The 1918 season began April 15 with two games, Athletics versus Red Sox in Boston and Yankees versus Senators in Washington. The other half of the American League and all the National were set to open the following day. Unlike a year earlier, the weather was sunny and blue in Boston. Huge front-page articles about a furious German attack on British forces near Ypres, Belgium, reminded fans in both cities why each game featured a Liberty Loan bond drive.
“Germans Hurled to Death by Thousands without Gain,” screamed the Boston Globe, which elsewhere identified seventeen New England soldiers killed or wounded fighting in France.1 Russia had withdrawn from the war March 3 by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. No longer fighting on two fronts, the German army had shifted divisions to the western front. “Then, on March 21, the Germans launched their great offensive,” historian Martin Gilbert records. “Were it to succeed, Germany could win the war in the west on the battlefield, as she had already won it in the east at the conference table.”2
Babe Ruth threw the first pitch in the Fenway Park opener at 3:15. “It was a perfect day, but the great drive on the other side must distract from baseball,” noted a visiting Philadelphia sportswriter.3 “It was an unusual crowd,” the Globe agreed. “You might call it a reflective bunch. They never failed to applaud a great play, but there was a sort of conservation of appreciation apparent.”4
Ruth earned a 7–1 victory for Boston and drove in two runs before ten thousand fans. Red Sox second baseman Johnny Evers wasn’t on the field or in uniform, having failed to sign with Frazee’s club. “It is the first opening day I have not played in 17 years,” he lamented from the grandstand. “I would have liked very much to go in, if only for one inning, just as a matter of sentiment.”5 Newspapers speculated about Evers catching on with the Cubs or Cardinals or even Jersey City, but the Trojan wouldn’t play for any other team in 1918. He instead soon found useful war work overseas.
Woodrow Wilson skipped the Senators’ home opener in Washington. An avid baseball fan, the president was detained by official business, another indication of the seriousness of the war news. A District of Columbia commissioner stepped in to throw out the first ball, which in grand tradition he bounced to Washington catcher Eddie Ainsmith. In addition to the usual array of dignitaries, the crowd of thirteen thousand included soldiers, sailors, and marines from nearby military installations. They all settled in to watch Clark Griffith’s team face the New Yorkers in Miller Huggins’s managerial debut with the Yankees.
The game began at the unusual hour of 4:00. The Senators announced that the games to follow would begin at 4:30. “It is the intention of the management ultimately to have the games get under way at 5 o’clock, allowing a full half hour for those fans who work in the government departments to reach the park after their offices close in time to see the games start.”6
As in Boston, everyone in the capital crowd felt the war’s presence. “Sergt. Harry Marshall, who in 1916 was giving his all for the French in No Man’s Land, and who now wears the uniform of the American trooper, gave a stirring appeal for the sale of liberty bonds.”7 After the speech, Capt. Antonio Resnati, an Italian military aviator, swooped low over the Georgia Avenue stadium in a gigantic Caproni triplane bomber. “Capt. Resnati’s liberty bond appeal was that of dropping liberty bond posters from an aeroplane not fifty yards above the athletes of both teams toiling in our national pastime.”8 Fan responded by buying $7,500 in bonds. The flyover was more successful than the Senators’ effort, as pitcher Walter Johnson faltered in a 6–3 loss. Tragically, Captain Resnati was killed in a crash during a test flight at an army airfield in New York only a month later.
Worse, another aviation flyover June 2 would end horrifically at the American Association ballpark in Indianapolis. A U.S. Army Curtiss biplane swooped over the field before an exhibition game between service teams, a major in the backseat dropping baseballs with banners attached to the four thousand fans watching below. “The machine was 500 feet above second base when Captain [Edwin] Webb ‘banked’ to drop the balls. Two balls dropped earlier had caught in the controls, and the machine refused to respond; it plunged to earth in a nose dive. Captain Webb was crushed by the motor.”9 Despite this odd tragedy, the tradition of military flyovers at professional baseball games had been firmly established at Washington, Indianapolis, Waco, and elsewhere.
