The Best: Wow, this is tough! Do I go with 1937? 1947? 1957? 1967? 1977? 1987? 1997? 2007? 2017? OK, that last one was merely speculative, but there you go. The point is: there are so many options!
The Yankees, obviously, know what looks good and how to stick with it. With the exception of an occasional patch, some updated fabrics, and differences in tightness and looseness depending on the fashion of the time, their uniform has been unchanged for 74 years. You don’t mess with perfection, and the Yankees’ uniform is perfect. In 20,000 years, when alien archeologists excavate the ruins of our planet and try to piece together the important aspects of our culture, they will find the Yankee uniform and hold it up as the ideal. It is baseball. And no matter how much you hate the Yankees, if you don’t admit it, you’re lying.
The Worst: This is all relative, of course. Pfun Pfact: they first put the interlocking “NY” on the uniforms in 1905, but it was an off-and-on thing for years thereafter, and didn’t stick for good until 1936. Still, they never looked bad. Even in dark blue. Even without pinstripes. Though, I suppose, we have to pick one of those for the worst of all time, because the Yankees look freakin’ weird without pinstripes.
Assessment: I have a personal, idiosyncratic favorite that is not the New York Yankees -- we’ll get to it on Monday -- but you could put any ballplayer in history in a Yankees uniform and they’d look pretty damn spiffy. Even guys like David Wells.