During the offseason we have been taking a look at the past, giving readers a timeline of St. Louis baseball throughout history.

Last time we learned about the end of the Gashouse Gang and the rise of Joe Medwick and Johnny Mize. The team had fallen a long way since their World Series win of 1934, but they were working their way back up with a strong 1939 campaign. Was this the start of a rise to the top, or a red herring?

Ray Blades had taken over the team before 1939 and the team had a strong year. People were hoping that the strong arms of Mort Cooper and Lon Warneke and the powerful bats of Joe Medwick, Johnny Mize and Enos Slaughter would carry them back to the top of the standings. Blades had been a players’ manager, but he was also a teacher – he knew the game and was great at helping young players learn and play up to their potential. However, that teaching did not translate well to managing professionals, and the team grew weary of his babying techniques. After a sluggish 14-24 start to the 1940 season, Blades was shown the door. He bounced around as a coach for several various National League teams, but never found footing in any place for more than a couple years at a time.

In his place, owner Sam Breadon turned to Billy Southworth, who had played with the Cardinals in the 1920’s and even managed half of a season back in 1929. Southworth had been managing the Rochester minor league team for most of the ten years between his two managing stints with the Cardinals. The interesting footnote here is that Breadon made the call, not Branch Rickey. Rickey found out about the hiring when he read it in the morning paper, and was more than frustrated with the owner. It was the beginning of the end of the pairs’ longstanding professional relationship. To make matters worse, Southworth made two conditions of his hiring: no player is added to/taken away from the roster without his approval, and no player could talk to upper management without his knowing beforehand. Rickey felt that his wings had been clipped!

Marty Marion

All but lost in all the drama was a young twenty-two year old just breaking in to the majors. Marty Marion had come a long way from the cotton fields of Atlanta, but his agile glove and diving stops in the hole at short showed a smart and savvy ballplayer and person. He could see how little people regarded ballplayers back then. After the rough and tumble ways of the Gashouse Gang, people were wary of ballplayers, especially when it involved doing things like putting them up in hotels or houses or doing any business with them away from the ball field. The boys were perceived as ruffians – callous, rowdy and irresponsible. Sportsman’s Park was often mostly empty during games, as fans stayed away, deciding that the team was not worth coming out to see.

Marion saw the rivalries too. He spoke often about how Mize and Medwick were always competing and really did not care for the other. The front office saw it too. Branch Rickey believed in trading a player at the peak of his career rather than after the parade passed him by. Both Mize and Medwick eventually found themselves on the train out of town, but Medwick went first, finding himself on a train bound to Brooklyn early in the 1940 season. To replace the mighty Medwick, Ernie Koy stepped in and played a solid left to fill in. It was Koy’s only truly solid season, as he only played in the majors for five years and bounced to four different teams in that short time. The fans were sad to see Medwick go, but it did not make that much of a difference in the box office, as the Cardinals were not really drawing that many fans in the first place.

After the trade of Medwick and the manager swap, the Cardinals picked up the pace, and went 69-40 with their new manager in Southworth. It was a strong sign of what was to come in 1941, despite the shift of power from the Reds, who had won the NL pennant in 1939 and 1940, to the Dodgers who were rising to power under manager Leo Durocher. The Cardinals and Dodgers went toe to toe all throughout the season, at one point starting a brawl on three consecutive nights because of all the animosity the two teams held against the other.

The September call ups from the previous year were raring to go for the stretch run in 1941. Stan Musial led the charge, getting twenty hits and batting .426 in twelve games after Enos Slaughter went down with an injury. Harry Walker and Whitey Kurowski were also key call-ups. Stan was the real story. He started the season as a pitcher, but after falling on his shoulder at the end of the previous season, his arm was not what it was before, and the Cardinals decided to make him into an outfielder. He worked his way up from the bottom to the bigs by the end of the season.

Despite the call ups, the Cardinals could not catch up to the Dodgers, and finished the season at 97-56. The team was already preparing for the next season when the horrific bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred, and according to Marty Marion, it felt like everything was going to change. Fortunately for the Cardinals, only one relief pitcher was drafted before spring training, and it was pretty much business as usual for 1942.

