Dec 2, 2011 -- 7:15PM, BigGuy wrote:

1915 Yankees eyed 42nd Street stadium

By DAVID K. LI

Last Updated: 7:29 AM, December 2, 2011

EXCLUSIVE

Imagine this, sports fans — the Broadway Bombers!

The Yankees once considered making their home on 42nd Street in bustling Midtown, according to a remarkable 1915 letter penned by team co-owner Colonel Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston.

A New York auction house just got its mitts on the historical gem — in which Huston, hat-in-hand, begs American League brass to help keep the then-financially struggling franchise afloat.

Huston, on behalf of his business partner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, asked AL President Ban Johnson for a meeting to hash over their plans to build a new stadium on 42nd Street.

BIDDER UP: This astonishing 1915 letter, written by a Yankee co-owner, raises the possibility of the team building a stadium on 42nd Street. The note is up for auction.

“We have canvassed the feasibility of the 42nd Street site for a ballpark,” Huston wrote in the July 16, 1915, letter. “Col. Ruppert and myself will be with the Club when it reaches Chicago, and we will be glad to discuss the subject with you then.”

The typewritten, yellowing letter with tattered edges is being hawked for $4,500 by Gotta Have Rock and Roll auctioneers.

The letter is a file copy that Huston would have had retyped and placed with other club papers, according to auction-house co-founder and co-owner Pete Siegel.

“When I first saw it, my mouth just dropped,” Siegel said. “It’s incredible to think what could have happened, how one paragraph in one letter could have changed the entire landscape of the city.”

The Yankees of today might be the most powerful team in sports, but those pre-Babe Ruth Yanks barely got by. In 1915, they were lowly renters, playing second fiddle to the Giants at the Polo Grounds in Harlem. Huston and Ruppert feared that if they didn’t get help to build a Midtown stadium, The Yankees wouldn’t survive.

“We think our team has been very lucky to keep in the first division and we are painfully aware of the fact it must be radically strengthened, and are greatly exercised over the small headway we have been able to make,” Huston wrote.

Equally amazing, considering the talent that has played on the Bombers’ 27 World Series championship teams, is that the 1915 Yankees were pleading for talent parity — asking Johnson to force other AL clubs to give up skilled minor-leaguers so New York could sign them.

The Yanks eventually got their financial house in order and dominated baseball after buying Ruth in 1919 and opening Yankee Stadium in The Bronx in 1923.

david.li@nypost.com

Read more: www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/ti...

Big Guy,

Thank you for the great Yankees History article. Until the Yankees Owners Ruppert and Houston purchased the land in the Bronx for Yankee Stadium in in 1922 from Vanderbuilt. They were concerned about where the Yankees would end up playing. They knew that they were on borrowed time with the Giants and using the Polo Grounds. The Red Sox mortage deal on Fenway Park was another back-up idea. If they failed to get land in New York City because of the Giants and McGraw's NYC political connections to block them. They were ready to bump the Red Sox out of Fenway Park if necessary, replacing the badly weaken Boston franchise by Harry Frazee's business methods. AL President Ban Johnson didn't want to lose the Yankees in New York City. In the the end things did worked for the Yankees in the Bronx.

Clipper