The Old Brawl Game: Cubs vs. Dodgers in the 1940s

During the 1940s National League baseball was largely dominated by the Cardinals and the Dodgers. St. Louis won four pennants in the decade while finishing second five times. Brooklyn took three flags and were runner-ups three as well. Besides a horrendous 1944 season, “dem Bums” were third the rest of the time. It was the era of Stan Musial against Dixie Walker.

But if the Dodgers played their money games against the Redbirds, they had their blood matches with the Cubs. Between 1940 and ’49, Brooklyn took Chicago on 119 occasions while the Cubs were victorious 101 times. Considering that the Dodgers nearly always had a far superior team, it was a fine showing for the Cubs.

In 1940, the Dodgers had become a force to be reckoned with after years of general dormancy, thanks mainly to the often controversial leadership of fiery manager Leo Durocher. The Cubs, on the other hand, were a franchise on the decline. After 14 straight years as contenders with four pennants—yes, that actually happened—the Chicago Nationals would drop to fifth place that season. While the Dodgers and Cardinals had built massive farm chains, the Cubs waited for apples to fall in their direction.

Such was the scene when the Lords of Flatbush locked horns with Chicago’s North Side gang on July 19, 1940, at Wrigley Field. In the bottom of the eighth inning, one-time Cub Hugh Casey on the mound for the visiting team. The Cubs had already scored two runs on Bill Nicholson’s 14th home run of the year, and Hank Leiber was on third base when Cub ace Claude Passeau came to bat. According to Chicago Tribune sportswriter Ed Burns, “Hughie wasn’t feeling especially chummy.”

Casey’s first offering to his mound rival was a wild pitch, Leiber scored easily. Now a bit incensed, Casey plunked Passeau between the shoulder blades. Not known as a pacifist, Claude hurled his bat at the offending Brooklynite as the dugouts emptied. After ducking the missile, Casey charged on Passeau with help from teammate Joe “Muscles” Gallagher, who attacked the Cub pitcher. As Cub manager Gabby Hartnett pulled him off Passeau’s back, Chicago third baseman Stan Hack put Gallagher out of commission with a haymaker.

Eventually, the umpires, ushers, and Chicago police brought the brawl to an end as the Cubs went on to an 11-4 victory. It was Passeau’s 11th win of the season and his fourth in a row.

The stage had been set. During the winter of 1940- 41, Cub owner Phillip K. Wrigley hired former sportswriter Jim Gallagher (no relation to Joe) as general manager and Jimmy Wilson as field boss. Together, the “James boys” embarked on a series of trades that made the Cubs look like a farm team for the Dodgers. Jealous of the popularity of Cub second baseman Billy Herman, Wilson and Gallagher swapped him to the Dodgers for $40,000, infielder Johnny Hudson, and a player to be named later. Not long thereafter, pitcher Larry French and outfielder Augie Galan were handed to Brooklyn on silver platters as well. Thought to be over the hill, all of these players soon found the fountain of youth in Brooklyn uniforms. The blood rivalry was heating up!

The Dodgers were back in Chicago on May 19, 1941. In the bottom of the second inning, the Cubs were already ahead 3-0 when Hugh Casey walked Bill Nicholson to start the inning. Usually a fireman, Casey appeared uneasy in a starting assignment. Nicholson easily stole second behind his back, after which “the Mad Russian,” Lou Novikoff, drew a free pass to first.

Up to the plate came the bulky rookie Cub catcher, Clyde McCullough. Although slower than a rock moving uphill, McCullough beat out a drag bunt to load the bases. Chicago second baseman Lou Stringer then coaxed Casey’s third walk of the inning to force Nicholson home. Seconds later, Dodger third baseman Cookie Lavagetto muffed Bobby Sturgeon’s grounder, allowing Novikoff to score. As if this were not humiliating enough, pitcher Claude Passeau smashed a grand-slam homer to make the score 9-0 with still nobody out.

At that point, Casey went to the showers and Mace Brown took the mound. It looked like a forerunner of instant replay as Stan Hack drew a walk and went to third on Phil Cavarretta’s double. Dom Dallessandro then flied to Pete Reiser for the first Cub out, with Hack scoring on the sacrifice. Up for the second time in the frame, Bill Nicholson swished a home run for the eighth and ninth Cub runs of the inning. Novikoff singled and went to second on McCullough’s sacrifice. Stringer walked, but Sturgeon flied to Joe Medwick to end the inning. The score was Cubs 12, Dodgers zip.

