One Summer: America, 1927

flew to Paris, for example, the Dodgers played before an audience of fewer than 4,000, which was fairly typical for them even in good years. Other teams like the St Louis Browns, which never had good years, sometimes had average attendances of about 1,500. It is a miracle that many teams held on as long as they did.
    Surprisingly, the man who made more money out of baseball than almost anyone else was an enterprising Englishman named Harry Stevens, who came to America as a young man around the turn of the century, fell for baseball in a big way and hit on the best idea of his life – namely, that fans might enjoy a hot snack in the course of a game. He experimented with various combinations of hot sandwiches and found that sausages in a roll kept warm longer than anything else he tried. He secured the right to sell his ‘red hots’, as he rather generously called them, at the Polo Grounds and almost at once began doing brisk business. It was Stevens’s products that the cartoonist Tad Dorgan dubbed ‘hot dogs’, injocular reference to their supposed principal constituent. Stevens loved the term, and by the 1920s hot dogs were indelibly associated with baseball games all across the nation, and Stevens had the concession operations at all three New York ballparks and others as far afield as Chicago. He was also rich in a way that most baseball club owners could only ever dream of being.
    In desperation, team owners resorted to economies that often made them look ridiculous. Most ballparks, for instance, insisted on reclaiming foul balls hit into the stands. A few enlightened owners, like Barney Dreyfuss of the Pittsburgh Pirates, let fans keep balls as souvenirs, but others were ferocious in defending what they saw as an important property right. Matters came to a head in 1923 at – appropriately enough, it would seem – Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, when an eleven-year-old boy named Robert Cotter caught a foul ball and refused to give it back. When it was also discovered that he had no ticket but had sneaked in, the Phillies’ management had young Cotter arrested and charged with theft. He spent a night in jail and was hauled before a judge the next day. The judge, to the delight of the city, ruled that it was entirely reasonable that a kid would want to keep a foul ball – particularly as Cotter had made a really good catch. After that, ballparks everywhere largely gave up trying to keep hold of foul balls.
    The paradoxical upshot of all this was that baseball at the time Babe Ruth came into the game was immensely popular but dangerously uneconomic – and of no team was that more true than the New York Yankees. In 1914, the year Ruth joined the Red Sox, it became known in the baseball world that the Yankees were for sale if anyone wanted to buy them. They were not an enticing proposition. They didn’t have a single player of real talent, generally finished near the bottom of the standings, attracted poor crowds and didn’t even have a home ground. They played in the Giants’ stadium, the Polo Grounds. Until recently they hadn’t even had a fixed name, but were known variously and casually as the Highlanders, Hilltoppers and Americans.
    The Yankees’ owners, William S. Devery and Frank J. Farrell, asked John McGraw of the Giants to help them find a new owner. McGraw approached two men who had never met but were keen on baseball: a New York beer baron named Jacob Ruppert and a businessman from Ohio who rejoiced in the name of Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston. Huston sadly was not as exotic or even as interesting as his name might lead us to hope. Born in 1866, one year before Ruppert, he had grown up in a middle-class household in Cincinnati, trained as an engineer, and made a fortune helping to rebuild Cuba after the Spanish–American War. He liked to drink, was a bit of a slob, was always cheerful, and loved baseball. That was about all there was to him.
    Ruppert, by contrast, was a more complex character. The scion of a wealthy brewing family, he grew up in a rambling mansion in the German-American enclave of Yorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan – the same neighbourhood that produced, in more modest circumstances, Lou Gehrig and the Marx Brothers – close to the yeasty smell of the Ruppert Brewery, which was the biggest in the nation, occupying an enormous site between Ninetieth and Ninety-Third Streets. It produced Knickerbocker, Ruppert and Ruppiner beers, which, not incidentally, sold