Running And Jumping At Yankee Stadium, 1923 To 1938

The full track during the early years of Yankee Stadium was a precursor to the “warning track” that is now a ballpark standard. (Library of Congress, Bain Collection)

 

Yankee Stadium was built for baseball, but it turned out to be an exceedingly versatile structure. Football was played there. Championship boxing, concerts, religious revivals. Popes visited. And, it turns out, track meets, beginning the year it opened, in 1923. A dozen meets were held at Yankee Stadium over the next 11 years, the last on Columbus Day 1934, a day on which the police were called to break up a riot.1 There were also a few exhibition footraces, ending in 1938 (by 1942 the track was gone) as well as motorcycle racing, a rodeo, and a marathon, all 26 miles 385 yards of it.

The starting line was in the left-field corner. From there came a 120-yard, five-lane straightaway, between the third-base line and the stands, the finish line near home plate.2 Was there room? Until 1937, home plate to dead left-center was 490 feet!3 It was a 400-yard cinder track, 20 feet wide, along the perimeter of the outfield. There was a sharp turn to the left just past home plate. The track was 40 yards less than regulation, so for longer races, the starting line was adjusted. Instead of a mile relay, at times that race was 4×400 (yards, not meters).

The track wasn’t added to the stadium. It was built that way. It was there on Opening Day, April 18, 1923, and three weeks later the first track meet – between two Bronx high-school teams – took place.4

Sometimes track meets and ballgames were held on the same day. In 1925 a track meet was held in the evening, after a doubleheader, under the lights, two decades before the Yankees played a night game at home.

Some meets were fundraisers. In the Olympic years – 1924, 1928, and 1932 – track meets previewed that year’s Olympic Games, giving New Yorkers a chance to see America’s Olympians in person.

The 1934 event drew some 25,000 fans, making it the best-attended one-day track meet in the city’s history to this day.5 That was one of the reasons to hold track meets in the stadium. There were other track venues in the city, but none with 60,000 seats.

There have been a few other American stadiums that accommodated baseball, football, and track and field – most famously the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which also opened in the spring of 1923. The Coliseum hosted the 1932 Olympic Games, was home to USC and UCLA football, and, when they moved west, the Dodgers. But Yankee Stadium may have been unique as a building built for baseball that handled so many other activities.

When Triborough Stadium opened on Randalls Island in 1936, the city finally had its own signature outdoor track facility. On that stadium’s Opening Day, Jesse Owens ran, qualifying for the Berlin Olympics.

MAY 7, 1923: MORRIS VS. EVANDER CHILDS

With 10,000 people – many of them students at the two schools – in the stands, Evander Childs beat Bronx rival Morris High 9-3 in a baseball game, immediately followed by a dual track meet, won by Morris, 32-30. The first-base stands were taken up by Evander students wearing their orange and black, while the third-base side was Morris maroon, including the school band. The events were the 100, 220, 440, 880, mile, and a relay.6

MAY 20, 1923: DAILY NEWS MARATHON

With some 30,000 people in the stands, a men’s marathon was held, sponsored by the New York Daily News. The starting gun was fired by the Wild Bull of the Pampas, the Argentinean heavyweight Luis Firpo, who had championship fights in Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, and Yankee Stadium.7

The race was almost 116 times around the 400-yard circuit and was won by a 28-year-old toolmaker from Stamford, Connecticut, Albert “Whitey” Michelson. He ran the distance in 2:48:23⅘ and thus was credited with a world record for a marathon run on a track, rather than on the roads. (The previous best had been indoors, at Madison Square Garden, in 1909.)

As the race neared its conclusion, thousands of overly enthusiastic spectators poured out of the stands, flooding the track. The 13 finishers – 31 started – had to fight their way to the finish line.

Two years later, Michelson set the world record for the regulation marathon, running 2:29:01 in Port Chester, New York,8 and he made the 1928 and 1932 US Olympic teams.

Unless you count a long doubleheader, it was also Yankee Stadium’s final marathon.

MAY 30, 1923: FORDHAM UNIVERSITY GAMES

With 4,000 fans in attendance, the feature race was the mile, where the veteran Joie Ray was taking a shot at the world’s record of 4:12.6, set in 1915 by American Norm Taber.9 The athletes used the baseball clubhouses to change; Ray stored his clothes in The Babe’s locker.

Thanks to a 25-yard handicap advantage, the first finisher was a runner from Columbia, Walter Higgins, who came across in 4:15⅗, half a second ahead of Ray.