That was the way it stood in the top of the fifth inning when Leo Durocher announced to plate umpire Lee Ballafant that his team was playing the game under protest on grounds that the Cubs were allegedly over the player limit. Interestingly, the Cub of controversy was the “player to be named later” in the Billy Herman trade, Charlie Gilbert. In reality, Gilbert had indeed reported to Chicago on May 6 but was still on the disabled list due to an ankle injury.

Ballafant requested that Cub field announcer Pat Pieper relay Durocher’s message to the audience, but Pieper’s translation to the partisan crowd was that Leo was complaining “because the Cubs have too many runs.”

Chicago went on to a 14-1 victory as Leo the Lion’s grievances were dismissed by league officials.

As that fateful season neared its end, the rivalry was already entering its “believe it or not” stage. In the first game of a September 10 doubleheader in Chicago, Brooklyn held a 4-2 lead. With one out in the top of the ninth, Cub pitcher Johnny Schmitz—in his major league debut—replaced Bill Lee, who had earlier relieved Claude Passeau. On Schmitz’s first offering, Cookie Lavagetto grounded into a double play to end the inning. In the bottom of the frame, Chicago bailed it out to win, 5-4. In hurling but a single pitch, Schmitz had gained his first victory!

To add icing on the cake, the Cubs won the second game by the same score. Despite the victories Brooklyn would win its first flag in 21 years while the Cubs dropped in the standings to sixth place.

By 1942, the Cubs had acquired the services of a temperamental rookie pitcher named Hiram Bithorn. Brooklyn was in town on July 15 and Bithorn was on the mound. Durocher began needling the young hurler from the visitors’ dugout. Getting a bit fed up, Bithorn whirled and fired a fastball at Leo’s skull in the top of the fifth inning. Players emptied onto the field from both benches, but the umpires managed to restore order before a full-scale rumble erupted. Hardly intimidated, the Dodgers bumped off their hosts, 10-5. Ex-Cub Billy Herman knocked a home run as ex-Cub Kirby Higbe took the win with relief help from ex-Cub Hugh Casey. As the Cubs ended up sixth again, the only consolation they could take was that the Cardinals surpassed the Dodgers at the end of the season to win the pennant by two games.

Wartime shortages were soon hitting home in baseball. The Brooklynites were back in Chicago on July 30, 1943, for an apparently unique event in history. With Johnny Allen on the hill for the Dodgers in the third inning, Phil Cavarretta cracked a home run off the left-field foul pole. In pre-war times, the baseball would have been discarded. But this time the umps gave it back to the Brooklyn pitcher. On the next pitch, Bill Nicholson slapped the pellet onto Sheffield Avenue for his 15th round-tripper of the year. To this writer’s knowledge, it was the only time that two homers were hit off successive pitches and with the same baseball. The Cubs sailed away to an easy 12-3 victory, a sweet taste of revenge for pitcher Hiram Bithorn. But Brooklyn enjoyed the last laugh, finishing third to Chicago’s fifth.

As the Chicago-Brooklyn antagonism continued, strange happenings resumed along with it. On May 18, 1945, Dodger outfielder Luis Ohno made history by hitting a grand slam home run plus a bases-loaded triple ( along with a double for good measure), as the Dodgers outslugged the Cubs, 15-12, at Ebbets Field. It was Chicago’s sixth straight loss. Earlier, Bill Nicholson’s three-run homer with two out in the sixth had temporarily knotted the score at 9-9. But in ’45 the Chicagoans were not to be stopped.

They won their “most recent” pennant, leaving Brooklyn 11 games behind in third place. Included in the championship drive was a 20-6 mauling of the Dodgers at Brooklyn on August 15. Cub catcher Paul Gillespie, chiefly remembered (if at all) as their first player to wear a crew cut, drove in six runs with two homers and a single. Andy Pafko and Heinz Becker also homered for Chicago, while Hank Borowy went the distance for the victory.

But the Cubs had won the 1945 flag largely because they had more 4-F’s than any team in the league and because the Cardinals (who finished a close second) lost Stan Musial to the Navy. By 1946, that temporary advantage had gone up in smoke. While the Dodgers and Cardinals had superstars coming back from the service, the Cubs had a few good journeymen at best.

The defending league champs were once again in Flatbush on May 22, 1946. With the score tied at one apiece in the top of the 10th, Cub shortstop Lennie Merullo slid into Dodger second baseman Eddie Stanky spikes high to break up a double play. Merullo and Stanky, who had not gotten along when they were Cub teammates in 1943-44, were wrestling it out in the dust before umpire Lynn Boggess and Brooklyn shortstop Pee Wee Reese broke it up. The two fighters were ejected from the game, which Brooklyn finally won, 2-1, as Dixie Walker’s double off Johnny Schmitz drove in Dick Whitman with the winning run in the bottom of the 13th. 

