In order to explain
the 1942 pennant race, one must start with the Brooklyn Dodgers. I will do so
with a personal reminiscence.
One of the first
major books on baseball of any kind that I read was Leo Durocher’s 1975
autobiography Nice Guys Finish Last. I
first read it when I was fifteen and nearly thirty years later I can still say
there are few sports autobiographies like it.
In most
autobiographies the subject tries to show their side of history by casting them
in a favorable light. Durocher does this
to an extent but at no point does he try to make himself look like a saint or,
well, a nice guy. In the first chapter
he makes it clear that his famous quote is a misquote but explains the context.
He is discussing a game between his Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants in
1946 (rest assured, we’ll be covering that pennant race too) In it he describes
the makeup of the Giants including their manager Mel Ott. He says: “They’re all
nice guys and they’re in last place. I’m not a nice guy and I’m in first
place.”
This is pretty honest
for any major athletic figure. In that same chapter he quotes Branch Rickey
(who he would have a complicated relationship with to say the least) when he
said: “Leo Durocher is a man with an infinite capacity for making a bad situation
worse.” Not only does Durocher deny that, in the next sentence he says: “Carve
it on my gravestone.”
Durocher tells a
fairly completely story of his life in baseball, from his years as a player in
which Babe Ruth, a former teammate called him ‘the All-American Out’ to his
time on the 1934 Cardinals to how he ended up manager of the Dodgers in 1939.
He recounts his complex relationships with ownership from Larry MacPhail to
Branch Rickey to Horace Stoneham. He talks about the pennants he won but spends
more time discussing the 1941 pennant race than his Giants comeback in 1951.
(He actually tells us that he has no memory of seeing Bobby Thomson’s home run.
Like most players he expresses more admiration for those of his younger days or
his peak as a manager then the ones he did in his later years (he refuses to
accept any responsibility for his part in the failure of the 1969 Cubs) and he
glosses over certain parts of his story he doesn’t want to talk about (such as
why exactly he was banned from baseball at the start of the 1947 season). But
he also doesn’t take credit he doesn’t think he deserves; he makes it very
clear that he played no part in Jackie Robinson’s signing and is subdued in his
part in quashing the planned Dodger’s revolt just before Robinson joined the
team. It is not a modest biography, to be sure – he is unapologetic about the
kind of man he was but it’s remarkably honest.
That said he doesn’t
spend a lot of time concentrating on what he might consider the failures of his
career. It’s for that reason it was not until decades after I read this point
that I learned about the 1942 pennant race. The most he will say about it is in
what almost seems like a throwaway – “I’ve lost 13 and a half game leads as
well as overcome them.” Any casual baseball fans knows that in the latter case
Durocher is referring to his 1951 Giants, who won 37 of their last 44 games to
tie Brooklyn for the Pennant after being spotting a thirteen and a half game
lead on August 9th. Far fewer
would know that Durocher was on the other side of this, and that came in 1942
when his Dodgers at one point had a thirteen and a half game lead but the
Cardinals would overcome it on a stretch run that is considered by some experts
more remarkable than the 1951 Giants.
At one point in Nice
Guys Durocher mentions that the two greatest ballplayers he ever managed
were Willie Mays and Pete Reiser. Reiser, he tells us, might actually
have been better than Mays but he had everything but luck. It’s actually worth
discussing Reiser because he himself believes he has a role in the 1942 pennant
race.
Donald Honig in his Baseball
America wrote that history considers the three great might have been in
baseball to be Smoky Joe Wood, Herb Score and Pete Reiser. It’s worth
discussing who these players were.
Joe Wood began
pitching for the Red Sox in 1908. At the start of the 1910s he was becoming one
of the best pitchers in baseball and his 1912 season is one of the greatest any
pitcher ever had. He went 34-5, struck out 258, threw 10 shutouts and at one
period won sixteen consecutive games. Walter Johnson himself said that no man
threw harder than Smoky Joe Wood. After capping his year by winning three World
Series games he seemed at the top of the world. The next year, he fractured his
ankle and was never the same. He pitched well for a while – even led the
American League in ERA and winning percentage in 1915 – but eventually couldn’t
pitch any more and became a utility outfielder for the rest of his career.
