From the team’s inception in 1903, the New York Yankees were a
floundering group that played as second-class citizens to the New York
Giants. With four winning seasons to date, the team was purchased in
1915 by Jacob Ruppert and his partner, Cap “Til”
Huston. Three years later, when Ruppert hired Miller Huggins as
manager, the unlikely partnership of the two figures began, one that set
into motion the Yankees’ run as the dominant baseball franchise of the
1920s and the rest of the twentieth century, capturing
six American League pennants with Huggins at the helm and four more
during Ruppert’s lifetime.
The Yankees’ success was driven by Ruppert’s executive style and
enduring financial commitment, combined with Huggins’s philosophy of
continual improvement and personnel development. While Ruppert and
Huggins had more than a little help from one of baseball’s
greats, Babe Ruth, their close relationship has been overlooked in the
Yankees’ rise to dominance. Though both were small of stature, the two
men nonetheless became giants of the game with unassailable mutual trust
and loyalty.
The Colonel and Hug tells
the story of how these two men transformed the Yankees. It also tells
the larger story about baseball primarily in the tumultuous period from
1918 to 1929—with the end of the Deadball Era and the rise of the Lively
Ball Era, a gambling scandal, and the collapse
of baseball’s governing structure—and the significant role the Yankees
played in it all. While the hitting of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig won many
games for New York, Ruppert and Huggins institutionalized winning for
the Yankees.
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