The key to any successful business operation is outstanding personnel . . . productive, well-trained, dedicated employees.—BOB HOWSAM, baseball executive
The death of Jacob Ruppert in January 1939 kicked off a period of uncertainty and turmoil in the Yankee front office that would last for nearly nine years. Ruppert had no children; he left his entire estate, including his brewery and the Yankees, in a trust for the benefit of two nieces and the daughter of a deceased friend. Ed Barrow, George Weiss, and manager Joe McCarthy continued to ably run the organization and Major League club, and the team made four more World Series appearances (winning three) in the next six years.
Meanwhile, Ruppert’s trustees faced a large estate-tax burden and not enough cash to settle it. For these reasons the sale of the team was inevitable, though the start of the Second World War and the subsequent shutdown in non-war-related financial activity delayed things considerably.1
One interested buyer was Larry MacPhail, the former general manager of the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers, now working in the War Department. In early 1943 MacPhail put together a syndicate to bid on the Yankees. The most prominent moneyed member of his group was John Hertz, a taxicab and rental-car mogul in Chicago. In February 1944 baseball commissioner Landis scuttled any hope of a deal because Hertz owned several thoroughbred racehorses, and Landis wanted to avoid the appearance of any relationship between baseball and gambling interests. When MacPhail backed away, Ed Barrow looked for another buyer.
Now seventy-five years old but still running the club and wishing to continue, Barrow had two big reasons to disapprove of a sale to a MacPhail group. First, Barrow owned 10 percent of the Yankees, and MacPhail’s offer ($2.8 million for the 96.88 percent of the stock owned by the Ruppert estate and Barrow) provided little return on Barrow’s small investment made more than two decades earlier. The team had enjoyed tremendous financial success in the intervening years, with Ruppert pouring its profits back into the ball club. The franchise now included several Minor League teams and Yankee Stadium as well. Second, MacPhail was a loud, domineering man who would surely want to operate the club himself. Barrow countered unsuccessfully by courting both Tom Yawkey, who owned the Red Sox, and James Farley, the former postmaster general.
As the pressure grew on the trust to pay the estate tax, MacPhail reorganized his bid, lining up two investors from his original syndicate to put up most of the money: Dan Topping, a sportsman playboy who owned a professional football team in Brooklyn, and Del Webb, a construction and real estate tycoon from Arizona. Once Barrow realized the sale was inevitable, he arranged separate meetings with Topping and Webb to stress the importance of maintaining stability in the very successful organization. Both men assured him they intended to keep the team running as it always had.
The sale of the Yankees to MacPhail, Webb, and Topping was announced in January 1945. Shortly thereafter, the trio acquired the nominal remaining interests held by others, giving the three men complete ownership. MacPhail borrowed most of his share of the purchase price from his two partners and, as the baseball man in the group, was named club president. Topping, Webb, and Weiss were elected vice presidents. Barrow was made chairman of the board, an empty title with no duties. MacPhail was in charge.
During the long reign of Ruppert and Barrow, the Yankees were a businesslike, drama-free operation. Ruppert let Barrow run the team, and the two men kept any disagreements they may have had out of the newspapers. Despite the assurances to Barrow by Topping and Webb, Larry MacPhail made news wherever he went and would not change just because he was taking over the hallowed and conservative Yankees. He had little patience or tolerance for administrative structure. He was an outgoing, frenetic man—the antithesis of Ruppert and Barrow and a shock to Weiss. MacPhail got to work.
With a war going on and many baseball players in the service, MacPhail’s considerable energies were directed toward the day-to-day activities of the team, which did not sit well with Joe McCarthy, who had won seven World Series as the Yankees’ manager. McCarthy had always been a drinker, but during the relatively calm days working with Barrow he had managed to keep his consumption in check. In 1945, however, McCarthy’s drinking problems worsened. He left the club on July 20 to return to his Buffalo home. (The press was told he was battling health issues.) He tried to resign, but MacPhail encouraged him to stick it out, and McCarthy returned on August 9.
