The Winners: McCarthy and Huggins

The Winners: McCarthy and Huggins

[paypal_donation_button]The Winners: McCarthy and Huggins

The New York Yankees won a title for Joe Girardi in his first year as manager. Joe Torre’s Yankees were among the most talented squads in team and baseball history, winning four World Series titles. Compare that to Billy Martin and Bob Lemon, who won one apiece. Ralph Houk won two. Throw in one from Bucky Harris, in 1947. Miller Huggins kicked things off with three wins in the 1920s.

But Casey Stengel won seven World Series, as did Joe McCarthy.

For perspective, that means Stengel and McCarthy each won more World Series titles as managers than all but four other teams (the Giants and the Red Sox, 8 apiece; the Oakland/Philadelphia Athletics, 9 titles; and, of course, the St. Louis Cardinals, with 11).

There’s a thousand ways to evaluate success of course, but that’s not quite what we’re going to do here. Instead, we’re going to look at one way of evaluating dominance—specifically, the relative dominance of each title-winning Yankees manager in those seasons they won their titles. This is a necessarily limited metric. It excludes not only those seasons when they helmed teams which didn’t make the postseason, but also those teams which advanced to the World Series and came up just short. It does not tell the full story, but it does tell an interesting story.

Given the particular, prodigious, species of dominance native to the Yankees, we’ll examine the managers over a couple of posts, starting, of course, with the two originals: Joe McCarthy and Miller Huggins.

McCarthy’s teams went an average of 102 – 51 in the seven seasons they won the World Series (out of 16 he would manage with the team). They would go on to win those World Series titles with a combined record of 28 – 5. On AVERAGE, the teams they faced in the World Series won less than a single game. The stiffest challenge they faced was in 1936, winning the Series four games to two over the New York Giants.

This was the first World Series they would play with Joe DiMaggio (and the first without Babe Ruth, who had retired the year before). This ‘most competitive’ series involved two games the Yankees would win by 8 runs or more. Game 2 was the absolute laugher, won by the Yanks by a score of 18-4, setting a record for margin of victory in the World Series. And, oh yeah, that particular drubbing also went a long way toward spawning a nickname we still use today, that of the ‘Bronx Bombers’.

So, you could say that McCarthy’s Yanks were pretty good.

But were they The Best? The diminutive Huggins (supposedly 140lbs soaking wet) won his three World Series in a managerial career that spanned 12 years with the Yankees. His records in those World Series winning years eerily mirrors those of McCarthy. They went an average of 103 – 50 in the regular season, and 12 – 2 in World Series (4-0, 4-1, 4-1). These teams would be known as ‘Murderer’s Row’. His titles were the first in franchise history—and the Yankees reached an early apex in 1927, winning 110 games, and featuring two of the great individual single-season performances in baseball history.

Player A: .356 / .486 / .772 / 60 HR / 165 RBI / OPS+ 225 / 11.8 WAR
Player B: .373 / .474 / .765 / 47 HR / 173 RBI / OPS+ 220 / 12.4 WAR

Player A, of course, is Babe Ruth. Player B, Lou Gehrig. And, that year, it was Gehrig who won the MVP. (Of course, Ruth was even better in 1923, when the Yankees won their first title, posting a ridiculous .393 / .545 / .764 line that might be the best season in baseball—if not sports—history).

Both men played under McCarthy as well, but both were somewhat out of their primes by then. (Although, in 1936 Gehrig still produced 9.1 WAR and won the MVP, again, so take ‘out of his prime’ with a grain of salt. This is, after all, Lou Gehrig we’re talking about.)

Picking between these two overlapping eras of managerial dominance, one is forced—narrowly—to take McCarthy’s teams, based on his success being sustained over a longer time. He won more and lost fewer World Series than did Huggins. Plus—the guy won the National League Pennant with the Chicago Cubs, in 1942. Not an easy feat.

You’ll notice, though, that the discussion of these two managers seems to center squarely on a pair of Yankee sluggers who played for them. This is, to an extent, unavoidable. A manager’s success is in large part determined by the players he has to work with, and never more so than in this early era of baseball when giants truly did roam the diamonds of the American League.

In the future, we’ll see success become more complicated, as the individual numbers become less gaudy, and the formula for winning a title more complex, amid an increasingly acronym-bound playoff structure of the LCS-era and, eventually, the divisional era.