A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939

by Richard J. Tofel

Book Overview

The best book about a single baseball team in a single year I have ever read.--Donald Honig. Here is the story of perhaps the greatest team in baseball history and of one of the game's most remarkable seasons. With Babe Ruth having retired but Lou Gehrig still in his prime, the Yankees in 1939 won their fourth consecutive World Series--and forever established the Yankee legend. The dramatic story of the 1939 season is one of turning points: Gehrig...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1566635527
• ISBN13: 9781566635523
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The Greatest Yankee Team of All?

A very well written book about the 1939 Yankees. Tofel not only takes the reader, month by month, through the 1939 season, but he also highlights the world events that were taking place that year. Tofel makes a strong case for the 1939 Yankees being the greatest of all Yankee teams but one may make equally strong arguments for the Yankees of 1927, 1961 and 1998. Yes, those 1939 Yankees were a great team, but NOT alone the greatest of all. That title belongs generically to all the great Yankee teams, past and present. From any viewpoint, the Yankees are baseball's greatest team. They are today and they always have been. That is their reputation and that is their tradition. Its great to be a Yankee fan! Hey Mel Allen, "How about that?"

A definitive book on a forgotten team

Most people remember the 1939 Yankees for only one thing...Lou Gehrig's heartrending speech. But this was a team that won 105 games, a then-record fourth straight World Series, and steamrolled all opposition in its path, including the Cincinnati Reds, taking the Fall Classic in four straight. The '39 Yankees did it with an MVP season from Joe DiMaggio (.381), a stellar season from pitching ace Red Ruffing (22 wins), and brilliant performances from future Hall of Famers Red Rolfe, Lefty Gomez, Bill Dickey, and Joe Gordon, as well as stalwarts Tommy Henrich, Frankie Crosetti, and Johnny Murphy, and rookies Babe Dahlgren and Charlie Keller. These achievements and players are well-described in Tofel's book, along with the context of the times -- the Great Depression still in force, Hitler marching toward war, and the World's Fair. The book also looks at myths of the period, such as that ballplayers did it for love of the game and not money (it was actually the other way around)), while also looking at the conventions of the time: baseball had to remain segregated, and radio broadcasts would ruin baseball, not add revenue. Through this book, the world of the 1939 Yankees -- flannel uniforms, sleeper cars, cheapskate owners -- comes back to life, and one realizes not only the differences between major league baseball of 1939 and that of 2009, but the incredible similarities -- players battling through injuries, facing the ends of their careers, teams struggling to keep up with the well-stocked Yankees, the Yankees themselves battling to keep up with their growing history. After reading this book, you realize that 1939 may be 70 years ago, but it's not so very far away.

Supremacy with Uncommon Style and Grace

Up front, I acknowledge that I have been a lifelong baseball fan. Growing up in South Chicago, I saved every penny I could from paper routes, caddying, setting pins at the local bowling alley (which, yes, dates me), cutting lawns, washing cars, and stocking the shelves of the local grocery inorder to afford going to as many Cubs and White Sox games as my funds allowed. Otherwise, I listened to radio broadcasts of home and away games. Our family was the first in the neighborhood to have a television set; I could then watch the games with my grandmother, another diehard baseball fan. She loved the Cubs, endured the White Sox, and shared my excitement when World Series games were televised. So much for where I have been and still come from. Today, for various reasons, I have much less interest in Major League baseball.Also up front, I want to say that I thoroughly enjoyed Tofel's account of the Yankees' 1939 season. It is exceptionally well-written. True, thanks to several dozen books I have already read, I already knew much of what he shares in this volume. Even so, he enabled me to return to a very special season in the history of Major League baseball, one during which there were so many transitions occurring. For example, Lou Gehrig was deteriorating (dying, in fact) while Joe DiMaggio was taking his rightful place as one of the greatest Yankees among so many outstanding players. The book follows an obvious but appropriate format: Pre-Game Warm-Up, followed by one chapter per each of nine Innings, then a Post-Game Report. Along the way, Tofel focuses on the key players and on the key games with the Yankees' strongest competitors. Along the way, when not recounting action on the field, Tofel pauses to discuss -- with sensitivity as well as insight -- human relationships which were neither revealed nor acknowledged until many years alter. Some have challenged Tofel's use of the word" pure" but I do not. I think he means that the quality of play in combination with the professionalism of the players "between the lines" invested that Yankee team with a certain purity of deportment. Of course, at that time, players were literally owned by the teams which employed them. True, the color barrier would not be overcome until eight years later (1947), about the same time the U.S. military services were finally integrated. It was not until 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation constitutionally illegal. Then and now, our society was not perfect and Tofel nowhere suggests otherwise. Given all that, the 1939 Yankees handled themselves with uncommon style and grace...with a self-assurance many then viewed as arrogance. Nonetheless, even today, when wearing the pinstripes and playing in Yankee Stadium as a Yankee for the first time, veteran players such as Jason Giambi say that they get goose bumps and feel lightheaded. Until 1939, that was probably not true. After they won the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, the players' brief

Enjoyable Baseball History

In his introduction the Richard Tofel notes the inspiration he drew from Richard Reeves's work on President Kennedy and David Herbert Donald's biography of Abraham Lincoln. The result of that inspiration is obvious. As you read Tofel's description of the progress of the '39 Yankees you feel as though you are there, living right along as the season winds to its foregone conclusion. In fact, it is only the inevitability of the Yankee victory, a runaway from the start, that occasionally slows the narrative. But that is not Tofel's fault. He more than makes up for the absence of a pennant race with several rich character portaits, partcularly of McCarthy and Gehrig. The sad recounting of the end of Gehrig's career, including a wonderful recreation of the day that Gehrig gave his "luckiest man on the face of the Earth" speech is alone worth the purchase price.

Tofel hits a Homer

Dick Tofel's new book on the '39 Yankees is a line-drive to gap just left of the monuments, a "rope" like the ones that Joe D. used to devliver, it's going - going -gone, that book is out of here, a home run, a four- bagger, a veritable trip around the bases, and -- if they count the runners on base -- many will come to regard this as a a grand slam. Tofel brings us back to a time when baseball was more than a game. Must reading for anyone who ever wondered how America came to have a National Pastime.