Yankees And Sports History, Part 3: The Greatest Manager in New York Hated The Yankees' Guts

 

From the moment the Yankees came to New York, the man who’d helped bring them there wanted nothing but victory. The irony is immediately after he brought them there, he deserted them – and spent the next three decades preaching his win-at-all-cost philosophy to another great New York team.

John McGraw is, even nearly a century after his death, still considered one of the greatest managers who ever lived. And considering that almost every one of his rivals managed for the Yankees at their peak, he still has that aura. His record of ten pennants has never been surpassed in the history of game and considering the amount of effort it takes to reach the postseason these days, it may very well stand forever. He may have that aura based on having managed in New York to be sure but considering that he did so for a team that is now on the other side of the continent and never after he departed did it ever enjoy the success it did when he was in charge, it’s hard to argue that it was the man more than the team.

McGraw was known for two things in his career: brawling and excellence. He started his career with what it considered the very first Greatest Team of All Time, the Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s, which won three consecutive national league pennants. From the start he was a brawler, but that was due as much to the era he played in then anything else, though the ugliness of 19^th Century baseball makes everything that followed look tame by comparison. He was a brilliant third baseman, with a lifetime batting average of .334. But he peaked fairly early and at twenty-eight was practically done as a player. (The roughness of the game led to a lot of short careers.)

The decline of Baltimore as well the National League – in the 1890s, the only League in town – led to an enterprising owner named Ban Johnson to see an opportunity. In 1900 four leagues were dropped from the National League. Johnson grabbed them and the players with them and encircled them in the American League, then known for being more ‘refined’ with less brawling. McGraw went with the Orioles. In 1902, the Orioles would end up moving to New York and becoming the Highlanders. McGraw, however, did not stay with them. His constant berating of umpires became so intense that Johnson suspended him. In an act of pique, McGraw left his team and joined the New York Giants. The Giants had been a mess for more than a decade with an owner going through managers and players so quickly he was once described as George Steinbrenner on Quaaludes. When John Brush bought the Giants, he hired McGraw – the smartest decision he ever made.

No one would mistake McGraw for being an ideal manager to deal with. He berated his opponents, manager, and umpires from the beginning of his career to the end. But in an era before the general manager truly existed, he was as active when it came to seeking out talent as any GM has been. And for his tenure on the Giants, some of the greatest players in the game’s history played for McGraw: from Christy Mathewson, a candidate for the greatest pitcher of all time, with 373 wins in his career, to Bill Terry, the last man in the National League to ever hit .400.

Many of his greatest teams don’t have the same appearance of excellence because of the low level of batting averages that permeating the first two decades of the twentieth century. But in an era where the term ‘on-base percentage’ was unknown, McGraw Giant’s were masters of it. They were also among the fastest teams in the major leagues: two of the three teams with the most stolen bases of all time were McGraw’s Giants: the 1911 team stole a record 341 bases, one that has never been approached by any team that wasn’t led by McGraw. And he pioneered methods that were considering unheard of it: he perfected platooning and was one of the first players to use relief pitching when no one left a game no matter how many innings you pitched.

The result was simple: McGraw’s teams won. A lot. In addition to their ten pennants, McGraw’s team were almost always in the pennant fight, he only finished last once in his thirty year tenure as Giants manager. From 1921 to 1924, his Giants won four consecutive National League Pennants, the first team in either league to achieve that accomplishment and still the only non-Yankee team to ever do so. Some teams would win four pennants in five seasons in the years leading up to division play, but none ever matched the Giant’s record; I feel relatively safe in saying that it will most likely stand forever as well.

McGraw could be unpleasant to play against or sometimes play for. He insisted on having complete control of every aspect of play and disliked it when his players did something different. (There’s a story that he once fined a player for hitting a homerun because he’d ordered him to bunt.) But few of his players ever seemed to object. In the many stories that were told of players who played under him, most respected him and some even said they loved playing for him. That may have been because McGraw went out of his way to make sure his players were paid well for playing for the Giants. And it may also be because even the times of defeat, McGraw might be willing to be more forgive than the national media was – especially when it came to two of the most notorious errors in the history of baseball, both of which worked against the Giants.

In 1908 rookie Fred Merkle, playing in one of his first game, was involved in a baserunning blunder that end up costing the Giants a game against the Cubs and eventually the pennant. (It’s immensely more complicated than that, but entire books have been written about this particular pennant race. Search them out. I mean it.) Everybody in baseball blamed Merkle, and he went the rest of his life with the nickname ‘Bonehead.’ McGraw never publicly blamed, actually saying that we lost a dozen games we should have ‘and you can’t blame Merkle for that.”(Admittedly he blamed everybody else in the League for the rest of his life, but he never choice the scapegoat the media had given.) He went out his way to respect Merkle and take his advice for much of Merkle’s career, one of the few players he gave such credit to.

