In the third week of January 1918, Ban Johnson removed the player limit for American League clubs. Both Major Leagues had left their limits in place during the 1917 season: twenty-five per club in the American and twenty-two in the National. Johnson now believed that eliminating his league’s cap would protect clubs that suddenly lost players in the Selective Service draft. “We are in the peculiar position of not knowing what will happen in the next draft,” he said, “and it seemed inadvisable to keep in effect a ruling made for conditions unlike those now prevailing.”1
Governor Tener attacked the plan and kept the National League limit in place. “Allowing any club that so desires to carry thirty-five or forty players isn’t fair to the other clubs that cannot afford this extra expense,” Tener said. “So the National League will try to help out the less fortunate clubs by not permitting the wealthier clubs to carry a lot of extra men.”2
It was an unnecessary spat, a continuation of the interleague exemptions imbroglio of two months earlier. Few teams had any intention of carrying a full complement of players, let alone exceeding it. Instead, roster numbers in Johnson’s American League would actually decline during the coming season. Talk of player limits before spring training, wrote one observer, was “only a whistling act to keep up courage.”
Practically every club has made it known that not over twenty-five players all told will be taken south, which means that after the weeding out process few teams will consist of over eighteen men. Even the affluent Chicago National league club has stated that it will take but twenty-five men into camp. Charley Comiskey is one of the exceptions. Thirty men will be taken to Mineral Wells, according to Chicago report.3
Fred Lieb of the New York Sun believed that more players than usual would be competing for fewer spots, because the military draft hadn’t yet affected Major League baseball as drastically as anticipated. “Instead of a shortage, there will be more players anxious for jobs this season than ever before,” Lieb predicted. “The smashup of the minors has thrown a drove of players on the market. Should the International League fail to start . . . another 150 players will be searching for jobs.”4
More Minor Leaguers were tossed into the market March 16, when the Class B Central League said it wouldn’t take the field in 1918. President Harry W. Stahlhefer had previously pointed to the rising popularity of private automobiles and golf as contributing factors in the Minor Leagues’ troubles, but his explanation for his circuit’s closure now was simpler. “Failure of Springfield, Ohio, to finance a club is responsible, the prexy said.”5
Seventy-six Major Leaguers were missing from the dugouts when the big clubs opened their camps that spring. The American League had lost forty-eight men to the armed forces, the National League twenty-eight. “Besides the major leaguers hundreds of minor and semipro players from all over the country have enlisted.”6 Sports editors printed long lists of ballplayers who had enlisted or been drafted, most of them since the World Series.
Death Valley Jim Scott was now a captain, commissioned in December. Many writers thought the army had been good for the White Sox pitcher. “The metamorphosis of Scott from an indifferent, carefree baseball player to an intrepid soldier of his country who takes his work seriously is one that has brought joy to the Old Roman [Comiskey].”7 The army soon assigned Scott to Fort Lewis, Washington, as an instructor teaching advanced arms to draftees. Not incidentally, he also boosted army baseball and athletic programs.
Infielder John “Dots” Miller, the St. Louis Cardinals’ captain, and his wife both had joined the war effort shortly before Christmas. He enlisted in the Marines, while she joined the Red Cross as a nurse. People had speculated about Miller’s baseball future after the Yankees lured St. Louis manager Miller Huggins to New York, but enlistment wasn’t a path any expected. “Miller might have been manager of the Cardinals at $7,500 a year had he cared to slack.”8 Instead, he was wielding a rifle in South Carolina as the Cards headed to spring training in San Antonio. “When he established the monthly shooting record at the Parris Island rifle range on February 23, Johnny proved that he was as capable of putting steel covered rifle balls right in the centre of a bull’s eye as he was in throwing the ‘pill’ to bases.”9
The former redbird liked duty in the corps and resisted attempts to get him to play for a Marines baseball team in Washington. “I want to fight,” Miller said. “That’s why I joined this outfit. And now they want me to play ball. Can you beat such luck?”10 An understanding general decided that Dots could stay right where he was. The ex-Cardinal would ship overseas late in the war, but wouldn’t see action before the armistice. “I was soon enough to be too late,” he would say ruefully.11
Several other Cardinals were also in the armed forces. Pitcher Marvin Goodwin, Miller’s rookie teammate in 1917, had enlisted in the army around Thanksgiving. He was now learning to fly, news that Sporting News celebrated with a poem:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Up above the world so far.
We will praise your pitching skill
If you “bean” old Kaiser Bill.12
Goodwin earned his commission in the Air Service after training in Texas, but like Miller he would be too late to see combat. Retaining his reserve commission after the war, he would be killed in an army air crash in 1925.
