Joe Page had thrown three straight balls to Rudy York. The bases were loaded, nobody was out, and 74,747 people had come to Yankee Stadium that night. Bucky Harris, the Yankees’ manager, later said that if Page had walked York, he was going back to the minors. Quite a spot to be looking for the strike zone.
Page threw two fastballs for strikes. At 3–2 he threw a curve. York swung through it. Bobby Doerr struck out next, and Eddie Pellagrini flew out to right. Harris had called for Page in the third inning. He left him out for the rest of the game.
The date was May 26, 1947. The Yankees beat the Red Sox 9–3. Joe DiMaggio hit a three-run homer in the fifth. Ted Williams, who had reached on an error to load those bases, went hitless. If you’d bought a ticket to see Williams and DiMaggio, you got seven shutout innings from the guy I’d have wanted to talk about on the train home.
I went looking for Page because of a number near the bottom of a very familiar story. Williams won the American League Triple Crown that year. DiMaggio beat him for MVP, 202 points to 201. Dean has already made the case for Williams in these pages, and he’d get my vote, too. But how does a man who hits .343 and leads the league in homers and RBIs get only three first-place votes? And what did seven writers see that made them spend theirs on a relief pitcher?
It’s a good week to ask. On Wednesday, the Baseball Writers’ Association of America will name its Reliever of the Year. The MVP awards come Thursday. I like that the relievers get a night. I’d also like to keep a spot on the MVP ballot for the kind of season that made seven people write down Joe Page.
What the Yankees asked Page to do
Start with the two numbers you’ll find on his pitching line. Page won 14 games and saved 17. The saves were credited retrospectively. They became an official statistic in 1969, more than two decades after Harris had to decide what to do with him. Besides, his first win of 1947 tells you something a save never could. He took over against Boston when the Yankees were losing and gave his teammates seven innings to change that.
I reviewed all 56 regular-season appearances and removed his two starts. That leaves 54 trips from the bullpen and exactly 134 innings of relief. In 23 of those outings, he got at least nine outs. In ten he got at least twelve. A starter could have a lousy afternoon, and Harris could still get through dinner without using half the pitching staff.
On July 6 against the Philadelphia Athletics, Page got eleven outs. Eight were strikeouts, and he didn’t allow a hit. On July 27 against the White Sox, he got eleven outs in the first game of a doubleheader. Harris brought him back for the second game. Six more outs, but also a run and a loss. A fan who went home after the opener missed a pretty fair-sized piece of Page’s workday.
Then Boston came back to the Bronx on August 15. Williams had four hits in five at-bats, including two doubles. He didn’t drive in a run. Page pitched 7⅔ innings out of the bullpen and drove in two runs himself. The Yankees won 10–6. You could put those two box scores in front of a kid and have a pretty good conversation about why RBI depend so much on who’s on base when you hit.
Cleveland’s Cade Smith gives those innings a little perspective. He’s up for the AL relief award this year after striking out 107 in 74 innings with a 1.95 ERA. Page threw 60 more innings in relief alone. That’s 180 extra outs the Yankees didn’t have to find somewhere else. Smith saved 41 games for Cleveland. Harris’s idea of a relief assignment could mean pitching through the heart of Boston’s order in the third inning and seeing those hitters again before the night was over.
Where the first-place votes went
The 1947 American League had 24 MVP voters. Eight put DiMaggio first. Seven put Page first. Three picked George McQuinn, the Yankees’ first baseman. That’s 18 of the 24 first-place votes for three teammates. Williams got the same number as McQuinn. Two writers chose Philadelphia shortstop Eddie Joost. One chose Lou Boudreau, Cleveland’s shortstop and manager.
What strikes me is how little agreement there was about the Yankees themselves. A writer who valued the pennant could start with the man playing center field. Another could go with the guy who kept a bad third inning from ruining an entire evening. And there was a third group willing to put McQuinn over both of them. We know where those votes went. We have no way to hand Page’s seven to somebody else and declare a new winner.
The ballots had ten places, though, and that’s where Williams nearly caught DiMaggio. First was worth 14 points. DiMaggio collected 112 points from his first-place votes; Williams just 42. Take those away from their totals, and Williams earned 159 points down the ballot to DiMaggio’s 90. He made up 69 of the 70 points he’d given away at the top.
Page had the opposite experience. With seven first-place votes, he still finished fourth. Boudreau, with one first-place vote, edged him 168–167. So that ballot produced two one-point margins. The Associated Press reported both the next day. Baseball has spent considerably more time arguing about one of them.
Boston fans know the story about the writer who left Williams off entirely. That part checks out. In his autobiography, Williams named Boston writer Mel Webb. When Glenn Stout researched the vote, he found that Webb hadn’t had a ballot. DiMaggio, meanwhile, was left off three ballots. If you hold DiMaggio’s total fixed, adding Williams in tenth on the ballot that omitted him produces a tie. Ninth gives him the award. I think leaving Williams out of a top ten was an indefensible vote.
The case for giving Ted the ballot
The eight DiMaggio voters had a center fielder who hit .315, drove in 97 runs, and helped New York win 97 games. He played 141 games. For most of those innings, a Yankees pitcher had the considerable pleasure of looking over his shoulder and finding Joe DiMaggio there. A ball he ran down in the gap with two men aboard would never show up in a Triple Crown race. I’d want to hear about those catches before I turned in my ballot.
The two Joes also had a pretty good arrangement on offense. On May 26, one kept the Red Sox off the board long enough for the other to hit a three-run homer. Listing them both high on the same ballot ought to have been easy. Deciding which teammate had done more for the Yankees was the hard part.
Then there’s what Williams did on the days nobody would remember to bring up in November. He hit 32 home runs and drove in 114. The part I keep coming back to is that he also drew 162 walks. DiMaggio had 64. Add hits and walks together and you get 343 for Williams, 232 for DiMaggio. Some of that gap comes from playing time. The rate tells you it was there, too. Williams reached at a .499 clip, DiMaggio at .391. Over a hundred chances, that’s about eleven more times Boston got to keep hitting.
To give Page my first-place vote, I’d need to believe the extra value of those tight innings could cover all the work Williams did between them. The August 15 game is a nice test. Page was probably the most valuable man on the field that afternoon. He soaked up the innings, got a hit, and helped win the game with his bat. What charge do I file against Williams? He went 4-for-5. He played well enough to swing the standings that day. His team lost anyway.
Baseball-Reference estimates Williams at 9.5 wins above replacement, DiMaggio at 4.7 and Page at 3.7 as a pitcher. Those are modern estimates of value over an available replacement. I’m inclined to give the old writers some room on how much ground DiMaggio covered in center and how much weight to put on an inherited runner with nobody out. I still come back to a hitter reaching base half the time over a full season. That’s an awfully big head start to give anyone, even a pitcher I’d trust with the bases loaded.
Today, quite often we get the MVP argument, is it the best player in the league versus the most valuable player for his team. In this case if there are those advocating for Page, does it diminish the traditional Triple Crown statistics? You do show how they could have been thinkinking back then.