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The House That Ruth Built

Little, Brown and Company

Winter

1

EARLY ON THE morning of Tuesday, December 26, 1922, a plain truck with DAILY BROTHERS stenciled on the side pulled up to a vast work site at 161st and River Avenue in the South Bronx. A man stepped out into the frosty air. He worked for a subcontractor of White Construction Company, the firm building the giant new Yankee Stadium. And the project was behind schedule.

The subcontractor’s job that chilly morning was to reopen a pit to expose a water main for inspection by the city. It was a typically frustrating delay in what was proving to be a winter of discontent for the builders. Visible breath spewed from the workman’s mouth as he huffed away, digging out the water main. He worked quickly, keen to escape the bitter cold and icy wind. He finished with his labor and was about to leave when he surreptitiously tossed something into the pit, hiding it under some loose dirt. The next day, the city inspector okayed the main, and the pit was closed, sealing the item inside.

What, exactly, the man threw into the open pit that would soon be filled by the most famous sporting ground in the country isn’t known. But, as noted in Harry Swanson’s informative work Ruthless Baseball, the worker did write, in the margins of records he submitted to White Construction, that he had buried something in order to bring luck to the Yankees. He didn’t elucidate on what it was. A horseshoe? A religious amulet? A Baby Ruth candy bar?

Whatever it was, it worked.

A few years before the anonymous worker dropped his totem into the pit, baseball had undergone a tectonic shift. The time before Babe Ruth became a New York Yankee in 1920 is known in retrospect as the dead-ball era. Practitioners and press at the time called the prevalent style Scientific Baseball. Runs came at a premium, earned with difficulty through cunning, aggression, and patience. They weren’t so much scored as crafted. The sacrifice hit, the stolen base, and the hit-and-run play were the pillars on which the game rested. So too the spitball, taking the extra base, and sliding with spikes raised. It was the baseball equivalent of the trench warfare going on in France. Nothing came easily.

Then along came the Babe. Ruth’s power at the plate combined with new rules that emphasized offense. After the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, which left eight Chicago White Sox players suspended permanently from baseball for conspiring to fix the World Series, the sport moved quickly to offset the bad press by enacting fundamental changes, with an eye toward attracting fans with a punchier, gaudier show. New, more tightly wound baseballs were produced. Smudged, dirty balls were tossed out immediately in favor of whiter balls that were easier for the hitter to see. Trick pitches that required foreign substances, like the spitball, the emery ball, and the mud ball, were banned. Fans were no longer required to throw balls back from the stands to be reused.

Taken cumulatively, the effect was explosive. As with the introduction of the forward pass in football or the twenty-four-second shot clock in basketball, baseball’s changes altered the game utterly. In 1918, the eight American League teams combined to hit ninety-eight home runs. Two seasons later, in 1920, Ruth alone hit fifty-four, more than all but one other major-league team. Ruth hit fifty-nine home runs in 1921, a display heretofore incomprehensible. But by now the long ball wasn’t solely a Ruthian phenomenon—seven other teams hit more than the Babe, and while no single player approached Ruth, five hit more than twenty. In 1922 the league topped one thousand combined homers for the first time. “The home run fever is in the air,” wrote prominent baseball chronicler F. C. Lane. “It is infectious.” With one big wallop, sluggers like Ruth could plate enough runs to win a game in a single blow.

And the crowds followed. The style of play embraced by the likes of McGraw, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, and the other big stars of Scientific Baseball had excited few but the most hard-core fans. And after World War I and its trench-warfare horrors that included modern “advances” such as the machine gun and mustard gas, the very concept of “science” had taken on a negative connotation.

And, of course, the fans dug the long ball. In 1919 the Giants easily outdrew the Yankees at the park they shared, the Polo Grounds. But once Ruth arrived in New York in 1920, the crowds streamed through the turnstiles when the Yankees were in town, eager to witness the slugging sensation in person. The Yanks drew nearly 1.3 million fans in 1920, about 350,000 more than the Giants. In 1921 and 1922, the Yankees easily topped one million fans, while the Giants were drawing 973,477 and 945,809, respectively. The Babe was “as much a tourist attraction in New York City as the Statue of Liberty, Grant’s Tomb, and the Fulton Fish Market,” wrote baseball historian Lee Allen. “The sightseeing Pilgrims who daily flock into Manhattan are as anxious to rest eyes on him as they are to see the Woolworth Building,” the Times noted.

This was an intolerable situation for the prideful Mr. John McGraw, who not only managed the Giants but held an ownership stake. Sometime late in September 1920, McGraw and Charles Stoneham huddled in the owner’s suite at the Polo Grounds. It was at this meeting that the two men decided to evict their uppity tenants. One of them said, “The Yankees will have to build a park in Queens or some other out-of-the-way place. Let them go away and wither on the vine.” Most sources agree that McGraw is the one who said it, and it does sound like the crusty John J. But there is no definitive proof that it wasn’t Stoneham.

Having a home to call their own was always the agenda of the co-owners of the Yankees. As soon as the pair bought the club in 1915, they tried to buy the Polo Grounds in order to raze it and build a monster, 100,000-seat stadium at the site. The plan was scotched. Nevertheless, the dream lived on, and the eviction notice was the prod to fulfill it.

Due to Prohibition, it was a difficult time for Ruppert—one of the biggest beer makers in the country, the purveyor of the popular Knickerbocker Beer and other fine concoctions—to plow enormous funds into any project. The temperance codes ate steadily at Ruppert’s core business. The idea of a Yankee Stadium, a House That Beer Built, filled with fans drinking Jacob Ruppert Brewery products, had long been the colonel’s fondest wish. Now he had the means and the impetus to actually build his dream palace—and no one could buy his beer. It was a maddening turn of events.

To his credit, Ruppert refused to let Prohibition alter his stadium dreams. He decided the long-term profits from building a successful new ballpark would outweigh immediate losses caused by construction costs. At the same time he fought against Prohibition as fiercely as anyone in the country. He wanted beer, at least, to be kept legal; if liquor had to be sacrificed, so be it. Real beer, that is—the new laws did allow beer to be sold, but at such a weak alcoholic content that it scarcely resembled what Ruppert...