During his manager’s absence, MacPhail sold Hank Borowy, the club’s most effective pitcher, to the Chicago Cubs for ninety-seven thousand dollars. This was somewhat shocking, as the Yankees did not seem to be in need of money. MacPhail feebly noted that Borowy was a poor second-half pitcher, but the hurler finished 11-2 for Chicago and helped lead them to the National League pennant.2 MacPhail, it was assumed, just wanted to shake up his team and to show there was a new boss in town. The Yankees were four games behind the Tigers at the time of the sale and finished six and a half back.
In 1946, with the war over, MacPhail was ready to make more of an impact. He installed lights at Yankee Stadium, as he had done in Cincinnati and Brooklyn. He added a new Stadium Club (which offered more luxurious seating and brought in five hundred thousand dollars before the season even started), reinstalled 15,000 seats, and added more promotional events. The Yankees played before an all-time record 2,265,512 customers in 1946. All of baseball experienced an attendance boom that year, but the Yankees were easily the biggest draw.
On the field the 1946 Yankees won eighty-seven games, well short of the powerful Boston Red Sox. Manager McCarthy again had to leave the team for “health” reasons, and this time he did not return. Longtime catcher Bill Dickey took over the club in May, but quit in September when he realized that MacPhail would not renew him for 1947, admitting that getting along with MacPhail was a challenge.3 Johnny Neun finished out the year, but left after the season to manage the Cincinnati Reds. MacPhail then selected Bucky Harris, a twenty-year managerial veteran.
MacPhail made two important moves during the following off-season. First, he traded second baseman Joe Gordon to the Indians for pitcher Allie Reynolds. The thirty-one-year-old Gordon had hit just .210 in 1946, and MacPhail probably thought he would not recover his prewar form. In fact, Gordon did bounce back to give the Indians a few excellent seasons and helped lead them to their 1948 pennant. Nonetheless, Reynolds’s eight stellar years anchoring the team’s pitching staff made this an excellent deal. In January 1947 MacPhail signed veteran first baseman George McQuinn to take over for the disappointing Nick Etten. McQuinn was nearly thirty-seven and was coming off a poor year with the Philadelphia Athletics, but he still had one excellent season left.
Somewhat surprisingly, the 1947 Yankees won ninety-seven games and a fairly easy pennant. After their dramatic World Series victory over the Dodgers, ending with a Game Seven win in Yankee Stadium on October 6, the Yankee owners had every reason to feel satisfied with their accomplishment and their future. Yet MacPhail’s bizarre reaction to the club’s victory would ultimately take over the story.
Just minutes after the final game, MacPhail stormed into the team’s clubhouse and announced his resignation, a decision first thought to be fueled by emotion (he was reportedly crying) and alcohol. A few hours later MacPhail arrived at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan, where the three owners were hosting a lavish “Victory Dinner.” The press was waiting for him, but he angrily shouted, “Stay away or get punched.” Sportswriter Sid Keener of the St. Louis Star-Times managed to capture a few MacPhail quotes. “I’m simply tired of it all,” said MacPhail. “Too much worry. The critical New York press gets me down. Besides, there are a lot of guys in baseball I don’t like—and don’t care to associate with.” He specifically mentioned baseball commissioner Happy Chandler and Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey. “Well, I gave New York another championship, didn’t I? And what are they saying about it around here? That I’m nothing but a big popoff. Maybe I am, but I deliver the goods, don’t I?”4
It later came out that MacPhail had been flustered by a brief exchange with Rickey just before MacPhail entered the Yankees’ locker room. MacPhail offered his hand, which Rickey took while saying, “I’m shaking hands with you because a thousand people are looking on, but I don’t like you.” Rickey later acknowledged this conversation.5
When he finally worked his way inside to the dinner, MacPhail only made things worse. He stumbled drunk around the dining room, alternating between bouts of sentimental crying and irrational raging. He slugged John McDonald, former traveling secretary with the Dodgers, who had made a complimentary remark about Rickey.
