnings of $20.1 million, a nice increase over 1996 and 1997.
The YankeeNets owners further sold an 8.6 % stake in the venture for $75 million, implying an increase in value of the combined teams to $872 million. From the 3 capitalization events over a roughly 1-year time frame, Steinbrenner and the Yankees’ limited partners reaped a huge cash payout. But to Steinbrenner’s credit, despite these massive paydays, he never skimped on reinvesting in his team-after Steinbrenner’s return in 1993, the Yankees under the Boss consistently maintained baseball’s highest payroll.
In the spring of 2000 YankeeNets teamed with a subsidiary of IMG to create a network to televise the Yankees and Nets. Unfortunately for the new venture, the MSG Network sued, claiming it had a right of first refusal on the rights fees to carrying Yankees games, and that any agreement with the new venture was prohibited under their contract. After bitter negotiations and outside arbitration, YankeeNets agreed to pay $30 million to the MSG Network to buy themselves out of the contract clause.
In the summer of 2000 YankeeNets formally established the YES (Yankees Entertainment and Sports) Network as a regional sports powerhouse to carry the Yankees and Nets plus other sports programming. To help capitalize the operation, the group brought in four outside investors: investment firms Goldman Sachs and Quadrangle for $150 million each, and Amos Hostetter Jr. and Leo Hindery Jr. for roughly $20 million each, with Hendry named chief executive. For the total of $340 million, YankeeNets surrendered 40% of the network, keeping 60 % of the enterprise, now valued at $850 million. YankeeNets used much of the $340 million to retire high-rate debt. The new network then negotiated a rights agreement to carry the Yankees and Nets, agreeing to pay the Yankees around $52 million per year. But the bitterness over the previous negotiations remained, and the cable operator Cablevision (the majority owner of the MSG Network) refused to include the YES Network in its basic cable package, trimming roughly 2.9 million subscribers (nearly 40% of the New York market) from the Yankees reach. Eventually in early 2003 New York Attorney General Elliott Spitzer helped mediate a 1-year deal under which Cablevision would carry the YES Network. The 2 sides needed to go to binding arbitration the next year to finally reach a more permanent accord to keep YES on Cablevision.
On March 23, 2004, the same day as the arbitration decision, the Yankees and Nets formally unwound their partnership. The relationship between Steinbrenner and the Nets owners had been contentious from the start-the personalities of the owners grated on each other -and the relationship further deteriorated when the Nets owners wanted to add the NHL’s New Jersey Devils. Steinbrenner insisted that a large percentage of the acquisition occur outside of the YankeeNets entity. Moreover, the increase in local revenue-sharing in baseball from roughly 20 percent to 34% in the 2002 collective-bargaining agreement — requiring additional payments by the Yankees for redistribution to the smaller-market franchises-exacerbated these tensions. The divorce became inevitable in the fall of 2003 when the owners decided to sell the Nets and break up. Once the YES Network had been established and stabilized, Steinbrenner and his Nets partners saw little need and had little desire to maintain the joint ownership.
The divorce settlement allowed the Nets contingent to keep the proceeds from the team’s $300 million sale, while in return the Yankees would get back most of the equity in their franchise. The ownership interests in the YES Network remained unchanged with the YankeeNets investment being distributed pro-rata among the owners. What had appeared revolutionary and prescient only a few years earlier was now just an unworkable clash of disparate personalities. The two franchises didn’t need to have joint ownership of their franchisees to air their games on a regional network and share in its ownership
Once the Nets owners had moved on, Steinbrenner and his executives morphed YankeeNets into its successor entity, Yankee Global Enterprises, as the umbrella company to own both the Yankees and the team’s share of the YES Network. The ex-Nets owners retained a minority, nonvoting interest. Technically, the Yankees were owned by Yankee Holdings-the entity controlled by Steinbrenner and including his family and the pre-YankeeNets limited partners-and it was this entity that fell under the YGE umbrella.
In the 1990s as the lease for Yankee Stadium neared its end, Steinbrenner began angling for a new ballpark. It had been a couple of decades since the remodel of 1970s, and the aging ballpark compared poorly with the new retro ballparks coming on the scene in many markets. Moreover, Steinbrenner disliked the stadium’s location in the Bronx and was lobbying for a site in Manhattan. But as the difficulty of finding a suitable, affordable site in Manhattan emerged once again, Steinbrenner reconciled himself to a new stadium in the Bronx across the street from the existing Yankee Stadium. The huge attendance increase in the late 1990s, jumping well over 3 million in 1999, lessened Steinbrenner’s concern over the Bronx as a stadium location.
In December 2001, as his term was expiring, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced a $1.6 billion plan to build new stadiums for both New York baseball teams. Given all the other issues in New York City at the time, most notably the ongoing recovery from the September 11 attacks, incoming Mayor Michael Bloomberg allowed the stadium proposals to languish. Eventually the Yankees and public authorities negotiated a revised deal for a Bronx site next to the existing Yankee Stadium, with a memorandum of understanding reached in June 2005. The official groundbreaking occurred just over a year later, on August 16, 2006, and the new Yankee Stadium opened in 2009.
Under the stadium financing plan the Yankees were responsible for $800 million, while the public sector covered around $210 million, mostly in the form of infrastructure and neighborhood improvements. When factoring in less-publicized subsidies and other potential savings, such as the deduction available from baseball’s revenue-sharing program, commentators noted that the Yankees’ net contribution was less than the stated amount, but in any case, it was still significant when compared to stadium arrangements elsewhere.
Hal Becomes the Boss
George Steinbrenner lost consciousness on December 28, 2003, at a memorial service for Hall of Fame quarterback and Cleveland legend Otto Graham. Though Steinbrenner and the Yankees publicly professed that it was just a fainting spell, thereafter the 73-year-old Steinbrenner began to slowly relinquish more authority to his deputies, President Randy Levine, CEO Lonn Trost, and Steinbrenner’s son-in-law Steve Swindal, a process that accelerated after a 2nd overnight hospital stay in October 2006.
The makeover of the brain trust also brought some tidiness to the front office. General Manager Brian Cashman, originally named to post in 1998, quickly found himself besieged by many Yankees executives with the Boss’s ear, several based in Tampa, where Steinbrenner had a home. In October 2005 Steinbrenner signed Cashman to a 3-year, $5.5 million extension, and the beleaguered GM explained: “I’m the general manager and everybody within baseball operations reports to me. That’s not how it has operated recently.”
In 2005, Steinbrenner named Swindal as his heir-apparent to direct the Yankees, though some observers felt one of his sons would eventually be advanced into the role. The question became moot in 2007, when Swindal and Steinbrenner’s daughter Jennifer divorced, effectively terminating Swindal’s stint with the Yankees.
In September 2007, the Yankees clarified the post-Swindal picture, electing Hal Steinbrenner Chairman of Yankee Global Enterprises, with both Hal and Hank being made Co-Chairmen of the Yankees in July 2008. Their brother-in-law Felix Lopez, married to their sister Jessica, was also added to the Yankee Global Enterprises board of directors.100 Hal’s promotion to the top spot became official in November 2008, when MLB formally designated him as the individual with the Yankees’ controlling interest. Thirty-five years after buying the team, George Steinbrenner had relinquished authority of his beloved franchise to his younger son. Two years later, he died at age 80 in Tampa.
At the time of his death the Yankees were baseball’s most valuable franchise by a considerable margin: According to the Forbes annual team valuation in April, the team was worth $1.6 billion, far outdistancing the 2nd-place Boston Red Sox at $870 million. The team also boasted revenue estimated by Forbes at $441 million, well above the second-place Mets at $268 million. But just as in the days going back to Jacob Ruppert, the Yankees continuously reinvested their profits back into the team: the team’s 2010 payroll of $211 million far exceeded the other franchises; Boston had the next highest payroll at $165 million.
The Yankees owners also still retained a considerable interest in the extremely valuable YES Network, which in 2006 had revenues of $340.5 million and cash flow of around $186 million. Over the 4 years from 2005 to 2008 the network went through three rounds of capital raises in the debt market, totaling about $2.5 billion, a sizable minority of which was distributed to the partners, including the Yankees, who owned roughly 36%. In 2012, the partners in the YES Network finally decided to cash out much of their remaining equity, selling 49% of the company to News Corporation for $584 million, implying a total enterprise value of equity and debt of roughly $3.8 billion, and reducing the Yankees ownership stake (technically Yankee Global Enterprises) to around 25%. In January 2014, News Corporation exercised its option to purchase up to 80% of the network, further diluting the Yankees ownership but providing another influx of cash to the owners.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 14, 2024 18:10:17 GMT -5
A Tour of Yankee Literature
This article was written by Mark Gallagher, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in The SABR Review of Books
This article was originally published in The SABR Review of Books, Vol. 1 (1986).
The literature on the New York Yankees is presumably indicative of baseball literature generally, except’ of course, that Yankee literature, like Yankee tradition, Yankee Stadium, Yankee uniforms and Yankee hot dogs, has a pinch or two of special interest, the Yankees being the Yankees.
It is a literature driven by a robust market, not only in New York and surrounding geography but across the continent and around the world. Yankee fans are everywhere. Ian Smith of Glasgow, Scotland, a SABR member, described himself in correspondence with me as “a Yankee fanatic.”
But there is another component of the market that is big, too-the Yankee hater component. A book entitled The Bronx Zoo is transparently beamed at Yankee-phobes as well as Yankee-philes. A Yankee hater buys The Bronx Zoo to see what the low-life pinstripers may be up to now, for the title appeals to all the attitudes and prejudices that make the Yankee hater what he is.
By Yankee literature I mean not only books but also newspaper writings, which in New York can be something special. I don’t happen to know what literature in the narrow sense means exactly, but I know that words blowing in the gutter the day after they’re written are no less for the transience of their medium. However, here, I concentrate on books.
What has happened to Yankee writings over the decades? They have grown better, much better, more adult, and there’s more of them-much more of them, although, it should be said, there is a down side to the recent literature, too.
You may have seen one of those old ballpark photos where the crowd looks almost comic in its homogeneity-white men sitting stiffly, side by side, in dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and straw-hats. Scissored male figures. The women were home doing what the day called for, washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, baking on Wednesday. The kids were reading inspirational sports books, learning how to become fit members of a principled adult society.
Things have changed. The ballpark crowd is more representative of all elements of society. Kids know the score; sophisticated youth can weed out the fake heroes from the real ones better than their counterparts of yesteryear, who were sheltered by the journalistic mores of the day, which tended to gloss up player images. Fans are more casual-you might not see one man in a suit and tie on a trip to the ballpark-but they demand more honesty. By and large the Yankee literature is more honest and more adult, and that is good.
My own Yankee collection begins, in terms of age, with a book that quite possibly owes its value to a source of inside information. No doubt about it, Yankee literature, any literature in part involving reportage, leans heavily on those capable of reliable disclosure. It was with the help of wonderful insider Waite Hoyt that Frank Graham wrote a history of the club at the 40-year mark, a book which sketches the beginning of the big Yankees picture.
I found Graham’s The New York Yankees: An Informal History, 1st released in 1943, a solid and candid book. Hoyt, the great Yankees pitcher who had become club historian of sorts, doubtless was instrumental in making this book what it is.
Graham didn’t stir controversy, and neither did he duck it. But what was controversy then and what is controversy now-and remember, we’re talking Yankee-are 2 different creatures.
Graham wrote that Earle “Doc” Painter, longtime Yankee trainer, was let go after the Yankees loss in the 1942 World Series because Manager Joe McCarthy never liked him and used the loss, the Yanks Only defeat in 8 Series appearances under McCarthy, as a convenient hook on which to hang the firing.
Good, honest speculation, and why not? Marse Joe wouldn’t give Painter or anyone else an explanation for the firing. However, it wasn’t exactly Thurman-hates-Reggie/Reggie-hates-Billy/Billy-hates-George stuff. It lacked the palpable passion of the 1980s.
Graham included a special page of appreciation to Hall of Famer Hoyt who was with the rollicking Yankees of 1921-1930. Through Hoyt, Graham probably got more anecdotal material on the Yankees of the 1920s than he could ever hope to get from the lid-clamping, news-managing Yankees of the 1930s.
The thing about Hoyt was that besides being articulate, intelligent and witty, he was reliable. He liked to tell it the way it was.
He had helped several authors with their books. I corresponded with him in 1978 about a Yankee book I was attempting. He replied, “l have assisted in so many books I truly am shy of participating in any others.” But being the grand gentleman that he was, he did offer assistance, and on more than one occasion, too.
Graham did another book, a laudatory biography of John J. McGraw, and still another biography that was issued a year before his informal Yankee history, this one called Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero.
I have heard tell that the Gehrig bio was written for kids and I am not surprised. Anyway, this Graham book, in retrospect, is disappointing. The dialogue is unconvincing— Graham couldn’t possibly have gotten all of that down so perfectly. And too much time is spent with Lou Gehrig, a decent man, in his final days; human empathy is one thing, but an endless dwelling on Lou’s final hours is maudlin.
But what rankles me is the way Graham either missed or glossed over the Gehrig-John McGraw relationship. Lou had a football scholarship to Columbia. He also played some for the Columbia baseball team, and; in an exhibition game against Hartford, hit a couple of attention-attracting homers. The Hartford papers later announced his signing by the Hartford club.
However, as Norton W. Chellgren pointed out in the 1975 Baseball Research Journal, the next day the new man was called Lou Lewis. Two weeks later Lewis was gone without explanation; the folks at Columbia got him out of Hartford. Lou sustained a suspension, but his amateur player status was intact.
Veteran sportswriter Fred Lieb, one of Gehrig’s best friends, has related that McGraw told Gehrig he could play pro ball and college football, too. “Oh, you can do both,” McGraw is said to have told Lou. “You’ll play in Hartford (preparing for the Giants) under the name of Lewis. Nobody will know that Lewis of Hartford is the same guy as Lou Gehrig of Columbia.”
