1928 World Series: Party Time as the Yankees Sweep the Cardinals

It would become commonplace in the years and decades to come, but for the first time in franchise history, the Yankees won back-to-back World Series, this time sweeping the Cardinals in the 1928 Fall Classic behind an epic performance by the dynamic duo of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. And when it was over, oh, what a party the Yankees had.

Unlike many of his players, Miller Huggins was not a drinking man. A bad digestive tract made it difficult for him to process booze, and he knew it, so he stayed clear.

But no one stayed clear of the spirits that were flowing freely on the train ride back to New York from St. Louis after the Yankees completed their second consecutive World Series sweep, this time wiping out the Cardinals in four straight.

“When you win two straight World Series without the loss of a game, it calls for something special,” Babe Ruth once said in one of the books chronicling his life, recalling that raucous train ride home from the Midwest.

Coming off their boundless success in 1927, there was a certain amount of pressure on the Yankees in 1928. With a lineup that was virtually unchanged, they were supposed to run roughshod over the American League and devour anyone the National League would throw at them in the Series.

However, the last three months of the regular season had been difficult and their struggle with Connie Mack’s emerging Philadelphia Athletics took a lot out of the team. It was somewhat surprising that they handled St. Louis so easily in the Series, but their desire to gain revenge from the 1926 Series loss served as a tremendous motivation and they seemed to forget their pain and struggles from the season long enough to embarrass the Cardinals.

When it was through, and the Yankees were able to take their place among the all-time great teams by winning a second straight championship, every ounce of pressure that had built up came screaming out during the overnight ride back to Grand Central Terminal.

“By midnight we were as crazy as a bunch of wild Indians,” said Ruth, long before the term ‘political correctness’ was born.

The Yankees drank, and they ate, and they drank some more. Then they drank a little more and finally, they drank a lot more. During the course of the night the players formed a single-file conga line and paraded throughout the entire train demanding male passengers relinquish their shirts or pajama tops and soon the majority of the men on board were topless.

When they arrived at the berth of team owner Colonel Jacob Ruppert, they found his door locked, so Ruth and Lou Gehrig began pounding until the Colonel said, “Go away Ruth!” Ruth’s reply was, “This is no night for sleeping,” and on the count of three, he and Gehrig slammed their shoulders into the door, broke it off the hinges and tumbled into the room. Ruth left with Ruppert’s lavender-colored pajama top and Ruppert asking him, “Is this normal?”

Every time the train pulled into a station, be it in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio or New York, crowds that had been notified by telegraph that the Yankees were coming would gather in the hope that they would catch a glimpse of Ruth. He never disappointed as he would step onto the platform and raise his beer and bask in the cheers.

No one enjoyed the revelry more than starting pitcher Waite Hoyt, a notorious partier who was often a companion of Ruth’s on his many drinking binges. Though he had changed his ways ever so slightly after a disastrous 1925 season during which he saw his record drop to 11-14, Hoyt was an able and ready participant in the train ride shenanigans.

And he deserved to go on a bender as he was one of the prime reasons why the Yankees were celebrating another world championship. He pitched two complete game victories including the clincher earlier in the day, a 7-3 triumph at Sportsman’s Park.

Hoyt uttered one of the all-time great quotes when he recalled his Yankee career by saying, “In the daytime you sat in the dugout and talked about women, in the night time you went out with women and talked about baseball. Small wonder - it’s great to be young and a Yankee.”

He had been a high school phenom in Brooklyn and by the time he was 15 he had thrown three no-hitters and was pitching batting practice for John McGraw’s Giants at the Polo Grounds. Always brazen, Hoyt asked for compensation and McGraw responded by signing him to a contract which made him one of the youngest pros in baseball history.

He bounced around the minor leagues for a few years, then made his major league debut on July 24, 1918 and struck out two of the three Cardinals batters he faced, yet McGraw was not impressed and that was the only inning he pitched before McGraw traded him to Rochester, though he never stepped on the mound there.

Tired of toiling in the minors, Hoyt refused to report and signed with a semi-pro team in Baltimore before eventually joining the Boston Red Sox in 1919 where he pitched adequately for two seasons.

Fortunately for Hoyt he was in Boston during the period when Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was in the practice of selling or trading his best players to the Yankees, and in the decade following Hoyt’s swap of red socks for Yankee pinstripes, he became New York’s most reliable pitcher.

“He had a good arm, meaning speed and stuff, a smart head which meant control and pitching know-how, and he had guts,” scout Paul Krichell once said of Hoyt.

Upon retirement Hoyt became a baseball broadcaster for the Cincinnati Reds and was nearly as accomplished in that field, drawing praise from former Giants play-by-play man Russ Hodges who said, “Waite Hoyt is authoritative. When he makes a statement there is no doubt as to its accuracy. When Hoyt says it’s so, the Cincinnati public goes by what he says.”

Figuratively what Hoyt said to the Cardinals in 1928 is, “Here’s my best, and you’re not going to touch it.”

The Yankees were a battered team entering the Series as Herb Pennock was sidelined by a sore arm, Earle Combs was out with a broken finger, Tony Lazzeri was bothered by a sore arm, Joe Dugan was slowed by a wrist injury, and Ruth had a sprained ankle. None of this mattered because Hoyt was brilliant in Games 1 and 4, and Ruth and Gehrig were a tag-team wrecking crew combining for seven homers and 13 RBI in the four games.

