Best 50 — 1942 St. Louis Cardinals (#39)
A superheated stretch drive shoots the Cards to a world title
We’re spending the 2025 season looking back at previous seasons, specifically the 50 greatest teams in history, a group that I call the Best 50. Today’s entry, the 1942 St. Louis Cardinals, is No. 39 on the list, as determined by my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
Facts and figures
Team: 1942 St. Louis Cardinals
Team score: 85.734 points
All-time rank: 39 of 2,544
All-time percentile: 98.51%
Season record: 106-48 (.688)
Season position: First place in National League
Final status: World champion
Season summary
The Cardinals hadn’t secured a National League title since 1934, though they had finished second on four subsequent occasions. The tightest of those races was the most recent. The Cards fashioned a sparkling 97-56 record in 1941, only to trail the 100-54 Brooklyn Dodgers.
The pundits doubted that St. Louis could get over the hump in 1942. “The Cardinals have not shown enough run-making ability to induce us to pick them to win,” wrote J.G. Taylor Spink in the Sporting News.
It looked to be a fair assessment. The Dodgers roared to a 9.5-game lead by July 4. They slowed a bit thereafter, yet still notched 104 victories, enough to clinch any NL pennant since 1910.
But the Cardinals eventually caught fire — ignited by hard-hitting outfielders Enos Slaughter and Stan Musial — and surprisingly topped the NL in scoring (4.84 runs per game). St. Louis went 65-19 (.774) after Independence Day, passed the Dodgers in mid-September, and banked a pennant-winning total of 106 victories.
Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams
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Postseason summary
The Cardinals naturally entered the 1942 World Series as underdogs. The Yankees had won five of the past six world championships. It was hard to imagine them losing.
Game One went as anticipated. New York cruised to a 7-0 lead before St. Louis scored four meaningless runs in the ninth inning. But the next four contests were much tighter — unexpectedly so — and all four went the Cardinals’ way. Rookie Johnny Beazley pitched a pair of complete-game victories, clinching the title with his win in Game Five.
The New York press corps was stunned. “The capitalistic system took another kick in the pants today,” wrote Joe Williams in the World-Telegram. He contrasted the “aristocratic and well-fed Yankees” with the newly crowned Cardinals, whom he called “the Oakies [sic] of baseball.”
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Lineup summary
The longtime general manager of the Cardinals, Branch Rickey, was halfway out the door in 1942 — he would become president of the Brooklyn Dodgers in October — but the St. Louis club still bore his distinctive imprint.
Rickey had created baseball’s first farm system in the 1920s, guaranteeing the Cardinals a steady flow of youthful talent. “The farm system,” he said, “is the only vehicle that a poor club has available to it to use to mount into respectability.” His innovation propelled the Cards to six National League pennants and four World Series titles from 1926 to 1942.
The club rotated through 10 position players in 1942; eight had yet to reach their 28th birthdays. The youngest in the bunch was also the best. Manager Billy Southworth shifted 21-year-old Stan Musial into the cleanup slot in mid-June, an unusual honor for a rookie. The left fielder responded with a .315 batting average, third-best in the NL.
The other corner outfielder, Enos Slaughter, finished second in the league at .318. Slaughter ran everywhere, even to first base after drawing a walk. Old-timer Frankie Frisch lauded him as “the most hustling so-and-so in the game today.”
Mort Cooper, who hadn’t won more than 13 games in any of his first four seasons with the Cardinals, blossomed in 1942. Cooper wore uniform No. 13, but he set a new goal by switching to 14 after notching his 13th victory in August. He continued to upgrade his number — exchanging uniforms with teammates — after each subsequent win. His final total of 22 led the league. Teammate Johnny Beazley was the NL’s runner-up with 21 victories.