Total Baseball (1994 Edition)/Total_Baseball_1994_Edition_Creative_Multimedia_1994.iso/dp/0017/00173.txt

Text File | 1994-02-24 | 52.0 KB | 737 lines

$Unique_ID{BAS00173}
$Title{Baseball and the Armed Services}
$Author{
Crissey, Jr., Harrington E.}
$Subject{Baseball Armed Services}
$Log{}

Total Baseball:  Other Leagues


Baseball and the Armed Services

Harrington E. Crissey, Jr.


It is regrettable that the average fan has little or no knowledge of the
historical relationship between the military and baseball, considering that
the links between the two date back to the beginning of the game's evolution
in North America approximately 150 years ago.  Perhaps it is because most
people associate baseball with pleasure and military service with anything but
that; or it may be that those who have never served in the armed forces have
no appreciation of the value of baseball in relieving either the stress or
boredom of military life, depending on one's circumstances.  Whatever the
reasons, the connections between the armed services and this truly
international pastime are long and storied, and deserve our careful and
devoted attention because the military has had a profound impact on the
propagation of baseball worldwide and on the development of the game as a
social leveler and instrument of international relations.
     A story about the origin of baseball was advanced by a committee of the
game's elder statesmen in 1907.  The committee, led by former player and
sporting goods magnate Albert G. Spalding, said that Abner Doubleday had
designed the first baseball diamond at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839 while a
cadet at the U.S. Military Academy.  This version was quickly accepted as
official by the baseball moguls and held sway for several decades, but it is
now considered a myth by serious baseball historians.
     Doubleday fought in the Battle of Monterey during the Mexican War;
sighted the first gun in defense of Fort Sumter when it was fired on by
Southerners on April 12, 1861, thus starting the Civil War; fought at Second
Bull Run and Antietam; distinguished himself at Gettysburg by helping to repel
Pickett's Charge, the Confederates' major attack of the battle; and eventually
retired from the Army as a general in 1873.  He was dead, however, by the time
the committee put forth its opinion, so no one could get his views on the
matter.  There is nothing in his writings which suggests he invented the game,
and other early commentators such as Henry Chadwick advanced different
theories regarding the origin of the game.  Nevertheless, the name of Abner
Doubleday, a career soldier, remains inextricably linked to baseball in the
popular mind.
     To discover the first bona fide influence of the military on baseball,
and a tremendous one at that, we must move ahead to the American Civil War
(1861-1865).  Baseball before the Civil War was almost exclusively a
gentleman's game, with the upper classes of society participating and the true
amateur spirit and British rules of sportsmanship holding sway.  Most of the
prominent teams were in the East, with a few, such as those in Chicago and St.
Louis, in the Midwest.  During the war, baseball became a sport played by
people of all social classes over a wide geographical area.  It was played
among Union troops during their leisure hours and an unheard-of crowd of
40,000 soldiers watched a game in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on Christmas
Day, 1862, between the 165th New York Volunteer Infantry (Duryea's Zouaves)
and a team picked from other Union regiments.  A.G. Mills, later to become
president of the National League, played in that contest.
     Baseball was known in the South prior to the Civil War.  Soldiers were
said to have played baseball during the Mexican War, the game was popular in
New Orleans, and many people south of the Mason-Dixon Line subscribed to
Northern periodicals which featured baseball news.  Nevertheless, the growth
of the sport in Dixie was greatly stimulated by Northern prisoners playing the
game to relieve boredom or tension in Southern POW camps.  Their guards first
watched, then decided they wanted to try, and finally organized teams to play
against their captives.  Southern POWs returned home similarly enlightened
about the game.  With more than a million men under arms during the conflict,
is it any wonder that the game proliferated when the veterans went home to
practically every town in the nation?
     The Civil War accelerated two trends that were first discernible in the
late 1850s:  increasingly fierce competition and with it increased
commercialism.  Diaries written by Union troops in the Army of the Potomac and
the Army of Northern Virginia show that as the war went on and baseball became
ever more popular and competitive, emphasis on skill was the great
consideration.  If a player was good, he got to play.  Teams in Army units may
have been promoted by officers or high-ranking noncoms, but the players on the
field were the most skilled.  In 1863 and 1864, some outfits had first and
second teams based on skill levels.  This idea of skill predominating over
social or military rank certainly fit the competitive pattern of post-Civil
War baseball, as more emphasis on winning led to keen rivalries between cities
and the rise of professionalism.
     In 1873, eight years after the cessation of hostilities in the United
States and twenty years after American ships under Commodore Matthew Perry had
succeeded in opening Japan to the West, two American missionaries named Wilson
and Maget introduced baseball to the Land of the Rising Sun.  The game took
root in part because influential Japanese of that time, such as Kido and many
former daimyo (feudal lords), supported its growth.  They originally viewed
baseball as an American version of a martial sport like Japanese judo or
kendo.  Practicing the sport was in their minds a way of getting at the
essence of the American fighting spirit, and thus baseball was played every
day, regardless of weather conditions.
     As time went on, the game evolved into a high school and college sport.
From 1888 until 1902, the top team in Japan was that of First High School, now
known as Tokyo University.  It sometimes played games against American
residents in Yokohama and teams from U.S. Navy battleships.  Whenever the
battlewagons made port calls in Yokohama, the First High School club would
challenge them and usually would win the contests.  Judging from a few of the
scores, the Japanese students had ample reason to feel good about their
progress in the sport:  in 1902, they slaughtered the U.S.S. Kentucky, 35-1,
and the next year clobbered the same ship again, 27-0!
