Frank Farrell

Winter, 1903. A meeting room in Manhattan. Ban Johnson, president of the young American League, needed a New York franchise and had exactly one bankrupt team to offer -- what remained of the Baltimore Orioles after a raid gutted the roster. Across the table sat Frank Farrell, a gambler who'd never managed anything more complicated than a pool hall. Farrell slid over a certified check for $25,000. "Take that as a guarantee of good faith, Mr. Johnson," he reportedly said. "If you don't put this ball club across, keep it."

Johnson didn't need the guarantee. He needed a New York team on the field by spring, and Farrell was the only man in the room offering to make that happen. On January 9, 1903, Farrell and his partner, former NYPD chief Bill Devery, bought the wrecked franchise for $18,000. Nobody in that room had ever run a baseball team. That didn't stop them from building one.

The Pool Room King

Frank J. Farrell was born around 1866 in New York City, the son of Irish immigrants with little money and less formal schooling for their son. He clerked in a dry goods store as a teenager, then tended bar at a saloon near Tammany Hall headquarters -- the kind of job that puts a young man in front of every operator the city's political machine has to offer. Farrell made friends fast.

He turned those friendships into a gambling empire. Pool halls, a casino, horse racing interests -- by the early 1900s, newspapers called him "New York's Pool Room King," and they weren't being subtle about it. In 1904, political pressure forced him to sell off the casino, the crown jewel of the operation, along with several of the pool rooms. He didn't need the money anyway. He had a baseball team now.

Building a Team From Nothing

What Farrell and Devery actually bought wasn't a team. The 1902 Orioles roster had been picked apart, and only a handful of players made the trip to New York. What they had was a league charter, a nickname problem, and a hole in the ground where a ballpark needed to go.

Clark Griffith solved most of it. Farrell hired him as the club's first manager -- Griffith took over March 9, 1903, still an active pitcher at 33 -- and Griffith built a roster out of whatever he could find. He signed Jack Chesbro before the team even had a name. He brought in Willie Keeler for a reported $10,000. He traded for Kid Elberfeld. The team settled at Hilltop Park, a wooden grandstand on one of the highest points in Manhattan, and took the name that came with the address: the Highlanders.

Farrell wasn't a hands-off owner. In 1904, Chesbro's 41st win of the season put the Highlanders in first place with four games left -- and then Farrell's decision to rent Hilltop Park out to Columbia University for a football game forced New York on the road for a doubleheader it needed and didn't get. The pennant slipped away by a game and a half. Whatever else you say about Frank Farrell, he ran his ballpark like a landlord first and a baseball man second.

Taking the Wheel Himself

Farrell and Devery had installed a businessman named Joseph Gordon as the club's public-facing president -- a common early-1900s arrangement, useful for keeping a gambler's name off the letterhead while a gambler ran the show. It worked until Farrell got tired of somebody else taking the bows. In 1907, he demoted Gordon to vice president, then pushed him out of the organization completely, and put his own name on the door.

Stallings has utterly failed in his accusations against Chase. He tried to smirch the character of a sterling ball player and has utterly failed to injure his character.

Once he owned the title outright, Farrell owned the decisions too -- including the ones that blew up in his hands. Griffith resigned in June 1908 after a public fight with ownership over spending, walking away in the middle of a 51-103 collapse rather than wait to be pushed. Farrell's office let him go without much of a fight.

The Stallings-Chase Fracture

The worst of it came in 1910. Manager George Stallings had the Highlanders in second place, 78-59, when he accused star first baseman Hal Chase of deliberately playing badly -- "laying down," in the language of the day -- to force Stallings out and take the job himself. Farrell summoned Stallings to New York to make his case. Ban Johnson investigated and cleared Chase publicly, and Farrell backed his league president's ruling. He fired Stallings that August and made Chase player-manager for the season's final 11 games.

Farrell told reporters Chase's own conduct had nothing to do with any of it -- that Chase was simply using a newspaper story as cover to leave. Whatever the real reasoning, the fallout was ugly and immediate. Chase managed the full 1911 season and the Highlanders finished sixth. A club that had been building toward a pennant under Stallings was suddenly running in place under the man Stallings had accused of sabotaging him.

