Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

Page 19

Don Larsen threw a perfect game. The Yankees won the Series in seven games.

1957–1964: Continued Success by Any Other Standard

The Yankees, along with their two brothers of New York baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, owned major league baseball for much of the 1950s. Through the decade’s first seven years, every World Series winner represented Gotham, as did five of its losers. There has been little debate over what era of baseball is most rightfully represented as the game’s Golden Age, and if you were loyalists of any one of the three New York based teams, it is easy to believe this particular period was it.

However, if it was a Golden Age outside of New York’s city limits, it was an aesthetic consideration and not a popular financial one. Attendance actually dropped through much of the

1950s, the blame for which was placed on everything from aging ballparks in decaying inner cities to television to Elvis. The lack of competitive balance that resigned many teams to concede their pennant hopes on Opening Day had something to do with it as well.

The postwar transitioning of America into more modern times gave many teams on baseball’s bottom rung a chance to climb to more prosperous heights. The Boston Braves made this startlingly