Jacob Ruppert Quotations

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.

Yankee Stadium is a mistake: Not mine - the Giants'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Baseball is a little bigger gamble than most, and the stakes are pretty high.

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.

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?