Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

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supersonic fastball, could have won 300 games and struck out 3,500. Hank Greenberg might have joined the 500 home run club, while Washington’s Mickey Vernon could have made it to 3,000 hits. But from the heart and to a man, every ballplayer would have considered such a relatively trivial loss of statistics as a small sacrifice compared to helping America defeat the Axis powers.

After 1943, more of the team's players were drafted into the military, and the Yankees ended 1944 in third place, one position higher than they finished the following season. A group

consisting of Larry MacPhail, Dan Topping, and Del Webb bought the Yankees, their stadium, and the franchise's minor league teams for $2.8 million in 1945. Under the new ownership, Yankee Stadium underwent extensive renovations that included the installation of lights.

When peace returned and the stars suited back up for baseball in 1946, the game enjoyed a fertile period lasting the rest of the decade that may have made for the most satisfying time of its long existence. Attendance boomed as the game basked in a highly popular postwar glow. The spoils of victory fueled the majors’ resurgence, making the sport as popular as ever. Now it was up

to the lords of baseball to maintain and grow within the ever changing vision of postwar America’s new frontier.