1939 World Series: Reds Overwhelmed as Yankees Win Fourth Straight

On the morning of May 2, 1939, Lou Gehrig visited manager Joe McCarthy in the team hotel in Detroit and asked to be taken out of the lineup, as he said, “for the good of the team.”

It had been obvious to everyone, that something was wrong with the Iron Horse, a man who that morning was sitting on a consecutive games played streak of 2,130. He had played dreadfully throughout the spring, and in the first eight games of the regular season he was hitting .143 with one RBI.

McCarthy balked at first, knowing what sitting Gehrig would mean, but he knew it was best for the Yankees, and more importantly, best for Gehrig.

That day, Gehrig presented the Yankees lineup card to umpire Stephen Basil, and just before the first pitch was thrown an announcement was made informing the sparse crowd at Briggs Stadium that Gehrig would not be playing. The Detroit fans paid tribute to Gehrig by standing and applauding for nearly two minutes.

With new first baseman Babe Dahlgren hitting a home run and a double, the Yankees steamrolled the Tigers 22-2, but the result mattered little. Afterward, all conversation focused on Gehrig.

“It would not be fair to the boys, to Joe, or to the baseball public for me to try going on,” Gehrig said glumly to the reporters gathered around him. “Maybe a rest will do me some good. Maybe it won’t. Who knows? Who can tell? I’m just hoping.”

McCarthy, clearly upset by what had transpired, said, “Lou just told me he felt it would be best for the club if he took himself out of the lineup. I asked him if he really felt that way. He told me he was serious. He feels blue. He is dejected.”

Six weeks later, with Gehrig having not appeared in another game, the world shared in that dejection when Dr. Harold Harbein of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. released a statement that solved the mystery of Gehrig’s physical malady. After a week of examinations at the renowned medical facility, Gehrig was found to be suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Though a timetable was not put on his imminent death, research indicated that he would likely be gone within two years, no more than three.

Not long after, on July 4, the Yankees held an appreciation day for the stricken slugger, and it spawned one of the great speeches any athlete ever delivered, bringing tears to the most hardened of men just the same as the women and children who were at Yankee Stadium that day.

Gehrig remained with the club throughout the year, even when the team was on the road. He brought the lineup card out to home plate before every game, then sat on the bench lending his teammates moral support. It was definitely the best thing for his spirits to stay with the team, though it was difficult to sit there and not play.

The Yankees had gotten off to a solid start despite the distraction and were in first place for good by May 11. But after the emotional July 4 doubleheader split with the Senators, the Yankees lost five games in a row at home to the Red Sox, part of a six-game losing streak that suddenly tightened the standings.

Their response to that was an eight-game winning streak which helped to offset Boston’s 23-10 record in July. It put the Yankees back in control, and by the time the season was over the pennant race was a joke. The Yankees won 106 games, were 17 games ahead of second-place Boston, and an unheard of 64.5 games better than the lowly St. Louis Browns.

The World’s Fair was hosted by New York City in 1939, and more than 33 million people attended. Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz debuted on the silver screen, John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, and Irving Berlin composed God Bless America. But once again, there was no better entertainment than the Yankees.

Over in the National League, the Cincinnati Reds had to work a little harder to win the pennant, but in the end they were 4.5 games clear of the St. Louis Cardinals. Not that it mattered who the NL sent to the World Series because no one was going to prevent the Yankees from winning an unprecedented fourth consecutive championship.

Everyone in attendance on an overcast but pleasantly warm afternoon in the Bronx expected to see the best pitching of the 1939 Series in the opener as Red Ruffing, a 21-game winner, opposed Cincinnati’s 25-game winner Paul Derringer. No one left disappointed as Ruffing and Derringer were brilliant and the Yankees squeezed out a 2-1 victory when Charlie Keller tripled to the gap in right-center and scored the winning run on Bill Dickey’s single over second in the bottom of the ninth inning.

“My arm hurt plenty right at the start, but I figured I’d keep throwing ‘em and either come out with a bad arm or as a winner,” Ruffing said.

The Reds took a 1-0 lead in the fourth when Ival Goodman walked on four pitches, stole second, and came around to score on Frank McCormick’s single past Red Rolfe into left field, but the Yankees tied it in the fifth when third-base coach Art Fletcher made a heads up decision. Joe Gordon lined a one-out single to left and Dahlgren followed with a double down the line in left. Gordon was steaming into third thinking Fletcher would hold him, but Fletcher gave him the green light when he saw the relay throw from Wally Berger sailing into Lonnie Frey at second base. Frey wheeled and fired home, but Gordon slid under Lombardi’s tag for the tying run.

“If you ask me,” McCarthy said, “I’d say the outstanding play was Fletcher sending Gordon in on Dahlgren’s double. That was smart. Art saw that Berger’s throw was going to second base and he kept Joe going around third at top speed.”

Neither team could scratch anything else off these two pitchers until the last of the ninth. Rolfe grounded out to first, but then Keller hit Derringer’s next offering high and deep to right-center. Goodman raced over from center and Harry Craft gave chase from right, and just when it looked like the two men might collide, each pulled up and the ball glanced off Goodman’s glove and rolled to the wall as Keller lumbered into third. Joe DiMaggio was intentionally walked as Reds manager Bill McKechnie opted to pitch to Dickey, but Dickey ruined that strategy by singling to win the game.

The Reds may have felt like they cheated themselves out of that first game, but there was nothing they could do about Monte Pearson in Game 2. McKechnie trotted out the other half of his dynamic pitching duo, Bucky Walters, who wound up being voted the National League’s most valuable player. McKechnie knew he had to win at least one game in New York, and Walters seemed like his best bet. On any other day, he may have been, but Pearson had a no-hitter into the eighth inning and settled for a two-hit, 4-0 shutout.

