Regular Season
The Browns were one of the unlikeliest pennant-winners in history; in nine out of the previous 10 seasons, they had finished in the second division. However, 1944 was the peak of wartime baseball. The shortage of players dragged the talent level of the entire league down, which benefitted the team.
The 1944 Browns were relatively untouched by the military draft. Nine players on the roster were 34 years old or older. Their all-4F infield included 23-year-old shortstop Vern Stephens, who led the league in RBI (109) and was second in home runs (20).
St. Louis started the season with nine straight wins and continued to hang tough in a four-team race with Detroit, Boston, and New York. It came down to the final week, when the Browns defeated the Yankees five times, winning the pennant by 1 game over Detroit. It would be the only championship the franchise would ever win in St. Louis.
Read more about this topic: 1944 St. Louis Browns Season
Famous quotes containing the words regular and/or season:
““I couldn’t afford to learn it,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh. “I only took the regular course.”
“What was that?” inquired Alice.
“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic—Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”
“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)