Wartime Baseball: An Alternative History

 

by Don Mankowski

An Excerpt From a Book in Progress

(Author's Note:  After I had posted a similar piece on SABR-L, the listserver for the Society for American Baseball Research, a request was made to make it available to SABR's archives.)

In researching the 1945 season, I was struck by the emphasis upon the travel reduction policy.  Major league baseball teams must have made up a tiny fraction of the nation’s travel, but I imagine that the leagues were supposed to be setting an example.  At one point, the Comissioner declared that the World Series would go on only if it involved teams from the same city (unlikely, but not too far-fetched).  At another, it was proposed to play the All-Star game in Europe for the servicemen.  When interleague exhibitions were staged in place of the All-Star game, sending the Pirates to Detroit was considered too long a trip.

All of this made me wonder: why didn’t they consider divisional play?  That would certainly cut down on long (e.g., Boston to St. Louis) trips.  As the National Football League featured East and West divisions, and shuffled teams as necessary, it’s not as though no one would have thought of it.

Teams were normally scheduled 11 times at each other’s park.  Had they cut interdivisional games to eight, they’d be making two visits to a city rather than three.  And, if they expanded intradivisional match-ups to 15 games, teams would be trading the longer trips for shorter ones.  The Dodgers trade a trip across the Mississippi for an extra one across the East River.  Imagine how much that would have pleased the wartime travel officers.

 

It still works out to 154 games, which would have been important.  I don’t believe they’d have accepted any odd numbers or other imbalances as we readily accept today.  Maybe they’d have shortened the regular season a bit to provide time for the league playoffs, but maybe not.

For your amusement, I have reconstructed the 1941 through 1945 standings along these lines. As an exercise, I divided each league in two, based strictly upon geography.  I know that the “western” division looks rather “central” by today’s perspective, but I doubt that anybody would have blinked back then—Chitown and St. Louie were The Final Frontier.

Instead of simply using raw won-lost to rank the teams (you can do that rather easily), I got the won-lost crosstable for each season and weighted the records by the method described in Chapter VI, "East is West and … "

To briefly recap the method: if two teams split 22 games 11-11, we assume that they would be 15-15 against each other as divisional rivals, or 8-8 against each other if in opposite divisions.  But, if a team went 18-4 (.818) against another, we’d project them to win 81.8% of 30 games and thus go 24.5-and-5.5.  Since that looks silly, we’d round off and say 24-6 or 25-5.  Similarly, we’d expect them to win 81.8% of 16 games, which works out to 13-3 more or less.  Of course the altered “pennant” races wouldn’t have caused teams to change strategies, but this is the best that we can do with the data.

The average of all these expected percentages will be the team’s projected winning percentage, assuming that they play more games against some teams and fewer against others.  Teams move up or down from their historical record depending upon whether or not they are grouped with teams against whom they played well.  We convert the percentage into a won-lost record, in this case based upon 154 games.  (I juggled the round-offs just a bit to fairly adjudicate apparent ties, and to make the wins and losses balance.)

I called the playoff/championship series result based upon the actual head-to-head data, computing the most likely number of wins by the lesser team in a best of seven.  It’s the formula with the nCr, p and q as described in Chapter VII.    For additional confirmation, I checked this forecast with the World Series Prediction Method devised by Bill James .

The 1941-45 pennant races in the alternate universe.

1941

White Sox win the A.L. West in the closest race.
 

NATIONAL LEAGUE, 1941
WEST DIVISION    W   L  Pct.  GB    EAST DIVISION     W   L  Pct.  GB
St.L. Cards     97  57  .630  ..    Brooklyn        105  49  .682  ..
Cincinnati      87  67  .565  10    N.Y. Giants      79  75  .513  26
Pittsburgh      77  77  .500  20    Bos. Braves      60  94  .390  45
Chi. Cubs       68  86  .442  29    Phila. Phillies  43 111  .279  62

 
A.L. title:  Yankees over White Sox in six games (based upon 14-8 record during actual season).

N.L. title:  Dodgers over Cardinals in seven games (teams were 11-11.  James System predicts Dodgers).

World Series:  Yankees vs Dodgers, as in actuality.  White Sox versus Cardinals or Dodgers would have both been unique match-ups.

1942
The A.L. has two decent races, as the Cards and Dodgers breeze in the N.L.
 

NATIONAL LEAGUE, 1942
WEST DIVISION    W   L  Pct.  GB    EAST DIVISION     W   L  Pct.  GB
St.L. Cards    106  48  .688  ..    Brooklyn        106  48  .688  ..
Cincinnati      74  80  .481  32    N.Y. Giants      87  67  .565  19
Pittsburgh      69  85  .448  37    Bos. Braves      63  91  .409  43
Chi. Cubs       69  85  .448  37    Phila. Phillies  42 112  .273  64

 
A.L. title:  Yankees over Browns in six games (based upon 15-7 record during actual season).

