My grandfather was born on Christmas Day, in 1895. Or perhaps Christmas Eve. Or maybe the day after Christmas.
Nobody’s certain. What Joseph Lippman did know was that he was the
second son of Wolf Lippman, an immigrant tailor living on Henry Street
in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Lippman wasn’t even the family name. It
was some Polish-Jewish jawbreaker that an Ellis Island clerk had
rewritten. I often wished that clerk had given Wolf something easier to
spell, like Mays, Thomson, or Ott. But Joe was the first of three
generations of my family to root for the Giants, and his love of his
team was his major legacy to me.
Nobody knows much about Joe’s older brother, Sam, not even when he was born. Apparently he got hooked into crime as a kid. Joe didn’t. Sam got a job working in a poolhall on Eighth Avenue, across the street from the Polo Grounds, in the early 1900s. One owner of the poolhall was Arnold Rothstein, the “Big Bankroll,” who was the leading bookmaker at the time. The other owner was John J. McGraw.
Sometime in 1908, when Joe was 12, Sam took Joe to his first baseball game, at the Polo Grounds. It must have been a weekday game in mid-summer, because there was no Sunday baseball in New York then, and I can’t conceive of Joe sneaking out of a synagogue on a Saturday while he was studying for his bar mitzvah.
According to Joe, Christy Mathewson took the mound for the Giants, wearing his white duster, and shut out the Cincinnati Reds in short order, 3-0, just one of 373 career victories. Fred Tenney played first base. After the game, Joe and Sam went down to the clubhouse, and Sam introduced Joe to McGraw and Mathewson. Joe was awed. He became a Giants fan. He remained one for the rest of his life.
Joe sat in decent seats behind the Giants’ dugout, and was there a year later when Fred Merkle failed to touch first base in a game that turned out to decide the National League pennant race. Like everyone else, he thought the Giants had won the pennant, stormed onto the field to celebrate, and stood there in shock watching McGraw scream at Umpire O’Day when the latter said Merkle was out, the game was a tie. Like everyone else, he called Merkle a “Bonehead” that day.
Joe kept going back to the Polo Grounds. After he said his piece at his Bar Mitzvah, he skipped out of shul. When Merkle replaced Tenney for good, everybody booed the poor goon. Merkle couldn’t make a play without being booed. He couldn’t hit a line drive off the wall for extra bases without being booed. God forbid he should go for the collar or ground into a double play. Joe felt sympathy for the tall first baseman, who would come off the field, shaking his head in despair. Joe’s stories of Merkle gave me sympathy decades later for Bill Buckner and Alex Rodriguez.
Sam was a rising man in the Rothstein organization. He started off cleaning spittoons, moved up to carrying McGraw’s gambling winnings and losses, and would periodically disappear and suddenly reappear, worrying his family. Sam would apologize for these disappearances by giving the folks new furniture and cash. He never explained where the money came from, and nobody wanted to ask. Then he was gone again.
Sam knew that Joe didn’t need furniture at age 12 or even 14, so he gave him the box seat at the Polo Grounds. And train fare and tickets to Boston and Philadelphia when the Giants went to the World Series in 1911, 1912, and 1913.
1911 was a tough World Series. Mathewson and pitcher Rube Marquard were roommates, rivals, and dueling columnists in the New York papers. Both columns were ghostwritten, of course, and neither “writer” seemed really interested in their content. So Mathewson ripped Marquard for serving up a home run to Frank Baker of the Athletics to lose one of the games.
That column did not make Marquard happy. Rube asked Matty the 1911 version of, “What the heck was that story about?” And Mathewson answered with the 1911 version of, “Hey, I was misquoted in my own column,” sounding like Darryl Strawberry 80 years later, explaining his controversial 1992 autobiography.
This proved that there is nothing new in baseball, and that theory was proven further in Matty’s next start in Shibe Park. Big Six threw a fastball that Baker smacked over the Schuylkill River. Marquard was sitting in the visitors’ bullpen, and when the homer went out (giving Baker the nickname “Home Run Baker”), he rose from the bench and walked by the fans (and Joe and Sam), wearing a sardonic smile.
I believe Marquard’s ghost tore up Mathewson that night for not knowing how to pitch to Baker. The only real difference I can see in that series and today is that nobody had figured out how to do advance scouting yet. But then, Baker’s in Cooperstown, so all the scouting in the world probably wouldn’t have helped pitch to him.