After the openers in Boston and Washington, the rest of the big-league clubs started the season April 16. Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander made his pitching debut with the Cubs on the road in St. Louis. Alexander had come to Chicago in a blockbuster deal in December, the Philadelphia Phillies trading him and catcher Bill Killefer for pitcher Mike Prendergast, catcher “Pickles” Dillhoefer, and $55,000. Betting that Alexander would be lost to the army draft, “the Philadelphia front office carried off one of the most cynical acts in baseball history.”10 The wartime extravagance had also helped stoke Captain Huston’s outrage in France.
The Phillies had good reason to think Alexander might soon be wearing khaki. Although unmarried, he had asked for a draft deferment on the grounds that he supported his mother and a brother at home in little St. Paul, Nebraska, population two thousand. His local board denied that request in January. “I don’t want to be called a slacker and lay myself open to criticism,” Alexander told the Cubs, “but I felt as if I should have been placed in another class.”11 He was now belatedly looking for options.
Alexander talked about joining the navy and called on the commandant of the Great Lakes naval training center outside Chicago. But conditions had changed since Whitey Witt had managed the army–navy switch several months earlier in Boston. The army was now ready to receive new draftees and was less likely to let any go elsewhere. Alexander telegraphed his draft board seeking permission to enlist in the navy, with very slim odds of receiving it. In more bad news for the Cubs, catcher Killefer’s draft board in Paw Paw, Michigan, reclassified him from Class 4A to Class 1A.
The opener in St. Louis went badly for Alexander. The Cards pounded him hard, winning 4–2 on nine hits and seventeen total bases. Worse for Chicago’s new pitching ace, his draft board officially denied his request to join the navy. “Alexander had all winter to join the navy if he wanted to,” said a captain representing Provost Marshal General Crowder in Nebraska. “Our general orders are to release no registrants to the navy after they have been called for duty in the army, and there is no reason why Alexander should be taken out of his present quota.”12
The pitcher now stood tenth on a list of twelve men in Howard County’s April draft quota. Unless he could convince someone in Washington to let him don the navy’s blue jumper, he was bound for Camp Funston, Kansas, at the end of the month.
As Alexander headed out of the National League, Fred Toney tried desperately to get back in. Cincinnati’s big right-hander had gone on trial for draft evasion in Nashville on April 6 with four lawyers beside him. “One of the attorneys for the defendant said Toney would admit making all the claims as to dependencies set forth in the indictment and expected to prove the truth of them all.”13
The proceedings ended in a hung jury after five days, the judge docketing the case for retrial during the next court term. Toney had landed in more trouble during the trial, however, when it was suggested he had crossed state lines with an underage girlfriend for what the law deemed immoral purposes. With his first trial still in progress, a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging him with violating the Mann Act, commonly known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Toney posted a $1,000 bond and was released pending still another criminal trial. Temporarily free of courtrooms, and not yet compelled to join the army or report to jail, he shifted his focus to keeping his pitching job in Cincinnati.
Long appeals which are somehow getting into the newspapers are being sent to [Reds] President Herrmann, and all signed by Toney’s legal representative. His present attorney, it seems, has ordered Toney to report to the Cincinnati club, but it does not appear that he is threatening any legal proceedings. . . . Nothing definite is coming from the Cincinnati club as to its disposition in the matter, but it is a good bet that Toney never will be seen in either that or any other big league uniform again.14
Nonetheless, Toney hadn’t been convicted of any crime, and manager Christy Mathewson’s pitching staff was much weaker without him. The Cincinnati club relented. “Toney was extremely lucky when the Reds decided to take him back,” Joe Vila later wrote.15 The pitcher returned to the Reds in winning form May 5, defeating Pittsburgh 3–1 in Cincinnati. It would have been a shutout but for an error. “Cincinnati’s hope now seems to be Toney, who won his first start yesterday,” Hugh Fullerton noted. “The big fellow, after settling his troubles with the draft board, reported and worked hard to get off the fat that accumulated in spite of his worries. Cincinnati must be considered a dangerous factor in the National league race because of the form Toney displayed against the Pirates.”16
Toney tossed a shutout eleven days later, defeating New York, 3–0, again at home in Cincinnati. “It was the first time the McGraw men have been called upon to face a pitcher who, in addition to the equipment of slants, speed and slow balls which every big league pitcher is supposed to possess, had two Federal court orders up his sleeve,” snarled the New York Tribune. “The Giants wonder why Uncle Sam hesitates in putting a quietus on this Toney in the form of an injunction which will prevent him from appearing on the mound against them until the war is over, at least. The other teams in the National League must feel the same about the matter as the New Yorkers.”17 New York would have reason to reflect on those sentiments two months deeper into the season.
