Yankees Magazine: 'Some Ballyard'

Yankee Stadium was only about a half-hour old when the first legendary moment occurred there.

On April 18, 1923, after spending the previous 10 years across the Harlem River as tenants of the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds, a period that, itself, followed 10 years in a wooden ballpark on one of Manhattan’s highest points, the Yankees opened the doors to their new home in the Bronx. It was unlike anything baseball had ever seen -- a triple-tiered monolith made of Edison concrete and Johns-Manville asbestos roofing that would stand for 50 years, undergo a two-year renovation in the mid-1970s, then provide 33 more years of memories before closing and facing the proverbial wrecking ball in 2008.

The first game was on a Wednesday afternoon, with Yankees catcher Wally Schang receiving Bob Shawkey’s first pitch at 3:30 p.m. And by the time the bottom of the third started, the minimum 15 batters had come to the plate. Boston’s George Burns, who looped a one-out single to left-center in the top of the second, had been the only baserunner to that point, and he was promptly caught stealing.

In those days, of course, batters didn’t step out of the box between pitches, umpires didn’t replace the baseballs whenever they touched the ground, and pitchers barely took a breath before going into their next windup. Games moved fast. Shawkey’s strikeout of Burns to end the 4-1 Yankees victory would occur shortly after 5:30 p.m., and a banker catching the Jerome Avenue elevated back to Manhattan could be sitting in his apartment by 5:50.

So, it was perhaps a few moments before 4 p.m. when Babe Ruth stepped into the box for his second plate appearance at Yankee Stadium. As a 19-year-old pitcher for the 1914 Red Sox, Ruth tossed his first complete game against the Yankees at 3-year-old Fenway Park. Now, here he was nine years later, a 28-year-old superstar slugger beginning his 10th season in the Majors, his fourth since being sold to New York by Boston owner Harry Frazee in December 1919.

Since ditching the mound and becoming a full-time hitter, Ruth had revolutionized the game, hitting twice the number of home runs in one season than anyone had thought possible. More than that, he was an all-around phenomenal baseball player. In his second season as a Yankee, 1921, he scored 177 runs -- still a team record.

By 1923, he was rich, famous and regarded as perhaps the best player in baseball. But he wasn’t quite …. a legend.

Not yet.

After that 1921 season, he took a step backward. He was suspended by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for the first six weeks of 1922 for participating in an offseason barnstorming tour -- something the league would beg him to do a decade later. The Yankees had named him captain during Spring Training of ’22, but in his sixth game back after serving the suspension, he got into an altercation with an umpire, got tossed from the game, heard it from a heckler at the Polo Grounds on his way back to the dugout, and decided to jump into the stands and chase said heckler, presumably while uttering some particularly unkind words.

The captaincy was revoked.

The Babe finished with a “disappointing” .315 batting average in 1922 and further diminished his standing with fans during the World Series, when he went 2-for-17 with one RBI in a second straight loss to the Yankees’ Polo Grounds landlords, the Giants.

Rather than wallow in that defeat, Ruth vowed to change his ways.

New York City of the Roaring Twenties had much to offer a young, wealthy star such as Ruth, but he retreated to his rural Massachusetts homestead that winter, working his body into shape by chopping wood and drinking nothing stronger than ice water.

His debut at-bat in what sportswriter Fred Lieb coined “The House That Ruth Built” yielded a shallow fly to right field that Boston’s Shano Collins hauled in easily for the final out of a 1-2-3 first. But a short time later, Ruth dug his spikes into the left-handed batter’s box once more against Red Sox right-hander Howard Ehmke. And this time, the Yanks had a rally going.

Second baseman Aaron Ward led off the third with a single, and shortstop Everett Scott -- seven years into the nine-year consecutive-games-played streak that would set the bar for Lou Gehrig -- bunted him over to second.

The next two batters, Shawkey and leadoff man Whitey Witt, reached on a fielder’s choice and a walk, then Yankees third baseman Joe Dugan plated the Stadium’s first run with a two-out single, leaving runners at the corners for the No. 3 hitter, Ruth.

He fouled off the first pitch, then took ball 1.

He fouled off a second pitch, then took ball 2.

Earlier in the day, Ruth had marveled at Yankee Stadium upon seeing it packed with fans for the first time. “Some ballyard,” he proclaimed, telling teammates, “I’d give a year off my life to hit one today.” Now, the once “incorrigible” dirty-faced kid from Baltimore who skipped school, chewed tobacco and snuck leftover drinks at his abusive father’s Inner Harbor tavern had an opportunity to do something … monumental.