In the opener, Hoyt handcuffed the Cardinals on three hits, one a Jim Bottomley home run in the seventh. “Waite Hoyt pitched a marvelous game, there was nothing we could do about it,” said Cardinals manager Bill McKechnie. “He was just in there and right, and that’s all there was to it. Bill Sherdel pitched a great game, too, and his own brand of hurling would have won nine out of ten.”

Perhaps, but this was the one he didn’t win. In the first inning Ruth and Gehrig hit back-to-back doubles for one run, Ruth doubled in the fourth and scored in front of Bob Meusel’s two-run homer, and Gehrig’s RBI single in the eighth wrapped up a 4-1 victory.

“Looks like the cripples did pretty well,” Ruth said afterward, poking fun at the pundits who said the Yankees, in their banged-up state, would struggle against the Cardinals. “We’ll do it some more. Four games is enough to win this Series.”

McKechnie disagreed, saying, “Don’t think this Series is on the chutes, though. The Yanks won the first game of the 1926 Series, too, but the Cardinals won the championship. Pete Alexander will be in there tomorrow and it will be another story.”

Oh, it was a different story all right. Unlike 1926 when Alexander beat the Yankees twice, then saved the seventh game in dramatic fashion with a bases loaded strikeout of Lazzeri, the now 41-year-old former star was battered by a New York team hellbent on paying him back.

In the clubhouse before the game, the Yankees were clearly enlivened by the prospect of facing Alexander. They had grown quite tired of hearing about his heroic performance against them in 1926, and they had targeted this as the day they would get even.

Within three innings Alexander was in the showers as the Yankees scored eight times on their way to an easy 9-3 victory and a two-game lead. “Just wasn’t going today,” Alexander said. “But I still don’t understand it. Two years ago that same gang got four hits off me. I pitched them exactly the same balls in the same places and they knocked me out of the box.”

The carnage began early, just as Ruth predicted, when Gehrig cracked a three-run homer in the first inning. “That ball Gehrig hit into the right-field stands was exactly the kind of a pitch he couldn’t touch the year we beat them for the championship,” said Alexander. “I threw him a screwball low on the outside corner. It went exactly where I wanted it to go, I couldn’t have asked for anything better, and he hit it into the bleachers.”

The Cardinals tied it in the second against George Pipgras, but the Yankees blew it open with a run in the bottom of the second and four more in the third.

“It’s a cinch,” Ruth reiterated.

The Cardinals were hoping a return to Sportsman Park would spark them, but Tom Zachary - the same guy who had yielded Ruth’s 60th home run a year earlier who was now a Yankee - pitched New York’s third straight complete game, scattering nine hits during a 7-3 triumph.

New York fell behind 2-0 on Bottomley’s two-run triple, but Gehrig hit a solo homer in the second and a two-run inside-the-park homer in the fourth. After the Cardinals pulled even in the fifth, the Yankees broke away with three runs in the sixth.

With a sweep in sight, Huggins gave the ball to his ace, Hoyt, and though he wasn’t as sharp as he’d been in Game 1, he didn’t need to be. He gave up 11 hits and was trailing 2-1 after six, but Ruth - who had already homered in the fourth inning and would do so again in the eighth - launched one over the right-field pavilion to tie the game in the seventh, providing this Series with its most memorable moment.

McKechnie had tapped Sherdel to oppose Hoyt again, and the little lefty was battling gamely. With one out in the seventh he threw two changeups past Ruth who never lifted the bat off his shoulder. After the second strike was returned to him by catcher Earl Smith, Sherdel fired in a fastball that caught Ruth by surprise and was thought to be strike three. However, umpire Charley Pfirman ruled that Sherdel had quick-pitched Ruth, a tactic that was legal in the National League during the regular season, but had been banned for the Series on a suggestion made by St. Louis’ own Frankie Frisch.

As soon as Sherdel threw the ball, Ruth complained, and the umpire did not hesitate in ruling it an illegal pitch. The Cardinals erupted in anger as McKechnie and Frisch rushed in to confront Pfirman, but they lost their argument and Ruth stepped back into the box as he exchanged obscenities with Sherdel.

“Throw it over and I’ll knock it out of the park,” Ruth yelled out to Sherdel. Once again, Ruth being Ruth, Sherdel threw it over and Babe knocked it out of the park for a game-tying home run. Frazzled by that turn of events, two pitches later Sherdel was watching another home run - this one by Gehrig - sailing over the pavilion in right that put the Yankees ahead for good.

The last out was a Frisch fly ball that drifted into foul territory in left field where temporary box seating had been erected. Ruth had switched positions with Meusel because he was uncomfortable glaring into the right-field sun, so it was left for him to make the catch. He waded in amongst the spectators and despite having programs swung at him, he reached above their heads and arms and plucked the ball out of the air, then trotted off the field laughing and holding the ball aloft for all to see.

“Say, wasn’t that a pip?” he said of the catch.

Ruth hit a Series record .625 while Gehrig weighed in with an average of .545. They combined for 16 of the Yankees’ 37 hits, 41 of their 71 total bases, scored 14 of the 27 runs and had 13 of the 25 RBI.

They were truly a dynamic 1-2 punch, the best there’s ever been in baseball, and as they whisked home from St. Louis later that evening on that wild party train, the expectation was that the Yankees were going to just keep winning World Series championships until the day Ruth and/or Gehrig decided to quit playing.