Epic Yankees Season Flameouts, Episode V!

You didn't want to see this, I didn't want to write this! But the JuJu gods, they are cruel mistresses, demanding ever more debasement in exchange for smiling on one's sorry hide again.

So...here we go. Flameout season number five: 1965, a particularly appropriate year to go with our conniptions this past week.

Yankees 77-85, 6th in a 10-team league.

The Yankees were the slight favorites to take what would have been their sixth consecutive American League title, and their 16th in 19th years. Instead, the team suffered a calamitous fall from grace, one which it would take them over a decade and a seismic change in ownership to recover from.

Background:

The Yankees finished with a losing record and out of the first division for the first time since 1925, the year of the Big Bellyache, and for only the second time since the war-shortened 1918 season.  From 1921-1964, they had captured 29 pennants and 20 World Series crowns in just 44 seasons, the greatest run in North American sports history.

The team had had a close run for the pennant in 1964, but had still come within a couple of bad calls and a couple of stunning errors by their Gold Glove second baseman from taking the World Series against a young and dynamic Cardinals team. Everything said "repeat."

Instead: splatter. They finished behind the Twins, White Sox, Orioles, Tigers, and Indians. Cleveland! for cryin' out loud.

What happened:

Herein lies one of the most misunderstood episodes in Yankees history.

The received wisdom continues to be that owners Dan Topping and Del Webb, who had just sold the team to CBS in 1964, had been planning to do so for years, and so had purposely disinvested in the franchise, refusing to spend money on scouting and development. Hence, as either Michael Burke or Bill Paley of CBS said, the network had bought "a pig in a poke."

Baloney, as they palaver in polite society.

There is absolutely zero indication that that is what happened. Far from being an old and dithering team in 1965, the Yankees were just slightly older than most of the AL.  The pennant-winning Twins, for instance, had an older pitching staff. And the 1965 Yankees were actually slightly younger as a team than they had been in 1961, at the height of their most recent, dazzling run.

If you take a look at the years leading up to 1965, and the years following, you'll see that far from being barren, the Yankees' farm system continued to produce good-to-excellent starting position players and pitchers with a regularity that we in the Age of Ozymandias Cashman can only envy:

1960—Bill Stafford
1961—Rollie Sheldon
1962—Jim Bouton, Tom Tresh (Rookie of the Year)
1963—Joe Pepitone, Al Downing
1964—Mel Stottlemyre
1965—Roy White
1966—Fritz Peterson
1967—Dooley Womack
1968—Stan Bahnsen (Rookie of the Year)
1969—Bobby Murcer
1970—Steve Kline, Thurman Munson (Rookie of the Year)

That should have been enough to keep an already stacked team rolling merrily along, at least in contention for years to come.

So what did go wrong?

Well, injuries, mostly.  In perhaps the most disastrous single, regular-season game in Yankees history, playing in the snow and freezing cold on Opening Day up in Minnesota, before about 15,000 hardy souls, both Bouton and Elston Howard badly injured their arms. Neither player was ever remotely the same after.

Howard was already 36, but he went from being the best catcher in baseball from most of 1961-1964, to being a subpar hitter, even for the late '60s. To add insult to injury on Bouton, the Yanks had apparently had a chance to trade him, straight up, for Frank Robinson in the offseason but had passed, feeling that as a black man who spoke up for himself, he was a "troublemaker." Thus they not only missed out on obtaining a great player, but let him go to what would soon be the best team in the league.

All year, other injuries just kept piling up.

The Mick's legs finally gave out—at only 33. After 1966, he would move permanently to first base, just a shadow of his former self. Roger Maris, just 30, would sustain the first in a series of puzzling hand and wrist injuries, which soon had the Yankees calling him a shirker. X-Rays would reveal he wasn't, but by that time his power was gone for good, and he was dealt away to St. Louis for the infamous Charlie Smith, one of the worst players ever to take the field in the Bronx.

Tony Kubek re-aggravted a back-and-neck injury he'd sustained in the army, hit .218, and retired at 29.  Tom Tresh had his last good year, at 26, before back injuries dragged him down, too, and forced his retirement at 30.  Whitey Ford had another excellent season at 36, but half the time he couldn't feel his pitching hand. After 1965, he would never win more than two games in a season again.

And of course, Joe Pepitone did a Sanchez, the first of many over his NYY career. The Yankees had, infamously decided to fire Yogi Berra before the end of the season, and committed to hiring crusty old Johnny Keane of the Cardinals. After Berra surprised everyone by winning the pennant and almost the Series...they went ahead and fired him anyway, even though he was maybe the one manager ever able to motivate Pepitone to go out and play.

Bright spots:

That good year from Tresh, a remarkably versatile athlete, able to play sparkling defense in the outfield and at short, who hit 26 homers.  Clete Boyer did his usual magic around third, and hit a not-awful .251 with 18 homers. Bobby Richardson won a fifth consecutive Gold Glove at second, though after 1966 he decided he just could not spend anymore time away from evangelizing, and retired at 30.

On the mound, besides Ford's last hurrah, Mel Stottlemyre compiled the first of his three, 20-win seasons, going 20-9 with a 2.63 ERA, 18 complete games, and four shutouts. Al Downing had a 12-14 record, but a decent ERA at 3.40. In the pen, Steve Hamilton and Pedro Ramos were outstanding.

But all-in-all, nothing really gelled, all year long. The team fought its way back to a winning record for a few days in August, but after reaching 64-62—still just in 6th place—it went 13-23 down the stretch, finishing 25 games back.

What happened next:

Years of misery.

In 1966, the Yankees fell all the way to the cellar for the first time since 1912. They were ninth in 1967, and while they rarely had a losing record after that, they did not really contend again until 1972. They managed to put together decent pitching staffs, but their hitting was generally wretched. The 1968 Yankees, at .214, turned in the lowest team batting average of the 20th century.

And no, the problem was NOT Horace Clarke, who statistically, at least, was almost exactly the equivalent of Bobby Richardson. So there.

Far from Topping and Webb being the culprits in the Yankees' demise, it was really CBS which proved wholly uninterested in their purchase, and why not? The Yankees had only been picked up for reasons of "corporate diversification," and at the time they were worth no more than two other such purchases by the network: the Fender guitar company, and the road show of Hello, Dolly!

We would have to wait for the arrival of the Mad King, and the 1970s revival of baseball, before anything really improved.