Thomas Austin Yawkey was an American industrialist and Major League Baseball executive.
Background
Yawkey was born on February 21, 1903 in Detroit, Michigan, the son of Thomas J. Austin, a businessman, and Augusta Lydia Yawkey. The elder Austin, who was associated with his father-in-law, William Clyman Yawkey, in lucrative timber and mining ventures in the midwestern United States and Canada, died of pneumonia when his only son was seven months old. Subsequently, young Tom Austin lived with his maternal uncle, William Hoover Yawkey, and his wife, Margaret Alice Williams Draper. William Hoover Yawkey had taken over the vast Yawkey family holdings in November 1903 after the death of his father.
Education
At the Irving School in Tarrytown, New York, Yawkey played baseball, basketball, and football and competed for the coveted Edward T. Collins Trophy, awarded to the school's preeminent student-athlete and named for Irving alumnus Eddie Collins, who achieved great fame as a major league second baseman. Though he never won the trophy, Yawkey was runner-up in both his junior and senior years. He studied chemistry, mining, and metallurgy at the Sheffield Scientific School, a division of Yale University, and received his B. S. in 1925.
Career
After college Yawkey settled in New York City and assumed control of his family's far-flung investments, which included lead and silver mines, oil fields, paper mills, and much timber land. By the age of thirty, Yawkey's personal fortune was estimated to be more than $20 million and he was well known in sporting circles as an accomplished hunter and fisherman. At this time, Ty Cobb and Eddie Collins, to whom Yawkey had become particularly close, convinced their young friend to emulate his uncle and such other millionaire sportsmen as Jacob Ruppert, who owned the New York Yankees, and William Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs, by purchasing a major league baseball franchise. He bid unsuccessfully for the New York Giants and spurned a half interest in the Brooklyn Dodgers before buying the most troubled franchise of the depression era, the Boston Red Sox of the American League. As of 1932, Boston had languished in last place for eight of the previous ten years. In 1932 the team had a record of 43 wins and 111 losses, ended up 64 games behind the first-place New York Yankees, and drew a total attendance of only 182, 000.
Yawkey paid $1 million for the Red Sox in February 1933 and hired Collins as his general manager. Although he continued to manage and expand his already considerable business portfolio, Yawkey devoted most of the remainder of his life to baseball. After settling the many debts incurred by the previous owners, Yawkey plowed $750, 000 into a major renovation of Fenway Park, the team's home in the Back Bay section of Boston. Yawkey and Collins also sought to refurbish their team's personnel by purchasing baseball talent from such cash-poor teams as the St. Louis Browns, the Philadelphia Athletics, and the Washington Senators. Yawkey thus spent over $1 million between 1933 and 1937 to acquire a host of new players, including such standouts as catcher Rick Ferrell, pitcher Lefty Grove, shortstop-manager Joe Cronin, and first baseman Jimmie Foxx. As a result of some of these acquisitions, the "Gold Sox" or "Yawkeybilts, " as they were called, were able to move up four notches to fourth place in the standings in both 1934 and 1935, and to bring crowds back to Fenway Park. When the team slipped back to sixth place in 1936, Yawkey and Collins adopted a new strategy to make their club a major force in the American League. Yawkey hired Billy Evans, a shrewd former major league umpire, to direct the farm effort. The gambit paid off as Red Sox teams, composed mainly of former farmhands, finished second to the Yankees in four of the next six years (1937-1942), and Williams established himself as one of baseball's greats by hitting for a prodigious . 406 average in 1941. Yawkey was so committed to his steadily improving team that he turned down the opportunity to buy the dominant Yankees in 1944.
The Red Sox seemed to begin to fulfill Yawkey's dream by winning the first postwar pennant in 1946. Like his uncle, who gave Detroit pitchers $100 bills for beating Cleveland and took the Tigers out on drinking sprees after victories, Yawkey idolized and spoiled his players. He paid them generously and they seldom, if ever, suffered pay cuts or even fines for poor performance or misbehavior. In the early years of his ownership Yawkey worked out with the team and took favored players on hunting and fishing trips to his expansive game preserve in Georgetown County, South Carolina. Despite consistently strong performances from Williams and his successor as Yawkey's favorite, Carl Yastrzemski, the Red Sox usually finished a distant third or worse in the American League from 1951 to 1967 and were viewed by the team's critics as the self-satisfied country club of baseball.
In these years Yawkey spent lavishly to sign high-priced "bonus babies, " most of whom failed to become stars or even dependable regulars. In an effort to make the Red Sox operation more businesslike, Yawkey appointed Dick O'Connell, who had handled the team's finances and advised the owner on tax matters, as general manager in 1965. Though he lacked the professional baseball credentials of his predecessors, O'Connell used his employer's resources wisely to revive an atrophied organization and assemble teams that won pennants in 1967 and 1975.
Yawkey was especially proud of the 1967 Red Sox, who came from ninth place in 1966 to win the next American League title on the last day of the season. Even as the Red Sox teams in 1967 and 1975 failed to win the world championship Yawkey had sought for so long, they popularized baseball in Boston and New England and made their owner's investment profitable in the last decade of his life. Records show that Yawkey's Boston American League Baseball Company lost money for eighteen of the twenty-seven years it existed as a corporation (1933-1960). A proprietorship after 1960, the Red Sox continued to be unprofitable through 1966. Between 1967 and 1975, however, the franchise became a reliable moneymaker. Though a shy, very private man, Yawkey had influence in the inner circle of owners who ran major league baseball. As vice-president of the American League from 1956 to 1973, he was instrumental in the selection of his longtime friend and associate Joe Cronin as league president in 1959.
Yawkey was also noted for his philanthropic activities in Boston and South Carolina, where he owned two plantations and spent his winters. He was a member of the executive committee of the Jimmy Fund of Boston, which raised money for the children's cancer research of Dr. Sidney Farber. Under the patronage of Yawkey and the Red Sox after 1952, the Jimmy Fund became one of the best-known charities in New England. In Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Yawkey donated generously to local hospitals and churches and was the principal benefactor of Tara Hall, a Catholic-run school for troubled boys. An ardent conservationist, he left 15, 000 acres of his coastal property, as well as $10 million in a trust to finance its care, to the state of South Carolina in his will. The land was to be preserved in its natural state and its wildlife protected. One of the last of baseball's sportsman-owners, Yawkey accepted his failure to win a championship with equanimity. Yawkey died on July 9, 1976.
Achievements
Yawkey became president of the Boston Red Sox in 1933, and was the sole owner of the team for 44 seasons, longer than anyone else in baseball history.
Connections
On June 18, 1925, Yawkey married Dora Elise Sparrow, an artist's model and beauty-contest winner from Birmingham, Alabama; they adopted one child. After nearly three years of separation, Yawkey and Dora Elise Sparrow divorced in November 1944. On December 22 of the same year he married Jean Remington Hollander Hiller, a once-married model for a fashionable New York women's clothing store; the couple had no children.
Father:
Thomas J. Austin
Mother:
Augusta Lydia Yawkey
Spouse:
Dora Elise Sparrow
Spouse:
Jean Remington Hollander Hiller
Friend:
Edward Trowbridge Collins Sr.
He was an American professional baseball player, manager and executive.
