Thoughts on the American League in the 1920s
We usually think of this as the Ruth-Gehrig era, when the Yankees began their long decades of dominance of the AL. It was, but…the story is much more complicated.
Looking back Yankees dominance seems preordained, but it wasn’t, and for a lot of the 1920s, when the dynasty began, they were not even, and sometimes were far from, the best team in the league.
In fact, I am convinced that, at least for the 1920s, the story of the American League is a story, not mainly of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but of four pitchers: Waite Hoyt, Urban Shocker, Walter Johnson, and Lefty Grove.
We might add Babe Ruth, the pitcher, if we started out story any earlier. Ruth was awesome on the mound In 1916, when he had a league-leading 1.75 ERA and 9 shutouts, winning 23 games, and in 1918, when he won 13 and lost only 7, the Red Sox won the World Series. In 1917, Ruth was arguably even better, but even he couldn’t get them past the best of the White Sox teams of the era. By 1919, the year of the Black Sox, Ruth pitched in only 17 games and was playing outfield pretty much regularly. It is entirely arguable that, for the first years as a batter on both Boston and New York, Babe Ruth was in fact less of a factor in the AL pennant races than he had been as a pitcher.
In 1920, his first year as a Yankee, he didn’t just break records, he made people forget who it was that had ever held them previously. The 54 home runs he hit broke his own record of 29. So for decades “who held the home run record before Babe Ruth” was like asking “who were the Presidents of the United States before George Washington” (There were 12 of them under the Articles of Confederation).
But….the Yankees came in third. To be sure, it was a tight pennant race. The Cleveland Indians won 98 games, but the Chicago White Sox also finished ahead of the Yankees with 96 wins to New York’s 95. The Yankees had a good team: along with Ruth who hit .376, and by the way struck out 80 times in 617 PA, while hitting 54 homers, not 180, not 280, as would not even lead to people blinking an eyelid today, but 80 times, the team also had Bob Meusel, who hit .328 with 11 homers, as good a season as he had in the more famous 1927, Wally Pipp at first and Aaron Ward at third each chimed in with 11 more home runs each. Ping Bodie, once a star in the Pacific Coast League, and second baseman Del Pratt hit .295 and .324 each. And the Yankees had good pitching: Carl Mays won 26, Bob Shawkey won 20, Jack Quinn won 18 and Rip Collins went 14-8 with a 3.22 ERA.
But the White Sox still had all the soon-to-be banned players from 1919. And they had company. Shoeless Joe hit .382 with 12 home runs, Happy Felsch hit .338 with 14 homers. Eddie Collins hit .371 and Buck Weaver hit .331. And the White Sox had four twenty-game winners: Faber, Cicotte, Lefty Williams and Dicky Kerr. But even the Sox fell short of Cleveland that year. The Indians, not the Yankees, White Sox, or Red Sox, start our decade off with the AL pennant. The 1920s will start with the Cleveland Indians winning the AL pennant, and end with the first of three-straight Philadelphia Athletics championships. Not what you would expect from the Ruth-Gehrig, Yankees domination narrative.
The Indians did not just win the AL pennant against such competition as the old dominant White Sox and Red Sox and the soon-to-be reigning New York Yankees, they won the World Series and they won it 5 games to 2. I kind of wish that the Brooklyn team, not only had stayed in Brooklyn, but in any case kept the name of that year, the Robins. Nice name for a team. But I digress. So who were the Cleveland Indians of 1920?
On the mound, they were led by someone named Jim Bagby, who won 31 games for them. He went 21-19 the rest of his career after 1920, which is why he is not one of the Fab Four I mentioned earlier. He mattered for a season, but did not affect the balance of power in the league in any deeper way. Stan Coveleski and Ray Caldwell won 24 and 20 respectively. But pitching-wise, they don’t look like anything their two closest rivals couldn’t handle. The rest of the staff was mediocre at best and that is being generous. But they had a good offense: the only starter not to hit .300 was poor Bill Wambsganss who we all knew growing up because he pulled off baseball’s only unassisted triple play and who apparently was also absent the day they gave out vowels for last names. Tris Speaker hit .388, Elmer Smith hit .316 with 12 homers, catcher Steve O’Neill hit .321 and had a high OBP. But…to tell the truth, I think if you ran a simulation of the season 1000 times, the Indians win it fewer than 50 of those. They sneaked in. They never repeated, not winning a pennant again until 1948.
