1927 World Series: It Was Never in Doubt

When the Yankees came north to start the 1927 season, they were a determined bunch looking to wash away the bitter taste of losing the final two games of the 1926 World Series on their home turf, and woe to anyone who was going to stand in their way.

On April 12, in front of what was believed to be the largest Opening Day crowd to that point in baseball history (73,206 at the newly expanded ballpark in the Bronx), the Yankees whipped the Athletics 8-3 as Waite Hoyt out-pitched Lefty Grove.

That victory put the Yankees in first place, and so began a season for the ages as they stayed atop the American League for 174 consecutive days, wire-to-wire leaders, and nearly 100 years later, many still consider this the greatest team in the history of MLB.

Babe Ruth didn’t hit his first home run until April 15, and that was the only one he hit in the first 10 days. He had just four at the end of April and while the Yankees were in first place, they weren’t as yet dominant. But Ruth cracked 12 homers in May and the team - backed by solid pitching and Ruth’s fellow members of Murderer’s Row - Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri and Bob Meusel - started to pull away from the Senators and Athletics.

During the months of June and July the Yankees won 45 of 58 games, and on July 4, it became plainly clear that no one in the AL was going to compete with them. In front of a massive holiday gathering at the stadium, the Yankees drubbed the Senators in a doubleheader, 12-1 and 21-1, prompting Washington first baseman Joe Judge to say, “Those fellows not only beat you, they tear your heart out. I wish the season was over.”

It was, except for the dramatic home run race between Ruth and Gehrig. Ruth was grabbing most of the attention, but Gehrig was doing just as much mashing and on Sept. 5, both players had 44 homers. Over the next two days, Ruth walloped five in three games against the Red Sox, and he finished with 17 in September. Gehrig would hit just three more.

The historic 60th came on Sept. 30, the next-to-last day of the season, when Ruth golfed at a screwball thrown by Washington’s Tom Zachary and sent it down the right-field line. Ruth had hit 59 homers in 1920, his first season with the Yankees, this one increased his record by just one, but that one made it 60, and as we learned through the years, 60 was a monumental figure.

“Sixty, count ’em, sixty,” he quipped, “Let’s see some son-of-a-bitch match that.”

The Yankees won 110 of 154 games, 19 in front of the Athletics, and as Hoyt said, “The ‘27 Yankees were an exceptional team because they met every demand. When we were challenged, when we had to win, we all stuck together and played with a fury and determination that could only come from team spirit. We felt we were superior people and I do believe we left a heritage that became a Yankee tradition.”

It wasn’t exactly a stretch to surmise that in the 1927 World Series, the Pittsburgh Pirates had no chance against the Yankees.

Never mind winning the Series, there was almost no chance that the Pirates were going to win a game and of course, they didn’t. The Yankees swept them in four straight by the cumulative count of 23-10 to procure their second world championship.

The day before Game 1, after the Pirates completed their workout, some of them took seats up in the stands at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field to watch the Yankees take batting practice and they were in awe as they sent baseballs flying over the fences in all directions.

It was reported in some publications that the Pirates were psyched out by this display, and for years, star Pirates outfielder Lloyd Waner didn’t know what the writers were talking about, and for good reason. Somehow it came out that Lloyd and his brother Paul were among the Pirate players sitting in the stands, and Paul is alleged to have leaned over and said to Lloyd, “Gee, they’re big, aren’t they.”

“I don’t know how that got started,” Lloyd said many years later. “I never even saw the Yankees work out that day. I was leaving the ballpark just as they were coming out on to the field. I know some of our players stayed, but I never heard anybody talk about what they saw.”

Quite frankly, it wouldn’t have mattered if the Pirates were in the stands or not. They’d enjoyed a nice season in the National League, winning 94 games to out-leg the Cardinals by a scant game and a half. And although Paul Waner, Lloyd Waner and Pie Traynor formed a productive trio, they were no match for the Yankees, and whether they were psyched out or not wasn’t the issue. The Pirates just couldn’t compete with the Yankees, and everyone knew it.

Before the Series, a reporter foolishly told Ruth the Yankees were in for a tough fight because the Pirates, “have seven good starting pitchers.” Ruth answered him by saying, “What good are seven starting pitchers in a four-game series?” That comment didn’t get quite as much attention as his alleged called shot in 1932 against the Chicago Cubs, but again, Ruth nailed it.

Miller Huggins pointed out before the Series began that the Pirates had a few more hits than the Yankees during the season, but that the Yankees had scored many more runs, “and it is runs that win ballgames,” Huggins said. “I have studied the Pittsburgh team and although they have a bunch of good hitters, they are not generally a slugging team. Against us, the Pirates will face a team that has power from the first to the last man up.”

That power was not evident in Game 1. The Yankees managed just six hits against Pirate pitchers Ray Kremer and John Miljus - none of them home runs - and the game was decided by Pittsburgh’s shoddy fielding.

With Ruth on first after a single in the top of the first inning, Gehrig came up with two outs and looped a sinking fly ball to right. Paul Waner charged in and tried to make a shoestring catch and failed. The ball skipped past him and Ruth scored from first as Gehrig chugged into third for a triple.

And then with the score 1-1 in the third, the Yankees surged ahead with three runs, again aided by Pittsburgh misplays. The Pirates pulled within 5-4 in the eighth, but Huggins pulled Hoyt and called for Wilcy Moore and the sinker-balling righty preserved New York’s victory by getting the last four outs.

One day in 1926, general manager Ed Barrow was flipping through an issue of The Sporting News and he noticed that a pitcher for Greenville, S.C. in the South Atlantic League had a record of 20-1. He dispatched scout Bob Gilks to inquire about this fellow named Wilcy Moore, and Gilks’ reported back saying, “He can’t pitch, and anyway, he says he’s 30 but he must be 40.”

