Forgotten Man of the ’27 Yanks Hasn’t Forgotten The Good Ol’ Days

Harvey’s favorite stories are about Yanks’ manager Miller Huggins and his distinctive coaching style. “Old Millsies, he’d gone to visit Tibet that January, and when he got back he was a changed man. One time when I asked if he wanted me to bunt he just told me, ‘Does the flower not also turn its face towards the sun?’ And if someone asked him what the lineup was going to be that day he’d just smile and say, ‘The sun rises, and so the sparrow flies.’ Towards the end of the season a couple of us took him behind the dugout and beat the living crap out of him.”

The big surprise, though, is that Harvey says that at the time those “in the know”—the other players and the managers, if not always the fans—felt the greatest member of the team was not Gehrig, Ruth, or even legendary catcher Bill Terry, but Tony Lazzeri, now thought of as talented but not spectacular. “The thing about Tony was, he may not have had the natural gifts, but my God, did he hustle. When he was at the plate, he’d run flat out to first base after every pitch, even if he hadn’t swung, in case he’d somehow hit the ball but hadn’t noticed. And when he was chasing a foul ball he never gave up, even if it went into the stands and someone caught it. Sometimes if he couldn’t convince the fan to give it to him he’d break into their house two or three days later and steal it.”

But Harvey is more than just a man who played for a magical team during their most magical season—he is also one of our last surviving links to baseball the way it used to be, before television, multimillion dollar contracts, and night games at Wrigley. “Back in ’18, when I started playing,” Harvey said, “the owners were more showmen than anything else. They’d do anything to get a crowd—the Dodgers’ owner wanted to change the rules so that if a guy hit a home run he got to have sex with the pitcher’s wife. And then for a while there was talk about starting each game with a beheading.”

Of course Harvey remembers the famous game when White Sox owner Bill Veeck brought a midget to pinch hit; the midget had such a small strike zone he was walked in four pitchers. “For Veeck, it started out as a one-time thing, a stunt,” Harvey told me. “But what most people don’t know is that then he began getting obsessed with dwarfs and everything small. He started collecting bonsai trees and watches with very tiny gears. By the end you’d see him in the stands scrunching himself down in his seat, muttering, ‘Smaller, smaller, I cannot be happy because I am too large.’”

Harvey was around during the twilight of Ty Cobb’s career, and has no shortage of opinions about him. “That ‘Georgia Peach’ was brutal,” he said simply. “He’d sharpen his spikes and go after you on slides. He’d put a horseshoe in his sleeve and hit you with that, and sometimes you’d see him carrying a sabre or even a gun on the field. He’d do anything to win—right before he retired I heard he was negotiating with the Army to buy a tank.”