From The NY Times;
In response to:
Whitey Ford, Beloved Yankees Pitcher Who Confounded Batters, Dies at 91
An irrepressible son of New York City, Ford joined the pantheon of baseball legends who dominated the 1950s and ’60s.
By Richard Goldstein
Oct. 9, 2020Updated 4:31 p.m. ET
Whitey Ford, the Yankees’ Hall of Fame left-hander who was celebrated as the Chairman of the Board for his stylish pitching and big-game brilliance on the ball clubs that dominated baseball in the 1950s and early ’60s, died on Thursday night at his home in Lake Success, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 91.
The Yankees announced his death.
Pitching for 11 pennant-winners and six World Series champions, Ford won 236 games, the most of any Yankee, and had a career winning percentage of .690, the best among pitchers with 200 or more victories in the 20th century.
At his death, Ford was the second-oldest surviving Hall of Famer, behind the former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, who is 93. His death came six days after that of his fellow Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals.
He was a scrappy, rambunctious, fair-haired son of New York City — hence the nickname — and through the decades a beloved one, as loyal to Yankee pinstripes as his most die-hard fans. “I’ve been a Yankee fan since I was 5 years old,” Ford said at his Hall of Fame induction at Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1974.
He was among the biggest names on Yankee teams featuring Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Roger Maris and his 1950s pitching mates Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi and Eddie Lopat. He survived all of them. And he joined Lou Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle and Rizzuto among the revered figures who spent their entire playing careers with the Yankees. The team retired his No. 16 and mounted his plaque beside theirs in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.
Ford had the competitive advantage of pitching for dauntingly good teams. But his prowess was never seriously questioned as he compiled an impressive 2.75 earned run average in 3,170 innings.
“He could throw any pitch, any time, for a strike,” Brooks Robinson, the Baltimore Orioles’ Hall of Famer, was quoted as saying by Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, in the o*al history “We Would Have Played for Nothing” (2008). “He had great players behind him, but Whitey Ford was the master.”
At 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, Ford seldom overpowered batters. But in his 16 seasons he mastered them with an assortment of pitches thrown with varying speeds and arm motions and delivered just where he wanted them. “If it takes 27 outs to win, who’s going to get them out more ways than Mr. Ford?” the longtime Yankee manager Casey Stengel once said.
Methodical on the mound, Ford was irrepressible off it. He joined with Mantle and Billy Martin for late nights on the town, inspiring Stengel to call them the Three Musketeers. Mantle, too, entered the Hall of Fame in 1974, and at the induction ceremony he was asked about the chemistry behind the friendship between him, the country boy from Oklahoma, and Ford, who grew up on the streets of Queens. “We both liked Scotch,” he said.
“In those early years it was three of us — me, Whitey and Billy Martin,” Mantle said, adding, “They were both brash, outspoken guys, and I could stay in the background.”
With the passing of DiMaggio and Mantle, Old-Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium became very much the Whitey and Yogi show. Ford and Berra, his catcher and baseball’s philosopher, were the celebrity elders of the hour. (Berra died in 2015 at 90.)
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