Legends: The Best Players, Games, and Teams in Baseball Read online

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  Copyright © 2015 by Howard Bryant.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bryant, Howard, 1968–

  Legends : the best players, games, and teams in baseball / Howard Bryant.

  pages cm.—(Legends ; 1) Audience: Age: 8-12. Audience: Grade: 4 to 6.

  1. Baseball—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography—Juvenile literature. I. Title. GV867.5.B79 2015

  796.357’64—dc23 2014031744

  ISBN 978-0-698-17258-6

  Edited by Michael Green. | Design by Semadar Megged.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

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  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Note From Howard Bryant

  SPRING

  The One and Only

  Babe Ruth

  42

  Jackie Robinson

  Willie’s Time

  Willie Mays

  Too Good

  Sandy Koufax

  “Something for Me, Mama”

  Hank Aaron

  Rickey Henderson

  Rickey Henderson

  SUMMER

  Miracle!

  The 1914 Boston Braves

  The Boys of Summer

  The 1947–55 Brooklyn Dodgers

  The Outlaws

  The 1972–74 Oakland A’s

  Saved

  The 1993 San Francisco Giants

  Too Good to Be True

  McGwire–Sosa

  Victory Summer

  The 1998 New York Yankees

  FALL

  Goliath Falls

  The 1960 World Series

  Something to Prove

  Roberto Clemente

  The Best Ever

  The 1975 World Series

  The Original

  Reggie Jackson

  “Don’t Give Us a Chance”

  The 2004 Boston Red Sox

  Joy and Heartbreak

  The 2011 World Series

  PHOTOS

  A TIMELINE OF BASEBALL’S KEY MOMENTS (TOP 40 STYLE)

  INDEX

  For Ilan Robert Bryant,

  a wonderful little boy who likes baseball,

  but loves to read

  A NOTE FROM HOWARD BRYANT

  THIS IS NOT A PERFECT BOOK. The best thing you, the reader, can do with it is disagree with it, debate it, change it, have fun with it, decide for yourself that THE 2010-2014 San Francisco Giants WHO WON THREE WORLD SERIES IN FIVE YEARS, are ABSOLUTELY a dynasty on par with the 1996-2001 New York Yankees, who won four World Series in six years (I would argue otherwise). Countless hours of your life are going to be spent debating stuff like which team was better, the 2013 Red Sox with their beards and that strange way they didn’t seem to be that good and yet always found a way to win, found a way to be great at just the right time right through the World Series; or the 2000 Yankees, who finished the regular season so bad they couldn’t even win two games in a row—until the playoffs started and then they got red hot, trampling the A’s, the Mariners, and the Mets to win the World Series for the third straight year. When you and your friends disagree, you can grab the Baseball Encyclopedia or get on baseball-reference.com and look up the stats and tell them they’re nuts to think that there was ever anyone better when it came to making a big play when a big play needed to be made than Derek Jeter, and they’ll say that David Ortiz was the most clutch hitter there ever was. And another friend will say, “Obviously, you’re forgetting Babe Ruth, who invented the word clutch.” And maybe someone else will say, “You know, for as great as Ruth was, he DID make one of the biggest boneheaded plays you could make. He got thrown out trying to steal second in Game Seven of the 1926 World Series. True story!” (And it is, for even the greatest players make mistakes, too.) When you look back one day, you’ll remember those debates as some of the best times of your life.

  Baseball has been around so long that, no matter how hard anyone tries, there is no such thing as a perfect list. It just can’t be done. The first World Series was played in 1903 between Boston and Pittsburgh, but baseball was being played thirty years before that—which was so long ago that the guys were hitting home runs and striking out less than ten years after the Civil War—and more than one hundred years after, to this day. The game has lived through twenty-six presidents and is now in its third century. It was played when the ball felt like a boulder (the old “dead ball” era, when a guy named Home Run Baker led the league with, yes, NINE homers); when it took eight balls for a batter to earn a walk (they changed it to four in 1889); and when pitchers threw underhand, like they do in softball. (That changed in 1884.) There was a time when none of the baseball parks had lights. The Reds played the first-ever night game in 1935, but the Cubs didn’t play their first home night game until 1988. White men were once the only players allowed to play. Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente and Ichiro Suzuki changed history, and during that time great players did amazing things that people still talk about to this day, just as things are happening now on the field that people will talk about far into the future.