And wouldn’t you know it? The son of a gun did it.

Ehmke tried to fool Ruth with a slow pitch on 2-2, but the Bambino blasted it into the right-field stands. The 198th of Ruth’s 714 career home runs marked the first Yankee Stadium _moment_, and the hero of the day soaked up the greatest ovation he had heard to that point, smiling broadly as he touched home plate and doffing his cap to the adoring masses.

“Governors, generals, colonels, politicians and baseball officials gathered together solemnly yesterday to dedicate the biggest stadium in baseball,” began the next day’s account in The New York Times, “but it was a ball player who did the real dedicating. In the third inning, with two team mates on the base lines, Babe Ruth smashed a savage home run into the right field bleachers, and that was the real baptism of the new Yankee Stadium.”

A century later, some 40,000 fans will come by car, by bus, by train and by foot to the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue to watch the 2023 New York Yankees take on the Los Angeles Angels. It’s a pilgrimage that has been made millions of times over, ardent fans arriving at this Bronx intersection where Gehrig’s speech and Jeter’s dive took place. Right here, two blocks from the Grand Concourse and the Bronx County Courthouse, is where Joe D’s streak began and where Mr. October was born. From Larsen’s perfecto to Judge’s debut, Yankees loyalists have witnessed history unfold.

Since the day it opened, Yankee Stadium has been much more than “some ballyard.” It has been a place where magic happens.

***

For a while on April 18, 1923, the estimated 74,200 in attendance at Yankee Stadium were the only ones who knew what had occurred. The first televised baseball game was still more than 16 years away. Even radio was just dipping its toes into baseball’s pool; the 1921 and ’22 World Series between the Giants and Yankees were among the sport’s first broadcasts. Word of mouth was the quickest medium of the day, and that was how the news spread like wildfire throughout the city. Over burgers at P.J. Clarke’s on 55th and Third, businessmen who had been at The Stadium bragged to their bartenders about what they had witnessed: A Ruthian blast and a Yankees victory in a breathtaking new venue that the ancient Romans and Egyptians would admire.

The 4-1 win over Boston was just one of many firsts at Yankee Stadium in 1923.

On May 12, promoter Tex Rickard drew 63,000 boxing fans to the Bronx -- the second-largest boxing crowd in history to that point -- to see five heavyweight fights in the first night event at Yankee Stadium. (The first night baseball game in the Bronx wouldn’t be played until May 28, 1946.) “From the lofty last row of the third tier, where people sit in the clouds and chat with low flying aviators, to the lower levels of the ringside sector,” The New York Times wrote, “it was a solid mass of humanity.”

On Sunday, May 20, while Ruth was driving in the go-ahead run in the eighth inning of a 3-2 win over the White Sox at Comiskey Park, more than 25,000 fans were inside Yankee Stadium to watch a marathon, in which Albert R. Michelson beat the 13-year-old record of 2 hours and 54 minutes by more than 6 minutes.

On June 15, a 19-year-old Gehrig, fresh off the campus of Columbia, made his big league debut, replacing Wally Pipp at first base for the final inning of a 10-0 win over St. Louis. Gehrig would make a handful of “relief” appearances in 1923, spending most of the season with the Minor League Hartford Senators. But when Pipp twisted his ankle stepping off a train car in Boston that September, Gehrig capitalized on the opportunity. He went 9-for-19 with five extra-base hits -- including his first career home run -- in four games at Fenway Park, spurring Yankees manager Miller Huggins to petition Landis to have Gehrig be eligible for the World Series. (Giants manager John McGraw would have none of it.)

July Fourth at Yankee Stadium has long been a date worth circling on the calendar -- a holiday tradition that began in 1923 when an Independence Day doubleheader sweep of Washington capped an 8-0 homestand. The Yankees’ league lead had ballooned from five games to 11 1/2, and there was no turning back.

While the team maintained its 12-game lead during a 6-6 “Western” road trip to St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland in mid- to late August, another promoter named Tex -- Tex Austin -- laid down 100,000 feet of cocoa fiber and held a championship rodeo at Yankee Stadium.

The Yanks wrapped up their third straight flag on Sept. 17. And on the last day of the regular season, Oct. 7, Ruth went 2-for-3 and hit his Major League-leading 41st homer in a 9-7 loss to Philadelphia that raised his average to .394 -- still a team record -- and cemented a grip on his first and only AL MVP Award. (Though it should be noted that players of that era were not eligible to win the award multiple times.)

