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number with the operator.”
    While the Giants used Pinkerton agents to police the Polo Grounds during games, the Highlanders, with Devery’s connections, chose to use retired policemen.
    Joseph Gavin was hired as team secretary, charged with making travel arrangements, paying the players, counting the gate, keeping the books, and answering the occasional question from the press. His duties would be assumed a year later by Abe Nahon, Farrell’s right-hand man throughout his gambling-hall days and a man Farrell trusted with the team’s checkbook and to make immediate business decisions. Nahon, a Columbia Law School graduate known as “On the Level Abe” by racetrack acquaintances, was officially the team’s secretary-treasurer.
    Team finances were not complicated. Income came from ticket sales and concessions. Expenses were salaries, travel, and rent, plus assorted clubhouse purchases including a large iron safe made by Mosler, which would house the players’ personal “valuables” during the games—their wallets, jewelry, and keys. Once you opened the master door to the safe, which was about four feet high, you would find twenty-four small drawers, each stenciled with a player’s name: Chesbro, Keeler, and so on. The safe, bearing the original names, would ultimately be the last vestige of the Highlander years, kept at Yankee Stadium before disappearing during renovations in 1973.
    By then I was working for the Yankees and knew the importance of the safe. It had been moved to the Polo Grounds when the team relocated there, then hauled to Yankee Stadium in 1923. And there it rested, first in the original clubhouse and then in the “new” clubhouse built in 1946. I spoke to Pete Sheehy about it. Pete was the clubhouse man, an employee since ’27; Logan’s assistant and then successor.
    “Pete, they will be tearing down this place in two weeks. Do you think we should get this moved out early to protect it?” I asked.
    I think he nodded. He was a man of few words.
    Sadly, the safe never made it to Shea Stadium, where the rest of the team’s belongings were being stored during the construction.
    The worst part of the new ballpark was surely the mess in right field. Try though he might, poor Phil Schenck could do nothing about this less-than-big-league condition. Willie Keeler, it was reported, “had to stand on a wooden platform placed over the impromptu ravine.”
    Schenck was unable to get sod over the muck that was right field, and so after a good rain there was a big mud puddle, and it was anything but level. The only good news for Schenck was that the first homestand lasted just six games, and by the time the team got back from its road trip, green paint had been applied to the grandstand, a roof was added, and, remarkably, right field was level and sodded.
    Left field was 365 feet and right field began as 385, but was reduced to 290 for the balance of the first season before being restored to 385 (1904–06) and then 365 (1907–12). Right-center field was the deepest part of the field at 424, with center field at 420. The fence in left was eight feet high, then twelve feet in center and right. A modest scoreboard in left field stretched for some twenty-five feet near the foul pole, providing a line score along with the scores of other American League games, while an adjacent board labeled “National League” kept a line score of the Giants game. In 1907 the Bull Durham tobacco sign was placed in center (later shifted to right). The sign was not unique to New York but was part of the origin for the term “bullpen,” where relief pitchers could warm up.
    Of course, the dimensions were fairly meaningless in the deadball era. Few home runs ever cleared the fences. Hitters of the time adjusted to placing the ball between fielders as best they could. Although a muscular male athlete might be expected to try and hit the ball as hard as possible, the futility of having it caught on the fly made the