Herb Score was an
incredible pitcher for the Cleveland Indians in 1955 and 1956, winning 36 games
and striking out 508 batters his first two seasons. On his third start on 1957,
Yankee Gil McDougald hit a line drive at him that hit him in the face, nearly
causing him to lose his eye. He did not pitch again for 1957 and when he
finally recovered he never pitched as well.
Wood’s and Score’s
stories are heartbreaking but far from rare for pitchers whose arms are more
fragile and can go awry in a heartbeat.
Reiser’s store is more tragic because he was an outfielder with enormous potential
that was taken away from him.
According to Durocher
the first time he played Reiser against the Pirates in spring training in four
games, no one got him out. He got thirteen hits with four home runs among them,
and he hit two from each side of the plate. Because of another fight between
Durocher and MacPhail, Reiser was basically a spare outfielder in 1940, hitting
.293 and driving in 20 runs in 225 at bats.
In 1941 Reiser played
his first full season and batted .343 to win the National League batting
title. He also led the league in
slugging percentage, total bases, runs scored and triples and finished second
in doubles. He finished second in the
voting for MVP to his teammate Dolf Camilli who led the league with 34 home
runs and 120 RBIs and was second to Reiser in slugging percentage and total
bases. In a later era Reiser might very
well have won the MVP but no one was pretending his play had not been brilliant.
When the 1942 season
began the draft had not yet begun to have its effect on the major leagues. Some
stars had been drafted but the lion’s share of the rosters from the year before
were still intact and that was true for both the Dodgers and the Cardinals. The
Cardinals had been favored to win the pennant race going into spring training,
but this time it was the Dodgers who got off to a meteoric start. The Dodgers were on cruise control going into
the All-Star break and Pete Reiser was a huge part of it. By July 19th
he was leading both leagues in batting with a .380 average and the Dodgers has
a thirteen and a half game lead over St. Louis.
On that day, in
Sportsman Park Enos Slaughter hit a fly ball to center field. Chasing after
Reiser collided with the outfield wall. Back
then not only were outfield walls not padded, they were usually made
with cement. Reiser hit the wall and was unconscious.
Reiser was in such a
state that a priest was called into pronounce last rites on him before he
regained consciousness. The trainer said
that he was done for the season. Perhaps if Reiser had been willing to accept that
fact, he might have become the legend so many thought he had the potential to
be. But two days later when the team was having a day game, he got out of bed
and began to dress. “The room started to spin as I did,” he admitted later.
He made it to Ebbets
Field. Durocher decided just to have him sit on the bench against Cincinnati to
fake out the opposition. But as the game went on, Durocher asked Reiser if he
could pinch hit. Reiser said he could. On the third pitch Reiser hit the line
drive against the wall that should have gone for a triple but as he was
rounding second base, he collapsed. He was hospitalized again, this time for a
month. Reiser came back later that year but he was never the same: his average
dropped to .310 by the end of the season. He spent the next three years
overseas but when he resumed his career, he continued to collide with outfield
walls and never played nearly as well again. He would occasionally show signs
of his former talent - he still holds
the National League record for stealing home seven times – but he was a shell of himself from that point
on.
Still while it can
not be denied that Reiser’s actions did doom his career, when he said later on
that he single-handedly lost the pennant for the Dodger that year, I think
Reiser is putting to much blame on himself. Because even if you allow for
Reiser’s collapse hurting the team, it’s hard to see how considering that the
Dodgers still won 104 games in the 1942 season. In the history of 20th
century baseball no team won that many games and did not win the pennant that
year. The most recent contender were the 1993 San Francisco Giants who won 103
games and still lost the division title to Atlanta on the last day of the
season.
So if the Dodgers
didn’t lose the pennant in 1942, how did the Cardinals win it? With
arguably the greatest stretch run in history. The closest parallel in modern
history may be the 1978 Yankees, who came from fourteen games down on July 19th
to win the division from the Red Sox in a one-game play-off. (No, I’m not mentioning this to rub salt in
Boston fans wounds; as we shall see, play-offs are actually central to St.