MacPhail lurched over to George Weiss’s table, where the Yankee farm director was dining with his wife, Hazel, as well as Barrow and several others. MacPhail started cursing Weiss and berating his work, eventually working himself into a frenzy and demanding that Weiss had “48 hours to make up your mind what you are going to do.” Weiss remained as calm as possible and suggested, “Larry, I don’t want to make a decision here tonight. We have all been drinking. I would like to wait until tomorrow and discuss this with you.” MacPhail, in no condition to be mollified, responded by firing Weiss on the spot. As MacPhail walked away Hazel Weiss chased after him to appeal for her husband’s job, without effect. A shaken Weiss went outside to cool down. Hazel returned to the table in tears.6
When Dan Topping tried to intervene, MacPhail shouted at his partner, “You’re just a guy who was born with a silver spoon in your mouth and never made a dollar in your life.” As MacPhail walked away Topping grabbed him, saying, “Come here you. . . . I have taken all of this I am going to take.” Topping forced MacPhail into an adjoining kitchen and closed the door.7
Now Mrs. MacPhail was in tears. “What’s Danny doing to him?” she cried. “He’s a mighty sick, nervous man.” Topping emerged alone, having forced the somewhat calmer MacPhail out a side door. MacPhail returned sometime later, freshened up, with neatly combed hair. He berated at least one Yankee player after his return, but the drama was largely over.8
Topping and Webb assessed the situation and concluded that they could not leave their investment in the hands of the obviously unstable MacPhail. The following day the Yankees announced Webb and Topping had bought out MacPhail’s shares for two million dollars. Topping was elected president, and Weiss was named general manager. “MacPhail’s connection with the Yankees is ended,” said Topping. MacPhail had turned his small initial investment into two million dollars in less than three years, but he would never work in baseball again.
Dan Daniel, writing in the Sporting News, summarized the dramatic events this way: “After three years of turbulence and equivocation under the sometimes inspired, and often much less than that, administration of Col. Leland Stanford MacPhail, the Yankees have returned to quiet and the peaceful pursuit of baseball happiness.”9 MacPhail’s frenetic style might briefly succeed, especially when backed by the wealth of Webb and Topping. However, in the growing complexity of baseball businesses in postwar America, neither the small streamlined front office of the Barrow years nor MacPhail’s crazed genius could expect to run a successful club for long. But the new partnership of Webb, Topping, and Weiss would create a professionally managed franchise that remained in place for thirteen years, capturing ten pennants and seven World Series titles.
When Topping and Webb named Weiss general manager, the Yankees were undisputedly baseball’s preeminent organization. In the aftermath of the war, however, the pecking order among AL teams was as fluid as it had been for many years. Nearly all of baseball’s top stars had been away from organized baseball for two years or more, and top prospects had lost valuable developmental time supporting the war effort. The talent was not as concentrated as it had been before the war. From 1944 to 1948 five different American League teams won the pennant. When George Weiss took control of the Yankee ship, there was more parity in the AL than there had been in decades.
The two co-owners were an odd couple—Topping, educated in an East Coast boarding school and expensive colleges, had little in common with Webb, a Californian who grew up in the construction business and played semipro ball—but established a surprisingly smooth working relationship. Topping’s role generally was to oversee the club’s business, while Webb assumed an active role in league affairs. The two owners recognized they had a talented general manager and generally left Weiss alone to mastermind one of baseball’s greatest organizations.
Weiss began his career in baseball in New Haven, Connecticut. After high school graduation, Weiss reorganized his school baseball team, brought in a couple of new players, and promoted his squad as a semipro club. He leased a field just outside the city limits and began playing games on Sunday, a practice prohibited in New Haven proper. By promising a guaranteed purse, Weiss brought in stars such as Ty Cobb and Walter Johnson, with whom he became friends, to play Sunday exhibitions with his team. Weiss parlayed this success into taking over New Haven’s team in the Eastern League. He quickly turned around that club’s on-field fortunes, and New Haven won the Eastern League pennant in 1920.