     The United States involved itself in war with Spain and its colonial
possessions in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 1898.  The
Spanish-American War was short, lasting roughly the length of the baseball
season.  The war didn't have a significant impact on the game at home but
undoubtedly influenced its spread to Puerto Rico, and other lands which border
on the Caribbean, and the Philippine Islands.
     Dr. Arlie Pond was pitching for the Baltimore Orioles of the National
League when the war started.  He had won 16 games for the Orioles in their
pennant-winning season of 1896 and followed it up with 18 victories in 1897,
but at the start of hostilities he entered the Army, joined a medical unit,
and went first to Cuba and then the Philippines.  After the war and the
Philippine Insurrection, he left active duty but stayed in the Philippines and
devoted the rest of his life to combating disease there, except for World War
One, when he returned to the States and became assistant surgeon general of
the Army with the rank of colonel.  Near the end of the war, he went with the
U.S. forces to Siberia following the Russian Revolution.  In 1919, he returned
to the islands after again relinquishing his Army commission and died there in
1930 at the age of fifty-seven.
     A year after the war, Dave Wills quit his medical studies at the
University of Virginia to play first base for Louisville of the National
League.  After hitting only .223 in twenty-four games, he decided to join the
Marines and wound up staying twenty years in the service.  He served as a
paymaster in the European Theater with the rank of major in World War One and
was buried in Arlington National Cemetery upon his death in 1959.  A little
more than a decade after the Spanish-American War, Hall of Famer Oscar
Charleston, a Negro League great, was first recognized for his baseball
ability while serving with the Army (1911-1915) in the Philippines.
     World War One began in Europe in August 1914, but the United States
didn't enter the conflict until April 1917.  Before the Yanks went "over
there," Canadian units in the British Army took the lead in teaching many
Englishmen and Australians how to play.  In the fall of 1917, a series for the
championship of the Canadian forces overseas was played in England.  One
hundred and one teams took part, with several minor league and semipro players
dotting the rosters.
     By the end of 1917 there were seventy-six American major league players
in the service:  forty-eight from the American League, including fifteen
Boston Red Sox, and twenty-eight from the National League.  Forty-two were in
the Army, twenty-one in the Navy, and thirteen in other branches of the
service.
     In May 1918 there occurred the promulgation of a "work or fight" order by
the provost marshal of the armed forces, General Enoch Crowder.  It was
designed to force all men of draft age out of nonessential work and into the
Army or war-related employment in order to aid in the prosecution of the war.
Baseball players were classified as nonessential while actors, opera singers,
and movie stars were deemed essential.  This was because the baseball magnates
didn't present their case in person, as did representatives of the other
specially exempted occupations.
     Relatively few players left baseball, however.  The great majority
remained with their teams.  When the July time limit set by the Crowder order
was reached, various draft boards issued conflicting orders to the players,
some saying their work was essential and others saying it wasn't.
     Eventually the Crowder edict was enforced and organized baseball shut
down its operation by the beginning of September 1918, although two additional
weeks were allotted for the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the
Chicago Cubs.  Despite the fact that the Crowder edict applied only to men of
draft age, the owners decided not to finish the season with players younger
than eighteen or older than thirty-five.  The magnates made it clear to the
players, however, that the reserve clause was still in effect, that the
players weren't free agents, and that they would be bound to their former
teams upon resumption of play.
     By the end of the war in November 1918, 144 American Leaguers and 103
National Leaguers were in the military.  Very few players went into
war-related work.  Of the 144 American Leaguers serving Uncle Sam, a
considerable percentage of them were known to be overseas.  At least
eighty-three were in the Army and forty-one in the Navy.  The Detroit Tigers
led the league with twenty-five servicemen, while the team with the fewest was
the St. Louis Browns with thirteen, even though the Brownies had won American
League prexy Ban Johnson's $500 prize for performing best in military
close-order drill (using bats as rifles) in 1917.  Among the National
Leaguers, the Brooklyn Dodgers and Pittsburgh Pirates tied for the lead in
enlistees with eighteen apiece, while the Cincinnati Reds had only six.
Boston Brave catcher Hank Gowdy was the first major leaguer to volunteer for
military service.  He was eventually sent to France, as were other prominent
players and executives such as Cincinnati Red manager Christy Mathewson,
Detroit Tiger outfielder Ty Cobb, Philadelphia Phillie pitcher Grover
Cleveland Alexander, Brooklyn Dodger hurler Sherry Smith, Chicago White Sox
catcher Joe Jenkins, Boston Brave executive Percy Haughton, and St. Louis
Cardinal executive Branch Rickey. Haughton and Rickey received their
commissions as majors and Mathewson was a captain in the Army's gas-and-flame
division.  Mathewson suffered gas poisoning during his service.  It led to
tuberculosis and his ultimate demise in 1925. Former major leaguers killed in
action were infielder Eddie Grant, who had played for four teams between 1905
and 1915, in the Argonne Forest in October 1918; Robert Troy, who had been
born in Germany and pitched and lost one game for the Detroit Tigers in 1912,
at the Meuse in October 1918; and Alex Barr, also with one game in the big
time as a New York Yankee outfielder in 1914, on his twenty-fifth birthday,
November 1, 1918, a mere ten days before the armistice.
     Servicemen's baseball was alive and well in Europe in both 1917 and 1918.
In addition to the aforementioned Canadian championship series in England in
the fall of 1917, an Anglo-American League was formed.  It was composed of
regular teams of American and Canadian soldiers, and was organized in London
by W.E. Booker and former big leaguer Arlie Latham.  The league played a
regular weekend schedule in London, the English provinces, and Scotland.
Every team had four or five professional players.  A benefit game between
American Army and Navy teams at Chelsea, London, on July 4, 1918, drew more
than forty thousand spectators, including the King of England and Allied
military notables.  The regular season ended on September 7, 1918, but the
clubs continued to play Sunday ball until September 29.
