Best Yankees season

By Trey Lyle


The Yankees are the winningest, most iconic franchise in all of sports with 27 championships. This is a franchise that was founded in 1901, and it took until the last decade in the 2010s before the team went a whole decade without reaching the World Series. So this might be the hardest one of all the team to pick the best season, but also it isn’t. 

It is the team that is widely considered to be the greatest baseball team in the history of Major League Baseball. 

The 1927 New York Yankees. 

Maybe the most star-studded team of all time that featured the famous “Murderers’ Row” line up featuring four Hall of Famers in Earle Combs, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Tony Lazzeri. As a team, the Yankees batted .307 and slugged .489 and scored 975 runs, outscoring opponents by then record 376 runs. To put that in perspective, the Cleveland Indians led the league last season in run differential by only 112 runs.  

As mentioned, this team featured two of the greatest players of all time in Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, who both had monster seasons. Ruth hit a then-record 60 home runs in a season, which set the focus on his chase of his previous record of 59 home runs set in 1921. The Yankees won the league by 19 games, being in 1st place wire to wire that season. Ruth's stats that season were incredible as he hit .356, drove in 164 runs, and slugged .772. 

The reason Ruth didn’t win MVP is because there was a rule back then that an MVP can't goe to one person in back-to-back seasons, so that honor went to Gehrig, who had a phenomenal season of his own right. Gehrig hit .373, had 47 home runs and hit a league-best 175 RBIs that season. 

The team’s pitching staff was no joke either. They had a league-best 3.20 ERA. They were headlined by two Hall of Famers at the top of the rotation in Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock. Hall of Famer Miller Huggins also managed the team. Just a team loaded with talent that we haven’t seen ever since. 

As mentioned, the team dominated the American League, winning by 19 games, winning 110 games, which was an American League record at that time. They went on to sweep the Pirates in the World Series to complete the best season in Yankees history and maybe in the history of Major League Baseball.