The great 1941 debate

Coral's first exposition can be found here. This is my opening volley.

Anybody who knows me personally knows that I live and die by statistics. Especially in baseball, they tell the story of what happened on the field more than anything else. So let's examine the numbers of the two players in question.

Joe DiMaggio
139 G, 541 AB, 193 H (43 2B, 11 3B, 30 HR), 122 R, 125 RBI, 76 BB, 13 K, .357 AVG, .440 OBP, .643 SLG, 1.083 OPS

Ted Williams
143 G, 456 AB, 185 H (33 2B, 3 3B, 37 HR), 135 R, 120 RBI, 147 BB, 27 K, .406 AVG, .553 OBP, .735 SLG, 1.288 OPS

Remember also that 1941 is the year DiMaggio had his 56-game hitting streak.

Why should Williams have been the MVP? There is no simple answer for this. DiMaggio was the BBWAA and Sporting News AL MVP, but Williams was the Sporting News MLB Player of the Year, so obviously there was some debate even back then over who was more valuable to the team.

Item A: Note the walk totals for each player. DiMaggio had eight more hits than Williams, but Williams walked almost twice as much as DiMaggio! This led to an on-base percentage for Williams that was over 100 points higher than DiMaggio's. An OBP of .553 is essentially saying that when Williams was up to bat, it was better than even money that he would get on base. To compare, the 2006 American League OBP leader was Manny Ramirez, with an OBP of .439.

Item B: One must consider the amount of talent surrounding each player. In the case of DiMaggio, he had three other 20-HR hitters in the everyday starting lineup, Charlie Keller in left field (who had a breakout season (.298-33-122)), 5 players who scored 100 runs or more, and a pitching staff with a 3.53 ERA and 4 10+ game winners.

Williams, on the other hand, was the only player on his team with 20+ HR's (Jimmie Foxx had 19, yes, but he also struck out over 100 times). Only two other starting players (Foxx and Jimmy Cronin) even cracked the .300 line, and those same two players were the only ones with OBP's as high as Williams' average! The biggest problem with the 1941 Red Sox, though, was the pitching staff. The collective staff had an ERA of 4.19, giving up almost 100 more runs than the Yankee pitching staff. The Red Sox pitching staff also gave up 150 more hits than the Yankee staff.

Why is this important? Williams had to do much more work to keep the Red Sox within arm's reach of the Yankees. The fact that the Red Sox were only 5 games back at the end of June is a minor miracle, considering the pitching staff of Boston was one of the weakest it would have during Williams' tenure with the team. A three-week swoon by the Red Sox in early July would eventually spell the end of the team's contention for the '41 World Series, but without Williams' bat, they would have been out of it from the word go. Without DiMaggio? The Yankees might have simply had a closer race from Boston, the White Sox, or the Indians, all of whom contended for the AL crown at some point during that season.

The problem with the way the Red Sox were built in 1941 (much like the problem the 2006 White Sox encountered) is that you cannot specifically build a team to hit, ignore pitching, and expect to win games at a sustained, extended stretch. Williams did all he could to hold a team together that really, for all intents and purposes, had no dominant pitching throughout the course of the season. He continued to hit, and hit, and hit, and while DiMaggio's sustained hitting streak is no doubt impressive, Williams' performance meant more to his team than DiMaggio's performance did to his.

EDIT: Fixed a grammatical error and a statistical typo.