SEPTEMBER 8, 1923: WILCO PRE-OLYMPIC GAMES

With the Yankees leading the American League by 13 games, a meet intended as a preview of the Paris Olympics – scheduled for the summer of 1924 – was held on a cool, wet, windy Saturday afternoon.10

In addition to running events, four field events were contested – the broad jump, high jump, pole vault, and shot put – scattered throughout the stadium.

The Yankees were on their way back from a road trip, comfortably in first place, headed to a rematch with the rival Giants in the World Series, sore from being swept the previous fall (there was one tie) when all five games had been played at the Polo Grounds, across the Harlem River in Manhattan. There were individual contests dominating the Yankees’ headlines that month as well. Sam Jones was coming off a no-hitter – he was scheduled to pitch again on Monday against the A’s – and Babe Ruth was battling Harry Heilmann of the Tigers for the batting crown, Tris Speaker of Cleveland for the RBI crown, and Cy Williams of the Phillies for the major-league lead in home runs. All three would come down to the final days of the season.

The track meet was held in a drizzle. The event, sponsored by the Wilco Athletic Association, drew a respectable crowd of 8,000. A portion of the gate receipts were to be donated to the Red Cross relief fund for survivors of the Great Kanto earthquake that had devastated Japan a week earlier.

For those fans who hoped to see stars of those coming Olympics, they got their money’s worth. Most fans sat on the third-base side, along the straightaway.

Five American men who were to win Gold Medals in Paris – the Olympics of Chariots of Fire fame – competed that day. (There was also a women’s relay race.) There was an international flavor to the meet, as Finland’s Willie Ritola, who resided and trained in the New York area, won the 5,000. Ritola eventually won three lifetime Olympic Gold Medals, including a victory over his legendary countryman Paavo Nurmi in 1928.

The other gold medalists competing that afternoon were DeHart Hubbard in the broad jump; Harold Osborn, double Olympic champion in the high jump and decathlon; Alan Helffrich, anchor of the winning 4×400 for the Americans; and two members of the winning 4×100 team, Lou Clarke and Loren Murchison.

The big race of the day was the men’s mile, where Joie Ray ran 4:14⅘.

The ballfield was then quickly reassembled overnight for baseball. The Yankees had been on the road (or the rails) – a 6-3 win over the A’s in Shibe Park on Wednesday, September 5; a 10-4 defeat of the Yankees farm team in York, Pennsylvania, in which even the big man, Ruth, played, hitting two home runs; then south to the nation’s capital, where they were shut out by the Senators, 4-0.

As Sunday the 9th dawned, The Babe was two behind Williams in home runs, with 33, and one point behind Heilmann in batting average, at .393. The Yankees swept the Red Sox that day, 6-2 and 4-0. Ruth hit number 34, an inside-the-parker, and the two games were played in a combined 3 hours and 30 minutes.

The next day, Jones pitched six more no-hit innings, extending his streak to a record 15 consecutive no-hit innings, and for the second day in a row, Ruth homered – again inside the park.

Ruth finished the 1923 campaign with 41 homers, 130 RBIs, and a .393 batting average but did not win the Triple Crown. He tied with Speaker – player-manager that year for the Indians – in RBIs, equaled Williams, the NL leader, for HRs, but lost the AL batting crown to Heilmann, who hit .403.

In the World Series, in spite of two game-winning home runs by the Giants’ Casey Stengel, the Yankees prevailed, four games to two, their first championship.

JUNE 7, 1924: EASTERN OLYMPIC TRIALS SECTIONAL TRYOUT

With the final selection meet for the 1924 Olympic team one week away in Boston, there was an excellent turnout of Olympic hopefuls. In the stands, the biggest noise came from the right-field bleachers, where an enthusiastic crowd of students from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan came to cheer for a fellow student, Frank Hussey, that year’s city schoolboy sprint champ. Grantland Rice covered the meet for the New York Herald Tribune.11

Running against veterans, Hussey did not disappoint, finishing a close third behind two future Olympians, Jackson Scholz and J. Alfred LeConey. Scholz won the Olympic 200-meter Gold Medal that summer in Paris, defeating the legendary Brit Eric Liddell, while Hussey qualified for the US relay pool and led off the American 4×100 team that won the Olympic championship and broke the world record.12