Also learning to fly was Arthur Shafer, a former teammate of Eddie Grant and Moose McCormick. Nicknamed “Tillie,” the ex-Giant third baseman was handsome, educated, wealthy, and notoriously shy. Shafer ostensibly had left baseball for a reason likely never heard before or since in the Major Leagues. “Arthur Shafer was too bashful to put up with the thousand and one perfumed notes which as a member of New York’s greatest baseball team he continually received.”13 His notorious shyness didn’t affect his flight or officer training in the navy, however. Stationed in San Diego, he also played a bit of navy baseball. Shafer later went on to the training station at the University of Washington and learned to fly seaplanes. He would be there still when the war ended.
The current New York Giants learned a bit about aviation, too. During spring training at Marlin, Texas, they played an exhibition game March 25 with a visiting team of army aviators. The $700 in proceeds went to the Red Cross. “A large number of officers came over from Waco to watch the game, several of them flying over,” the New York Times reported. “During the game three of the machines did stunts above the ball ground, and one whiskered farmer concluded, ‘They’s so many things going on here that a country feller don’t know which way to look.’”14 The Giants visited the aviators’ home field a few days later, where flying again featured in the game. Thirty or so planes soared over the diamond, performing stunts, spins, dives, and rolls. The baseball community, like the rest of the country, was fascinated by flyboys.
The list of Major League players missing from spring training went on and on. Pitcher Sherrod “Sherry” Smith of the Dodgers and catcher Joe Jenkins of the White Sox were at Camp Gordon, Georgia. “Having been originally drafted from the minor leagues to the majors, and then drafted from the majors to the Army, the battery has been drafted into the series of intercantonment games for the championship of Uncle Sam’s fighting forces at home and abroad.”15 Infielder Hal Janvrin, who had aided Sergeant Hoffman in drilling the Red Sox in Boston, had enlisted in the Signal Corps and was now at nearby Camp Devens. Leon Cadore, the drafted Brooklyn pitcher, was working toward an army commission at Camp Upton. Nearly every club in the Majors had lost a handful of players and expected to lose more.
One man who wasn’t greatly missed in training camp was Cincinnati Reds pitcher Fred Toney. The tall right-hander had won twenty-four games in 1917, second in the National League only to the Phillies’ Grover Alexander. Authorities had arrested Toney two days before Christmas at his home in Tennessee on a charge of draft evasion—“the first black eye on the national pastime.”16
Toney claimed that his wife, child, mother, stepfather, and sister were all dependent on the $5,000 salary he earned with Christy Mathewson’s club. A district attorney believed otherwise. He charged that Fred hadn’t lived with his employed wife for three years, “has contributed but little to her support, and, further, that his exemption claims were not supported by the facts.”17 A county tax assessor was also arrested and charged with conspiring in the fraud.
Freed on $5,000 bail, the pitcher got scant sympathy from fans or the press. One syndicated sports cartoon showed a well-dressed fan, labeled “Sporting Public,” grasping Toney’s pitching shoulder and declaring, “You are through!”18 Toney likely received no great sympathy, either, from the dozens of former National and American Leaguers now in the armed forces, a number of whom were either already overseas or on their way to France.
Capt. Eddie Grant, for example, had sailed from New York on March 27 with the Seventy-Seventh Division. “The boat proceeded slowly, almost reluctantly, it seemed; the faces in the windows blurred and the Statue of Liberty was left behind,” a division historian wrote. “What could be a more fortuitous omen than the Division’s own emblem smiling a ‘bon chance’ as the Division sailed out to sea during the latter days of March and the first of April.”19 The Liberty Division crossed the Atlantic in convoy via Halifax. After touching in England, the New Yorkers crossed the English Channel and became the first division of the national army (primarily draftees, rather than regulars or guardsmen) to reach Europe. They would undergo additional training in northern France until mid-July.