As for actual baseball? The Dodgers jumped out in front early. They were leading all the way, and looked to be primed to cruise all the way back to the World Series. In mid-July the team swung down to St. Louis for a doubleheader, and in the first game Enos Slaughter lifted a long fly ball to center. Speedy Pete Reiser ran full-tilt to chase it down, but was not paying attention to where he was going and crashed head first into a concrete wall in right-center. Resier had been hitting .350, but after knocking himself out cold he was never the same, and the Dodgers suddenly found themselves without a key component of the team.

In mid-August, the Cardinals were still about thirteen games back in the standings, but they were also beginning to really gel as a team. Manager Billy Southworth made sure that the team got along, but the boys did not really need him for that. They referred to themselves as ‘a young veteran team,’ and all the rookies were taken in by veteran players and treated well. Pitchers helped each other, and everyone was constantly focused on the game ahead. Catcher Walker Cooper was the jokester of the team, but everyone else took the game very seriously. They were determined to win every day, and were confident that if they lose, so what? They would win again the next day, and that was the case more often than not.

Johnny Beazley

Down the stretch, the Cardinals went 43-9. Johnny Beazley led the team with twenty-one wins, despite being a loner who found himself in an altercation with a porter at a train station who drew a knife and left Beazley bleeding profusely from his pitching hand. Unfortunately this game with two weeks left in the season and the team up only one game on those pesky Dodgers. Somehow, Beazley recovered, and the team went 9-1 in the last ten, while the Dodgers went 10-2. It took a 106-48 record to pull out with the National League crown.

The World Series was waiting, and the New York Yankees were right there ready to derail the Cardinals’ fast track. Just like back in the first Series the Cardinals had played against the Yanks in 1926, there was a fearsome lineup coming at them, led by Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, Phil Rizzuto, Frank Crosetti, and others. The Yankees had won 103 games, as well as their last eight straight World Series appearances, or every appearance since that 1926 Series won by the Cardinals.

The first game was a heartbreaker, losing late to Red Ruffing, but the Cardinals were determined. They won the next game, and the next, and the next, and the next! Who would have imagined that the Cardinals would win four in a row against the mighty Yankees? No one… except the team. They shocked the world, and as a reward, each one got $6,193 as a share. Why were they so excited about this? For many of the players playing for the tight-fisted Breadon and Rickey, that World Series share more than doubled their salary for the season. The Cardinals only reward for the victors came from Sam Breadon’s wife, who bought all the players a drink on the train ride home from New York.

Things were looking to unravel quickly at the end of the year, as on October 19, Branch Rickey turned in his resignation. He was tired of Breadon treating him like he could do better without him there. Rickey went on to Brooklyn to take over the general manager’s position for the Dodgers. His story is far from over as he went on to be the instrumental cog in breaking the color barrier when he signed Jackie Robinson to be the first African-American man to play in Major League Baseball.

In the meantime, players in St. Louis were happy to see him go. They thought that with Rickey gone the salary constraints would be better, and maybe they could get some fair wages. Unfortunately with the war going on, attendance was down across baseball, and everyone was tightening their purse strings. Even Stan Musial himself had to hold out to get a better contract before the 1943 season, eventually getting a raise from $4,200 to $6,250. Considering the fact that both Enos Slaughter and Terry Moore were drafted in the offseason, Musial was the only regular outfielder left!

Rationing for the war meant that rubber for baseballs was not high on the priority list. Commissioner Landis decided that the teams would use what became known as ‘balata balls,’ or dead balls, instead. Home runs were down, power hitters were quieted, but the running ways of the Cardinals were riding high. They jumped out in front and led for all but a few days in July where the Dodgers had managed to tie them.

Stan Musial

They got by on the strong arms of Mort Cooper and Max Lanier, the brilliant catching of Mort’s brother Walker, and Stan Musial’s incredible hitting. Mort got the run support, which is how he went 21-8 with a 2.30 ERA, but Max had to work for his wins, going 15-7 with a miniscule 1.90 ERA. In the meantime, Musial won the batting title and MVP, slapping 220 hits and hitting .357. In the end, Musial claimed he had an easier time thanks to being able to move from left to right field, as well as what he said was a decrease in the quality of pitching because of the war taking so many players.

The team as a whole never played for the big inning. They were a running group, and took the extra base wherever possible, but rarely stole the bases. They played tough, going in spikes up, sliding their way around tags, and slapping the ball out of players’ gloves so as to avoid the out. They won 105 games and marched right back to the Series and right up to those same Yankees that they had beaten the year before.

