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Cleveland, Not Boston: Part 4

© Harold Friend

A ten league team is untenable. There are nine losers and even when there is a tight pennant race, there are still six to eight teams that are out of it for a substantial part of the season. The owners realized something had to be done, but they moved slowly until another expansion occurred in 1969 with the creation of the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots in the American League and the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in the National League.

From 1952 to 1965, the Red Sox never finished closer than 15 games behind the Yankees with the exception of 1959, when the Yankees finished 15 games behind the pennant winning White Sox and the Red Sox finished 19 games out. Then, when the Red Sox won the 1967 pennant, the Yankees finished a distant 20 games behind them. Reality returned in 1968, with the Red Sox finishing fourth, 17 games behind World Champion Detroit, while the Yankees finished 3 games behind Boston, so Boston and the Yankees were close and Boston finished ahead, but the battle between the "rivals" was for fourth place, not first.

When the 1964 World Series ended, Yankees' owners Dan Topping and Del Webb sold 80% the team to CBS for $11.2 million, and two later CBS purchased the remaining 20%, putting Mike Burke in charge. It was a bad time for the Yankees and they never came close to winning anything until the George Steinbrenner era began when he relieved CBS of their investment for $12 million in 1973.

The Yankees outdistanced Baltimore by 10 ½ games and Boston by 15 ½ games to win the 1976 Eastern Division and then they won their first pennant since the "Phil Linz harmonica pennant" in 1964 when Chris Chambliss hit a home run off Mark Littell in the last of ninth to give the Yankees a 7-6 victory. The crowd swarmed onto the field and the Royals are still waiting for Chambliss to touch home plate. The Yankees were swept by Cincinnati in the World Series.

In 1977 the Yankees and Red Sox were beginning to compete for real again. In a close race, the Yankees finished 2 ½ games ahead of both Baltimore and Boston to win their second straight pennant and in the Reggie Jackson World Series, defeated the Dodgers in six games. Then came Bucky Dent's home run.

References:

http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/N...

http://www.baseball-reference.com/league...

Lipsyte, Robert. "Yankees Long Haul: It Starts Today." New York Times, March 9, 1967, p. 48.