One Summer: America, 1927

thousand people – more than had ever attended a regular seasonbaseball game anywhere – packed into the stadium, and thousands more had to be turned away.
    The weeks of bad weather that had caused so many flight postponements at Roosevelt Field wrought similar havoc with baseball schedules that summer. The Yankees played eighteen doubleheaders in 1927 – four in six days in June alone – but none would be more important than this Fourth of July meeting. fn1 The Yankees had hit their stride in June, going 21 and 6 for the month and opening up a lead of 9½ games over the rest of the league, but now the Senators were heating up, too. They were hitting the ball well – five of their starting line-up were batting over .300 – and had just won ten straight to move into second place ahead of the White Sox. They arrived in New York in buoyant mood, confident that the series could be a turning point in their season. It was – but in the wrong direction.
    The Yankees killed them. In the most humblingly lopsided doubleheader defeat ever meted out, New York won 12 to 1 and 21 to 1. The Yankees hit as if at batting practice, smacking nine two-base hits, four three-base hits and five home runs – 37 hits and 69 total bases in all. The team batting average for the day was .468. Every Yankee batter but one, pitchers included, got at least one hit, and six had four or more. Even the light-hitting, seldom used rookie Julie Wera, who played in only forty-three games in two short seasons in the major leagues, hit a two-run home run – the only one of his career. (‘Julie’, incidentally, was short for Julian.) The only player who didn’t hit was pitcher Wilcy Moore, who was widely held to be the worst hitter in baseball, but he pitched nine complete innings and allowed the opponents to score just one run. This followed a similarly assured performance by George Pipgras, who gave up one run on nine hits in a complete game in the opener – but who also rapped out two hits as a batter.
    ‘Never have pennant challengers been so completely shot to pieces,’ observed the New York World . ‘I wish the season was over,’ said the Senators’ first baseman, Joe Judge. In fact, in any meaningful sense it was. The Yankees extended their lead to 11½ games with the two victories. They would beat the Senators again the next day and in six of their seven remaining games after that. No team would come close to threatening the Yankees again.
    All this was quite unexpected. Nearly everyone forecast the Philadelphia Athletics to win the American League pennant in 1927. The Yankees, all agreed, were past their best. Ruth, for a start, was thirty-two years old and demonstrably paunchy, and the pitching staff was even older. Dutch Ruether and Herb Pennock were both thirty-three. Bob Shawkey and Urban Shocker were thirty-six. The average age of the team was over twenty-eight. Only five of the players on the roster had been born in the twentieth century. Shocker was in such bad shape that he would actually die before the end of the next season.
    Yet the 1927 Yankees would prove to be one of the greatest teams of all time – possibly the very greatest. Seven members (counting manager Miller Huggins) would be voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, an extraordinary proportion for one team. Rarely has a group of players had such depth.
    It is generally futile and foolish to compare athletic performances across decades, but what can be said is that when such rash assessments have been ventured the baseball team most often selected as the best ever is the ’27 Yankees. It is certainly fair to say that they were an exceptional bunch, both as players and as people. Among the more memorable were:
     
    Waite Hoyt , right-handed pitcher. Called ‘Schoolboy’ because he’d come to the big leagues when he was just seventeen, he was now in his tenth season in the majors and he was having one of his best ever years. He would finish the season with a record of 22 and 7, and would be at or near the top of the league in five categories for pitching.
    Hoyt’s private life was no less memorable. He was the son of a well-known vaudeville performer, and was a talented singer and performer in his own right – good enough to have made a living on the stage had he chosen to. Hoyt’s father-in-law owned a funeral parlour in New Jersey, and Hoyt often helped him out by fetching bodies from morgues in Manhattan and bringing them back to New Jersey to be prepared