Bucky Harris

Bucky Harris managed the Yankees for exactly two seasons, 1947 and 1948. He won a World Series in the first one and got fired after the second, a 94-win season that would've been a pennant in almost any other year. That alone makes him an unusual case in franchise history. What makes him a strange one is that none of it was new to him. Harris had already done the "young manager wins it all" trick once before, twenty-three years earlier, with a team from Washington that had no business winning anything.

The Boy Wonder

On February 10, 1924, Washington Senators owner Clark Griffith handed the manager's job to his 27-year-old second baseman. Harris had five years in the big leagues and zero managerial experience. The Senators hadn't finished better than fourth since Griffith bought in. Nobody outside the clubhouse expected much.

Harris delivered a pennant by two games over the Yankees -- a season documented from the losing side in this very encyclopedia -- and then took Washington to its first World Series against John McGraw's New York Giants. He hit .333 in that Series himself, not just running the club but hitting in the middle of the lineup. Game 7 went to extra innings on the back of two bad-hop grounders over a rookie third baseman named Fred Lindstrom, the second one plating Muddy Ruel with the Series-winning run in the twelfth. Washington had its only championship. Harris, at 27, had become the youngest manager ever to win one.

The nickname followed him for the rest of his life: The Boy Wonder. It got harder to live up to every year that passed without a repeat.

Twenty-Two Years in the Wilderness

Harris managed the Senators again the following season and lost the 1925 World Series to Pittsburgh in seven games, blowing a 3-1 lead. Critics ripped him for leaving a tiring Walter Johnson in for the Game 7 loss. Harris never budged on it: "If I had it to do over again, I'd still pitch Johnson."

What came next was two decades of moving around without ever getting back to October. Detroit. Boston. Washington again. Philadelphia. Washington a third time. He managed 29 seasons across parts of six different stops, fourth-most in baseball history, and by the mid-1940s the Boy Wonder tag had curdled into something closer to a punchline -- a reliable baseball man, respected around the league, who couldn't recapture whatever he'd had in 1924.

A Job Nobody Expected Him to Get

The Yankees needed a manager in the worst way by the fall of 1946. Joe McCarthy had resigned in May after 35 games. Bill Dickey lasted 105 more before quitting in September. Johnny Neun finished out the year as a caretaker. Club president Larry MacPhail had brought Harris into the organization that season in a front-office capacity, and both men kept insisting, publicly, that Harris wouldn't be managing anyone.

MacPhail also floated Brooklyn's Leo Durocher for the job and talked himself out of it. "I don't think Leo would have been the logical choice for this job," he said. "There were other angles involved." On November 5, 1946, MacPhail named Harris manager instead. The announcement read like a formality by the time it came. Harris was 50 years old, a well-traveled baseball lifer taking over a roster that still had Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, and a 22-year-old rookie named Yogi Berra on it.

The Second Championship

The 1947 season gave Harris everything the '24 Senators couldn't sustain. The Yankees ran off a 19-game winning streak that buried the pennant race by July, and DiMaggio edged Ted Williams for MVP by a single point. October brought a seven-game war against the Brooklyn Dodgers that's already been picked apart on this site in full -- Berra's pinch-hit home run, Bill Bevens's broken-up no-hitter, Al Gionfriddo robbing DiMaggio at the bullpen fence. Harris just needed one more thing to go right, and Joe Page gave it to him: five scoreless innings of relief in Game 7, a 5-2 win, and Harris's second championship. Twenty-three years after the first one.

The champagne barely dried before the front office that hired Harris blew itself up. At the victory dinner at the Biltmore Hotel, MacPhail got drunk, insulted his own partners and players, took a swing at farm director George Weiss, and announced his resignation on the spot. Topping and Webb bought him out the next morning and made Weiss general manager. Harris had just delivered the franchise's 11th title. The man now running the front office hadn't hired him and didn't especially want him.

Fired Anyway

The 1948 Yankees won 94 games and finished third, 2.5 games behind Cleveland and 1.5 behind Boston in a race that came down to the season's final week. Ninety-four wins is a pennant most years. It wasn't enough to save Harris. Weiss reportedly viewed him as an old-style "book" manager, a holdover from the MacPhail regime rather than his own hire, and the two men never got along. The most-repeated version of the story -- that Harris wouldn't give Weiss his home phone number -- made the rounds in the sportswriting of the day, including a Saturday Evening Post piece on his successor. Whatever the real friction was, the outcome wasn't in doubt. On October 12, 1948, the Yankees hired Casey Stengel, and Harris was out after two years, one pennant, and one ring.

After the Bronx

Harris went back to managing -- Washington a third time from 1950 to 1954, Detroit again in 1955 and 1956 -- without ever finding his way back to a pennant. He retired from the dugout after 1956 with 2,158 career wins, the most of any manager without a winning record, spread across 29 seasons and five franchises. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1975. He died on November 8, 1977, in Bethesda, Maryland -- his 81st birthday, the same date he'd been born.

The Boy Wonder tag was supposed to describe a start, not a whole career. Harris spent 22 years trying to prove it wasn't a fluke, bouncing between six organizations without ever getting back to the top. Then he did it again in the Bronx, with a roster he didn't build, in a job nobody thought he'd actually get. It still wasn't enough to keep it.