Weiss’s baseball career almost ended before he became famous. In December 1923 Weiss and New Haven manager Wild Bill Donovan set out for the winter meetings in Chicago aboard the 20th Century Limited. Tragically, the train crashed, killing Donovan and eight other passengers. Badly injured with lacerations to his back, Weiss spent the next month hospitalized in Erie, Pennsylvania, followed by a long convalescence at home.
Weiss understood that the financial survival of Minor League operators required selling their players to higher leagues. Redirecting his promotional skills to negotiating player sales, he sold twenty-six players for around $300,000 while keeping his team highly competitive on the field during his tenure with New Haven. From 1920 through 1928 New Haven won three Eastern League pennants and had only two losing seasons. After the 1928 season Weiss sold the New Haven team and took over the International League’s Baltimore Orioles, a storied franchise that had fallen on hard times. Over the next three seasons Weiss rebuilt the struggling club and earned another $242,000 on player sales.10 In 1932, at age thirty-seven, he joined the Yankees as director of their fledgling farm system.
Jacob Ruppert’s 1939 death placed constraints on club spending. Weiss was directed to try to sell some of the unneeded talent in the system, a practice Branch Rickey had mastered in St. Louis. Weiss managed to peddle a number of players for prices in the $20,000 to $40,000 range. He also often garnered a Minor Leaguer in the deals, and the quality of the Yankee scouts meant that these afterthoughts occasionally developed into valuable ballplayers.11 In one oft-chronicled series of transactions, Weiss sold Willard Hershberger to the Reds after the 1937 season for $20,000 and shortstop Eddie Miller. He later sent Miller to the Boston Braves for $10,000 and several players, including Vince DiMaggio and Gil English. Weiss sold DiMaggio to the Reds for $20,000 and two players, Nino Bongiovanni and Frenchy Bordagaray, the latter later sold to the Dodgers. Weiss also received $7,500 in exchange for English when he sent him to St. Paul in the American Association.12 Weiss had learned well in New Haven.
Weiss succeeded in running one of the great dynasties of American sports because he understood the importance of a strong organization. He was unafraid of having strong, intelligent men working for him. As his top assistants Weiss at various times had Bill Dewitt, a once and future baseball GM and owner, and Lee MacPhail, a future GM and American League president whose father, Larry, had gone on the tirade against Weiss in 1947. Weiss held regular meetings at which he “invited open discussion from all department heads, and weighed each suggestion carefully before reaching a decision.”13 He was a perfectionist and detail oriented but would allow trusted associates to make decisions. “The entire organization bears down all the time. Every day, 12 months a year,” Weiss remarked. “There’s a restaurant in New York which advertises that it threw away the key when it opened for business. That’s the picture I carry of the Yankees.”14 In today’s world of twenty-four-hour sports channels and football coaches sleeping in their offices, this may seem unremarkable. But in the 1950s, with family ownership and sportsmen owners, Weiss’s professional approach was groundbreaking.
Red Patterson worked for Weiss for many years as a public relations director. “Weiss was a great detail man,” Patterson recalled. “He always had an old envelope in his pocket. On the back he had written himself notes and details he wanted taken care of. If he gave you something to do he would keep reminding you of it until it was done and he could cross out the note.”15
By the time Weiss took over the Yankees at age fifty-three, he looked and acted the part of an executive. He dressed in conservative suits, wore little jewelry, and had put on weight. Generally soft-spoken, but firm and confident, the round-faced Weiss had the “odd habit of thrusting his hands into his jacket pockets, with the thumbs on the outside when engaging in standup conversation.”16 He was often cold and unemotional to those outside of his closest circle. This was both a conscious effort to keep his distance from players and subordinates and a case of extreme shyness.
