Danny Mac Fayden - Back To Boston

Back To Boston

He would play five season with Boston's National League team through the end of the 1939 season. The team, which was partly owned by Bill Quinn, the former Red Sox owner who first signed MacFayden, started calling itself the Boston Bees in 1936 in a bid to get the fans to forget their dismal performance.

Ironically, his first three full seasons with the Boston Bees would be the best of his career. A harbinger of what was to come occurred on September 28, 1935, when MacFayden tied Dazzy Vance's 11-year-old National League record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game when he fanned 15 New York Giants hitters in a game. (Hall of Famer Vance also struck-out 17 batters in a 10-inning game in 1925.)

MacFayden had his best year in 1936. His ERA of 2.87 ranked second best in the senior circuit, which along with his 17–13 record on a team that came in 6th in an eight-team league with 71 victories, won him votes for Most Valuable Player. (He came in 9th in a vote topped by Hall of Famer pitchers Carl Hubbell of the pennant-winning New York Giants, the N.L. M.V.P., and runner-up Dizzy Dean of the St. Louis Cardinals, that year's bridesmaid for the N.L. pennant.) His 1937 and '38 ERAs of 2.93 and 2.95 put him in the Top 10 for the league.

According to Charles Bukowski's childhood friend Harold Mortenson, in the 1930s, the two played a statistics-intensive baseball game akin to Strat-O-Matic that involved two dice and two manuals that was marketed under Danny MacFayden's name when he was with the Boston Bees.

After a losing season in 1939, the Bees traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates for pitcher Bill Swift and cash. For the Pirates, he was 5–4 with a 3.55 ERA, mostly as a reliever, but the organization released after the 1940 season as they considered him too old at 35. The Senators signed him as free agent, but released him on May 15, 1941 after he went 0–1 with a 10.59 ERA in five games.

MacFayden eventually returned to Boston's Braves Field in July 1943 for a last hurrah, two years after being released by the Senators. The manpower demands of World War II meant that major league baseball was bereft of major league talent. He went 2–1 with a 5.91 ERA, all but one of his ten games in relief. He was released by the Braves in April 1944, before the start of the season.