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  • Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees' First Dynasty
  • Lee Lowenfish
Daniel R. Levitt. Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees' First Dynasty. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 427 pp. Cloth, $29.95.

Dan Levitt closes his thorough and indispensable biography of baseball executive Edward Grant Barrow with high praise from Branch Rickey. He was "the smartest man who ever was in baseball," declares Rickey, whose 1926 and 1942 St. Louis Cardinals were the only teams to beat Barrow's Yankees in a World Series. "He knows what a club needs to achieve balance, to become a pennant winner. I, perhaps, can judge the part, but Mr. Barrow can judge the whole" (379). Although Rickey was being too modest in the appraisal of his own career, there is no doubt that Barrow's achievement was unprecedented in baseball history. The Yankees' sustained excellence during Barrow's reign (1920 to 1946) put the word "dynasty" into the game's parlance and spawned a great divide in baseball fandom between those who love the Yankees for their aplomb and success and those who loathe them for their arrogance and unfair advantage as a huge market.

One of the many strengths of Levitt's biography is that he provides ammunition for both sides in this schism while telling the story in an even-handed and convincing manner. Yankee haters and the pre-2004 Red Sox sufferers might well foam at the mouth when they learn that only days after Red Sox owner Harry Frazee sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees (and later such key players as third baseman Joe Dugan and pitchers Herb Pennock and Joe Bush) he attended the press conference as Barrow took the reins in the Bronx; on occasion, he even used a desk in the Yankee offices. It must be said, though, that Barrow was loyal to his friends, and Frazee was grateful that as Red Sox field manager Barrow had won a pennant and World Series in 1918 and supervised the conversion of Babe Ruth from starting pitcher to everyday outfielder. (Levitt convincingly argues that Barrow's role was more significant than Red Sox outfielder Harry Hooper's in the transformation.) Levitt also makes a strong case that it was money for theatrical productions, such as No, No, Nanette, that was a key motive in Frazee's Boston fire sales and not a rebuilding effort as argued by Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson in what Levitt calls "their otherwise excellent book, Red Sox Century" (163).

Any student of baseball history who is not irreparably damaged by his loathing of Yankee entitlement will profit from Levitt's biography. Barrow surely paid his dues by the time he arrived in the Bronx, a fifty-two-year-old high school dropout from Des Moines, Iowa, who possessed experience at every level of baseball except player, with a few bouts as an amateur boxer thrown in for good measure. Early on, Barrow revealed a gift for talent scouting, two [End Page 161] of his earliest finds being Fred Clarke, who went on to be a Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Fame player and manager, and another immortal, Honus Wagner.

Before he managed the Red Sox to the 1918 Series title, Barrow had worked as field boss for the Tigers, but he did not get along with owner Frank Navin, who fired him in the middle of his second season in 1904. Barrow soon found employment as a minor-league manager in Toronto and later Montreal while also playing important roles in the front office evaluating and acquiring players. One of his major achievements was transforming the Eastern League into the International League, a top pre–World War I minor-league circuit that bore the brunt of the Federal League war of 1914 and 1915 before peace came in 1916. Levitt excels at telling the stories of the internal machinations in baseball's labyrinthine off-field business. His excellent chapter on the Federal League war, "Fight These Fellows to a Finish," is taken from a Barrow war cry in which the executive took pride that he kept his eight-team league together despite the major threat from the...

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