This year, the Yankees were in bad shape, having lost most of their stars to the draft in the offseason. The Cardinals, however, had lost something worse – their fire. They were confident, but without the desire to win, it was all for naught. The team suffered a few loses throughout the Series outside of the diamond. Mort and Walker Cooper’s father died after game one, and Mort went out and won game two. Whitey Kurowski collided with a Yankees player in the second game so badly it caused him to pass a kidney stone. No one could hit. The Cardinals should have won, but they fell apart, and lost the Series 4-1. They went home with their tails between their legs.

1944 looked to be the Cardinals’ year right from the start. While most teams had been decimated by that point by the draft, the Cardinals had not been hit particularly hard, due to old injuries, odd circumstances like being an only child or supporting parents, etc. Stan Musial was one who was still supporting his parents, but to help out he even went to a war factory and worked there in the offseason to support the troops that way (and probably because he could use the money!).

The main nemesis over the last few years in the Dodgers had been decimated over the offseason, losing most of their prominent players. The Cardinals felt like they would never lose. On September 1, the team had already built up 91 wins, and were not about to quit there. By season’s end, the Pittsburgh Pirates were fighting to stay in second place, and finished with 90 wins exactly. The Cardinals had 105, and led the league in just about every way possible.

Marty Marion won the MVP in 1944, and when they called him to announce the award, his response was, “What’s the MVP?” His leadership led the team, his defense led the team, and he let the team speak for themselves with the bats and from the mound. As a whole, the Cardinals had just 112 errors. They led the league in hits, runs, batting average, doubles and home runs. Four different players led the team in various offensive categories (talk about spreading the wealth)! From the mound, there were four different pitchers with sixteen or more wins, and they led the league in winning percentage, shutouts and earned run average. The team ERA was a miniscule 2.67. They coasted through the regular season and marched on to the Series.

Sportsman's Park - home to the entire 1944 World Series

As a surprise to everyone, the Browns pull out the American League pennant! It would be the only Series in the history of baseball where every game was played inside the same stadium, as the two teams had been sharing Sportsman’s Park for many years. Despite sharing clubhouses, the two teams actually knew very little about each other, but they were excited for the opportunity to play against each other on the grandest of stages in the Fall Classic. The fans were excited too, although many were unsure who they were excited for. Cardinal players assumed that St. Louis was a Browns town, but the Browns saw how more people showed up for Cardinals games. When great plays happened, the batters were often unsure if the fans were cheering for a home run for them or an amazing catch from the opponent! Talk about confusing!

The NL St. Louis team thought that they had the upper hand. They had been to the Series the previous two years, and knew the pressure. The Browns did fight tough, and took the Series to six games. In the end, the Cardinals won 4-2, but both Stan Musial and Max Lanier thought that it was the toughest Series they had ever played in. The top player for the Cardinals in that six game set? None other than infielder Emil Verban.

Wait, who?

Emil Verban was a light hitting infielder who had played the majority of the year at second base for the Cardinals. He was the weakest hitting player on the team, and he was so small that in today’s vernacular he would surely be labeled with the “scrappy” title. Verban had a bone to pick with Don Barnes, the owner of the Browns. Barnes had placed Verban’s wife behind a pole for every game of the Series! When he asked politely for his wife to be moved so she could see the field, Barnes laughed and said he didn’t play well enough to even try to make demands like that. Verban was so furious that he went out and hit .412 for the Series, including three hits alone in the final game to put the nail in the Brownies’ coffin. After the last out was recorded Verban stomped over to Barnes’ owners’ box and pointed at him, reminding him that maybe next time he would not be so rude to a polite request. Who would imagine on a team with Stan Musial, Walker Cooper and Marty Marion that little Emil Verban would be such a hero?

The Cardinals were riding high, winning three straight pennants and two of three Series crowns. How long could they stay on top?

Angela Weinhold covers the Cardinals for i70baseball.com and writes at Cardinal Diamond Diaries. You may follow her on Twitter here or follow Cardinal Diamond Diaries here.

