Editorial
EDITORIAL Death of the Yankees? If any organization in our culture personified the myth of the American century, it was the New York Yankees. A lonely, frugal power in the baseball world for many...
...When they were threatened toward season's end by some upstart contender, the Yanks had the will and the cash to acquire just the extra player they needed to win...
...The New York team, which last spring sold an ace pitcher because of a wage dispute, is dying on the vine for lack of pitching...
...Combined with their ample material resources were what could only be termed "spiritual resources...
...None of it has helped...
...In their halcyon days, the Yanks had little need of fanfare, ballyhoo or sentimentality...
...But, after the war, the Stadium organization was running in high gear again, Last October, the Yanks won their fifth consecutive championship—even though only a handful of their 1953 players had played on the 1949 team...
...money is waved around...
...that didn't help either...
...As with all myths and all cultures, the heroic, classical age of the Yankees imperceptibly gave way to a baroque era in which "tradition" was discovered and sanctified...
...It was often said, and it seemed to be true, that a player who had migrated from one of the league's impoverished teams suddenly became a new man in the bright new Stadium...
...When the era of individual giants and big-money deals came to an end in 1929, the Yankees were among the leaders in a new form of baseball economics—the farm system...
...A fine right-handed pitcher named Waite Hoyt summed it up during the Ruth heyday: "It's great to be young and a Yankee...
...In the midst of the crisis, the organization fired its popular publicist, who had dreamed up "Old-Timers Day" and other gimmicks...
...Pitcher after pitcher tries his hand...
...Huggins, the great manager...
...even when the turnstiles (and the rest of the Stadium with them) were sold for a neat profit, it mattered little...
...A lonely, frugal power in the baseball world for many years, the Yankees came into their own in 1921 and, led by Babe Ruth, revolutionized the game by patenting and developing the super-weapon, the home run...
...lineups are juggled and scientific "platoon systems" employed...
...Yankees are public-spirited gentlemen...
...Even as the team kept winning, legend came to frame and order reality...
...Certainly there is food for thought...
...There was a pride, a confidence, an individual robustness about being a Yankee...
...Cleveland, which fielded an all-Negro outfield the other day, leads the league...
...Al Rosen, the Cleveland infielder who ignored a hand injury to play in the All-Star Game and thereupon hit two home runs, seems more in the old Yankee mold than any of the current Stadium athletes...
...They have since won 20 of the last 33 American League championships and 16 world titles...
...Today, too, there are no rousing clubhouse or pullman-car fights between the athletes...
...One thing is sure: The death of the Yankees is, in the deepest sense, a very American tragedy...
...enterprise: "Don't call us...
...It is still possible that Cleveland will collapse of its own contradictions, that the Yankees will somehow pull out another championship—but it doesn't look that way...
...But, behind the scenes, men like Charlie Keller and Tommy Henrich, who gave long and inspired service to the Yankee cause, were being unceremoniously dropped by the front office with the time-honored counsel of U.S...
...Perhaps there is a broader moral in all this, perhaps not...
...And these men, bad or brilliant as they might be on days when little was at stake, always knew how to win the big game—the one that sealed the verdict on a season...
...Today, near the Stadium's center-field flagpole stand bronze monuments to Ruth and Gehrig, the great players...
...From their outright subsidiaries and from the friendly minor teams with which they had "working agreements" came an endless parade of new players to move effortlessly into the smooth-running machine at Yankee Stadium...
...we'll call you...
...The New York team, now the only pennant contender in either league which has no Negro players (pure coincidence, say the owners), is in second place...
...The myth and the monuments are still there, but the talent seems to have fled to other climes...
...This system worked so well that between 1936 and 1943 they lost only once...
...Now the secure and prosperous Yankee fans are troubled...
...hurried calls are made to the farm teams for new manpower...
...During the height of the war, true, the Yanks looked like any other team...
...Barrow, the great organizer...
...Each year now at the Stadium, an "Old-Timers Day" is celebrated, a ritual of mass veneration of the heroes of days gone by...
...So long as Yankee fans kept coming through the turnstiles, it did not matter...
...their third baseman once made three errors in a single inning...
...They were a rough-hewn, eternally scrapping crew whose talents spoke for them...
...The New York team, admiration for which transcended all partisan loyalties in the Ruth era, now has virtually an entire nation rooting for its defeat...
...and, more indicative, their legend has been of no assistance in the big games which, in previous years, would mark the stepping-stones to New York victory...
...At this writing, the Yankees are four games behind...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 33
