The Yankees Greatest Dynasty?
The Yankees Were Baseball's Best During the Country's Toughest Times
Mar 19, 2008
While their is no definition of a baseball dynasty in Webster's Dictionary, one prominent baseball analyst defined it as "a sustained period of dominance by a single team with roughly the same core group of players from the beginning to the end."
By dominance, of course, no one is talking about division titles or wild card berths; they are talking about pennants and world championships. Throughout the history of the game, there have been several notable dynasties: the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1910s, the Oakland A's of the early 1970s and the New York Yankees from 1996 though 2001.
But the best dynasty in baseball history, arguably, were the New York Yankees from 1936 trough 1939.
1936-1939 New York Yankees
After the Yankees let Babe Ruth go following the 1934 season, many believed that New York's sustained period of dominance was over. After all, prior to Ruth's arrival in 1920, the team had never even won a pennant. In his fifteen Yankee seasons, the club won seven league championships and four World Series trophies. So it was only natural to think that without Ruth, the Yankees would take a step backward.
Instead, they took a giant leap forward.
In 1935, the team posted a record of 89-60 and finished a mere three games behind the Detroit Tigers, who went on to beat the Cubs in the World Series. While the team still had the great slugger Lou Gehrig, they obviously needed another power bat to get them back to prominence. That man turned out to be a twenty-two year old rookie from San Francisco named Joe DiMaggio. The son of a fisherman, DiMaggio would one day be immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in the prize-winning novel The Old Man and the Sea. But when he arrived at Yankee Stadium in the spring of 1936, the future was still wide open.
1936
Gehrig and DiMaggio soon proved to be a formidable pair. In DiMaggio's rookie season of 1936, the kid hit .323 with 29 home runs and 123 RBI. But Gehrig was clearly still the team's biggest star. He hit .354, clubbed 49 homers, collected 152 RBI and scored 167 runs. Supporting the big two on offense were future Hall of Famers Tony Lazzerri and Bill Dickey, and All-Stars Frank Crosetti and Red Rolfe.
Their pitching staff featured Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing, two more players who would someday gain election to Cooperstown. The Yankees won 102 games and lost 51, and took the American League by nineteen and a half games.
In the 1936 World Series, the Yankees met their longtime rivals, the crosstown New York Giants. The '37 Giants had a very fine team. Carl Hubbell anchored the pitching staff with 26 wins and won his second National League MVP award. On offense, the Giants had future Hall of Famers Bill Terry and Mel Ott (who hit .328 with 33 HR and 135 RBI).
The Series wasn't much of a contest, however. The Yankees won in six games, including two wins in which they outscored the Giants 31-9. It was the team's first title since they beat the Cubs in 1932.
1937
The next year saw the further rise to superstardom by the young DiMaggio. He batted .346 with a league leading 46 home runs, 151 runs scored, and 418 total bases. His 167 RBI was second only to Hank Greenberg's 183. Gehrig also had another great year, batting .351 with 37 home runs and 159 RBI. Bill Dickey was remarkable with 29 home runs and 133 RBI. The pitching staff was once again anchored by 20+ game winners Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez, and the team finished 102-52, a full thirteen games ahead of the second place Tigers.
Once again they met the Giants in the Series. This one wasn't very close. The Yankee prevailed in five games by a combined score of 28-12. Ruffing, Gomez and Monte Pearson kept Giants hitters at bay while Gehrig, DiMaggio and Lazzerri fueled the offense to a second straight title.
1938
By 1938, it was clear that DiMaggio had become the best player on the team. Although Gehrig had a season that would have been great by the standards of a mere mortal, his .295 average, 29 homers and 114 RBI were almost pedestrian when judged against the Iron Horse's career averages. DiMaggio, on the other hand, continued to improve, hitting a league best .324 with 32 homers, 140 RBI and 125 runs scored. Bill Dickey, Tommy Henrich and Red Rolfe also had great seasons, and the Yankees finished 99-53, a full ten games in first place.
The team crushed the Cubs in the World Series, sweeping them and outscoring Chicago 22-9.
1939
The next season marked perhaps the biggest change to the team in 20 years. In spring training, the uber-consistent Gehrig struggled mightily. Observers said that his bat speed slowed dramatically, his running pace decreased by more than half. He even had trouble picking up easy ground balls at first place. But because he was Lou Gehrig and because he was in the midst of a consecutive games streak that exceeded 2,100 games, manager Joe McCarty made it clear that Gehrig would start the season at his usual spot.
But as he played through April, it became very clear that something was wrong with Columbia Lou. By the end of the first month, the once great slugger was hitting .143 with no home runs and just one RBI. On May 1, before the game, he told McCarthy that he was ready to sit out, thus ending his 2,130 consecutive games. He would never play again. A few weeks later he was diagnosed with a fatal disease that would soon bear his name. On the 4th of July, the Yankees held a day in his honor, during which Lou gave his now famous "Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth" speech.
Although Gehrig was gone, the rest of the team struggled on in his honor. DiMaggio led the American League with a .381 batting average and won his first MVP Award. He, Bill Dickey, George Selkirk, and Joe Gordon all drove in at least 100 runs. The team led the league in runs, home runs, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. Seven pitchers had double-digit wins, led by Ruffing's 21-7 record. They finished 106-45, a full seventeen games ahead of the second place Red Sox.
The World Series was almost an afterthought. New York won in a four game sweep over the Cincinnati Reds, and thus became the first team in major league history to capture four straight World Series titles.
There have been other great Yankee dynasties, including the Casey Stengel teams of the 1950s, the M&M boys of the 1960s, and Joe Torre's clubs of the late 1990s, but perhaps no other team in history was as dominant and had so many legends as the Yankees of the 1930s.
