Our countdown of baseball’s 50 greatest teams — a list known as the Best 50 — rolls today to No. 6, the 1944 St. Louis Cardinals. The rankings come from my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
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Team: 1944 St. Louis Cardinals
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Team score: 91.706 points
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All-time rank: 6 of 2,544
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All-time percentile: 99.80%
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Season record: 105-49 (.682)
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Season position: First place in National League
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Final status: World champion
America’s involvement in World War II dragged into its third summer in 1944, and baseball began showing the strain. The quality of major-league ball had remained fairly strong during the war’s first two years, even as a growing number of players enlisted or were drafted. But deterioration became obvious by 1944. Roughly 340 big leaguers had donned army or navy uniforms by the start of the ’44 season.
Some teams were devastated by military call-ups, while others were virtually untouched. The Cardinals fell into the latter category. Stan Musial had not yet been summoned by his draft board, and prewar injuries exempted fellow stars Mort Cooper and Marty Marion from military service.
The Cards breezed through the National League, seizing a seven-game lead by mid-June, eventually expanding the margin to 14.5 games. “Every day, you knew you were going to win,” said St. Louis left fielder Danny Litwhiler. “If you lost, so what? We’ll get them tomorrow. And we did. It was so easy.”
Get the complete lowdown on the 50 greatest (and 10 weakest) clubs of all time
The 1944 National League pennant was the eighth won by the St. Louis Cardinals, a level of success that was foreign to the city’s American League franchise. The Browns had never qualified for the World Series prior to their astonishing AL title in 1944.
The press called it the Streetcar Series, though the contestants had no need for mass transit. The Cardinals and Browns both played in the same stadium, Sportsman’s Park, and their managers even split the rent on a single apartment. (One or the other, of course, was always on the road during the regular season.)
Most of the nation’s fans rooted for the underdog Browns, who eked out wins in two of the first three games. But the Cards rallied to claim the championship, sweeping the final three contests by a combined score of 10-2.
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Stan Musial, still only 23 years old, cemented his superstar status in 1944, a year after being named the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Musial didn’t repeat as MVP — he finished fourth in the balloting — but he did top the league in several categories in ’44, including hits (197), doubles (51), on-base percentage (.440), and slugging average (.549).
Almost everyone was charmed by the easygoing Musial. “If you don’t like Stan, you don’t like anybody,” said teammate Marty Marion. But opposing pitchers were not enchanted by his power and consistent excellence. “I had success with Musial by throwing him my best pitch and backing up third,” joked Carl Erskine, a longtime pitcher for the Dodgers.
Marion lacked Musial’s skill at the plate. He batted only .267 in 1944 and never topped .280 during his 13-year career. But he was in a class by himself in the field. “I’ve looked at a lot of shortstops in my day,” said Connie Mack, “but that fellow is the best I’ve ever seen.” Famed columnist Red Smith wrote that Marion “could go and get balls nobody else could reach.”
Center fielder Johnny Hopp (.336) and catcher Walker Cooper (.317) joined Musial (.347) with batting averages above .300. Sportswriter Fred Lieb hailed Hopp as “the most improved player in the National League.” Cooper was the good-natured brother of Mort Cooper, the temperamental ace of the Cardinals’ pitching staff. Mort paced the rotation with 22 wins, and he led the league with seven shutouts.