Still, Barrow was intrigued and he said, “Anyone who can win that many games is worth what they’re asking for him.” The price was $3,500, which the Yankees paid.

Moore, who was 29 years old but, as Gilks noted, looked much older, wound up 30-4 that season for the Spinners and his success was due in large part to the development of a devastating sinker. Moore had been hit by a batted ball earlier in his career and suffered a broken forearm. He resorted to a sidearm delivery to alleviate pain in his wrist caused by the injury, and the result was a sinking action on his fastball that proved nearly unhittable in the bush leagues, and in 1927, it was unhittable to American League hitters as well.

“Wilcy was a character,” Barrow once said. “He was a big, raw-boned, heavy-handed farmer with a bald head from Hollis, Oklahoma who threw a heavy ball that sank as it got close to the plate. It was the perfect equipment for a relief pitcher coming in with men on base.”

At first glance, Huggins wasn’t convinced Moore could help the Yankees. “I figure it’s more sensible to take a pessimistic view because of his age,” he said. “He’s one of those old youngsters. He is breaking into the majors at 30 - that’s old for a pitcher.”

It didn’t take long for Huggins to come around, though. He used Moore as a part-time starter, part-time reliever, and Moore pitched 213 innings despite starting just 12 games. With so many innings, he was eligible for the league’s ERA title which he won with a 2.26 mark.

“I don’t know where Moore was when all the scouts were gumshoeing around those parts,” Ruth said, “because he was just about the best pitcher in our league in 1927.”

Another pitcher who became a surprising producer was George Pipgras, a man who’d spent the previous three years in the minor leagues learning how to pitch. During Game 1 of the Series, Pipgras was sitting on the bench when Huggins leaned over and asked him if he could pitch Game 2. Urban Shocker was the scheduled starter, but Huggins was playing a hunch.

“He told me to get a good night’s rest,” Pipgras said. “A good night’s rest! I’ll tell you what I did, I went back to the hotel and began studying that Pirate lineup until my eyes started to hurt.”

Huggins gave the ball to Pipgras and after a rocky start, his studying paid off. Lloyd Waner led off the bottom of the first inning with a triple and he scored moments later when Clyde Barnhart hit a sacrifice fly. Thereafter the Pirates managed just six hits and one run and when the Yankees put up a pair of three spots in the third and eighth innings, Pipgras was the winner by a 6-2 count.

“George has speed to burn and a real hop on his fastball,” said Bob Shawkey, who at this point in his career was serving as a player/pitching coach for Huggins. “He has a great curve, too, when he needs to use it, but today he just had to stand up there and throw it past ‘em.”

Standing in front of his locker holding court with the writers, Ruth said, “Looks like a breeze, just a breeze. Two more games and the Series will be over.”

Rogers Hornsby, who joined the Giants prior to the start of the 1927 season and missed out on another Series appearance when the Pirates edged his new club by two games, had predicted that Pittsburgh would give the Yankees all kinds of trouble if Huggins decided to pitch his left-handed starters, Pennock and Dutch Ruether.

“I believe that Huggins will make a mistake if he starts either of his southpaws against the Pirates because they murder this kind of pitching,” Hornsby said.

Hoyt, Moore and Pipgras were righties and they’d had no problem with the Pirate batting order in the first two games, but in Game 3 at Yankee Stadium, Huggins ignored Hornsby’s advice and started the wily 13-year veteran, Pennock. All Pennock did was throw a perfect game for 7.1 innings before Traynor broke it up with a single. By then Ruth had hit a three-run homer during a six-run seventh inning that gave Pennock an 8-0 lead, and the Pirates wound up “murdering” him to the tune of three hits during an 8-1 loss that dropped Pittsburgh into an insurmountable three games to none hole.

Pennock, who’d broken in to the major leagues with the Athletics in 1912 and had learned his deadly screwball from Chief Bender, baffled the Pirates. It was thought that he wouldn’t pitch in the Series because he’d been hit by a ball in batting practice the day the Yankees psyched out the Pirates with their pyrotechnic display. Further, Pennock could never sleep on train rides, and he’d been awake all night when the teams traveled from Pittsburgh to New York. Imagine if he’d been totally healthy and rested.

“The way the gang played today was marvelous,” Pennock said afterward. “No pitcher ever got better support. I’m mighty grateful. I had good control, the ball just went where I wanted it to, and I had good luck.”

With a chance to wrap it up, Moore took the ball in Game 4 and it was appropriate that the most unlikely of Yankee heroes in 1927 was the winning pitcher in the season’s final game. And how Moore became the winner was equally as unlikely as the power-packing Yankees brought an end to the Series not with a home run by Ruth or Gehrig, but with Earle Combs sprinting across home plate after a wild pitch by Miljus in the bottom of the ninth. How’s that for anti-climactic?

“I felt that wild pitch coming, and I was sorry,” Huggins said. “Miljus was trying so hard that something was bound to slip. An infield error would have been a better ending.”

Ruth’s two-run homer gave New York a 3-1 lead in the fifth, but when the Yankees came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, the score was tied at 3-3. They quickly loaded the bases with none out, then Miljus heroically struck out Gehrig and Meusel and it looked like the Pirates might extend the game. Instead, with Lazzeri at the plate, Miljus threw one past catcher Johnny Gooch to give the Yankees a 4-3 victory and the world championship that cemented the 1927 team’s place in history.

“Just putting on a Yankee uniform gave me a little confidence,” Mark Koenig, who hit .500 in the Series, said years later. “We won 26 out of 27 games at one point. I don’t think it entered any of our minds that we were the best ever. We just went on winning.”