The Del Webb Yankees

Richard Sandomir’s fine piece in the Times on Colonel Jacob Ruppert, the beer baron whose money made the Yankees into the Yankees long before George Steinbrenner was conceived, touches on, but does not dwell on, the subsequent reign of football jersey
the man who made the Yankees, in some circles, less than likeable.

That would be Del Webb, who with his partner, Dan Topping, bought the club for $2.8 million in 1945, and then later sold it CBS in 1964 for $14 million. “Best deal I ever made,” said Webb, who made his money building things, sometimes for people of questionable legal and moral standing.

It was Ruppert who built the original Stadium, who signed Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Henrich, Lazzarri—pick a name, find a Hall of Famer. But it was Webb who, expanding on Ruppert’s success, transformed the club into the object of fear, envy, and in cities that made up the American League map, occasional loathing.

Webb was not a presence in the clubhouse, save for appearances after yet another World Series victory where he could be spotted toward the back—a tall, bespectacled man with a receding hairline and a smile that revealed nothing. It was Topping who was seen at the ballpark, but then Topping, a rich kid and a dabbler, was occupied primarily with marriage, divorce, and remarriage. He did it five times, most famously to Sonja Henie, the Norwegian figure skating champion. Webb, on soccer jerseys
the other hand, was self-made, a one-time amateur ballplayer who, when illness ended his career, took up building houses in the Southwest. With the help of friends with influence, and with a reputation for finishing work on time, he expanded his business. By the time the war came, Webb landed a contract to build the internment camps where Americans of Japanese ancestry were imprisoned. If he felt bad about this, he never said so.

But it was in Las Vegas where Webb made his real money. He built the Flamingo for Bugsy Siegel, and then the Sahara, and bought a stake in the Mint. The F.B.I. had opened a file on Webb during the war, but its contents were kept to a minimum after it was noted that, “Mr. Webb is known to the Director on a first-name basis.”

Still, Webb’s connections to houses of gambling displeased the baseball commissioner, Happy Chandler, who in 1950 made his concern public and was about to launch an investigation. Webb gathered with his fellow owners and Chandler was out of a job. “It took me about forty-eight hours to get enough votes to throw him out,” Webb said. “It was the best thing that ever happened to baseball.”

The success of his ball club, meanwhile, was predicated on having the best players. In 1954, Webb tapped into a heretofore unimagined source: another big league club. When the Mack family sold the Philadelphia Athletics, the buyer was Arnold Johnson, who was a partner with Topping and Webb in the Automatic Canteen Company. While this did not go unnoticed, it did go unchallenged by Chandler’s neutered successor as commissioner, Ford Frick, and by the other owners, who understood in a way that their fans did not how essential the Yankees were to their clubs’ financial well-being. The Yankees were the game’s biggest draw, and the seven other American League franchises benefited mightily from their respective shares of well-attended weekend series when the Yankees came to town.

Johnson, however, was first among Webb’s most reliable friends. Year after year he traded his best young players—Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, and Ralph Terry among them—to New York in exchange for players whom the Yankees deemed too old (Hank Bauer) or just not Yankee-like (Billy Martin). The clubs made fourteen trades and exchanged fifty-two players from 1955 until Johnson died in 1960. Some men made the trip twice, such as Terry, who it was decided, needed some fine-tuning with the A’s, and then was brought back to New York when he looked ready.

Webb’s interest in wins and losses didn’t match Ruppert’s, and certainly fell short of Steinbrenner’s. Instead, Webb was about building—hotels, military facilities and, in time, retirement communities in Arizona. His industriousness even earned him a spot on the cover of Time magazine. Baseball needed building, too. When Johnson needed someone to expand Kansas City’s tiny minor league stadium, the contract went to Webb. So, too, did the contact to retrofit the Los Angeles Coliseum as a temporary home for the Dodgers.

If all of this feels a little too cozy, that’s because it was. But just as the game was changing—and with expansion and a player draft leaving the Yankees no longer able to claim so many of the best players in the land—Webb cashed in and left nba jerseys
town before the coming of the woeful and pennant-less Horace Clark-Jake Gibbs-Dooley Womack era.

Still, Webb wasn’t gone completely. In 1960, he insisted that if the National League were to add a franchise in New York to take the place of the departed Dodgers and Giants, then the American League could intrude upon his rival Walter O’Malley’s claim to Southern California. No matter that O’Malley had awarded the contact for Dodger Stadium to a rival builder. The Angels would need a ballpark, and in 1966, the team opened its season in Anaheim, in the “House That Webb Built.”