1943 World Series: Gaining Revenge on the Cardinals

What was perhaps most striking about the only World Series the Yankees won in war time were the endless rows of empty seats at ballparks all around baseball, including Yankee Stadium.

America’s entrance into World War II had happened in December 1941, but President Roosevelt told baseball to keep playing because Americans needed a diversion from the grind of war-time life. So baseball did what he asked, though the game just didn’t mean much, even to the most ardent of rooters, many of whom were more concerned about their loved ones or their neighbors fighting the good fight on the other side of the world. In the 21-year history of Yankee Stadium, attendance had never been lower.

Then again, there wasn’t much to cheer. Both pennant races were uneventful bores, and with so many of the star players in the service, every team’s roster was badly diluted. Quite naturally the quality of play was poor, and while the uniforms remained the same, the game was as unrecognizable as the names in the box scores.

Baseball’s only saving grace in 1943 was the World Series because - well, it was the World Series - but also because the matchup was a juicy one. Even with Joe DiMaggio, Red Ruffing, Tommy Henrich and Phil Rizzuto missing from the Yankees and Enos Slaughter, Creepy Crespi, Terry Moore and Johnny Beazley unavailable to the Cardinals, there was a palpable tension to the Series, mostly from the Yankees side because they felt they had a score to settle with the Cardinals who had beaten them in 1942. So for one week in October, baseball regained some of its luster, and the Yankees regained their rightful place in the baseball world.

With war-time travel restrictions in effect, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis instituted a special set-up for the Series whereby the first three games would be contested at Yankee Stadium and the remaining games at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. All three in New York drew massive crowds and the final count was more than 207,000, or nearly one-third the amount of people who had passed through the turnstiles the previous 5 1/2 months.

When the scene shifted to St. Louis, nary a seat was unoccupied and what fans in both ballparks saw were five interesting and exciting games, two of which were won by the man who was voted the American League’s most valuable player in 1943, Yankees pitcher Spud Chandler.

Chandler won the opener by 4-2 and the clincher by 2-0, going the distance in each, even though he admitted of his unusual 10-hit shutout in Game 5, “I didn’t have my best stuff, but I guess I was just lucky. I had what I call just average pitching, my control was a little shaky, but I still managed to get them all out.”

Actually, it wasn’t such a great mystery. Chandler was a superb pitcher and is probably one of the least appreciated players in Yankee history. During his 11 years with the team, he cobbled together a record of 109-43, a winning percentage of .717 that is the highest for any pitcher in major league history with at least 100 victories.

Chandler’s rookie season with the Yankees was 1937, but that wasn’t the first time he stepped on the pitchers’ mound at the ballpark in the Bronx. Chandler was a Georgian who attended the University of Georgia where he played baseball and football and ran track. The football Bulldogs came north for a game against New York University at Yankee Stadium, and the day before the game, Chandler stood on the mound with a football in his right hand and declared to a few of his teammates, “Right here is where I’m going to be.”

Baseball was Chandler’s best sport and he had been scouted by the Cardinals and Cubs, though he spurned offers from both clubs in the hope that the Yankees would sign him, which they did in 1932. “I guess it was that Yankee magic that got me, they were always the No. 1 club in my mind,” he said. “I received a much greater offer to go with the Cubs than I did with the Yankees, but there you are, that Yankee magic.”

His major league debut was delayed because he didn’t have an out pitch, so despite a decent fastball he was batted around pretty good in the minors. Plus there was no room for him on the Yankee roster. When he arrived for the 1937 season, he saw Lefty Gomez, Red Ruffing, Bump Hadley and Monte Pearson already cemented in the rotation and wondered if he was doomed to a sixth year in the bushes. Instead, he made the Yankees.

In his first game at Yankee Stadium with a baseball in his hand, he pitched a four-hitter, but lost a heartbreaking 1-0 decision to the White Sox. He went on to win seven of 11 decisions before hurting his arm, prompting a demotion to Newark where he finished the year with the Little World Series champion Bears.

Chandler returned to New York in 1938 and had an excellent 14-5 record, and after missing most of 1939 with a broken leg, he established himself as a key member of the staff starting in 1940, right around the time he began to develop a slider that was murder on right-handed batters. “I came up with that extra pitch, a slider, and that turned everything around for me,” he said.

He lost World Series starts in 1941 and 1942, but in 1943, Chandler, who had a reputation for being fiercely locked in on the days he pitched, was almost unhittable. Milton Gross, who was a columnist for the New York Post, wrote a freelance cover story for the Saturday Evening Post on Chandler that carried the headline “The Yankees’ Angry Ace.”

“I used to have this reputation for keying myself up before a game to the point where I was so angry people couldn’t talk to me,” Chandler said. “They said I used to sit in the clubhouse and scowl and glower, and that not until I was full of rancor was I ready to go out and pitch. Well, it just wasn’t true. I was just so determined to win that it might have looked that way. But I never got what you would call mad or disgruntled or overbearing. My father-in-law read (Gross’ story) and began wondering what kind of monster his daughter was married to.”

The Cardinals were probably wondering what kind of monster was on the mound in the first game.

“Spud Chandler pitched a great game all the way, I thought,” Joe McCarthy said in reference to Chandler stifling the Cardinals on seven hits.

He started out a little shaky when the Cardinals scored once in the second and could have had another had not Yankee right fielder Tuck Stainback gunned down Danny Litwhiler at the plate for the third out.

St. Louis’ Max Lanier mowed the Yankees down for three innings without much effort, but in the fourth, his own error led to a pair of unearned runs, the second coming on a lengthy Joe Gordon home run for a 2-1 Yankee lead.

