1936 World Series: DiMaggio and the Yankees

The Teams
American League: New York Yankees (102-51) - Eighth World Series (won in 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932)
National League: New York Giants (92-62) - 11th World Series (won in 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933)

What Happened
For the eighth time in 15 years, the New York Yankees were the American League champions in 1936. For the first time ever, though, they were going to play in a World Series without Babe Ruth, who had retired the previous season. But they still had Lou Gehrig, and they still had the best pitching staff in baseball, and they also had a new weapon in 1936: a rookie center fielder named Joe DiMaggio.

DiMaggio stepped right into the Yankees lineup, occupying the No. 3 spot that Ruth had made his own for a decade and succeeding instantly, putting together one of the best rookie seasons in baseball history. Adding him to an already lethal Yankee lineup almost seemed unfair, and it seemed to ensure the Yankees would be a dynasty over the rest of the 1930s.

Hoping to delay the Yankee ascension by at least a year were their cross-Harlem River rivals. The Giants didn't have much on their team, especially when compared to the great Yankees, but they did have Carl Hubbell, who may have been the best pitcher alive in 1936. Hubbell was all the Giants needed in Game 1, though, as the Yankees could only manage a third-inning home run in a 6-1 loss.

All that loss did was make the Yankees angry, and the Giants didn't like the Yankees when they were angry. A seven-run third put Game 2 away early; a six-run ninth turned it into a laugher. The final out of the Yankees 18-4 victory was a drive to the deepest part of the Polo Grounds, where DiMaggio ran the ball down and, without slowing down, ran up the steps into the clubhouse.

After that debacle, the Giants held the Yankees to only four hits in Game 3. One was a home run by Gehrig, and another was an eighth-inning single by Frankie Crosetti that gave the Yankees the win. Game 4 was Hubbell's turn again, and the Yankees weren't impressed the second time around, taking a 4-0 lead after three innings on their way to a 5-2 win. The Yankees blew a chance to win the series at home, losing Game 5 in 10 innings, but the Polo Grounds were just across the river, so it might as well have been a home game for the Yankees. Their 13-5 win in Game 6 not only clinched the series, but also sent notice to the rest of baseball that a new dynasty was born. 

Defining Game
Game 6 looks like a blowout if you see just the score, but it served as an appropriate symbol for the series. The Yankees took an early 5-2 lead and then, perhaps bored, let the Giants get slowly back into the game. The Giants eventually cut the lead to 1; when the Yankees scored one in the 8th, the Giants answered right back in the bottom of the inning. Finally, the Yankee juggernaut woke up, yawned, stretched a bit, and crushed the Giants, closing out the series with a debilitating seven-run ninth inning.
 
MVP
Jake Powell joined the Yankees in midseason to bolster the bottom of their lineup, and he ended up being the biggest star in a World Series full of them. His .455 average, 10 hits, and 8 runs were all series highs. He hit a home run off Hubbell in Game 1, then tied Game 6 with a double before delivering the series-clinching hit, a bases-loaded single that broke up the Yankees' seven-run ninth in the deciding game.

Scores
(Home team shaded; winners in Bold)

N.Y. Yankees	1	18	2	5	4	13
N.Y. Giants	6	4	1	2	5 (10)	5

The List
I'm ranking all the World Series, from worst to best. Here are the ones I've done so far:

60. 1936 - New York (A) def. New York (N) 4-2
61. 1909 - Pittsburgh (N) def. Detroit (A) 4-3
62. 2005 - Chicago (A) def. Houston (N) 4-0
63. 1950 - New York (A) def. Philadelphia (N) 4-0
64. 1906 - Chicago (A) def. Chicago (N) 4-2
65. 1981 - Los Angeles (N) def. New York (A) 4-2
66. 1943 - New York (A) def. St. Louis (N) 4-1
67. 1954 - New York (N) def. Cleveland (A) 4-0
68. 1978 - New York (A) def. Los Angeles (N) 4-2
69. 2006 - St. Louis (N) def. Detroit (A) 4-1
Numbers 70-79
Numbers 80-89
Numbers 90-99
Numbers 100-107

1927 World Series: Murderer's Row

The Teams
American League: New York Yankees (110-44) - Fifth World Series (won in 1923)
National League: Pittsburgh Pirates (94-60) - Fourth World Series (won in 1909, 1925)

What Happened
The story is told so often that you start to wonder if it's apocryphal. During batting practice before Game 1 of the 1927 World Series, the Yankees kept hitting blast after blast deep into the Forbes Field seats. The bombs didn't let up. Supposedly, the Pirates were so intimidated by the site of Ruth, Gehrig, and Co. making their giant ballpark look small that the series was over before it began. Or so the legend goes.