Hank Gowdy was now at the front with the Rainbow Division in the relatively quiet Luneville sector of eastern France. “Yet it wasn’t so quiet,” observes historian Mitchell Yockelson. “The Germans were well aware that green American doughboys loomed nearby and sent artillery fire and the occasional raid to welcome them to the front.”20 The 166th Infantry’s headquarters was no safer than anywhere else. “Being in HQ Company did not spare him, or anyone, what the rest of the regiment was enduring,” historian Richard Rubin writes of a doughboy in another American division. “Everyone took their turns in the front-line trenches, and . . . the fighting often came right up to HQ; after artillery and machine guns, it was the enemy’s top target.”21 Gowdy recalled years later, “Yes, they tried out a lot of ways of killing a guy in that war.”22
The Boston backstop saw his first action in an early morning raid near Badonviller. So many 166th men volunteered to go that officers selected a few from each company, the Braves catcher among them. The March 10 raid went unopposed, a good introduction for green troops. “The positions were occupied in broad daylight by the Americans, after German evacuation. A German barrage later forced a withdrawal, but the Americans returned and now firmly hold the positions.”23 The Ohioans captured no prisoners and returned without loss. According to a regimental history, twenty-three soldiers received the Croix de Guerre, a largely symbolic gesture by the French for so bloodless an action. Limited by strict censorship, war correspondents made only veiled references to Gowdy.
“The athlete whose name was deleted in Sunday’s despatches is a former baseball catcher. He is different looking in a gas mask and tin hat than he was behind a wire mask and in a baseball cap.” Newspapers soon confirmed that this was indeed Gowdy. “Every outfit ought to have a few fellows like Hank,” his colonel had once told a correspondent. “The boys idolize him and he’s got ’em all stirred up with his proposed baseball teams. He helps ’em to forget the discomforts of war.”24
All of baseball’s popular army drill instructors from 1917 were now back on active duty. Contrary to his earlier assertions, Ban Johnson no longer planned to mandate drill instruction for American League clubs again in 1918.
“I was told by army authorities that the daily drills last season stimulated recruiting to a marked degree. There is no need of that now, because of the draft,” Johnson explained. “We also believe the clubs will be changed about a good deal this season, as the players are called into the army, and we would not care to stage a poor exhibition.”25 Except for a similar paragraph or two on some sports pages, the end of Captain Huston’s grand preparedness scheme went largely unnoticed.
Several sportswriters and columnists who had written about Huston and the drill sergeants in 1917 were gone from the sporting scene as well. Bozeman Bulger of the New York World now commanded the Second Battalion of the 306th Infantry in the Seventy-Seventh division. “He went through two training camps at Plattsburg, preceded by his experience in Cuba in the Spanish-American War, and his men think him the greatest Major of them all,” said the World.26 In France with Eddie Grant and the others, “Old Boze” was soon transferred to less arduous duty at AEF headquarters, riding herd on the war correspondents, among whom he had many friends. “While my work is really a big job, and I go all over France, along the line,” he wrote later, “I have never yet got over the keen disappointment of leaving the old battalion with which I served so long.”27
The roster of writers and editors wearing khaki also included Lt. Grantland Rice, Capt. W. P. McGeehan, and Pvt. Bucky O’Neil, all of the New York Tribune, and Lt. Jack Wheeler, whose syndicate circulated sports features and comic strips. Among a dozen or more other scribes who had or would enter the army were Nat Fleischer of the New York Sun, Al Jappe of the Cleveland News, James W. Gantz of the Philadelphia Press, contributor J. C. Kofoed of Baseball Magazine, and Harry Lewis of the Atlanta Georgian. Virgil Jackson of the St. Joseph (MO) News-Press and Sporting News would be severely wounded fighting in France shortly before the armistice.
Grantland Rice had left New York City the first week of December to enlist as a private in a National Guard unit from his native Tennessee. The columnist was thirty-seven years old, and everything he knew about the army he had learned as a teenager at military school. “Why I chose the Infantry I’m not sure, except that Kipling had made it all sound romantic and tough.”28 When the army changed his regiment’s designation and purpose, he suddenly found himself in Battery F of the 115th Field Artillery. “Rice is only one of a number of baseball scribes who have gone into service—note that they enter the active service, too, taking their chances with the rest of the boys,” Sporting News noted.29
Rice’s friend Walter Trumbull of the New York World enlisted as well. The pair trained together at Camp Sevier near Greenville, South Carolina. Most of the men in their outfit were Tennessee farm boys, few of whom had ever left the mountains. “Is this France?” one teary, homesick doughboy asked Rice. Like Hank Gowdy, the sportswriter soon earned a sergeant’s stripes. He and Trumbull were then commissioned second lieutenants and promoted to first lieutenants. Lt. Innis Brown, late of the New York Sun, also transferred into their battery. The sporting gunners were known in camp as the Three Inseparables.
“As a soldier, I was no great shucks,” Rice wrote decades later.30 He cheerfully conceded to his commanding officer during a field exercise that he hadn’t the slightest idea what he was doing. Rice’s greatest accomplishment at Camp Sevier was carving a baseball diamond from a green forest. Time permitting, he occasionally wrote his Sportlight column for the Tribune. Louis Lee Arms wrote a poem for his own column about Rice, writer Franklin P. Adams, and others who had left the newsroom and press box for the armed forces:
“And what about old Grantland Rice?