“During the Winter Matty was at Camp Sheridan [Alabama] on a visit, and while there he played checkers with the soldiers at the YMCA hut. Thousands of youths at this camp revered Christy Mathewson as the idol of their boyhood days. He was a hero during his visit, and he was such a great attraction for the soldiers that the YMCA persuaded Matty to bring the Reds to the camp for their Spring training.” The YMCA and the Montgomery Board of Trade had split the Reds’ costs. “Because of the great personal favor with which Matty is regarded, his ball club will have a free training trip while the other major league clubs are expending thousands of dollars to get into shape in the South.”18 “There is only one fly in the ointment,” the Stars and Stripes noted from Paris. “An Army officer will probably umpire the games played in the camp, which means the guardhouse for all kickers on decisions.”19
Mathewson was just as popular with American troops overseas. Barely a week into the regular season, the YMCA asked him to leave the Cincinnati club and go “over there” to take charge of the organization’s baseball operations in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). The official in charge of the Y’s work in France said “the selection of Matty was made by popular vote, the majority of men in France considering him the most desirable man to take charge of baseball among the soldiers.”20 “Come On, Matty,” Stars and Stripes urged in a headline.21
It was no small imposition to ask a manager to leave his club at the start of a season and take on an enormous new job overseas, but the YMCA badly needed the help. By May 1918 some seven hundred thousand doughboys were already overseas with the AEF, with tens of thousands more stepping off troop transports every week. In March, at the request of the government, the YMCA War Work Council had begun shipping a thousand gross of Louisville Sluggers to France from Kentucky—“The largest shipment of baseball bats in the history of the game,” according to the New York Times.22 “Their ultimate destination,” added the New York Telegram, “is the Lorraine sector of the fighting front in France, where they will be distributed among the American troops.”23
The Y wanted to keep the troops active and healthy when they weren’t at the front dug into their trenches. The organization was therefore recruiting a thousand business and professional men to handle its war work, including a large number of athletic directors. Who better than Christy Mathewson?
“Special cables from those in authority urge you to come over with important relation to the promotion of baseball for the entire American Army,” William Sloane, chairman of the National War Work Council, wired to the Reds manager April 24. “Such an opportunity has never been presented to any man. We are hopeful, if this appeal is placed before your management, they will see in it a chance to serve thousands of Americans, now enduring the terrific strain and make a great contribution toward winning the war.”24 Sloan added that he realized the financial sacrifice involved, and he asked for a personal meeting.
Mathewson and the Reds agreed to consider the proposal. “I think Matty can be induced to accept the offer of the YMCA, and for the National League I may say that organized baseball appreciates the honor of the call from our soldiers in the trenches,” Governor Tener told Dr. George J. Fisher, the YMCA official sent to Cincinnati to talk with the manager.
The drama continued for several days. Some newspapers ran articles saying that Mathewson would go and others that he wouldn’t, all amid speculation that Hal Chase would replace him if and when the skipper went to France. “He will leave the Cincinnati team if the YMCA can show him that his duty lies overseas, and the men there need him to help them to win,” Fisher said. “The YMCA can show him, and a cable message has been sent to France today for confirmation of the original appeal made to Matty. If necessary to convince him that he is needed in France even General Pershing will be willing to add his plea to the call of his troops.”25 Hugh Fullerton recorded Mathewson’s dilemma:
Matty evidently postponed his decision until he could have a conference with his family and study the matter. Much pressure is being brought to persuade Matty that he really is needed in France, and also volunteers are rushing forward eager to take the job. The trouble is that there is only one Matty, and no one else in sport could get the same results. They might be even better in the work, yet Matty’s name would do more for baseball among the soldiers than any dozen men’s work could do.26
Despite the excitement, the scheme slowly fizzled before the Fourth of July without any announcement or denouement from either side.