It's a convenient story to tell after the fact. After all, these were the Yankees, Murderer's Row, the greatest Yankee team of all time. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, more than any other team in the league. Lou Gehrig hit 47 homers, with 175 runs batted in. Tony Lazzeri was third in the league with 18 home runs. A Yankee lead the league in every offensive category except batting average. They annihilated the American League so thoroughly that the pennant race was over in July. The World Series was supposed to be nothing more than a coronation, the crowning of the greatest baseball team ever assembled.

It wasn't quite that simple, though. The Pirates had won the World Series in 1925, beating the legendary Walter Johnson in Game 7. They had five future Hall of Famers in their lineup, a lineup that, aside from the home runs, was just as dangerous as New York's.

And the Pirates gave the Yankees a good fight. Many people forget that in the glare of the Yankees' 110-win regular season and in the fact the series ended up as a New York sweep. But the Yankees needed to hold off an eighth-inning Pittsburgh rally to win Game 1, didn't put away Game 2 until a three-run eighth of their own, and won the series on a walk-off wild pitch in Game 4. So yah, it was a sweep, the only fitting result for a team that good. But the Pirates gave the Yankees as good a fight as any team could have been expected to.

Defining Game
Game 4. When Ruth hit a two-run home run in the bottom of the fifth to give the Yankees a 3-1 lead, it's possible the Yankee fans started celebrating their impending World Championship (I don't know. I wasn't there. It was 1927 - my grandpa was born in 1927). The Yankees might have gotten ahead of themselves, too, thinking about the champagne shower ahead of them, just 12 outs away. You have to get those outs, though, and the Yankees made things interesting with two eighth-inning errors that let the Pirates tie the game.

Then came the bottom of the ninth. The first two Yankees got on base, bringing up Ruth. What a perfect way to cap off the great season, the great Ruth getting the World Series-winning hit ... but a wild pitch moved the runners to second and third. Ruth was, of course, walked from there. Gehrig then had his chance, but he struck out. So did Bob Meusel. What was happening here? Why couldn't the greatest team ever finish the job? Up came Lazzeri, and he didn't get the series-winning hit, either; however, he was smart enough to lay off the pitch in the dirt that bounced to the backstop, allowing the series-ending run to come home.

MVP
Unofficially, Ruth. He hit the only two home runs of the series, batted .400, and even stole a base. Plus, he supposedly intimidated the Pirates beyond repair with his batting-practice home runs before Game 1. And when it was all over, he probably threw a hell of a party.



Scores
(Home team in Bold)

New York	5	6	8	4
Pittsburgh	4	2	1	3

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The List
I'm ranking all the World Series, from worst to best. Here are the ones I've done so far:

92. 1927 - New York (A) def. Pittsburgh (N) 4-0
93. 2004 - Boston (A) def. St. Louis (N) 4-0
94. 1932 - New York (A) def. Chicago (N) 4-0
95. 1908 - Chicago (N) def. Detroit (A) 4-1
96. 1999 - New York (A) def. Atlanta (N) 4-0
97. 1963 - Los Angeles (N) def. New York (A) 4-0
98. 2010 - San Francisco (N) def. Texas (A) 4-1
99. 1937 - New York (A) def. New York (N) 4-1
Numbers 100-107

1938 World Series: The first three-peat

The Teams
American League: New York Yankees (99-53); 10th World Series (won in 1923, 1927, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1937)
National League: Chicago Cubs (89-63); Ninth World Series (won in 1907, 1908)

What happened
In 1937, the New York Yankees became the seventh team to win a second straight World Series. They entered the 1938 season trying do the one thing those previous six teams had failed to do: win a third straight title. With six future Hall of Famers in their clubhouse, getting back to the World Series would be no problem.

Standing between the Yankees and their date with destiny was the Chicago Cubs, who won their fourth National League championship in nine seasons. While they had four future Hall of Famers of their own, a couple of their stars were at the end of their careers. It didn't look like much of a matchup.

