Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

Page 9

Detroit Tigers and Chicago White Sox were quite competitive from 1946-1956. In the National League pundits considered the Brooklyn Dodgers an all-star team.

The detractors try to have it both ways. Many of today’s “observers” consider Stengel’s five straight championships as something that could have been done by anyone, given the personnel, while others extoll the opposite view, that the Yankees were not the best team, and were just lucky. With no disparagement directed toward the personnel other than to factually point out that DiMaggio’s best days were over by 1949

and Mantle’s had yet to begin by 1953, the baseball pundits of the time only considered the Yankees to be the pre-season favorite pennant winner in one of the five years from 1949-1953. In the World Series the Yankees faced the Brooklyn Dodgers, the virtual National League All-Star team, for the first and the

last two championships. In retrospect, the Dodgers always found some way to blow the big games.

To say that winning everything five years in a row is not the measure of team greatness is only considered arguable by a moron. The difficulty here, if any, is the fluid nature of the team. Understand that for all their “new” numbers the sabermetricians

have not yet discerned a way to measure clutch time performance, and these Yankee teams were literally stocked and stacked with