Our countdown of baseball’s 50 best groups — a listing often called the Finest 50 — rolls at present to No. 42, the 1947 New York Yankees. The rankings come from my new e-book, Baseball’s Finest (and Worst) Groups.
Right here’s a fast boilerplate rationalization that I’m appending to each story on this collection:
I compiled the Finest 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league groups from 1903 to 2024. These golf equipment have been ranked by their crew scores (TS), that are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given membership’s all-time percentile is the proportion of the opposite 2,543 groups that it outperformed.)
See my e-book for a proof of my TS calculations. The e-book additionally affords separate breakdowns of the very best and worst golf equipment for each decade and franchise, complete profiles of the Finest 50 (together with position-by-position lineups and way more info than you’ll discover on this publication), and related summaries of the ten worst groups of all time.
Now on to at present’s profile.
Workforce: 1947 New York Yankees
Workforce rating: 85.355 factors
All-time rank: 42 of two,544
All-time percentile: 98.39%
Season file: 97-57 (.630)
Season place: First place in American League
Last standing: World champion
The Yankees completed at the least 10 video games above .500 every season from 1944 by means of 1946. Different golf equipment might need been glad, however not the Yanks. They fell in need of the American League championship all three years. In the event that they failed once more in 1947, their pennant drought would develop into the longest the crew had suffered since World Warfare I.
Mercurial proprietor Larry MacPhail employed a brand new supervisor, Bucky Harris, to forestall such a calamity. Harris had spent 20 seasons directing 4 franchises that had been usually undermanned and underfunded, impediments he wouldn’t face in New York. “This actually isn’t Washington or Detroit or Boston or Philadelphia,” he laughed.
It certainly wasn’t. 9 Yankees had been named to the AL’s All-Star crew in 1947, demonstrating the wealth of expertise at Harris’s disposal. (No different membership within the league was blessed with greater than 4 All-Stars.) The high-powered Yanks sputtered a bit through the first two months of the season, however they locked up first place with a 19-game profitable streak from late June to mid-July.
Get the whole lowdown on the 50 best (and 10 weakest) golf equipment of all time
The Yankees gained the primary two video games of the 1947 World Sequence — outscoring Brooklyn 15-6 — and a sweep appeared possible. However the Dodgers staged a valiant comeback, knotting the collection at two wins apiece and once more at three.
The drama reached most depth in Recreation 4. New York pitcher Invoice Bevens carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning, solely to give up a two-out, two-run double to Brooklyn pinch hitter Cookie Lavagetto, giving the Dodgers a 3-2 win. Bevens mentioned philosophically that he had at all times dreamed of taking part in for the Yankees, assembly Babe Ruth, and pitching in a World Sequence. “Effectively, I reached all three,” he mentioned, “so how can I complain?”
Bevens and his teammates earned World Sequence rings three days later. The Yanks overcame an early Brooklyn lead for a 5-2 Recreation Seven victory.
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5 members of the 1947 Yankees had additionally been energetic with the franchise’s legendary 1939 membership. Solely Joe DiMaggio performed a outstanding function in each of these seasons, and outstanding is probably an inadequate adjective. DiMaggio was voted the American League’s Most Invaluable Participant in ’39 and once more in ’47. He topped the latter crew with 20 dwelling runs, a .315 batting common, and a .522 slugging common.
The 1947 world title was the sixth of DiMaggio’s profession, however he insisted it had a particular place in his coronary heart. He known as his teammates “the best bunch of gamers I ever performed with.” A number of had been relative newcomers. George McQuinn signed with the Yankees after Connie Mack’s lowly Athletics launched him in January 1947. Mack contended that McQuinn had “performed baseball one 12 months too lengthy,” however the 37-year-old first baseman batted a stable .304 for New York. The opposite nook infielder, third baseman Billy Johnson, hit .285 in his third season with the Yankees.
The membership’s two pitching stars had been additionally current arrivals. Allie Reynolds was obtained (on DiMaggio’s suggestion) in an offseason commerce with Cleveland, the place he had gone 11-15 in 1946. He flipped his file to 19-8 in New York. Joe Web page was a hard-throwing (and hot-tempered) lefty who had flopped as a starter throughout his first three seasons. Bucky Harris shifted him to the bullpen, the place he was so profitable at dousing opponents’ rallies — main the AL with 17 saves — that native sportswriters dubbed him “Fireman Web page.”
