Flashback, May 1966: Floundering NY Yankees Replace Keane With Houk

Only a year and a half from managing the St. Louis Cardinals to a seven-game World Series championship over the New York Yankees, then resigning to take over the team he defeated, Johnny Keane (pictured) was fired 60 years ago this month after enduring a sixth-place finish in the American League in 1965 and a 4-16 start to the next season.

The Bronx Bombers may have felt confident that replacement Ralph Houk—who had managed the squad to three straight pennants and two world championships before becoming general manager for two seasons—would turn the club around. Indeed, the team proceeded to win 13 of the first 17 games after the return of “The Major” (a reference to his World War II service).

It was all a mirage, however. By the end of the year, the team had fallen into last place—a finish predicted by fading slugger Mickey Mantle in a private conversation with a reporter in spring training—and the first time the team had sunk to this level since 1912.

That ugly denouement was in keeping with the way the team’s top brass terminated Keane (not to mention his predecessor, beloved icon Yogi Berra, dropped after losing the 1964 World Series). 

It happened on a Friday—within 24 hours of now-minority owner Dan Topping scorning the rumors of the skipper’s departure as ridiculous—and, following a loss in Anaheim, Calif., conveniently timed so that most fans would not hear the bad news until they opened their Sunday papers.

Nobody realized that the team’s precipitous slide was not a temporary blip but the start of a decade in the wilderness before it returned to the postseason.

The days when the team’s fans could rely on seeing their team in October—when fans in other cities would grumble that cheering for them was like rooting for U.S. Steel—were long gone. “A sequence of historic events and bad decisions in 1964 changed the course of baseball history, ending four decades of Yankee dominance,” wrote sportswriter Leonard Koppett.

Those multiple, interlocking forces included:

*A bad managerial fit: In his memoir Uppity, St. Louis Cardinals first baseman (and future Yankee broadcaster) Bill White bluntly stated that Keane, the former manager he had come to admire, “tried to apply a National League hard-work ethic to an American League team of complacent, aging superstars and was resented for it.” The Yankees saw what White and others recognized—that he demanded much from players—and missed, beneath his strait-lacked, religious exterior, what they well knew: that he respected and rewarded effort. The team was particularly incensed when Keane fined clubhouse leader Mantle for showing up to a game hung over. Despite the players’ pro-forma statements to the press after Keane’s termination that they felt their underperformance had let him down, they admitted years later that he’d effectively lost control of the locker room.

*Injuries: It was bad enough that the team’s cornerstones in pitching (Whitey Ford, blocked artery in his pitching arm) and the plate (Mantle, hurt shoulder and pulled hamstring; Roger Maris, broken right hand) were sidelined for much of 1965 and still adversely affected in 1966. But the squad was also reeling from ailments that debilitated shortstop Tony Kubek, starting pitcher Jim Bouton, and catcher Elston Howard—and the team was on notice that second baseman Bobby Richardson, though still young at 31, would retire by the end of the season.

*A lost advantage in the new amateur draft system: The draft gave underperforming teams a better chance at picking prized prospects, undercounting powerhouse franchises like the Yankees.

*New ownership in the Kansas City Athletics: In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Yankees and A’s engaged in several trades that were so lopsided in the Bombers’ favor that many observers suspected something nefarious, even charging that the Midwestern team was, in effect, a “farm team” for the Bombers, giving them key players like Maris, Ralph Terry, and Clete Boyer. Whatever the truth of the arrangement, new A’s owner Charles O. Finley was so annoyed by what he heard that, in February 1961, he had a “Shuttle Bus to Yankee Stadium” burned as a not-so-subtle indication that the old ways were over.

*New ownership in the Yankees: In 1964, owners Dan Topping and Del Webb sold an 80% share in the Yankees to CBS. The transaction, shifting control of the club to the number-one television network, signaled a shift from a sportsman model of ownership to one owned by a conglomerate. (David Halberstam’s October 1964 is especially good at explaining the shock this represented to the baseball establishment.) As it happened, CBS had not done as much due diligence as they should have into the problems associated with the most famous franchise in sports.

*Corporate disinvestment in baseball operations: In trying to maximize the worth of the ball club in the late 1950s in preparation for an eventual sale, Topping and Webb had been told that, to stay on top, the team had spent heavily in several areas. The partners then cut their expenses in areas such as the farm system, scouting, and roving instructors. After a year or two, the realization dawned on CBS that Topping and Webb that, with their top stars aging—and even younger ones unexpectedly hurt—they had few options coming up who could replace them.

The nadir of the Bombers came on September 22, when only 413 fans showed up at Yankee Stadium for a drizzly weekly makeup game with the Chicago White Sox. Announcer Red Barber lost his job for highlighting the empty stands during the game.

The visual impact of all of this might have been embarrassing, but not any more so than the Yankees’ fall from contention and grace. The team would not appear in the postseason again until two more seismic forces appeared in the Seventies: free agency and the new owner who exploited it, George Steinbrenner.