1939 World Series: Yankees Sweep the Reds

October 4, 1939. Yankee Stadium. 58,541 people showed up hoping to watch a baseball game. What they actually watched was a dynasty proving it didn't care how history is supposed to work.

Three months earlier, on a July afternoon in the Bronx, Lou Gehrig stood at a microphone and told those same fans -- in a voice that kept almost cracking -- that he considered himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. The Iron Horse had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that June. He'd benched himself in May after 2,130 consecutive games. He was 36 years old, which meant he was dying faster than anyone wanted to acknowledge.

Now he was in the dugout. Watching. In uniform.

That's the thing about the 1939 World Series that no recap fully captures. The Yankees won their fourth consecutive championship -- the first team in baseball history to do it -- against a Cincinnati Reds club that had just won 97 games and the National League pennant. The baseball was dominant. The Series was a sweep. But the emotional undercurrent of the whole week ran through the man in the dugout who couldn't play.

106-45 and Still Not Getting Enough Credit

The Yankees didn't stumble into this Series. They went 106-45 in the regular season, won the AL pennant by 17 games, and put together what SABR historians have called the greatest road team in baseball history -- 54-23 away from the Stadium. Joe DiMaggio won the first of his three AL MVP awards, hitting .381 with 30 home runs and 126 RBI. Red Ruffing went 21-7 with a 2.93 ERA and led the staff. This was a machine in full operation.

Cincinnati had won 97 games and featured a rotation anchored by Bucky Walters (27-11, 2.29 ERA, NL MVP) and Paul Derringer (25-7). They weren't pushovers. The Yankees made them look like it anyway.

Game 1: Ruffing's Walk-Off Gift

Ruffing and Derringer matched each other for eight innings. One run each. The kind of game where every pitch felt loaded, where a crowd of 58,541 went quiet at the wrong times. Cincinnati scored first in the fourth on Frank McCormick's single. The Yankees tied it in the fifth. And then they played four more innings of baseball without touching the scoreboard.

Bottom of the ninth, tied at one.

Charlie Keller stepped in and tripled to right-center -- a screaming line drive that sent 58,000 people from their seats. DiMaggio came up next, and the Reds made the logical, disastrous decision to walk him intentionally. That brought up Bill Dickey.

Dickey singled to center. Keller scored. Game over. The walk-off was almost too clean.

Ruffing had been 1-0 in each of the previous three World Series (1936, 1937, 1938). He ran the streak to four. He was the most quietly reliable postseason pitcher of his era -- four October starts, four wins, all complete games.

Game 2: Monte Pearson and What Almost Was

Here's what people forget about Monte Pearson: he'd already thrown the first no-hitter in Yankee Stadium history, in August 1938 against the Indians. So when he walked to the mound for Game 2, he brought some precedent for this kind of thing.

He was hitless through 7.1 innings. He'd walked Billy Werber in the fourth -- Werber was caught stealing, so the bases were clean -- and retired everyone else. In the eighth inning, with the Reds down 4-0 and the crowd buzzing with possibility, Ernie Lombardi lined Pearson's first pitch sharply over second base.

Single. No-hitter gone.

The Associated Press put it plainly: "Just when the fingers were 'crossed' for Monte to become the first flinger in World Series history to hurl a no-hit, no-run game, the spell was broken." Werber singled with two outs in the ninth. That was it -- a two-hitter with eight strikeouts and one walk, a shutout so dominant it almost broke the sport's all-time postseason record. Pearson went four-for-four in his World Series starts across the dynasty years. He never lost one. (He never got a Cooperstown plaque either, which is a different argument for a different day.)

Game 3: King Kong's Arrival

This was the game that introduced Charlie Keller to the national audience, though Yankee fans already knew what they had.

Keller was 22 years old. A muscular outfielder out of the University of Maryland who'd played just 111 games in his rookie season but hit .334 with 11 home runs. His arms were comically large, which is how he got the nickname "King Kong" -- not for any malice, just the visual.

Lefty Gomez started and lasted one inning (he was already battling the arm issues that would end his career within a few years). Bump Hadley came in and pitched eight more innings. None of that mattered, because what Keller did with the bat was the whole story.

First inning: Keller hit a two-run home run off Junior Thompson. Yankees up 2-0.

The Reds tied it, then went ahead 3-2 in the third. DiMaggio came up with Keller on via walk and hit a two-run shot. Yankees back in front, 4-3.

Fifth inning: Keller hit another two-run home run off Thompson. 6-3. The game -- and really, the series -- was decided right there.

Keller became the first rookie in World Series history to hit two home runs in a single game. If the Commissioner's Trophy had existed in 1939 and came with an MVP vote, Keller would have won in a landslide. There was no such award. History doesn't always give you the right paperwork.

Game 4: Lombardi's Famous Nap (That Wasn't)

Game 4 went to extra innings -- the only moment this series had any real drama, and even that drama ended with one of baseball history's more unfair epithets.