     Whereas the Canadians had initially taught baseball to the British and
Australians, the Americans introduced it to the French.  The game was not
exactly new in Paris because Americans had occasionally played it there before
the war.  Once the Yanks began arriving in large numbers, games were played
every Sunday in the Bois du Boulogne and other public parks.  The YMCA
organized an Association League in France, with thirty teams playing a
fifteen-game schedule each Sunday up to the middle of September.  Shortly
before the armistice, French soldiers were under orders to learn baseball!
Their primary teacher was erstwhile National League great Johnny Evers, who
had been sent to France by the Knights of Columbus for that purpose.  Where
did all the equipment come from?  There were three sources:  the
aforementioned YMCA, the Knights of Columbus and the Ball and Bat Fund, headed
by Clark Griffith, manager of the Washington Senators.  The fund disbursed
$63,865.29 worth of baseball gear, although the supply ship Kansan, with its
load of equipment for the American Expeditionary Force, was torpedoed and sunk
by a German submarine while en route to Europe.
     The top service teams of World War One (1918) included the 342nd Field
Artillery, American Expeditionary Force club, which featured Grover Cleveland
Alexander and several other major leaguers and beat all comers; the Second
Naval District, Newport, Rhode Island, aggregation, with a handful of big
leaguers on its roster; the Great Lakes, Illinois, Naval Station club, piloted
by White Sox outfielder Phil Chouinard and later Senator shortstop Doc Lavan,
which posted a 30-8 won-lost record and had Hall of Fame pitcher Urban "Red"
Faber and pro football great George Halas; the 85th Division, Battle Creek,
Michigan, nine, which lost only one game, beat the Great Lakes club, and had
the Browns' Urban Shocker hurling for them; the Camp Dodge, Iowa, club, which
logged 27 wins against 8 setbacks and counted six major leaguers among its
players; the San Diego, California, Naval Training Camp team, with a 78-10
record to its credit; and the Kelly Field club in San Antonio, Texas, which
won 42 games and lost only 8.
     During and immediately after the war, baseball was played in Great
Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, and the German Rhineland.  There was
enthusiastic talk in the Reach and Spalding Baseball Guides of the period
about baseball becoming a major sport in England and France, but such a
development failed to take place.  Colonel Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston,
part owner of the New York Yankees, guessed the result correctly.  Upon
returning to the United States from France after sixteen months in the Army,
he commented that if American soldiers had been in Europe for at least another
year, baseball might have taken hold, but the soldiers were returning home too
fast to make a lasting impression.
     The influence of the military during the period between the world wars
was negligible, save for the occasional ballplayer who served a hitch in the
armed forces.  "Barnacle Bill" Posedel joined the Navy in 1925 while still in
his teens, put in four years of active duty, later became a pitcher with the
Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Bees on the eve of World War Two, served four more
years in the Navy during that conflict, and eventually became a major league
pitching coach.  Nemo Gaines was a star pitcher for the U.S. Naval Academy,
class of 1921.  Upon graduation, he received permission to take special leave
and pitch for the Washington Senators.  After four appearances with the Nats,
he went on active duty and served until 1946, when he retired with the rank of
captain.  Pitcher Sig Jakucki, who was to become an important cog in the St.
Louis Browns' drive to their only American League pennant in 1944, was in the
Army from 1927 to 1931 and starred for the Schofield Barracks team in Hawaii
as an outfielder and occasional hurler.  As was customary, American servicemen
brought baseball with them wherever they went.  On July 29, 1937, sailors from
a Navy squadron formed two teams and played a softball game in the sports
stadium of the port they were visiting.  The locale?  Vladivostok in the
Soviet Union!
     Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and World War Two was on in
Europe.  As the war clouds drifted across the Atlantic and became more ominous
over America, the United States government instituted a military draft in the
autumn of 1940, the first in its history during peacetime.  It required the
registration of men ages twenty-one to thirty-five.  The first major leaguer
to get drafted was Philadelphia Phillie pitcher Hugh Mulcahy in March 1941,
nine months before Pearl Harbor.  The next to go was a star--Detroit Tiger
slugger and 1940 American League Most Valuable Player Hank Greenberg.
Hammerin' Hank had led the Tigers to the pennant the year before.  After
hitting two homers in a 7-4 win over the Yankees on May 6, he entered the Army
the next day, the same day the Tigers officially raised their 1940
championship flag.  Thus began a parade of professional ballplayers into the
armed forces, a parade which would continue unabated until the Japanese
surrender in August 1945.
     Perhaps no other statistic better expresses the extent to which the
military put its stamp on professional baseball during World War Two than the
one which appeared in the New York Times in the spring of 1945:  as of January
of that year, 5,400 of the 5,800 pro baseball players in the country at the
time of Pearl Harbor were in the service.  With an impact of that magnitude,
it would take a decent-sized book to describe in detail military baseball
alone during the war years, not to mention pro and military ball combined, a
task which has already been accomplished twice in recent memory.  How then
should one approach the topic?  By emphasizing that the military is ultimately
made up of people.
     Over fifty professional ballplayers made the supreme sacrifice while
serving in the armed forces.  The majority of them died in combat.  Two were
ex-major leaguers who appeared briefly in the American League in 1939.  Harry
O'Neill, who caught one game for the Philadelphia Athletics, died on Iwo Jima
in March 1945.  Army Air Corps Captain Elmer Gedeon, an outfielder in 5 games
for the Washington Senators in 1939, was shot down over France on April 15,
1944, his twenty-seventh birthday.  The first pro player to enlist, minor
league outfielder Billy Southworth, Jr., joined the Army Air Corps in December
1940.  He was the son of the St. Louis Cardinals' manager and compiled quite a
war record as a bomber pilot in Europe before being killed in a crash after
takeoff on a routine flight from Long Island to Florida on February 15, 1945.
