Baseball’s Best Runners-Up: 1942 Dodgers

Dem Bums indeed.

1942 Brooklyn Dodgers, 104-50. Finished in 2 ^nd to St. Louis Cardinals (106-48).

The first two installments of this series featured clubs which spent the majority of their seasons looking up in the standings: the 1885 New York Giants, 1886 Detroit Wolverines, and 1909 Chicago Cubs all surely felt a sense of urgency building from mid-summer. The 1942 Brooklyn Dodgers were different in that they were in first place for nearly the entire year, from April 19 until September 5. As late as August 5, they had a lead in double digits. Like the others, the 1942 Dodgers were certainly unlucky in having to duel with another extremely talented team. Only their season, however, is also mentioned among the worst collapses in baseball history.

In 1941, the Dodgers took their first pennant since 1920, and also won 100 games for the first time since 1899. They led the National League in every major offensive category, including hits, runs, steals, extra-base hits, batting average and slugging, and finished with a team OPS+ of 115. Pete Reiser hit .343/.406/.558 in a remarkable rookie season, earning a starting spot in the All-Star Game and coming in second in MVP voting behind teammate Dolph Camilli, the runaway champion. Camilli recorded 34 homers and 120 RBIs, both most in the league, and shared the lead in OPS+ with Reiser at 165. In total, seven Dodgers were named all-stars, also including Billy Herman, Cookie Lavagetto, Joe Medwick, Mickey Owen, and pitcher Whit Wyatt. Wyatt and Kirby Higbe each won 22 games, anchoring a staff that allowed the fewest hits in the N.L. and posted the lowest team ERA. Rabid Dodger fans rewarded the Bums by packing Ebbets Field day after day; in fact, Brooklyn sold nearly twice as many tickets as any other team.

As it turned out, they needed every win they could get, as Billy Southworth’s Cardinals battled them the entire season long. St. Louis spent 67 days in first place over the course of the 1941 season, mostly in the early-going. Leading the charge were 28-year old Johnny Mize and 25-year-old Enos Slaughter. The two teams split 22 head-to-head matchups evenly, and were tied in the standings at the beginning of September. On September 11-13, in their final series of the year, Brooklyn took two of three in St. Louis, including a Wyatt shutout. This gave them a two game lead which they never relinquished. In the Fall Classic, the Dodgers fell to the powerhouse Yankees in five games.

Entering the 1942 season, little had changed in Brooklyn. Reiser, Camilli, Medwick and Owen were all back, as were pitchers Wyatt and Higbe. Although Camilli, Wyatt and righty Curt Davis were all over 34 years old, none showed signs of slowing down, and the rest of the team was relatively young. The only significant move for the Dodgers in the off-season had been the acquisition of infielder Arky Vaughan from the Pirates. Vaughan was coming off eight consecutive all-star seasons, yet Brooklyn was able to pry him free with four spare parts from its 1941 team. He filled in the hole created at third base when Cookie Lavagetto joined the Navy in January, 1942. Vaughan was actually a natural shortstop, and had displayed excellent range in Pittsburgh, but manager Durocher was not interested in shifting the young Pee Wee Reese from his position. Ironically, Reese had also originally belonged to Pittsburgh, but left without having played for the big league club.

St. Louis had also engineered a trade involving a high profile player. In their case, however, the star was leaving, as Johnny Mize went to the New York Giants for three players and $50,000. Mize was replaced at first by Johnny Hopp, who had batted .303 the year before in left field. The most important development of the off-season in St. Louis, however, was not a transaction, but rather the continued development of 21-year-old Stan Musial. The young man had shot through the Cardinals’ farm system the year before, hitting the cover off the ball in Rochester and landing in Sportsman’s Park before the season was out. Hopp’s move to the infield created an opening for him at left field, and Musial was primed to make the most of it. Billy Southworth’s team certainly had promise, but none expected it to seriously challenge the heavily favored Dodgers.

On opening day, Curt Davis took the hill for Brooklyn and pitched his side to a 7-5 victory in front of over 32,000 fans at the Polo Grounds in New York. At the close of May, the Dodgers had a 14-3 mark and a four game lead in the standings. They had a brief scare on April 29, when Whit Wyatt was forced to leave a start against Cincinnati in the 1 ^st inning due to arm soreness. As he said afterwards, “my arm [felt] like it would come off.” With his status uncertain, the club went into a four game skid, but had righted the ship by the second week of May, when he returned and picked up his first victory of the season. They ran off eight in a row at one point in that month, and pushed their lead to seven games. Through June and July, the Dodgers put together few long winning streaks, but also avoided any major slumps. Their cushion in the standings vascillated between five and nine games.

The high point of the year came on Wednesday, August 5. In an early evening ballgame in Brooklyn with 24,000 in attendance, the Dodgers shut the Giants out, 4-0. It was their 74 ^th win of the season against just 30 losses. Lefty Max Macon faced just two batters over the minimum, while Babe Herman and Mickey Owen provided the offense. Thanks to a loss the day before by 2 ^nd place St. Louis, the Bums had opened up a double-digit lead in the N.L. With two thirds of the season in the rearview mirror, the Dodgers were poised to take another shot at a World Series title.

In comparison to their domination of the rest of the league, Brooklyn had struggled against St. Louis thus far. They had lost 8 of 16 games to them, including a few blowouts, while most of their victories had been nail-biters (they were 27-17 in one-run games on the year). St. Louis was getting superb pitching from Mort Cooper and Johnny Beazley, while Musial was having his anticipated break-out season.

