The 1944 Red Sox: What Could Have Been

In 1944, even the Browns were able to win an American League pennant, having previously come close only when the George Sisler-led 1922 assemblage barely lost out to Babe Ruth and the pre-Lou Gehrig Yankees. But it could have turned out quite differently.

Missing from the action

The 1944 Red Sox were missing three of their best players but had already played without them in 1943 as they tumbled from a 93-win second-place finish in 1942 to a seventh-place 68-win total that season.  But every team was hurting – by one account, more than 60 percent of the 1941 major-league regulars were in the service in 1944.1 The Red Sox, even without Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, and Johnny Pesky, were clearly better off than the decimated Yankees, who by that time had lost Dom’s big brother Joe, Charlie Keller, Bill Dickey, Phil Rizzuto, and Tommy Henrich, among others, to the military.

The Tigers were also missing quite a few ballplayers – 11 were gone by 1943, most notably Hank Greenberg, who was drafted in May 1941.2  Nevertheless, they remained competitive principally because of the pitching of Dizzy Trout and Hal Newhouser, who garnered 56 of the 88 Tiger victories in 1944.

Great to play for

Red Sox manager Joe Cronin was viewed positively by many of his ballplayers.  Bobby Doerr, at age 96 the oldest surviving Hall of Famer, stated in late 2014 that Cronin was “great to play for.”2 According to Doerr, Cronin was a good manager who helped him to adjust to the major leagues when he came up in 1937. Wartime Red Sox players Tony Lupien, Jim Bucher, and Hal Wagner all concurred in Doerr’s assessment of Cronin – that he was a manager who handled regular players well and was smart offensively.  Lupien, however, believed that “the handling of the pitchers was the one flaw in his managerial makeup.”4

A potent offense

Although the Browns had 18 players on their 1944 roster who were designated 4-F,5 the Red Sox had a stronger lineup than any of the three other contenders. Unlike the Browns, Yankees, and Tigers, the 1944 Red Sox manned every position except catcher with men who were regulars before and/or after the war.  Notably, Bobby Doerr was midway through his Hall of Fame career, and Tex Hughson was the ace of the staff and one of the three best American League starters, along with Trout and Newhouser. Meanwhile, veteran Pete Fox was still producing in the outfield and was joined there by longtime star left fielder Robert Lee “Indian Bob” Johnson, who had been acquired for a pittance from the Washington Senators in the offseason.  Productive as well were “Rawhide” Jim Tabor at the hot corner and George “Catfish” Metkovich, who split time between first and the outfield.  In the end, the Red Sox had the best American League offense, leading in runs scored, batting average, and on-base percentage.

If they only had a little more pitching

Where the club was truly lacking was the pitching staff.  After Tex Hughson, it was pretty slim pickings.  Pitching mainstays of the 1942 Red Sox Joe Dobson and “Broadway Charlie” Wagner were away in the military; Opening Day starter Yank Terry, Emmett O’Neill, and newcomer Joe Bowman could hardly fill their shoes.  Brooklyn’s star pitcher Kirby Higbe, who watched several AL contests in late July while in St. Louis for treatment of a sore shoulder, observed that the Red Sox were “by far the best team I’ve seen.  They have a better lineup than the Yankees.  If only they had a little more pitching, they’d win.”6 One month later, Connie Mack predicted that the second-place Red Sox would not overcome the first-place St. Louis Browns because “they haven’t got the pitchers.”7

Or maybe the pitchers they had were not being used properly.  Jimmie Foxx, who was wrapping up his career with the Chicago Cubs, was quoted in the June 30, 1942, Yank magazine to the effect that Joe Cronin was seriously deficient in his management of a pitching staff.  In an interview conducted by sports editor Dan Polier, Foxx praised Connie Mack while disparaging Cronin: “One manager [Mack] knew what he was doing and the other didn’t.  Cronin didn’t.  If he had handled our pitchers properly we might have won several pennants.”  In the end, according to Foxx, when it came to pennant-race failures, “it wasn’t the fault of the pitchers.”8 Surprisingly, Cronin actually conceded that Foxx’s criticism might have some merit, although he noted that the stellar Yankees lineups of the late ’30s also played a part.9

Since Yank, which was a weekly military publication from 1942 to 1945, served a readership estimated by some to be as many as 10 million servicemen, the soldiers at war were well-informed of the alleged shortcomings of Red Sox management.10 Meanwhile, Boston Globe writer Jerry Nason made sure that fans on the home front also knew about failures of the Boston front office.  In an article dated August 5, 1944, Nason opined that the Red Sox public-relations staff failed to properly handle the news that Doerr, Hughson, and in-season acquisition and sparkplug catcher Hal Wagner were soon to depart for the military.  The club apparently told some newsmen about their impending player loss while telling others they knew nothing about it.  “Either the club is guilty of a deliberate attempt to cover up, or is capable of a remarkable nonchalance in the face of disaster,” Nason wrote.11

In fact, Boston management could not control the loss of critical talent to the war effort any more than Cronin could pitch Tex Hughson more frequently than once every four days.