Some of the event winners that day included Sabin Carr, a 19-year-old prep-school student who later became the first man to pole vault 14 feet;13 45-year-old Pat McDonald, the 1912 Olympic champion in the shot put who directed traffic in Times Square as a New York City cop, and Leroy Brown, a Dartmouth grad, who had some good tries at 6-7¾ in the high jump, just shy of the world record.14

MAY 26, 1925: FINNISH-AMERICAN A.C. MEET

Yankee Stadium was a busy place on Tuesday, May 26. Thousands of baseball fans showed up early to watch Ruth – who had yet to play a game that season – take batting practice. He was released from St. Vincent’s Hospital that day after a seven-week stay during which he lost 30 pounds and showed he might be able to play baseball again.15 At 1:30, the Yankees and Red Sox began a doubleheader, each winning a game, The Babe a spectator. The ballclubs needed to get off the field, because there was a track meet at the Stadium, that night!

It would be years before the Yanks, or any other major-league team, played night baseball – the first night game at the Stadium was in May 1946 – but Yankee Stadium was outfitted for an evening track meet. It began at 7:45 P.M. and lasted until 10, with some 20,000 in attendance.16 Floodlights that had been set up in 1924 for a rodeo were used to illuminate the track. Night events began there with boxing, using a lighted ring, in 1923.

The big draw was the Flying Finn, Paavo Nurmi, who was wrapping up a monthslong tour of the United States. He took on and defeated all comers, at all distances, rushing by overnight train from city to city, in a lucrative grand tour, but on this night, he ended the stay in defeat, losing the 880 to New Yorker Alan Helffrich, a star runner in his own right, who ran 1:56⅘ for the win.

Miller Huggins’ Yankees, meanwhile, had a disastrous season, finishing next to last. Ruth played 98 games and hit .290 with 25 homers, the last time he would fail to win the home-run crown until 1932.

SEPTEMBER 14, 1925: KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS MEET

Some 5,000 people attended on a Monday afternoon. The Yankees were in Philadelphia playing the A’s.

The feature race, the 880, was won by Pincus Sober, captain of the City College of New York team, who defeated a powerhouse field of Philip Edwards of New York University, George Marsters of Georgetown, and the Olympian Alan Helffrich in 1:57⅖.17 Sober went on to a lifetime in the sport in New York, as an administrator and meet announcer.

JULY 7, 1926: ST. JOHN THE DIVINE BENEFIT

A meet was held to benefit restoration work on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in Upper Manhattan.18 The feature event was the shot put, with competition held with 8-pound, 12-pound and 16-pound implements. John Kuck, a student at Kansas State, won all three – 68-75/8, 57-9¼, and 48-3½. World records were claimed for the smaller weights. Two years later, Kuck became Olympic champion and set the world record.19

It was an international show, including wins by Pierre Lewden of France in the high jump, Ove Anderson of Finland in the 3,000, and Sweden’s Sten Petterson, a three-time Olympian, in both hurdles.

After the disastrous 1925 season, the Yankees turned the corner, winning the AL in ’26 but losing to the Cardinals in seven games in the Series. Ruth returned to form – 47 home runs and 153 RBIs but was again denied the Triple Crown when he lost the batting title to the Tigers’ Heinie Manush .372 to .378.

JUNE 16, 1928: EASTERN SECTIONAL OLYMPIC TRYOUTS

The final US Olympic Trials were three weeks away, in Boston. For some competitors, this was a final tune-up; for others, a hope that they had a shot at the team. Commuter trains stopped at the Stadium. The fare was 5 cents.

Four events were held elsewhere a day later. “One reason the steeplechase has been transferred to Travers Island,” the New York Times slyly wrote, “along with the hammer, discus and javelin, is that the Yankee ball club objected to having a big hole dug in the outfield to provide a pond for the water jump.”20

A number of athletes who would make the 1928 team competed that day, including Boston’s Lloyd Hahn, fifth in the Olympic 800; Leo Lermond, fourth in the Olympic 5-K; New Jerseyan John Gibson, 400 hurdles; and Penn State’s Alfred Bates, bronze in the broad jump.21

Paying little heed to the Olympics in Amsterdam the Yankees and their stars – Ruth hitting third and Lou Gehrig fourth – were on a tear, sweeping the 1927 Series from the Pirates and 1928 from the Cardinals.