Seven decades later, David Cone, who harbored dreams of being a sportswriter, tried his hand at the trade by pretending to write a column during the 1988 post-season. The actual wordsmith was Bob Klapisch. As Met fans with good memories know, the Mets won the first game of the playoffs against the Dodgers, and Cone trashed the Dodgers in his phone interview with Klapisch after the game, and Klap obediently wrote up the sneering remarks. Neither pitcher nor author seemed to realize that the Dodgers would be infuriated, and sure enough, in Game Two, they demolished Cone with vigor.
To his credit, Cone did not blame the remarks on Klapisch that evening, although Keith Hernandez saw Klap in the clubhouse after the game, smirking, having evaded the rap. When the series was over and the Mets left in the dust, Klapisch and Cone rose from the rubble to apologize for their misstep.
When I read all this, knowing that Klapisch was a baseball writer, and Cone more knowledgeable about the game’s history than the average player, I wondered if either of them had read about the 1911 World Series. I think ballplayers should read about their spiritual ancestors…there’s a lot to learn from these examples.
Joe always said that the 1912 Giants team was his favorite, because they could do it all – hit, run, throw, pitch, play defense. Christy Mathewson won 20 games. Rube Marquard won 19 in a row. Rookie Jeff Tesreau led the National League in Earned Run Average, something they were charting for the first time (1.96). The team had Larry Doyle, Josh DeVore, Fred Merkle, Fred Snodgrass, Red Jack Murray, and Chief John Meyers catching. Meyers was Joe’s favorite, a full-blooded Indian, a Cahuilla, and he could barely run. But he hit .358.
The Giants were 103-48 that year, and won the pennant by 10 games. They led the National League in runs scored (823), batting average (286), stolen bases (319), saves (14), ERA (2.58), and home runs…with 47. Most of those were probably the inside-the-park variety.
The Boston Red Sox were 105-47, leading the American League by 14 games, and they had 108 complete games. Their aces were pitcher Smokey Joe Wood, 34-5, 1.91, 258 K, and Tris Speaker, .383, 10 HRs to lead the league, and 98 RBIs. At that time, the Red Sox were one of the dominant teams in the American League, winning four world titles in a decade. Meanwhile, the Yankees were the “other” New York team. They couldn’t buy a win.
The 1912 World Series turned out to be one of the most exciting of all time. If they’d had videotape, slow-motion cameras, and Bob Costas back then, that series would be better remembered today. Instead, it’s become obscure.
Even so, the facts are pretty well known. The series went eight games because Game Two was called by darkness. The Red Sox took a 3-1 lead in games, the Giants clawed back to 3-3, and everything hinged on the finale in Boston, where Fred Snodgrass dropped a fly ball to keep the Sox alive. Joe saw that. He and Sam were there, on tickets supplied by McGraw.
Joe saw the next play, too. Harry Hooper hit a screaming line drive to left center and Snodgrass snapped it down in a tremendous catch. Joe remembered that. Nobody else did. Joe remembered what happened next, too. Tris Speaker lifted a foul fly ball on the right side, and Christy Mathewson, Fred Merkle, and Chief Meyers all went for it. Mathewson called Merkle off (wrong move) in favor of the slow-moving Meyers, and the ball landed in a little triangle between them.
Speaker got a second life. While jogging back to the plate, he said to Mathewson, “That play will cost you the series.” Mathewson didn’t answer. Matty must have known that he’d just made a titanic mistake. And Speaker finished up his career with 3,000 hits, so he wasn’t bragging. The next pitch was a base hit to tie the game, and Larry Gardner scored Speaker to win the World Series with a sacrifice fly. In those days, Boston could do nothing wrong when it played New York.
Joe remembered seeing all of McGraw’s actor pals from New York, sitting in their seats behind the Giants’ dugout, in tears. At that time, the Giants were the top team in New York, so they drew actors to their games the way Calista Flockhart goes to Yankee games these days. The difference was – the actors of 1912 were really McGraw’s friends, not just Fox TV stars trying to win extra free publicity for their shows.
Joe insisted that the best team lost, and I think he was right. Snodgrass never lived down the fly ball. He became a rancher, a banker, and mayor of Oxnard, California, campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and died on the eve of Henry Aaron’s 715th home run. The Times obituary didn’t go into too much detail on that. But it did go on at great length about the 1912 error.
Joe said that the great thing about baseball was that there were always opportunities for redemption. In 1913, the Giants won 100 games and the pennant again, and played the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series again. There really is nothing new in baseball.