“George Weiss always seemed like a guy who never had fun,” one writer recalled years later, “but that wasn’t so. They say he swung pretty good in his younger days, and there were signs in his latter days with the Yankees that this was so. He liked to bet a horse, but he could bet and then watch the race as excitedly as if he were watching the grass grow. He liked a drink, but he was a washout at any kind of party because small talk was impossible for him and any kind of talk was improbable. There were times, though, when a couple of beakers of grog would loosen him up in a boys-will-be-boys situation.”17 But to the public he looked the part of a conservative businessman.
One of the keys to the Yankee success was their remarkable farm system. A May 1958 Baseball Digest study of ballplayers showed that of the 318 regulars and top reserves in the Major Leagues (approximately 20 per team), 43 had originally been signed by the Yankees, nearly one-seventh of the total. The Dodgers, the National League’s top franchise at the time, ranked second with 36.
The Yankees were landing quality as well as quantity. Yogi Berra joined the club when Weiss was still farm director. Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford graduated to the Yankees early in Weiss’s tenure as general manager. These three were among the best half-dozen players in the AL in the 1950s, which begins to explain the Yankees’ ongoing dominance. Weiss and his scouts also filled the roster with other stars and capable regulars.
By the postwar period few players in the dwindling independent Minor Leagues were sufficiently skilled to play in the Majors—most Minor League teams were affiliated with Major League organizations, who were stocking their farm systems by signing amateur talent. The price for the top talent skyrocketed after the war, although the Yankees’ role in this market was minimal (notably their 1950 signing of Andy Carey for sixty-five thousand dollars). Weiss believed his scouts could outhustle their competitors and dig up players others might miss. The scouts proved him right: Mantle, Berra, and Ford, plus future stars Bill Skowron, Gil McDougald, Hank Bauer, Bobby Richardson, and Tony Kubek, all cost less than seven thousand dollars per signing.18
The Yankee farm system also innovated. When Lee MacPhail and scout Joe Devine suggested a fall gathering of top prospects for additional coaching and evaluation, with input from the Major League coaches, Weiss approved the idea. The Yankees expanded the venture over the next couple of years, and other teams eventually followed suit. Today, this experimental initiative has matured into the Fall Instructional League.19
The postwar Yankee farm system proved more successful at developing position players than pitchers. Other than Ford and Vic Raschi, most of the best Yankees pitchers during Weiss’s tenure came via trades. The farm system’s surplus and Weiss’s trading acumen allowed the Yankees to pick up Eddie Lopat, Allie Reynolds, Don Larsen, and Bob Turley, among others. Weiss trusted his scouts to find good pitchers who were struggling with poor records on second-division teams. He then acquired these hurlers by surrendering prospects and occasionally cash. The Yankees were wealthier than most teams and willing to use this advantage.
Weiss’s first acquisition turned out to be his worst. After the 1948 season Weiss sent three players and one hundred thousand dollars to the St. Louis Browns for pitcher Fred Sanford, a deal that Weiss remembered with dismay for the rest of his career. Weiss later claimed that he had succumbed to pressure from the press and co-owner Dan Topping. Though Sanford won just twelve games over the next two-plus seasons, the deal did not sour Weiss on using cash in future transactions.
