THE 1941 MEXICAN LEAGUE SEASON
November 17, 2019 by Kevin Johnson · 2 Comments
Before the 1941 season began, the Mexican League consolidated, going from 7 teams down to only 6 teams. Although the number of Negro Leaguers decreased from 67 to 58, in percentage terms they increased from around 33% to 40% of the total player population. But this understates their impact, as in terms of At Bats, Negro League position players had over 50% of the league’s AB’s. And even that underplays the impact of the Negro League position players. A look at the OPS+ Leader Board will reveal the highest ranked native Mexican player was Epicacio Torres, at 96 OPS+.
This time Josh Gibson played the entire season in the league, and easily was the “MVP” for 1941, hitting .374 with 33 Home Runs and 124 RBIs in 358 At Bats. It would have been a Triple Crown season for Gibson except that Wild Bill Wright hit .390, and led the league with 26 Stolen Bases. It was a good year for Shortstops as Bus Clarkson (.334/.414/.598), Sam Bankhead (.351/.433/.521), and Willie Wells (.347/.430/.516) all had strong years.
Mexican Professional Baseball Hall of Famer Jesús Valenzuela
was the ERA leader at 3.12 (153 ERA+), with his Tampico teammates Francisco Castañeda
(3.51 ERA) and Nate Moreland
(3.67 ERA) finishing right behind him.
Azules de Veracruz pitcher Barney Brown
had the best W/L record at 16-5.
In the race for the championship , even with the top 3 pitchers Tampico only finished in 3rd, as heavy hitting Azules de Veracruz , with Hall of Famers Gibson, Wells and Ray Dandridge won for the second consecutive year.
(The data comes primarily from Pedro Cisneros’ “Mexican League Encyclopedia”, compiled into electronic form by Frank Hamilton. I, Juan Rivera, Eric Chalek, and Gary Ashwill all reviewed, edited, modified and added to the data, particularly in areas of team information, player identification and biographical material.)
Hi – quick question. The batting & pitching stats do not seem to add up to how many games were accounted for in the standings. Is that because there are boxscores missing for a certain amount of games? Just curious. I am in awe of your organization’s drive and commitment to document these leagues. Be well.
Cheers,
John
John – that’s a great question. For most league/seasons on the site, we’ve built them ‘from the ground up’ using individual game box scores, and in those cases we make sure that all the batting and pitching stats add up correctly. For the Mexican League however, we are using already compiled stats from various encyclopedias and other sources. Unfortunately, some of those sources do not include all stats, most particularly batting stats for all pitchers, so the batting and pitching stats will never exactly match. Also, because we estimated Runs Allowed based on known batting runs, we are probably under-estimating runs scores and allowed by some small percentage.