In 1912, another Giant was given a similar fate. In the final game of the World Series against the Red Sox, with the Giants ahead 2-1 in the bottom of the tenth, a pinch hitter for Boston hit what looked like an easy fly ball to the outfield. Fred Snodgrass in center field called for it ‘and then, well, I dropped the darn thing.” It began a rally that would lead to a World Championship for Boston. After what became known as Snodgrass’ Muff, McGraw was asked what he did to Snodgrass after making that error. “I raised his salary $1,000,” he answered. (The financial bonus never erased the damage: when Snodgrass died at the age of eighty-eight, the opening line on his obituary in the New York Times read: ‘Muffed fly-ball in World Series.” The New York press never forgets.”

The one thing McGraw could not bearing was being upstaged in his own city, which is what happened when Babe Ruth came to the Yankees in 1920. This was galling twice over; first, because at the time, the Yankees were sharing the Polo Grounds with McGraw’s Giants and constantly under-drawing them, and second, because McGraw had wanted to sign Babe Ruth in 1914, but never had gotten the opportunity. Ruth had been playing with the minor league Orioles, but the Red Sox bought him before McGraw could present an offer. This must have been especially galling to McGraw, first watching the Red Sox win three World Series in four years with Babe as their ace pitcher, and then watching him breaking home run and box office records with the Yankees. (That’s the reason Yankee Stadium was built, by the way. McGraw was sick of having to share his park with them.)

From 1921-1923, the Yankees and the Giants faced off in the first ever subway series. The Giants took the first two; the Yankees the third. The only reason the Yankees weren’t in the 1924 World Series was because Walter Johnson helped lead the Washington Senators to their first pennant. Even by this point in history, people were starting to grumble about New York dominating the post-season.

When the Giants lost to Washington in 1924, it marked the end of McGraw’s Giant’s dominance of New York. His Giants would never win another pennant, while the Yankees would eventually win three straight and two World Championships. In June of 1932, with his Giants in last place, McGraw resigned. And for one last time, he took the Yankees out of the headlines. The day he quit; Lou Gehrig became the first man to hit four home runs in a single game.

McGraw would die just two years later, at the relatively youthful age of sixty-one. And when he passed, the mantle of greatness left the Giants entirely and went to the Yankees. Much of the tradition that would lead the Yankees to so much dominance in the 1950s (led by Casey Stengel who had played for three seasons under McGraw in the 1920s) would be used to great effect in the years to come. Platooning and relief pitching would be keys to Yankee victories in their eras of dominance. Other areas were also used by Yankee management, not all of them scrupulous. McGraw had used his influence over the years to trade or buy critical players for his team during the pennant stretch, a practice that the Yankee management would weaponize during the 1950s. Not even McGraw would have gone as far as the Yankee management did, though. In 1955, the Kansas City Athletics would be bought by a real estate man named Arnold Johnson, who knew little about baseball but had friends in real estate that happened to be in Yankee ownership. From 1957 to 1960, when the A’s had a player the Yankees wanted, they would dump used ones on the A’s exchange for it. The A’s never finished above seventh during this period. The Yankees kept winning pennants. The last major trade brought a taciturn outfield named Roger Maris to the Yankees.

But all of this was keeping with the New York tradition of doing whatever it took to win. Except… there was one thing the Yankees wouldn’t do that McGraw had spent his career wishing he could.

During his leadership of the Giants, McGraw had fought hard to sign black talent. He tried deception, he spoke of the talent of Negro Leaguers, he even scouted some of their best teams to learn their methods. This desire never left him. Going through his things after his death, his widow found lists of all the Negro League players he’d wanted to sign over the years.

Decades later, after Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson shattered the racial barrier, a scout for the Yankees wrote a letter to head scout Paul Krichell about the potential talent of an eighteen-year outfielder with the Birmingham Black Barons. A traveling secretary for the Yankees had scouted him and told management that the man ‘couldn’t hit a curve ball and wasn’t a prospect.’ Despite that the New York Giants took a chance and signed him at 19. The outfielder’s name was Willie Mays.

A lot of the rot at the center of Yankees – as it was for much of baseball at the time and still today – had to do with institutional racism. And even though the Yankees didn’t start it, they helped lead the way. To deal with that particular issue – especially important considering the World Series make up this year – I will follow up next week.