![]() ![]() Cubs GM Jim Gallagher went to owner Philip K. MacPhail offered Borowy to the Cubs for $97,000, which was a huge amount of money in baseball in those days. Senators owner Clark Griffith complained mightily that there was some sort of trickery involved, but the league said it was a fair claim. ![]() Somehow, MacPhail got Borowy through waivers. Back in those days, a player had to clear waivers from every team in the league before they could be traded to the other league. That could come back to bite the Yankees. Andy MacPhail once said “my grandfather was bombastic, flamboyant, a genius when sober, brilliant when he had one drink and a raving lunatic when he had too many.” Larry MacPhail probably watched Borowy lose a game, got drunk and said to himself “I’m getting rid of that SOB.”īut MacPhail wasn’t crazy enough to let another American League team get Borowy. This is a guy who once went on a harebrained trip into the Netherlands to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm. Merullo was a prankster.)īut my best guess is that the reason was that MacPhail was an impetuous jackass who did things on a whim. (Lennie Merullo used to claim Borowy was dead on road trips because he never said anything. Borowy also had a reputation of being a tough guy to deal with, although it was because he was the “strong, silent type” who rarely betrayed what he was thinking, not because he was a problem in the clubhouse. It’s possible that MacPhail feared he was going to get injured and wanted to cash out now. It didn’t seem likely that he’d get drafted now.īorowy had complained of a sore arm and had missed several starts because of blisters. But the war in Europe was over by the summer of 1945 and things were winding down in the Pacific. ![]() He had a 2-B deferment because he worked the offseason as a tool and die man in a vital war industry. Unlike a lot of players in 1945, Borowy didn’t have a 4-F deferment. Some suggest that MacPhail was worried that Borowy would get drafted. Although they got a princely sum for Borowy from the Cubs, the Yankees, then as now, were not a team hurting for money. ![]() Getting rid of your best pitcher made little sense. The Yankees were in third place in the American League and only four games out of first. There are several explanations, but no real answers. By 1945, the Yankees had lost enough players to the draft and to retirement that Borowy was their best pitcher.įor reasons that are only known the Yankees team president Larry MacPhail (yep, Andy’s grandfather), in the summer of 1945 he decided that Borowy, his best pitcher, had to go. (The Yankees, in the midst of winning four straight titles, would stockpile talent in Newark that could have played in the majors for any other team so that they couldn’t play in the majors for any other team) He pitched in the 1942 World Series that the Yankees lost to the Cardinals and started and won a game for the 1943 team that beat the Cardinals. After spending three seasons on the loaded Newark Bears minor league teams of that era, Borowy finally got his chance with the Yankees in 1942 as the war depleted their major league roster. Borowy was a right-handed pitcher from New Jersey by way of Fordham University that the Yankees signed in 1939. You can’t talk about the 1945 World Series or the 1945 Cubs without knowing who Hank Borowy was. On top of that, the Tigers were getting key players back from the war and no one knew how well they’d do. There were still a lot of players on both teams that had posted gaudy numbers against inferior wartime opponents. The Cubs were favored over the Tigers, although to be honest, no one really had a good handle on which team was better. The Cubs had won five pennants over the last 17 seasons, and that was pretty good. The Cubs really hadn’t been favored in any of the Series that they had lost. And if the team’s record in World Series competitions left something to be desired, the American League was the stronger league from the mid-teens on. Only the Giants had won more National League pennants than the Cubs up to that point. It was not just the end of World War II, it was the end of a long streak of the Cubs being one of the most successful teams in the National League. Every Cubs fan knows the meaning of the year 1945. ![]()
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