[Syd Thrift]

1932 World Series Preview

New York Giants (110-44) vs. New York Yankees (96-58)

Overview
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Although the Giants are, obviously, heavily favored, one should not count out the New York Yankees, who battled through a great deal of adversity to win 96 games -a fine total in its own right. The Giants will attempt to bludgeon the Yanks down with long hits and home runs, while the Yanks will attempt to rely on good pitching and situational hitting to win the day.

Ballparks
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These teams' ballparks could not be more different. Yankee Stadium is a pitcher's park that heavily favors left-handed hitters due to a huge left field and a relatively short right field porch. They brought LF Carter Keeton in specifically to take advantage of this, and while he is out of the series with an injury they do have switch-hitting SS/1B Mike Kennedy and left-handed 3rd baseman Quincy Hudson to make life tough for teams visiting their park.

Polo Grounds has a gaping outfield - dead center is more than 500 feet away - but short foul lines (279 to left, 258 to right). The effect is that singles hitters struggle against the Giants' solid outfield defense but everybody hits a lot of homeruns. CF Erik Conn hit 24 of his 37 homeruns at the Grounds and 3B Emory Jefferson had a similarly home-friendly 20 of 37 circuit clouts at home, so expect a lot of power.

History
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The Giants were perhaps the best team in the National League in the teens - 5 pennants in 7 years between 1910 and 1916, although only one World Series title to show for it - but in recent years this franchise fell on hard times. Between 1922 and 1928 they managed a finish higher than 7th just once. Things have really turned around recently, though, culminating in a league-record 110 victory season this year.

The Yankees haven't had the overall franchise success of the Giants in terms of reaching the postseason but they've gotten a lot better lately. Pennants in 1928 and 1929 mean that this year marks the 3rd time in 5 years the Yanks have emerged at the top of the American League. Before this time the team was widely known as the weak sister of the junior circuit, finishing dead last 7 times in the first 22 years of its existence.

[b]Starting Rotation[b]
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Giants
Fred Fleming: Fleming is a fireballing right-hander who was brought in in a midseason trade with the Cleveland Indians, where he won 20 games in 1931. With the Giants this year, he was nothing short of unstoppable, winning 22 of 24 decisions, a percentage that would be the best in major league history if you discounted his 6-6 record with the Indians at the beginning of the year. Even so, only one man since 1913 won more games than Fleming, and that was his teammate this year.

John Burns: Burns had what some proclaim is the greatest season a pitcher ever had. We're not sure about that, but it was a very fine season, especially considering this was only the 2nd major league season for this young man. Burns doesn't have Fleming's heat, but lefties rarely do and besides his plus curveball and change of pace more than make up for it. He won 29 games against 8 losses, completed 30 of the 39 games he started, and had the 2nd lowest opponents' batting average in the league.

Ryan Rush: "Pinto" Rush was, for 1932, the calming veteran influence on this highly talented staff. Although he can still crack the mid-90s at times with his fastball, Rush is at this point in his career a pure pitch-to-contact man. More than two thirds of his outs were groundballs last year, a great quality for a man pitching half his games at the Polo Grounds to have. His career may be nearing an end but we believe this career 331 game winner still has enough left in the tank to gut out a Giants' Series victory.

Yankees
Bob "Eeyore" Meyers: Meyers is Exhibit A in the Yankees' new strategy for victory, which is to buy up all the talent they can get and use that talent as often as possible. The team from the Bronx picked up Eeyore from the crosstown Dodgers, who were frankly not in a position to appreciate a man with his particular gifts. Meyers finished his Yankee season 21-8 and had a K/BB ratio of 150/26. Meyers is a true talent who can throw 5 different pitches for strikes and who gets his opponents to beat the ball into the ground when they aren't whiffing at his pitches.

Steve Krug: The lone holdover from the 1929 champion rotation, Steve Krug has quietly won 20 or more games the last 5 years and 6 of his last 7. He does it by not making mistakes: he's never topped the century mark in strikeouts but walks even fewer men and gave up just 10 home runs last season. Right-handed hitters face Krug at their own risk: they hit just .234 against him this year with a paltry 3 home runs in 663 at-bats.

Alan Hack: Hack missed most of the season this year with a partially torn labrum, an extremely scary injury for a pitcher to have. However, he came back to pitch two games in October and looked like he'd just been on a vacation: 5 runs allowed in 18 innings of work, 11 strikeouts, and a 2-0 record. Hack is a huge wild card in this series: if he's truly at midseason form, it will be like the Yankees have two #1 starters in this Series.

Stars of the Lineup
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Giants
Erik Conn, CF: Not many people have their career seasons at 38 years of age, but Conn has always been one to buck the odds. He debuted in the midst of the dead ball era and did not belt his first home run until his 4th year in the major leagues. Even then, he didn't get to double digits until 1925, when he was 31 years old and an established starter. In the years that followed, Conn started to hit a bit more and, paradoxically, get more and more respect for his fielding. Now he's won 3 of the last 4 NL Gold Gloves for his play in centerfield. The power, though, is something else: the 37 homeruns he hit in 1932 were more than his previous 2 best seasons combined.

Benton Wheeler, SS: Wheeler is such a tremendous hitter that it's easy to forget how awesome a fielder he is as well. The Gold Gloves in 1929 and '31 only scratch the surface as to how great this man is with the glove. If we had a special version of the movies that was able to show highlights every night, rest assured that this man would appear on that movie show all the time. Hitting-wise, Wheeler merely hit for the cycle last month and has had a 20+ game hitting streak each of the last 2 seasons.

Emory Jefferson, 3B: Jefferson's also a reigning Gold Glover. Yes, the Giants may impress with their hitting but really it's their fielding that separates them from the other merely great teams of baseball history. Jefferson's power surge is also slightly easier to explain than Conn's: after all, he did crack the 20-HR mark in 1930. Jefferson set positional records for 3rd basemen this year with homeruns, total bases (340), slugging percentage (.613), and on base + slugging (1.013). Despite only playing the position for a little more than 4 years in the bigs, he is already the career leader among hot corner men in HRs with 96.

Yankees
Mike Kennedy, SS: While so many men fell around him, Kennedy was the rock of the Yankees' lineup, batting 3rd all season long and playing in the field wherever manager Rich Naughton felt he should play that day. When the Yanks needed him the most, he was there: he hit .393 for both August and September, during which time the team battled all kinds of injuries and still managed to triumph over the Chicago White Sox. The future looks cloudy: Naughton has stated publicly that he'd like to move Kennedy off of shortstop but there's nowhere else for him to go at this time. Still, it was a great year.

Nathan Benkhe, CF: At first glance, Benkhe's 1932 looks a lot like his 1931. Then you start to wonder how it is he scored 45 more runs than the previous season. At that point, you see the uptick in walks from 18 to 76 and the concurrent rise in on-base percentage from .346 to .398 and you begin to see why this team thinks they have the best lead-off man in the American League. He's no slouch in the field, either; this might be the year the 25-year-old wins his first Gold Glove.

Phil Foster, C: The slugging backstop played for his 3rd team in 3 years and finally got some of the respect he deserves. Foster has just an average arm, but is renowned throughout the league for his ability to call a game. Additionally, he moved into the cleanup spot the last month of the season and acquitted himself well, driving in 40 men from September 1 through the end of the year and just missing the 100 RBI mark for the season.