The Blunder Years: The Dark Ages of the New York Yankees (1965-1973)

Someone once said, “There once was a team so strong, that when a player hit a single, he was stopping the rally.” Such was the legacy of the New York Yankees through the early 1960s. Love ’em or hate ’em, theirs was a legacy of winning, of great players, of class and dignity. Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle were household names, and their participation in the fall classic was routinely anticipated. That would all come to a screeching halt in 1965, when the Yankees would begin an unforeseen and precipitous downslide. Finishing in last place in 1966, the team would languish under new CBS ownership, succumbing to the specters of age, injuries, mismanagement, and neglect, with no one to replace their immortal superstars. This was the Horace Clark era, the dark ages of the New York Yankees that I call the “blunder years.”