New York Yankees

They began, modestly enough as the New York Highlanders in 1903, owned by a couple of New York bartenders who laid out $18,000 to buy the Baltimore franchise and bring it north.

For their first eighteen years in New York, the Highlanders (they became the Yankees in 1913) seriously challenge for a pennant only once, in 1904 when star pitcher Jack Chesbro set a modern day record with forty-one victories, completing a staggering forty-eight games and posting an ERA of 1.82.

Some great players passed through New York in those years including Wee Willie Keeler, Hal Chase, Roger Peckinpaugh and Frank Baker, but the Yankees were always also-rans.

That all changed in 1920. The Yankees completed the famous deal to buy Babe Ruth from the Red Sox and also brought along some of Ruth's more talented teammates including third baseman Joe Dugan and pitchers Carl Mays, Waite Hoyt, Herb Pennock and Bullet Joe Bush.

With Ruth and a solid pitching staff as the seedlings, a dynasty sprouted. Yankee manager Miller Huggins guided the team to its first three pennants in 1921-22-23. They played the New York Giants in all three series, losing the first two; winning in 1923, the year they moved into Yankee Stadium.

In mid-decade, the team added a strapping young first baseman named Lou Gehrig to give the Yankees an unprecedented 1-2 punch, that along with supporting hitters Tony Lazzeri, Bob Meusel and Earle Combs, came to be known as "Murderer's Row." They won consecutive pennants again in 1926-27-28, winning the latter two World Series both in four game sweeps.

The 1927 team is considered by many baseball historians as the best team of all time, with Ruth hitting his Olympian sixty home runs (which was more than any American League team hit that season) and Gehrig hitting forty-seven. Gehrig had more runs batted in: one-hundred seventy-five to one-hundred sixty-four. Huggins died suddenly in 1929 and the Yanks were derailed for a few years, returning to the Series and sweeping the Cubs in 1932 under new manager Joe McCarthy. Ruth was gone two years later, but the Yankee machine would now enter an era of dominance rarely matched in the game before or since.

The Yankees won four straight World Championships from 1936-39, winning the pennant races by nineteen-and-a-half, thirteen, nine, and seventeen games respectively. They scored over or close to one-thousand runs in each of the four seasons with a brutal batting order that consisted of Gehrig, Lazzeri, catcher Bill Dickey, and a talented and charismatic new outfielder named Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio played anything like a rookie in 1936, hitting .323 with twenty-nine home runs and one-hundred twenty-five runs batted in. In fact DiMaggio was one of five Yanks to drive in over a hundred runs that year.

Although the Yankees lost Gehrig to the disease which claimed his life and now bears his name, they kept on rolling.

They won three more consecutive pennants in 1941-42-43. They beat the Dodgers in 1941, and split the next two with the Cardinals. McCarthy resigned after three straight middle-of-the-pack finishes and Bucky Harris led the team to another championship in 1947, during which Yogi Berra made his debut.

After a disappointing 1948 season, the team surprised everyone by naming former National Leaguer Casey Stengel as manager. Stengel started out winning five consecutive World Championships from 1949-53. Unlike their Bronx Bomber predecessors, this Yankee dynasty was fashioned around pitching; the trio of Vic Rashi, Allie Reynolds and Ed Lopat were the bedrock, joined in 1951 by a New York-born lefty named Whitey Ford.

This is not to say these teams did not have offense. There was still DiMaggio, and when he retired in 1951, Stengel oversaw the transition to Mickey Mantle in center field; Berra was winning three Most Valuable Player Awards and a hard-nosed outfielder named Hank Bauer was the new team sparkplug.

With the exception of 1959, the Yankees were in every World Series from 1955 through 1964. They beat up on the Dodgers frequently, (only losing to them in 1955) and traded championships with Milwaukee, in 1957 and 1958. By this time, Mantle had reached the heights of a triple crown season in 1956 (.353, fifty-two home runs & one-hundred thirty runs batted in).

The Yanks would lose the 1960 World Series despite outscoring Pittsburgh 55-27. Some of Stengel's pitching decisions did not sit well with the front office and Stengel was gone shortly after Mazeroski finished his triumphant trek around the bases in the bottom of the ninth in Game Seven.

The Yanks served notice that the Series upset and a new manager (Ralph Houk) would not derail them. They rewrote the record books in 1961 with Roger Maris hitting sixty-one home runs to beat Ruth's single season record and Mantle clubbing fifty-four. The team hit a record two-hundred forty (with no designated hitter), a record that stood until 1996. Whitey Ford won twenty-five games and led the Yanks to a five game win in the World Series. They won it all again in 1962 against the Giants and also won pennants in 1963-64.

Suddenly the bottom fell out and the Yankees stopped winning. The veterans grew old, the farm system was dry and the fans were bored with the Yanks' almost-inhumanly methodical winning. What the Yankees had accomplished to this point was staggering. Since the start of their dynastic run in 1921, they had won two-thirds of all the American League pennants awarded and almost half of the World Championships (twenty in forty-three years).

After a decade of wandering the wilderness of mediocrity, the team returned to the top, infused with new leadership and cash from George Steinbrenner, who bought the team in 1973. The Yankees again won three straight pennants in 1976-77-78. Catcher Thurman Munson hit over .300 and drove in over one-hundred runs three straight years, but a loss to Cincinnati in the '76 series prompted the team to sign free agent slugger Reggie Jackson. Jackson made a permanent name for himself in Yankee lore with his post-season heroics, especially in the 1977 World Series when he capped the Yanks victory with three homers in the decisive Sixth Game.

In 1978, the team erased a 14 game deficit to catch the division leading Red Sox, and then beat them in a one-game playoff sparked by Bucky Dent's three run homer and Reggie Jackson's solo shot. The team subdued Kansas City and Los Angeles for another championship.

The 1979 team was erratic and dispirited by the death of Munson in a plane crash on Aug. 2. In 1980, the team rebounded to win one-hundred three games, but lost the American League Championship Series to Kansas City, and in 1981, they were back in the Series again only to lose to the Dodgers in six games.

Through the rest of the decade, the team hit a slow decline. Chaos in the front office resulted in a revolving door of managers, the bleeding of talent and a suspension of Steinbrenner for misconduct.

A rejuvenated farm systems, astute trades and free agent signings built the team into a wild card winner in 1995, but a loss in the Divisional playoffs to Seattle cost manager Buck Showalter his job and brought the dawning of the Joe Torre era.

Torre has led the Yankees to the post season in each of his nine seasons through 2004. Torre blended veteran hitters like Paul O'Neill and Tino Martinez with younger talent such as Bernie Williams and Derek Jeter, liberally adding pitching talent like Andy Pettitte, David Cone, David Wells and Roger Clemens, with closer Mariano Rivera the icing on the cake. His formula has resulted in six pennants and four World Series rings.

Love them or hate them, the Yankees were the barometer of success for baseball and sports in the 20th Century. It seems unlikely they can repeat the length and breadth of their domination of the sport in the 21st Century. But under Torre they are off to a good start.