The difference this time was that the Giants, who were 101-51 behind three 20-game winners (Mathewson, Marquard, and Tesreau), hobbled into the Series with Merkle, Snodgrass, and Meyers all injured. McGraw had to put ancient pitcher George “Hooks” Wiltse on first base. Ninety years later, I was reminded of this when I saw Gary Sheffield impersonating a first baseman for the Yankees in the 2006 American League Divisional Series.
With all these injuries, it was a miracle the Giants won a single game, when Christy Mathewson hurled his fourth World Series shutout in the second contest. He had to win it himself in the 10th inning by singling in the game’s only run. Matty picked up his other three post-season shutouts in 1905. That’s a record nobody will ever break.
Joe saw that game, and was in the Polo Grounds three days later, when Eddie Plank finally bested Mathewson in a World Series (he was 0-2 against Matty so far), facing only 29 Giants to win a neat 3-1 victory, taking the series for Philadelphia.
By then, the Giants were in the new Polo Grounds, a cavernous double-deck stadium squeezed between subway yards to the north, 8th Avenue and the elevated tracks to the east, and Coogan’s Bluff to the west. Joe reached the ballpark by taking Manhattan’s spidery and numerous elevated lines. Rich people had cars. Sam was making money, for himself and Arnold Rothstein, socialized with Broadway actors and Giants players, but Joe was too young to drive a car.
After the Athletics took the 1913 World Series, the Giants grew old very quickly. McGraw sold off most of his veterans, including Mathewson and Marquard.
Everybody seemed to be aging. Sam was spending less and less time with his family and at the ballpark, and more time gone. He wasn’t even at the poolhall. He told Joe a little bit about doing “jobs” and “favors” for Arnold Rothstein, Monk Eastman, Louis Lepke Buchalter, and “Gyp the Blood” Horowitz. Those names meant a lot to Joe when he told me about them in 1970. I could see the look of awe on his wrinkled face. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
The Giants climbed back into first place in 1917 with a new crowd that included Benny Kauff, Heinie Zimmerman, and Ferdie Schupp, who won 20 games. Zimmerman went from “Heinie” to “Henry” with the First World War, but he batted .297 anyway, with 102 RBIs, to lead the league. Kauff hit .308. The team won 98 games in the season.
The Giants faced the Chicago White Sox that year, and it was pretty much the same ballclub that took a dive two years later – Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, Shoeless Joe Jackson. Weaver was the shortstop, and a poor one, Joe said, making four errors. But he hit .333 in the series. The Sox’ star was Red Faber, who wound up in Cooperstown, mostly because he was shelved during the 1919 World Series with arm injuries. Faber won two of three decisions in 1917. The Sox committed 12 errors. The Giants committed 11. Reading those numbers, I wondered how either team won their respective pennants. The biggest blunder came in the final game when the Giants’ Henry or Heinie Zimmerman chased Eddie Collins across the plate with the ball, instead of throwing to catcher Bill Rariden for an easy out. Collins’ run was decisive, of course.
Zimmerman told reporters after the game, “Rariden wasn’t covering the plate. What was I supposed to do? Throw to the umpire?” But Joe said Rariden was standing at the plate, and Zimmerman was screaming, “I’ll get this monkey myself.” Joe wondered about that incident for the rest of his life. I wonder about that too. It seems that Heinie or Henry Zimmerman, who won the NL Triple Crown in 1912, got suspended for life in 1919 (a fateful year) when he tried to bribe his buddies on the Giants to dump games so that the Cincinnati Reds would win the pennant. Zim’s teammates refused, and the Reds didn’t need any help anyway. Zimmerman became a plumber in The Bronx. Reading about this in 1990, I wondered if Zimmerman had gone in the tank in 1917, and deliberately chased Collins across the plate. Zim was a regular in Rothstein’s poolhall, and he and Sam socialized together.
Joe couldn’t ask Sam about these goings-on because he enlisted in the Army to defeat the Kaiser. When Kaiser Wilhelm heard Joe Lippman was coming, he abdicated. Or so my relatives said. When Joe was marching up duckboard roads through the blasted Argonne one morning, his whole outfit was told to about-face and march back to St. Nazaire to go home to America. The Armistice had just taken effect. Joe never saw the hell of the trenches. He was lucky.