Gehrig became a football star at Columbia and later signed with the Yankees. He remained bitter toward McGraw. “In 1921, McGraw was a sophisticated, experienced baseball man and I was a dumb, innocent kid,” Gehrig told Lieb. “Yet he was willing to let me throw away a scholarship as though it was a bundle of trash.”
Lieb reported this in his 1977 memoirs, Baseball As I Have Known it. The way Graham told the story 35 years earlier, the story that misled SABR member Fred Stein and me in our preparation of a book manuscript on the market competition between the Giants and Yankees, the Hartford Manager, one of McGraw’s many birddog scouts, took Lou to the Polo Grounds for a tryout, but McGraw wasn’t interested. The manager, one Arthur Irwin, then signed the strapping youngster to a Hartford contract. McGraw is clean, according to this version.
Gehrig was partly to blame for his situation. He should have confided in his Columbia Coach before signing anything. But he was a kid; McGraw and Irwin were big boys, and Graham exonerated the former by implication and rationalized the latter’s jeopardizing of Lou’s amateur status as the work of “a hearty and pleasant old chap who merely did as any other scout would have done in the circumstances.”
Graham portrayed Gehrig as a strong silent type- the type that America would have as its hero. Heroes, heroes, heroes. The sports sections of the papers were chock-full of them. Sports journalism for decades was peachy-cream stuff. Veteran reporters covering the Yankees got close to the Yankees so they could write upbeat stories about them.
Then came the Chipmunks. Born of the ’50s, the ‘Munks didn’t enter the realm of reality until they had a name, and that didn’t happen until the 1960s. One version has it that they got their name when a newsman of the old school saw some of them in animated discussion and grunted scoffingly, “They look like a bunch of chipmunks.” And so, the name and the reality. The Chipmunks could indeed get into their work. They were inquiring and, above all, irreverent, and they were headquartered in New York where the Yankees are headquartered.
Jack Mann explained Chipmunkery in his excellent 1967 book, The Decline and Fall of The New York Yankees. Mann portrayed himself, Stan Isaacs, Phil Pepe, Maury Allen, George Vecsey, Steve Jacobsen, Leonard Koppett and others as ‘Munkers- guys who wanted to have some fun in their day-to-day reporting and to be able to occasionally go beyond day-to-day reportage.
“If they made no attempt to relate the billion-dollar industry of show sport to the society in which it exists, they wouldn’t be doing anything but writing stories about games,” was the way Mann put it.
Chipmunks covering the Yankees had a friend for a time in Yankee President Mike Burke, who occupied the pinstriped throne for a relatively brief time, but Burke aside, they were faced with a long, deeply instilled Yankee tradition of nondisclosure.
Nondisclosure stemmed in part from Joe McCarthy’s insistence on a certain demeanor for the Yankees collectively and for Yankees as individuals, a demeanor that signaled a quiet and efficient “class. ” It owed first and foremost, however, to wonderful Edward Grant Barrow, who came to the Yankees as Business Manager in 1920 and left as Club President in 1945.
Barrow ran an iron-fisted show and kept in the background. “The spotlight,” he wrote in his 1951 autobiography, My Fifty Years in Baseball, written with James M. Kahn when Barrow was 83, “should be reserved for the players and the players alone.” Nothing was necessary to promote the game, not even night baseball. (Yankee Stadium didn’t acquire lights until after Barrow’s departure.) The game was enough-“Baseball doesn’t need a carnival or sideshow,” Barrow declared.
With Barrow as your general manager, if you weren’t lucky enough to count a Babe Ruth among your personnel, you weren’t going to have a helluva lot of color. Wit, maybe-the wit of a Gomez, perhaps-but swashbuckling color, no, not even a whole lot of human interest.
When Barrow, who himself had a most colorful past that began on a wagon train bound for Nebraska, became teamed with rulebook Joe McCarthy, who joined the club in 1931, there was no limit to the Yankees’ discreet decorum. Rule breakers were unwelcome, especially those Southern boys. McCarthy had a prejudice-no, a conviction rather than a prejudice, according to Barrow, “because he had reasoned things out in his own way,” against Southern ballplayers. Barrow wrote that McCarthy “thought they were too hot tempered and defeated themselves.”
In another Barrow passage, he wrote Joe thought that players who came from the hill country of the South were particularly onerous.
“They’re all moonshiners back there,” Joe once said, “and they’re just naturally against the law. They resent any kind of rules or discipline.”
Barrow gave a couple of examples of talented, temperamental players traded away by McCarthy for the good of the team. But Barrow didn’t say how McCarthy’s views affected his opinion of Bill Dickey, born in Louisiana and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Barrow also revealed Tony Lazzeri’s epilepsy in terms decidedly insensitive by today’s standards. Barrow, who believed Lazzeri was “one of the greatest ballplayers I have ever known,” said other clubs passed over the Pacific Coast League star because he “took fits. ” But after an elaborate check into Lazzeri’s background, Barrow decided to take a chance and purchase his contract. “As long as he doesn’t take fits between 3 and 6 in the afternoon, that’s good enough for me,” Barrow said at the time.
There was a stigma attached to epilepsy. Barrow always feared that Lazzeri would have a seizure on the field, but, to Ed’s relief, Tony’s attacks were confined to the clubhouse or a railroad car. The Lazzeri story could have been a great inspiration to other epileptics, but views on epilepsy were not as enlightened as they are now, and the story was covered up. “l don’t believe the public ever knew this about him (Lazzeri),” wrote Barrow. “Certainly, we took every precaution we could to see that the public never did, and in this the sportswriters traveling with the club were likewise as considerate of Tony’s feelings and welfare.”
So, the writers sat on the story. It is doubtful that the same story could ever be covered up today, which is probably the way things should be. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when Lazzeri played, a player’s faults, and, unfortunately, epilepsy was seen as a fault, often went unreported. The clubs and writers would scratch each others’ backs. Contrast that with today’s headlines of drug and alcohol problems. If you appreciate an open society, you’ve got to say that today’s situation is healthier.
The Chipmunks weren’t about to toe the company line. They wouldn’t even use the word “we,” as in “who are we going to pitch tomorrow, Skipper?”, a typical question from the old-school writer. A Chipmunk was a reporter, not a booster. The Chipmunks not only changed the press’s day to-day approach, but they changed the book literature, too. A case in point is Mann’s own The Decline and Fall of the New York Yankees. It not only details, why the Yankee Dynasty toppled, but it delves into the chinks in the Yankee armor back in their perfectionist glory days.
The Yankees were far from being the most accessible baseball team to the press. The traditional pattern was that Yankee management would issue only the information that served its purposes- injuries would be covered up, for one thing- and the old-school writers would settle for what they got. The Chipmunks would not. To Yankee management, Chipmunkery threatened management’s ability to control the news.
Yankee players resisted the Chipmunks, too. Around the locker room, a Chipmunk was a reporter who asked too many damn questions, including questions about players not as playing but as human beings. A good writer, to a player, was one who didn’t probe, one who stuck to whatever happened on the field. A bad writer was a “ripper.” A ripper sometimes did no more than tell the truth.
The Yankees collapsed in 1965, then fell to the cellar in 1966. Mike Burke took over as Yankee President and pledged a new era of openness around the club. He even went to the New York Baseball Writers annual outing-something Dan Topping, his predecessor, had never done-played for the Chipmunks in the softball game and was awarded a Chipmunk sweatshirt. The Chipmunks liked Burke for his openness, but Burke’s Yankees didn’t win and it wasn’t long before Burke was gone and George Steinbrenner was the big cheese in the South Bronx.
The 1st earthshaking Chipmunk influence in the book literature appeared in 1970, 3 years after Decline and Fall. It created a sensation. Ball Four, by Jim Bouton (with Leonard Shecter) blew the lid off clubhouse secrecy.
Bouton wasn’t a Chipmunk-he was a Yankee pitcher of the 1960s who won 21 games in 1963-but Shecter was. They violated the rule of the clubhouse that says “all that is said here and is seen here stays here.” What Bouton did was expose some Yankee debauchery.
Shecter had already taken the halo off sports heroes with his 1969 book, The Jock. In this book he rips into the hypocrisy surrounding the sports world, from the magnates to the stars, sparing no one, including his own profession of journalism. It is such a biting book that the numbed reader can’t discern Shecter’s legitimate points from his bitter tirades.
The Yankees, for example, a club Shecter covered for the New York Post, and the team’s individual players, are a special target for his slings and arrows. To Shecter, Joe DiMaggio had become vain and lonely. Yogi Berra’s 1961 autobiography, Yogi, was “a terrible book, cheap and phony and transparent.” Mickey Mantle had only himself to blame for his leg problems because he didn’t do his offseason exercises.
Shecter was not well-liked in the Yankee clubhouse. He was seen as a ripper, the No. 1 ripper in the eyes of Roger Maris, whom Shecter portrays as “a griper.” But Shecter says he liked Maris, or rather his accessibility, when Roger joined the Yanks in 1960 and even felt that Roger handled his next, 61-HR season reasonably well. He even wrote a paperback on Maris, Home Run Hero. When Maris encountered all his problems with the fans in 1962, however, Shecter wrote a Post story saying, basically, that Maris was at fault for reactions that were causing the fans to intensify their abuse. According to Shecter, Maris cursed him for the story and they never talked again.
Shecter argues that ballplayers don’t understand the job reporters have to do. “The last thing a ballplayer cares about are the precepts by which a newspaperman is supposed to live,” wrote Shecter.
He explains how in 1963 Yankee pitcher Bill Stafford was going bad-Stafford’s career was in jeopardy, in fact- and after another bad performance, Stafford told Shecter he didn’t want to talk. Shecter persisted, in the correct opinion that if a player could talk reams when winning, he should find the grace to talk when losing. But what Shecter failed to understand, or at least acknowledge, was the tremendous pressure building up inside Stafford. My God, this young man was watching his professional career slip away. But Shecter left him alone only after a mouthful of fist became a distinct possibility. Respect is another 1 of those 2-way streets.
Shecter’s favorite was Casey Stengel- “the only great man I ever knew.” He was especially grateful to Stengel for overlooking a mess Shecter got into in 1958 when he reported a brief cigar-jamming scuffle between Pitcher Ryne Duren and Coach Ralph Houk that a rewrite man over-amplified. The rest of the Yankees shunned Shecter, but Stengel, recognizing the nature of Lenny’s profession, bought Shecter a drink.
Stengel won a lot of points like that with reporters, who doted on him. But while Shecter revealed some of the cruel things Casey said about his players- of the slumping Moose Skowron, who played despite serious injuries, Casey said, “The way he’s going I’d be better off if he was hurt”- it didn’t seem to bother him much. Stengel had Shecter’s loyalty, much the way the “house men” writers Shecter so loathed were in the clutches of the club they covered.
As Bouton and Shecter turned the clubhouse inside out, Geoffrey Stokes in his excellent 1984 book, Pinstripe Pandemonium, explored the Yankee psyche. Perhaps only a book on the scrutinized Yankees could include a chapter on the psychology of the Yankees.
Stokes examines the 1983 Yankees, maintaining that these Yankees, runners-up to Baltimore in the American League East, were without effective leadership. The team had been leaderless since the death of Thurman Munson in 1979. And the pine-tar fiasco, throwing the team into disarray, was a situation that demanded leadership. No one stepped forward, wrote Stokes.
Graig Nettles was the senior Yankee and team captain in 1983. He was the unquestioned leader on the field, smart, alert and tough in the clutch, but he wasn’t a dominant presence in the clubhouse. He didn’t understand, or it was never explained to him, what his captaincy meant. For example, when Steve Kemp was benched and his spirits fell, Nettles made no move to pick him up. Don Baylor tried, but like Kemp, he too was a 1st-year Yankee who was still feeling his way around.
Dave Winfield certainly possessed a physical presence. But Winfield, too, showed Stokes a limited concept of leadership, calling himself “an influential peer.” He resisted anything rah-rah-good for him-but he also resisted taking command. He felt it enough to lead with bat and glove.
Ironically, quiet Willie Randolph, the least likely leader at 1st glance, a player whose injuries were sometimes questioned, was serving a key function of leadership. The younger Yankees volunteered to Stokes that it was Randolph who made them feel welcome on the team. Randolph revealed that Munson had put him at ease, when he joined the club in 1976, and Willie was making a conscious effort to do the same for others.
The real probers and derobers of the Yankees, however, have been members or former members of the family. Joe Pepitone, the Yankee 1st baseman of the 1960s, was one of the 1st of the Yankees to come out with his own book after Ball Four. Pepitone had told Peter Golenbock in Dynasty how upset he was over Bouton’s writing unflattering things about Mickey Mantle in Ball Four, such as how Mantle would duck kids asking for autographs. “Kids grew up with a lot of good images about Mickey Mantle,” Pepitone told Golenbock. “They felt good just thinking about him, and the next thing you know they’re depressed because of what Jim wrote. Why should Jim give a shit? He’s not going to see the kids’ faces, see the way they feel."
So, what did Pepitone do? He wrote a book in which he told a couple of stories that could have really hurt Mickey’s image with kids, although to my way of thinking, the stories made Mantle more human and appealing than ever. Joe’s book, Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud written with Barry Stainback and published in 1975 by Playboy Press, shouldn’t be read by kids, anyway. Pepi, an original, dared to tell, just as he dared to be different in his playing days.
One story has All-American-boy Mantle getting stoned smoking marijuana with Joe before a game and not only losing all of his fabulous coordination at the plate but also passively accepting a strikeout when he normally exploded in anger. Pepi stressed that this was Mantle’s 1st and only experiment with pot. All the same, the Mick would probably have voted not to have the story told.
The other story, more in keeping with the Mantle legend, had Mantle and Pepitone oversleeping after a night on the town and, having missed the team bus, taking a limousine to West Point for an exhibition game. Loaded on vodka, they made quite a scene, when the limo arrived right on the playing field. Mantle, in The Mick, never addressed the marijuana tale, but made a point of saying that Pepitone exaggerated the details of the West Point story.