Despite all this, no one could have foreseen the drama to take place down the stretch. Beginning on August 6, the bottom fell out:

*In the first 105 games, Brooklyn tied one game, St. Louis two.

Had this scenario played out seventy years later, Dodger fans could have prepared themselves for the fall by looking at the mid-season pythagorean expectancies for each team. Through the first two thirds of the season—up until Brooklyn pushed their lead to its highest, at ten games—St. Louis had actually outscored and out-prevented the Dodgers. They had underperformed their expectancy by eleven games, while Brooklyn had out-performed its own by one.

Why did St. Louis have such a large discrepancy between its projected and actual records? The most convenient explanation would be a good record in one-run games coupled with a poor record in blowouts. For the year, St. Louis was 25-24 in one-run games, which doesn’t seem suggestive. When split into the two parts of the season of which we are speaking, however, the result is striking. All of the relevant statistics are presented below:

After losing two-thirds of their one-run games in the first four months of the season, the Cardinals were able to take the pennant on the strength of an incredible 13-1 record in one-run games over the final 50 games of the season. For the season, the Dodgers actually did slightly better in close games, but they cooled down slightly in August and September, just as St. Louis was heating up. The blowouts appear to have been less of a factor, although it is worth noting that St. Louis had more of them.

Among those final fifty games were six head-to-head matchups, four in St. Louis and two in Brooklyn. St. Louis took five of them, which fittingly included three one-run affairs. The first four games were played in late August; Brooklyn’s lead stood at 7.5 before the series began. St. Louis won the first game 7-1, then the second and third by consecutive 2-1 scores. Brooklyn finally rebounded on Thursday with a 4-1 Curt Davis victory in the series finale, but the lead had been chopped to 5.5. The next time the clubs met, on September 11 in Brooklyn, the stakes had risen considerably—the lead was down to two games. Brooklyn was coming off a 10-2 shellacking at the hands of the Cubs, while St. Louis rode the tide of 23 wins in their last 27 attempts.

The first game was more of the same, as Mort Cooper shut out the Bums and brought his club within a single game. The second game, on Saturday afternoon, was pitched by two southpaws named Max: Lanier for the Cards, Macon for the Dodgers. Four of Lanier’s twelve wins thus far that year had been at Brooklyn’s expense. 27,511 packed the aisles at Ebbets Field, hoping the home team could stave off the contenders for one day more.

In the top of the second inning, Whitey Kurowski broke an early scoreless tie with a two-run blast to left field. As the New York Times noted after the game, Kurowski was “a powerful youngster whose taking over of third base some weeks ago started the Red Birds winging towards their present lofty height.” The Dodgers scratched back in the bottom half, however, as Pee Wee Reese drove in Mickey Owen with a double. The game progressed into the afternoon, with each team squandering its share of opportunities.

The Dodgers threatened seriously in the home half of the 7 ^th , after Durocher and Charlie Dressen were ejected following a heated exchange with umpire Al Barlick. Arky Vaughan hit a two-out single, then advanced to second on an error. With Frenchy Bordogoray at the plate, Lanier uncorked a wild pitch. Vaughan sped to second and, with the slightest hesitation, rounded the bag and made for home. Catcher Walker Cooper, however, recovered the ball in time to throw him out at the plate, ending the inning.

Again in the 8 ^th , Brooklyn nearly tied the game. Again with two outs, Joe “Muscles” Medwick dropped in a single, sending Babe Herman to third and bringing mighty Camilli to the plate. To the great disappointment of the crowd, Camilli tapped a meek grounder to the infield, ending the Dodgers’ best chance at the game, and also their time at the top of the leaderboard. The next day’s Times sought to capture the gravity of the situation: “Flatbush fandom’s worst fears today are a woeful reality. Those irrepressible St. Louis Cardinals are tied with Brooklyn’s Dodgers for the National League lead.”

At this point, the teams were tied in the standings with thirteen games left to play. It was clear, however, that the clubs were going in different directions. In fact, Cardinals team president Sam Breadon went so far as to begin printing World Series tickets. “I think we’re in,” he said. “We’ve won 29 out of 34 and those fellows have lost six of their last nine.” Having received this slap in the face, Brooklyn went on to lose four of its next six, all at home, allowing St. Louis to move in front by three. The Dodgers then closed the year on a seven-game run, but it was too late. The pennant had been lost.

Upon closer inspection, the 1942 season was not a collapse by Brooklyn as much as a St. Louis resurgence. The Red Birds had first-place numbers for the entire season, yet it did not show in their record until their remarkable second-half surge. Musial, 21 years old, finished the season batting .315/.397/.490, while Enos Slaughter was .318/.412/494. Like the Dodgers of 1941, the Cardinals of 1942 led the N.L. in hits, runs, batting, on-base and slugging, as well as in ERA and fewest runs allowed. The American League’s contender in the Fall Classic was once again the Yankees, and it was once again decided in five games. This time, however, it was the senior circuit prevailing, as Johnny Beazley defeated New York twice in the series, including the clincher in the Bronx. For the Cardinals, it was the beginning of a brief but glorious stretch under the watchful eye of Billy Southworth. For the Dodgers, despite such a promising start, it was just another “next year” gone by.

References: New York Times archives, www.baseball-reference.com