Still, the Yankees did not finish a game behind them (keep that in mind when we discuss another pennant race that was close just below), but three behind them, with the White Sox two games back and one ahead of the Yankees. The 1920 Yankees, with Babe Ruth added, were still not as good, though by only one game, so maybe we should say, no better, than the outgoing White Sox/Black Sox. Babe Ruth changed the balance of power between Boston (which finished under .500) and New York, but not in the American League. Not yet anyway.
In 1921, the New York Yankees did finally win their first of 40 American League pennants over the next 88 years. They won 98 games and finished 4.5 games ahead of the Indians. So, apparently the Indians, despite looking like a good team to be sure on paper but not quite as superlative as the White Sox and Yankees when they won it a year before, and as I mentioned not getting a 30 win season out of Bagby ever again, nevertheless had something to them after all. They won 94 games and so were in it till very late in the season. We will look at both the AL pennant winners in New York (the Yankees played at the Polo Grounds still at that point, in upper Manhattan, not yet in the Bronx), and the Indians, who came up just a little short, again, showing that important as Babe Ruth’s presence was, it didn’t make New York invincible. But first, I want to draw your attention to two very important also-rans for our story: the teams that came in third and fourth. The St. Louis Browns with a record of 81-73 improved from their fourth place, one game under .500 finish a year before, and the Washington Senators came in one half-game behind them in fourth place at 80-73. This information will prove important going forward.
First the Indians. I am going to be honest, I am not sure how they competed, and competed so well, except actually I think I do. First, they had no dominant starter but had a balanced rotation: Coveleski, an underrated pitcher historically I think, won 23, George Uhle 16, Duster Mails and Jim Bagby each won 14, and Allan Sothoron went 12-4. Still, three of those guys had ERAs around or just over 4.00, so we aren’t talking the 1995 Braves here. Guy Morton out of the bullpen pitched 107 innings though, and had an ERA of 2.76. I still think relief pitchers who throw a lot of innings in a lot of games and pitch really well have been a major source of team success a lot of the time and it is out of fashion now, but I miss it. The 1927 Yankees will have Wilcy Moore a while up the road and he will be a big factor for them too, and Firpo Marberry will do the same for a couple of Washington Senators teams.
Anyway, the other big, and probably more important factor for Cleveland is that they had a whole lineup that got on base. Yes OBP. Cleveland’s TEAM OBP for the year was .383 ! That was second in the league, but to Detroit’s pitching gave up half a run a game more than the Indians’ did. They didn’t hit a lot of long balls: Elmer Smith with 16 was the only one in double-digits, but they had pitchers who kept them in games, if they did not always have the best pitcher in the game on their team, and their batters got on base and that was good enough to be just 4 and a half games worse than the first Babe Ruth Yankees pennant winner.
So now to the AL champs. The Yankees had Ruth, who broke his own record again with 59 homers and Bob Meusel, who hit 24 home runs while batting .318. But the only other OPS+ over 100 player they had was catcher Wally Schang. The rest of the lineup was good to be sure, but not earth-shaking. This was not Murderers’ Row. It was Babe Ruth with Bob Meusel backing him up, and Wally Schang, Wally Pipp and Aaron Ward hitting just under or just over .300 in a hitters/high average era. It looks more like the Barry Bonds Giants with Jeff Kent than it looks like the awesome Yankees lineups of the future. Good, but not insurmountable. But the Yankees had a new factor: their pitching staff still had Carl Mays, who was their best arm that year, going 27-9, and they still had Bob Shawkey and Rip Collins with 29 wins between them. But they had added Waite Hoyt, yet another treasure from the old Red Sox championship teams. Hoyt is one of our Fab Four, and he was good enough, going 19-13 with a 3.09 ERA (ERA+ 136) to be the difference in overtaking the Indians. Waite Hoyt, not Babe Ruth, was the crucial additional factor that made the Yankees pennant winners and the team to beat for the next few years in the American League.
But to fully understand what will happen in the next few years, we will have to take a look at those two newcomer runners-up, the St. Louis Browns and the Washington Senators.
To be continued - part two sometime tomorrow (Monday)