Negro league baseball in New York City never produced teams as good, or popular, as the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays. Stocked with talent that included the future Hall of Fame inductees Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, these clubs are seen by baseball historians to be among the best ever assembled. Negro league teams in New York faced the presence of three well-established major-league franchises. And then, of course, there was the Babe.
No ballplayer was better suited to wide-open, splashy, Prohibition-era New York. Ruth kept an 11-room suite at the Ansonia and nightclubbed with the best of them. An incorrigible womanizer, he destroyed his friendship with his teammate Lou Gehrig, the beloved “Pride of the Yankees,” by carousing with Gehrig’s wife. The Ruth we recall today from granular newsreels — paunchy, spindly-legged, gingerly trotting the bases — is but a shadow of the “sleek, muscular” pitcher turned outfielder who arrived from Boston in 1920 and set the game ablaze. As Baker sees it, Ruth may not have been the most valuable baseball player of the 20th century — Joe DiMaggio appears to have earned that spot — but he was “the most important athlete in history.” While Pelé, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali starred in “more universally popular sports,” it was Ruth “who first made professional sports big time, with all that would follow.” I don’t happen to agree, but it makes for a good barroom argument.
What about New York’s two other teams? The Stoneham family made money from baseball, but rarely used it to help the Giants. Gambling and alcohol ate up most of the profits. And the Dodgers went through so many owners that they eventually wound up in the hands of a Brooklyn bank. What differentiated the two were the ways in which the Dodgers represented their aggrieved borough, starting with Ebbets Field, the oddly shaped bandbox where the outfield walls were covered with local advertisements, such as the haberdasher Abe Stark’s iconic “Hit Sign, Win Suit.” Dodger baseball meant Hilda Chester and her cowbell leading the bleacher cheers, with her piercing “Eacha heart out, ya bum”; the organist Gladys Goodding playing the national anthem with her terrier pup standing at attention; the off-key “Dodger Sym-Phony” serenading in the aisles; and the public-address announcer, Tex Rickards, imploring the crowd before each game to “don’t throw nuthin’ from the stands!”
The Yankees, meanwhile, never took their foot off the gas. Led by Colonel Jacob Ruppert, they plowed their profits back into the organization by hiring scouts to find the best young prospects and creating a farm system where this talent could bloom. The Colonel was also coldblooded in contract negotiations, backed by a “reserve clause” that bound players permanently to the team. He forced Ruth and Gehrig to take pay cuts at the height of their careers, and openly humiliated DiMaggio for asking for a small raise. Joe “would never complain again,” says Baker, “at least not in public.”
“The New York Game” concludes with the end of World War II. The Yankees remain in control, but a new era is unfolding. The Dodgers have hired a general manager named Branch Rickey, who is keen on building a farm system — and even keener on breaking the color line. A rush to suburbia, accelerated by the master builder Robert Moses, is gaining steam. The fan base is in danger of shrinking. Television is on the way. California beckons.
One hopes for a second volume from Kevin Baker, every bit as good as this one.
THE NEW YORK GAME: Baseball and the Rise of a New City | By Kevin Baker | Knopf | 511 pp. | $35