Pepi was soon joined by a long pinstriped line of authors.
However great the World Champion 1977-1978 Yankees may have been with bat and glove; they were veritable giants with the pen. No less than 8 Yankees of 1977-1978, including Manager Billy Martin, joined with collaborators to write books on their days with the Yankees
The books include: Thurman Munson, by Munson with Martin Appel (1978); The Bronx Zoo, by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock (1979); Guidry, by Ron Guidry and Golenbock (1980); Number 1, by Billy Martin and Golenbock (1980); Yankee Stranger, by Ed Figueroa and Dorothy Harshman (1982); Balls, by Graig Nettles and Golenbock (1984); Reggie, by Reggie Jackson with Mike Lupica (1984), and Sweet Lou, by Lou Piniella and Maury Allen (1986).
All of these Yankees were, or are, big stars, with the exception of Figueroa, who maybe should have been. Figgy was the unsung hero of the 1976-1978 campaigns, winning 19, 16 and 20 games over those 3 pennant-winning seasons. But he wasn’t great. He wasn’t colorful. He wasn’t even personable. What was he trying to do with his Yankee Stranger?
He was telling us from the very title that he was an outsider (who happened to be from Puerto Rico) and that we had in store an outsider’s fresh perspective. But Figgy only reveals that he has a thin skin and he supplies no more than overkilled stories and inanity, telling us, for example, that Bill Lee is funny, Nolan Ryan throws hard, and Carl Yastrzemski is always “a tough guy for me to face. “Thanks, Figgy.”
Figgy is not exactly alone. There is a certain inanity in all of these books. Worse, in at least some, there is a certain grub-for-the-buck “candor.” One wonders and worries. Is it better to get it from a writer type, or an historian type, or to place one’s faith in firsthand accounts from jocks either exorcising past torments or joining in the spirit of squeezing bucks from the printing press, or both?
Reservations aside, by and large, the player books make for good reading. They’ve got the necessary color and off-color and they’re free of much of the phoniness that used to plague us in baseball literature. My favorite is Munson’s. No big rips, fair treatment for friend and foe alike.
I became a little upset when, on April 24,1984, the New York Daily News, the paper of sports columnist Mike Lupica, Reggie’s co-author, ran the blaring headline: REGGIE BLASTS RACIST YANKEES. Racism, of course, was just 1 of several slaps Jackson laid on his former club in this scoop by Paul Needell from Jackson’s yet-to-be released book.
But that isn’t what made me angry. The Jackson story was old stuff really. What ticked me off, and amused me a little, too, was something on the inside pages of the Daily News, a column by Lupica, whom I consider without peer as a witty sportswriter. (Lupica has, however, allowed his intense dislike for George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin to warp his objectivity when writing about the Yankees.) Lupica was cheering an exciting April of sports in New York. “There had been too many Aprils around here in which the only racy sports news came when Boss Steinbrenner blew his nose or had his hairspray back up, but this time it is different,” he wrote. “For now, Boss Steinbrenner and his Yankees have to fight it out in headline land with fine hockey, and basketball . . . and a vastly interesting young baseball team known as the New York Mets.”
I thought that Lupica was trying to have it both ways. After all, he was a party to Jackson’s revelations exploiting controversy that on that very day were monopolizing the headlines of his paper. I said so in a letter that the Daily News was kind enough to print.
There is nothing wrong with controversy. It sells books. The problem is that the public has to be wary; is it honest controversy that sheds light, or trumped-up controversy to sell books? Take former Colt Bubba Smith, who in his book declared that the 1969 Super Bowl, which the Colts lost to the Jets, was fixed. Presumably, the allegation sold a few more books; it did not trigger any investigations to my knowledge. And it didn’t get me to buy the book. (Bubba, who is great in his TV beer commercials with Dick Butkus, stands a better chance of getting me to buy the beer.)
Of the greatest Yankee ballplayers--Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle - the Mick has been the most prolific author. Gehrig never got to write a book before his tragic and early death. DiMaggio in 1947 wrote Lucky to be a Yankee and Ruth a year later wrote The Babe Ruth Story. Mantle, besides his 1964 work, The Quality of Courage, was involved in 4 books about his life story, playing career, or both. These were The Mickey Mantle Story, by Mantle as told to Ben Epstein (1953); The Education of a Baseball Player, by Mantle with Bob Smith (1967); Whitey and Mickey, by Ford, Mantle and Joseph Durso (1977); and The Mick, by Mantle with Herb Gluck (1985).
The tones of the latter 2 were drastically different from the gee-and-goshisms of the 1st 2 which portrayed Mickey as the All-American boy, meaning countryside boy. In The Mickey Mantle Story, Mantle said: “I’m loaded with hayseed and aim to stay that way. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the city way of life. But those big city apartments and townhouses always struck me as foolishly paying your money to eat and sleep in a jail.”
Part of Mantle’s charm is that fame never really changed him. But one doesn’t spend 18 baseball seasons in New York without acquiring a certain amount of sophistication. Mantle acquired a great deal.
The Mick is one of the best baseball books ever published. Though Mickey is known to clam up rather than cut someone down, he is very honest about his opinions in this book and about his own weaknesses, too. He said of Duke Snider: “I loved the Duke. In fact, I would have loved to have been the Duke. Listen, you could practically fit Ebbets Field right inside Yankee Stadium.” Mickey speculates he might have hit 15 more HRs a year playing in Brooklyn.
I have read that Pete Rose considers himself- wrongly, in my opinion-the greatest switch-hitter of all time. Perhaps Mickey read it, too, because he had a pretty good zinger for Rose. “The world’s greatest singles hitter,” Mantle called him. “He chokes the bat, protects the plate and concentrates on getting a piece of the ball. It’s his thing. And I have a world of admiration for him. However, if I had played my career hitting singles like Pete, I’d wear a dress.”
Books on the Yankees have changed in focus over the 3 decades from Joe DiMaggio’s Lucky to be a Yankee to Sparky Lyle’s The Bronx Zoo in 1977, as their titles imply.
There have been histories, pictorial histories, anthologies, encyclopedias, date books, diaries, quiz books and individual biographies. There have even been books catering to Yankee haters, like the 1981 book, Diary of a Yankee Hater by Bob Marshall and the 1982 The Official New York Yankees Haters Handbook by William B. Mead. I accepted the latter with a chuckle and even kidded with Bill about it at a SABR meeting, telling him I was offended that none of my books was listed among his sappiest books about the Yankees. (Bill replied that he wasn’t aware of them. Huh?)
But Bill’s book is troubled with little inaccuracies. Bill blames Yankee General Manager George Weiss for firing broadcasters Mel Allen and Red Barber, when, actually, Weiss himself was canned after the 1960 season, while Allen lasted through 1964 and Barber through 1966. Oh well, I have a mistake in print too and Bill would probably say it didn’t matter; they were all fired by some heartless Yankee executive.
On the serious side, Dynasty, the 1975 book by Peter Golenbock that chronicled the great Yankee teams of 1949 through 1964, did a great service for Yankee fans. Golenbock got behind the scenes of those fabulous teams with a series of illuminating interviews. Each interview made a statement about the interviewee. For example, Gil McDougald came across as a tremendously warm human being, something that could have been overlooked when McDougald played for the Yankees and the players were often seen as interchangeable and replaceable parts in a distant, smooth-running machine.
Golenbock’s interviews also exposed some fabrications, such as Mickey Mantle’s mysterious ailment in 1957, known at the time as “shin splints.” Nobody knew exactly how Mickey came up with this ailment-all the official explanations didn’t ring true — but what was obvious was that Mantle had a huge cut in his shin, keeping him from running well and ruining what might have been an unprecedented 2nd straight Triple Crown season.
Tom Sturdivant told Golenbock the true story. According to the Yankee pitcher, he and Mantle were coming off the golf course when Mickey, upset over developments in his friendly bet with Tom, but really more annoyed with Sturdivant’s high-pitched giggle, swung his putter at a tree limb overhead. The putter either missed the limb or snapped it in 2; whatever, it ended up stuck in Mickey’s leg. Shin splints. Mantle confirmed the basic story in The Mick.
Dick Lally penned Pinstriped Summers, a great 1985 book that picked up the Yankees where Dynasty left off in 1965. He addresses the problems the press had with the Yankees, and wrote of how the 1962 arrival of the Mets in New York, a National League stronghold, didn’t ease those problems.
New York reporters like Bob Lipsyte, George Vecsey and Lenny Shecter made the infant Mets fun. They wrote hip stories about a losing team and hip fans celebrated losing. Vic Ziegel, who started covering the Yankees in 1964, in the days of smug success, told Lally there were a “lot of flatout house men” in those days-writers who toed the company line. These writers overidentified with the Yankees. “You know, when the team started to lose, those guys were much harsher on the club than the younger writers,” Ziegel told Lally. “The reason they came down so hard was because they were bitterly disappointed. They were crushed. They had to cover games all year, and the team wasn’t good anymore. It made them furious.”
Possibly the best baseball biography ever written was Babe, the 1974 Ruth biography by Robert W. Creamer. Almost incredibly, the field was wide open; Babe was the 1st objective, adult, full-length biography of America’s greatest sports hero. (Marshall Smelser followed in 1975 with another excellent book on Ruth, The House that Ruth Built, that unfortunately was released on the heels of the Creamer work.)
Creamer set up his book brilliantly. Ruth was bigger than life, everyone’s hero-his here-but Creamer, in his words, wanted “to go beyond the gentle inaccuracies and omissions of the earlier accounts and produce a total biography, one that, hopefully, would present all the facts and myths, the statistical details and personal exuberance, the obvious and subtle things that combined to make the man born George Ruth, a unique figure in the social history of the United States.”
Creamer held true. He told the Ruth story as completely as it can be told. He put the pieces together of Ruth’s life, in part, through an exhaustive series of interviews. Listen to what Waite Hoyt wrote to Creamer: “I am almost convinced that you will never learn the truth on Ruth. I roomed with Joe Dugan. He was a good friend of Babe’s. But he will see Ruth in a different light than I did. Dugan’s own opinion will be one in which Dugan revels in Ruth’s crudities and so on. While I can easily recognize all of this and admit it freely, yet there was buried in Ruth humanitarianism beyond belief, an intelligence he was never given credit for, a childish desire to be over-virile, living up to credits given his home-run record and yet a need for intimate affection and respect, and a feverish desire to play baseball, perform, act and live a life he didn’t and couldn’t take time to understand.”
A few years ago, I stopped in at the Babe Ruth Museum, birthplace home of the Babe, in Baltimore. The best thing there was Creamer’s Babe manuscript. It was inspiring. Especially considering the disillusionment this Yankee fan felt when he discovered that the Babe Ruth birthplace was an ill-disguised excuse for an Orioles’ shrine. Upstairs, in the Ruth bedroom, where the Creamer manuscript was kept, a few people poked in their heads for a polite look-see. Next door, though, was where the real action was, Baltimoreans milling around various tributes to the local club. Somehow, the whole setup seemed as phony as the Babe was genuine.
Anyone wanting to gain an historical perspective on the Yankees could achieve his or her purposes nicely by reading just three books. These are The New York Yankees: An Informal History, (the version I have was updated through 1950); Dynasty, covering the years 1949 through 1964; and Pinstriped Summer, covering a period that begins with 1965 and runs up to recent times.
No doubt there will be a 4th book addressed to the final decade and a half of the 20th century. If this newcomer proves deserving, the Yankees will enter the 21st century well documented. Which is good, because once that century line is crossed, the events of the dislodged century will tend to dim; having them tacked down on paper will serve posterity.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 14, 2024 18:24:06 GMT -5
When Harry Met the Bronx Bombers: The History of the Yankee Stadium Concessions
This article was written by Don Jensen, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in Yankee Stadium 1923-2008: America’s First Modern Ballpark
Harry M. Stevens, shown at left with Yankees Owner Jacob Ruppert, was the Yankees’ official concessionaire through the 1963 season. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)
The 12-page official program of the new “Greater New York Base Ball Club of the American League“ at its home opener on April 30,1903, was published by Harry M. Stevens, who had built a concessions empire since the 1880s that extended from the Midwest to New England. Stevens had made a fortune in New York City the previous decade managing the concessions at the Polo Grounds, home of the National League Giants, the new club’s now immediate rival; Madison Square Garden; and the upstate Saratoga Racecourse. The association of Stevens’ firm with the new American League franchise (at first called the Highlanders) would enable Harry to become a key force in the emergence of the franchise as a dynasty in major-league baseball.
The advertisements scattered throughout the inaugural program and scorecard, priced at 5 cents, reflected the goal of concessionaires everywhere: to enhance and profit from the fan experience at the ballpark. In addition to player rosters and space to keep score, the card included advertisements for Philip Morris cigarettes, Dewar’s scotch, Coca-Cola, Horton’s ice cream cones, Atlas motor oil and grease, Pommery champagne and Henry Rahe’s Café across the street. At Rahe’s, fans could order Jac. Ruppert’s Extra Pale, Knickerbocker and Ruppiner beers. One ad tried another way to pique fan interest: “Any baseball player who will hit the ‘Bull Durham’ cut-out sign on the field with a fairly batted ball during a regularly scheduled league game will receive $50.00 in cash [almost $1,700 in 2022].”
Concession salesmen worked exclusively on commission, and sales were often dependent on the weather. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library)
THE BUSINESS OF CONCESSIONS
But profits for the new franchise from selling scorecards and advertisements alone would be small. By contrast, catering to the fans’ desire for refreshments during the game would provide the Highlanders’ owners, gambler Frank Farrell and former New York City Police Chief Bill Devery, with a vital source of revenue to supplement income from ticket sales. In selling concession rights to an experienced and shrewd entrepreneur like Stevens, the club could avoid the burden of procuring food and beverages, hiring cooks, vendors, and other salespeople, setting prices, and meeting fans’ expectations for superior quality. (Some clubs at the time, such as the Chicago Cubs, sold concessions themselves.)