“Matty never could find out exactly what he was to do when he got there,” Tom Rice wrote. “Taking charge of baseball among the troops might have meant anything from dishing out bats and balls to organizing leagues or coaching players. He declined to accept, unless the duties were outlined more specifically, and eventually the matter was dropped.”27 The YMCA had also realized that France wanted soldiers, not civilian noncombatants. “Then, too, the French people, whose viewpoint in athletics is not in accordance with our own, may possibly misunderstand our whole idea, in which event there is possibility for unfavorable reaction,” an official wrote to Mathewson.28 The plan to send “Big Six” overseas quietly died.
As Mathewson stepped back, Johnny Evers stepped forward. The legendary second baseman had wanted to enlist like former teammate Hank Gowdy, but he had failed the physical examination because of neuritis in his arm. “Hank, I will be over there some way,” he had promised Gowdy.29 In early June Evers signed up with the Knights of Columbus to become what the Syracuse Journal called “the generalissimo of baseball in France.” Like the YMCA, the Knights of Columbus was heavily engaged in volunteer war work and was sending uniformed officials called secretaries to work among the troops in the AEF. Evers was a perfect candidate. “The famous Trojan, who was recently retired as a member of the Red Sox, was asked to take the position of second base by Manager Jack Hendricks of the St. Louis Cardinals; but he said that he believed the work in France was more essential.”30 Evers and Mathewson both would be in France by fall, albeit in different uniforms.
Besides losing growing numbers of players to the draft and enlistments, magnates and managers faced another major drain on manpower: the heavy industries that were becoming increasingly vital to the American war effort. Seattle shipbuilders snapping up Minor League ballplayers set adrift by the Northwestern League in 1917 was a harbinger of what was to happen in the Major Leagues in 1918. Workers who held essential jobs in shipyards, steel mills, and munitions plants received Selective Service exemptions, a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by ballplayers or hundreds of thousands of other American men of draft age. Only a month into the 1918 campaign, sports fans across the country began reading reports like this:
A unique league has arisen in the ranks of baseball with the opening of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation Baseball League which played its initial game on May 11. The season will continue for twenty weeks and as the rivalry between the various plant teams is intense a number of famous major and minor league players, for the past and present, have been signed to alternate in serving the corporation in overalls and baseball uniforms. . . . Furthermore, money is no object in the plan to secure players. While it is not authoritatively stated, nevertheless, it has trickled through the trenches that from $200 to $250 has been offered to some of the big leaguers for each game played.31
“Backed by the millions of Charles M. Schwab and his personal stamp of approval, the Steel league . . . is now menacing the very foundations of the organization of baseball,” another article stated.32 As the head of Bethlehem’s many operations, Schwab believed in providing off-hours entertainment for workers in the corporation’s steel mills and shipyards around the country. In April 1918 Schwab was also appointed head of the U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, which oversaw all American wartime shipbuilding. The steel magnate was now one of the most influential men in the country.
“Schwab handles athletes like he does everything else, with a six-cylinder force,” said a newspaper in Pennsylvania steel country. “Mr. Schwab expressed himself very emphatically in favor of wholesome hardy sports like baseball which have all the allurements necessary to attract a spectator and furnish his husky riveters amusement. Not only that but he believes in building baseball plants at all ship building places. What if the big leagues do bust up? There’s Schwab.”33
The powerful Steel League fielded teams at the corporation’s plants in Steelton, Lebanon, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Quincy, Massachusetts; Wilmington, Delaware; and Sparrows Point, Maryland. As arguably the best industrial baseball circuit formed since America had entered the war, it was sometimes pilloried as the Steal League, “because it has been purloining, or at least attracting, a lot of major league material to it.”34 Competing directly with the Steel League for manpower and ballplayers was the strong Delaware River Shipbuilding League, centered in Philadelphia and Wilmington. Other shipyard leagues operated in New York, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Gulf Coast states. Numerous other industrial circuits scattered around the country included the Head of the Lakes–Mesaba League, composed of mining, steel mill, and shipyard teams in Minnesota, and the Copper League, a mining circuit in New Mexico. Anywhere that war industries operated, industrial leagues drew ballplayers from the Minor and Major Leagues. A few military ball clubs even took part in these leagues. The League Island Navy Yard in Philadelphia, for instance, was briefly a member of the Delaware River circuit. Fort Bayard played in the Copper League, while other army teams participated in factory leagues elsewhere around the country.
