The greatest teams of all time
Were the 1927 Yankees truly the best ever? No, they weren’t
Almost a century has passed since their championship season, yet the 1927 Yankees are still widely hailed as the greatest team in baseball history.
Babe Ruth launched a record-setting 60 home runs for the Yanks that year, fellow slugger Lou Gehrig won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award, and four other Hall of Famers graced New York’s lineup. “The Yankees of 1927 were supermen in white pinstripe uniforms,” exulted Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Arthur Daley.
But, ahem, I beg to differ.
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I have analyzed 2,544 American and National League ballclubs from every season of the World Series era, dating back to the dawn of the previous century.
Those ratings are presented in my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams: The Top (and Bottom) Clubs Since 1903.
The book offers a comprehensive list of the 100 greatest clubs throughout baseball’s history. The 1927 Yankees fit comfortably into the top 10, though they yield first place to a powerhouse of more recent vintage. (No spoilers here.) The bottom 100 teams are listed separately.
I’m going to devote the next few months of this newsletter to a countdown of the top 50 ballclubs of all time, collectively labeled as the Best 50. Each story will summarize the regular-season journey and postseason triumphs for a given team within the Best 50, accompanied by a discussion of the key players in its batting order and starting rotation.
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams
Get the complete lowdown on the 50 greatest (and 10 weakest) clubs of all time
If you’d like considerably more information — and you want it more quickly — I would suggest that you get the book.
The bulk of Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams is devoted to lengthy profiles of history’s 50 best (and 10 worst) major-league clubs. Each profile summarizes a given team’s successes and failures in the regular season and postseason, the record and personality of its manager, the strengths and weaknesses of its everyday lineup, the greatest and worst performances by its players, and the level of support provided by its fans.
The book’s profiles are supplemented by the aforementioned standings of the top and bottom 100 teams. Individual rankings are also provided for 13 different decades (from the 1900s to the 2020s) and 30 discrete franchises (from the Angels to the Yankees), detailing the five best and five worst clubs for each.
We’ll start our online countdown of the Best 50 on Friday.