When the Highlanders opened for business at American League Park – soon after called the Hilltop due to its location on a ridge in northern Manhattan – the question of what food and drink to sell at ballparks already had a long and controversial history. Initially, baseball owners were slow to provide concessions and other entertainment to fans. However, unauthorized bars, liquor booths, rum shops, and “restaurants” – saloons – often popped up near ballparks and siphoned off potential revenue from the teams. Gradually, clubs came to offer items such as cherry pie, cheese, chewing tobacco, tripe, chocolate, and onions, like food sold at fairs, racetracks, circuses, railway stops, and other outdoor venues. In the 1880s, Chris Von der Ahe, a German immigrant and later Stevens’ mentor, bought a team, the St. Louis Browns of the American Association, to increase profits at his bar near Sportsman’s Park, the Browns’ home. He later added an amusement park with a Bavarian-style beer garden, a water flume ride, an artificial lake, and a racetrack near the outfield. The American Association, known as the “Beer and Whiskey League,” prohibited gambling on its grounds and disapproved of the racetrack, but permitted beer sales. In contrast, teams in the more established National League sought a more respectable clientele by having higher ticket prices and forbidding the sale of liquor at games.
The controversy over alcohol in ballparks raged well into the 20th century when the growing temperance movement lobbied baseball clubs to eliminate bars and hard liquor and to sell beer more discreetly. (Soft drink manufacturers marked their beverages as “temperance drinks” – often soda water sweetened with syrup.) However, it was impossible for the New York American League club to fully board the Prohibition bandwagon after Jacob Ruppert, who inherited a fortune in the family brewing business, purchased the team on January 11,1915.
Harry M. Stevens set up shop at the Hilltop with a proven business model that improved on Von der Ahe’s approach. Unlike Von der Ahe, Stevens put the fan experience of watching the game above everything else. Stevens may have been the 1st concessionaire to have his vendors patrol the stands during the games. He placed drinking straws in glass soft-drink bottles, so spectators could watch the play as they sipped and varied product offerings by the city to accommodate local tastes. Eventually, Stevens controlled so many venues that several items on his menu became standard ballpark fare, including peanuts, nonalcoholic beverages, and ice cream.
Later baseball legend credited Stevens with introducing hot dogs to ballparks, but there is no evidence that in 1903, he offered frankfurters on his menus, either at the Hilltop or elsewhere. Hot dogs, initially working-class street food, were 1st introduced to the United States by German immigrants who settled in the Midwest after the Civil War. Around 1867, Charles Feltman, a German-American restaurateur, began selling sausages in rolls at Coney Island. In the 1880s Von der Ahe introduced a “wiener wurst” in St. Louis, where they became a staple at Browns games. The food also may have grown in popularity in New York City with the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s.
There is no information on the profits Farrell, Devery, and Stevens made from concessions sales in the early years at the Hilltop. However, circumstantial evidence from major-league clubs elsewhere suggests they were substantial. One team reported making more than $2,000 in 1908. Another earned an estimated $1,000 on Coca-Cola sales, with a cut of 40 cents on a case of 24 bottles selling at a nickel apiece. By 1910, Stevens had a son at Yale, rode around in a “swell” automobile, sat in a box at the theater, smoked dollar cigars, dined at swanky Sherry’s restaurant, and lived in a series of fancy Midtown hotels.
The best indicator that business was good was Harry Stevens’ steady rise as a central player in the business affairs of the Highlanders and other clubs. With the money rolling in, Stevens became a dependable financier to whom owners could turn if they needed to meet a payroll or just the money to paint an outfield fence. Even as he developed his business with the Highlanders, he served on the New York Giants Board of Directors, with whom he had long been identified. Stevens considered becoming a partner with Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets in 1908 and an owner of the Giants after the death of John T. Brush in 1912. Thus, when Jacob Ruppert and businessman Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston bought the New York American League team in 1915, the new owners awarded Stevens the concessions rights, no doubt partly due to his large bankroll.
HIGHLANDERS TO YANKEES
Stevens’ position with the Yankees was bolstered after the 1920 season, when Ruppert and Huston hired Ed Barrow, Harry’s longtime friend and former business partner, from the Boston Red Sox to become the business manager of the Yankees. Barrow had spent a lifetime in baseball as a minor-league manager, minor-league owner, minor-league president, and major-league manager. Before he joined the Yankees, Barrow had never won a pennant as a general manager. But with Ruppert’s support, Barrow created one of the greatest dynasties in sports history. In his 24 years with the club, the Yankees won 14 American League championships and 10 World Series.
Barrow and Stevens had been friends since the 1890s, when both men frequented the Pittsburgh sports scene. Barrow landed a job in a hotel that catered to sportsmen. Barrow and Stevens were partners, hawking scorecards, refreshments at the ballpark, and playbills to local theaters. The partnership soon broke up amicably after Barrow decided to remain in baseball and not accompany Stevens to New York City to sell food and drink for the Giants. But they remained close.
Stevens came to hate Huston, who wanted to break the concessions contract with the Stevens family and install his son as the concessionaire at the Polo Grounds, which the Yankees shared with the New York Giants. Meanwhile, Barrow was caught in the middle of the squabbling between Huston and Ruppert over how to run the team, especially Huston’s criticism of Miller Huggins’ effectiveness as on-field manager. Huston in any case wanted out, and after negotiations for the sale of the club to a 3rd party fell through, he tried to find a purchaser for his half of the team. Ruppert did not want a new partner, so he bought out Huston himself. After completing the transaction, Ruppert would offer Barrow the chance to buy 10% of the Yankees for $300,000. Barrow borrowed the money from Harry Stevens, intending to repay the loan with future dividends. Ruppert promoted Barrow to team treasurer and gave him a spot on the Yankees’ Board of Directors. Stevens’ contract with the Yankees was secure.
At this point in his career, Stevens styled himself as “publisher and caterer … from the Hudson to the Rio Grande” – the latter a reference to his racetrack in Juarez. With the opening of Yankee Stadium on April 18,1923, the financial heart of Stevens’ far-flung concessions empire shifted from the Polo Grounds across the river to the Bronx. The new facility was the largest in baseball and could accommodate about 60,000 hungry customers. (At the height of the Yankees’ popularity in the 1920s and 1930s about 80,000 fans could be squeezed in.) This size was not daunting to Stevens, who was used to overseeing large crowds. (He catered the famous Dempsey-Carpentier heavyweight championship bout-an early “Fight of the Century” in Jersey City in 1921, where almost 90,000 people attended.) It was said of his firm that it served up to 250,000 spectators at various ballparks and racetracks on summer afternoons. As Stevens’ ties to the Yankees grew, Harry and his sons especially Frank- became close friends with national idol Babe Ruth, who conspicuously consumed Stevens’ frankfurters. Ruth gave the elder Stevens a signed picture of himself that read, “To my second dad, Harry M. Stevens.” After he hit 60 HRs in 1927, Ruth presented Harry with a poster showing an image of every ball he hit out of the park. Each had the date of a blast, and they were numbered from 1 to 60.
THE BUSINESS OF CONCESSIONS
Concessions provided an important part of the Yankees’ profits throughout the following years. In the 1929 season, the last before the great stock-market crash, about one-third of the team’s net income – $271,028 – came from selling food and drink. This was higher than the crosstown Giants (whose concessions were still managed by the Stevens company) and the 2nd highest in the major leagues. During the Depression in 1933, the Yankees made $59,000 from concessions sales even though the team lost money overall.
In May 1934, Harry Stevens, 76 years old, died of pneumonia. Two of Harry’s sons, Frank and Joe, who informally ran the company in their father’s final years, formally took over. After that, business at Yankee Stadium remained profitable for the company and the club. In the 1940s, the Stevens empire operated not only in Yankee Stadium and at the Polo Grounds but at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, Braves Field and Fenway Park in Boston, and high-profile racetracks like Churchill Downs, Pimlico, Belmont Park, Saratoga, Hialeah and Narragansett. Stevens’ venues also included minor-league parks, dog tracks, state fairgrounds and polo fields. Other concessions networks operated around the country, most notably that of the Jacobs brothers, Sportservice, Inc., which had its headquarters in Buffalo and operated in venues not served by Harry M. Stevens. Several smaller, profitable chains prospered on the West Coast. But while concessions firms came and went, the Stevens empire seemed eternal, like Yankee Stadium itself.
However, profit margins in the industry remained small. In 1942 a representative of Sportservice provided a cost itemization for each dime hot dog his company sold and from which his firm earned only half a cent. Horse racing crowds had the highest average – one reason Harry Stevens controlled prestigious tracks around the country. Fans of track and field spent about 40 cents per capita. Baseball crowds spent 15 cents (22 cents at doubleheaders) and boxing and hockey crowds spent 8 cents. Football fans paid on average 10 cents in mild weather and 25 cents in bad weather. (They were not generally crowds, who spent a lot of money, since they sat on their hands during a game and were unwilling to reach into their bulky overcoats for a dime.) Football fans spent more when it was cold: They clamored for hot food, paper rain hats, and unlimited coffee.
Profits also depended on less predictable factors like fan moods and the weather. Experienced salespeople, who during the Great Depression were frequently older men, varied their sales pitch based on their assessment of crowd psychology. They worked exclusively on commission, getting from 10 to 20 percent of total sales. One veteran salesman at Yankee Stadium, who had refined his sales pitch, claimed he made $26 on a good day, but only $3 on his worst. One of his less experienced colleagues usually pulled in $2 to $8. Sudden weather changes could be disastrous. Counting on a sweltering day, a concessionaire might prepare to sell copious quantities of ice cream and cold drinks only to find that unexpectedly cold weather might shift the demand to coffee, hot dogs, and soup.
Managing an army of vendors at a facility as large as Yankee Stadium was complicated. Forgetting the company founder’s belief in the importance of audience preferences, Stevens company executives came to produce concessions the way Henry Ford manufactured autos: They strictly rationed supplies and insisted on the uniformity of practices- coffee was made the same way every game, and vendors were trained how to put a hot dog in a roll and apply mustard with a minimum of motion. They kept track of coffee sales by counting the number of paper cups issued. Still, there were many opportunities for vendors to cheat. Most bags of peanuts contained 50 to 60 items, but a vendor could pick up empty bags around the ballpark and reapportion his stock to make it look as though he sold more. Harry Stevens did not make his employees sew up their pockets, as did the Jacobs Brothers, but the firm carefully monitored the activities of all his employees. It required all vendors to wear the prices of their wares on a printed card in their hat so they could not overcharge customers.
DECLINE
The Yankees opened the 1964 season without Harry M. Stevens as their concessionaire. The team had replaced Stevens with National Concessions Service, a division of Automatic Canteen Company, a firm partly owned by the team’s owners, businessmen Del Webb and Dan Topping. The menu now included novel items such as shrimp rolls, pizza, fish sandwiches and milkshakes.
Having the Yankee owners control the team and the Stadium’s food and drink operation made good financial sense for the team. In any case, the formidable grip of the Stevens operation on the industry had long been weakening. The Stevens family continued to be reluctant to adapt to evolving audience tastes. (The Stevens company was the only major concessionaire to boil rather than fry its hot dogs, because the elder Harry insisted on cooking them that way.) The reluctance to innovate was reinforced by the large scale of the Stevens holdings, which forced management to standardize its offerings with little variation “from the Hudson to the Rio Grande.” Finally, a company like Stevens, with a highly variable level of concessions profits as its core business, almost inevitably would have less resilience than a larger food conglomerate for which concessions were only a sidelight.
At Yankee Stadium, Automatic Canteen, under various names, managed concessions until the Stadium closed in 2008. The Yankees then created a new firm in partnership with the Dallas Cowboys called Legends Hospitality. That conglomerate focused on food, beverage, merchandise, retail, stadium operations, and entertainment venues like the San Francisco 49ers’ Levi’s Stadium and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Legends tentacles also stretched beyond food to helping teams operate stadiums and selling naming rights and personal seat licenses.
Harry M. Stevens could not have dreamed of culinary offerings at the new Yankee Stadium today. They include meatball parmesan sandwiches, egg creams, cheesesteaks, garlic fries, and Buffalo chicken quesadillas, along with Nathan’s hot dogs. Nor could he have conceived of the video menu boards scattered throughout the ballpark. But he would be on more familiar ground reading the results of a Yankee Stadium concessions case study conducted by Legends in 2014. The report found that the most effective way of increasing concessions sales per capita was to increase the average number of dollars customers spend per transaction. This was sound business practice, indeed and one Harry Stevens pioneered more than a century ago.
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Post by pippsheadache on May 14, 2024 18:25:21 GMT -5
Great list Clipper. A lot to digest. Thank you.
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Post by fwclipper51 on May 14, 2024 18:36:50 GMT -5
1947 Yankees: The hiring of Manager Bucky Harris
This article was written by Art Spanjer, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in 1947 New York Yankees essays
The announcement on November 5,1946 that Bucky Harris would manage the 1947 New York Yankees was almost a foregone conclusion. Still, the circumstances that led to the hiring were anything but mundane.
The announcement on November 5,1946 that Bucky Harris would manage the 1947 New York Yankees was almost a foregone conclusion. “The announcement scarcely bowled over anyone with surprise,” one newspaper commented Still, the circumstances that led to the hiring were anything, but mundane.
Larry MacPhail and Bucky Harris
1947 Yankees Manager Bucky Harris (1947-1948)
The process began early in the 1946 AL season. That season was a managerial turnstile for the Yankees’ 2nd-year co-owner, Larry MacPhail (who was also the team’s President and General Manager). Joe McCarthy, who had been the manager since 1931, abruptly left in May after 35 games. He was succeeded on May 24 by fan favorite Catcher Bill Dickey, whose “managerial contract,” the club said, “would run through 1947.” Dickey managed the team for 105 games and quit on September 12th. Later it was disclosed that Dickey had never signed a contract, a detail that paved the way for his quick exit with 14 games left in the season.