Yankees manager Miller Huggins, among others, protested what he considered unfair tampering by the big northeastern industrial leagues. “A half dozen players on my club have been approached by men who presumably are conducting the welfare work for the Bethlehem Steel Company, and I have authoritative knowledge that players on virtually all the big league clubs who thus far have played on the Atlantic seaboard have received offers similar to those made to my men,” Huggins charged. He added that one shipyard had offered a New York player more “to play baseball and learn a skilled trade than his American League baseball contract called for.”35 “I think organized baseball owes it to itself to ascertain precisely what inducements are being made our men to go to the ship yards in advance of their draft call by the government. It is a fact that the repeated offers from representatives of these teams—who, I understand, are to form a shipbuilders’ league—is damaging the morale of our teams and contributing to the manifold difficulties of managing a major league baseball team in war time.”36
Cleveland manager Lee Fohl understood why a ballplayer with dependents or other responsibilities might jump to a shipyard team. “I tell you it’s a great temptation to put in the way of a young fellow who is a bit undecided what to do,” he said. “And I don’t wonder that quite a few of them have fallen for it. What should be done is to put a bridle on the men who have been responsible for offering such contracts. They are the ones most to blame.”37
Only a few big leaguers worked in steel mills or shipyards early in the 1918 season. Former Pirates pitcher Al Mamaux, who began the year with Brooklyn, had a job at Bethlehem’s Fore River plant in Quincy. Ex-Giants infielder Hans Lobert and former Phillies pitcher Charles “Chief” Bender played on the Hog Island (Philadelphia) team in the Delaware River Shipbuilding League. Starting pitcher George Mogridge, although widely reported to be joining a shipyard team as well, remained with the Yankees instead and appeared in forty-five games in 1918.
Other familiar names were sprinkled through the steel and shipyard rosters, and the list only grew as the season continued. Giants starting pitcher Charles “Jeff” Tesreau jumped to the Steel League’s Bethlehem team in June. Widely criticized for apparently seeking to avoid the draft, Tesreau told the club instead that he was “disgusted with baseball and wanted to get in to some other business.”38 On the Fourth of July, after an argument with manager Ed Barrow, it briefly appeared that Boston pitcher Babe Ruth had jumped to the Chester team in the Delaware River Shipbuilding League, but he returned without suiting up. The Chester manager said that Ruth had asked only to play for the team on the holiday.
Charges against Steel League and shipyard teams continued all summer. “Cannot something be done to stop these robbers getting players under pretext of helping win the war?” Frank Bancroft angrily wrote to Garry Herrmann in June. “It is a joke and I don’t believe the heads at Washington would sanction contract jumping and slacking if it was put to them as it ought to be.” The Reds’ business manager fumed in a postscript: “The Kaiser may be rotten but doubt if he would harbor a lot of crooks and hate to believe the U.S. Government will.”39
“Divers stars have been asked to name their own terms and the agents do not take one ‘nay’ as final,” Dan Daniel wrote later that month. “We know of a player who was approached three times in as many days. He got rid of the pest by threatening bodily harm. A pitcher for one of the New York clubs has been asked to fill out his own contract to work for a shipbuilding team.”40 Likewise Yankees business manager Harry Sparrow received a tip before a July doubleheader: “Watch sharp for a man in a gray suit and soft hat, who will try to interview the Yankee players between games. He is a shipyard agent, and his name is Petty.”41
The fact that most players wanted to stay with their Major League clubs to protect their postwar careers made little difference to the recruiters, Daniel wrote. “When the Reds were here on their recent trip the agents planned a wholesale raid on a scale never even approached in the palmiest of Federal League days.” Asked both to jump his team and to recruit two teammates as well, Cincinnati journeyman infielder Lena “Slats” Blackburne “not only refused but he nearly annihilated the unlucky agent.”42
The Steel League’s biggest bombshell had landed May 14, just a month into the season, when slugger Joe Jackson abruptly left Charles Comiskey’s championship White Sox. “Shoeless Joe” had sounded unconcerned only a day earlier after learning that he would be headed into the army with the next draft call. “Well, the old boy will be out there slugging the Dutchman pretty soon,” he said in Philadelphia, where his club had just played Connie Mack’s Athletics. “And if I ever draw a bead on one of them birds, it’ll be all off with him.”43 He reported for work the next morning at Harlan & Hollingsworth, Bethlehem’s shipyard subsidiary in nearby Wilmington.