N.L. title: Tossup!  (Cardinals over Dodgers in seven games, based upon 13-9 record during actual season.  But the James System favors the Dodgers).

World Series:  Yankees versus Cardinals (actual opponent) or Dodgers.  It could have been Browns—Dodgers or Browns—Cardinals, each a first, the latter a classic.

1943
Cleveland wins a mediocre A.L. West race.  Brooklyn benefits from the N.L. schedule.

NATIONAL LEAGUE, 1943
WEST DIVISION    W   L  Pct.  GB    EAST DIVISION     W   L  Pct.  GB
St.L. Cards    102  52  .662  ..    Brooklyn         85  69  .551  ..
Cincinnati      84  70  .545  18    Bos. Braves      72  82  .467  13
Pittsburgh      80  74  .519  22    Phila. Phillies  65  89  .422  20
Chi. Cubs       71  83  .461  31    N.Y. Giants      57  97  .370  28

 
A.L. title:  Yankees over Indians in seven games (based upon 13-9 record during actual season).

N.L. title:  Cardinals over Dodgers in six games (based upon 15-7 record during actual season).

World Series:  Yankees versus Cardinals, just as in the actual season.  Indians-Cardinals would have been a first-ever and still-only Series match-up.

1944
The Browns still win their only pennant.  The N.L. had an interesting season when viewed this way; the more westerly teams all finished ahead of the more easterly teams, which makes for a stirring hypotherical East Division race.
 

NATIONAL LEAGUE, 1944
WEST DIVISION    W   L  Pct.  GB    EAST DIVISION     W   L  Pct.  GB
St.L. Cards    102  52  .662  ..    N.Y. Giants      71  83  .461  ..
Pittsburgh      86  68  .558  16    Brooklyn         71  83  .461  ..
Cincinnati      85  69  .552  17    Bos. Braves      66  88  .428  5
Chi. Cubs       72  82  .468  30    Phila. Phillies  63  91  .409  8

 
A.L. title:  Browns barely over Yankees in seven games (based upon 12-10 record during actual season).  James says Yankees should win.

N.L. East Playoff:  Giants over Dodgers, two games to one, presumably on a miracle home run (based upon 12-10 head-to-head).

N.L. title: Cardinals over Giants in six games (based upon 16-6 record during actual season.  The Cards would have been bigger favorites over the Dodgers, from whom they won 18).

World Series:  Browns versus Cardinals, just as in the actual season.  But our historical re-write could have given us New York, New York for the umpteenth time.

1945
The Yankees did rather well against the other teams in the east, and hence improve the most in our projection.
 

NATIONAL LEAGUE, 1945
WEST DIVISION    W   L  Pct.  GB    EAST DIVISION     W   L  Pct.  GB
Chi. Cubs       97  57  .630  ..    Brooklyn         93  61  .604  ..
St.L. Cards     95  59  .617   2    N.Y. Giants      80  74  .519  13
Pittsburgh      79  75  .513  18    Bos. Braves      71  83  .461  22
Cincinnati      57  97  .370  40    Phila. Phillies  44 110  .286  49

 
A.L. title: Tigers over Yankees in six games (based upon 15-7 record during actual season).

N.L. title: Cubs over Dodgers in six games (based upon 14-8 record during actual season).

World Series: Tigers versus Cubs, as in the actual season.  Had it been instead Tigers-Dodgers, it would have been the first Fall (and last) match-up of those clubs.  And, once again the Bombers and the Bums could have continued their feud, via the back door as it were.

The only really close pennant races in the 1941-45 period were:

Dodgers—Cardinals 1941 and 1942

Browns—Tigers 1944,

Cubs—Cardinals and Tigers—Senators 1945.

We lose the first two due to the divisional structure, experience the next two in the alternate universe, and replace the last with one just as good, and add an oddball classic in 1944 (N.L. East).

 
Suppose further that divisional play were so successful that it continued after the War had ended.  I haven’t taken the trouble to recompute every season, but an eyeball of the historical standings suggests that the Yankees might have topped an A.L. East division every year from 1949 through 1964(!)  Fact is, they won the pennant 14 times in that 16-year stretch, but one wonders if they could have prevailed in an annual playoff series against Cleveland, Chicago or occasionally Detroit with the same frequency.  You might spend some time reviewing the record from this perspective, especially if the Cardinals are your team.  Looks as if the Cards would often qualify as western champions.

How would the Braves’ move to Milwaukee, the Athletics’ to Kansas City and the Browns’ to Baltimore have been handled?  An East-West breakdown might have further complicated the Dodgers—Giants flight to the west coast in 1958: would the Pirates and Reds (or Braves) have moved to the East to accommodate them, or would they have been permitted to go on winning bogus “eastern” titles, like the Dallas Cowboys?

There are really too many “ifs” to carry this exercise much further, but once each league had swelled to twelve members, we might have seen three divisions in each plus the wild card as early as 1969.

Enough already.
 
 

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