Spud Chandler

Only one pitcher in the history of the New York Yankees has ever won the American League Most Valuable Player award. He didn't throw the hardest fastball on the staff, and for most of his career he wasn't even the best arm in his own rotation. Spud Chandler won the award anyway, in 1943, at age 35, by simply refusing to lose. Across eleven seasons in pinstripes he went 109-43, a .717 winning percentage that remains the highest of any pitcher with 100 or more career wins since 1876. He never had a losing season. Not once, in eleven years.

Path to the Bronx

Spurgeon Ferdinand Chandler grew up in Commerce, Georgia, and won a football scholarship to the University of Georgia, where he played halfback and did some placekicking before baseball ever became the plan. The Yankees signed him, and then the minors nearly buried him. He bounced from Binghamton to the Newark Bears to the Minneapolis Millers to the Syracuse Chiefs, lost most of 1934 to elbow trouble (a bad one -- he won just two games all year), and got shipped all the way to the Pacific Coast League in 1935 before finally pitching his way back to Newark in 1936. He didn't reach the majors until May 6, 1937, in Detroit -- 29 years old, ancient for a rookie, with a fastball that was good but not great and a temperament that scouts had a hard time describing politely.

Yankees Career

Chandler spent his first six seasons as the reliable arm behind Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez -- never the story, always the guy who gave you 15 wins and went home. He went 7-4 as a rookie, 14-5 the next year, and settled into a run of solid, unspectacular seasons that included an entire year, 1939, spent exclusively in relief (not one start, all season, and he still went 3-0). Then in 1942 something changed. He went 16-5 with a 2.38 ERA, third-best in the league, and made his first All-Star team at age 34.

Then came 1943. With DiMaggio, Ruffing, and Rizzuto all gone to the war, the wartime Yankees needed someone to carry the staff. Chandler went 20-4 with a 1.64 ERA, the lowest in the majors between 1920 and 1967, and won the MVP over players who'd hit 31 home runs and driven in 107 runs that same season. Then he won two complete games in the World Series against the Cardinals, including a Game 5 shutout to clinch it. It stands among the finest single seasons any Yankees pitcher has ever produced.

Chandler's postseason ledger tells its own story. He appeared in four World Series -- 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1947 -- and went 2-2 with a 1.62 ERA. In 1942 he saved Game 1 and then lost Game 3 despite allowing a single run over eight innings, the kind of outing that makes a pitcher wonder what more he could possibly have done. He was also on the roster during the championship seasons of 1937, 1938, and 1939, though the Bombers never called his number in those Octobers. Three rings came the hard way -- 1941, 1943, and 1947 -- each one earned by taking the ball in October, not just posing for the clubhouse photo.

The Angry Yankee Ace

Bill Dickey caught most of Chandler's starts, and he needed to understand a pitcher who treated every hitter like a personal insult. Chandler called opposing lineups "the enemy." If a hitter dug in too comfortably, he'd sail one at his chin without apology. Milton Gross wrote a Saturday Evening Post profile calling him "the angry Yankee ace," and Chandler's response was to insist he wasn't mean -- just determined. Baseball Magazine described him more gently: "so serious one could get the erroneous impression that he lacks a sense of humor," restless on the mound, "forever picking up the resin bag, scraping the sod with his cleats."

The war interrupted him at his peak. He made one start in 1944 before reporting for Army induction that April, and he didn't pitch again until his discharge in September 1945. His comeback start came against Bob Feller, also just back from the service, in front of 72,152 fans at the Stadium -- New York wanted a look at the men who'd been gone. Chandler went 2-1 in four late-season outings, then delivered a full comeback in 1946: 20-8, a 2.10 ERA, and a career-high 138 strikeouts at age 38 (not bad for a man most teams would've already put out to pasture). He pitched one more season, going 9-5 in 1947 before his arm gave out, and threw his final major league pitches in relief during a Game 3 loss to Brooklyn in that fall's World Series.

Chandler retired after 1947, later coached and scouted for other organizations, and died in 1990 without ever making the Hall of Fame. The plaque never came. The number does the talking instead: a .717 winning percentage that's outlasted every Yankees pitcher who came after him, from Ford to Guidry to Pettitte. Nobody's caught it yet.