He used to write his stuff blamed nice.”
“Oh, he’s left to take a chance
At showing Kaiserbilly’s bums
That they stand no chance when a Yankee comes.
He’s going to France.”
“Yep, old man, he’s going to France.”31
By the time the poem appeared in early May, Rice was headed across the ocean with his battery, sailing on the transport George Washington and attached to the Thirtieth “Old Hickory” Division. His war service took an unexpected turn once he reached the other side.
Capt. T. L. Huston had left the Yankees in June 1917. Now with his regiment “somewhere in France,” he kept tabs on Major League Baseball from American newspapers yellowing with age. What he learned from them made him violently unhappy.
One winter day, probably in February, Huston met George V. Christie, formerly of the Brooklyn Eagle sports department, who was serving overseas with an ambulance unit. The captain rashly granted Christie the sort of interview that boosts a writer’s career, only to withdraw permission to quote him later after he cooled down. Huston instead composed a long interview with himself. At nearly two thousand words, the piece ran in the Eagle and other New York papers March 24 during spring training. It detonated with a bang that would have impressed Grantland Rice’s artillerymen. “As I see it from this far-off lookout station,” Huston wrote, “baseball wants to do its duty by the Nation and at the same time it naturally desires to avoid the sacrifice of its entire invested rights and property.”
Everybody but the men managing baseball sees the immediate serious situation to which America is exposed. If they don’t wake up from their stupor and put the national game in its rightful place in the front ranks of all patriotic movements, events combined with public opinion will force them out and put others more alert in their places. This is no time to “four flush” with the public. Beware of trifling with the situation. It’s loaded. . . .
The small percentage of the proceeds of the World Series donated was ridiculous and really insulting to the Nation. At least 25 per cent. should go for patriotic purposes. This would tend to take away the bad taste always left by this annual baseball financial orgy, which is fast becoming a menace to the life of the national game, for if not abated, some fatal scandal is bound to occur sooner or later. There have already been some close shaves.
The lack of patriotism shown in baseball circles is a disgrace. Very few big league players volunteered. We have Hank Gowdy’s picture draped in a silk American flag . . . stuck on our Company A’s bulletin board. I hope to personally greet him when he arrives over here. Not a person connected with the business end of baseball has volunteered. Ye gods, what a mortifying and shameful spectacle!32
Huston also criticized large player contracts at a time when, in his view, austerity was the order of the day. He stated that the American League’s drill program should have been the foundation for a civilian home guard. He predicted lower Major League attendance in 1918 and urged teams to play more benefit games for soldiers and sailors. Although he praised Charles Comiskey’s Red Cross donations and Clark Griffith’s Bat and Ball Fund, Huston thought most other magnates had fallen far short. “Up to August 1 when I left, the National had done nothing patriotic, but I hope it fell in line subsequently.”33 Huston suggested that Governor Tener might find useful employment in France as an intermediary between military and civilian officials and that Ban Johnson might help organize the YMCA’s planned baseball league in Paris.
“Gentlemen, baseball will wag along a year or two without you,” Huston wrote. “Thousands of families are doing without the husband and father, so fall in. If Garry Herrmann or others so desire I’ll fix them up also.” Although he believed that Major League Baseball would yet rise to the occasion, the magnate ended his extraordinary broadside with a warning: “But, men of baseball, reveille sounded for you long ago. If you are deaf to that call, the nation will sound taps for you, and you will hear it!”34
Reaction on American sports pages was immediate. “It is a safe assertion that the published interview is not as strong as the one originally granted to Christie, but, at that, ‘Cap’s’ communing with himself cannot be said to be in any respect lacking in forthwith, downright language that few men in his shoes as club owner would have had the courage to use,” Thomas Rice wrote in the Eagle.35
To Dan Daniel at the New York Sun, the missive “undoubtedly is the most remarkable document yet written by a major league official. Engaged in most severe and serious work with the Engineer Corps over there, . . . Capt. Huston has far more intense opinions about some things than it would be possible for us here to develop.”36 Nonetheless, Daniels largely agreed with him, as did many others.