The Yankees' Hall of Famers took control of the series and never let the Cubs into it. In Game 1, catcher Bill Dickey's 4-for-4 day backed up Red Ruffing's complete game for a 3-1 win. In Game 2, Joe DiMaggio's ninth-inning home run clinched the victory for Lefty Gomez. In Game 3, it was Joe Gordon, the future Hall of Fame no. 8 hitter, who hit the go-ahead home run for New York in the fifth. In the last game, every Yankee got a hit, including starting pitcher Ruffing, as they completed the sweep to become baseball's first back-to-back-to-back World Series champs.

It was a domination in every way. The Yankees used only four pitchers the entire series. Nine Yankees drove in a run in the series, and five different players homered. The Yankees won easily despite a pedestrian effort from their star of stars, the great Lou Gehrig.

Gehrig had only four singles in the series for New York, the first World Series of his career without an extra-base hit. This after finishing a season where he hit below .300 for the first time since his rookie year. At first, Gehrig's struggles were dismissed as those of somebody who had played every game for 12 years and might finally be wearing down. Knowing what we know now, it is instead likely that Gehrig started suffering the earliest effects of ALS during the 1938 season. Gehrig played only eight games in 1939 before retiring, meaning the 1938 World Series was his last appearance in the postseason.

Defining Game
Game 4. The Yankees took a 4-1 lead into the eighth inning, happy to take that lead home and celebrate a third straight title. But then the Cubs cut it to 4-3 with a home run by Ken O'Dea in the top of the eighth. That just made the Yankees angry. They used four hits, two walks, two wild pitches and a stolen base to add four more runs. It was their last half-inning at bat in 1938, and it was the fitting cap to a dominating season.

MVP
There was no official MVP of this series, and it would have been hard to pick one. The best choices would have been either Gordon - who batted .400 with a team-high six RBI from the no. 8 spot - or Ruffing, who gave up only three runs in two complete-game victories. Or, you could have picked a Yankee name out of a hat and picked a legitimate MVP.

The Scores
(Home team in Bold)

New York	3	6	5	8
Chicago	1	3	2	3

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The List
I'm ranking all the World Series, from worst to best. Here's the ones I've done so far:

103. 1938 - New York (A) def. Chicago (N) 4-0
104. 1998 - New York (A) def. San Diego (N) 4-0
105. 1989 - Oakland (A) def. San Francisco (N) 4-0
106. 1928 - New York (A) def. St. Louis (N) 4-0
107. 1917 - Cincinnati (N) def. Chicago (A) 5-3

1928 World Series: Sweep, repeat

The Teams
American League: New York Yankees (101-53); fifth World Series (won in 1923, 1927)
National League: St. Louis Cardinals (95-59); second World Series (won in 1926)

What Happened
It's the 1927 Yankees that are almost universally known as the greatest team in Major League history, but it was the 1928 version that put in the most dominating performance in World Series history. The main reason for that is the quality of the opposition - the 1927 Pirates were a genuinely good team, one that would have had a very good chance to win the Series in any other year. The 1928 Cardinals were good, but they were no match for the Yankees.

It's true the Yankees took a step back in 1928. Their pitchers fell back a little bit, the hitters that weren't name Ruth and Gehrig had lesser seasons, Ruth had the audacity to not hit 60 home runs, and so on. But they were still Murderer's Row, a lineup of stars that gave opposing pitchers no breaks.

The 1928 series was a clinic in efficiency. The Yankees scored in the first inning of the first game -with Gehrig driving in Ruth - and they never looked back. They trailed for only six of the 36 innings in the series, and they often put the games away early. The Cardinals only managed three hits in a 4-1 Game 1 loss, and that was the closest game of the series. It was a sweep, the Yankees' second straight, and it established this Yankees team as one of the true juggernauts in the game's history.

Defining Game
Game 4 - Babe Ruth did a lot of things on a baseball field that nobody before him had ever done. The latest was his performance in Game 4, when he became the first man to hit three home runs in a World Series game. Ruth went deep in the fourth, seventh, and eighth innings, all of them to deep right, to put the series away. It was a fitting exclamation point to the Yankees' two years of dominance.

MVP
Ruth and Gehrig. Pick a name out of a hat. Or, pick both of them. To wit:

Ruth's stats: .625 average, 10 hits, 9 runs, 3 doubles, and of course the three Game 4 home runs.

Gehrig's stats: .545 average, 4 home runs, 9 runs batted in (as many RBI as the entire Cardinals team).

Can you imagine what pitchers of that era felt when they were about to face the Yankees and knew they'd have to face those two batters back-to-back? Frightening.

