Customer Reviews

The Lean Years of the Yankees, 1965-1975

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Let's face it, winning is a lot more fun than losing. This book does a nice job in documenting the PAINFUL downward spiral of baseball's greatest franchise--starting the 1965 and taking more than a decade to re-emerge as a contender. Almost 40 years removed from this time, it is not well understood nor appreciated by younger Yankee fans as to what happened. The seeds of the Yankees downfall actually began around 1960 when GM George Weiss (as well as manager Stengel) were canned. Owners Dan Topping and Del Webb had decided that they would cut back in scouting and player development expenses in order to save cash--so that the bottom line would improve---the owners had contemplated putting the team on the market. They stopped looking for the best young talent and by 1965 the farm system had dried up.

For the prior decade, the Yankees farm system was almost unsurpassed---bringing up fresh talent year after year or using prospects to trade for players such as Roger Maris, Clete Boyer, Bob Turley, Johnny Sain, etc. As the pipeline of young talent began to dry up, the Yankees stars--Mantle, Ford, Kubek, etc were aging or retired prematurely due to injuries. For those of us who remember the 1964 World series, we didn't realize it at the time, but this was the Yankees "last hurrah" until 1976. Compounding these problems was the new rule passed by Major League baseball which began the amateur draft----so no longer could the Yankees (even assuming they had the money or the will to do so, could no longer sign any player they wanted). At the same time this was happening, CBS bought the Yankees and while their were howls of outrage from sports writers and other owners (this was the first corporate ownership of a baseball team) that CBS' unlimited resources would give the Yankees an advantage--actually the reverse happened--CBS didn't understand how to run a baseball club and weren't inclined to spend money in any case.

Although 1965 looked like it would be more of the same (on paper, the Yankees still had many great players in the late '20s or early '30), the disasterious hiring of Johnny Keane as manager (and Yogi's firing) as a PR disaster and demoralized the players. The bumbling, lovable Mets became the darling of New York for the until the early 1970's.

The author contends that these consecutive losing years made the Yankees more lovable---nonsense. They couldn't compete with the Met's in this respect and comparing attendence figures bears this out. Not lovable--just lousy.