Louis and Brooklyn’s history later on.)
Billy Southworth’s
Cardinals had already been surging even before Reiser’s injury. They would go
22-9 in the month of the July but were only able to gain a single game on the
Dodgers. Then on August 9th the Cardinals began to truly astonish. They
won five of seven games between then and the 13th. They followed
that with an eight game winning streak and between the 14th and the
end of the month they won seventeen of nineteen games, including 3 out of 4
from Brookyln starting on August 24th.
On August 25th,
in what was to date the biggest-ever crowd for a night game in St. Louis, the Cardinals
and Dodgers played twelve innings of a scoreless tie. In the thirteenth, the
Dodgers finally broke in with a run against Mort Cooper. The Cardinals tied it
with a run in the bottom of that inning. In the bottom of the fourteenth with
the bases loaded, Terry Moore hit a single to put the Cardinals ahead 2-1. Mort Cooper got his sixteenth win, a fourteen
inning complete game.
By this point Cooper
was switching jerseys with almost every start so the number would match the win
he was trying for. He wore Gus Mancuso’s 14 when he got his fourteenth win; he
wore his brother Walker’s 15 for win fifteen; he wore reserve catcher’s Ken O’Dea’s
16 for that win; Erv Dusak’s No. 17, Lon Warneke’s No. 18 and Harry Gumbert’s number
19. We have no idea if he carried on the tradition until the end of the season,
but he probably didn’t need too. That year, he finished the season 22-7 with an
astonishing 10 shutouts and a 1.78 ERA, the lowest notched in the National
League since 1933 when Carl Hubbell had managed a 1.66 ERA for the New York Giants.
Just as Hubbell did in 1933, Cooper would be awarded the MVP at the end of the
1942 season.
Johnny Beazley, a
rookie sensation for St. Louis won his sixteenth game the next day. The Dodgers
managed to win the last game of the series, pushing the Cardinals to five and a
half back
Two weeks later the
Cardinals went to Ebbets Field for their last two games against the Dodgers. In
the sixteen games in between, the Cardinals had gone 14-2. Cooper pitched another
masterpiece in the opener, a three hit shutout for his twentieth win, helping
himself with two hits and scoring two runs. The next day Southworth went with
Max Lanier to beat Brooklyn 2-1, pulling them into a tie with the Dodgers.
Durocher refused to
acknowledge how bad things were for his team, saying that it had taken them
five months to catch them. But the next night the Cardinals split a doubleheader
with the Phillies while Cincinnati beat the Dodgers. The Cardinals were in
first place by half a game. The Dodgers didn’t fold, going 11-7 the rest of the
season, and ended their year by winning their last eight games. But when they
lost five out of six games between September 11th and 17th,
they could not recover because the Cardinals never lost. They finished the year
14-2 to finish the year with an incredible 106-48 record.
The Cardinals won
thirteen of fourteen one-run games during this stretch, but they also went 17-3
in games that were decided by four or more runs. They went 25-3 at home and
18-5 on the road. The most impressive
part of their streak was during this period that beat the Dodgers five times
out of six. Had the Dodgers only been able to win two more of those games, they
would have won the pennant.
As a team, the
Cardinals led the lead in every major offensive category with the sole
exception of home runs, hitting just 60 as a team. During World War II, offense
would diminish across the board for every team, and this was particularly true for
the National League. Only the Giants hit more than 100 home runs that year and
that was because they were led by Mel Ott and Johnny Mize. (Combined their 56
home runs would be nearly as many as the entire Cardinal team.) That didn’t
mean that the Cardinals lacked for offense; they led the league in runs scored,
doubles and triples. In pitching they were in a league of their own, leading both
leagues with an incredible Team ERA of 2.55. Not all of this was Cooper, Johnny
Beazley went 21 and 6, with a 2.19 ERA while Max Lanier went 13-8 with a 2.98 era.
The bullpen was also superb, led by Howie Krist, who went 13-3 to lead the
National League in winning percentage.
