Jimmy Sez

Recently, Joe Posnanski - the greatest baseball writer of our generation - undertook the task of ranking all of the plaques currently captured in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It's an interesting project, and certainly a unique way to dig through baseball history. Naturally, those rankings got me thinking about the Yankees and how we could do a similar exercise with the plaques housed in Monument Park. At the very least, it would be a good way to distract myself from the beatings they took recently from the Red Sox, Orioles, Braves, and Mets. In these rankings I focused only on plaques that cover what I'll call "uniformed" Yankees. That is, players and managers only. The handful of other plaques in Monument Park tend to be quite different in nature. I'm also ignoring the blue plaques beneath the retired numbers in Monument Park. There's a subset of players and managers who have been honored with a bronze plaque that have also had their uniform number...

This post is part of a series that includes material originally written for  The New York Yankees All-Time All-Stars  but had to hit the cutting room floor prior to publication. For other posts in the series you can search for the label "Author's Cut" on this site. “He knew how to hold a ball club together. He was a master psychologist. I thought he was a very brilliant man in many ways. He’d leave one player alone. He’d get one mad. Like Yogi he’d leave alone, and me he’d get mad all the time.” – Billy Martin The New York Yankees were at a crossroads in 1949. They had enjoyed unthinkable success under Joe McCarthy in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, but in the five years from 1944 through 1948 they had won only one World Series and were underwhelmed by Bucky Harris’ two-year stint as manager. Instead they handed the keys over to Casey Stengel, who in nine years as a manger in the National League compiled a record that stood 161 games below .500 and never finished bett...