OCR Text |
Show Ball Season "Falls"ShofT Of Records By JTJDSON BAILEY Associated Press Sports Writer With as much fanfare as a mouse entering its hole, the 1939 baseball season expired yesterday and shortly will be buried- in the history his-tory books Well-beloved while it was a living, liv-ing, boisterous being, the season left a surprisingly small estate to posterity. Appraisers In years hence probably prob-ably will find it Is Indeed burled when they go thumbing into the records. Chiefly, 1939 was the year the New York Yankees won their fourth consecutive American league championship and the Cincinnati Cin-cinnati Reds battled through to their first National league pennant pen-nant In 20 years. The Yankees devoured their opposition op-position like some dread dragon. They took the lead in the first week of the season and after one short struggle In which they were up and down with the Boston Red Sox, gsined permanent control May 1L They clinched their championship September 16 and finished with a 17-game margin. Beds In Scramble The Reds had a nlp-and-tuck scrsmble with the St. Louis Cardinals Car-dinals at the i trt of the season and gave an encore of the same routine at the end of the show, although they led the senior circuit all the way from May 26. Their final margin was four and a half games. The Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers provided the year's major ma-jor surprises. Both were deep in the second division last year and figured to stsy there, or thereabouts. there-abouts. But the Cardinals never were worse than third and the Dodgers wound up third in their only first division finish since 1932. Larry McPhail. mogul of the Dodgers, gambled his team's position po-sition for a million attendance yesterday and won. The club had drawn some 990,000 paid admissions admis-sions and wanted to reach 1,000,-000 1,000,-000 for the season. Rail feU all day and the club had third place clinched if it didn't play, but ran the risk of losing that position If defeated. The Dodgers nosed out the Philadelphia Philadel-phia Phillies In the rain, 3-2. and reached both goals. A second scheduled game was canceled. Inclement weather cut heavily into the final day's double-headers, but Harry Gumbert managed to come up with one of his best pitching performances, a four-hitter, to give the Gianta a 5-0 shutout shut-out over the Boston Bees ; the Chicago Cubs nosed out the Cardinals, Car-dinals, 2-1. and Cincinnati's champions cham-pions divided a meaningless double bill with the Pittsburgh Pirates, 9-1 and 8-0. Grace Swats Homer In the only American league games Joe Grace hit a homer in the ninth and drove in another run in the tenth to beat the Chicago Chi-cago White Sox, 4-3, for the St Louis Browns, and Cleveland and Detroit split n twin bill. 8-3 and 1-0. The first game was victory No. 1 24 for Bob Feller and the second Buck Newsom's twentieth. Besides this pair, the season's ' 20 game winners included Cincinnati's Cincin-nati's great combination, Paul I Derringer and Bucky Walters. Curt Davis of the Cardinals, Red j Ruffing of the Yankees, Dutch Leonard of the Washington Sena- tors and Luke (Hot Potato) Hamlin Ham-lin of Brooklyn. .There not only was no "double no-hit" spectacle this year, but also no single no-hit perform-1 perform-1 ancea. Slugging reached no peak comparable to the 1938 season, I when Hank Greenberg knocked ! 58 home runs. The best this sea-I sea-I son waa 35 by Jimmie Foax of the Red Sox. Joe DiMaggio of the Yankees sauntered out in quest of hitting immortality as represented by a .400 batting averge. but had to be satisfied at the end with a J81 i figure, accompanied by the American Amer-ican league hitting championship. I Johnny Mize of the Cards topped I the National with -343, |