My favorite baseball person was Miller Huggins.
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Miller Huggins was and still is my favorite baseball person. He wasn't the greatest infielder in history, but he did led the league in fielding and was a good leadoff hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals until Rogers Hornsby came along and as manager Huggins replaced himself with Hornsby. He was,if you look at his stats as a manager over 1400 wins , 6 pennants and 3 world series championships, one of the best Yankee managers in history. He was one of the best judges of talent and his leadership ability was beyond question with any managers of today or yesterday.
A lot of things have been said about his relationship with the Babe,but I can put that in a very good perspective because my first 11 years of life I grew up with Miller at my grandfathers and father house during the off season and sometimes even during the season. My real first understandings of who he was was after my 5th birthday. He use to come over for family dinners, like a lot of the players did during the 20's and 30's and what I loved to do was talk baseball with him. Miller was in his late 30's when he became manager of the Yankees in 1918, the year I was born, and it took him under 1923 to win his first world series championship and then he took the best team in history the 1927 Yankees of Babe and Lou and won again and then again in 1928. Sadly, he died in October of 1929 and didn't make the hall of fame until 1964 when the veterans committe elected him.
I remember sitting by the fire with him in the evening listening to him talk about the season and different players other than his own. Baseball writers loved to make up stuff about his relationship with Babe because Babe was always putting jokes on him and talking about his short size. After the 27 series during that winter he was over at the house and he and I were sitting together at the kitchen table one morning and I asked him right out what he thought about Babe and all the crap he was always putting in the clubhouse and on the trains is drinking and gambling. They played cards on the trains going from town to town. Well, he sat there for a minute and looked down into his coffee cup and then looked up at me a 10 year old asking him a question I am sure he was asked a thousand times before. He replied I can still hear today. "He's a big kid who is playing a game he loves and just being himself, I don't think he thinks that what he is doing is wrong or out of place because to him it is just a game". I really didn't understand it until much later but he use to talk about doing this or that and what he liked to have his team do in certain situations. God, he loved to talk baseball even to a 10 year old. He was my friend and today I love to think back and remember what he use to talk about when it came to playing baseball and even to some extend life. He died two years later and anybody that wants to believe that Babe didn't really like Miller Huggins should understand that the Babe thought the most of Huggins and knew that he use to drive him crazy in the clubhouse. I asked the Babe the last time I got to see him in 1932 about his relationship with Miller and he told me then that when Miller died that October a huge part of the Yankees died with him. I never really got to know Babe real well but he seriously understood what Miller meant to the Yankees and to himself. He use to tell my dad and Red Adair that Huggins built the Yankees into the teams they became even after he left he had put them on a course of tradition that still stands tall today.
I may have gotten off the subject so to speak here but my favorite Yankee will always be Miller Huggins because of his way and his persona. Who many major league managers would sit at the dinner table and talk baseball with a 10 year old on a daily basis. He was funny, upfront, serious when he needed to be and always made me laugh at the stories he told me about himself and the Babe, Lou, Tony, Waite all of them. One of his funniest, even today, is as the manager of the St.Louis Cardinals he wasn't really getting it done and when they bought in Rogers Hornsby as a player in 1917 he decided then that he would replace himself with as he called him one of the greatest hitters in history and that he can tell his grandkids when he is older that it took someone like a Rogers Hornsby to replace him as a player in the lineup. I am sure I didn't get the joke of it then but now it really is funny. He was one of my grandfather nicest and sweetest friends and I can honestly say I miss him even today. The Yankee organization put that statue up in center field for him but baseball never gave him his do until over 35 years later. He should have been in the first elite group of players/managers to be in the Hall of Fame. There have been more managers with more World Series Titles,Casey and a few others, but for what he did for the Yankees and in truth baseball by making the Yankees a unbelieveable tradition he did deserved to be in the hall much earlier and not by a veterans committee either.