Boston had lost too much to be competitive

Despite pitching inadequacies, the Red Sox stayed competitive in 1944 until mid-September.  The hitting of Doerr, Johnson, and Fox, who were 1-3-4 in batting at the All-Star break, and the stellar pitching of Hughson kept them close throughout the summer.  Wagner, who arrived in a May 7 trade from Connie Mack’s Philadelphia A’s, provided a boost with a career year as he shared the catching duties with Roy Partee. According to 1944 teammate and utilityman Jim Bucher, Wagner was a vocal leader, “a holler type. … He kept you on your toes.” And he was hitting .332 when duty called.

Meanwhile Doerr, according to Bucher, was “a steadying influence on the club – the kind of leader who helped everyone. And Hughson?  Bucher again: “A typical Texan – very confident and very good.” In fact, Bucher quoted Tex as often saying, “Anytime I go out there to pitch, I’m gonna win.  I know I’m gonna win.  Nobody can beat me.”12

All three of the above-mentioned players left for military service at a critical juncture of the 1944 season. Doerr was found to have a perforated eardrum in June of 1944, but the eardrum was completely healed by the time he was re-examined later in the season, leading to his reclassification as fit for duty.13 Doerr’s last game was September 3.

Hughson and Wagner knew their time was coming – they had been allowed to start the season subject to recall. Hughson changed uniforms after winning his 18th game on August 9; Wagner’s last appearance came on August 27.  Even before they left, sportswriter Harold Kaese editorialized that their departures meant that “Red Sox morale has wilted like a starched collar on a sultry day.”14 Clem Dreisewerd, after winning 20 games for Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League, arrived in late August to try to fill the void caused by the loss of Hughson.  He remembered being told by Doerr, who had not yet departed, that the team was feeling down after Hughson left.  Dreisewerd later said that “we had more life on a last-place club in Sacramento than a first-division club in Boston.”15

Looking back 70 years in 2014, Doerr felt that Boston had lost too much to be competitive when he, Wagner, and Hughson all left the team.  Doerr believed that Hughson was good for 20-23 wins.  When Hughson departed with an 18-5 record, nearly one-third of the 154-game schedule remained. One could do the math and conclude that Tex easily could have ended up with even more wins than Doerr’s relatively modest prediction. 

Doerr also pointed out that articles of the time indicated that the loss of his own bat and stellar defense was also critical.16 If we use retrospective calculations of wins above replacement as a guide, we can certainly see what a huge loss of talent the Red Sox suddenly experienced.  Hughson had a 5.7 WAR – the rest of the staff had a negative WAR of 0.1 for the season.  Meanwhile, Doerr’s 5.9 WAR was second only to Indian Bob Johnson’s 6.3 on the team, and Wagner’s 2.4 was fourth among offensive players behind the 2.8 of Jim Tabor. 17 Is it any surprise that the Red Sox lost 10 straight games in mid-September, falling from three games in back of the Browns to a fourth-place finish, 12 games back?

DORON “DUKE” GOLDMAN is a longtime SABR member who is specializing in research on baseball integration and the Negro Leagues. In addition to expanding his research on the Double Victory campaign, he is currently researching various aspects of the career of Monte Irvin.

 

Notes

1 Bill Gilbert, They Also Served: Baseball And The Home Front, 1941-1945 (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1992), 113.

2 David Finoli, For the Good of the Country: World War II Baseball in the Major and Minor Leagues (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002), 88.

2 Email from Don Doerr to Bill Nowlin, conveying Bobby Doerr’s responses to questions posed by the author, October 13, 2014.

4 Harrington E. Crissey, Jr., Teenagers, Graybeards, And 4-F’s Volume 2: The American League (New Jersey: Self-published, 1982), 20.

5 William B. Mead, Baseball Goes to War: Stars Don Khaki, 4-F’s Vie For Pennant (Washington, DC: Farragut Publishing Company, 1985), 141.

6 Boston Evening Globe, July 25, 1944.

7 Boston Evening Globe, August 29, 1944.

8 Yank, Volume 3, Number 5, June 30, 1944, 23-24.

9 Boston Evening Globe, August 10, 1944.

10 brown.edu/Facilities/University_Libraries/libs/hay/focus/focus2/focus2.html, accessed October 15, 2014.

11 Boston Evening Globe, August 5, 1944.

12 Crissey, Teenagers, 27-28.

13 Email from Don Doerr.

14 Boston Evening Globe, August 7, 1944.

15 Crissey, Teenagers, 38.

16 Email from Don Doerr.

17 baseball-reference.com/teams/BOS/1944.shtml.