When he came home in 1919, Sam wasn’t around much at all. Joe could and did walk up to the Polo Grounds, tell his name to the ushers, and they’d get him a decent seat. Joe came home in time to hear about Zimmerman and fellow Giant Hal Chase offering bribes and getting suspended, first by McGraw, then by the National League. Then baseball was shaken upside down when eight White Sox players were banned for life for dumping that year’s World Series.
Joe never specifically told me what role Sam played in that scandal, and I had to ask a bunch of relatives elliptically what Sam did. My great-aunts and great-uncles didn’t like to talk about mobsters. They were more interested in grilling me to make sure my morals were pure. I guess they were afraid that with my great interest in Sam, I might turn into him and start whacking people.
Apparently Sam was by now one of Rothstein’s bagmen and enforcers, and he threatened some of the Black Sox, to ensure their complicity in the scandal.
None of this meant much to Joe, except that when Joe entered Fordham University to earn his pharmacy degree, Sam gave Joe tuition money. When I riffled through this 80 years later, I realized that some of Rothstein’s ill-gotten 1919 World Series loot paid for Joe’s schooling.
Joe spent most of the early 1920s riding the Third Avenue elevated through the South Bronx, either going to classes at Fordham or going to date Rose Denker, the oldest of three sisters and a brother who lived around 180th Street and Third Avenue. He spent the rest of the time at the Polo Grounds.
By now the Giants had a totally different team, with Art Nehf and Rosy Ryan as the top pitchers, and Long George Kelly and Ross Youngs leading the offense. Mathewson was dying of poison gas, Marquard was a Brooklyn Dodger, and Fred Merkle was a Yankee, of all things. He was still getting booed.
The 1921 Giants won the pennant by four games over the Pirates. Ross Youngs hit .327 with 3 HRs, 102 RBIs. Frankie Frisch hit .341, with 8 HRs and 100 RBIs. George Kelly hit 23 HRs to lead the league and 122 RBIs. Some ballclub. But the Giants’ tenants, the Yankees, had a guy who smacked 59 home runs and 171 RBIs to lead the league. He needed no introduction. The Yankees won the pennant by four-and-a-half games.
The entire World Series took place at the Polo Grounds that year, so both teams were at home. They alternated home and visitors’ status each day. I never found out if the two teams had to drag their gear from one clubhouse to another between each game. It was probably the first time the Giants had ever had to wear visitors’ gray in the Polo Grounds in their history. It was certainly the first World Series to take place entirely in one stadium.
The first “Battle of Broadway” was a hot item in New York. All the actors and bigshots went up to the Polo Grounds in cars or carriages to watch the action and get mentioned in any one of 15 daily newspapers New York had then, most of which had gossip columns. If you think today’s media circus is harsh, try feeding 15 papers without benefit of e-mail, web sites, or even microphones. And back then, sports columnists didn’t lower themselves to actually interview players. They just wrote what they thought, which could be extremely harsh. And they could spew out racist and anti-Semitic material without fear of complaint or protest. The 1921 Series was the last five-out-of-nine classic. Carl Mays shutout the Giants in the opener with his tricky stuff, and Waite Hoyt did the same in game two. Joe was impressed. He also noticed that most of the fans at the Polo Grounds were rooting for the Yankees. The tenants were outdrawing the landlords.
In Game Three, the Giants woke up and smacked 20 hits and 13 runs, chasing Sailor Bob Shawkey. Next game, Babe Ruth ripped his elbow sliding into a base, and the Giants tied up the series at 2-2. Waite Hoyt shutout the Giants next game, and the Giants tied it up again with an 8-5 win.
But now Babe Ruth was finished for the series, and without the Big Bamboo (that’s what Joe called him), the Yankees couldn’t score a run. The Giants’ Shufflin’ Phil Douglas won Game Seven, 2-1, and Art Nehf dueled Waite Hoyt in the finale, 1-0, winning on an error in the first. The series ended when Home Run Baker, now a Yankee, hit a line smash with one out to Johnny Rawlings in right, who knocked it down, and threw to first to erase Baker for the inning’s second out. First baseman George Kelly threw to third to nail Aaron Ward for the final out and the Giants were World Champions for the first time since 1905, which was a long wait by any standard. Some 25,410 fans saw this basic 9-3-5 series-winning double play. That was about half the Polo Grounds’ capacity, so Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis ended the 5-of-9 format as too unwieldy.
Joe remembered that Landis was the tall grim-looking guy gent with white hair sitting in the really good seats by the Giants’ dugout, who posed for photographers with his chin on the rail, looking like he was balancing justice. He showed up at a lot of games, Joe said, and often lectured players and umpires on deportment.