Weiss became a master of the midseason trade, often adding a valuable veteran to bolster the always-contending Yankees for the stretch drive. “Our trading philosophy,” said Weiss, “has been one of trying to get a man to fill a needed gap, often short-term, without helping the opposition too much and without trading away a star.”20 Late in the 1949 season Weiss purchased aging veteran Johnny Mize, who still had a couple of good years left, for forty thousand dollars. At the 1950 trading deadline he picked up pitchers Tom Ferrick and Joe Ostrowski for several players and forty thousand dollars. “They weren’t stars,” Weiss explained, “but they helped us considerably.” The next year Weiss made another poor trade—sending pitcher Tommy Byrne and twenty-five thousand dollars to the St. Louis Browns for Stubby Overmire—which he again blamed on Topping’s influence. Byrne was a pretty good pitcher, but Topping said he could not watch him because of his wildness. While pleasing Topping, Weiss angered manager Casey Stengel, who still thought he could harness Byrne’s potential. A couple of years later Weiss reacquired Byrne, who turned in several good seasons for Stengel. Other midseason acquisitions included Johnny Sain, Johnny Hopp, Ewell Blackwell, Harry Simpson, and Ryne Duren.21
The Kansas City Athletics famously proved to be a willing trade partner. Topping’s close friend Arnold Johnson had purchased the Athletics after the 1954 season and moved them from Philadelphia to Kansas City. Johnson used very little of his own money to buy the club, and throughout his tenure the organization was consistently woeful. While forty-three Major League regulars or semiregulars in 1958 had been originally signed by the Yankees, only eight had been inked by the Athletics. Weiss made numerous deals with Kansas City general manager Parke Carroll, who, predictably, had also once worked for the Yankees. In aggregate, however, the trades were not nearly as one-sided as often remembered. Kansas City needed to find players somewhere, and the Yankees reputedly had good ones. Weiss summarized Johnson’s typical response to the criticism, which was to argue that he was “out to improve the A’s whether it helps the Yanks or not.”22
To some degree the legacy of all postwar general managers and owners is heavily determined by their response to integration. Weiss and the Yankees have been rightly criticized for their hesitancy in this area. No black player made the Yankees’ regular-season roster until Elston Howard in 1955, eight years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Brooklyn. Weiss was certainly not alone in either baseball or American society in his dawdling on integration. Ten of the sixteen teams were still all-white as late as September 1953. Moreover, most teams did not integrate solely due to a sense of responsibility or morality. Teams signed black players because they wanted to win, and once Robinson had broken down the door and played so well, integration was the best (and cheapest) way to find top talent. As we shall see in the next chapter, this huge supply of available baseball stars was unique in baseball history, and the way teams responded to this opportunity changed the balance of power in baseball for the next twenty years. The Yankees, uniquely, continued to win without aggressively signing black talent.
By the late 1940s the Yankees were actively scouting the Negro Leagues. In addition to Howard the Yankees made a couple of notable acquisitions, including Vic Power and Luis Marquez. Weiss was later criticized for trading Power before he appeared in the Majors with the Yankees, and many believed Weiss was actively delaying the team’s integration. On the other hand, Weiss was livid when baseball commissioner Happy Chandler awarded Marquez to Cleveland because of a dispute over which Negro League club held his rights. “This decision soured George Weiss on Chandler,” Lee MacPhail later wrote. “Del Webb was already against him and the Yankees then took the lead in putting together enough votes to eventually unseat Chandler as commissioner.”23
Weiss had a reputation as a hard negotiator with his players, which made him little different from most front-office executives of the time. Before free agency, players had little leverage other than refusing to sign a contract and hoping the team would relent, at least a little. Relative to the rest of baseball the Yankees paid respectable salaries. In 1954, one of the few Weiss years the Yankees failed to win the pennant, the team paid a league high $674,622 in player salaries. Pennant-winning Cleveland was second at $592,660; the rest of the league ranged from $357,329 to $450,796. The Yankees had a payroll 50 percent greater than all but one team, a level befitting their unparalleled success.24
One of the more controversial moves Weiss made in his Yankee years came with his lone managerial hire. When the 1948 club, the first with Weiss in charge, slipped to third (albeit with ninety-four wins), Weiss fired Bucky Harris, who Weiss felt was “an old-style, ‘book’ manager who couldn’t fit in with the many experiments the Yankees wanted to make with new young players.”25 Harris had been hired by Larry MacPhail, and Weiss wanted his own man in the dugout.
