When I was a boy, I had a baseball team of my own. We played on a vacant lot between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets. I had a little menagerie of my own, some pigeons, guinea pigs, and so on. On Saturday mornings, I had to take my music lesson. Then the members of my team used to come see my menagerie.
For several years, I have had my eye on second baseman Del Pratt of St. Louis. I cannot say that he is a better player than our own Joe Gedeon, but he has played better ball, and we wanted him. Well, how did I get him? I paid $15,000 in cash and gave away a number of good players for him. But what can you do?
It was in the open market that we found Joe DiMaggio with the San Francisco Seals. A bad knee had scared everybody else off DiMaggio. But we risked $25,000 in cash and five players, and landed a star whom I would not sell for $250,000.
When I was thirty and perhaps forty, I did not want a wife. It was too much fun being single.
I was always interested in baseball. In fact, in my younger years, I played it in an amateur way. But up to the time when I became identified with the Yankees, I was a strong National League rooter.
It would be impossible for me to say when the idea of becoming an owner first came to me. Probably it was a gradual process. The first time the matter was brought to my attention in a concrete form, however, was when Charles Murphy was selling out his controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs.
The first intimation I had that the Yankees were for sale was through an item to that effect in the newspapers. The idea instantly occurred to me that here was a prospect to become interested in a major-league club at home.
In the American League, there seems to have been an entire lack of any concerted campaign to build up a club in New York which should rival the Giants on an even basis.
Baseball is a little bigger gamble than most, and the stakes are pretty high.
Yankee Stadium is a mistake: Not mine - the Giants'.
Captain Huston and myself have spent over $200,000 in strengthening the Yankees since we purchased the club. We paid $37,500 for Frank Baker; we paid $25,000 for Lee Magee, and we have got rid of a young fortune on other players who couldn't deliver the goods. And we have had some of the most frightful luck I ever heard of.