In 1922, Sam was a big man in the Rothstein organization, and learned to drive. He tooled around he Bronx and the Lower East Side in a fancy suit, replete with stickpin and fob watch. The only family member he’d spend time with would be Joe, usually at the ballpark. Sam would talk evasively about putting together business deals involving speakeasies and nightclubs in Harlem. Joe figured that Sam was probably making money off Prohibition. Tell people you can’t have something, and suddenly everybody wants it.
Even though liquor was illegal, Shufflin’ Phil Douglas still found enough booze to keep him an alcoholic in 1922. He unreeled 11 fast wins by July for the Giants, putting them in first place, then showed up dead drunk. McGraw put Douglas in an institution, and my understanding is that Sam acted as an intermediary between McGraw and the pitcher. That didn’t work out too well, because Mcgraw socked Douglas with the sanitarium’s $225 bill and a $100 fine, plus five days pay. That was a lot of money back then. Probably still is now.
Douglas was furious, and sent a letter to a former teammate, Leslie Mann, now a Cardinals outfielder. Douglas offered to go home for the season, thus crippling the Giants, if the Cardinals paid him off.
Douglas was a dummy, but Mann wasn’t – he angrily passed the letter to Landis, who banned Shufflin’ Phil for life, and Douglas wound up unemployed, bedridden, and depressed. Sam kept an eye on him and helped Douglas and his family return home to Tennessee. It was a generous gesture to a ruined man, and it doesn’t fit with the mobster life he led. I never found out why.
Without Douglas, the Giants won the pennant anyway, doing so on September 25. Art Nehf won 19 games, Rosy Ryan 17, and every regular hit except Heinie Groh hit at least .321. The Giants took on their tenants again, and 37,000 fans, including Joe and Sam, Christy Mathewson, Black Jack Pershing, Al Smith, and Lord and Lady Mountbatten jammed the Polo Grounds for the second Battle of Broadway.
Game Two was tied at 3-3 in the 10th inning and the umpires called it because it might become too dark to complete another inning. The sun was shining broadly at the time, and angry fans jostled Landis and his wife and pelted them with wadded paper as they left the ballpark. It wasn’t Landis’s fault – he thought the owners had called the game so they could take home some profits – and he ordered the entire second-game receipts, $120,500, turned over to New York charities.
After that, the Giants shut down the Yanks in three straight. McGraw, holding a bat, wearing suit and tie in the damp and chill, and standing on the top step of the dugout, called every pitch to Ruth. He batted a mere .118, unable to hit slow curves.
“McGraw came as near to perfection in his strategy as man probably ever will come in baseball,” a Detroit sportswriter wrote that evening. McGraw emerged from the dugout to receive kisses and applause from grateful fans. He told Sam and Joe that Ruth was a freak type of ballplayer who wouldn’t last. McGraw and the Giants were rulers of New York. That sentiment lasted for one whole winter.
Next year, the Yankees opened their new palace across the Harlem River, and Ruth hit .393, with 41 homers and 131 RBIs. Baseball’s center of gravity had changed forever. McGraw wouldn’t admit it. Neither would Joe, initially. After a while, he realized what was going on.
The 1923 season was a repeat of the previous year. The Giants won the pennant. So did the Yankees. McGraw refused to allow the Yankees to substitute their rookie first baseman, Lou Gehrig, for the ailing Wally Pipp. Nor would McGraw let his team use Yankee Stadium’s visitors’ clubhouse. The Giants dressed at the Polo Grounds and rode by taxi, trailing fans, across the Macombs Dam Bridge. Joe rode over with Ross Youngs.
The Giants won the first game in the ninth inning, when Casey Stengel hit an inside-the-park two-out home run. Joe couldn’t believe Casey could score before Bob Meusel could track down the ball, but Stengel scored, shouting “Go legs, go, take this boy around the bases.”
In Game Two, McGraw called the pitches to Babe Ruth. This time, the Big Bamboo had figured out McGraw’s pitching theory. Or maybe the Yankees had good advance scouts. Ruth hit two shots into the seats to win the game. In the third game, 62,430 people jammed Yankee Stadium to watch Stengel hit another home run, this time into the bleachers, to win a 1-0 shutout for Art Nehf. The Giants now led the series 2-1, but that was the high point. A record Polo Grounds crowd of 46,802 saw the Yankees win Game Four by an 8-4 score. In Game Five, the Yankees got 14 hits and won 8-3.