The Scores
(Home team in Bold)

St. Louis	1	3	3	3
New York	4	9	7	7

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The List
I'm ranking all the World Series, from worst to best. Here's the ones I've done so far:

106. 1928 - New York (A) def. St. Louis (N) 4-0
107. 1917 - Cincinnati (N) def. Chicago (A) 5-3

July 4, 1939: Luckiest Man

BRONX, N.Y. - He held his hat in his hands, keeping his hands together at his waist in front of him. As dignitary after dignitary took their turns at the microphone set up at home plate, he kept his head down, trying to contain his emotions. He'd barely lift his head as they came by to shake his hand, giving a smile and a slight nod before resuming his head-down pose.

The first genuine smile he cracked was when former teammate Babe Ruth moved in for a hug. Not wanting to ruin the photo opportunity, he smiled, pushing aside a decade-long fued with Ruth.

Lou Gehrig hated the attention, always had. When he was teammates with Ruth, he was always happy to let the big guy all the attention and accolades, even in the years where Gehrig was actually better. When Ruth left, he was replaced by Joe DiMaggio, another immortal who took the attention away from Gehrig. Again, Gehrig didn't complian. But on July 4, 1939, Lou Gehrig Day, he had no choice but to stand there and accept it. That's what you did when your team threw a day in your honor, when 70,000 fans came to voice their appreciation.

The toughest moment was when Gehrig's manager, Joe McCarthy, took to the microphone. After a few minutes of prepared remarks, McCarthy broke down, turning to Gehrig and saying "Lou, what else can I say except that it was a sad day in the life of everybody who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God, man, you were never that."

And that was that. Or it almost was. Gehrig had no intention of speaking that day, being far too emotional to consider it. But with the crowd chanting for him and his old manager encoraging him, Gehrig finally stepped to the mic. He had no prepared statements, simply spoke from the heart. And what he said became his legacy. Much more than his consecutive-games streak, his MVP and championship seasons, even the disease that bears his name, Gehrig's simple opening statement said everything anybody needed to know about him and became the most famous pair of sentences ever uttered by a professional athlete.

Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

He continued, expressing gratitude at the fans who cheered him for 17 years, for the teammates and opponents there to honor him. He thanked his parents and his wife. Then he closed with an optimism that defied the circumstances.

So I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.

May 2, 1939: The Iron Horse takes a seat

DETROIT - The whispers started in spring training. Was this the end of Lou Gehrig's career? Instead of looking graceful in the field, he looked clunky and awkward. Instead of running, he shuffled. When he'd make solid contact with the ball, it would fall harmlessly in the outfield. In short, he looked done.

There were some signs the year before - he had struggled in the second half of the year, sending his batting average to its lowest number since his rookie year, and he didn't get an extra-base hit in the World Series. But what was happening now caught everybody by surprise. His uniform suddenly looked baggy on his once-powerful frame. He was 35 but looked a decade older. He even collapsed during one spring training game. It was obvious that his streak of 2,122 straight games played was in serious jeopardy.

As the team broke camp, Gehrig tried to tough it out, playing in his team's first eight games, but he soon saw the writing on the wall. His speed and strength were completely gone. On May 2, 1939, before a game against the Tigers, Gehrig went to manager Joe McCarthy and asked to be removed from the lineup.

Gehrig himself took the lineup card out to the umpires at the start of the game that day. It was the first Yankees lineup card since 1925 that didn't have his name on it. When the public address announcer informed the crowd at Tiger Stadium that Gehrig wasn't in the lineup, the crowd stood and applauded. During the game, photographers took several pictures of him showing him, unusually, on the bench. In one, tears could be seen forming in his eyes. McCarthy had told Gehrig could return to the lineup whenever he felt able, but though Gehrig stayed with the team for a few more weeks, he never played again.

The Yankees didn't miss Gehrig on the field that year, winning their first game without him 22-2 and cruising to the American League and World Series champions with a team often considered among the best of all time. But they never forgot their captain, honoring him with a dedication day on July 4 and making him the first player in American professional sports to have his number retired.

Over the next month, Gehrig's condition worsened to the point where he visited the Mayo Clinic. On June 13 of that year, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a disease that slowly eats away at the central nervous system. Though he returned several times to the Mayo Clinic, there was little the doctors could do. Within two years, Gehrig was dead, the most famous victim of the disease that now bears his name.