How the Giants inadvertently helped the Yankees start a dynasty

A New Stadium, the First Yankees Championship, and the Redemption of 1923

By Robert Weintraub

Little, Brown. 421 pp. $26.99

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Reviewed by Paul Jablow

Someone once said that some material is so good that no bad writing can ruin it. Whoever it was, this book shows he knew what he was talking about.

Robert Weintraub's The House That Ruth Built captures a bright moment in baseball history: The first of the Yankees' 27 World Series triumphs, accomplished in 1923, their first year in Yankee Stadium.

Banished in 1921 from the Polo Grounds, where they were tenants of the rival New York Giants, Yankee owners Col. Jacob Ruppert and "Cap" Huston set out to build their own magnificent ballpark across the Harlem River in the Bronx.

The eviction notice from Giants owner Charles Stoneham came after the Yankees' first American League pennant and a loss to the Giants in the Series. With construction of the new park bogged down - literally and figuratively - the Yanks hung on in 1922 at usurious rent.

Extortion was quickly followed by ignominy, a second Series loss to the Giants, this one a four-game sweep. A befuddled Babe Ruth was held to two hits in 17 at-bats as Giants manager John McGraw, whom Ruth couldn't stand (the feeling was mutual), called every pitch from the bench, cackles of glee rising to match the Babe's frustration.

Revenge came the following year as the Yankees beat the Giants in six games, with Ruth batting .368 and hitting three homers.

The backdrop for all this, of course, was the Roaring Twenties, an era of sports obsession and speakeasies. It is well-researched if not gracefully described here, rather like the finest single- malt Scotch served in a styrofoam cup.

Cliches abound: "Sweeping the area like wildfire"; "the tools of their trade"; "Frisch stood firm as Gibraltar."

We hear about "a nation that fairly leapt out of bed each morning, anxious to attack the day." We "learn" that as McGraw walked through Harlem toward the stadium before the first Series game, "He would likely have heard the hottest recording of the year, Bessie Smith's 'Downhearted Blues,' " but somehow we know that he definitely "scowled."

Weintraub, clearly a knowledgeable baseball historian, tells us how 1923 marked the eclipse of McGraw's run-at-a-time "scientific baseball" by the homer mania set off by Ruth. But he follows this by a piece of what can only be termed crackpot sociology:

"[A]fter the First World War and its trench warfare horrors that included warfare 'advances' like the machine gun and mustard gas, the very concept of 'science' had taken on a negative connotation."

There are also missed opportunities, like a haphazardly inserted paragraph about the migration of Southern blacks to New York without adding that the Yankees - one of the last major league teams to integrate - would be less than enthusiastic over the years about attracting black fans to the Stadium.

But in the end the story wins the day. There is the larger sweep of the McGraw-Ruth rivalry, the strange chemistry between Ruppert and Huston, Ruth's miraculous talents and Rabelaisian appetites.

And there are countless smaller gems, such as the one about President Warren G. Harding winning the 1920 election and celebrating by going back to his hometown of Marion, Ohio, to play in a charity game and jamming his finger after two innings of play.

Or the incident in which Ruth wheels a grand piano out onto the frozen surface of a pond near his winter home in Sudbury, Mass., for a concert - the author warns us this may be apocryphal - and sees it fall through. "In 2010," we learn, "an expedition discovered parts of what may have been Ruth's piano at the bottom of the pond, thanks in part to the help of a psychic."

Or perhaps McGraw desperately seeking a Jewish version of Babe Ruth and winding up with a hapless klutz named Morris Solomon, a.k.a. "The Rabbi of Swat."

The House that Ruth built is no more, of course, replaced by a new Yankee Stadium in the 2008 season. But the history of the old one is irreplaceable.

In Weintraub's words, "the Giants pushed the Yankees into creating a juggernaut, marrying the biggest star in the country with a grand edifice to display him. Had McGraw (and Stoneham) not acted in such a knee-jerk fashion to the Babe's instant popularity, they might have withstood the Ruth phenomenon and delayed the construction of Yankee Stadium until Ruth was near or at the end of his career," the mid-1930's.

Or, as Col. Ruppert put it: "Yankee Stadium was a mistake, not mine but the Giants'."