Before Game 6, Joe and Sam were in the Giants clubhouse when Joe McGraw delivered one of his tirades to the troops. Joe had never heard such profanity. The lecture didn’t work. Ruth hit his third home run, and Art Nehf gave up five runs in the eighth inning and the Yankees were World Champs for the first time, each Yankee pocketing $6,161 in series shares, the biggest to date. After that, Joe paid close attention to the Yankees.
In 1924, McGraw weighed 220 lbs., banned golf for his players and injured his right knee and limped on crutches until June. Ross Youngs’ kidneys blew out, which caused his death in 1927, and three rookies, Hack Wilson, Bill Terry, and Fred Lindstrom, came up to the Giants to stay. The Giants won the pennant by one game over Brooklyn and faced the Washington Senators in the World Series.
The Senators had a young manager, Bucky Harris, and an old pitcher, Walter Johnson, and the two teams traded wins until Game Seven. Joe noticed that many fans at the Polo Grounds were rooting for Walter Johnson.
In the finale, Bucky Harris played a mind game with McGraw. Harris started right -hander Warren “Curly” Ogden. He faced one batter and showered, and left-hander George Mogridge came on to pitch. McGraw had invented platooning, and he yanked Bill Terry, who had batted .429 for the Series, putting his best bat on the bench. Joe couldn’t believe his eyes, and told Sam, “That’s pretty dumb. You don’t sit down a .429 bat. This kid Terry can hit.”
“McGraw knows what he’s doing,” Sam said. With Terry on the bench, the Giants had trouble scoring runs.
After eight innings, the game was tied, and Walter Johnson came on in relief. He held the Giants scoreless for four innings. In the bottom of the 12th, Muddy Ruel came to bat for the Senators with one out. He hit a pop foul. Catcher Hank Gowdy leaped up to catch the foul, dropped his mask – and stepped on it, stumbled, and missed the ball. Joe immediately remembered the gaffes that cost the 1912 World Series. The Giants were doing it again.
Sure enough, Ruel then hit a line drive double to left center. Next came Johnson, who could hit well. He drove a grounder to Travis Jackson at short. Jackson couldn’t come up with the ball. Runners on first and third. Earl McNeely came up and slapped a sure double-play grounder to Lindstrom at third. The ball hit a pebble, and bounded high in the air, over Lindstrom’s head, and Ruel scored to win the World Series.
Joe and Sam sat in their seats in shock as Washington fans stormed the field to celebrate the city’s only World Championship.
Joe and Sam went home with the downcast Giants and McGraw, who seemed relaxed. When the train reached New York, McGraw told the players to summon their wives to a post-Series party at the Hotel Biltmore, where McGraw and his Broadway pals all sang songs. Joe thought the party was forced – the Series loss had been from disastrous miscues and benching Bill Terry, and the team was aging again.
After 1924, two things changed – McGraw stopped wearing his uniform on the field, and Sam disappeared. McGraw’s change was easy to explain – the man was older and overweight. So he sat in the dugout, wearing a suit, looking grouchy.
He had every reason to be grouchy, besides suffering from urinary tract infections. The Giants stopped winning. Ross Youngs died of tuberculosis. They had front-office troubles and lawsuits. Charles Stoneham took over the club, and there were more suits. The Yankees, in their new home right across the river, drew big crowds. Joe was among those crowds. He had to admit it, the Yankees were becoming an impressive ballclub. Babe Ruth had an injury-riddled and weak year in 1925, but that new first baseman, Lou Gehrig, was proving a good hitter, displacing Wally Pipp. Just to make the situation odder, Gehrig would come out late in the game for a defensive replacement – and the replacement was Fred Merkle, playing his last year in the majors. He still got booed.
Back at the Polo Grounds, McGraw tried everything. He kept bringing in Jewish players like Mo Solomon, the “Rabbi of Swat,” Andy Cohen, and Lefty Rosenberg. McGraw’s theory was that New York’s vast Jewish population would trek up to the Polo Grounds to see one of their own. None of the Jewish players hit, so few of the Jewish fans appeared. The Mets tried a similar theory in the late 1970s, signing and showcasing players born in the New York area, hoping to be the “local” team, guys like Pete Falcone, Eddie Glynn, and Lee Mazzilli, and the Mets lost games before thousands of empty seats. There is nothing new in baseball.
