The Blunder Years: The Dark Ages of the New York Yankees (1965–1973)

By Ron Quartararo

Someone once said, There once was a team so strong, that when a player hit a single, he was stopping the rally. Such was the legacy of the New York Yankees through the early 1960s. Love em or hate em, theirs was a legacy of winning, of great players, of class and dignity. Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle were household names, and their participation in the fall classic was routinely anticipated.

That would all come to a screeching halt in 1965, when the Yankees would begin an unforeseen and precipitous downslide. Finishing in last place in 1966, the team would languish under new CBS ownership, succumbing to the specters of age, injuries, mismanagement, and neglect, with no one to replace their immortal superstars. This was the Horace Clark era, the dark ages of the New York Yankees that I call the blunder years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524551407

Ron Quartararo

Ron Quartararo is a senior level business development executive for a global technology company. He has spent the past 20 years in a variety of planning & development, strategy, solutions and sales roles in the media & entertainment industry.  Quartararo is also an accomplished writer with OpEd articles appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, Barron’s, Newsday, Business & Society Review, TV Executive, Broadcast Engineering and Broadcasting & Cable. His first book, La Famiglia: The Power & Passion of Family was published by Xlibris in 2010. His second, Exploring the Mafia Mystique, was published in 2014.  A life-long Yankee fan, Quartararo grew up during the late 60’, a period when Yankee heroes were hard to find and championships were relics of the past. Yet, despite the team’s reversal of fortune, this time was filled with memorable, (albeit sometimes frustrating) days, when Quartararo and his cousin would rediscover this remarkable franchise, whose achievements were and are unprecedented in sports. Now, more fully appreciating this era in Yankee history, Quartararo attempts to uncover the roots of the decline while sharing his personal experiences with the reader.

Book preview

Glory Days (Pre-1964)

The Yankees don’t pay me to win every day – just two out of three – Casey Stengel

Someone once said, "There once was a team so strong, that when a player hit a single, he was stopping the rally". Such was the legacy of the New York Yankees through the early 1960’s. It was a legacy of winning, of great players, of class and dignity.

It began with fortuitous acquisition of Babe Ruth from the Boston Red Sox – a successful pitcher who could also hit the ball out of any ball park. He had an outstanding career as a pitcher with the Red Sox with a record of 94-46 with a 2.28 ERA. He won 20 games in two of his six years as a full time pitcher, highlighted by a 1.75 ERA in 1916 with a record of 23-12.

The Red Sox also took notice of his prowess as a hitter, and began playing him more frequently as a position player highlighted in 1919 by a 29 homerun performance and a .322 batting average in 130 games. Upon his arrival to the New York in 1920, the Yankees brilliantly and permanently transitioned him to the outfield to enable his potent bat to enter the lineup every day. He responded by hitting 54 homeruns that year – more than the combined totals of any team that year except Philadelphia!

While the number 714 is easily remembered by baseball fans, perhaps not as well known is that of the 15 years he spent with the Yankees, they won the pennant seven times. The Yanks had not won a championship before that. He led the American League in homeruns 12 times. And while his 714 lifetime homeruns have been surpassed twice, (once legitimately and once in the steroid era), he still holds the #1 spot in slugging percentage (.690) and OPS.

With a well-publicized, larger than life persona, Babe Ruth transcended baseball. Women, booz, hot dogs and late parties were no match for the Bambino (a name affectionately bestowed upon him by the large Italian immigrant population of New York who translated Babe into their native tongue). He loved the game; he loved the fans; he loved the spotlight…and most of all he loved kids.

But more than anything, Babe was a competitor. For the Yankees, he would set in motion a legacy of winning unsurpassed in sports. And for the Red Sox, they would be branded with his name as a curse that would plague them for the next century.

The Yankees would be blessed with a sequence of immortal players as well as managers, with the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig immediately succeeding Ruth, and the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio right behind Gehrig. Following in the footsteps of his immortal predecessors, Miller Huggins (Yankee manager in the Ruth/Gehrig era) and Joe McCarthy (in the DiMaggio era), Casey Stengel in the 1950s accomplished what no manager had been able to do before - winning five consecutive World Series championships - from 1949 to 1953, a feat that has not been repeated since. The Yankees would finish the decade with six World Series wins. Mickey Mantle ascended to his rightful place at the throne after DiMaggio’s retirement in ’51, and continued to write chapters in Yankee lore.

The Yankees would enter the 60’s as they left the 50’s, winning the first two championships of that decade. Fresh off a thrilling homerun derby between Mantle and Maris in ‘61, the Yankees would go on to face the Cincinnati Reds, winning handily in five games. The following year, in ’62, the Yankees would meet and defeat the Giants, their old world rivals, who had traded their upper west side home at the polo grounds for their new digs in San Francisco. It would be their 20th World Series championship in 40 years.

But this seemingly perennial string of world championships, which both tortured and thrilled baseball fans across the country, would end the next year, foreshadowing a much more ominous fate for the world’s greatest sports franchise.

In 1963, perched beside a 19 black and white Emerson TV, I watched with my father in disbelief as Sandy Koufax sliced and diced the immortal NY Yankees with more efficiency than a Vegematic", (think Cuisinart ala 1960s). Koufax, along with his compadre Don Drysdale and the rest of the Dodgers, sent the Yankees unceremoniously back to the Bronx after an embarrassing four game sweep. My mom, an old time Dodger fan from Brooklyn, was thrilled; my father, in disbelief. It was the first Yankee game I recall ever watching.

That’s not to say I had not read and learned about the exploits of Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris, and like everyone else, had at least a cursory interest in their 1961 race to de-throne the immortal Bambino for the most coveted prize in baseball. But, in ‘61 at 7 years old, I was far from anything resembling a serious Yankee fan – and had no vision of what I would eventually morph into as a teenager a few short years later. It would not be until five years later in 1968 that I would come to appreciate the history, the legacy and the pride that the NY Yankees had to offer.

The Yankees could not redeem themselves in ’64, losing to the Cardinals in seven games. Still, through that season, the Yankees were, by any standard, the most successful, the most revered, the most reviled franchise in baseball. Of the 60 World Series played from 1903 to 1964, the Yankees would participate in almost half of them, with 29 American League pennants, and would win a third of them (20), two out of every three that they played in. They would not actually enter their first World Series until 1921, a year after the Red Sox’ epic faux pas– (their sale of Babe Ruth’s contract to the Yankees for $125,000), making the Yanks’ winning percentage during that 43 year stretch even more remarkable.

During that reign of glory (or reign of terror depending upon your perspective), the names of Gehrig, DiMaggio, Henrich, Lazzeri, Rizzuto, Ford, Mantle and Maris would be splashed on the back pages of countless (many now defunct) NY dailies, proclaiming the latest pillages by the Bronx Bombers. Young newspaper hawkers kept the city abreast of Lou’s 2,130 consecutive games and Joltin’ Joe’s 56 game hitting streak. They vicariously allowed the fans to experience the excitement encapsulated by Yogi’s leap into Don Larson’s arms as he pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, and share in the agony and ecstasy of Mickey Mantle’s multitude of injuries and achievements.

The Yankees simply set an expectation of winning - to themselves, to their rivals, to the media, and to their fans. Unlike their Brooklyn neighbors (the Bums) who could never seem to win with one notable exception (1955), the Yankees would do it perennially with style, and grace and class. Even in years when the Yankees failed to reach the fall classic, they were always in the hunt. From the years 1919 through 1964, the Yankees would not finish below 500 except for one – 1925, the year of the infamous Babe Ruth stomach ache. (That year Ruth complained