Bob Shawkey

April 18, 1923. Opening day at the brand-new Yankee Stadium, 74,200 fans packed into the biggest ballpark anyone had ever built, and Miller Huggins handed the ball to a 32-year-old right-hander who'd been with the club since 1915. Bob Shawkey walked to the mound, threw a ball high and inside to catcher Wally Schang, and became the answer to a trivia question that's outlasted every player in the building that day: first pitch ever thrown at Yankee Stadium. He followed it with a complete-game three-hitter, a 4-1 win over Boston, on the same afternoon Babe Ruth hit the park's first home run. Shawkey didn't get top billing (he rarely did). But for thirteen seasons, he was the pitcher the Yankees could least afford to lose.

The Fire Sale

Shawkey broke into the majors in 1913 with Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, a rookie on a team that won the World Series without needing him (Mack rode Chief Bender, Eddie Plank, and Joe Bush the whole way, and Shawkey never got into a game). He stuck around for the A's pennant the following year too, watched the "Miracle" Boston Braves sweep them in the Series, and then got caught in the housecleaning that followed. Mack, gutting his roster after that upset, sold Shawkey to the Yankees on June 28, 1915, for $3,500. It's not the most infamous transaction Mack ever made -- that would be selling off basically his entire dynasty -- but it's the one that worked out worst for him specifically.

Shawkey spent the next thirteen seasons in pinstripes and became, by the time he retired, the franchise's all-time leader in wins, innings pitched, strikeouts, shutouts, and saves. Four different times he won 20 or more games. He missed most of 1918 serving in the Navy -- chief yeoman, shipyard ball teams, a furlough in June to throw a couple of starts for the Yankees before shipping out to the battleship USS Arkansas, where he watched the German fleet surrender at the end of the war. The Navy stint earned him a couple of nicknames that stuck: "Sailor Bob" and "Bob the Gob."

The Ace Before the Dynasty

He came back from the war and had the best stretch of his career. In 1919, Shawkey went 20-11 and, on September 27, struck out 15 Philadelphia batters to seal his 20th win -- a Yankees single-game strikeout record that survived Ruth, survived DiMaggio, survived Mantle, and didn't fall until Ron Guidry struck out 18 Angels on June 17, 1978. Fifty-nine years is a long time to hold a franchise record. It's an even longer time when the record-holder spent most of his career as the second- or third-best pitcher in his own rotation.

The following year he was better still. Shawkey went 20-13 in 1920 and led the American League with a 2.45 ERA -- the first ERA title any Yankees pitcher had ever won. That's the same season the Yankees drew over a million fans for the first time in franchise history, the same season Ruth, freshly purchased from Boston, hit 54 home runs and turned the sport upside down (a good year to be anyone else on the roster trying to get noticed). Shawkey's ERA crown got buried under the Ruth news. It usually did.

Two Octobers of Getting Beat

By the early 1920s the Yankees had Ruth, and Ruth meant pennants, and pennants meant John McGraw's Giants waiting in October. Shawkey pitched in both of the losses. In the 1921 World Series, a best-of-nine, all-Polo-Grounds affair the Yankees lost five games to three, he dropped Game 1 and got roughed up again in relief in Game 3. In 1922, the Giants swept the Yankees outright, and Shawkey's lone start was a 10-inning, 3-3 tie -- called on darkness, no decision, which under the circumstances counted as a moral victory. Twice the Yankees reached the Series. Twice McGraw sent them home. New York's papers had a phrase for it: the shadow of McGraw.

1923: The Answer

Everything changed in 1923. The Yankees demolished the American League, won the pennant by 16 games, and finally got a ballpark of their own -- and Shawkey, the senior man on the staff, got the honor of throwing the first pitch in it. He beat Boston 4-1 that April afternoon, and six months later he was back on a bigger stage.

The Yankees met the Giants for a third straight October, and this time New York had the better team and, for once, the home ballpark. Shawkey made one appearance in the Series -- Game 4, at the Polo Grounds, with the Yankees trying to even things at two apiece. He was excellent for seven innings, shutting the Giants out, before New York's 8-0 lead got a little uncomfortable in the eighth. Three runs crossed the plate off him before the Yankees closed it out, 8-4. It wasn't his cleanest outing. It was still a win, in a Series the Yankees won, four games to two -- the first championship in franchise history, the one that made everything after it possible.

Shawkey stuck around four more seasons, winning 16 games in each of 1923 and 1924, before age and a thinning role caught up with him. He made his final major-league appearance on September 29, 1927 -- a member of the "Murderers' Row" club that swept Pittsburgh in the Series that October, though by then Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock, and a younger staff did the pitching, and Shawkey didn't appear in that Series at all. He'd earned three World Series rings across fifteen seasons -- 1913 with the A's, 1923 and 1927 with the Yankees -- and pitched in exactly two of those three Octobers.

One Season in the Dugout

Huggins died suddenly in September 1929, and the Yankees needed someone in a hurry. Shawkey, by then coaching for the club, was the familiar face they turned to. What he inherited wasn't close to what Huggins had built. Ruth was still Ruth -- 49 home runs, a .359 average at age 35 -- and Lou Gehrig hit .379, the best average of his career. But the pitching staff that had carried the 1927 and 1928 championship teams had gone soft at exactly the wrong moment, and the front office traded away Waite Hoyt in May for good measure, which didn't help.

Shawkey's Yankees went 86-68, third place, 16 games behind a Connie Mack Athletics team that simply had better arms (Lefty Grove went 28-5 that year, which tends to settle these things). Nine future Hall of Famers wore pinstripes for Shawkey in 1930. It wasn't enough. After the season, owner Jacob Ruppert let him go and hired Joe McCarthy away from the Cubs -- a move that stung Shawkey more than the front office let on, given McCarthy was making twice his salary to inherit basically the same roster. McCarthy won eight pennants and seven titles over the next dozen-plus years. Shawkey never managed in the majors again.

Shawkey lived another fifty years after his one season running the club, mostly at a distance from an organization he'd given thirteen years to as a player. He turned up now and then -- Old-Timers' Day appearances, a 1939 Gehrig farewell that doubled as a 1927 reunion, a first pitch thrown out at 85 years old. He never got the plaque in Monument Park that some of his rotation-mates got. He got a franchise record that took 59 years to break instead, and a ballpark that still, in some sense, opened because of him.