The 1922 St. Louis Browns

Sometimes life isn’t fair: Most of the finishes in the 52-year history of the franchise (1901–1953) were in the depths of the second division. The one exception was 1922, a year in which the Browns led the league in batting, slugging, runs, triples, stolen bases, walks, strikeouts, saves and earned run average—and still came in second.
This book meticulously recreates that year from spring training to season’s end, when they fought the Yankees down to the wire, losing by one game on the next to the last day.

Roger A. Godin currently serves as team curator for the NHL’s Minnesota Wild after having served two tours as director of the United States Hockey Hall of Fame. While American hockey is the principal focus of his research, he has written a number of monographs for Society for American Baseball Research publications. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Roger A. Godin
Format: softcover (5.5 x 8.5)
Pages: 239
Bibliographic Info: 16 photos, appendices, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2014 [1991]
pISBN: 978-0-7864-7745-6
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction      1

1. Spring Training: Alabamy Bound      5

2. April: Kenny Williams Took a Bat and Gave a Baseball Three Long Whacks      35

3. May: Welcome Back Babe      51

4. June: Troubles with Mays and Haney      71

5. July: “I Never Doctored the Ball”      93

6. August: Reinforcement from Boston      121

7. September: “I Benched Davis…to Get Rid of Smith”      147

8. Aftermath: Last Days and Last Hurrahs      191

Appendix A: Batting, Pitching, and Fielding Statistics      215

Appendix B: Dave Danforth Statement, St. Louis Post-Dispatch      217

Appendix C: The “Little World Series” Games      220

Bibliography      223

Index      225

“the year the lowly Browns led the league in most every category, and still finished second”—Baseball America.