He had attempted an emergency landing at LaGuardia Field but plunged into
Flushing Bay after overshooting the runway.  His grieving father was not alone
among major league pilots.  Ex-Tiger skipper Mickey Cochrane and former Cub
boss Jimmie Wilson also lost sons in the war.
     Several men who played major league ball were wounded in action, among
them Army Air Corps fighter pilot Bert Shepard, who was shot down by
antiaircraft fire over Germany in May 1944 and had his right leg amputated
below the knee.  After spending the better part of a year in a German POW
camp, he was repatriated in a prisoner-of-war exchange and, with the help of
an artificial limb, pitched in one regular-season game and several exhibitions
for the Washington Senators in 1945.  Others in the category of the wounded
included the St. Louis Cardinals' John Grodzicki; the Philadelphia Athletics'
Jack Knott, Bob Savage, and Lou Brissie; the Cleveland Indians' Gene Bearden;
and the Brooklyn Dodgers' Tommy Warren--all of them pitchers.
     Yet another pitcher, Phil Marchildon of the Philadelphia Athletics, spent
nine months in a German prison camp while serving in the Royal Canadian Air
Force.  Cecil Travis, the star Washington shortstop, had his feet frozen at
the Battle of the Bulge and lasted only two seasons after the war due to his
limited mobility.  The major league careers of hurlers Hugh Mulcahy of the
Phillies and Charlie Wagner of the Red Sox were effectively curtailed by
weight loss brought on by dysentery contracted in the Philippines.  Two other
pitchers, Johnny Rigney of the White Sox and 1942 rookie sensation Johnny
Beazley of the Cardinals, threw their arms out while pitching service
exhibitions.  Outfielder Elmer "Red" Durrett hooked on with the Dodgers in
1944 after being discharged from the Marine Corps.  He had suffered shell
shock on Guadalcanal.  It took a while for infielder Billy Cox and outfielder
Monte Irvin to recover from the emotional effects of their Army experiences
before they hit their stride again.  Cardinal second baseman Frank Crespi
broke his left leg in a game at Fort Riley, Kansas, in 1943.  While
convalescing at a military hospital, he got into a wheelchair race, slammed
into a wall, and broke the leg again, thus ending whatever chance he had of
returning to the Redbirds after hostilities had ceased.
     There were the great ones--men like Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Bob
Feller, and Hank Greenberg--who lost between three and five of their prime
years to the service, thus giving rise to a multitude of "what if?" questions
regarding their lifetime statistics had there been no war.  Then there were
the legions of players who didn't stick with their former clubs because of the
personnel crunch in the spring of 1946, when the mix of returning veterans and
wartime holdovers was so great that many men never had a chance to get back
into shape gradually and compete for jobs effectively.  Although major league
clubs carried thirty men rather than twenty-five on their 1946 rosters in an
effort to mitigate the problem, the remedy was hardly adequate to accommodate
the flood of returnees.  A few players--Tony Lupien, Merrill May, Bob Harris,
Bruce Campbell, Steve Sundra, and Al Niemiec--either threatened legal action
or undertook it in an effort to protect their reemployment rights under the
then-new GI Bill, but most of them settled out of court on the issue of pay,
and none stayed with their former teams.
     For every sad story, there was a courageous or heartening one.  Jack
Knott of the Athletics and southpaw Earl Johnson of the Red Sox won
battlefield commissions after showing bravery under fire.  Former first
baseman Zeke Bonura won the Legion of Merit as an Army corporal for organizing
and promoting sports programs for service men and women in North Africa.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower personally pinned the award on him.  The
aforementioned Bert Shepard served as an inspiration to all disabled
servicemen when he made occasional appearances on the mound for the Senators.
The opportunity to gain valuable experience by playing service ball with and
against seasoned professionals presented itself to people like outfielder Del
Ennis, who jumped from one year in the low minors to the major leagues after
discharge.  For others, it served to showcase their talents as prior amateurs
or semipros.  Johnny Groth, an eighteen-year-old wonder fresh out of Chicago
Latin High School, proceeded to win a starting berth in centerfield for the
1945 Great Lakes Naval Training Center team with which he hit .341.  He was
signed to a Detroit organization contract at war's end and went on to have a
long and productive major league career despite key injuries along the way.
Maurice "Mo" Mozzali was a Louisville area semipro who impressed his teammates
while performing for submarine-base teams at Pearl Harbor and New London,
Connecticut.  He signed a pro contract in 1946 and rose to the level of
Triple-A as an All-Star first baseman with Columbus of the American
Association.
     Several prominent players had triumphant returns to the major leagues
after completion of their service hitches.  On August 24, 1945, after
forty-four months in the Navy, Bob Feller made his first start against the
Tigers in Cleveland.  His appearance resulted in Cleveland's biggest baseball
crowd in three years (46,777 fans).  Bullet Bob struck out twelve, gave up
only four hits, and won easily, 4-2.  In his second game versus Detroit late
that summer, he one-hit the Tigers.  When he pitched in Yankee Stadium on
September 10, a total of 67,816 spectators were present.  Hank Greenberg
heralded his return to the Tigers on July 1, 1945, by hitting a home run
against the Athletics before 48,000 hometown fans.  On the final day of the
season, his grand slam home run in the rain against the Browns clinched the
American League pennant for Detroit.  Tiger righthander Virgil Trucks was
discharged from the Navy less than a week before the 1945 season ended.  He
started the Tigers' pennant-winning 6-3 victory over St. Louis and followed
that up with a 4-1 complete-game win over the Chicago Cubs in the second game
of the World Series.