The bad blood was far from over. During a pregame practice the following day, Merullo walked into the batting cage to show Reese his black eye, reportedly telling him that if he wanted to hit him again to do it while he was looking so that he could break Reese’s neck. Sneaking up from behind, Dixie Walker slugged Merullo on the back of the head, and then headed for the home dugout. Lennie grabbed Walker, tripped him to the ground, and knocked out one tooth while breaking another in half. By now every­body on either side of the fence had become involved in the melee. Phil Cavarretta was pushed back by the police, “who apparently thought the Dodgers needed protection,” according to writer Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Tribune. Cavarretta later denied taking part in the brawl but was conspicuously silent when asked if he had punched Leo Durocher in the nose.

From that point on, five policemen were stationed in each dugout. Again, the Dodgers pulled off a 2-1 victory, this time in only 11 innings. Walker, Reese, Merullo, Cavarretta, and Cub coach Red Smith were all slapped with fines. Jim Gallagher protested those of the Cub players, but his face-saving gesture went nowhere.

The Cubs were going nowhere either, finishing a distant third as the Cardinals and the Dodgers duked it out for the pennant. St. Louis eventually won it, along with the World Series. In their last gasp of winning ways for another two decades, the Cubs squared off with the Dodgers in Brooklyn on September 15, 1946, winning the first game of a twin bill, 4-3, in 10 innings. But in the sixth inning of the nightcap, a swarm of gnats descended upon Ebbets Field like an Old Testament plague. The obnoxious insects refused to depart, causing the contest to be called as a 2-0 Dodger win. Perhaps that was Brooklyn’s way of saying to Chicago, “Gnats to you!”

Cub fans gloated over the winter as commissioner Happy Chandler suspended Durocher for alleged associations with gamblers and other unsavory characters. But with Leo gone and Burt Shotton as their “temporary” manager, the Dodgers changed baseball forever by hiring Jackie Robinson, the first African American player in the majors since 1884 as well as the first to make racial integration permanent. On May 18, 1947, a crowd of 46,572 shoehorned its way into Wrigley Field to see Robinson’s Chicago debut. Although Jackie went hitless in his first Chicago appearance, the Dodgers won the game, 4-2, en route to another pennant while the Cubs sank to sixth.

By the end of the ’40s, Leo Durocher deserted Brooklyn permanently to become field boss of the New York Giants, while the Cubs had become the doormat of the National League. But the smoldering Chicago embers could occasionally still turn into a blazing fire when Brooklyn was around. On June 19, 1949, another overflow Wrigley Field assemblage (42,089) saw Cub manager Frankie Frisch, catcher Bob Scheffing, and bench warmer Al Walker get tossed from the game over umpiring calls which they thought were a bit too much in favor of the Dodgers. Momentarily inspired, the Cubs snapped a seven-game losing streak with an 8-2 triumph, helped by the long ball hitting of Andy Pafko and Hank Sauer. Far from demoralized, Brooklyn went on to win 17 games from Chicago that year. Ironically, the Cubs even helped the hated Dodgers win the pennant by thumping the Cardinals two out of three during the final weekend of the season.

As the ’40s evolved into the ’50s, the Cub-Dodger hatred still simmered, even if the open belligerency declined. In July 1950, Hank Sauer, Ralph Kiner of the Pirates, and Enos Slaughter of the Cardinals were voted as the starting outfielders for the National League All-Star team. But team manager Burt Shotton decided to replace Sauer with his own Duke Snider of Brooklyn. Up went a roar of protests from Chicago as Shotton was besieged with derisive mail. Frankie Frisch said (publicly, at least) that he would not swap Sauer for five Sniders. Yielding to pressure, league president Ford Frick ruled that Sauer would indeed start the game and play at least three innings. The Dodger manager obeyed but yanked Sauer after the third inning. Diplomatically, he replaced him with Cub teammate Andy Pafko.

For good measure, the Cubs acted as spoilers in the pennant race again. This time, they spanked the Dodgers 12 times out of 22 to help the Phillies win their first flag since 1915.

It would be the Cubs’ last major hurrah against their despised enemy for years to come. Throughout the 1950s, the Dodgers went on gathering pennants while the Cubs languished in or near the cellar. Not until 1964 would the Cubs again edge the Dodgers—by then relocated to the world’s largest suburb—in a season’s series. By 1966, the once loathed Leo Durocher had become the Cubs manager. That, however, is a story in itself.

ART AHRENS lives within walking distance of Wrigley Field. He attended his first game there on September 26, 1959, when Chicago beat Brooklyn, 12-2. He is the author of many articles on the Cubs.