Yankees Mag: The Roaring Yankees

The grandest, most successful and colorful of all the years I played baseball was 1927. We went into first place after the first game, and we were never out of it the whole season, winning 110 games. In 1969, at the celebration of baseball’s 100th season, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America voted the 1927 Yankees the greatest club of all time. That may be true, but maybe not. Many other teams have bona fide claims to greatness, but I’ll be satisfied with the accolade until some other club establishes an uncontestable record and set of figures.

Despite all the clamor about other Yankees greats and teams throughout the decades, I am sure the teams of the ’20s initiated the style, set the pattern and, through wisdom and management, built the almost invincible organization that came to be known as the Yankees dynasty.

This was the season Babe Ruth set his record of 60 home runs. It has often been said it was easy to pitch for the ’27 Yanks because of the murderous hitting. This is outright baloney for one reason: If a pitcher didn’t start the game well, he didn’t last long, and someone else was pitching in no time. I hold a fondness for the ’27 season, as I led the league with 22 wins, in earned run average at 2.63 and in winning percentage at .759. I was among the first five in fewest bases on balls per nine innings, 1.90, and third in complete games, 23.

We took the winner’s share of the 1927 World Series by practically scaring the opposition to death. The Pirates won in the National League with a batting average of .305 and had seven men hitting above .300, but the mere sight of our assassins taking turns driving the baseball out of the Pittsburgh ballpark took most of the fight out of them.

The Series opened in Pittsburgh, and I was asked to pitch batting practice. Huggins made no special request of me to lay the ball in there to help our sluggers show off. I just pitched in the regular batting-practice style, and one after another, the team teed off on me, as I was glad to have them all do. Every one of them powered the baseball out of the playing field again and again.

I could see the Pirate players watching in numb silence. They had their own hard hitters -- the Waner brothers, who could belt the baseball, too. But they were small men who looked like schoolboys in the company of the towering Yankees sluggers. They shook their heads as they watched and left the field in silence. After that, they never had a chance, and the Yankees won four games in a row. The first game was mine, which I won with the eighth-inning help of our new sinkerball relief man, Wilcy Moore.

Our 1928 season was very much a repeat of 1927, as the Yanks won the pennant again, but not without a struggle. We had a series of injuries -- and in August we blew a 13-game lead. The Philadelphia Athletics caught and passed us. Before an estimated crowd of 80,000, we played the A’s in a doubleheader [on Sunday, Sept 9]. The crush of the crowd was so overwhelming that it was impossible to get a car within 10 blocks of the park. I had to show my credentials to get a policeman to ride my running board before I was allowed to come through the lines.

George Pipgras pitched 5-0 to win the first game, and I beat them 7-3 in the second. We held on to win the pennant by two games. The Athletics were a mighty team, but we were mightier. Nothing seemed to stop us. If one man got hurt, we came up with a Leo Durocher or a Tom Zachary to fill in and keep us winning.

We knew in our hearts that when we beat Philadelphia we had clinched the pennant but did not make it a certainty until we beat Detroit on Sept. 28. Then we uncorked a wild celebration at the Fort Shelby Hotel. Babe Ruth got management to add two extra rooms onto his suite, and he had couriers bringing up drinkables all evening. Lord knows how many invited and uninvited guests were there. Babe at one point climbed on the piano and warned that the party was going to get rough. But no one went home, and the racket continued until dawn.

I had to pitch later that day, and my teammates were barely in condition to walk to their positions. I was aghast when I noticed that my catcher, Pat Collins, had his pants on backward.

I didn’t have any inkling at the time that the 1928 World Series was my last as a Yankee and was probably my most prosperous year in baseball. The Series, which the Yankees took from the Cardinals in four straight games, was as spectacular as the season had been -- even more so when you consider that almost every Yankee was sporting a bandage or a bruise of some sort and Earle Combs could not play at all.

We were the first team ever to win the World Series four games straight two years in a row. Moreover, we used just three pitchers. I won the first and fourth game, Pipgras the second, and Zachary the third. Between the three of us, we pitched four complete games. Of course, the Babe was the greatest. In the final game, in St. Louis, he hit three home runs and even had the bloodthirsty Cardinals fans cheering him.

It may have been the extra money and soft living that brought me overweight and out of condition to St. Petersburg the following spring. Now, don’t forget we were in the middle of the halcyon days of the ’20s when the market started to rise. This was the age of Prohibition, and with it came the drinking, cocktail parties and nightclubs. There were speakeasies, and morals began to loosen. All of a sudden, the forerunner of the jet-set appeared at places like the Stork Club, where Sherman Billingsley would give perfume to the ladies, offer cigarettes to the men and serve champagne.

