This Day In Yankee History
Posted by MJ Recanati on January 25th, 2011 · Comments (2)
According to my little desktop baseball calendar, today marks the 66th anniversary of Larry MacPhail, Dan Topping and Del Webb’s purchase of the New York Yankees from the estate of Col. Jacob Ruppert for $2.5M.
As Steve posited yesterday, the MacPhail/Topping/Webb ownership group presided over one of the best eras in Yankee history.
It’s remarkable to think that the most valuable team in American sports was once sold for $2.5M (or, 28 years later, for $10M).
Topping and Webb owned the Yankees for twenty years (1945-1964) and during those twenty years the Yankees won ten World Championships. They are arguably the most successful owners in the history of professional sports, and yet very little has ever been written about them. Strange, don’t you think?
Jim TreshFan wrote:
Yeah, it is strange.
Then again, I wonder if sports owners didn’t become “celebrities” or biography-worthy until later, when you had such famous eccentrics as Charlie Finley, Steinbrenner, Mark Cuban, Jerry Jones, etc.
I could be wrong here — and there are always exceptions — but I get the feeling that the only millionaires/billionaires people were interested in back in the MacPhail/Tobbing/Webb days were magnates (Howard Hughes) and movie stars (Samuel Goldwyn), etc.