baseball in the 1940s

If you enjoyed Tom Ruane's article on the '30s, here's the next one:

http://www.retrosheet.org/Research/RuaneT/rev1940_art.htm

The big story on the mound in 1946 was Bob Feller's assault on the single-season strikeout mark. He struck out ten while pitching a three-hit shutout in the opening game of the season, and he struck out eleven in pitching his second career no-hitter at the end of April. By the time he completed back-to-back shutouts in early July, Feller had struck out ten or more batters in a game ten times. At the All-Star break, he had thrown nineteen complete games in twenty starts and had 190 strikeouts to go with a 15-5 record and a 1.90 ERA.

And he wasn't done yet. At the end of July, he pitched a one-hitter and eight days later, he did it again. This was his eighth career one-hit game, breaking the previous AL record set by Addie Joss from 1902 to 1910 and tying the major league mark set by Old Hoss Radbourn from 1881 to 1888. By an odd coincidence, the batter with the only hit against Feller in his latest one-hitter was Frankie Hayes, who had been with Cleveland earlier in the year and had caught Feller's no-hitter.

Feller had a 21-6 record after the one-hitter, and even though he lost six of his next seven decisions, he didn't pitch poorly during that stretch. He did, however, pitch a lot. In September, Feller made nine starts, completed eight of them, and pitched twice in relief for a total of 79 innings. Four of those starts came with only two days rest and one came only two days after he had pitched five innings in relief. All this might have made sense if the Indians had been in a pennant race, and Boudreau had decided that the chance of winning a pennant outweighed the risks of ruining Feller's arm, but at the beginning of September, Cleveland was in fifth place, 31 1/2 games behind the Red Sox. No, the Indian braintrust kept running Feller out there every three days for one reason: they wanted him to break the strikeout record.

And he did. Or he didn't. On the last day of the season, Feller defeated Newhouser and the Tigers 4-1. The victory left both Feller and Newhouser with 26 wins, the most in the majors, but more importantly, Feller's five strikeouts gave him 348 for the season, five more than the 343 batters Rube Waddell struck out in 1904. But even as he was approaching Waddell's record, researchers were saying that the 343 mark was incorrect, that Rube had actually struck out 349 batters in his record-setting season. If you count the three strikeouts during his winning stint in that year's All-Star game, Feller topped even Waddell's actual strikeout total. But of course no one does.

To modern baseball fans, used to pitch counts and innings limit, what Feller did that season seems crazy. Things were different then, however, and while people might have looked at Feller's 5-9 record down the stretch and worried that all those innings pitched might have tired him out, few would have connected his workload that year with the fact that his fastball disappeared midway through the next season, or that he would never again strike out as many as 200 batters in a season and would have one only more game in his career with ten or more strikeouts after the first two months of 1947.

I just noticed this yesterday! I read up to 1943 during lunch, I think this is my favourite part so far:

Saturday, July 10th was "Salvage Day" at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, and 4,512 women traded tin containers of fat (and a dime) for tickets to the game. In all, over 5000 pounds of fat were collected in drums outside the park for use in making explosives.

Different times.

yeah, now all the fat is in the seats *rimshot*

LOL @ Spahn and Sain actually putting up WORSE numbers than the rest of the Braves' pitchers down the stretch in 1948!!