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Whitey Ford, pitcher who epitomized mighty Yankees, dies at 91

Nicknamed the “Chairman of the Board,” Ford was a wily left-hander who pitched from 1950-67 in the major leagues, all with the Yankees.

Whitey Ford, the street-smart New Yorker who had the best winning percentage of any pitcher in the 20th century and helped the Yankees become baseball’s perennial champions in the 1950s and ’60s, has died. He was 91.



He won 236 games and lost just 106, a winning percentage of .690. He would help symbolize the almost machinelike efficiency of the Yankees in the mid-20th century, when only twice between Ford’s rookie year and 1964 did they fail to make the postseason.



Ford was in his mid-20s when he became the go-to guy in manager Casey Stengel’s rotation, the pitcher Stengel said he would always turn to if he absolutely needed to win one game. Ford was Stengel’s choice to pitch World Series openers eight times, another record.



Credit: AP

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Unlike Koufax, Ford was not an overpowering pitcher. Instead he depended on guile and guts, rarely giving hitters the same look on consecutive pitches. He’d throw overhand sometimes, three-quarters other times, mixing curves and sliders in with his fastball and changeup. To catcher Elston Howard, Ford was the "Chairman of the Board,” a nickname that fit Ford’s role at the top of the Yankees’ pitching staff.


“If there are some pitchers doing it and getting away with it, that’s fine by me,” Ford told sports writer Phil Pepe, in 1987. “If it were me and I needed to cheat to be able to throw the good stuff that would keep me in the major leagues at a salary of about $800,000 a year, I’d do whatever I had to do”

After his retirement, Ford briefly worked as a broadcaster and opened a restaurant in Garden City, “Whitey Ford’s Cafe,” that closed within a year. In 2001, actor Anthony Michael Hall played Ford in the Billy Crystal-directed HBO movie “61(asterisk),” about the 1961 season and the quest of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth’s single-year home run record.

Ford and Mantle were cultural opposites, an odd couple who became inseparable off the field, Ford the fast-talking city kid, Mantle the shy country boy from Oklahoma. They enjoyed the attraction of New York nightlife along with rowdy, wise-cracking infielder Billy Martin and Stengel called the trio “whiskey slick.” Mantle shortened that to just “Slick” for Ford, who proudly used the nickname as the title of his 1987 autobiography, co-written by Pepe. (Ford in turn would coin one of baseball’s most famous nicknames, “Charlie Hustle,” for Pete Rose).


Then it occurred to Martin that it might be fun to sling some insults at the wrestler. Their new friend continued to nod and smile. Then, when the evening was over Martin said good night in Japanese and the wrestler nodded and said, “Thank you very much for a nice evening,” in perfect English.

It was a lesson in international diplomacy.



“It never was anything I imagined was possible or anything I dared dream about when I was a kid growing up on the sidewalks of New York,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I never really thought I would make it as a kid because I always was too small.”




Mantle summed it up: “He was the best pitcher I ever saw and the greatest competitor. Whitey won seven out of every 10 decisions and nobody in the history of baseball has ever done better than that.”