After the Cardinals pulled even in the fifth, Frank Crosetti scored from second base on a Lanier wild pitch in the sixth, Bill Dickey made it 4-2 with a bloop RBI single, and Chandler made the lead hold up.

Cardinals manager Billy Southworth was nonplussed by the defeat. “There’s nothing to feel badly about,” he said. “Lanier had great stuff and we’ve seen as good pitching as Chandler showed us. I know we can play better ball than we did today and can hit Spud’s kind of pitching.”

The Cardinals certainly hit Ernie Bonham’s kind of pitching in Game 2 as Marty Marion and Ray Sanders both whacked home runs to support the courageous pitching performance of Mort Cooper, lifting the Cardinals to an emotional 4-3 Series-tying victory.

Just hours before the start of the game, the Cooper brothers, Mort and Walker, were informed that their father Robert had died of a heart attack at the age of 58 back at the family home in Independence, Missouri. Before the team took infield practice, the brothers met the press and Mort said, “My brother and I are going to stay on and play today. We are doing this because we both feel dad would want it.”

Their dad would have been proud. By the time the Yankees notched their first hit - a bunt single by Crosetti in the fourth - the Cardinals were already ahead 4-0. The Yankees clawed back into contention and with two runs in the ninth pulled within 4-3, but fittingly, Mort Cooper induced Gordon to pop up in foul ground where Walker Cooper made the putout to end the game.

The Cardinals had done the same thing in the 1942 Series, losing the opener before winning the second game to get even before then winning the next three to win the championship. When they took a 2-1 lead into the eighth inning of Game 3, a record Series crowd of 69,990 began to wonder if history was about to repeat itself. Litwhiler’s two-run fourth-inning single seemed more than enough as rookie Al Brazile was baffling the Yankees on two hits through seven innings.

But as was so often the case then, the Yankees found a way to win. They erupted for five runs, the highlight a bases-loaded triple by Billy Johnson that sent them into a 4-2 lead on their way to a 6-2 victory.

The Cardinals were their own worst enemy in the fateful eighth. Johnny Lindell led off with a single to center which Harry Walker misplayed, allowing Lindell to reach second. Snuffy Stirnweiss, pinch-hitting for Hank Borowy who pitched well and was deserving of the victory, bunted toward first base. Sanders scooped the dribbler and fired to third in an effort to nail Lindell, but Lindell crashed into Whitey Kurowski and the ball fell to the ground for a second error, so both runners were safe.

Stirnweiss tagged and went to second on a fly ball, and Crosetti was walked intentionally to load the bases. Up came Johnson, and the wide-eyed rookie ripped one through the left-center gap and as the ball rolled all the way to the wall, three runs scored and that was the ballgame.

Lindell flashed a chipped tooth in the clubhouse courtesy of his collision with Kurowski, who suffered a jammed neck on the play. Lindell’s play was borderline dirty, but he explained that when he saw Sanders throwing to third, “I hit the dirt quick and hard.” On this point the Cardinals were half in agreement. Lindell certainly came in hard.

McCarthy was later asked for a reaction and he spat, “Well, it’s not a pink tea, you know.”

After the game both teams, officials and members of the press boarded various trains for the journey out to the Midwest for the concluding games of the Series. The Cardinals were fully confident that a return to familiar surroundings at Sportsman’s Park would alter their luck, and on the off day Southworth said, “If we play our regular game we’ll surely win the next one.”

St. Louis’ problem in the first three games was its unsteady play in the field as the Cardinals committed eight errors that led to five unearned Yankee runs. Once they returned home, their bats went to sleep, and when they scored only two runs combined in the fourth and fifth games, the Cardinals lost both and the Series came to an abrupt end.

McCarthy raised a few eyebrows when he tabbed Marius Russo to start the fourth game. Russo had struggled in the regular season, mainly due to a lame arm, but he checked the Cardinals on seven hits and the only run he allowed during New York’s 2-1 victory was unearned. “That was as well-pitched a game as I ever want to look at,” said Dickey, who had seen his share in 15 years.

“Russo should have had a shutout,” lamented Crosetti, whose error in the seventh set up the only Cardinal run. “I spoiled it for him.”

The Yankees went ahead in the fourth when Gordon doubled to left-center with two outs and scored on Dickey’s single up the middle, and that lead help up until the seventh when the Cardinals put together a two-out rally keyed by Crosetti’s muff of a pop fly.

Having pinch-hit for Lanier in the seventh, Southworth brought in Harry Brecheen to pitch the eighth, and Russo, who had already walked and doubled in the game, doubled again. Stainback promptly sacrificed him to third from where he scored on Crosetti’s fly ball, and when Russo escaped jams in the eighth and ninth innings, the Yankees were up three games to one.

So confident were the Yankees that they were going to win the fifth game, Pete Sheehy was told to pack the bags before the game so that the team could make the first available train back to New York. As dusk was settling over St. Louis, the Yankees were on that train thanks to a 2-0 victory delivered by Chandler’s shutout and Dickey’s game-winning two-run homer in the sixth.

During the clubhouse celebration, McCarthy waddled over to Chandler, put his arm around him and said, “Oh my boy, you pitched two wonderful games, just like I thought you would.”

Champions again, and now it seemed like the loss in 1942 hadn’t even occurred. It was as if the Yankees had merely loaned the championship to the Cardinals, and now they had come to take back what was theirs.

Asked if this was more special given the depleted state of his roster, McCarthy said, “It was just another pennant and another championship.”

Unfortunately for him, it was his last pennant and last championship.