Miller Huggins

October 15, 1923. The Polo Grounds, upper Manhattan. When the final out settled into a Yankees glove, Miller Huggins -- all five feet six inches of him -- had his first championship. Eleven years managing in the major leagues, six of them with a franchise that had never won anything, and here it was. The New York Yankees, finally, were champions of baseball. Huggins would win two more before he was through, and build the greatest team the sport had ever seen along the way.

The Mighty Mite

Miller James Huggins was born March 27, 1878, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a law degree from the University of Cincinnati, where he also captained the baseball team, and then did the thing every practical instinct told him not to do: he skipped the bar exam for a middle-infield job that paid less and promised nothing. He played second base for the Cincinnati Reds from 1904 to 1909 and the St. Louis Cardinals from 1910 to 1916, a wiry 140-pound table-setter who couldn't hit for power and didn't need to. He worked counts, drew walks, led the National League in that category more than once, and retired with a .265 average that undersold how often he actually got on base. They called him "Rabbit." They called him "Little Everywhere." Mostly, they called him the "Mighty Mite," a nickname that followed him from the infield dirt to the dugout.

He'd managed the Cardinals since 1913 with middling results, which made Jacob Ruppert's decision after the 1917 season look like a strange one. On October 25, 1917, Ruppert signed Huggins to replace Bill Donovan, and co-owner Huston was furious about it -- he'd wanted a different man entirely. The baseball writers weren't impressed either. A small, quiet former second baseman with no championships on his resume didn't look like the answer to fifteen years of Yankees irrelevance.

Building Something From Nothing

Huggins didn't have Ruth yet. That trade came in January 1920, engineered by Ruppert and Ed Barrow, and it landed in Huggins' lap the way a hurricane lands on a coastline -- he didn't summon it, but he had to survive it (and figure out where to put everyone else). What Huggins built around Ruth was the rest of it: Lou Gehrig at first, Earle Combs in center, Tony Lazzeri at second, Bob Meusel in left, Waite Hoyt on the mound. He assembled a supporting cast good enough that even Ruth's home runs looked like part of a larger machine instead of a solo act.

The results came in waves. Pennants in 1921 and 1922 ended in World Series losses to John McGraw's Giants -- five games to three, then an ugly sweep (four losses and a tie, which is its own special flavor of humiliating). Huggins broke through in 1923, winning the franchise's first championship in the first year of the new Yankee Stadium. Three more pennants followed in 1926, 1927, and 1928, with titles in the last two -- back-to-back sweeps of Pittsburgh and St. Louis. The 1927 club that Huggins fielded, 110 wins and a lineup that opposing pitchers openly feared, earned the name that still gets attached to that era: Murderers' Row.

Managing the Unmanageable

Every account of the Huggins years eventually turns into an account of Ruth, because keeping the biggest star in the sport productive and (mostly) in line was the job underneath the job. Huggins fined him. He benched him. On August 29, 1925, after Ruth ignored a bunt sign in a tight spot and then blew off a team obligation following another late night, Huggins suspended him indefinitely and hit him with a $5,000 fine -- one of the largest in league history at that point. Ruth assumed Ruppert would overrule his manager. Ruppert didn't. Ruth apologized to both men and was back in the lineup by September 5.

That same 1925 season produced a quieter decision with a longer shelf life. On June 2, Huggins started a 21-year-old Lou Gehrig at first base in place of Wally Pipp, who'd reported with a headache on a team already lost in the standings. Gehrig never gave the job back. What began as a manager with nothing to lose trying something new became the 2,130-game streak that made Gehrig the Iron Horse.

Five Days in September

By September 1929, the pennant race was already decided -- the Athletics had it locked up, 18 games clear. Huggins was managing out a lost season when a red patch of erysipelas spread across his face and he checked into St. Vincent's Hospital on September 20. The infection turned into pyaemia, blood poisoning, faster than 1929 medicine could keep up with. Four blood transfusions later, Huggins died on September 25, at 51 years old. It's the kind of infection a prescription cures today. It killed him in five days.

The American League canceled every game on September 27 for his funeral. Thousands filed past his casket at Yankee Stadium. Coach Art Fletcher finished the season at 6-5 and then turned down the permanent job -- following a legend wasn't something he wanted, and Bob Shawkey got the call instead, twenty-two days after Huggins died.

The First Monument

On May 30, 1932, the Yankees dedicated a bronze monument to Huggins in deep center field at Yankee Stadium -- the first monument the franchise ever placed, years before Gehrig's or Ruth's joined it. The inscription reads: "A splendid character who made priceless contributions to baseball." He beat two of the greatest players who ever lived to that honor, which tells you something about how the people who actually worked alongside him measured the man.

Key Moments

The Yankees won seven more championships in the next two decades, under managers who got the parades and the plaques and the bigger headlines. None of it happens without the small man who took the job nobody wanted in 1917, fined the biggest star in the sport into shape, and gave a scared kid from Columbia a chance to play first base on a Tuesday. Huggins built the thing. Everyone else just kept it running.