JUNE 17, 1929: WINGATE FUND BENEFIT

On a steamy summer night in front of 5,000 spectators, Lermond came close to the world and American records in the mile, running 4:13.0. He was paced by Brooklyn’s Gus Moore, who ran 440-yard splits of 61-2:09-3:11 before finishing a close second in 4:15, the fastest mile of his career.22

JUNE 11, 1932: SENIOR MEETS

The local AAU Association meet, a major annual event on the New York City track calendar, was held at Yankee Stadium for the only time in its long and storied history, with 4,000 in attendance.23

Some historic meet records were broken, including Pete Bowen running 48.4 to break Maxey Long’s 1897 record in the 440, and Otto Rosner running 1:54.4 to break Mel Sheppard’s 880 record from 1911. Both Long and Sheppard had been Olympic champions in their day. In the triple jump, Sol Furth, a graduate of NYU and New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, jumped 48-3 to break Platt Adams’s 1914 record.

In baseball, the A’s dominated the game in 1929-30-31, winning two World Series, but Joe McCarthy’s Yankees ballclub won 107 in 1932 and swept the Cubs in the Series.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1932: VICTORY TRACK & FIELD GAMES, SPONSORED BY THE WETHERED J. BOYD COUNCIL OF THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS

A month after the LA Olympics had ended on the West Coast, New York fans got the chance to see some of the stars of those Games in person.

Philip Edwards, a 1930 NYU graduate, and Alex Wilson, who between them won five medals in LA for Canada, ran individual and relay races. Edwards won the mile while he and Wilson teamed up to run an odd relay distance, 4×400 yards – because the track at the Stadium was 400 yards. The Canadian squad won in 3:01.7. Another unusual relay, the 4×800 yards, was won by the German AC, in 7:04.7.24

Wilson was upset in the 400-yard dash by Milton Sandler, a graduate of Townsend Harris High School in Queens and NYU, in 45.5 seconds. Sandler went on to dental school and served in the Pacific in World War II.

Edwards went on to medical school at McGill University in Montreal, specializing in tropical diseases. He won a Gold Medal for his native British Guiana in the Commonwealth Games in 1934 and made three more finals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936.

Ralph Metcalfe, double LA sprint medalist, won the 100 meters (10.6) and 150 yards (14.5), and New Yorker George Spitz took the high jump (6-4). The shot put was won by the Olympic champion, Leo Sexton (52-5½), a Georgetown graduate.

The Yankees were in Detroit, where they swept a doubleheader from the Tigers, to increase their lead in the American League to 13 games, on their way to the World Series victory over the Cubs, their first in four years. An aging Babe Ruth missed the games in Detroit because of an attack of appendicitis.25 For the first time in seven seasons, he failed to win the home-run title, despite hitting 41. He did however hit two homers in Game Three against the Cubs, including the famous “called shot” off Charlie Root.

OCTOBER 12, 1934: AMERICAN-ITALIAN UNIVERSITY GAMES

Before a raucous Columbus Day crowd of 25,000, the United States beat an excellent Italian team, 8-5.26 But it was action outside the Stadium that got the headlines.

The biggest race of the day was the 1,500, where the reigning Olympic champion, Luigi Beccali, defeated the American Joe McCluskey by 30 yards. McCluskey came back to win the 3-K.

By 1934, Benito Mussolini had been in control of Italy for a decade, and Adolf Hitler was taking over Germany. In New York these developments produced an outcry as some 3,000 anti-Fascists surrounded the Stadium in protest. While inside Yankee Stadium some fans wore the notorious “black shirts,” outside signs read, “Down with Fascism!” Eventually, the police were called and three people were arrested for civil disorder.27

The Yankees did not make the Series that year, bested by the Tigers in the AL after finishing second to the Senators the year before. With the arrival of a young Joe DiMaggio, New York returned to dominance, winning every Series from 1936 to ’39. And by then, another world war was on the horizon.

EXHIBITION EVENTS: JULY 5, 1930

With the Yankees on the road in Washington, several footraces were held during the intermission of a Negro Leagues doubleheader between the Lincoln Giants and the Baltimore Black Sox. The activities, before 15,000 fans, were a benefit for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Philip Edwards ran the 880 and NYU teammate Sol Furth the 100.28

SEPTEMBER 7, 1937, AND SEPTEMBER 7, 1938: PARADE OF STARS

Parade of Stars fundraisers were staged at the Stadium by the Police Athletic League, broadcast by WOR Radio and attended by 35,000 to 40,000 people, many of them children from local hospitals, orphanages, and children’s homes.

In addition to some track races, in 1937 there was a scrimmage between the Fordham University and Brooklyn Dodgers football teams, while Yankees stars including Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio took batting practice. Baseball, football, running – a busy day at the ballyard.29 As part of the activity in 1938, New York City’s finest had a tug of war.30 This is believed to have been the final time the Yankee Stadium track was used for competitive races.

