Best 50 — 1947 New York Yankees (#42)
Joe DiMaggio hails this team as ‘finest bunch’ he ever played with
Our countdown of baseball’s 50 greatest teams — a list known as the Best 50 — rolls today to No. 42, the 1947 New York Yankees. The rankings come from my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
Facts and figures
Team: 1947 New York Yankees
Team score: 85.355 points
All-time rank: 42 of 2,544
All-time percentile: 98.39%
Season record: 97-57 (.630)
Season position: First place in American League
Final status: World champion
Season summary
The Yankees finished at least 10 games above .500 each season from 1944 through 1946. Other clubs might have been satisfied, but not the Yanks. They fell short of the American League championship all three years. If they failed again in 1947, their pennant drought would become the longest the team had suffered since World War I.
Mercurial owner Larry MacPhail hired a new manager, Bucky Harris, to forestall such a calamity. Harris had spent 20 seasons directing four franchises that were typically undermanned and underfunded, impediments he wouldn’t face in New York. “This certainly isn’t Washington or Detroit or Boston or Philadelphia,” he laughed.
It surely wasn’t. Nine Yankees were named to the AL’s All-Star team in 1947, demonstrating the wealth of talent at Harris’s disposal. (No other club in the league was blessed with more than four All-Stars.) The high-powered Yanks sputtered a bit during the first two months of the season, but they locked up first place with a 19-game winning streak from late June to mid-July.
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams
Get the complete lowdown on the 50 greatest (and 10 weakest) clubs of all time
Postseason summary
The Yankees won the first two games of the 1947 World Series — outscoring Brooklyn 15-6 — and a sweep seemed likely. But the Dodgers staged a valiant comeback, knotting the series at two wins apiece and again at three.
The drama reached maximum intensity in Game Four. New York pitcher Bill Bevens carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning, only to surrender a two-out, two-run double to Brooklyn pinch hitter Cookie Lavagetto, giving the Dodgers a 3-2 win. Bevens said philosophically that he had always dreamed of playing for the Yankees, meeting Babe Ruth, and pitching in a World Series. “Well, I reached all three,” he said, “so how can I complain?”
Bevens and his teammates earned World Series rings three days later. The Yanks overcame an early Brooklyn lead for a 5-2 Game Seven victory.
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Lineup summary
Five members of the 1947 Yankees had also been active with the franchise’s legendary 1939 club. Only Joe DiMaggio played a prominent role in both of those seasons, and prominent is perhaps an insufficient adjective. DiMaggio was voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player in ’39 and again in ’47. He topped the latter team with 20 home runs, a .315 batting average, and a .522 slugging average.
The 1947 world title was the sixth of DiMaggio’s career, but he insisted it had a special place in his heart. He called his teammates “the finest bunch of players I ever played with.” Several were relative newcomers. George McQuinn signed with the Yankees after Connie Mack’s lowly Athletics released him in January 1947. Mack contended that McQuinn had “played baseball one year too long,” but the 37-year-old first baseman batted a solid .304 for New York. The other corner infielder, third baseman Billy Johnson, hit .285 in his third season with the Yankees.
The club’s two pitching stars were also recent arrivals. Allie Reynolds was obtained (on DiMaggio’s recommendation) in an offseason trade with Cleveland, where he had gone 11-15 in 1946. He flipped his record to 19-8 in New York. Joe Page was a hard-throwing (and hot-tempered) lefty who had flopped as a starter during his first three seasons. Bucky Harris shifted him to the bullpen, where he was so successful at dousing opponents’ rallies — leading the AL with 17 saves — that local sportswriters dubbed him “Fireman Page.”