  So who gets to decide what players, games, and teams are the best of all time? You do. This is just a road map to get you started, to go back into history through the years before television, before there were teams in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Seattle, and to add those long-lost teams and feats and deeds to the amazing plays being made in baseball today. The great players of today, like Mike Trout or Justin Verlander or Clayton Kershaw, compared to the likes of Babe Ruth and Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

&nb
sp; In the end, whether in 1914 or 2014, the game always finishes in the same way, with a group of happy ballplayers being the only team in the league to win the last game of the season, pouring champagne over each other’s heads.

  What matters is what the sport means to you. When I first started reading about baseball, Bob Gibson, Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson became my favorite players even though I had never seen any of them play in person. I went outside, played second base, and thought I was Robinson, dirt under my feet, ready to steal second and, if the ball got by, ready to get up and take third—even though he retired twelve years before I was even born. How is that possible? He was that good, and at the end of this journey, hopefully you’ll do what this book is intended for you to do: Make your own lists; learn about and imagine the people who built the game of baseball and the moments and players who are building it now. After 150 years, baseball is still a fantastic trip worth taking.

  The One and Only

  BABE RUTH

  There are certain figures in American history whose names, no matter how long ago they lived, are timeless. They remain even as time moves forward. Most are either presidents or businessmen whose companies or foundations still exist with their famous names. But there are few entertainers and athletes whose names have survived an entire century, long after their time has passed.

  In baseball, there is one above everyone else, and his name is Babe Ruth.

  There have been many great players over the history of baseball. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Henry Aaron, Ty Cobb. Why was Ruth so much bigger than everyone else? Why is he still such a memorable figure to this day? Ruth was born in 1895, played his last game in 1935, and died in 1948—yet people still talk about him.

  There are many reasons, and all of them are important. The first is that he was the player who made baseball what it is today. Before Ruth, hits were more important than home runs. Before Ruth, New York was just another place to play, a city overshadowed in importance by more successful baseball cities like Chicago and Boston. Before Ruth, baseball was a popular sport. With Ruth, it became not only the most popular sport in America, but the national pastime.

  Growing up, Ruth did not seem to have much of a chance to survive, never mind become the most famous baseball player of all time, and one of the most popular Americans in history. He was born poor and without a family. He was raised in an orphanage in Baltimore. He was always in trouble and was constantly caught by the police for skipping school. Ruth had very little going for him, but he somehow found himself in New York, as America’s most famous ballplayer in America’s most famous city.

  All of the odds were against him, and yet he made the American dream happen.

  Ruth had oversized talent and a huge personality. He was big. He grew to be six-foot-two and weighed 215 pounds. He was funny and he laughed and joked with everyone. He boasted he could eat twenty hot dogs in one sitting. He drove people crazy doing things his own way, but he was so good he got away with a lot. Ruth made everyone around him (except people in authority, like his managers) feel good—always the life of the party. He was the kid in class who was popular and good at sports but was never mean to anyone else. He made the younger kids, the less popular kids, all feel special. For that, people loved him.

  “The Babe” was larger than life. He was like a comic book, a figment of a kid’s imagination—except that he was real. He was bigger and better than everyone else who stepped on a ball field. When he arrived in Boston as a rookie in 1914, he was already one of the best pitchers in baseball, and then he became the best hitter. Who else does that? For years, baseball was played with a ball that felt like lead. It was heavy and weighted in the center, which made it difficult to hit home runs. That period was called the “dead-ball era.” During part of that time, Ruth pitched as a member of the Boston Red Sox, and he dominated. He was a great pitcher, leading the Red Sox to the World Series in 1915, 1916, and 1918.

  In 1920, the year the Red Sox sold Ruth to the Yankees, baseball leagues began using a ball that had a light cork in the center. When it was hit, the new ball flew longer and farther than the dead ball. When Ruth hit the ball, it traveled seemingly for miles. Fans of all ages loved it, and they came to baseball games in record numbers, in a way they never had before. A star was born, and it was during the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was at his peak, that baseball became America’s national pastime. He stopped pitching and became the greatest power hitter the game had ever seen.

  Before Ruth, no one had ever hit 20 home runs in a season. In New York, he hit 54 homers in his first year, and 59 in his second. From 1926 to 1931 he led the league in home runs each year. He played 22 seasons and led the majors in home runs 11 times!

  With Ruth, it wasn’t just home runs, but the dominance of his offensive game. He won a batting title in 1924 when he hit .378. He led the league in runs scored eight times. He led the league in runs batted in five times. He was so good no one wanted to pitch to him and while crushing pitchers everywhere, he still led the league in walks 11 times. He hasn’t played a game in 80 years and still is the career leader in three more categories!