When the track was pulled out, it was replaced by grass that went all the way to the outfield wall. The “warning track,” now standard in ballparks, became mandatory in parks in 1950, especially as a result of collisions the Dodgers’ Pete Reiser had with the left-field wall in Ebbets Field.31

JACK PFEIFER, an Orioles fan since childhood, is president of the Track and Field Writers of America and a retired editor for the New York Times.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is indebted to Brian Richards and his former assistant, Danny Cohen, of the Yankees; Cassidy Lent and Jim Gates (retired) of the Hall of Fame; Bob McGee, author of Ebbets Field: The Greatest Ballpark Ever; and SABR colleague David S. Johnson, of Philadelphia, for their invaluable research assistance.

 

NOTES

1 Correspondence with Brian J. Richards, museum curator, New York Yankees, and Danny Cohen, November 1, 2022.

2 Jack Masters, “Joie Ray Will Try for Record at Yankee Park,” New York Tribune, May 14, 1923: 14.

3 Philip J. Lowry, Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of all Major League and Negro League Ballparks, fifth edition (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, Inc., 2019), 213.

4 A photo of the Stadium before it opened, showing the track, is available at this Getty Images link: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/general-view-of-yankee-stadium-the-new-ballpark-for-the-new-news-photo/73495008. Accessed November 21, 2022.

5 George Currie, “Joe McCluskey Wins Race He Wanted to Pass Up after Bowing to Beccali,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 13, 1934: 8.

6 “Evander Nine Wins Before 10,000 Fans,” New York Times, May 8, 1923: 15.

7 Jack Masters, “Albert Michelson, Stamford Runner, Shatters World’s Record in Winning Marathon Race,” New York Tribune, May 21, 1923: 16.

8 Richard Hymans and Imre Matrahazi, Progression of IAAF World Records (Monaco: IAAF, 2015), 370.

9 “Higgins Beats Ray in Handicap Race,” New York Times, May 31, 1923: 19.

10 “Ray Runs Fast Mile in Meet at Stadium,” New York Times, September 8, 1923: 124.

11 Grantland Rice, “Scholz Flashes to Victory over Leconey and Hussey at Stadium,” New York Tribune, June 8, 1924: C1.

12 Hymans and Matrahazi, 164.

13 Hymans and Matrahazi, 164.

14 Rice, C4.

15 “Ruth Is Discharged from the Hospital,” New York Times, May 27, 1925: 19.

16 Richards Vidmer, “Nurmi Beaten by Helffrich Before 20,000 in Farewell Race,” New York Times, May 27, 1925: 18.

17 James P. Dawson “Michelson Takes 15-Mile Title Run,” New York Times, September 15, 1925: 21.

18 “Kuck Smashes Two World’s Shot-Put Records in Meet at the Yankee Stadium,” New York Times, July 8, 1926: 23.

19 Hymans and Matrahazi, 184.

20 John Kieran, “Sports of The Times,” New York Times, June 16, 1928: 22.

21 “Hahn and Gibson Set Track Marks,” New York Times, June 17, 1928: 139.

22 Arthur J. Daley, “Mile Run in 4:13 by Lermond in Wingate Fund Meet at Yankee Stadium,” New York Times, June 18, 1929: 42.

23 Arthur J. Daley, “New York A.C. Team Wins Track Title,” New York Times, June 12, 1932: 105.

24 Arthur J. Daley, “Meet Honors Won by Canadian Stars,” New York Times, September 11, 1932: S1.

25 “Ruth Much Better, Escapes Operation,” New York Times, September 11, 1932: B7.

26 Louis Effrat, “Beccali Captures 1,500 by 30 Yards,” New York Times, October 13, 1934: 17.

27 “Cracked Skulls Are Remembrances of Columbus Day,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 13, 1934: 21. An 11-minute film clip from Fox Movietone News resides in the University of South Carolina film archive and is viewable at this link: https://digital.tcl.sc.edu/digital/collection/MVTN/id/1422/rec/13.

28 “Lincoln Giants Split with Baltimore Team,” New York Times, July 6, 1930: 117.

29 “Children Dazzled by Stars’ Parade,” New York Times, September 8, 1937: 25.

30 “40,000 Youths See Police Sports Fete,” New York Times, September 8, 1938: 25.

31 Peter Morris, A Game of Inches: The Story Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010), 388.