     Navy duty during the war resulted in the beginning of new professions for
Max Patkin and Dusty Cooke.  Patkin began his long and famous career as a
baseball clown while pitching first for Aiea Hospital and then for Aiea
Barracks in Hawaii in 1944.  Cooke was trained as a pharmacist's mate.  This
training came in handy after the war.  In search of a baseball job, he hooked
on with former teammate Ben Chapman and the Philadelphia Phillies as club
trainer and later went on to coach and even manage the team for a few days in
1948 between the departure of Chapman and the arrival of Eddie Sawyer.
     At times there was an embarrassment of riches on military teams.  In the
first two years of the war, former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney's
eight-week enlisted athletic specialist training course was located at the
Norfolk, Virginia Naval Training Station.  Thus the Norfolk NTS manager, Gary
Bodie, had his pick of the numerous professional athletes who were taking the
course.  In 1943 he was faced with the difficult yet wonderful prospect of
choosing between two of the premier shortstops in baseball, Phil Rizzuto and
Pee Wee Reese, for his ballclub.  He kept Rizzuto and sent Reese a mile down
the road to Norfolk Naval Air Station, where he became part of NTS'
opposition.
     The Army stockpiled its talent in the Hawaiian Islands at the Seventh
Army Air Force, Hickam Field, in 1944.  Manager Tom Winsett, a former major
league outfielder, had three top-level second basemen--Joe Gordon, Gerry
Priddy, and Dario Lodigiani--at his disposal that summer.  Priddy and
Lodigiani were the first to arrive, with Lodigiani staying at his normal
position and Priddy playing shortstop.  When Priddy was transferred, Gordon
replaced him.
     There were also some wacky trades.  After the Tunney school was shifted
from Norfolk to Bainbridge, Maryland, former St. Louis Browns outfielder Red
McQuillen went through the program.  Norfolk NTS needed an outfielder and
Bainbridge needed a life raft, so the deal was made.  The raft turned out to
be defective upon receipt in Bainbridge, but the deal wasn't voided and
McQuillen went on to bat .367 and lead the Norfolk club in hits and triples in
1944.  General William Flood, commanding officer of the aforementioned Seventh
Army Air Force at Hickam Field, wanted Eddie Funk, a good pitcher with a
little experience in the low minors, for his ballclub.  Funk was at another
facility on the island of Oahu, and his CO was anxious to keep him; however,
the CO had two dogs which he loved, and they were sick.  General Flood had the
only veterinary service among the military stations in Hawaii, so he made a
proposition to Funk's boss:  you give me Funk and your two dogs will get well.
The deal was consummated, and Funk went on to pitch excellent ball for the
Seventh Army Air Force.
     It was common for the top service teams to have past or future major
leaguers at every position.  Both the Army and the Navy had outstanding teams
at several of their installations around the country.  For instance, Navy
outfits at the training centers in Norfolk, Great Lakes, Bainbridge, and
Sampson, New York, were superb.  The Army aggregations at the Seventh Army Air
Force, Fort Riley, Kansas; New Cumberland, Pennsylvania; and the Waco, Texas,
Army Flying School distinguished themselves.  The Marine Corps had fine clubs
at Quantico, Virginia, and Parris Island, South Carolina, and the Coast Guard
teams at Curtis Bay, Maryland, and New London, Connecticut, were excellent.
There was also a multiplicity of top-notch clubs on the West Coast.
     Most of these teams rang up outstanding won-lost records against all
types of opposition--for example, the magnificent 48-2 log achieved by the
1944 Great Lakes club.  Many exhibitions were played against major and minor
league teams, with the majority being won by the service clubs.  Some of the
scores are legendary, like the 17-4 slaughtering the Great Lakes sailors gave
the Cleveland Indians in their 1944 season finale, or the pastings
administered to the Boston Red Sox (20-7) and the Cleveland Indians (15-2) by
the 1944 Sampson Naval Training Center nine.  Were the major leaguers trying?
Evidence indicates that they were, although second-line pitchers were often
thrown against the service clubs and sometimes the pros played a position
other than their normal one.  Because big league clubs often took fewer than
the normal twenty-five players on road trips during the war, it was not
uncommon for players to be platooned at an unfamiliar position--as, for
example, a pitcher playing in the outfield.
     Service players participated in some great war-benefit games.  Perhaps
the most famous was the American League All-Stars-Service All-Stars contest at
Municipal Stadium in Cleveland on July 7, 1942, when 62,094 fans saw a
one-of-a-kind ballgame in which the American Leaguers triumphed, 5-0.  The
gross receipts from the spectacle totaled $143,571; $100,000 of the net went
to the Bat and Ball Fund and the rest to Army and Navy Relief.  A month
earlier, the Norfolk NTS team had played a group of Army ballplayers in the
Polo Grounds in New York.  The year 1943 saw the $2 million war-bond game
between the Norfolk NTS squad and the Washington Senators, won by Norfolk,
4-3, at Griffith Stadium in Washington, on May 24; the Service
All-Stars-Boston Braves contest at Fenway Park, Boston, on July 12, in which
the All-Stars, managed by Babe Ruth and featuring Ted Williams, nipped the
Braves, 9-8; the July 28 game in Yankee Stadium between North Carolina
Pre-Flight (Navy) and a combined team of New York Yankees and Cleveland
Indians, called the "Yank-lands" and managed by Babe Ruth, in which North
Carolina Pre-Flight triumphed, 11-5, and $30,000 was poured into the Baseball
War Relief and Service Fund, Inc.; and the $800 million war-bond game at the
Polo Grounds on August 26, when a combined team of Yankees, Dodgers, and
Giants beat a group of Army All-Stars, 5-2, before 38,000 people.  It is
interesting to note that the only picture supposedly taken of Ted Williams and
Babe Ruth together in uniform was snapped at that Fenway Park contest in July.
