Great teams are built piece by piece.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an eventual world champion that just happened to fall into it, to emerge from nowhere to the mountain top. Even today, when you can spend money to collect stars, the base of the team can be years in the building.
This was as true of the 1948 world champion Indians as any other team. Stars they had. Solid regulars, too. But it took years, for some guys over a decade and even most of a career, to get to that zenith.
Ken Keltner, a mainstay on the Indians of the 1940s, was such a man.