Originally Joe planned to do some painting for the shipbuilding company. He had been decorating the offerings of star pitchers so long that he felt he would make good as a decorator in the service. He had his heart set on this work, but after the boss watched Joe wield a brush in much the same way he twirled a bat, it was decided that as a painter Joe would make a wonderful INSPECTOR.44
Jackson landed his plum job despite the fact that he was largely illiterate. The Harlan yard fielded teams in both the Steel and Delaware River Leagues. The slugger joined the former and played his first game June 1. He was the first big name to jump to a shipyard or steel team. Ban Johnson, for one, wasn’t at all happy at what the move portended. “The American League does not desire to impugn the motives of the players who have gone into this work. Some of them are patriotic,” the league president said. “But if there are any of them in class 1–A, I hope Provost Marshal General Crowder yanks them from the shipyards and steel works by the coat collar, and places them in cantonments to prepare for future events on the western front.”45
General Crowder’s office soon announced that a draft exemption for employment in a steel mill or shipyard wasn’t automatic, as many believed. “Exemption is granted only through the regular channels of the army, and there is no official knowledge of the Steel League’s existence.”46 Jackson nonetheless kept his new job at the Harlan yard, as did a majority of the ballplayers who followed the outfielder’s example.
The Steel League and other industrial circuits became known derisively as Paint and Putty leagues. Although the games drew surprisingly well—Delaware River contests routinely drew four or five thousand spectators—the players heard about their choice of employment from the bleachers. A former Major Leaguer serving in the navy watched as several ex-Giants played for one of the shipyard teams. “Nothing was too mean to call them, and if they got a dollar for every time some one called them ‘slackers’ or ‘trench-dodgers’ they must have gotten round-shouldered carrying their money home.”47
“A star baseball player is no more entitled to extraordinary draft law interpretation than a bum checker player,” Louis Lee Arms rumbled in the New York Tribune. “Only an ignorant one, who has taken too seriously the generous approval extended the successful sports professional, would think of such a thing, and he, perhaps, because of his obvious shortcomings, is less at fault than his more mentally responsible tempters.”48
Viewed as the first of the Major Leaguers who “deserted their teams for bomb-proof jobs in shipyards or steel works,” Joe Jackson became the particular target of unhappy writers and fans.49 Washington Times sportswriter Louis A. Dougher often referred to the slugger as “Joe the Painter,” a label that stuck in the capital.50 All season long, in any newspaper article listing ballplayers who had landed jobs in shipyards or steel plants, Jackson’s name inevitably came first. None of the players was popular. Owner Charles Comiskey reacted angrily when two more White Sox, Claude “Lefty” Williams and Byrd Lynn, followed Jackson into the shipyards.
“There is no room on my ball club for players who wish to evade the army draft by entering the employ of ship concerns,” Comiskey said.51 The owner praised pitcher Red Faber’s decision to join the navy. “I told him I was glad to hear it—that he had my well wishes. That goes for every player under contract to me who wishes to join the army or navy.”52
“It is not pleasant to be obliged to testify that professional athletes, on the whole, have not been disposed to yield ready service to their country,” J. B. Sheridan wrote in July.53 The sportswriter was hardly alone in his condemnation. A Massachusetts state legislator launched an investigation of what he called “camouflaged players” in shipyard leagues, “carried on the payrolls as painters and who carry two pails of paint a day to the real workmen and spend the rest of the time when they should be building ships on the baseball diamond.” Declared the Sporting News, “The ‘camouflaged player’ is about to get his. It won’t be because of any new moral sense awakened in those in charge of the ship yards, however. They may deny they know what was going on, but the evidence is against them. As is the habit of their kind when smoked out, they make great protestations of innocence but they fool nobody.”54
Late in the summer, Sporting News ran one of its harsh satirical poems, this one about young athletes who hadn’t entered the armed forces as the editors thought they rightly should do:
Some more bold, fearless ath-aletes of note
Have gone to captivate the kaiser’s goat
And save the world from Hun autocracy
By smearing gobs of paint upon a boat. . . .