Dickey’s departure and the hiring of Harris had to do with both on-and off-field issues. In 1946 hundreds of baseball players were returning from World War II. Evaluating new players and re-evaluating veterans took tremendous time and energy. This placed a huge burden on Major League teams’ front-office and scouting staffs. Scouting was less highly developed then, with nothing like the complex, computer-driven systems of the modern baseball era. With the sudden influx of veterans, teams were pressured to assess large numbers of players in a very short time.
On the field, the Yankees had languished in 2nd or 3rd place for most of the 1946 season. The impulsive and outspoken MacPhail was strident in his demands that the Yankees finish no lower than 2nd place. Predictably, Dickey and MacPhail had several rough patches during the season. Dickey threatened to quit at least 4 times, only to be dissuaded by MacPhail.
Then, in a surprise press conference on September 9th, MacPhail introduced Stanley Raymond “Bucky” Harris as an executive hired without a title and with a vague job description. MacPhail commented to Roscoe McGowen of the New York Times that he and the Yankees’ Farm Director George Weiss, were stretched to the limit because of the scouting burden. “Bucky will be the contact between myself and the club, doing a job that I have found neither myself or George Weiss has had time for this year
Bucky Harris was a long-time player and manager. He made his managerial debut in 1924 when the Washington Senators added field management to their 2nd baseman’s responsibilities at the astonishingly young age of 27. The Senators won the pennant and World Series in Harris’s 1st year, earning him the sobriquet “Boy Wonder.” In 1946 Harris, after 20 years managing several teams, was the General Manager of the AAA Buffalo Bisons in the International League, a farm club of the Detroit Tigers. MacPhail had not met Harris until a couple of months before he hired him. Ed Barrow, who had preceded MacPhail as the Yankees’ General Manager, and Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, convinced MacPhail that Harris would fill a hole in the Yankees organization. “’There’s not a sharper, shrewder appraiser of young talent in the majors than Stanley Harris,” Barrow said Kritzer, Cy, “Harris Managed ‘For Last Time’ with Bisons,” The Sporting News, November 13, 1946.
When he introduced Harris, at the September 9th press conference, MacPhail said he would be an Executive Aide hired to help in the evaluation of talent and to bolster scouting. MacPhail’s 1st directive to Harris: “Join the Yankees, follow them around the circuit. I want you to get acquainted with the American League again Harris himself said he had no desire to return to managing, that his assignment was to be solely administrative.
Near the end of the press conference a sportswriter asked MacPhail who would manage the Yankees in 1947. MacPhail replied, “That hasn’t been decided. I haven’t given it any thought.” When Dickey was informed of MacPhail’s statement, he immediately went to the Yankees’ executive offices on 5th Avenue in Manhattan. He confronted MacPhail and asked for a clarification of the President’s remark, apparently to no avail. Then, early on the morning of September 12th, while the Yankees were in Detroit, Dickey telephoned MacPhail and took himself out of managerial consideration for 1947.
The timing of Dickey’s announcement apparently astonished MacPhail. He had assumed Dickey would finish out the year. For Dickey to call him from the road, on the eve of an important series with Detroit, whom the Yankees were battling for 2nd place, was more than MacPhail could take. The next day, Dickey was gone and Johnny Neun was named interim manager. "Johnny Neun Installed as Yankee Pilot.” The speculation that Bucky Harris would be the 1947 manager was now growing, even though both MacPhail and Harris continued to assert that Harris’s role with the Yankees would remain off the field.
Behind the scenes, though, MacPhail began to press Harris to be the manager for 1947. But the Yankees boss was also considering another candidate, Brooklyn Dodgers Manager Leo Durocher. When MacPhail was the General Manager of the Dodgers before leaving to serve in World War II, Durocher was his manager, and the 2 had great respect for each other. MacPhail was also not fond of Branch Rickey, who had succeeded him at the helm of the Dodgers.
MacPhail and Durocher met in mid-November, but the facts are somewhat cloudy as to what took place. Durocher told the Washington Post, “About a month before the season ended Larry MacPhail asked to see me. I went over and he offered me the Yankee job. I told him I had a verbal agreement with Mr. Rickey and couldn’t take it. That was the last I heard of it MacPhail denied he had offered the job to Durocher. According to MacPhail, Durocher had sought out Yankees part-owner Dan Topping in early August and expressed interest in the manager’s job. Then, in October, Harris, after scouting Brooklyn’s playoff series with the Cardinals, recommended Durocher for the job. MacPhail took Harris’s recommendation “under advisement,” but 5 days later, on October 8th, told the Yankee Board of Directors, he was recommending that Harris be hired.
The story then turns a little strange. Apparently, Harris and MacPhail had agreed to terms on October 21st for Harris to manage the 1947 Yankees. Two days later, on the 23rd, Harris and Dodgers Coach Chuck Dressen signed contracts and MacPhail called Durocher to inform him of the decision. MacPhail told the New York Times that Durocher had said he would “consider it a favor” if MacPhail could hold the announcement for a few days, to give Durocher some leverage in his negotiations with Branch Rickey over a new contract. MacPhail agreed, but called Leo Durocher again on October 26th and told him that he “could not wait any longer. Durocher and MacPhail subsequently agreed to a date of November 5th for the announcement.
(Based on the previous history of their relationship, MacPhail appeared to be tweaking Rickey and the Dodgers by insinuating that he withheld the Harris announcement in order to give Durocher leverage in his negotiations with Rickey and the Dodgers.)
Durocher said he was “surprised when Dressen signed with MacPhail and hasn’t heard from Dressen since.” Jack Hand, an Associated Press sportswriter, commented, “this situation, following on the heels of Dressen’s ‘jumping’ the Dodgers, could be the foundation of an honest-to-goodness feud. Because he was still under contract to the Dodgers when he signed with the Yankees, Dressen was fined and suspended for 30 days. However, it should be noted that the 2 teams jointly announced 3 exhibition dates in Havana and another three to be played at Ebbets Field. Sportswriters for the most part lauded MacPhail’s choice of Harris, but many criticized MacPhail’s seemingly impulsive, haphazard decision-making process. New York Times columnist Arthur Daley called Harris “an eminently sound choice,” and said he would take no “nonsense” from MacPhail “if that impulsive character ever should try to stick his finger in the pie” Daley, Arthur, “Harris is Elected,” There was one more twist to the saga of Harris’s hiring: At the winter baseball meetings in California, even though Harris had already signed with the Yankees, the Tigers offered him their General Manager position, which they termed “the job of a lifetime.” Yet one has to question, why the Tigers didn’t go after Harris earlier, when he was leaving Buffalo and not yet hired by the Yankees, especially since the Bisons were a Detroit AAA affiliate. Harris nevertheless was forced to re-emphasize to the press his commitment to the Yankees. MacPhail also jumped in to allay any rumors, telling the press that the job had been offered to Harris and he spent some period of time considering it, but he ultimately rejected it. Harris’s final determining factor in accepting the job as Yankees Manager, may have been money. It was speculated in the press that when Harris was hired as a Special Assistant to MacPhail his salary was put at $20,000, When he was made the 1947 Yankees Manager, it was raised to $35,000. Others also mused that once a talent like Harris was bitten by the managerial bug the wound ran deep and a return to the position was inevitable. One sentiment everyone could agree on when it was obvious that the Yankees had something special happening in 1947: “Well, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy” Drebinger, John.
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Post by fwclipper51 on Jun 1, 2024 12:32:23 GMT -5
Joe “Oats” DeMasteri Reserve Yankees INF (1960-1961)
Baseball Digest article by Norman L. Macht, September 2003
Edited by Clipper
1960 Topps Baseball Card
On December 11,1959, Joe DeMaestri got the best Christmas present of his life. After 8 consecutive years as a shortstop for deep 2nd division denizens of the AL (White Sox, Browns and the A’s) he had had enough. It was time to go home to the family beer distributing business in northern California. Then he got a telephone call from the Yankees front office, informing him that he had been included in the 7-man trade that brought Roger Maris from Kansas City to New York. It took him less than 10 seconds to change his mind about retiring from baseball. Although the Yankees had finished 3rd in 1959, the chance of a World Series payoff was always good. It was the best move I ever made," DeMaestri said at his home in Novato, California. "2 years, 2 World Series.”
The worst move, that I made was when I walked away from the Yankees after the 1961 season. I could have stayed. They came out and played the Giants in the 1962 World Series right in my hometown. That's the only regret I have." Joe’s 1961 season playing time was blocked by new Yankees Manager Ralph Houk’s set infield; Bill Skowron, Bobby Richardson, Tony Kubek and Clete Boyer; gone was Casey’s platoon system. Joe had appeared in only 30 games, while hitting just .146 with no HRs and 2 RBIs. After the 1961 World Series has ended, Yankees GM Roy Hamey and Manager Ralph Houk had wanted him to stay another season.
He would tell them no. His decision was cause problems for the team, when shortstop, Tony Kubek was called up by the Army Reserves for 6-month active duty tour: leaving them with 2 rookie shortstops, Tommy Tresh and Phil Linz to fight it out in the 1962 Spring Training Camp to be the starting shortstop. Tresh would beat out Linz for the jog. Veteran Bill Gardner would play reserve, until his trade during the 1962 season.
Joe DeMaestri quickly learned how different it was to play for the Yankees. "1st day of spring training in 1960, I'm sitting at my locker and suddenly there's about 5 players around me: Bill Skowron, Gil McDougald, Yogi Berra ... One of them said to me, 'Just remember, every time you take the field, you're playing with our money.' "They weren't used to losing. They expected that extra money every year. I never forgot that. It was an entirely different attitude from what I was used to.
"The journey that ended with a World Series ring began in 1947 riding the bus at Class C San Jose for $140 a month. "Red Sox Scout Charlie Wallgren had signed me out of high school in 1946. Some other guys from my school had signed for big bonuses--$10,000. My mother knew that, so she held out for a bonus for me. I'd have signed for nothing, but she squeezed $8600 out of them." DeMaestri rose to AA Birmingham and $225 a month in 1950, then was drafted by the White Sox. Two months into the 1951 season, when he had endured the most embarrassing moment of his career.
"Paul Richards was the Manager, the smartest, toughest, most intense manager I ever played for. Ask anybody who played for him; they'll probably tell you the same thing. No conversation. No words of encouragement, Seldom a smile. He never got close to his players. But in a game, he was always 2, 3 innings ahead, like he knew what was going to happen. "Well, this time he didn't know what was about to happen. We're in Boston, June 22nd, a night game. The White Sox are in 1st place, 3 games ahead of the Yankees. I hadn't been playing much, and it was always tough for me to stay in shape sitting on the bench. Some guys can do it; I never could. "We're down, 6-3, in the 5th inning. Our pitcher, Randy Gumpert, is due to lead off. Richards looks down the bench and says, 'DeMaestri, get a bat.' "I felt like I was walking on eggs. I'm a 22-year-old rookie. You're, whole life suddenly changes. Mel Parnell was pitching for Boston. I swung at a pitch and I knew I hit it pretty good, headed for the Green Monster. I put my head down and I'm running all oat and make the turn at 1st, don't look at the coach, don't see Ted Williams play it off the wall and fire it in to 2nd."All I know is off the wall is a double, right? I round 1st and get about a 3rd of the way to 2nd and all of a sudden, my legs don't want to run anymore. I feel myself leaning forward and fall flat on my face about 20 feet from 2nd. I'm lying there watching Bobby Doerr take the throw at 2nd and turn to put the tag on me. I can't move. "He walks over to me. 'You're hurt,' he says. "'No.' "Well, you're out,' he says, "Now I gotta get up and take that long walk back to the bench.
There was a bathroom with a swinging door just inside one end of the dugout. The whole team was trying to cram in there, they were laughing so hard and didn't want Richards to see it. Richards is sitting all alone at the other end, this vast empty bench beside him. When I got there, he didn't say a word, didn't even look at me. He didn't have to. His expression told me enough. "The photo of me lying there in the dirt went all over the country. When I got back to Chicago, my wife greeted me with it at the front door. 50 years later, Eddie Robinson, the 1st baseman on that team, still reminds me of it when I see him. "Richards had managed the White Sox to a 4th-place finish, good for a $500 bonus on DeMaestri's $5,000 salary.
In November, DeMaestri was part of a multi-player trade that sent him to the St. Louis Browns and the horror of playing for Rogers Hornsby. "Hornsby got on you about everything. He tried to teach everybody his way. He'd say, 'You can't hit that way,' and grab a bat and show you how he did it, like you could hit .400 doing it his way, too." Bill Veeck was the Browns' Team Owner and the ageless Satchel Paige was his best pitcher. "Hornsby hated Paige," DeMaestri said. "His kind of players were tough, scrappy, wild men like Jim Rivera and Clint Courtney, the opposite of Satch. First morning of spring training, we're all sitting on some bleachers while Hornsby's talking--all but Satch. Then we see Satch ambling slowly toward us, trying to sneak in behind Hornsby's back. "Hornsby saw him and lit into him, gonna fine him $250 and on and on. Satch just stood there, and when Hornsby was through, Satch said, 'I don't think so.' He knew Bill Veeck was his man. "Some guys were ready to strike, just refuse to play for him. But it became a whole team mutiny. If there were any leaders, it might be Bobby Young and Marty Marion, but I can't prove it "Veeck knew what was happening. In July, the team was in Boston. Veeck came into town and replaced Hornsby with Marty Marion. "We all chipped in and gave Veeck a huge trophy for liberating us. "They didn't play any better after that, finishing 7th, but they could breathe.
