Clark Griffith

Clark Griffith spent 35 years as the man who owned the Washington Senators, and that's the Griffith most baseball histories remember -- the crafty old boss in the owner's box, mortgaging his ranch to buy into a losing franchise and running it until the day he died. But Griffith's first big job in baseball leadership happened in New York, not Washington. He was the New York Highlanders' first manager, hired for their inaugural 1903 season, and he ran the club -- pitching for most of it himself -- through the franchise's formative years before it ever wore the name Yankees.

He was already a star when he took the job. He just wasn't finished yet.

The Old Fox Arrives

Clark Calvin Griffith was born November 20, 1869, in Clear Creek, Missouri, and broke into the majors in 1891 as a slight, unimposing right-hander who threw nothing especially hard. He made up for it with guile -- scuffed balls, quick pitches, a changeup before anyone called it that -- and the sportswriters started calling him the Old Fox before he'd turned 30. Pitching for Chicago's National League club through the 1890s, he won 20 or more games six years running, a run of dominance built entirely on outsmarting hitters who should've had the physical edge on him.

In 1901, Griffith jumped to Ban Johnson's brand-new American League and took over as player-manager of the Chicago White Sox. He went 24-7 with a 2.67 ERA, second in the league in wins behind Cy Young's 33, and managed the White Sox to the league's first pennant, an 83-53-1 season that made him one of the most valuable commodities in the sport's newest experiment. Johnson noticed. When the American League decided to plant a flag in Manhattan for 1903, he needed someone with a name players would follow into a fight with the established National League. He got Griffith.

Building the Highlanders From Nothing

Frank Farrell and Bill Devery had bought the shell of the old Baltimore Orioles for $18,000 and moved it to New York, but what they actually had was a roster built from spare parts and trades. Griffith, 33 years old and still an active pitcher, put it together -- Jack Chesbro signed before the team even had a name, Willie Keeler brought in for a reported $10,000, Kid Elberfeld acquired in a trade with Detroit. The club took the field for the first game in franchise history on April 22, 1903, in Washington, and lost 3-1. They finished the season 72-62, fourth place in the AL, with Griffith himself going 14-11 with a 2.70 ERA as his rotation's third arm.

It wasn't a great team. It was a real one, and in the AL's second year fighting for a foothold in New York, real was enough.

One Pitch From a Pennant

The 1904 season was the closest Griffith's Highlanders ever came to a championship. Chesbro won 41 games -- still a modern-era record -- and New York rode him into a September dogfight with the Boston Americans. On October 7, Chesbro beat Boston for his 41st win, putting the Highlanders in first place with four games left. Then a scheduling mess (Frank Farrell had rented Hilltop Park to Columbia University for a football game) forced New York to travel for a doubleheader it needed to win and didn't, and the pennant race came down to a single afternoon.

October 10, 1904. Ninth inning, score tied 2-2, Boston's Lou Criger on third. Chesbro's spitball sailed over catcher Red Kleinow's head and went to the backstop. Criger scored standing up. Boston won 3-2 and took the pennant by a game and a half. The official scorer charged Chesbro with a wild pitch. Griffith argued, loudly and for the rest of his life, that it should've been ruled a passed ball on Kleinow -- a case he never won and never dropped. Either way, the Highlanders finished 92-59, the best record of Griffith's tenure, and it wasn't enough.

The Player-Manager Problem

Griffith kept pitching in relief and spot starts as his team's fortunes cooled -- a losing season in 1905, a strong second-place finish in 1906 built on a 15-game September winning streak, then a slide back to fifth in 1907. Running a big-league roster and still taking the mound had never been an easy split, and by the spring of 1907, at 38 years old, Griffith was running on nothing. Teammates noticed him short-tempered and sleepless. The Highlanders finished 70-78, their worst record since arriving in Manhattan, and Griffith hung up his glove for good at the end of the year. Twenty seasons after he broke in, he was a manager only.

It didn't save him. The 1908 club started respectably enough, then collapsed -- seven wins and 21 losses in June alone, 12 losses in 13 games at the worst of it. On June 24, 1908, with his record at 24-32, Griffith told reporters at Hilltop Park he was done. "Maybe I'm a hoodoo," he said, and walked away rather than wait to be pushed. He wasn't entirely wrong about the pushing -- the resignation followed a public dispute with ownership over spending, and Farrell's front office was happy to let him go. Kid Elberfeld took over and went 27-71 the rest of the way. New York finished 51-103, dead last.

Griffith had run the club since before it had a home ballpark. Five and a half seasons, two second-place finishes, a pennant lost by a game and a half, and a farewell that sounded like a man who'd talked himself into believing his own bad luck. The "Yankees" name was already showing up in newspaper headlines by then. The franchise Griffith built was about to become something else, under somebody else.

Life After the Highlanders

Griffith wasn't done with baseball -- not close. He managed the Cincinnati Reds from 1909 to 1911, then took over the Washington Senators in 1912, mortgaging his cattle ranch to buy a 10 percent ownership stake alongside the manager's job. He ran the Senators' dugout through 1920, then moved upstairs for good. Three managers cycled through over the next three years -- George McBride, Clyde Milan, and Donie Bush -- before Griffith, after a fourth-place finish in 1923, turned to his 27-year-old second baseman, Bucky Harris. Harris justified the faith immediately: the 1924 Senators, built around Walter Johnson and owned by Griffith, won the franchise's first and only World Series title, beating the Giants in seven games.

Griffith spent the rest of his life as the Senators' owner and team president, running the club until he died on October 27, 1955, at 85. The Baseball Hall of Fame elected him in 1946, honoring a baseball life that had, by then, touched every side of the game -- ace pitcher, pennant-winning manager in two different cities, and finally an owner who held onto one franchise for 35 years. He remains the only man in major-league history to spend at least 20 years each as a player, a manager, and an owner.

Key Moments

He never managed a game in Yankee Stadium. He never saw the club he'd built from spare parts win a championship -- that took until 1921, more than a decade after he left, and by then the roster and the ballpark and even the name had all changed. But the interlocking NY didn't exist yet when Clark Griffith walked into a half-finished ballpark in Washington Heights and started building something out of nothing. Somebody had to go first. It was him.