Weiss surprised baseball pundits by hiring Casey Stengel, who in nine years managing in the National League had never finished higher than fifth. Weiss and Stengel had been friends for many years, dating back to Stengel’s brief managing stint in the Eastern League. Stengel had just won the PCL pennant in Oakland, which had helped restore his reputation somewhat, but his hiring was still a shock to the New York sportswriters, many of whom portrayed the colorful Stengel as a clown.
With Stengel in charge on the field, the team won a record five consecutive World Series from 1949 through 1953. After the 1953 Series crusading U.S. congressman Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, whose beloved Dodger squad the Yankees had just defeated, penned a verse complaining about the Yankees’ dominance, partially in jest.
It’s time that Congress investigate.
The time is short, the hour is late,
Five times running; it’s more than fate,
The Yankees have a monopoly!
The Dodgers are artful, courageous the Braves,
The Giants have stature, the Phillies earn raves,
Must they now all take to caves?
The Yankees have a monopoly!
They can’t flout our laws; the trust must be bust.
We’ll subpoena the witness and answer he must.
The cry has been heard; the verdict is just
The Yankees have a monopoly!26
The next season the Yankees won 103 games, the high-water mark during Weiss’s tenure, but fell to second behind a Cleveland Indians team that won a then league record 111. The Yankees’ success in the nation’s largest metropolis generally led to the league’s largest profit. For the years for which we have data, 1952–54, the Yankees outearned their competition in two of the three years. In 1952 the Yankees booked $224,000 in net income, Cleveland was second at $204,000, and four teams lost money. The next year the Yankees made $622,000, the White Sox were second at $205,000, and three teams lost money. In 1954 Baltimore (their first year in the new city), Cleveland, and Chicago all made more than the Yankees’ $174,000.
After four more pennants from 1955 to 1958, the Yankees fell to third in 1959. The team, the press, and the fans spent much of the off-season trying to understand how the Yankees could have fallen from their rightful place atop the league. “Injuries ruined the team,” Weiss explained, but he also thought that his players “maybe weren’t hungry enough . . . maybe they had too many outside interests on their minds. All the key men are independently wealthy from the high salaries and the World Series shares they’ve been getting for a long time. They’ve invested their money in business propositions.”27 The team rebounded in 1960 to capture the pennant before losing a heartbreaking seven-game World Series to the Pirates.
In the aftermath of the 1960 Series, Topping forced both Stengel and Weiss out of their positions. At Topping’s request both the seventy-year-old manager and the sixty-six-year-old general manager announced their retirements at press conferences. Though he mainly kept his remarks evasive, Stengel conveyed that he was not quitting voluntarily. Weiss was a little less transparent, but the New York Times reported that he “did not sound altogether happy, despite his protestations to the contrary.”28 Exactly why the Yankee owners fired Weiss and Stengel remains murky. The team’s claim that they were instating a sixty-five-year-old retirement age probably contained a grain of truth. More likely, the Yankee owners questioned whether the club was still moving in the right direction. In addition, Topping wanted to get more directly involved in the operation of the franchise and wanted a position for his son Dan Jr., desires that would have been much trickier with the imperial Weiss still in charge.
From 1949 through 1960 the New York Yankees won ten pennants and seven World Series. In recognition of his retooling of the Yankees into the 1960 pennant winner, the Sporting News named Weiss Executive of the Year, the fourth time he had been so honored. No one has been awarded this prestigious accolade more often. The team Weiss had built went on to win the next four pennants as well, giving the Yankees an incredible fourteen in sixteen years.
Weiss spent his formative baseball years as a successful Minor League operator at a time when it took smarts, hustle, and a good eye for ballplayers. He successfully transferred his skills to the Yankees, first to the farm system, then to the entire operation. Once in charge Weiss proved a skilled administrator: he was not afraid to hire strong men as subordinates, maintained the crack scouting staff organized under Barrow, and, most important, trusted and listened to his staff. The professional organization over which Weiss presided influenced many of baseball’s more recent championship clubs.