Was this guy looking at WAR 77 years ago?

[PowderedH2O]

I am always intrigued with MVP and Cy Young voting. The AL MVP race of 1941 has always pushed a button with me. Ted Williams had one of the finest offensive WAR seasons of all time, but garnered only 8 of 24 MVP first place votes, with Joe DiMaggio getting 15. We can go back and forth about the two players that year. We can all agree that both guys kicked butt and would have won MVP awards in many other years with those seasons they had.
But who got the other vote? Well, it went to Thornton Lee of the White Sox. I've looked at his numbers: 22-11 with a 2.37 ERA. Those are really good numbers, but on the surface it looks pretty much like a typical Jim Palmer/Juan Marichal type season. I just happened to look at the WAR number and it made me do a double take. His 9.2 was better than DiMaggio's 9.1. That 2.37 in the great offensive 1941 AL season was worth an adjusted ERA of 174. He had 30 complete games, and led the league in ERA and WHIP (although I doubt he ever knew that).
Obviously, the only WAR conversation in 1941 was WW II, but a sportswriter made a vote that I considered to be a throwaway that actually wasn't quite as heinous as I first thought. I'd still rank Lee 3rd, but I give somebody credit for seeing a great performance on a 6th place mediocre White Sox team. Makes you wonder if the sportswriter was doing some sort of sabermetrics of his own, or was is just a Chicago beat writer who liked Lee.