Page 246 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 239
bear with his friends, his wealth continued to accumulate.
Tom Yawkey always loved baseball. He had lived with William when his uncle owned the Tigers, and had known and idolized famous ballplayers his entire life. It was Ty Cobb who rst suggested to Yawkey that he consider buying a baseball team. at was in 1926, several years before Tom would get his inheritance. Yawkey’s biggest idol in baseball was Eddie Collins, a great second baseman of the 1910s and 1920s who had preceded Yawkey at the Irving School by more than a decade. Yawkey played ball himself at Irving and was a pretty good athlete. Years later, Yawkey met Collins at a school function and asked Eddie, then a coach with Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, to let him know if a baseball team came up for sale.
By late 1932, the Boston Red Sox were in dire straits. In the early 1920s, owner Harry Frazee had decimated a great team by selling or trading all its best players to the New York Yankees. When he sold the wreck of a club to Robert Quinn in 1923, there were no good ballplayers left. Quinn owned the Red Sox for 10 seasons, nishing last eight times and losing money every year. After the club nished 64 games out of rst place in 1932, Quinn decided he had had enough. During the World Series he ran into Collins, who arranged a meeting with Yawkey.1
e price for the team and Fenway Park was 1.25 million dollars, a lot of money for a struggling franchise in 1933. e sale was announced on February 25, four days after Yawkey’s 30th birthday. Yawkey would love the Red Sox for the rest of his life, but he knew nothing about running a team and never really would. Before making the deal, Yawkey persuaded Collins to be the team’s vice president and general manager, running the club’s day-to-day operations. e stories in the local papers played up the role of Collins over the unknown Yawkey. “Eddie Collins and 30-Year-Old New York Millionaire Buy Red Sox Club,” announced one headline.2
e Red Sox franchise was failing. e team had just lost 111 games, to this day the worst record in its long
history. e team had no farm system from which to draw new players, and was largely made up of players other teams had discarded. To improve the team, Yawkey had to either begin purchasing good prospects from the many independent minor-league teams or try to acquire or purchase productive major-league players. Yawkey — a rich man during a time when most owners were struggling nancially — chose the latter course.
Over the next few years, the Red Sox acquired a few of the better players in the American League — notably Lefty Grove, Billy Werber, Rick Ferrell, Wes Ferrell, Joe Cronin, and Jimmie Foxx — to jump-start the sagging club. Cronin, purchased for $250,000 in October 1934, would be the team’s manager for the next 13 years. e Red Sox also brought in several veterans whose best years were behind them — George Pipgras, Rube Walberg, Max Bishop, Lloyd Brown, Heinie Manush — indications that Yawkey (or Collins) was not as discriminating about spending money as perhaps he could have been. Most of these players were acquired using Yawkey’s money, as the team had little in the way of players to trade.
Armed with these players, many observers thought unrealistically, the club should vault to the pennant. In fact, most of the star players continued to perform at a high level, but the team still did not have the kind of talent that could contend with the Tigers of the mid-1930s or (especially) the great Yankees of the late 1930s. Yawkey took over a team that finished 43-111 — two years later they were at .500, and by 1938 they were the second best team in the league. e expectations of the media and fans, that purchasing a bunch of veteran players would put them on par with the New York Yankees, were not realistic. Perhaps Yawkey was not misguided to invest money as he had, but he and everyone else should have recognized that his approach was nothing more than a reasonable rst step.
Yawkey remained perfectly content with his chosen hobby. “Some men like to spend their dough on fast horses and other things that go fast,” he told writer Dan Daniel in early 1937. “Some men like to go in for