     A few takeoffs on the World Series occurred.  At the end of the 1943
season, the Norfolk Naval Training Station and Norfolk Naval Air Station clubs
engaged in an exciting best-of-seven series, which the Training Station won,
four games to three.  Following the 1944 baseball campaign in Hawaii, the
cream of the crop of Army and Navy ballplayers participated in the famous
Service World Series.  What started out as a best-of-seven affair limited to
Oahu Island wound up as an eleven-game extravaganza, with the final four
contests being played on the islands of Maui, Hawaii, and Kauai.  The Navy,
shored up at the last minute with reinforcements from the continental United
States and Australia, won the first six games and finished with an 8-2-1
record for the series, the tie being a fourteen-inning 6-6 humdinger in
Hoolulu Park, Hilo, Hawaii.  The following fall, the Navy had its own World
Series in the Hawaiian Islands, featuring the American League against the
National League.  The AL squad was favored, but the National Leaguers won,
four games to two.  As in the previous year, an additional contest was played
for the benefit of service men and women, with the Americans beating the
Nationals; so the final tally was Nationals four, Americans three.
     Baseball was played all over the world during the Second World War. In
late February 1945, twenty-eight Navy ballplayers boarded two Marine Corps
planes and proceeded to make two tours of the forward areas of the Pacific,
with both of them ending on Guam; then the players were dispersed among Guam,
Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu, and Ulithi.  Shortly afterward, Army Air Corps
players did the same thing.  Right after the war in Europe ended, many pro
players had German and Italian POWs build fields for them and top-flight
competition ensued.  An Army All-Star team was formed and toured Europe,
visiting cities in Germany, France, Italy, and Austria.
     Perhaps the most important outgrowth of World War Two military baseball
was black-white integration.  A full year before Branch Rickey signed Jackie
Robinson to a Brooklyn Dodger organization contract, Hal Hairston, a black
pitcher formerly with the Homestead Grays of the Negro National League, was
hurling for the Army against the Navy in the Service World Series in Hawaii.
A year later, Calvin Medley, another black pro, was pitching for the Fleet
Marine team on Oahu Island.  Two thousand miles away from the U.S. mainland,
on a group of islands populated with Hawaiian natives and American, Chinese,
and Japanese immigrants, racially integrated baseball could become a reality.
Blacks and whites could play together on service teams and black, white, and
yellow people could perform as a unit in the Honolulu semipro league.  Back in
the continental United States, black and white service teams would remain
segregated until after the war.  Thus the white Great Lakes team won 48 and
lost only 2 in 1944, while the black club went 32-10 and won the championship
of the Midwest Service League.  Larry Doby, star shortstop on the black team
and later the first man of his race to play in the American League, could not
play with whites in Illinois but was welcome to play softball on Ulithi Atoll
a year later with white professionals like Mickey Vernon and Billy Goodman.
Negro League stars Leon Day and Willard Brown couldn't as yet crack the color
barrier back home, but they could lead a team comprised almost exclusively of
white semipro players to victory in Nuremberg's famous stadium, site of the
massive Nazi Party rallies of the 1930s.  Against the hand-picked
professionals of General George Patton's Third Army club, righthanded
fireballer Day led the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition (OISE) club to a
2-1 victory for the European Theater of Operations (ETO) championship before a
huge crowd.
     No description of military baseball during the period would be complete
without mention of what transpired in Japan.  The Land of the Rising Sun had
been on a war footing since the Marco Polo Bridge incident in Beijing, China,
on July 7, 1937.  Professional ballplayers had been drafted at least from 1938
on, as evidenced by the induction that year of Eiji Sawamura, the country's
most famous pitcher.  In fact, Sawamura was to be taken into the Army three
times:  in 1938, 1941, and again in 1944.  With the coming of global war
following Pearl Harbor, intense Japanese nationalism and militarism manifested
themselves in many ways regarding baseball.  Team names on uniforms were
changed to Japanese characters from Roman letters, and the traditional
baseball cap took on a military look.  The Tokyo Giants were renamed Kyojin
Gun or "Giant Troop."  Baseball terms imported from the foreign enemy, the
United States, were changed to Japanese equivalents.  "Strike" became yoshi
("good") and "ball" became dame ("bad").  "Safe" was transformed into ikita
("alive") and "out" to shinda ("dead").  A shortstop became a yugeki
("free-lancer").
     After 1942, many outstanding players, both professionals and collegians,
were drafted into the military.  The two most famous collegiate baseball
clubs, those of Keio and Waseda Universities, had an emotional farewell game
before 30,000 students in October 1943.  The presidents of both universities
had negotiated successfully with the government for this contest to be held,
and after it was over tears flowed freely as both players and spectators
wondered if they would ever see another game.  Their sadness was well founded.
Among the three million Japanese, military and civilian, who died on the home
islands or in the Pacific, China, and Southeast Asia were a great number of
good players, including the best, Sawamura, who was killed on a troop
transport in the Taiwan Strait on December 2, 1944.  Today the Japanese
equivalent of the Cy Young Award, given annually to the best pitcher in each
of the American leagues, is named in his memory.  Ironically, Japan's number
two pitcher, Victor Starffin, was spared because as a child immigrant from the
Soviet Union he was exempt from conscription.
     By 1944 only six clubs were competing for the professional championship
and the season was only thirty-five games long.  In 1945, the last year of the
war, play was suspended altogether as cities were ravaged by fire bombing, the
economy collapsed, and the two atomic bomb detonations hastened Japan's
surrender late that summer.
