On This Date in 1944: Hal Newhouser Starts His Trek Towards the Hall of Fame as the Tigers Dominate Starting Pitching

On this date back in 1944, the American League MVP vote turned into something you almost never see: two Detroit Tigers fighting it out for the top spot. Hal Newhouser won it by a slim margin, four votes, over his own teammate, Dizzy Trout. If you ever needed proof of how strange and unforgettable wartime baseball could be, this is exhibit A.

Before that season, Newhouser was more potential than payoff. Big arm, sure, but the results didn’t always match. Over the four previous years, he won 34 games combined, and nobody was writing him in ink as the staff ace. Then 1944 arrived, and he suddenly looked like a different pitcher. The command sharpened up, the strikeouts jumped, and he was basically the guy hitters did not want to face.

He won 29 games that year with a 2.22 ERA, and he led the league in strikeouts. That alone would’ve made him a strong MVP candidate. But the twist—the part that always makes this story fun—is that Dizzy Trout was right there with him, pitch for pitch, and in some ways even better.

Trout posted a 2.12 ERA, the best in the league, and won 27 games. He threw a pile of innings, hit better than a lot of bench players, and came up big in several key stretches when the Tigers’ lineup was paper-thin, batting .271. If you’re looking at this from today’s perspective, you could make a legitimate argument that Trout might’ve deserved the award. ERA title, nearly identical win total, two-way impact, it’s a compelling case.

But MVP voting back then leaned heavy on wins and narrative, and Newhouser’s breakout season carried a certain weight. He suddenly became the guy other teams dreaded on getaway day. Voters noticed that kind of leap. That, plus the strikeout numbers, was enough to tip the scales his way.

You also have to remember the timing. This was right in the middle of World War II. A lot of star players were overseas. Baseball wasn’t watered down in the way people sometimes describe it, but the league was absolutely different. Newhouser and Trout were both classified 4-F, which meant they were available to pitch while many others were not. Detroit simply had two elite arms when plenty of teams were patching rotations together from whoever showed up healthy.

If you dig into the numbers a little deeper, the picture becomes even clearer. By modern metrics, Trout and Newhouser didn’t just lead the Tigers, they carried the entire pitching staff on their backs. Trout posted an astonishing 9.3 bWAR, the highest in the American League, while Newhouser wasn’t far behind at 7.7 bWAR. After those two, the drop-off is dramatic. No other Detroit starter even cracked 2.0 WAR, and several ended the year either barely above replacement level or in the negatives.

In other words, this rotation leaned on two arms for almost everything. Between Trout’s 352.1 innings and Newhouser’s 312.1, they logged more than 660 innings combined, a workload that today would be split across an entire pitching staff. That’s why the 1944 Tigers stayed in the race as long as they did: one team, two horses, and a season held together by their endurance as much as their dominance.

The Tigers didn’t win the pennant in 1944, just finishing a game back of the St. Louis Browns, but they hung around because their pitching kept almost every game competitive. And the following season, in 1945, all that dominance carried over. Newhouser won the MVP again and the Tigers won the World Series. It’s one of the rare cases where back-to-back MVP awards truly reflected reality: he was the best pitcher in baseball during that stretch, full stop.

Even now, you can still argue the Trout side of the debate. Tigers fans who dive into the numbers sometimes come away surprised by just how close the two were. It wasn’t a case of Newhouser towering over everyone else—it was more like Detroit had two frontline guys at the exact same time, and the voters preferred the story of the one who made the biggest leap.

Whatever angle you take, the result stands as one of the unique MVP races in franchise history. Not many teams can say their pitchers finished first and second in the voting in the same year. Detroit did it in ‘44, and it kicked off a run that still stands tall in the Tigers’ long, winding history.

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