THE 1941 HIT KING? IT’S NOT WHO YOU THINK
Taking a break from all my postings on 1969…I wanted to step back for a moment to 1941 – specifically, the landmark ’41 baseball season, when Ted Williams hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio had his record 56-game hitting streak. Since then, no player has finished a Major League season with a .400 average, and DiMaggio’s mark has never been seriously challenged.
Yet a little-known fact, one of my favorite pieces of baseball trivia, is that Cecil Travis led all of baseball in hits that year. A three-time All-Star for the Washington Senators, Travis tallied 218 hits (the only player in baseball to reach the 200-hit mark that season) while hitting .359 and knocking in 101 runs in 1941, when he emerged as the top shortstop in the game.
Travis seemed destined for Cooperstown at the time, having compiled seven .300 seasons. But the soft-spoken Georgia native with the sweet, left-handed batting stroke was drafted into military service following the ‘41 season and spent the next 3 1/2 seasons away from the game due to World War II. He returned to the Senators late in the ‘45 season but was never the same player again – he’d suffered frostbite during the war, though Travis said he simply was unable to regain the timing in his swing – and retired at the end of 1947.
When Travis passed away in December 2006, he had been largely forgotten by all but the most esoteric baseball fans, but such dignitaries as Bob Feller and the late Bowie Kuhn have said that Travis merits induction in the Hall of Fame.
When I spoke to Mr. Travis several years ago, he seemed entirely uninterested in the fact that someone was writing a book about him. He was known as a modest man, once voted the favorite player of American League umpires, and the complete antithesis of many modern athletes. No one had written a book about Travis, which was just one reason why I chose to do so. Cecil Travis of the Washington Senators, my first full-length book, was published originally in 2006, and I’m delighted that Bison Books (of the University of Nebraska Press) has come out with a new edition. The Bison Books edition comes with a much nicer cover, proofing errors corrected, and a more trade-friendly list price!
If you’re a fan of old-time baseball – of an era when teams traveled by train and St. Louis was the western-most club in the ”bigs” – I think you’ll enjoy this book.
-Rob
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Tags: Baseball, Books, Cecil Travis, Rob Kirkpatrick, World War II
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