McGraw’s next move was to try to bring back old hands – dying Christy Mathewson as a coach, Edd Roush as an outfielder, Rube Marquard as a pitcher – and that didn’t work. Roush hated McGraw and refused to play. He sat out for an entire year. So McGraw traded for Rogers Hornsby, who had worn out his welcome in St. Louis, where he had just managed the Cardinals to the world championship. It amazed me that the manager of a World Championship team would be expendable immediately, but the Cards repeated this bizarre phenomenon in 1964, with Johnny Keane. There is nothing new in baseball.
Hornsby batted .358 for the Giants in 1927, and acted as manager when McGraw’s urinary tract trouble kept the old man in bed. Hornsby proceeded to alienate the players, the owners, and the press. The thing was, not as many people were interested in the battles between Hornsby and McGraw, or Hornsby and Fred Lindstrom, or Hornsby and the Stonehams. For one thing, a lot of sportswriters still didn’t interview players, so these stories often didn’t leak out. The second thing was that sportswriters who did interview players didn’t write about their personal lives and views the way writers do today. Back then, writers and players went on road trips together, invariably by rail, and then socialized together after the games, which were always by day, which meant plenty of time after the game for drinking and dames. Reporters didn’t “rip the lid” off players’ misbehavior – they were just as guilty, too.
And ironically, the guy who did the biggest expose of the seedy life of the major league ballplayer would be a member of the fraternity – Jim Bouton – which was probably what irritated the writers more than the actual book “Ball Four.” They got scooped.
But the big reason the Hornsby melodrama didn’t get as much attention in 1927 (including from Joe) was the bigger drama across the Harlem River. What happened at Yankee Stadium in the summer of 1927 doesn’t need repeating. The Yankees won it all and Babe Ruth did it all.
After the season, the Giants traded Hornsby to the Boston Braves for Shanty Hogan, a catcher with a massive appetite. Stoneham told the press it was “for the good of the club.”
Joe didn’t buy that. He bought a few tickets, though, because he was courting Rose Denker, my grandmother, and periodically took Rose and her sisters and brother Frank to the Polo Grounds or Yankee Stadium. Rose and the sisters weren’t too interested, but Frank enjoyed the games. By now the Giants were wearing white uniforms with orange lettering and piping, and orange and black were becoming their colors. Meanwhile, the Yankees were playing in pinstripes. Nothing else. That big interlocking “NY” didn’t appear on their home uniforms until 1936.
Ross Youngs was dead, Frankie Frisch and Hack Wilson gone, but Joe rooted for Mel Ott, Bill Terry, Fred Lindstrom, and a stringy Texan named Carl Hubbell. McGraw spent more and more time away from the park, suffering kidney and prostate trouble. Joe, now a pharmacist, figured McGraw had jammed up his arteries with a lousy diet.
One day in 1925, Frank drove Joe home from the Polo Grounds along 7th Avenue. Frank complained about the lack of parking at the ballpark. “That’s going to be a problem,” Frank said. “I’ll show you another problem.”
“What’s that,” Joe asked.
Frank pointed at the people and businesses on the streets of Harlem. “This place used to be a Jewish neighborhood. Now they’re here.” Frank didn’t have to explain what he meant. Harlem was becoming an all-black neighborhood. That fact didn’t bother Joe, but Frank said, “White people won’t want to come here to see ballgames. The Giants will have trouble drawing crowds.”
Joe married Rose in 1925, and opened a pharmacy in Inwood, in a building that was sinking into a swamp. He didn’t know it. Joe sold ice cream and soda to people sitting in cars on Dyckman Street waiting for the ferry. When the George Washington Bridge opened in 1931, Joe was nearly bankrupted.
He didn’t get to many ballgames after that, being too busy trying to keep the family afloat. On June 24, 1928, Joe went to the Jewish Memorial Hospital while Rose gave birth to my father. Her brother Frank manned the drugstore. While Dad was being born, two men robbed the store at gunpoint. For years, the family believed that Frank, a part-time con man, had simply taken all the money in the cash register. But before he died, he produced the newspaper clippings of the incident. The cops actually caught the two guys and jailed them
Had this robbery happened three or four years before, Joe could have called Sam and had the two robbers dealt with a little more firmly. But Sam disappeared sometime in 1925. Nobody knew or would tell what happened to him. Rothstein was shot in the back at a poker game in 1928. He wouldn’t name his killer, either.
But we knew that Sam had become one of Rothstein’s chief enforcers and bagmen, shaking down bettors and fixers, delivering the take. Later we learned pieces of the truth. Apparently Sam got greedy, and skimmed the take. Rothstein was a good accountant and efficient gangster. Sam got whacked. The family joke was that he remains a cornerstone in New York’s infrastructure – he’s holding up the Triborough Bridge.