Meeting Al Capone in Chicago in the ’20s was rather an incident.

If you wanted a glass of beer when you were on the road, you’d ask somebody on the hosting team for the best places to go. So many clubs closed so rapidly that places you had been just a month or two before would be gone, so you had to ask someone for advice. One time, when we were playing the White Sox at Comiskey Park, Bob Meusel, Herb Pennock, Joe Dugan and I were directed to Capone’s club.

Dugan was a wisecracker who was always talking out of the side of his mouth. So, he said to the bartender, “Say,” he said, “how do you get to meet the big boy?” Now, Dugan was only kidding.

The bartender said, “Are you serious?”

Dugan said, “Why, certainly.”

The fellow said, “Wait a minute,” went into the back, and pretty soon came back out and said, “There’ll be a car here in 20 minutes.”

We couldn’t get out of it at this point. We couldn’t say we were afraid or didn’t want to. In exactly 20 minutes, this big, black limousine pulled up in front of this place. They took us to a hotel -- I can’t remember the name -- the Wentworth or whatever it was in South Chicago.

We went up the elevator and then down a corridor. Our escorts knocked on the door and then announced us. We entered the room, and there’s Al Capone sitting behind this big desk with a grin on his face. Up above Capone was a picture of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and, on the far right, Al Capone. So, Dugan, the wisecracker, stepped up to Capone, shook his hand, and said, pointing at the pictures, “Three great men: George, Abe and Al.”

Capone thought that was the greatest thing, so he said to some handy guy, “Bring in the grape,” meaning wine. So, in came the guy with a hand truck, and on it was a couple of cases of Champagne. We stuck around there for about an hour drinking with the guy. He was very cordial, and I couldn’t believe everything that was ascribed to him, but nevertheless it had to be so.

We ended our afternoon with Al Capone in one piece. The fate of my decade with the Roaring Yankees was another matter, however.

In mid-September 1929, I started a game against the Cleveland Indians, with Joe Hauser playing first base for them. I used to get Joe out pretty easily because I could pitch high and fast to him. But I was having a bad day, and Hauser hit a home run off me. I was pitching out where I usually threw to him, but he got around on the ball and knocked it into the right-field seats.

Miller Huggins, our manager and my mentor, was not on the bench that day because he had developed what looked like a boil, or a carbuncle, on his right cheek. He was in the clubhouse, putting a heat lamp on it. I’m not acquainted with the facts on these things, but as I understand it, he was doing the worst thing you could because the heat generated the germs and spread them. What jackass told him that a sunlamp was the right treatment for the dreadful infection on his face, I’ll never know. I came into the clubhouse, knocked out by that home run, and Hug said to me, “What happened to you?”

And I said, “Well, Hauser hit one into the seats off me, and they took me out of the box, so here I am.”

He said, “Sit down, I want to talk to you.” I sat down alongside him, and he said, “Waite, how old are you?” And I said, “Hug, I was 30 a week ago, September the ninth.”

“I’d like to say something to you,” he said. “I knew that you were not going to have a good season.” He said, “I told Colonel Ruppert in Spring Training this year that you were going to have a bad season. You came down fat in the chest, and I just knew what was going to happen.”

Hug looked me straight in the eye. “I have always discovered in my relationship with athletes that they cannot do after 30 what they have done before,” he continued. We had quite a talk along those lines, and it was very sound advice, but Hug wasn’t finished yet.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “go down and get your paycheck. You’re through for the season. Get in good shape this winter, come down next spring, and have the year I know you can have.”

That was my last visit with Miller Huggins. Sadly, what was thought to be a carbuncle or a boil developed into severe blood poisoning. Hug was taken to the hospital, given blood transfusions, but died within a week. I sensed that everything was going to be different from then on in baseball, and it was … it was. It was never the same again. I had some fairly good years and some not so successful. Some of the years I don’t even like to think about.

Miller Huggins’ death took a lot of the life and determination out of me. I went to his funeral, sat in the back of a little church down in lower New York City and cried like a baby. If there was a single Yankee who did not cry that day, I don’t know who he was.

Adapted from Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero by Waite Hoyt with Tim Manners by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. ©2024 by Tim Manners. Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press (800) 848-6224 and at nebraskapress.unl.edu.

This story appears in the July 2024 edition of Yankees Magazine. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.