The House That Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the First Yankees Championship, and the Redemption of 1923 (review)

Robert Weintraub is a freelance writer who has written a popular history that is both pleasant and engaging. Baseball scholars may not find much that is new here, but most readers will, one suspects, enjoy this book immensely. It is well written, making good use of many secondary sources, and it deftly weaves together three related stories. The first of these is the history of Yankee Stadium itself, how “the House that Ruth built,” to repeat Fred Lieb’s phrase, came to be and what it has meant for the success of the New York Yankees. The second is the story of the 1923 season, a campaign that culminated in the third consecutive World Series matchup between the Yankees and the New York Giants. While the third, the “redemption” of which the book’s title speaks, refers to Babe Ruth and his immense performance in the 1923 World Series after underachieving two years in a row.

The author pretty much skips the Yankees’ early years, how the club born as the Baltimore Orioles in 1901 left that city for New York in 1903, and how it suffered from poor ownership and a decided lack of success for almost two decades. From this point of view, the heroes are the two men who bought the club in 1915, Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, called “Cap” because of his military service during the Spanish-American War, and Jacob Ruppert, called “Colonel” for his service in the Seventh or “Silk Stocking” Regiment of the New York National Guard. Huston was an engineer, quite capable of supervising a project as massive as building a ballpark. Ruppert was a brewer intent on selling lots of beer. Weintraub admires them both, despite the disputes that eventually led to Huston selling his share in the team to Ruppert. It was Giants manager John McGraw who brought them together as partners, and it was McGraw who came to rue their accomplishments.

Yankee Stadium was a true wonder, even before it opened on April 18, 1923. Big and beautiful, it was from its very beginning far ahead of all other ballparks. And it remained so for decades. Those old enough to remember the stadium before its renovations in the 1970s and its replacement in this century will recall the huge expanse of green grass in left-center field. Less frequently recalled is the reason why: the stadium was a multifunctional facility, built not only for baseball and boxing but also track and football, with one end zone wedged near the first-base dugout and the other positioned in deep left-center. A true cash cow, the Stadium provided revenues that Ruppert cagily plowed back into his club, helping to make the Yankees perennial winners. The Giants had welcomed the Yankees as tenants in the Polo Grounds, but when McGraw and his owner, Charles Stoneham, pushed the Yankees out, the error was theirs. “Yankee Stadium was a mistake,” Ruppert said, “not mine but the Giants’” (94).

After two consecutive third-place finishes in 1919 and 1920, the Yankees finally won their first American League pennant in 1921, and they repeated in 1922, only to lose the Series both times to the Giants. Weintraub explains quite well how McGraw’s team was the toast of the town, with the Yankees forced to play the role of upstarts. (One is reminded of the current situation in New York where the Mets have been the Yankees’ poor relations for years.) McGraw, in fact, made the competition personal, confidently pitting his brand of inside baseball, born in Baltimore in the 1890s, against the emerging “murderers’ row” being assembled by the Yankees. Thus, the whole of the 1923 season was a mere prelude. The Giants led the National League pennant race from wire to wire, outscoring their closest opponent by sixty-eight runs, and the Yankees romped to the AL...