During the offseason I will be taking a look at the past, giving readers a timeline of St. Louis baseball throughout history. The plan is to build five years at a time from now through whenever I hit the present. Originally I was going to start at 1900, but I realized that there were stories to tell before then, which is where we will begin today. Hope you enjoy this series!

Before superstars were looking for millions of dollars to play a game, before players had their pick of which car to drive to the park that day, and before uniforms could be tossed in a bin at the end of the game and players could come back the next morning to find a sparkling white one hanging in their locker, there was baseball in St. Louis. Baseball pre-dates television, planes, cars, and even the Civil War. The game was first brought to St. Louis in the 1850s, when a contractor by the name of Jere Frain came in from New York and built a diamond, hoping to spark an interest in his new city for the game he had grown to love.

Throughout the first twenty years or so of baseball in St. Louis, the amateur teams went by several different names, including the Empires and Unions. The teams were loose, unorganized, and utterly terrible, routinely passing down scores of 36-8 and 47-1. In 1874, St. Louis boosters, discouraged and frustrated by the futility, scraped together $20,000 to build a professional team. The team became known as the Brown Stockings, for although the team uniform socks were white, they quickly became brown from tobacco spit and dirt. Gross.

The 1875 season had two games that officially put St. Louis on the baseball map, defeating the Chicago White Stockings twice in the course of three days, winning 10-0 and 4-3. This came after being defeated twenty times in a row the previous year, so the turnaround from that to even a couple of wins was understandably exciting for the St. Louis faithful.

The Brown Stockings lasted just three years as professional team before withdrawing from the National League at the end of the 1877 season. Baseball, however, would not die so easily, and the team continued playing with an amateur status on the corner of Grand and St. Louis avenues, at the site of the eventual Sportsman’s Park. Two brothers – Al and William Spink – held the team together, paying for everything the club would need, creating schedules and even doing their own write-ups on games in St. Louis papers. In 1880 and 1881 the team lost just one game per season. It was after the 1881 season that something truly exciting happened: Charlie Comiskey was brought in to play first base for the large salary of $75 per month.

Chris Von der Ahe

It was based on the play of Comiskey that Chris Von der Ahe was convinced to buy the team and return it to professional status in 1882. He knew nothing of baseball until he started noticing how quickly his bar would fill, then empty, before the start of every Browns game. He then realized that these baseball fans liked their beer, and bought the team so that he could sell beer at the games and make a tidy profit off the fans. He even went so far as to convert a house he owned behind right field into a beer garden where people could drink to their hearts’ content and watch the game at the same time. It was Von der Ahe who first recognized that baseball could be a profitable adventure for an entrepreneur such as himself.

However, thanks to Al Spalding’s tyrannical rule of the National League, beer could not be sold in-stadium at professional baseball games. In 1881, Spalding jettisoned four teams from the NL, two for not finishing the schedule and two for selling beer. A few of these clubs joined together to create the American Association in 1882, and Von der Ahe’s Browns were among the founding members.

A strong showing in 1883 found the Browns a mere one win from winning the pennant, but Von der Ahe could not stop meddling in the affairs of the team. Despite his claims to just be the owner and not know anything about baseball, “der boss president” became the George Steinbrenner of his time, leading his team in parades before every game, telling his team to hit every ball to right field after the team won one game on a ball hit to right, building a life-size statue of himself and pouring all the cash receipts from the day into a wheelbarrow and personally pushing it down to the bank, flanked at all times by two armed security guards. Because of the constant circus-like attitude, there was a merry-go-round of managers for the Browns, until Von der Ahe turned to his then 25-year-old star first baseman, Charlie Comiskey.

Comiskey would take over the managerial reigns before the 1885 season, and Von der Ahe, desiring to see his ballclub become a juggernaut, opened his wallet and created the most expensive team in the country. That 1885 club had a salary of $32,000 spread out over fourteen players, and it was worth every penny. Comiskey led the talented team to four consecutive pennants and one championship, making him the brightest star on the baseball landscape and Von der Ahe the owner everyone loved to hate. Comiskey was not afraid of Von der Ahe, instead taking his suggestions and doing the exact opposite, to the relief of the players and boosters.