Even though Sam was dead, Joe still got free Giants tickets from McGraw. The connection ended in June 1932, when McGraw resigned as Giants manager. It was a bizarre day all around for New York baseball…the story was leaked to writer Tom Meany by a hot dog vendor, and his exclusive and the follow-ups tore Lou Gehrig’s four home runs at Shibe Park off the sports page. It was one of the few times after 1923 that the Giants drove the Yankees out of the public eye, even for a day. And the Giants got rained out, to add tears to injury.
Bill Terry took over, and ended Joe’s largesse. Joe complained that Terry was just being tight with a buck (which he was), but it was more likely Terry just didn’t know Joe Lippman from Joe Stalin.
It didn’t matter. The Great Depression hammered Joe hard. He didn’t have the time to close the drugstore and go to the ballpark or the money to hire someone to man the shop for him. Joe went to the ballpark less and less often, and followed baseball in the paper. He was lucky that now teams were broadcasting games on radio, and then on television, starting in the 1950s.
He worked himself to exhaustion in the drugstore, with my father helping him every night, starting on his 12th birthday in 1940, and until the eve of his wedding in 1957. It was a hard life…the first drugstore on Dyckman Street nearly went broke when they opened the George Washington Bridge in 1931. The bridge took away all the customers who were waiting on Dyckman to cross by ferry to New Jersey, who would buy sodas and ice cream while they waited. Then the building the drugstore was in started sinking into a swamp. So Grandpa had to move to an ancient drugstore at 186th Street and Amsterdam Avenue that was lit by gas and overrun with rats, and compete with a brand-new one, set up by an anti-Semitic landlord to drive Joe out of business.
But Grandpa persevered, and sometime in 1939, the drugstore owner across the street, had enough of being a pawn in a landlord’s game, offered to sell his store to Joe, and he moved across the street into more modern digs, which he owned and operated until he retired in 1967.
As far as I know, Joe didn’t get back to the Polo Grounds until Old Timer’s Day in 1950. There was a reason for that re-appearance. Among the aging stars being introduced that afternoon was Fred Merkle. It was the first time Merkle had set foot in the Polo Grounds since leaving baseball.
“Bonehead” didn’t want to come. He was afraid of being booed again. He needn’t have worried. When Merkle was introduced, the tall, graying first baseman strode onto the field, and all 26,000 fans, including Joe, stood up and gave him a prolonged standing ovation, trying to make up to him for all the suffering so long ago. I sometimes wonder if Bill Buckner, A-Rod, and other popular baseball whipping boys will get such treatment while they can still enjoy it. On the other hand, you don’t see Bobby Bonilla, John Rocker, or Vince Coleman at Shea Stadium at all.
Merkle faced the crowd, and doffed his cap, tears in his eyes. I don’t know if there are any photographs or video, because I would have liked to have seen it.
That was the last time Joe saw a Giants game at the Polo Grounds. He missed Bobby Thomson’s shot and Willie Mays’s catch. He did catch some of the Yankees’ bigger moments, but mostly on TV. He couldn’t bear to attend the Giants’ finale in 1957. It was too painful.
The next and last time he went to the Polo Grounds was on April 10, 1964. That was the day they started tearing it down.
My grandfather was born on Christmas Day, in 1895. Or perhaps Christmas Eve. Or maybe the day after Christmas. 
Sam knew that Joe didn’t need furniture at age 12 or even 14, so he gave him the box seat at the Polo Grounds. And train fare and tickets to Boston and Philadelphia when the Giants went to the World Series in 1911, 1912, and 1913.
RBIs. Frankie Frisch hit .341, with 8 HRs and 100 RBIs. George Kelly hit 23 HRs to lead the league and 122 RBIs. Some ballclub. But the Giants’ tenants, the Yankees, had a guy who smacked 59 home runs and 171 RBIs to lead the league. He needed no introduction. The Yankees won the pennant by four-and-a-half games.
In 1924, McGraw weighed 220 lbs., banned golf for his players and injured his right knee and limped on crutches until June. Ross Youngs’ kidneys blew out, which caused his death in 1927, and three rookies, Hack Wilson, Bill Terry, and Fred Lindstrom, came up to the Giants to stay. The Giants won the pennant by one game over Brooklyn and faced the Washington Senators in the World Series.