     When the last of the American wartime draftees was mustered out of the
service and returned home during the 1946 season, it marked the beginning of a
temporary halt in the influence of the military on baseball performance but
not on fan interest in the United States.  The strong desire of many who had
been in the service to put rigorous or traumatic wartime experiences aside, to
get on with one's life, to get out, relax, and enjoy a ballgame sparked a
large increase in attendance at professional games and a rise in the number of
minor leagues that was to peak in 1949 before the advent of television took
its toll.
     In defeated Japan, the victorious Allies, particularly the United States,
were calling the shots, and the American military had the fate of Japanese
baseball in the palm of its hand.  Fortunately the resurrection of the game
was in line with the aim of the occupation forces, namely to reform Japanese
political, economic, and social institutions so that they would more closely
reflect those of the Western democracies.
     General Headquarters encouraged the revival of spectator sports, and in
November 1945, just three months after the unconditional surrender, the
Japanese professional baseball league was reorganized as many players returned
from duty in Manchuria, China, and Southeast Asia.  There were problems at
first because the occupation forces controlled the ballparks, used them for
their own entertainment, and made the Japanese professional and college
leagues negotiate for their use; but key people in the Allied administration
aided the Japanese in their negotiations and smoothed the way for
ever-increasing privileges.  General Douglas MacArthur, head of the occupation
government, personally issued the order to clean up Korakuen Stadium, home of
the Tokyo Giants, which had been used as an ammunition dump during the war.
     In 1946 Japanese professional play resumed with a total of four hundred
and twenty games being contested. By 1948, there were eight teams in the
league, and such great progress was made that in 1950 two leagues were formed.
There were fifteen teams that year, but the number eventually dropped to
twelve, six teams in each league, which is the present setup.
     Such was the situation on both sides of the Pacific when on June 25,
1950, North Korean forces invaded the South and the Korean War began.  For the
second time in a decade, the specter of large-scale military conscription and
its inevitable effect on players and pennant races loomed over the American
professional baseball scene.
     The effect of the war was felt before the 1950 season ended.  The
Philadelphia Phillies "Whiz Kids" were out in front of the National League
pack and aiming for their first pennant in thirty-five years when on September
10, their number two pitcher, Curt Simmons, who had already won 17 games, was
called away when his Pennsylvania National Guard unit was mobilized.
Simmons' loss, as well as injuries to three other key players, took the steam
out of the Phillies, but they managed to hang on and win the pennant on the
last day of the season against the Brooklyn Dodgers.  Simmons received a
furlough to attend the World Series, but Phillie manager Eddie Sawyer decided
not to put Curt back on the eligibility list because of his limited baseball
activity while away.  The Phillies lost the Series to the New York Yankees in
four straight games.
     The following spring, veteran sportswriters making their predictions
about the 1951 pennant races focused in part on the possible effect of the
draft.  The consensus was that veteran teams like the Boston Red Sox in the
American League and the St. Louis Cardinals and Boston Braves in the National
League would stand better chances of winning because they would be the least
likely to lose players.  Comparatively young clubs like the Philadelphia
Phillies would be the most vulnerable, while teams like the Brooklyn Dodgers,
with a combination of veterans and rookies, might stand the best chance of
all.  They would do well in the first half of the race with their youngsters,
then would come on strong in the second half with their veterans as Selective
Service took its toll.
     The entire line of reasoning proved almost meaningless because a
large-scale call-up never took place.  The war was limited.  What happened
instead was that a handful of individuals got drafted, usually one or two
players per team, for a period of two years.  This pattern continued
throughout the decade of the 1950s, even after the Korean War ended in 1953.
The only service that had a general recall of its World War Two veteran
ballplayers was the Marine Corps, which took its Reserve aviators.  This
recall involved only two key players--Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams and
Yankee second baseman Jerry Coleman.
     Williams' farewell was especially poignant.  Shortly after the 1952
season began, on April 30 to be exact, a Wednesday afternoon crowd of 24,764
took part in pregame festivities.  The Splendid Splinter was given a Cadillac
and a memory book containing 430,000 signatures.  The fans held hands and sang
"Auld Lang Syne."  Williams didn't disappoint them.  He hit a two-run homer
off Detroit Tiger pitcher Dizzy Trout in the seventh inning in his final
at-bat of the game to lead the Red Sox to victory.  Given The Thumper's age
(thirty-three), many felt they would never see him play again.
     Ted's experience as a fighter pilot almost proved their thinking correct.
He completed thirty-eight combat missions in Korea, was hit by antiaircraft
fire three times, and almost didn't make it back on the second occasion.  He
was awarded an Air Medal with two Gold Stars in lieu of his second and third
Air Medals before being transferred back to the United States for a nagging
inner ear and nose ailment that ultimately left him partially deaf in one ear.
He was discharged on July 28, 1953.  After a little over a week of
conditioning, Teddy Ballgame returned to major league play and hit a
phenomenal .407 in 37 games, with 13 home runs and a whopping slugging
percentage of .901.  Seven more years of superb hitting were to follow.
     While the Red Sox plunged to sixth place without Williams in 1952, other
contending clubs who lost players to the service didn't fare that badly. The
Yankees were so deep in talent that they won five straight pennants between
1949 and 1953 despite the loss of ace lefthander Whitey Ford (1951-1952),
third baseman Bobby Brown (1952-1953), and infielder Jerry Coleman
(1952-1953).  They lost to the Cleveland Indians in 1954 without the services
of their crack second baseman, Billy Martin, but still managed to win 105
games.  Only a tremendous 111-win season by the Indians outdid them; however,
Martin returned late in the 1955 campaign, in time to spark the Yankees to the
top of the heap again.
