Yankees Birthday of the Day: Ralph Houk
· Yahoo Sports
The Yankees have had some decent success in replacing franchise cornerstones over the years. Back in the day, they had a run at catcher that, with some small gaps, went from Bill Dickey to Yogi Berra to Elston Howard to Thurman Munson. Their careers overlapped, but Mickey Mantle became the Yankees’ center fielder shortly after Joe DiMaggio’s career at the spot, a generation after Joe D. effectively succeeded Murderers’ Row center fielder Earle Combs. In recent years, Didi Gregorius did an extremely admirable job taking over at shortstop after Derek Jeter retired.
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In terms of Yankee managers, Casey Stengel is arguably the best ever. He’s tied with Joe McCarthy with seven World Series titles, while Stengel has one more pennant and did all that in a shorter time frame. However, the Yankees did — somewhat controversially — dismiss Stengel following the 1960 World Series loss. While the man who followed Stengel didn’t match the number of World Series titles or anything, he did pretty well himself.
Ralph George Houk
Born: August 9, 1919 (Lawrence, KS)
Died: July 21, 2010 (Winter Haven, FL)
Yankees Tenure: 1947-54 (player); 1955-60 (coach/Triple-A manager); 1961-63 and 1966-73 (manager); 1964-66 (general manager)
Born in Kansas in 1919, Ralph Houk grew up on a farm not far from Stull. He grew a love of baseball while watching his uncles play local semi-pro ball. He eventually started playing himself, and took to the catcher position, where he excelled with his sturdy frame at Lawrence High School in the shadow of the University of Kansas. He also excelled in football and indeed had offers to play in college both at Kansas and Oklahoma. However, Houk preferred baseball, and eventually inked a deal with the Yankees in 1939.
Houk got off to a decent start in his first couple minor-league seasons, but he left to serve in the army in World War II ahead of the 1942 campaign. While he wasn’t part of the initial D-Day Normandy landings, Houk did land on Omaha Beach shortly after and took part in the Battle of the Bulge. He received a number of commendations in his time in the military, including a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Houk’s strong military background eventually led to him being referred to as “the Major.”
Well over four years after his previous professional games, Houk eventually returned to baseball in 1946. He did enough that season and in spring training in 1947 to make the Yankees, but he spent the next couple seasons going back and forth between the majors and Triple-A. During that stretch, he nearly gave up on the Yankees at one point, believing that he should be with the big league team and not in the minors, but was eventually persuaded to stick through it.
Houk eventually would play with the Yankees for good from 1950-54, but was very much a third-string catcher. This stretch was, after all, the height of Yogi Berra’s powers, when the beloved backstop won multiple MVPs.
Houk only ever played in 91 games over eight major league seasons, and almost half of them came in that first 1947 season. He won his first World Series ring that year (getting a pinch-hit infield single off Brooklyn’s Joe Hatten in his first of two career Fall Classic at-bats) and was part of the dynasty that won five championships in a row from 1949-53, though during that latter stretch, he never received even 10 plate appearances in a single season. However, Houk did become a clubhouse leader in the Bronx, with teammates often turning to him for advice on their game and more. That reputation led to the Yankees approaching him about becoming a minor-league manager.
In 1955, Houk hung up his cleats and was named skipper of the Triple-A Denver Bears. In Denver, Houk had three winning seasons, including winning the American Association pennant in 1957. That success led to the Yankees bringing in Houk to serve as first-base coach under Stengel. He did so for the next three seasons, securing his seventh ring for the 1958 champs.
Then in 1960, the Yankees lost a heartbreaking World Series to the Pirates, losing on Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run in Game 7 despite easily outscoring Pittsburgh in the Fall Classic. In the aftermath, the team announced that they were moving on from Stengel. Owner Dan Topping said that they were looking towards the future as Stengel was 70, and the move would’ve been made even if the Yankees had won. (Stengel famously said “I’ll never make the mistake of turning 70 again.”) There’s also a thought that the Yankees didn’t want to lose Houk, whose success in the minors and as a Yankees’ coach had made him a hot manager target for other teams. Whatever the true reasons, Houk was indeed the choice to take over as Yankees’ skipper.
In 1961, Houk was taking over a team that already had plenty of talent and had been a dominant force in baseball over previous years, but he did put a bit of his own spin on it. Whitey Ford had already been the team’s ace, but Stengel often liked to move him around and selectively use him in tougher matchups, lowering his start total. Houk, however, said he would be taking the ball every fourth day no matter what. As a result, Ford won 25 games with a 3.21 ERA in 283 innings, winning the Cy Young Award for the first and only time in his career.
Then of course, there were the M&M Boys. From the start of the 1961 season, Houk slotted Roger Maris third in the lineup and Mickey Mantle fourth and that helped result in one of the most memorable seasons of all time. The two famously challenged Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record of 60, going back and forth all summer. A hip issue ended up leading to Mantle missing some time and finishing with 54, but Maris broke the record with 61, holding the mark for over 30 years.
Oh, and the Yankees as a team were pretty good in 1961 too. Led by those three great seasons and more, the team won 109 games and beat the Reds in five games in the World Series. Houk became just the third manager to ever win the World Series in their first season.
The Yankees repeated as champions in ‘62 in a seven-game classic over the Giants, with Houk standing by his starter who had been the goat two years prior, Ralph Terry. The righty pitched a 1-0 shutout in Game 7 and Houk had his ninth ring.
New York made it back to the Fall Classic in ‘63, but fell in a sweep to the Dodgers. After that season, Houk stepped into a front-office role and handed over the reins to Berra. While Yogi led the team back to the World Series, Houk and ownership weren’t enamored with him as manager and fired him after the team lost to the Cardinals in seven. In his place, Houk hired the Cardinals’ manager, Johnny Keane, who had clashed with his front office in St. Louis.
However, the stars of dynastic era of the team were starting to age out, and the Yankees didn’t have the reinforcements in store. Keane lasted just over a year before Houk dismissed him in May 1966 and took back over the job himself, eventually ceding GM responsibilities to Lee MacPhail. Houk’s second tenure as Yankee manager lasted eight seasons, but wasn’t remotely as successful as the first. He led them to a second-place finish in the AL East in 1970, but other than that the team hovered around .500 or worse. Houk did gradually help usher some stars of the future — such as Thurman Munson, Roy White, and Bobby Murcer — into the big leagues, but new owner George Steinbrenner decided to move on after the 1973 season. For his own part, Houk sounded relieved to not stick around long enough to really endure the worst of Steinbrenner’s meddling.
After leaving the Yankees, Houk managed the Tigers from 1974-78 and the Red Sox from 1981-84, but never led either to the postseason. However in both cases, he helped develop some of the teams’ future young stars. (Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, and others in Detroit; Wade Boggs, Roger Clemens, and more in Boston.) He later held a front office role with the Twins, helping assemble the teams that would win the World Series in 1987 and ‘91.
In 1990, he retired to Florida, where he eventually passed away in July 2010, the same month as Steinbrenner and longtime PA announcer Bob Sheppard. The Yankees wore black armbands in tribute to Houk for the remainder of that season.
Ralph Houk absolutely had the good fortune of inheriting a dynasty when he took over as Yankees’ manager in 1961. However, fancy cars still need a driver who knows what they’re doing and Houk absolutely did so, earning his players’ trust and keeping the dynasty going.
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series here.