“The Huston warning, written many weeks ago, proves but the more the farsightedness and keen perspective of this real patriot,” Bill Macbeth wrote in the New York Tribune. “It may be true that when he spoke Captain Huston had not been informed of the response to arms of the many major league stars who followed in the footsteps of Hank Gowdy and Rabbit Maranville. His displeasure centred, however, on those in control of the administration of the game, and on that score, at least, he has every argument for vindication.”37
Major League owners had little to gain by publicly criticizing an officer serving in France. “Efforts to obtain official comment on Huston’s letter failed in every direction except in Flatbush,” Daniel wrote. Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets, the Squire of Flatbush, defended his and others’ donations to the American Red Cross and similar war funds and charities. “I do not think that Huston’s remarks on that score were in good taste or that they were backed by any definite information,” Ebbets said. “We certainly did as well as we could last year. We intend to do better this season—that is, if some of us do not go bankrupt.”38
After the war, Sporting News would recall Huston’s self-interview and other letters as “attacks on baseball charging it with unpatriotism almost to the point of treason.” While keeping their heads safely below the parapet in 1918, Major League magnates were privately furious. The Giants even threatened to “kick the Yankees out of the Polo Grounds.”39 Caught uncomfortably between his partner and other owners in the league, Colonel Ruppert briefly thought about selling his portion of the New York club. He soon reconsidered, and the uproar faded from the sports pages. It would not be as quickly forgotten, however.
Nobody really knew what to expect, either on the field or off it, as the Major Leagues approached their 1918 season openers. Most clubs had lost multiple players to the draft and enlistments, and worse clearly lay ahead. Hugh Fullerton expressed the widespread uncertainty about teams’ abilities to compete:
We can figure the strength and the weakness of each club, but there remains the chance that the Nation will demand the services of many ball players before the season is finished. . . . Any club in either major league is liable to lose a vital element at any minute, which adds to the uncertainty of the races and gives an incentive to the trailing clubs to keep trying, hoping that the leaders will be crippled.40
Uncertainty on the business side was nearly as great. Charlie Ebbets’s dark aside about possible bankruptcies echoed ominously throughout the spring. Louis Lee Arms in the New York Tribune reported from the Giants’ training camp that four big-league clubs might not survive the season. “The big leagues are in a more impoverished condition than they have been in years, and there is no telling what may happen in view of the seriousness of the war situation,” he wrote, quoting an unnamed authority. “I know of four clubs now that are financially on the ragged edge, and it may be that they will have to withdraw before the season is finished, though we hope not.”41 Arms suggested that the endangered quartet were the Senators, Athletics, Braves, and Pirates.
The situation in the high Minor Leagues was even gloomier. The International and New York State circuits both sought ways to survive another season. “I do not know now whether the State league will start again,” President John Farrell admitted in early March. “The contracts were sent out by all the clubs in the circuit before March 1st, as it is necessary to mail contracts to the men before that date in order to retain their services.”42 As both the New York State leader and secretary of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, Farrell was well informed about conditions around the Minors. His uncertainty about his own circuit’s future was chilling.
Sportswriters correctly surmised that the New York State League was waiting to see what the equally troubled Class AA International would do before deciding its own course. Sports pages reported rumors that the larger circuit would disband and reorganize. Then late on the evening of April 4, at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, the circuits jointly announced what amounted to a wartime merger.
The new International was an eight-team circuit whose shortened season would run from May 8 to September 15. The directors elected Farrell president. The cobbled-together league included Baltimore, Buffalo, Newark, Rochester, and Toronto from the International and Binghamton and Syracuse from the New York State. The eighth franchise was Jersey City, a member of the International from 1912 to 1915, but without professional baseball in the two seasons since. The seven other International and State teams that had survived 1917 were dropped. Only two of these landed in lower circuits for the 1918 season: Providence in Class B Eastern and Richmond in Class C Virginia.
“The New International League—the Dr. Jekyll of the former circuit’s Mr. Hyde—has been assured a most active career for 1918 and doubtless many seasons to come,” Bill Macbeth wrote in the Tribune.43 Each club would carry a roster of only fourteen players and the manager. “With the imminent passage of the Sunday baseball law in this State every city in the league with the exception of Toronto will be able to play Sunday games at home. Sunday ball is not permitted in Baltimore, but that club will play outside the city limits.”44
Most big eastern newspapers wished the new International well, but many baseball insiders saw rough days ahead for the Minor Leagues overall. “The big minors are going to have a tough time of it,” predicted Dick Kinsella, former owner of a Three-I League franchise, now a scout for John McGraw’s Giants. “The fans prefer the high-grade baseball and will be glad to pay the difference to take a trip to see a big league team in action rather than stay at home and see a minor league squad perform.” Kinsella laughingly rejected the notion of creating new lower circuits, such as a proposed Illinois State League. “There wouldn’t be enough people at the ball parks,” he declared, “to fill a flatiron building shoe-shining shop.”45 He was just about right.