Today's addition is HOFer Whitey Ford, the Chairman of the Board. Ford was maybe the most successful pitcher of his era, and his World Series stats are still all over the record books, most notably his 10 wins. He started an amazing eight Game Ones, but remarkably never pitched any of the seven Game Sevens the Yankees had in that run. I was looking around for some good Whitey stories, and ran across this one, by C. Paul Rogers III, on the SABR website. I thought it was pretty good, so I clipped it from there, to share with your morning coffee:
The Yankees assigned Ford to report to spring training in 1947 with the Binghamton Triplets of the Eastern League, who trained in Edenton, North Carolina. The Triplets were managed by former Yankees southpaw great Lefty Gomez who had trouble remembering all of his new players’ names. Gomez imposed a 10:00 pm curfew. A carnival was in town and one night about 9:40 Ford and teammate Ray Passapanka decided to catch one last ride on the Ferris wheel before getting back to their hotel. They ran into a problem when the Ferris wheel operator would not stop the wheel to let them off and ended up getting back to the hotel a few minutes after 10. They were met in the lobby by Gomez, who promptly fined them each five dollars.
A number of years later when Ford was with the Yankees, he happened to see Gomez interviewed by Joe DiMaggio on television between games of a doubleheader. Gomez related how, in spring training in Edenton he had given the Ferris wheel operator a couple of dollars to keep the wheel going past 10:00 pm before walking back to the hotel to await the tardy ballplayers. After the interview, Gomez came into the Yankee clubhouse only to be confronted by Ford, who said, “You SOB. How can you keep that from me all these years?” Gomez laughed and said, “I got a lot of mileage out of that story at banquets.” Ford said, “Well, at least you can give me back the ten dollars you fined me.” Gomez reached in his pocket and gave him the money and Ford had his revenge. Gomez had only fined him five dollars.
The card has a wrinkle in the upper left that doesn't really show on the scan, thus the Vg rating, otherwise a pretty nice one.