Chasing a Ballpark That Never Got Built

Farrell wanted his own stadium, not a rented wooden grandstand at the mercy of whatever event paid better that week. In the 1911 offseason, he broke ground on a new ballpark at 221st Street and Kingsbridge Road in the Bronx. The site sat next to the Spuyten Duyvil Creek, which flooded the construction site over and over until the project collapsed under its own soggy foundation. Farrell never got his stadium. He got a hole in the ground and a bill.

The irony arrived a few months later. A fire tore through the Polo Grounds' wooden stands in April 1911, and the Highlanders let the Giants use Hilltop Park while their crosstown rivals rebuilt. The Giants remembered the favor. In 1913, they offered the Highlanders a 10-year lease at the new Polo Grounds. Farrell's club took it, left Hilltop Park behind, and adopted the name sportswriters had been using in headlines for years anyway: the Yankees.

Running Out of Money

The good favor didn't fix the finances. Farrell's racing ventures stopped turning a profit, and the money sunk into the failed Kingsbridge Road project never came back. Devery's own investments -- mostly Long Island real estate -- weren't producing much either. When Tammany power broker "Big Tim" Sullivan died in August 1913, both men lost a pipeline of political and financial support they'd leaned on since the beginning. By 1914, the partnership that had bought a bankrupt franchise for $18,000 was itself running short of cash, and the friendship behind it was fraying under the pressure.

Farrell reportedly didn't want to sell. He liked what came with owning a New York ballclub -- the visibility, the connections, the standing -- and dragged out the final negotiations over minor contract details, hoping something might still change. It didn't. Ban Johnson eventually put Farrell and Devery in one room and Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston in another, and let the lawyers finish the deal without them.

Selling the Orphan Club

In January 1915, Farrell and Devery sold the franchise to Ruppert and Huston for $460,000, with the club still carrying roughly $20,000 in debt. Split evenly, it was still a real payday -- twenty-five times what Farrell had put up twelve years earlier. It just didn't feel that way to a man who'd run out of runway everywhere else in his life at the same time.

Farrell died February 10, 1926, in Atlantic City, of a heart attack, not long after recovering from a bout of bronchitis. He never saw what the club became. Ruppert bought Babe Ruth five years after buying the team from Farrell, built a stadium Farrell could only dream about at Kingsbridge Road, and turned the Highlanders' twelve rocky years into the sport's most successful franchise. Farrell wasn't around for any of the parades.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Frank Farrell?

Frank Farrell was a New York gambling operator and racehorse owner -- known as "New York's Pool Room King" -- who co-founded the franchise that became the Yankees. He and partner Bill Devery bought the bankrupt Baltimore Orioles for $18,000 in January 1903, moved the team to Manhattan as the Highlanders, and owned the club until selling to Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston in 1915.

How much did Frank Farrell pay for the Yankees franchise?

Farrell and Bill Devery paid $18,000 for the wrecked Baltimore Orioles franchise on January 9, 1903, then moved it to New York and renamed it the Highlanders. They sold the club 12 years later, in January 1915, for $460,000 -- about 25 times their original investment.

Why did Frank Farrell fire George Stallings in 1910?

Stallings, the Highlanders' manager, publicly accused star first baseman Hal Chase of deliberately playing poorly to get Stallings fired and take over as manager himself. American League president Ban Johnson investigated and cleared Chase, and Farrell backed that ruling, firing Stallings in mid-August 1910 and making Chase player-manager for the final 11 games of the season.

Why did Frank Farrell sell the Yankees?

By the early 1910s, Farrell's racehorse and gambling income had declined, he'd lost money on an abandoned Bronx stadium project at Kingsbridge Road, and the August 1913 death of Tammany power broker "Big Tim" Sullivan cut off financial and political support he and Devery had relied on. Both partners were in financial trouble by 1914, and they sold the franchise to Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston for $460,000 in January 1915.

When did the Highlanders become the Yankees under Frank Farrell?

The club officially adopted the Yankees name in 1913, after leaving Hilltop Park for a 10-year lease at the Polo Grounds -- an arrangement the Giants offered after the Highlanders let them use Hilltop Park following a 1911 fire that destroyed the Polo Grounds' original grandstand.

He never played an inning and never wanted to. Frank Farrell wanted a franchise, a title on a letterhead, and a seat at the table in the biggest city in the country -- and for twelve chaotic years, running hot and cold on the men who worked for him, he got exactly that. The stadium at Kingsbridge Road never got built. The team he sold for $460,000 is worth billions now. He didn't live to see either outcome fully play out, but he's the reason there was a franchise left standing to do it.