  And this was all happening just as the film industry was taking off, just when people started going to the movies. Game highlights on ESPN are normal by today’s standards, but back then Ruth was the first sports film star in America, the first to be embraced by the entire nation rather than just a city. Most fans didn’t get to go to ball games, so they listened on the radio or read about their favorites in the newspaper. In their imaginations, all kids across America wanted to be Babe Ruth.

  Ruth became a star in New York. People came to see the big man hit. They came to see him swing and hit home runs. They came to see him swing and miss. They loved how big his personality was, how many nicknames he had. He was the Babe. He was the Bambino. He was the Sultan of Swat. Even his strikeouts were dramatic. Sometimes, Ruth swung so hard he fell down. No one in the history of baseball had ever been such a showman and a salesman for the game. Though the company would consistently deny it, most people believed they even named a candy bar after him—Baby Ruth! (For the record, the candy company claimed the bar was named after President Grover Cleveland’s daughter, Ruth Cleveland, though nobody really believed them.)

  There was something else about Ruth. He wasn’t just the greatest player in the biggest city in America—he was a game changer. He was a winner. When Ruth arrived, the Yankees went from losers to winners. Ruth liked to do things big, and it was no coincidence that with him the Yankees became the biggest winners in the history of baseball, a title they still own to this day. Before Ruth, the Yankees had never appeared in the World Series. In 1921, his second year in New York, the Yankees went to the World Series for the first time, even though they lost. They went again—and lost—in 1922.

  Yet Ruth’s popularity was making the Yankees so rich that the owner, Col. Jacob Ruppert, built a new ballpark for the team. It was called Yankee Stadium and it opened in 1923. The stadium was enormous, except for one place: right field. The fences in right were among the shortest in baseball, designed specifically for Ruth, who hit left-handed, to have the best chance at hitting all those home runs.

  Today, it is often known as the “House that Ruth Built” to honor the man whose greatness stands eternal.

  Ruth’s Yankees changed American sports. The first year in their new ballpark, 1923, they won their first World Series. There were great teams in the past, like John McGraw’s New York Giants, but the Yankees reached a new level of dominance. They won the series again in 1927 and 1928. Then, after a three-year absence, the Yankees returned to the World Series in 1932 against the Chicago Cubs. The Yankees swept that series in four games, but that’s not what people remember. To this day, people still talk about Game 3, when Ruth pointed his bat toward the center field bleachers, as if to tell the pitcher where his hit was going to land. On the very next pitch, he slammed one out of the par
k, into the center field bleachers. Ruth was so good he had even called his own shot.

  For generations, Babe Ruth was the greatest home run hitter who ever lived. His single-season record of 60 home runs was thought to be unreachable and stood for 34 years. He hit 714 home runs over his 22-year career, which was another number no one ever thought could be broken. It was a record that stood for 39 years. They were the two most celebrated and chased-after records in baseball.

  When Ruth retired, nearly every offensive record in the book—and even some pitching ones—belonged to him. He won the World Series three times with the Red Sox and four more times with the Yankees. Ruth was the model for the modern superstar. People still talk about him, because he was Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, Kobe Bryant, and Tom Brady combined. He talked big and played even bigger—in doing so, he became the idol of baseball fans across America. And to this day, he’s still an idol—for not a single baseball fan, alive or dead, hasn’t heard of the greatness of Babe Ruth.

  Babe Ruth

  TOP TEN LIST

  Babe Ruth’s career was defined by dominance. In particular, Ruth’s home run hitting prowess allowed him to lead not just the American League, but all of Major League Baseball in home runs eleven times, the most ever by any player. Here are other players who dominated the competition during their careers:

  Barry Bonds: Most MVP awards—7 (1990, 1992–1993, 2001–2004)

  Roger Clemens: Most Cy Young awards—7 (1986–1987, 1991, 1997–1998, 2001, 2004)

  Brooks Robinson / Jim Kaat: Most consecutive seasons winning a Gold Glove award—16 (Robinson: 1960–1975; Kaat: 1962–1977)

  Ty Cobb: Most seasons leading the majors in batting average—11 (or 10*) (1907, 1909–1915, 1917–1919 [tied 1907])

  Walter Johnson / Randy Johnson: Most seasons leading the majors in strikeouts by a pitcher—8 (W. Johnson: 1910, 1912–1914, 1916, 1918–1919, 1921; R. Johnson: 1993–1995, 1999, 2000–2002, 2004)