One deal made this year was quite significant.
The 1945 National League pennant won by the Cubs was somewhat unexpected. It was their first in seven years, and in fact they hadn’t even had a winning season in six.
Mostly, it was because the Cubs had fewer of their good players leave for war service than many of the other teams. When guys who had served in World War II came back to other ballclubs, the Cubs’ fortunes started to fade.
As has been the case with several other posts in this series, I’m including some non-trade transactions because of their significance, and also because there just weren’t many trades in 1945.
May 26: Acquired Loyd Christopher from the Red Sox on waivers
Yes, that’s the correct spelling of his first name — one “L.”
And one game is all he played for the Cubs, as a defensive replacement in the first game of a doubleheader May 30 against the Giants.
Then he went back to the minors, where the White Sox claimed him in the 1946 Rule 5 Draft. Eventually he went back to the semi-independent Oakland Oaks in the Pacific Coast League, where he played five seasons and hit pretty well, but never got another call from a MLB team.
He then got a job scouting for various teams for 35 years: A’s, Reds, Braves, Indians, Angels and Expos. Among the young players he scouted and recommended was future Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley.
June 23: Acquired Ray Starr from the Pirates on waivers
Starr pitched briefly in the majors in the early 1930s, then spent more than a decade in the minor leagues before returning to the bigs at age 35 in 1941 with the Reds.
In 1942 and 1943, he became a … star… in the war-depleted league, making the NL All-Star team in ‘42.
By the time the Cubs got him he was 39 and basically done. He pitched in just nine games with a 7.43 ERA.
July 27: Acquired Hank Borowy from the Yankees for cash considerations
This is one of the most significant deals in Cubs history. The Cubs sent $97,000 to the Yankees in this deal. That’s roughly equivalent to $1.7 million today, and even in the billion-dollar baseball world of 2024, that’s not chump change. We don’t see those kinds of cash deals anymore, they’ve fallen out of fashion.
The Cubs had muddled around .500 most of the early months of 1945. Then a 15-1 run had put them four games in first place on July 16, but the team felt they needed more pitching.
The Yankees had signed Borowy out of Fordham in 1939, in an era when not that many college players were desired by MLB teams. The Cubs had been one of the teams looking at Borowy at Fordham, but the Yankees’ offer kept him in his home town.
He spent three years pitching for the Yankees’ Newark farm team before making his MLB debut in 1942 at age 26. Borowy got downballot MVP votes in 1942 and 1944 and was an AL All-Star in ‘44.
In ‘45 Borowy was throwing well for the Yankees, with a 3.13 ERA in 18 starts. So why were they willing to dump him? Borowy’s SABR biography explains, referring to Yankees team president and co-owner Larry MacPhail:
MacPhail had a simple explanation. He had been in the park on June 15 when Borowy had yielded the longest home run of the season at Yankee Stadium to Detroit pitcher Zeb Eaton. It was the fourth of five consecutive starts that Borowy had failed to complete. The possessor of an even more mercurial personality than present-day Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, MacPhail supposedly decided right then that Borowy was finished as a Yankee.
The owner claimed that an analysis of Borowy’s record indicated that he lacked the stamina to be a winner in the second half of a season. “I got rid of Borowy, with McCarthy’s approval, because I did not like his record with the New York club,” explained MacPhail. “This year he pitched four complete games for us after April, none after June 24. Last season he won only five and lost eight after July 15. In short, he has not been, for the Yankees, a pitcher who could be relied on when pitching class was needed most.”
From a modern standpoint, that would seem a silly reason to get rid of a solid pitcher who had one bad stretch. But after winning seven pennants and six World Series from 1936-43, the Yankees fell to third in 1944 and were struggling in ‘45. I suppose they wanted the money more than they wanted a pitcher they no longer thought was any good at age 29.
Borowy was spectacular for the Cubs. In 15 appearances (14 starts) he threw 11 complete games and led the NL with a 2.13 ERA (in those days, qualifying for the ERA title required 10 CG, not a minimum number of innings). The Cubs went 12-2 in the 14 starts and he posted a (retroactive) save in the other game. It was an earlier version of the Rick Sutcliffe trade from 1984.
The Cubs won the pennant by three games. It’s not an exaggeration to say they probably don’t win it without Borowy.
Naturally, with a guy this hot, manager Charlie Grimm wanted to get the most out of him in the World Series and… Grimm overdid it. Borowy had thrown a career-high 254⅓ innings during the season. Then he threw a complete-game shutout in Game 1 of the WS, okay, that sort of use could be expected back then. On three days’ rest he threw five innings in Game 5 — again, common usage in 1945.
That was Oct. 7. The very next day — Oct. 8 — Game 6 went into extra innings, and Grimm had Borowy pitch again, four innings on no rest. He shut out the Tigers for those four innings and the Cubs won, forcing Game 7.
On one day’s rest, Grimm had Borowy start Game 7. The results were predictable, he got hammered (hits from the first three Tigers he faced, at which time he was pulled) and the Cubs lost.
To the day he died, Cubs starter Hank Wyse — who had also pitched in Game 6 but faced only four batters — would tell you that if Grimm had started him in Game 7, the Cubs would have won.
We’ll never know.
As for Borowy, the overuse and better players coming back from the war made him just an average pitcher after 1945. He did all right in ‘46, less so in ‘47 and ‘48, and then he was traded to the Phillies.
But that 15-game stretch in 1945 made Borowy one of the most memorable Cubs of his time.
September 29: Acquired Clem Hausmann and cash from the Red Sox for Rip Russell
The deal was actually not completed until Dec. 10, when Hausmann was sent to the Cubs.
I just want to say that “Rip Russell” is a great baseball name. An infielder, Russell had batted .259/.300/.372 in 319 games for the Cubs from 1939-42, then spent the next three years in the Cubs minor leagues. He got to Boston in time to play in the 1946 World Series, where he was 2-for-2 as a pinch-hitter.
Hausmann never played for the Cubs, so this deal was a plus for Boston.
The Borowy acquisition gives 1945 a C+ grade.