The 1941 Dodgers

The Love Affair in Brooklyn Begins

154 games is a long time to chase a pennant with scant opportunities for a team to catch its breath. But that crucible enveloped the Brooklyn Dodgers straight through the 1941 season.

The team had been gaining steam after being taken over by Leo Durocher as manager in 1939 — his first such job in the major leagues. After winning the N.L. pennant in 1920, Brooklyn, with only occasional exceptions, was mired in the bottom half of the league. Before Durocher’s arrival, the Dodgers played well under .500 for the previous six seasons.

The 1939 and 1940 teams posted winning percentages of .549 and .575, but each finished a dozen games out of the running to the Reds, who were consummating a revival of their own.

Beginning in 1941, however, the decade would belong mostly to Brooklyn and St. Louis. And those two teams were at each other’s heels for virtually the entire season. Pearl Harbor was months away (and so baseball was still in full force), but this dogfight was the sporting world’s version of The Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe going at it over the skies of England the year before.

From April 27th on, first and second places were occupied exclusively by either team. The Dodgers closed out the month a game ahead. The Cardinals finished May a length ahead. On June 30, they were tied. The Cardinals fell back by four in the middle of July, but by the end of the month had gotten back to the top, with a two-game cushion. A two-game lead was the most either team held in August until, again, they were tied at the end of the month. No quarter given. None asked.

Three days into September there was still no daylight separating the two teams. But St. Louis dropped a doubleheader to the sixth-place Cubs and never recaptured a share of the lead.

The two teams played a three-game series at Sportsmans Park, beginning Sept. 11, with Brooklyn holding a one-game lead going in. The opener went to the Dodgers, 6-4 in11 innings, decided by Dixie Walker’s two-run single in the top of the inning. The Cardinals got a complete game from Max Lanier the next day to win 4-3. The series finale matched Whitlow Wyatt for Brooklyn and Mort Cooper for the Redbirds. Was scoreless until the eighth, when Walker doubled with one-out and Billy Herman followed with a double of his own. It would be the game’s only run. Wyatt won his 20th game. Both pitchers surrendered only three hits.

Two games clear now of St. Louis, the Dodgers never padded that margin until the final series of the year and wound up winning the pennant by 2 1/2 games. The war would break up major-league baseball for most of the next four years, with rosters depleted of stars and youth. But when baseball was back on track in 1946, the Dodgers and Cardinals went to the wire again — and that time they went even beyond.

It was a substantially different Brooklyn team that would again go toe-to-toe with the Cardinals on the other side of the war. Gone from the starting lineup were Mickey Owen (though he stayed on through 1945 after one of the most famous miscues in history against the Yankees in ‘41), MVP winner Dolph Camilli (gone from the game entirely after 1945, with a year lost to the war), Billy Herman (traded early in the ‘46 season), and Joe Medwick (back with the team as a free agent signing in June after failing to make the Browns roster out of spring camp).

The pitching staff was even more unrecognizable, with Kirby Higbe and Hugh Casey the only holdovers from before the war.

So, although the love affair with the Dodgers lasted for the better part of two decades in Brooklyn, it was something of a brief encounter with this group.

Let’s meet some of the players we haven’t yet talked about.

Freddie Fitzsimmons was a Giants stalwart in the second half of the ‘20s until the mid-’30s. His lifetime won-loss record was 217-146, helped by a 22-3 mark he put together for the Dodgers in 1940 and ‘41.

Billy Herman (R) hits a ninth-inning, game-winning home run off Bucky Walters against Cincinnati immediately following the critical mid-September series with the Cardinals and makes a winning pitcher of Hugh Casey in relief. Herman finished 11th in MVP voting, Casey 7th.

From the same game, MVP Dolph Camilli, Fitzsimmons, Dixie Walker, Pete Reiser, Curt Davis, Mickey Owen and Durocher react to something on the field. Writing on reverse of photo gives no hints, but might well be Herman’s homer.

Second-year shortstop Pee Wee Reese did not attract any MVP votes, hitting just .229. But a failure to receive MVP recognition wouldn’t happen again until 1957.

Joe Medwick was in the middle year of three .300 seasons with the bat for Brooklyn.

Johnny Mize of the Cardinals beats the tag of Reese for a double in late August, when the teams split four games in Brooklyn and the Dodgers maintained a lead of a game and a half.

Kirby Higbe won 22 games, in spite of issuing 132 walks, matching mound mate Whit Wyatt for the league leadership in victories.

Mickey Owen tags out future N.L. MVP Bob Elliott at the plate

Paul Waner was on this team, but not around for all the fun stuff. Dodgers released him in mid-May after he batted only .171.

The addition of Herman in early May gave the Dodgers a future Hall-of-Famer who could still play and solidified a shaky second base situation.

Pete Reiser comforted by Medwick after crashing into a metal door in centerfield at Ebbets Field after robbing Country Slaughter of extra bases. It’s early in Reiser’s career — about 80 games in — but such incidents would prematurely curtail what many observers projected to be a Hall-of-Fame career.

Big-game pitcher Wyatt shuts out the Cardinals in the rubber match of their three-game set in mid-September, 1-0.

Durocher and Wyatt celebrate something the Dodgers hadn’t seen in 21 years — a pennant.

The Yankees were next for the Dodgers in a World Series full of dramatic moments.