Oral Hildebrand started for the Yankees and threw four shutout innings before twisting his side. Steve Sundra took over, and eventually Johnny Murphy came in to close it. Bucky Walters started for Cincinnati and pitched all ten innings. The Reds tied it at 4 in the eighth on a Lombardi home run.

Tenth inning. Walters walked Frankie Crosetti. Red Rolfe bunted him to second. Charlie Keller (his third homer of the series had already come earlier, because of course it had) grounded to shortstop Billy Myers, who made his second error of the game. Crosetti to third, Keller to first. DiMaggio singled to left.

Crosetti scored.

Left fielder Ival Goodman fumbled the ball. The Yankees were already waving Keller home -- he was running hard from first. He scored, crunching into Lombardi at the plate. Keller's knee caught the catcher in the groin. The ball was loose. Lombardi was down.

DiMaggio was still running. He kept going. He scored too.

Three runs in the inning. 7-4 final. Fourth consecutive championship.

What the newspapers wrote the next day was this: Lombardi had "napped" at the plate. "Lombardi's Big Snooze," they called it, and the name stuck for decades -- as though one of the best catchers in baseball (the reigning batting champion, the 1938 NL MVP) simply dozed off when it mattered most. The reality was that he'd been incapacitated by a collision. The ball was under him, not resting beside him in the sun. The "snooze" was invented mockery from writers who were there to write a story and found a better one than the truth.

Lombardi never really escaped the label. That's one of the cruelties of baseball history -- the wrong stories have the best names.

The Dynasty That Gehrig Saw

When the final out was recorded at Crosley Field on October 8, 1939, Lou Gehrig was in the Yankees dugout. He couldn't celebrate the way he would have the previous year, or the year before that. The disease was already doing what it does.

Joe McCarthy, who'd managed Gehrig for nine years and watched him play his last game in late April, later said what was on everyone's mind: "Lou, what else can I say except that it was a sad day in the life of everybody who knew you when you came into my hotel room that day in Detroit and told me you were quitting as a ballplayer because you felt yourself a hindrance to the team. My God, man, you were never that."

That was the 1939 season -- the one the Yankees couldn't lose and couldn't fully celebrate. The fourth championship, the one that made history, the one nobody could pretend was the most important thing that year.

They won it anyway. Gehrig was there to see it. That counts for something, even if it's hard to say exactly what.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who won the 1939 World Series?

The New York Yankees defeated the Cincinnati Reds, four games to none. It was the Yankees' eighth championship and their record fourth consecutive World Series title -- the first time any team in baseball history had won four in a row.

Who was the best player in the 1939 World Series?

Charlie Keller, the 22-year-old rookie outfielder, batted .438 with three home runs and six RBI across four games. There was no official World Series MVP award until 1955; had one existed, Keller would have won it. Joe DiMaggio batted .313 and drove in the decisive runs in Game 4. Monte Pearson threw a near-no-hitter in Game 2.

What was 'Lombardi's Snooze'?

In the 10th inning of Game 4, Charlie Keller scored from first base, colliding with Reds catcher Ernie Lombardi and knocking him to the ground. With Lombardi incapacitated, Joe DiMaggio -- still running -- also scored on the same play. The press dubbed it "Lombardi's Big Snooze," implying the catcher had napped at the plate. The name was unfair -- Lombardi was genuinely knocked down by the collision -- but it stuck, and history remembered the 1938 NL MVP as the man who fell asleep in the World Series.

Was Lou Gehrig at the 1939 World Series?

Yes. Gehrig had been diagnosed with ALS that June and had removed himself from the lineup in May after 2,130 consecutive games. He was in the Yankees dugout for the Series but couldn't play. He died on June 2, 1941, at age 37. The 1939 championship was the last World Series he witnessed in uniform.

How good were the 1939 New York Yankees?

They went 106-45 in the regular season, won the AL pennant by 17 games, and won the World Series in four straight for the second consecutive year. Joe DiMaggio won his first AL MVP, hitting .381. Red Ruffing went 21-7. The team outscored the Reds 20-8 across four World Series games and out-homered them 7-0. They remain one of the most complete teams in baseball history.

Did Monte Pearson throw a no-hitter in the 1939 World Series?

Almost. Pearson was hitless through 7.1 innings in Game 2 before Lombardi singled to break it up. He finished with a two-hit shutout and eight strikeouts in a 4-0 victory -- one of the greatest World Series pitching performances in the sport's history. Pearson had also thrown the first no-hitter in Yankee Stadium history the prior August (1938), giving him an unusual flair for the near-perfect game.

McCarthy won his fifth World Series title that October, tying Connie Mack's record. He'd add a sixth two years later, in 1941, with a team that still had most of this core intact.

The dynasty ran four championships in a row, then two more after the war. Six rings between 1936 and 1943, with a gap for the conflict. The best team in baseball, for the better part of a decade, playing in front of a city that sometimes took it for granted because championships felt inevitable.

Gehrig never played again after 1939. But he was there when they won. That's where the story ends, because that's where it should.