Five O'Clock Lightning: Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the Greatest Baseball Team in History, The 1927 New York Yankees by Harvey Frommer

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(Hardcover)

  • Pub. Date: October 2007
  • 288pp
  • Sales Rank: 137,245

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    Product Details

    • Pub. Date: October 2007
    • Publisher: Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated
    • Format: Hardcover, 288pp
    • Sales Rank: 137,245

    Synopsis

    Eight decades is a very long time in professional sports. Yet eighty years after their spectacular season and thrilling World Series victory, the 1927 New York Yankees are still widely recognized as the greatest team in Major League Baseball history. Not only did they dominate their league and run away with the pennant, they became the first American League team ever to win the World Series in four games straight. They weren't called "Murderers' Row" for nothing. But many of the most fascinating and exciting details of that storied season have long been forgotten; many more have never been revealed to the public—until now.


    In Five O'Clock Lightning, award-winning sports writer Harvey Frommer puts you in the dugout, takes you aboard the team train, and lets you peek into the hotel rooms of the game's most celebrated team and its larger-than-life heroes. You'll meet legendary manager Miller Huggins, whose diminutive stature masked a gigantic store of baseball savvy; the young, robust, and exquisitely talented Lou Gehrig, known at that time as "the Buster"; the prickly but powerful Long Bob Meusel; the taciturn and talented Tony Lazzeri, anxious to redeem himself after blowing a key at-bat in the final game of the 1926 Series; and, towering over them all, the Babe.
    Quite fittingly, the story of the '27 Yanks begins and ends with Babe Ruth: from his fabled, and very public, preseason contract negotiations with team owner Jake Ruppert, which made Ruth the highest-paid player in baseball, to his raucous barnstorming tour with Gehrig following their spectacular victory in the Series. In between, he hit his sixtieth home run on the next-to-last day of the season,topping his previous world record of fifty-nine, set in 1921.
    Harvey Frommer draws on a huge amount of archival material—some controversial, some never before published—including oral history from '27 Yankees and opponents, long-buried letters, and diary notations. He paints a vivid and detailed portrait of the best team in baseball chasing greatness in Jazz Age, Prohibition-era New York City in all its pre-Depression glory.
    Packed with facts and statistics that cover everything from batting averages and fielding percentages to standings, player salaries, and World Series shares, Five O'Clock Lightning reveals the hidden history of the most memorable team ever to play the game of baseball.

    Publishers Weekly

    Frommer (A Yankee Century; Red Sox vs. Yankees) spares no detail in this exhaustive but sometimes tedious recounting of the 1927 New York Yankees championship season. The team, which won 110 games when the regular season was eight games shorter than it is today, starred the iconic Babe Ruth and a young Lou Gehrig. Ruth had his career high 60 home run season, and Gehrig batted in a league-leading 175 runs. The Yankees' trademark rallies were dubbed "Five O'clock Lightning," as they often scored in late innings when the clock struck five (Yankee Stadium in those days had no lights, and most games started at 3:30 p.m.). Frommer sets the stage with a sweeping overview of New York in the 1920s, and then chronologically rehashes the preseason, spring training, each month of the regular season and then the four-game sweep of the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series. He concludes with a chapter containing obituaries of all 31 members of the team, many of whom succumbed at early ages: Gehrig died 14 years after the 1927 season, at the age of 38, and Ruth 21 years later, at 53. Unfortunately, Frommer fails to put together an engaging narrative, simply offering a compendium of facts and statistics. (Nov.)

    Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

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    Biography

    Harvey Frommer has been writing about sports for nearly thirty-five years. He has been honored by the New York State Legislature and cited in the Congressional Record as a sports historian, a SABR Keynote Speaker, and an expert witness for Major League Baseball. Dr. Frommer is a professor emeritus at City University of New York and a professor at Dartmouth College in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. He has written nearly forty sports books, including Red Sox vs. Yankees: The Great Rivalry, A Yankee Century, and New York City Baseball.

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