DeMaestri's next stop was the Philadelphia Athletics, where the fun-loving Jimmy D*y*k*e*s prevailed in 1953. Then Eddie Joost managed the A's in their last year in the Quaker City. By now, DeMaestri was playing regularly and had climbed to a lofty $6,000 on the player salary scale. One night, he got a glimpse of the difference between the haves and have-nots. "We had played the Yankees a day game at home and both teams were leaving town. The trains were waiting for us at the station. The Yankees had a dining car attached; meanwhile, we had box lunches."
Kansas City A's player photo
When the A's moved to Kansas City, DeMaestri would spent the next 5 years playing for Managers Lou Boudreau and Harry Craft. "Lou Boudreau taught me how to play a shorter shortstop," he recalled, "how to position myself and get a jump on the ball. He was an experimenter, tried a Mantle shift and a Williams shift. You never knew what he might come up with. "Kansas City was great. My family really enjoyed our time there. "DeMaestri was now one of the veterans, when 23-year-old sophomore OF Roger Maris arrived in a June 1958 trade from Cleveland.
DeMaestri's next stop was with the Philadelphia Athletics, where the fun-loving Jimmy D*y*k*e*s prevailed in 1953. Then Eddie Joost would manage the A's in their last year (1954) in the Quaker City. By now, DeMaestri was playing regularly and had climbed to a lofty $6,000 on the salary scale. One night, he got a glimpse of the difference between the haves and have-nots. "We had played the Yankees a day game at home and both teams were leaving town. The trains were waiting for us at the station. The Yankees had a dining car attached; we had box lunches." Clipper’s Note: My late High School Gym Teacher former Philadelphia A’s hurler Bob Hooper had told me the same story.
When the Philadelphia A's had moved to Kansas City, DeMaestri would spent the next 5 years playing for Managers Lou Boudreau and Harry Craft. "Lou Boudreau taught me how to play a shorter shortstop," he recalled, "how to position myself and get a jump on the ball. He was an experimenter, tried a Mantle shift and a Williams shift. You never knew what he might come up with. Kansas City was great. My family really enjoyed our time there.” DeMaestri was now one of the veterans, when 23-year-old sophomore OF Roger Maris arrived in a 1958 trade from Cleveland.
"Roger was friendly but not outgoing," he said, "like he couldn't relax and let it out. He'd go out after a game with a bunch of players, but it seemed like he was never at ease. And some guys didn't like him because of the things he said. He didn't know how to handle the press, was always wary and suspicious, like what does this guy want from me? And if a reporter asked him something that maybe wasn't the greatest question, Roger would fire back at him. Sometimes he'd say something that didn't ring true and you'd sit there and cringe. "That wasn't a big deal in Kansas City, where there were maybe 2 writers covering the team. But in New York, there were dozens from all kinds of papers, a lot of them young and inexperienced writers. And when that 1961 season hit him, Roger had no idea how to deal with it."
1961 Topps Baseball Card
With Tony Kubek the Yankees' starting shortstop, DeMaestri went back to a utility role, when he was traded to New York. But it gave him a front seat for the last year of the Casey Stengel show and the unforgettable 1961 season. "Stengel’s meetings were a real show. He rambled on and you couldn't understand a word he said and you couldn't keep from laughing. Then he'd finish with 'Go get 'em' and disappear. But he didn't have to say anything with the kind of team he had. He would sleep on the bench behind those dark glasses. Didn't make any difference. One night, he woke up about the 6th inning and looked at the scoreboard. We're losing by something like 5 to 1. He gets up and starts walking up and down, saying, 'Hey, I think it's time we get this guy.' And we did, won it maybe 11-5. "I could have managed those teams."
But DeMaestri agrees with the assessment of other Yankees of that era: Stengel was a master psychologist. "One day we're getting dressed for a game and Mantle is sitting there pretty hung over. He was hurting pretty good, too. He's sitting there wrapping his legs. Casey's looking out of his office and he can see that Mick had had a tough night. He walks over to Mantle, looks down at him and says, 'You're not going to play today,' and turns and walks back to his office. Before he could sit down Mantle was there. Mick says, 'Don't you ever take me out of that lineup.' If Mickey had any feeling that he didn't want to play that day, Casey had changed it."
After years of dwelling in the 2nd division of the AL, DeMaestri found himself in 4 World Series games against the Pirates in 1960. In the wild final Game 7, he had replaced shortstop Tony Kubek, when a ground ball took a weird bounce and hit Kubek in the throat in the 8th inning: " We were leading, 7-4. They scored 5 in the 8th, then we tied it in the 9th. Then Maz hit the HR to win it.
"Everybody remembers Maz's homer, but the key to that World Series was really when Clemente hit a topper in the 8th and pitcher Jim Coates didn't cover 1st base and Clemente beat it out. If he's out, we're out of the inning leading 7-5. Instead, it was now 7-6. Then Hal Smith would hit a 3-run HR. The next spring, Coates comes into spring training camp and Clete Boyer greets him with, 'If you'd covered 1st base, we'd have been a little richer.' I mean, those guys took that seriously. They didn't let you forget it if you cost them money. "DeMaestri didn't get into any games of the 1961 World Series, but he did get a winner's ring and another full Series share. And that season is still paying dividends for him 40 years later. Whenever the 1961 Yankees are invited to a reunion or a card show, Joe DeMaestri is one of them, to show up.
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Post by fwclipper51 on Jun 14, 2024 16:39:39 GMT -5
Almost a Yankee Rod Kanehl, Forever a Mets Infielder
This article was written by David E. Skelton, Edited by Clipper
Mets Spring Training Camp PhotoIn March 1956, New York Yankees Manager Casey Stengel watched in “amazement” as Rod Kanehl, the club’s versatile 22-year-old prospect, “scaled the fence in a do-or-die effort to catch” a HR ball during a meaningless practice game. His effort left a lasting impression on Casey that when the New York Mets hired the future Hall of Fame skipper before the team’s inaugural season, he directed the team’s Triple-A affiliate to select Kanehl during the November 1961 MLB Minor League Player Draft. “[T]he embodiment of the every-man quality that helped to popularize the Mets . . . Kanehl [or ‘Kanoo,’ as he was known by his manager,] hustled his way on to the 1962 roster with Casey’s support and hung around for 3 seasons.”
Roderick Edwin Kanehl (pronounced kah-NEEL) was born on April 1, 1934, the 3rd of 4 children of Raymond E. and Marjorie M. (Roderick) Kanehl in Wichita, Kansas. In the 1940s, Rod’s parents, both Kansas natives, moved the family to Springfield, MO. Raymond was a high school physical education teacher, a vocation that had a significant influence on his son. An exceptional athlete at Springfield (later Central) High School, Rod’s exploits in football, basketball, baseball, and especially track would, 50 years after his circa 1952 graduation, still place on a list of top 100 southwest Missouri athletes. In 1953, while enrolled as a physical education major at Drury University in Springfield, Rod had finished 2nd in the national decathlon competition. His exploits captured the attention of Missouri native and longtime Yankees MLB Scout Tom Greenwade, who had 4 years earlier had signed Mickey Mantle. Though Kanehl’s baseball pursuits ran secondary to his track exploits, Greenwade was convinced that the youngster’s talents (especially his ability to run the 100-yard dash in 10.5 seconds) would prove valuable on the baseball diamond. In 1954, Kanehl would sign a $4,000 bonus contract and reported to the Yankees Class-D affiliate in McAlester, Oklahoma.
Greenwade’s projections panned out when Kanehl, whose teammates included Mantle’s 2 younger twin brothers Ray and Roy, when he had established a Sooner State League record 32-game hitting streak that ran through July 4th. Among the McAlester Rockets leaders in nearly every offensive category, Kanehl also finished the 1954 season tied for 2nd in the circuit with 11 triples. Progressing rapidly through the Yankees farm system over the next 2 years, Kanehl was initially assigned to the AAA Denver Bears (American Association) with Manager Ralph Houk in 1957, but the plans were changed, when the Yankees put him in AA, with the Dallas Rangers (Texas league) a year later, Kanehl would rebound to finish among the Texas League leaders with 154 hits while pacing the circuit with 28 stolen bases. Despite a dismal .879 fielding percentage at shortstop, the organization was pleased with his adaptability at other positions — specifically 2nd base and center field.
In February of 1959, Kanehl was just 1 of just 4 minor leaguers invited to the Yankees advanced training school, a week of accelerated instruction in Florida that Manager Casey Stengel conducted ahead of the regular Yankees MLB spring training camp. At its close, Kanehl was asked to work out with the big boys as a non-roster invitee. A dark horse candidate for the club’s last roster spot, Kanehl was one of the last players the Yankees would cut before the start of the regular AL season. After a brief stay with AAA Richmond Virginians (International League), Kanehl was sent to the AAA Houston Buffs (American Association) with a request from Stengel that he be used at 2nd base. With veteran infielder Dick Cole holding down the position in Houston, Kanehl would spend the season jockeying between the outfield and shortstop where, despite meager improvement in fielding percentage, he drew considerable notice for his range. On the downside, his 1st season of extended play in the high-level minors roughed up his offensive numbers. Kanehl’s batting line dropped to a meager .238/.301/.291 in 429 at-bats, and his career path appeared crippled, when he was demoted to the AA Nashville Volunteers (Southern Association) midway through the 1960 season. But a changed batting grip helped resurrect his career the following year. Around 1960, Kanehl had declined a Yankees offer of a managerial post with a Class-D affiliate to continue playing. Though a late slump removed him from contention for the Southern Association’s 1961 batting crown, Kanehl would finish the season among the league leaders in runs (92), hits (174), doubles (31) and stolen bases (14). And this rebound would help Stengel make the argument with the Mets front office for Kanehl’s selection by the Mets in the November minor league player draft from the New York Yankees.
1962 Mets player photo
In 1962, Rod Kanehl, for the 2nd time in his pro baseball career, reported to a major league spring training as a non-roster invitee. Already appreciated by Stengel, Kanehl’s aggressiveness — a style of play which earned him the nickname “Hot Rod” — soon won over the Mets front office personnel as well. Lastly, he “won his way into the hearts of Mets’ fans . . . [when] in a game televised to New York from St. Petersburg, Fl[orid]a, [Kanehl] delivered a 9th-inning, 2-run [pinch-hit] double off the Los Angeles Dodgers ace Sandy Koufax on a check swing . . . The hit enabled the Mets to tie the score in a game they eventually won.” A week later Kanehl officially became part of a rare breed, an original Met, after edging out OF Joe Christopher for the final roster spot.
On April 15,1962, Kanehl made his MLB player debut at New York’s Polo Grounds pinch-hitting against Pirates Ace Bob Friend, where he grounded out to 3B Don Hoak. Two days later, Kanehl got his 1st MLB start as the Mets 2B during a 5-2 loss to the other NL expansion team; Houston Colt .45s. Not until April 21st, in his 7th season at-bat, did Kanehl get his 1st MLB hit, an 8th inning pinch-hit single against Pirates veteran reliever Roy Face. Used primarily as a pinch-runner or -hitter for the 1st 6 weeks of the 1962 NL season, on April 28th, Kanehl would notch a small little piece of Met history. Entering as pinch-runner in the 6th inning of a game against the Phillies, he scampered home from 2nd base on a wild pitch to score the winning run in the franchise’s 1st-ever home victory. He was soon “regarded as something of a lucky piece by the Mets” after scoring the tying or winning run in 7 of the club’s 1st 11 wins.
As injuries and general ineffectiveness plagued the team, in June, Casey Stengel began inserting Kanehl into the starting lineup hoping to generate some offense from the MLB's worst hitting team. The “enthusiastic and eye-catching . . . rookie” opened the month with a 10-for-18 run in route to a .321 average in 131 at-bats through June and July. Although far from a power threat, on July 6th; Kanehl would connect for the 1st grand slam HR in Mets franchise history against the Cardinals veteran reliever Bobby Shantz. He was used at every position except catcher or pitcher throughout the season, Kanehl eventually took over the Mets starting 2nd-base job after Charlie Neal was moved to shortstop to replace injured Elio Chacon. Unfortunately, his 22 errors in 62 games there were exceeded in the MLB, only by the Giants’ Chuck Hiller, who played 99 more games at 2nd than did Kanehl. Nonetheless, he was 1 of only 2 rookies (and 7 players overall) Stengel designated as the team’s untouchables in the wake of the Mets modern MLB record-setting 120-loss season.
This horrendous debut season understandably precipitated a buzz of Mets activity during the offseason. Upon reporting to spring training camp, Kanehl found himself competing with 6 other potential 2B. Hobbled slightly by winter knee surgery (to fix an undisclosed injury, he had suffered near the close of the season), Kanehl, despite reporting to Florida early, failed to reclaim his starting job (former Braves prospect Ron Hunt took it). Reassigned to the Mets bench, Stengel’s “favorite utility player” got just 10 ABs through the 1st 4 weeks of the 1963 NL season. On May 12th, in his 1st start of the year, Kanehl earned a $50 bonus from his run-starved club after driving in a run on a bases-loaded hit by pitch. But he got few starts: Stengel preferred to hold Kanehl back as the club’s deluxe substitute batter. “[He is] our leading pinch-hitter,” Casey explained. “[W]hen you need a hit, he generally comes through.” Moreover, Kanehl’s versatility in the field he had played every position except pitcher, catcher and shortstop-provided Stengel with a valuable late-inning defensive replacement. Though he got just 191 at-bats throughout the 1963 NL season, Kanehl understood perfectly. “If being an all-around man is the way I can stay in the major leagues, I’m for it,” he said.
During the offseason, Kanehl’s tenure with the Mets appeared tenuous when Mets GM George Weiss, unlike Stengel not nearly as enamored with the reserve player, had purchased utility infielder Amado Samuel from the Braves. One of Weiss’s concerns about Kanehl appears to have been his free-swinging approach at the plate a large contributor to his meager .268 OBP during the 1963 season. But Stengel would push back and eventually, prevailed in the matter. He pointed out Samuel’s equally poor career OBP, plus his hope that Kanehl might solve the Mets’ veritable turnstile at 3B, where a gaggle of 15 players, including Kanehl at the hot corner in over 2 seasons.