     The Dodgers won pennants in 1952 and 1953 without their top righthander,
Don Newcombe, but lost to the Giants in 1954 when he returned. Newcombe went
on to be the bellwether of the Brooklyn staff in the Dodgers' 1955 and 1956
National League championship seasons.  The Giants won in a playoff with the
Dodgers in 1951, Willie Mays' rookie season, but lost without him in 1952 and
1953.  When the Say Hey Kid returned in 1954, they won again.
     The Army got practically all of the professional ballplayers who were
drafted during the Korean War, and thus it had some outstanding teams, both
stateside and overseas.  The 1951 Fort Myer, Virginia, club featured pitchers
Johnny Antonelli (Braves) and Bob Purkey (Giants), infielder Danny O'Connell
(Pirates), and catcher Sam Calderone (Giants).  That same year, the Brooke
Army Medical Center team in San Antonio, Texas, boasted outfielder Dick Kokos
(Browns), second baseman Owen Friend (Browns), pitcher Glenn Mickens
(Dodgers), and catcher Gus Triandos (Yankees).  In 1953 the All-Army champions
at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, had Dick Groat (Pirates) at shortstop and Tom
Poholsky (Cardinals) on the mound.  Fort Jackson, South Carolina, could call
on outfielder Faye Throneberry (Red Sox), catchers Frank House (Tigers) and
Haywood Sullivan (Red Sox), and pitcher Joe Landrum (Dodgers).
     Several players wound up in the Far East Command, where the real action
was.  With Japan being used as a staging area for Korea, a few servicemen
found themselves playing with or against Japanese professionals.  In 1953, Leo
Kiely of the Red Sox and Phil Paine of the Braves pitched a few games for the
Mainichi Orions and Nishitetsu Lions, respectively.  Two years earlier,
ex-Pacific Coast League southpaw Ken Lehman of the 40th Infantry Division had
been the star performer of the Far East Command, with a 14-1 record on the
mound and a .408 average at the plate.  Among his accomplishments during the
1951 season was defeating a group of Japanese All-Stars, 1-0, before 32,000
fans at Miyagi Stadium in Sendai.  When Lefty O'Doul brought a group of
top-flight major leaguers to Japan for an exhibition tour after the American
season ended, Lehman was invited to play with them and pitched excellent ball
in two games, one a start against the Japanese Central League All-Stars.  He
later went on to pitch for the Dodgers, Orioles, and Phillies.
     Only one ex-big leaguer lost his life in combat during the Korean War:
Bob Neighbors, an Air Force major, who died in North Korea in August 1952.  He
had played in seven games for the St. Louis Browns in 1939 and also served his
country in World War Two.
     After the cessation of overt hostilities in Korea in 1953, Army baseball
continued to feature a smattering of professional players who were two-year
draftees; but in 1957 the All-Army championship tournament was discontinued,
and the following year the level of competition was reduced to intramurals at
the lowest unit level possible.  Because the Navy wasn't drafting people and
had not been a force to be reckoned with in baseball since the end of the
Second World War, the Army's actions effectively spelled the end of top-flight
military hardball.  Over the last quarter century, softball has been the
serviceman's game.
     The Vietnam War, like the Korean conflict, was limited in scope.  This
fact, coupled with the availability of Reserve programs which required only
six months of active duty, made the impact of the military on professional
baseball slight from 1964, the year the war escalated after the Gulf of Tonkin
"incident," to 1973, when the United States began to pull its forces out of
Vietnam and terminate the draft.
     Most players and executives who were eligible for the draft entered
Reserve components of the armed forces, particularly that of the Army.  They
were obliged to do six months of basic training and spend six years attending
one weekend meeting or four weekday meetings each month, and two weeks of
active duty for training each fiscal year.  The sixth year was basically
inactive in the sense of the Reservist not having to attend meetings or do the
two-week stint.  The active duty obligations were normally performed during
the off-season.  Monthly attendance at drills became a problem on occasion,
and a player might miss a weekend's worth of games here and there, but many
Reserve units used the players in public relations roles for recruiting or
image-building purposes and, as such, meetings could be staggered to suit the
individual.
     While pitching the Red Sox to their "Impossible Dream" pennant in 1967,
Private First Class Jim Lonborg had to fly down to Atlanta and do his two-week
Army Reserve duty.  His fortnight began on Sunday, July 30, in the heat of the
pennant race, and ended on Saturday, August 12.  Fortunately, he was able to
work out with the Atlanta Braves and with the aid of passes, didn't miss a
start.  After being shelled by the Minnesota Twins two days before his
departure, he flew back to Boston and worked 5 1/3 innings against the Kansas
City Athletics on Tuesday, August 1, giving up three runs and eight hits but
gaining his fifteenth win of the season.  On Sunday, August 6, he lost to the
Twins in Minnesota, 2-0, in a rain-shortened, five-inning contest.  His
counterpart, Dean Chance, pitched a perfect game.  On Wednesday, August 9, he
beat the Athletics in Kansas City, 5-1, for win number sixteen, tops in the
majors.  With his two-week sojourn over, he lost to the California Angels,
3-2, on the West Coast on Sunday, August 13.
     While military duty may have caused Lonborg a mild inconvenience,
youngsters like Al Bumbry and Garry Maddox were serving in Vietnam.  They
would go on to make their mark as top-quality major league outfielders in the
1970s. With the demise of the draft, future ballplayers wouldn't have to worry
about such unpleasant career interruptions.
     If there is another major war ahead of us, modern armaments, particularly
nuclear weapons, will probably make it a short one, perhaps a year or less.
The influence of the military on baseball should therefore remain minimal and
not approach the high-water mark of World War Two, when both the length and
the extent of the conflict had a pervasive effect on the game, both at home
and abroad.  As venerable and fascinating as the link between the military and
baseball is, let us hope it remains low-profile in the future.