None of those stats or awards meant much to Ruth, though. McGraw and the hated New York Giants had won their third straight NL pennant, and if you thought they enjoyed beating the Yankees in the World Series when it was held entirely at the Polo Grounds, just imagine what they thought about the prospect of spoiling a party at the Yankees’ fancy new home across the river.

Ruth and his teammates had other plans.

***

As retold in Robert Weintraub’s excellent 2011 book, "The House That Ruth Built," the Giants thought so little of Yankee Stadium that they put on their uniforms at the Polo Grounds and took taxis across the Macombs Dam Bridge for the 1923 World Series opener. McGraw, in his tailored suit, walked.

The Giants puffed their chests out even more after the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium, another Wednesday afternoon affair, when their 33-year-old veteran center fielder, Casey Stengel, legged out a ninth-inning inside-the-park-home run in a 5-4 Giants win. They stood three wins away from being baseball’s first three-peat champions.

But “The Battle of Broadway” was far from a wrap.

The Yankees answered with a 4-2 win at the Polo Grounds in Game 2 on Thursday afternoon behind two home runs from Ruth. On Friday afternoon, the Giants’ Art Nehf threw a six-hit 1-0 shutout in 2 hours and 7 minutes, and Stengel, thumbing his nose at the Yankees’ bench as he rounded the bases following his seventh-inning solo homer, was once again the difference-maker.

The Giants’ momentum was stalled over the weekend, though, as the “Hugmen” erupted for eight runs on Saturday in Manhattan and again on Sunday in the Bronx (in front of a capacity crowd of 62,817) to take a 3-games-to-2 lead in the Series.

And on Monday, Oct. 15, 1923, the Yankees traveled across the Harlem River one more time, back to the horseshoe-shaped ballpark they had called home for the previous decade, and where their quest for the franchise’s first World Series championship had come up short in each of the last two seasons.

For seven innings, it was all Giants, as the Yankees trailed, 4-1. But after Ward popped out to begin the eighth, the next four Yankees batters all reached base, cutting the deficit to 4-2. McGraw reluctantly pulled an exhausted Nehf and called on Rosy Ryan, who walked the first batter he faced on four pitches to force in a run and bring up Ruth with the bases loaded in a one-run game.

Ryan may have been just 25 years old, but the Massachusetts native had plenty of experience under his belt. He had relieved Nehf in the eighth inning of the 1922 World Series opener, striking out Ruth to end that frame before facing the minimum three batters in the ninth.

Ryan went right after Ruth again, striking out the Great Bambino on four pitches.

The 1923 Yankees weren’t solely reliant on Ruth, though. They were a team. Despite being mostly the same cast of characters that won AL pennants in ’21 and ’22, the ’23 Yanks were “wholly different in morale, discipline and team play,” wrote the editors of "Reach’s Official Base Ball Guide." “From being a mob of temperamental and ill-disciplined stars, each intent on playing in his own way and for himself, it was changed, overnight as it were, into a harmonious and co-operative whole, obedient to Manager Huggins’ every command, and always playing the game as it should be played, with an eye single to the common good.”

The next hitter, Bob Meusel, hit a ground ball up the middle that, after an errant throw from center field, cleared the bases. The Yankees went on to win, 6-4, capturing their first World Series championship. Meusel finished with a Series-best eight RBIs, Ward paced the Yanks with 10 hits in the six games and Ruth slugged 1.000, clubbing three home runs, a double and a triple among his seven hits. Herb Pennock, traded from the Red Sox in January, was the pitching hero, winning Games 2 and 6 and recording the final four outs of Game 4.

The players celebrated their triumph jubilantly, albeit without champagne in the Prohibition-era visiting clubhouse. Ruth made a short speech from atop a table, telling his teammates that they all owed a debt of gratitude to “the guiding hand of Mr. Huggins.” But perhaps no one was more satisfied than Col. Jacob Ruppert, the wealthy Knickerbocker beer baron who, after eight years of co-owning the team with Col. Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, bought out his partner in May of 1923 to become sole owner of the Yankees. Legendary sportswriter Damon Runyon observed that Ruppert was “a pleasant picture of absolute happiness” as he exited the Polo Grounds following the Yankees’ ultimate victory.

“New York born, New York raised, a big towner to his marrow, it has been Colonel Ruppert’s great desire for eight years to bring an American League pennant and an American League world’s championship to his home town, to his own baseball yard,” Runyon wrote. “He has succeeded.”

One hundred years later, that same desire drives the 2023 New York Yankees toward a 28th world championship. And as the world has witnessed over the past century, at the corner of 161st Street and River Avenue, anything is possible.