‘Chairman’ was Yankees’ greatest starting pitcher
NEW YORK
During an era when the Yankees won the World Series so routinely it was joked that rooting for them was like rooting for General Motors, their ace pitcher owned the most fitting nickname: “The Chairman of the Board.”
Whitey Ford, the streetsmart New Yorker who had the best winning percentage of any pitcher in the 20th century and helped the Yankees become baseball’s perennial champions in the 1950s and ’60s, died Thursday night. He was 91.
The team said Friday the Hall of Famer died at his Long Island home in Lake Success, New York, while watching the Yankees in a playoff game. His wife of 69 years, Joan, and family members were with him.
Ford had suffered from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. His death was the latest this year of a number of baseball greats — Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock and Bob Gibson.
On a franchise long defined by power hitters, Ford was considered its greatest starting pitcher.
Not big and not overpowering, the wily left-hander played in the majors from
1950-67, all with the Yankees, and teamed with the likes of
Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra to win six championships.
Ford’s 10 wins are still the most in World Series history.
“If you were a betting man, and if he was out there pitching for you, you’d figure it was your day,” former teammate and World Series MVP Bobby Richardson told The Associated Press on Friday.
Ford won a Yankeesrecord 236 games and lost just 106, a winning percentage of .690. He would help symbolize the almost machinelike efficiency of the Yankees in the mid-20th century, when only twice between Ford’s rookie year and 1964 did they fail to make the World Series.
“This is one of the guys that’s a Mount Rushmore guy in the Yankee organization,” manager Aaron Boone said.
The blond-haired Ford was nicknamed “Whitey” while still in the minor leagues.
His death occurred in a month when he for so long soared on baseball’s biggest stage, and hours before his former team played Tampa Bay in a decisive Game 5 of the AL Division Series. The Yankees planned a patch with Ford’s No. 16 on the left sleeves of their jerseys.
“He would have been the starting pitcher in this game for the Yankees in years past,” Richardson said.
The World Series record book is crowded with Ford’s accomplishments. His string of 33 consecutive scoreless innings from 1960-62 broke a record of 292⁄ innings set
3 by Babe Ruth. Ford holds records for World Series wins, games and starts
(22), innings pitched (146) and strikeouts (94).
“Whitey earned his status as the ace of some of the most memorable teams in our sport’s rich history,” baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “Beyond the Chairman of the Board’s excellence on the mound, he was a distinguished ambassador for our national pastime throughout his life.”
Ford died on the 64th anniversary of the single greatest pitching performance in Yankees lore — Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Larsen died on New Year’s Day this year.
Ford also made Oct. 8 a special day, surpassing Ruth’s mark for consecutive shutout innings on that date in the 1961 Series. Ford was the MVP of that Fall Classic, twice beating Cincinnati.
“Mickey was hurt and we had a lot of backups in there against the Reds,” teammate Tony Kubek told The Associated Press. “We won that because of Whitey’s pitching.”
Ford and Mantle were cultural opposites, an odd couple who became inseparable off the field, Ford the fast-talking city kid, Mantle the shy country boy from Oklahoma. They enjoyed the attraction of New York nightlife along with rowdy, wise-cracking infielder Billy Martin and Stengel called the trio “whiskey slick.”
After Martin was traded in the aftermath of a 1957 brawl at the Copacabana night club, Ford and Mantle remained centerpieces in the Yankees dynasty and were elected together to the Hall of Fame in
1974.
Ford often called his election the highlight of his career, made more meaningful because he was inducted with Mantle, who died in 1995.
“It never was anything I imagined was possible or anything I dared dream about when I was a kid growing up on the sidewalks of New York,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I never really thought I would make it as a kid because I always was too small.”