The boy who stood upon the burning deck,
When all about him was a flaming wreck,
Was out of luck—he could not smite the ball
Nor swing a brush and draw a big league check.55
“There is a chance for some reporter to dig up a whale of a story by starting his prodding in Washington, where the government auditors have their headquarters,” Tom Rice fumed in Sporting News.56 This and similar calls produced few damning facts, however. An Emergency Fleet Corporation official later said that, with few exceptions, ballplayers put in a full day’s work in shipyard jobs like everyone else. “Furthermore, he praises the efforts that have been made to make baseball the main recreation for the ship yard workers and says an even more expansive sport program is being planned, to include soccer, football, trap shooting and other activities.”57 The corporation did prohibit hiring ballplayers “more for the purpose of bolstering up teams than to expedite the shipbuilding programme,” and announced that it wouldn’t reimburse any yard that offered large salaries as an incentive.58 The Steel League also initiated a rule that a ballplayer had to be employed at least a month before he was eligible to play.
Among the few ballplayers actually yanked back out of a shipyard was Ed Monroe of the Yankees. The pitcher had appeared in nine games for New York in 1917 and one in 1918. “Monroe deserted Huggins several weeks ago and became a member of one of the teams in the Steel League,” Joe Vila wrote in late July. “He was in Class 1A and presumably was anxious to avoid a call to the colors. But it turns out that Monroe couldn’t save himself from a trip to the battle front.”59 When he turned to the Steel League for protection, Louis Dougher added, Monroe was “politely, but firmly, told that it had no further need of his services. Now he is awaiting the call of the bugle.”60 The pitcher never returned to the Majors, but played two postwar seasons in the Minors.
Such minor exceptions aside, Jackson and his ballplayer colleagues complied with federal law and worked legally in shipyards, mills, and factories alongside many tens of thousands of other healthy young American males. The country badly needed the steel, ships, and weapons they all helped to produce.
“The sports writers in the cities of Major League ball are ‘riding’ the Bethlehem Steel Corporation League hard, contending that the players who have deserted the ranks of O. B. ball for a job in the Steel league have done so for no other purpose than to escape the draft,” the Harrisburg Telegraph stated. Writers and managers couldn’t object when the draft took their players, the newspaper contended, but were quick to complain when anyone left to work in essential industries. “Do they for one minute think that it took them to call attention to the fact that players are seeking a refuge in the Steel league to evade the draft when the country is represented strongly by agents of the department of justice and secret service upon whom devolves the duty of ferreting out draft evaders?”61
A few people specifically defended Joe Jackson. “I can’t understand why Jackson was placed in Class One A,” E. A. Batchelor, a former Detroit sportswriter turned YMCA secretary, wrote shortly after the outfielder went into the shipyard. “There are many stars of the big leagues who are married and have many times the amount of wealth Joe processes who are in Class Four.”62
After the war, in spring 1919, Fred Lieb would write about the injustice of what he called the “war hysteria which was so severe on shipyard ballplayers.” He pointed in particular to what he considered unfair criticism from Hugh Fullerton and others of Pirates southpaw pitcher Bob Steele, who worked briefly in a shipyard before returning to the National League with the Giants. “Steele, a British subject, supports a wife, a 15-month-old baby, and a widowed mother. He had three brothers in the Canadian service, one of whom made the big sacrifice.”63 But all that was months in the future. While the war still raged in Europe, shipyard and steel mill ballplayers enjoyed very little popularity or support.
“Blue stars indicate on a service flag players who have gone into the service, gold stars indicate those who have lost their lives making the fight for civilization,” Sporting News said. “If it were not that saffron might be mistaken for a gold color it would be suggested that ‘yaller’ stars be imposed on service flags to demonstrate the players that have left the club to work for the ‘steal’ league.”64