Get the complete story of the Yankees, from Babe Ruth to Derek Jeter—with twenty-seven World Championships in between—in this “enormous home run” ( Kirkus Reviews ) of a middle grade adaptation of Pinstripe Empire , a celebrated keepsake for every baseball fan full of black and white photos from author and former Yankees PR director Marty Appel. The New York Yankees are the team of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, Don Mattingly, Reggie Jackson, Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, and Carlos Beltran; the team of forty American League pennants, twenty-seven World Championships, and nearly forty Hall of Famers. With more than a century’s worth of great stories, anecdotes, and photos, plus an introduction by Yankee television broadcaster Michael Kay, Marty Appel—who Bob Costas calls “a fine storyteller with a keen eye for detail”—tells the complete story of the Yankees from their humble beginnings, with no stadium to call their own, to today, when the team’s billion-dollar franchise presides over a rebuilt Yankee Stadium. Middle grade sports lovers, baseball fans, and Yankee acolytes will find a treasure trove of facts, tales, and insider details in Pinstripe Pride . Marty Appel is the author of many books for children and adults, including Pinstripe Pride and the New York Times bestseller Munson . Following his years as the Yankees’ public relations director, he became an Emmy Award–winning television producer and director of Marty Appel Public Relations. Appel lives in New York City and appears frequently on ESPN, HBO, the MLB Network, and the YES Network. Pinstripe Pride CHAPTER 1 You Can’t Make This Stuff Up If the people who ran baseball could have created a superhero to come and save the day, Babe Ruth would have been their guy. In appearance, in personality, and in ability, he was almost like a comic-book creation. Even his nicknames—the Babe, the Sultan of Swat, and the Bambino—made him seem like he wasn’t real. But he was real, and his name would have come up over the dinner table at the fancy New York restaurant where the owners of the New York Yankees—Jacob Ruppert Jr. and Til Huston—dined with their friend, Harry Frazee, owner of the Boston Red Sox. It was Christmastime in 1919. Fans and newspapermen and people who worked in baseball were still talking about the World Series that year, in which the heavily favored Chicago White Sox had lost badly to the underdog Cincinnati Reds. There had been rumors that players on the White Sox might have lost on purpose—bribed by gamblers to “throw” the series. That way, those gamblers could cheat and bet against the White Sox, knowing they would lose, and collect on bets. It would be another year before the players were arrested for doing just that. They came to be called the Black Sox, and the Black Sox scandal was the worst to ever hit baseball. If gamblers could take over the games by bribing players, then the public trust was gone and the future of the major leagues was in doubt. It was baseball’s worst moment since it had become a professional game in 1869. So of course Ruppert, Huston, and Frazee would be talking about it. Everyone was. Frazee not only owned the Red Sox, but he also produced Broadway shows and lived on Park Avenue in New York. It was not uncommon for him to socialize with the Yankees owners. Might they have a few beers with their dinner? Of course! Ruppert, after all, was not only co-owner of the Yankees, but owner of the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Company, one of America’s largest beer producers. Babe Ruth was baseball’s biggest star from the time he joined the Yankees in 1920. (Rogers Photo Archives) The Yankees and the Red Sox had just begun making trades with each other. Five months earlier, in July, the Sox sold a suspended pitcher—Carl Mays—to the Yanks, a deal that the league president, Ban Johnson, tried to stop. Johnson said it wasn’t right to sell a player, and to reward him with a new contract while he was under suspension. It wound up being decided in court, making the Yanks and the Red Sox allies against Johnson. Johnson lost, Mays became a Yankee, and he won nine games in the final two months of the season. The Red Sox were the more successful team at this point—they had been to the World Series five times since the American League was founded in 1901. They were playing in an eight-year-old ballpark, Fenway Park, where their “Royal Rooters” were very loud and very supportive. The Yankees had yet to win a pennant, much to the frustration of their fans and their owners. They didn’t even have their own ballpark. They were much less interesting to New York sports fans than the New York Giants baseball team, and the ballpark the Yankees shared with the Giants—the Polo Grounds—was much more crowded when the Giants were playing. Ruppert, in fact, had first tried to buy the Giants before “settling” for the Yankees in 1915, bringing in Huston as a partner. “So, Harry,”