1964 Topps Baseball Card
In the 1964 Mets spring training camp, Kanehl would compete with 6 others for the starting 3B job. When the regular 1964 NL season had opened, he started at 3rd in 3 of the club’s 1st 7games before resuming his familiar reserve infield role, after the Mets had acquired veteran 3rd baseman Charley Smith from the White Sox. He was used primarily at 2B and center field, where on June 19th, he accomplished a rare unassisted double play by an outfielder. Racing in to catch a shallow line drive, his momentum carried him to 2nd base where he put the tag on Phillies baserunner Ruben Amaro. This was one of few highlights for Kanehl during the 1964 NL season. He would endure a horrific slump in July, and then injured his leg in August, which limited him to just 92 ABs through the 2nd half of the season. While his fielding percentage may have been below average, Kanehl's ability to get to balls in the infield or outfield was notable. Based on analysis of Baseball-Reference.com data for players with 100+ innings at a position, Rod Kanehl led all Met 2nd and 3rd basemen in assists per inning during 1962 and 1964 seasons and had the highest ratio of centerfield putouts per inning during the 1964 season. During 1963, Kanehl was close to Outfielders Joe Hicks and Duke Carmel as the Mets centerfielder with the highest putouts per inning ratio.
On October 4,1964, in his last plate appearance in the MLB, Kanehl would delivered a pinch-hit RBI single against veteran reliever Barney Schultz during a lopsided 11-5 loss to the Cardinals. Within days, he was dispatched to the International League’s AAA Buffalo Bisons, but 1 of 9 players that were reassigned as the Mets, who had suffered through their 3rd straight 100-loss season, started to committ themselves to a youth movement. He was exposed to the MLB Rule 5 Player Draft because of his assignment to AAA Buffalo Bisons, Kanehl was bypassed in the player selection process. After the 1964 season, the Mets did not invite Kanehl to spring training, but also they had prevented him from taking a minor league coaching job that he had been offered by the New York Yankees. In February of 1965, he would report to the AAA Buffalo Bisons spring training camp, while the Mets, per his request, tried to trade him. When no one had shown interest, Rod Kanehl would spurned a minor-league contract for the 1965 season. He would retire from MLB. Rod had amassed a .241/.277/.300 batting line in 796 MLB at-bats. On April 12,1965, when the Mets opened the regular season at home against the Dodgers, observers noted a banner which read: “The Mets Look Odd Without Hot Rod.” During his prol baseball career, Kanehl had spent off-seasons at his home in Missouri, to which he returned in April 1965. But he was not willing to abandon the game he loved. He had signed on with the semi-pro Wichita (Kansas) Rapid Transit Dreamliners and alongside several former big leaguers including Mets teammate Charley Neal and future MLB GM Pat Gillick, led the club to the National Baseball Congress championship (the World Series for amateur and semi-pro leagues) in September 1965. Kanehl, a meticulous student of the game, continued play in the semi-pro circuits for at least 1 more year, hoping all the while to attract attention as a professional coach or manager.
Many years later, “in Peter Golenbock’s book, ‘Amazin’: The Miraculous History of New York’s Most Beloved Team [Kanehl] talked about how he . . . [and] future manager Gil Hodges and] Don Zimmer would all talked strategy and managerial technique, while in the locker room.” Stengel often thought of Kanehl as an extra coach and in one instance at the end of the 1963 season used him as a 1st base coach, after letting his regular coaches go home early. But despite his seemingly rich qualifications Kanehl attracted no interest as a possible coach or manager. Around 1970, he had moved to California and over the next several decades dabbled in a variety of occupations: construction, insurance sales, restaurant management, and eventual ownership. In semi-retirement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked part-time as caddy at the exclusive Bel Air Country Club in Los Angeles.
Throughout his playing career Kanehl was known for his sharp sense of humor; he was a beloved teammate and a favorite on the rubber chicken circuit. A “noted [tongue-in-cheek] philosopher[, he] once observed that ‘the line drives are caught, the squibbles go for hits. It’s an unfair game.’” On October 20,1963, Kanehl would represent the Mets at a St. Louis dinner honoring retired Cardinals great Stan Musial. The following spring, when the Mets opened their new state-of-the-art Shea Stadium, Kanehl turned to teammate Pitcher Bill Wakefield and, alluding to the hapless nature of the team, cracked, “Are we good enough to play [here]?” Though well received by fans at several Old Timers Games between 1967-1972, Kanehl slowly receded from memory as the Mets began achieving some success on the field. After the club captured the world championship in 1969, Kanehl “ventured into the clubhouse as no more than a suitably dazzled and slightly grizzled spectator of the team’s amazing rise to glory.” When former Mets and Yankees Manager Casey Stengel would died 6 years later, Kanehl was “reportedly the only ex-Met player” to attend the funeral in Glendale, California.
Around 1953, Rod Kanehl had married Missouri native and high school sweetheart Shirley L. Toler. The couple would have 3 sons and 1 daughter before their divorce in California 20 years later. In 1975, Kanehl would remarry and also proudly celebrated the graduation of 1 of his sons from Yale University. This marriage would prove to be short-lived, and Kanehl eventually wed a 3rd time. He also suffered a particular tragedy in 1990 when his youngest son, Thomas Andrew, died of AIDS at the age of 30.On December 14, 2004, 4 months removed from his 71st birthday, Rod Kanehl had died from a heart attack in Palm Springs, California. He was buried at Greenlawn Memorial Gardens in Springfield, Missouri.
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Post by fwclipper51 on Jul 5, 2024 14:38:49 GMT -5
Roy White:The Quite Yankee
This article was written by James Lincoln Ray, Edited by Clipper
Yankees Player Game Photo
Roy White was a quiet, graceful leader on the New York Yankees during a transitional period in the club’s history. His strength of character and remarkable versatility enabled him to survive, and even excel, in the shark tank that is so often New York Yankee baseball. At a time when the great careers of Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Roger Maris and Elston Howard were winding down, White broke into the majors and steadily evolved from speedy utility player to the team’s cleanup hitter and one of its top sluggers. During White’s early years the team was suffering its 1st down period in quite some time, though he stuck around long enough to help with the club’s renaissance.
Roy Hilton White was born on December 27, 1943 in Compton, California. His parents had separated, when he was 5, leaving his mother to support Roy and his younger brother. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Compton, a place where the sun shined every day and there were many vacant lots strewn about the neighborhood; which allowed White and his neighborhood friends to play a lot of baseball. Actually, they had played a variation of baseball that White and his pals called sock ball. “We’d take an ankle leg sock and stuff it with rags, and then we’d wrap it with tape or maybe sew it. The pitcher would stand about 25 feet away because the ball was so light. But you could curve it, throw a screwball,” he would later explain when asked about how he developed his batting eye and hitting style.
White had attended Centennial High School in Compton, where he was a standout in baseball and football. On the diamond, he played 2nd base and formed 1/2 of a very formidable double play combination with fellow future all-star, Reggie Smith. White had rare talent–he was a switch-hitting 2nd baseman with great speed and moderate power, who hit more than .400. During his Sr. year, White had received numerous full scholarship offers from some of the best universities in California. UCLA wanted him to play baseball. Long Beach State Univ. had offered him a full ride to play football. But on July 1st, New York Yankees Scout Tuffy Hashem had persuaded White to sign a minor league contract for a guaranteed salary of $6,000, with a $4,000 bonus. if he made the big-league club
White had struggled mightily in his early days in the minor leagues. In 1962, while playing for Greensboro’s Class A ball club, he was batting just a few points above .200 and worried that he wasn’t going to make it in baseball. According to White, he briefly considered quitting the game: “I was hitting around .210. I was sitting around one night, and saying to myself “If I can’t play baseball, what am I going to do?” Fortunately, White decided against quitting. “Then, I started to hit, and I thought, ‘if I finish at .250, I’ll be happy.’” Instead, by the end of the season White had pushed his batting average all the way up to .284. By 1964, the Yankee would promote White to the Double-A Columbus (Georgia) Confederate Yankees. As he had done in Class A Ball, White would struggle in the early going and finished the season hitting just .257. But the next year back at Columbus he broke out, hitting .300 with 19 HRs and 14 triples in 139 games. For his efforts, he was awarded the 1965 Southern League Most Valuable Player Award. White’s big season in 1965, led the Yankees to call him up to the big leagues when they expanded their MLB player roster in September.
Roy White would see his 1st MLB action on September 7, 1965, when he would pinch-hit for Pitcher Al Downing in the 9th inning of the 1st game of a doubleheader. White would drive a single up the middle and a few batters later, scored his 1st MLB run on a Tom Tresh single. In the 2nd game, White had started at 2nd base, and went 2-for-5 with a double and another run scored. The 21-year-old remained with the club for the waning days of the 1965 AL season, he would hit .333 in 14 games. Bust just as things were looking up for White, times were getting tough for the Yankees. After winning 5 straight American League pennants between 1960 and 1964, the Yankees fell to 6th place in 1965. Their biggest star, Mickey Mantle, suffered through a difficult, injury-riddled year, hitting just .255 with 19 HRs and 46 RBIs. The team’s other great slugger, Roger Maris, who had hit a record 61 HRs just 4 years earlier, managed just 8 HRs and 27 RBIs in an injury-riddled 1965. Whitey Ford was starting to slip. Elston Howard was contemplating retirement. Fans hoped for a comeback in 1966, and looked to the team’s youngsters, especially White and fellow infielder Bobby Murcer, to pick up where the veterans were leaving off. White initially responded very well to the increased expectations. During spring training, he had won the James P. Dawson Award as the best rookie in camp, and the New York Times remarked that White “seemed destined for a fine Yankee career, [and that] he may turn out to be cut from the same mold as Mickey Mantle or Yogi Berra.”
White would hit well early in the 1966 AL season, batting .290 with 5 HRs through the 1st 6 weeks of the season. But he would soon slumped and, according to White, it was his attempts to hit HRs that were his undoing. As he explained years later, the allure of the short porch in Yankee Stadium‘s right field led him to try to pull every pitch. His strikeouts increased, his hits and walks dropped, and soon White was batting a measly .240. The team fell even further, finishing in 10th (last) place in 1966, and White struggled down the stretch to close the year with a disappointing .225 batting average. Because of his late season slump, White began the 1967 season on loan to the Dodgers with their AAA Spokane club. By midseason, he was hitting .343, when the Yankees called him back to the big leagues. In an abbreviated 1967 season, during which he had just 214 at-bats, White hit .224 with 7 HRs and 20 RBIs. During the 1968 AL season, Roy White finally found his place on the Yankees. Forced to start the season without a definite position or a set spot in the batting order, White was used as a
pinch-hitter and a defensive replacement in the early going. By the end of May, he was playing so well that Manager Ralph Houk felt compelled to insert him as the team’s everyday left fielder. White also found a spot in the batting order. From May through July, he’d been hitting 3rd, in front of senior statesman Mickey Mantle. But on August 13, 1968, Ralph Houk had moved White into the cleanup spot and shifted Mantle to 3rd. The move was questioned by many New York sportswriters who were fond of Mantle and saw the move as a slight to the future Hall of Famer. But as White later explained, Houk had good reason to make the change. “The other teams were walking Mickey a lot, so Ralph Houk decided to hit Mickey 3rd and me 4th.” For the season, White would hit .267 with 17 HRs and 62 RBIs. At first blush those numbers appear respectable, but when viewed through the prism of 1960s baseball, which was a time period dominated by pitching, they are actually quite impressive. White’s .267 batting average was 37 points higher than the American League average of .230. His 62 RBIs were the most of any Yankee, and only Mantle, who hit 18 HRs, surpassed White’s total of 17. In fact, White’s season was so good that when the baseball writers voted for American League MVP that fall, the Yankee youngster would finish in 12th place.
By the spring of 1969, all of the Yankee greats from the early 1960s were gone. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford had both retired. Roger Maris had been sent to the Cardinals in 1967, and had hung up his spikes for good before the start of the 1969 season. Elston Howard had been dealt to Boston in 1967, he had since retired as well, rejoining the Yankees as a MLB Coach. Times had changed, and leadership of the Yankees now shifted to players like Mel Stottlemyre, Fritz Peterson, Horace Clarke, Bobby Murcer and Roy White. The team had finished in 5th place with an 80-81 record. Despite the rough transition that the Yankees were experiencing as a team, Roy White continued to improve every aspect of his game. By mid-July 1969, he was hitting .320. Roy was named to his 1st AL All-Star team. White finished the season hitting .290 and he drew 81 walks to yield an impressive on-base percentage of .392. Although he hit just 7 HRs, Roy increased his doubles to 30 and his RBIs to 74. By 1970, White had become a fixture in the middle of the Yankees batting order. All but one of his at-bats that season came from the 3rd or 4th spot in the batting order. He would filled the role of slugger nicely, batting .296 with 30 doubles, 6 triples, 22 HRs and 94 RBIs. Also, he had stolen 24 bases and drew 95 walks, which helped him to a .387 on-base percentage. White would finished 3rd in runs scored in the American League, with 109. In July, he was named to his 2nd straight All-Star game, and when the season ended, baseball writers had placed him 15th in MVP voting.
