During World War II, baseball players wore two kinds of uniforms
The coronavirus crisis is often compared to a war. People talk about America “battling the disease” or Donald Trump being a “wartime president.”
Recently I have been reading a book about what happened to professional baseball during a real war, World War II. Let’s take a look at this chapter in sports history.
The war started in September 1939. The United States entered the fighting after Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Soon the United States was fighting two enemies: Germany in Europe and Japan in the Pacific Ocean region.
World War II was an enormous challenge for America. The country needed millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines to fight and millions more people to make the guns, planes and other equipment the troops needed for the fight.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Landis, who was named after a Civil War battle where his father had lost a leg, asked Roosevelt whether the 16 major league and 320 minor league teams should continue to play baseball during the war.
Roosevelt, who was a baseball fan, answered the next day. The president wrote that the games should go on. He thought baseball games would provide needed recreation during the hard days ahead. But he added that eligible players “should go, without question, into the [armed] services.”
So the games went on. But as Roosevelt insisted, hundreds of major league and thousands of minor league players — including some of the game’s biggest stars — served in the military in the next four years.
Red Sox slugger Ted Williams was a Marine pilot. Warren Spahn, a pitcher who won 363 games after the war, fought and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. Pitcher Bob Feller (266 career wins) commanded a gun station on a battleship, the USS Alabama.
Share this articleShareWith many of the best players serving in the military, hundreds of additional players got a chance to play in the major leagues.
Pete Gray had lost his right arm in a childhood car accident. Gray loved baseball, so he learned how to catch, throw and bat left-handed even though he was naturally right-handed.
Gray became a good minor league player in the 1940s — he was the most valuable player in the Southern Association — and got a chance to play for the St. Louis Browns (later the Baltimore Orioles) in 1945. Despite having only one arm, Gray hit .218.
Pitcher and pilot Bert Shepard had his injured leg amputated 11 inches below his knee after his plane was shot in combat. Still, Shepard pitched in a game for the Washington Senators in 1945 and gave up only one run in 5⅓ innings.
Like the coronavirus outbreak, World War II changed a lot of lives — and a lot about sports.
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