Charlie Comiskey

Make no mistake; Comiskey was a brute of a ballplayer, which overshadowed his brilliance as a manager in terms of ability to keep players motivated and playing tough every day of the season. Those who argue that Ty Cobb was the dirtiest player of them all obviously have never heard stories of Comiskey, who would stand in the basepaths and knock unaware runners over, start fights unprovoked and managed a team as wild and unruly as he was. One of his players, Curt Welch, was a known umpire-baiter who consistently found himself in trouble with the law, and this not because of what he did before and after the games, but what he did on the field, causing riots and at times almost critically injuring opposing players! Third baseman Arlie Latham became the poster child for trash talk, finding new and colorful ways to yell and curse both on the field and from the dugout. To top it off, Comiskey and shortstop Bill Gleason were such vile base coaches that the rest of the league insisted upon setting boundaries to keep them in check (you know them today as the coaching boxes up the first and third base lines).

The Browns of the late 1880s were the jerks of baseball, but St. Louis fell in love with their winning ways. Beyond the players mentioned above, the team was led by the one-two punch of Dave Foutz and Bob Caruthers, who had records of 114-48 and 106-38 over the course of 1884-1887. They became the strongest defensive team in the American Association, teaching pitchers how to back up bases, shifting infielders to eat up more groundballs up the middle by having the first baseman play away from the bag, and confusing batters by being in constant motion before and during each pitch. The team also scored runs by the tens, outscoring their opponents by 352 runs in the 1886 season alone and averaging 8 runs scored per game.

However, despite four consecutive pennants, Von der Ahe’s meddling could only go so far, and after the owner refused to pay his players their share of the gate receipts from the 1888 championship series for the second consecutive year, the players lost all respect for the owner. Despite player-manager Comiskey’s best efforts, things were unraveling for the Browns. The 1889 season was suspect, and despite the team only losing the pennant by two games, between forfeits, threats of going on strike, and rather suspect play from the players, it was obvious that the second place finish was not where the Browns should have ended up.

In 1890 salary disputes caused many players in the American Association to defect and create their own league, called the Brotherhood League. It lasted one season, but the point was made, and many owners, after losing a stockpile of money because of their stars disappearing, welcomed back their players with open arms and checkbooks. However, Von der Ahe had not learned his lesson, and while he did allow all of his players (including Charlie Comiskey) to return, he had become even more of a wild card. His ridiculous demands, low salaries and treatment of players caused all of his stars to declare that they were leaving the team after the 1891 season to play for National League teams.

Even with the owner’s trickery, including swinging a deal to wipe out the American Association and join the National League, without Comiskey to show him the way Von der Ahe could not put together a winning ballclub even after gaining a place in the NL. He even attempted to be the manager in 1892, then went through five managers in the next three seasons in an attempt to recreate the magic he had been a part of with Comiskey, Gleason, Latham, Caruthers and Foutz, but to no avail. The media turned on him, as The Sporting News returned to prominence after beginning a personal attack on the curmudgeon of an owner by referring to him as “Chris Von der Ha Ha.”

The downward spiral continued. Five managers sat in the dugout for the Browns in 1896, four more in 1897, and the team went from a 90+ win team to going 29-102 in embarrassing fashion. The nail in Von der Ahe’s baseball coffin came in 1898, when the stadium caught fire. The grandstand, half the bleachers, his saloon, offices, gate money, trophies, clothes and files were left in ruins. Many fans were also injured in the fire, and the lawsuits came fast and furious. Eventually Von der Ahe found himself jailed and disgraced. The other owners of the National League stripped him of the franchise and sold it to Frank and Stanley Robinson in 1899.

The Robinsons were the owners of the Cleveland Spiders of the American Association, and quickly transferred the best of their Cleveland players to St. Louis, including a pitcher named Denton ‘Cy’ Young. To revamp the club’s image the owners changed the look of the team, including changing their socks from brown to a bright red, and the name shifted from Browns to Cardinals. There is some debate as to how this change came about, some crediting a journalist and others a relative of the owners. I prefer the latter, which is the one I will close this post with.

Upon seeing the revamped team for the first time in 1899, a young woman turned to a club official and said, “My, what a lovely shade of cardinal!” The name stuck.

Next week: the new-look Cardinals from 1900-1905.

Angela Weinhold covers the Cardinals for i70baseball.com, BaseballDigest.com and writes at Cardinal Diamond Diaries. You may follow her on Twitter here or follow Cardinal Diamond Diaries here.