Few Cardinals managed
similar offensive numbers. Stan Musial in his first full season batting .315 with
32 doubles, ten triples, 87 runs scored and 72 RBIs. Still in his first full season, he finished
third in batting average in the National League. Leading him three points was
his fellow outfield Enos Slaughter, who would lead the National League in hits,
total bases and triples that year, while scoring 100 runs and driving in 98. He would finish second to Cooper for National
League MVP that year. Indeed, the MVP balloting in 1942 (as it would be for the
next three years) would be dominated by Cardinal players. Shortstop Marty
Marion finished 7th. Catcher Walker Cooper finished 11th.
Stan Musial finished 12th, Johnny Beazley 13th and Terry
Moore at eighteenth. It was a clear sign as to how evenly balanced and
respected the Cardinals were by the sportswriters of the era.
Despite their
impressive stretch run, the Cardinals still went into the 1942 World Series and
underdogs against the New York Yankees. Few could have blamed the oddsmakers. Joe
McCarthy had just taken the Yankees to their sixth pennant in seven years,
winning 103 games. Furthermore the Yankees had not lost a World Series since
1926, when Grover Cleveland Alexander’s pitching had given the victory to St.
Louis. And after the opener, there seemed no reason to doubt the oddsmakers.
The Yankees scored seven runs off Mort Cooper and were leading 7 to nothing going
into the ninth. Yankee Red Ruffing didn’t allow a hit until there were two out
in the eighth. Sure the Cardinals had come
back with four runs in the bottom of the ninth but the Yankees still demolished
St. Louis’ best pitcher.
Then in Game 2, the
Cardinals got off to a 2-0 lead. Johnny Beazley would pitch superbly and would
hold a 3-0 lead until the Yankees rallied in the eighth, helped by a two run
homer by Charlie Keller to tie the score. But in the bottom of the eighth,
Musial doubled and Enos Slaughter drove him in to put the Cardinals on top
again, then threw out a Yankee pinch runner to save the game in the top of the
ninth. The Cardinals won 4-3.
The next day Ernie
White, St. Louis fifth starter, threw a six hit shutout, even more remarkable
when one learns that it was the first time the Yankees had been shutout in a
World Series game in sixteen years – yes by St. Louis. The Cardinals won 2-0.
The next day, the Cardinals took an early 6-1
lead before the Yankees would once again rough up Cooper, this time driving him
from the game in the sixth with five runs.
His brother bailed him out in the seventh by driving in Slaughter to put
the Cardinals back ahead and they held on to win 9-6.
In the fifth game Johnny
Beazley made his second start against the Yankees and was nearly as good but so
was Red Ruffing. They battled to a 2-2 tie until the 9th when Whitey
Kurowski hit a two run home run off him to put St. Louis ahead. The first two
Yankees reached based in the bottom of the ninth, but Walker Cooper picked Joe
Gordon off second base and Beazley retired the next two batters. St. Louis had
beaten the mighty Yankees, four games to one in what was McCarthy first World
Series loss since taking over the team in 1931.
It was a triumph for
the Cardinals but it had been overshadowed by the realties of the war. Even as
the series had continued there was still doubt that the 1943 season would be
played. As it was the Cardinals would end up losing several players by the end
of the 1943 season. Slaughter had been sworn into the reserves late in the year
and in the winter his unit would be called up; he would not return to St. Louis
until after V-J- Day. Several other Cardinals went into uniform. One of them
was Johnny Beazley. Stationed in Texas, Beazley pitched some but not enough to
keep his arm in shape. When his old team came for an exhibition game, Beazley
would get hit hard early, reach back for something extra and injure his right
shoulder. He would never be the same pitcher (though we will hear from him
later)
But the biggest loss
the Cardinals faced came two weeks after they won the World Series. Sam Breadon
and Branch Rickey had been on loggerheads for years and on October 19th
he resigned. Shortly thereafter, he accepted a position as general manager of
the Brooklyn Dodgers. (The front office had tired of MacPhail the previous
year.) The day Rickey left the Cardinals
they got worse and the Dodgers got better, though it would take several years
for the full effects to be shown. And considering what the next two years would
be like for the Cardinals, few could imagine that it would change any time
soon.
In the next article I
will deal with the 1943 season as the full affects of World War II began to be
felt on baseball.
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