Perhaps the best assessment of White’s balance and versatility came from his former teammate Mickey Mantle, who after the 1970 MLB season wrote an article for Sport magazine that ranked White as one of the most underrated players in baseball. Mantle was particularly impressed with White’s ability to do the important things that might not always show up in the box score, but which often contribute to winning the game. “People ask me: what happened to all the Yankee stars? I tell them that Roy White is as good a player as any of the old players we used to have.” In support of his statement, Mantle noted that White “hit for power and average, walked a lot, and he also could steal bases, sacrifice, hit behind the runner, and play the field well.” Despite his great season, there were still many Yankee followers who had trouble adjusting to a Yankee cleanup hitter who wasn’t nearly capable of the 50 HRs that fans came to expect from players like Ruth, Gehrig and Mantle. A 1971 Sport magazine article entitled “The Yankees Have a Cleanup Hitter Who Chokes the Bat” drove home the point. In the piece, White acknowledged that he was not cut from the same mold as Ruth, DiMaggio or Mantle, but explained, “my style is to hit the ball up the middle and to the opposite side. Not to pull–when I try to pull, I overswing and I’m pulling my head away from the ball.” Regardless of his hitting style, no one complained about the results. He finished the 1971 season with a .292 batting average, 19 HRs and 84 RBIs. He also set a new American League record for sacrifice flies with 17. White followed up that year with another solid performance in 1972, a year when he hit .270, led the American League in walks (with 99), and finished 4th in doubles. Although his power numbers dipped a little, hitting just 10 HRs and collecting 54 RBIs, White’s speed picked up some of the slack as he finished 9th in the league in steals and 8th in runs scored. Despite White’s steady performance, however, the Yankees continued to struggle. Although the team finished 2nd in 1970, over the course of the next 2 years, the Bombers would dropped back to 4th place and barely broke the .500 mark. But it wasn’t just the team that was suffering. It was the whole organization. Attendance for the Yankees had dropped throughout the 1960s, from 1.7 million in 1960 to 1.3 million the year before CBS, Inc. bought the team, and kept falling during the CBS ownership of the team. In 1972, just 966,328 people went to the old ballpark to see the Yankees play. Yankee Stadium, which had been completed in 1923 and hadn’t undergone any meaningful renovations in a half-century, was beginning to crumble.
But alas, the cavalry was coming and it was being led by a Cleveland-area shipping magnate named George M. Steinbrenner, III. On January 3, 1973, Steinbrenner had led a group of investors, who had purchased the New York Yankees for $10 million from CBS, Inc. Over the next 3 seasons, the Yankees would rebuilt their Stadium and restocked their team with better player talent. By the time the “new” Yankee Stadium reopened for the start of the 1976 AL season, the Yankees were flush with new stars, players that Steinbrenner and GM Gabe Paul had acquired through aggressive trades and during the nascent days of MLB free agency. Third baseman Graig Nettles came over in a trade with Indians for the 1973 season. First baseman Chris Chambliss would join him in the Bronx to in early 1974. Five time 20-game winner Catfish Hunter arrived in 1975, as an MLB Free Agent. During this time of transition, Roy White served as a steady presence in a sea of new and constantly changing faces. He had struggled in 1973, when his slump ran into the 1974 season, new Yankees Manager Bill Virdon tried to make White a part-time designated hitter, which was something he despised. “I didn’t like that,” White told reporters in 1976, “other teams think you can’t play anymore.” Despite hitting .275, White’s power numbers dropped drastically. After averaging 17 HRs and 74 RBIs during the 4 previous seasons, White hit just 7 HRs with 43 RBIs, and at some point, he even demanded to be traded from the only major league team he had ever known. But by mid-1975, Steinbrenner had fired Virdon and replaced him with Billy Martin, a manager, who knew how to use White’s talents better than any of his previous skippers. Martin ended the designated hitter experiment and re-installed White in left field. He also moved the veteran back into the number 2 spot. White explained why he liked Billy and liked the changes that Martin demanded from him. “ fit into Billy’s mold. I have speed, I’m a base stealer, I’m a switch hitter, and I’m able to move runners along — things that are very important to the way Billy manages.”
White would spent the next 3 years in left field and worked mostly out of the 2 spot in the batting order. The adjustments seemed to re-energize the 32-yearold, who in turn helped the Yankees return to their former greatness in the coming years. The 1976 season saw the re-emergence of White as a valuable player and the Yankees as an American League powerhouse. Comfortable with a secure position in the field and a batting spot worthy of his skills, White had his best all-around season in 5 years. Batting behind Mickey Rivers and in front of 1976 American League MVP Thurman Munson, White would hit .286, led the AL in runs scored with 104, finished 4th in walks with 86, stole a career-high 31 bases and had 19 combined sacrifice flies and bunts. White’s 1st playoff series came against Whitey Herzog‘s Kansas City Royals, a team that featured American League batting champion George Brett. In the 1st game, White came through in the top of the 9th with a big 2-out double that knocked home 2 runs and clinched the win for New York. Five days later, with the series knotted at 2 wins apiece, White’s single, 2 walks and 2 runs helped the Yankees get into a position to win the game on Chris Chambliss’s dramatic HR to lead off the bottom of the 9th inning. In 5 games, he had hit .294 and his ALCS record 5 walks upped his OBP to .455. Roy also had 3 doubles, 3 RBIs and scored 4 runs in the ALCS series. White would followed up his great ALCS showing with a disappointing World Series. The Cincinnati Reds, the famed "Big Red Machine" that featured Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, crushed the Yankees in a 4 game sweep and White hit just .133. The World Series 4-game loss made it clear to Steinbrenner that the Yankees were close, but they were still 1 step from the top of the mountain.
Roy White Topps Baseball Card
After the 1976 AL season, the Yankees had rewarded White with a 3-year deal, which was the 1st multi-season contract of his MLB playing career. The 1977 season shaped up as a 3-team race among the Yankees, Orioles and the Red Sox. On August 10th, the Yankees were 5 games back and were struggling to stay in 3rd place, but they would win 24 of their next 27 games and by the 1st week of September, New York was in 1st place by 4 games. They held onto the lead, and eventually clinched the American League East on the next-to-last day of the season. White finished the year with his numbers slightly down from his ’76 revival, batting just .268, but with 14 HRs with 18 stolen bases and 72 runs scored. Martin used White sparingly in the 1977 postseason. In 11 postseason games, the veteran left fielder came to the plate just 7 times, hit .294, with 2 doubles and 2 runs scored. The Yankees would eventually won the World Series, their 1st title in 15 years, when Reggie Jackson hit 3 HRs in Game 6 to sink their age-old rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4 games to 2. In 1978, White would become a part-time player, sharing left field with Lou Piniella. In 346 at bats, he would hit .269 with 8 HRs in a very tumultuous, but ultimately successful season. White was a key part of the team’s success down the stretch, when they caught the Red Sox. In September, he had played in 24 games, hit .337 and posted an on-base percentage well over .400. The 2 teams finished the season tied with 99-63 records. In the 1-game playoff at Fenway Park, the Yankees trailed 2-0 entering the top of the 7th inning. With 1 out and Chris Chambliss at 1st base, Roy White drilled a single to centerfield, setting up light-hitting shortstop Bucky Dent‘s dramatic HR, the key blow in the 5-4 Yankee victory. White batted .313 in the ALC playoffs against the Royals, getting at least 1 hit and scoring at least 1 run in each game and most importantly, homering in the decisive 4th game. White also hit .333 (8-for-24) with a HR in the World Series victory over the Dodgers, capping a great October.
When White arrived at spring training in March of 1979, he was hoping the Yankees would quickly offer him an extension. But Yankees General Manager Al Rosen had announced early in spring training that the Yankees would not talk about an extension or a new contract with their veteran left-fielder until the 1979 MLB season was over. This frustrated White and angered a lot of his teammates. Willie Randolph expressed his frustration with ownership, saying: “It happens every year. I don’t think it’s fair for him to always come to spring training and go through this. Just let him play. He’s proven himself over and over again.” Reggie Jackson hit the nail on the head when he described how White’s contributions to the team, although essential, were sometimes overlooked: “Sometimes management can’t accept his kind of player because they’re looking for loud players, guys who do things in a big way. If you really don’t watch him, and you really don’t figure out what he does, he can easily be overlooked. But his biggest asset to the club, is that here’s a guy who’s going to do his job and not make mental mistakes, a guy who will bunt, hit a grounder to the other side to advance a runner, hit a sacrifice fly, get you a quiet single and get on base.” The 1979 season turned out to be a letdown for the Yankees, after their 3 straight pennants. By mid-season, they were struggling and in 4th place, 14 games behind the Orioles. This year there would be no historic comeback. Then, tragically, on August 2, 1979, team captain Thurman Munson died while trying to land his private jet plane. Things were changing dramatically as another decade came to a close. After he hit just .215 in 205 part-time at bats, the Yankees didn’t negotiate with White after the season, so he looked for a new home on the MLB free agent market.
Roy White Giants Baseball Card Japan
Although the 15-year veteran received offers from several big-league clubs, he surprised many in baseball when, on February 17, 1980, he signed a multi-year contract to play with the Yomiuri Giants of Japan’s Central Professional League. While American youngsters and veterans alike had been playing in Japan for years, no player with as much experience or success in the Major Leagues as White had ever done so. “I had 3 or 4 offers to stay in the big leagues,” White said, “but I was looking for a different experience. I felt I had had everything good happen to me with the Yankees – I played in the World Series and the All-Star Game – and I felt there was nothing else to experience in the major leagues in the United States.” But it was clear that White was saddened by leaving the only professional team with whom he’d ever played. “I must say, that it is with deep regret that I leave the New York Yankees, and their great and loyal fans who have supported me throughout my career.” The Yomiuri Giants were the best team in the Japan. They had won 21 league titles in the 29 seasons before White joined the club and had earned the nickname “The Yankees of Japan.” Their most celebrated player was the all-time Japanese HR King Sadaharu Oh, who was entering the final season of his magnificent playing career, when White arrived in Tokyo in the spring of 1980. Oh had already clubbed 839 HRs, when the Giants’ Manager informed White that he would be hitting 4th, and Oh would bat third, so that the aging slugger would have more lineup protection. It was the 2nd time in White’s career that he provided lineup protection for a baseball legend and a national treasure and he quickly proved that he wasn’t intimidated by such historic company. In his very 1st game in Japan, on April 5,1980, White would hit 2 HRs and drove in 2 RBIs against the Yokohama Taiaya Whales. It was just a sign of things to come for the former Yankee. White played very well in his debut season. He made the All-Star team and finished the season hitting over .300 with 29 HRs and 106 RBIs. The next year, White hit 23 HRs and helped the Giants to the Japan Series against the Nippon Ham Fighters, a series the Giants won in 6 games. As had happened throughout much of his Yankee career, White found himself in a part-time role for much of the 1982 season. But by mid-June, he was back into the lineup and hit .330 the rest of the way, finishing the season at .296 with 12 HRs in limited play. All done, White had finished his 3-year stint in Japan with a .296 batting average and averaged more than 20 HRs per season. Just before his retirement from playing, White reflected on his years in Japan with a sense of pride and accomplishment. “I went there with more big-league time than any previous player. I’d spent 14 years with the Yankees, going on 15. My 1st season was Sadaharu Oh’s last and he would hit 30 HRs. Now he’s the Assistant Manager. My 2nd year, the Giants won the Central League pennant, the Japan Series, won it all.
”After White hung up his spikes for good, he returned to America and to the New York Yankees, this time to serve as a Coach. Upon his return, White explained how he had never lost touch with his former team, even while he was playing halfway across the world. ”I spoke to Mr. Steinbrenner last year and this year,” White said. ”Both times he expressed a desire for me to come back. He said the door always was open. I always felt I eventually would come back to the Yankees.” And he did, serving as the team’s MLB hitting coach between 1983 and 1986. Over the course of the next decade, White spent some time in the Yankee front office as Assistant to the General Manager, where he worked as a roving Minor League Instructor and MLB Scout for the Yankees, providing long range reconnaissance on far east talent like Hideki Matsui. In 1999, White would work in the Oakland Athletics organization, serving as the batting coach for their AAA affiliate and tutoring such players as future American League Rookie of the Year Bobby Crosby. As batting coach, White helped the team to 2 AAA championships in 5 seasons. White again returned to the Yankees in 2004, he spent the next 3 seasons in various coaching and instructing capacities. Perhaps the greatest moment of his post-playing days came, when the Yankees traveled to Japan to play an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants. On the morning after the Yankees arrived in Japan, while he was eating breakfast at the New Otani hotel in Tokyo, a long line of his fans waited patiently outside. In a strange but satisfying dichotomy, some were holding cards from White’s playing career with the New York Yankees, others clutched cards from his days with the Yomiuri Giants. As he sat patiently and signed more than 100 autographs for his fans, White told American and Japanese reporters: “I had a few people say, `You were my favorite player when I was 10 years old. I always felt I played for 2 teams that were the most known and I’m kind of proud of that in my career. It’s probably one of the reasons I didn’t play with another team when I came back to the U.S. I felt I had 1 or 2 years left – I had hit .300 in my last year in Japan and I was 39 years old and my legs felt good – but I spoke to some friends, who I really respected. They told me I should stay with just the 2 teams and I agreed with them. Very few players now can say they did that.” Looking over the crowd of autograph seekers, White smiled as he said: “I was probably more popular in Japan than I was in America."
As of 2008, Roy had been married to his wife Linda for 41 years. They resided in Toms River, New Jersey. They have 2 children: daughter Loreena, a graduate of Brown and son Reade, who is a successful independent Public Relations and Marketing Consultant and New York University graduate. White’s accomplishments, however, are not limited to baseball, or even to his devotion to family. For years he has also been heavily involved in philanthropic work, and most recently, he created the Roy White Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organization which provides financial assistance to young adults and children whose desire to further their education is inhibited by financial complications. The mission of the charity “is to help such individuals pursue their dreams and aspirations by easing the frustrating burden of monetary obligations.” The Foundation has been a rousing success, attracting such luminaries of sport, business, and philanthropy such as: famed designer Joseph Abboud, former Yankee Graig Nettles and Jim Oscatello of USA Financial Services. Since its inception, the Foundation has helped many students with financial assistance for higher education, including granting 15 college scholarships to high school students in 2003. The Foundation continues its good work to this day with the support of thousands of members.
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