“I didn’t know I had a no-hitter,” said Pearson, who had thrown a no-hitter in August 1938, the third in Yankees history. “I just knew they didn’t have many hits, but all I was trying to do was get those fellas out.”

He had gotten all the run support he needed when the Yankees got to Walters in the third for three runs, and Dahlgren’s solo homer in the fourth made it 4-0 and the only issue left to decide was whether Pearson could complete his march to immortality.

Through seven innings, only one Cincinnati batter had reached base, Bill Werber on a walk in the fourth, and he was quickly erased by a double play. When McCormick lined to George Selkirk in left to open the eighth, Pearson had faced the minimum 22 batters and was five outs away from the no-hitter, but Ernie Lombardi wheeled on a fastball and lined it solidly for a history-ruining single.

When the scene shifted to Cincinnati, more than 5,000 people - undeterred by their team’s predicament and just happy to be in the World Series for the first time since 1919 - greeted the Reds at Union Terminal when they arrived. The players, those who didn’t duck out, were then whisked to waiting cars for a parade through downtown attended by about 30,000 horn-blowing, pennant-waving fans.

Of course the mood changed drastically the next day when the Yankees made it three games to none with a 7-3 victory. In sweltering heat that made it feel like July rather than October, the Yankee bats boomed as Charlie Keller swatted a pair of home runs and DiMaggio and Dickey had one each, all off Reds rookie starter Gene Thompson.

“There’s nothing much to say,” said McCarthy. “Keller, DiMaggio and Dickey did all the talking today. They were kind of noisy, too, weren’t they?”

And so was Bump Hadley, who replaced Lefty Gomez at the start of the second inning when Lefty - who allowed three hits and a run in the first - had to retire with an injury to his side. Hadley pitched eight unexpected innings and while the Reds touched him for seven hits and three walks, he yielded only two runs, none over the final seven innings.

Keller’s first homer was a two-run shot in the first, and after Cincinnati rallied to take a 3-2 lead in the second, Keller drew a two-out walk in the third and trotted home when DiMaggio unleashed a long home run to dead center to re-establish the Yankee lead. And then in the fifth, Keller hit his second two-run homer and Dickey tacked on a solo shot to make it 7-3.

In the clubhouse, Yankees road secretary Mark Roth was holding a handful of train tickets with a departure date for the next day, so confident was he that the Yankees would finish off the sweep. But McCarthy said to him, “Better wait until tomorrow” to start passing them out.

And that’s what Roth did when the Yankees closed it out with a dramatic 7-4 victory in 10 innings. The game was scoreless for the first six innings as Derringer for the Reds and Oral Hildebrand and Steve Sundra for the Yankees pitched very well. Derringer blinked first as Keller and Dickey both hit solo homers in the seventh to give the Yankees a 2-0 lead, but the Reds stormed back with three unearned runs in their half to take the lead.

When Lombardi hit an RBI single in the eighth for a 4-2 lead it looked like Cincinnati would get to host another game at Crosley Field. Instead, with Walters on in relief in the ninth, Keller and DiMaggio opened with singles and both scored to tie the game. After Johnny Murphy set the Reds down in the ninth, the Yankees took advantage of shoddy fielding by the Reds in the 10th and manufactured one of the wildest plays in Series history.

Frank Crosetti led off with a walk and was bunted to second by Red Rolfe. Keller reached when shortstop Billy Myers misplayed his grounder, then DiMaggio hit what appeared to be a routine single into right field. Here’s where it got interesting. Crosetti trotted home with the go-ahead run, and then Keller made a sprint for the plate when Goodman booted the ball. Goodman threw home in an attempt to nail Keller, but Keller beat it by knocking the ball out of Lombardi’s glove and injuring the big catcher at the same time.

DiMaggio, who had never stopped running, saw the ball laying unattended near the prone Lombardi and he took off for home. With a classic fadeaway slide, DiMaggio just beat the recovering Lombardi’s tag, and the Yankees had three runs on one single. Ballgame. Championship, the Yankees’ record fourth in a row.

“You just can’t explain that 10th inning,” said a downhearted McKechnie. “There is just nothing to explain it. It’s just one of those things.”

In between the celebratory choruses of Roll Out The Barrel which he was leading in the clubhouse afterward, Art Fletcher said of DiMaggio’s heads-up base-running, “I told him nothing but watch the ball, and boy did he watch it. He gave us one of the greatest pieces of sliding I’ve ever seen. Lombardi found out you can’t sit down with those Yankees on the base paths.”

As the players carried on in glee, Gehrig sat in a corner of the clubhouse, smiling that easy smile. He was happy for his teammates, but he was also cognizant of the fact that as of today, he was no longer their teammate. Gehrig’s playing career ended that day in Detroit back in May, but he had remained with the team all season. At the conclusion of the Series, though, it was over.

On the train ride back to New York, the Yankees partied from car to car, but when they reached the car where McCarthy and Dickey were sitting, McCarthy barked, “Cut that kid stuff out, I thought I was managing professionals.”

The players quieted down and retreated like a bunch of school children after a reprimand by the principal. McCarthy was just as happy about the championship as the players, but the cessation of Gehrig’s tenure as a Yankee, as the Iron Horse, had finally struck him.

McCarthy loved Gehrig like he loved no other player, and as the night rolled by his window, he stared out into the darkness knowing that his good friend was dying, and his team would never be quite the same again.