The number of Major Leaguers serving in the armed forces had risen sharply since spring and continued climbing during the final weeks of the shortened season. “It is almost impossible to keep the record of the baseball players in the service, as it increases daily,” J. B. Sheridan noted in early July, “but it seems that about 120 major leaguers have joined or been drafted into the army or have joined the navy.”1
Sheridan’s figure represented nearly eight men for every big-league franchise, before the work-or-fight order went into effect. Shipyards and steel mills increased the manpower drain. Clubs improvised and finagled to put barely recognizable teams onto the field. Often they turned to the shuttered Minor Leagues in search of former Major League players who were now safely beyond the draft age.
The El Paso Herald announced, “The old timers are flocking back into the majors at a fast clip since the war has taken out so many youngsters, and it would be possible to put in the field an ‘All Aged’ team that would hold its own with some of the clubs now in the majors.”2 High on this imaginary roster was surely Nick Altrock, forty-one, pitching again for Clark Griffith’s Senators. Many players in their thirties, who might otherwise have retired, hung on for one more season.
Occasionally, too, the flow reversed, as a shipyard or industrial team lost a player to the Major Leagues. Frank Truesdale, a thirty-four-year-old former Browns and Yankees infielder, leaped all the way to the Red Sox from the Copper League. “It is there that the men play ball with the thermometer registering 100 degrees in the shade, with the mesa for a background and the cactus taking the place of safety razor signs,” Dan Daniel marveled. “It is from there that Truesdale is coming to join the pacemakers of the American League. What a jump!”3
Fred Lieb found the state of the American and National Leagues sadly laughable.
Were it not for the plight that professional baseball finds itself in, the lineups of some of the big league teams these days would read like a comic sheet. Even the most hard hit magnate will admit that the present baseball lineups are ludicrous. One may feel sad for Miller Huggins, yet cannot help from breaking out with a loud guffaw over Ham Hyatt playing first base for the Yankees with Silent John Hummel his first assistant.
When John McGraw is compelled to play Jay Kirke on first base it is more amusing than sad, but still more funny is the sight of the Yankees and Chicago White Sox scrapping for the services of John Picus, alias Jack Quinn. The leading humorist of all the season has developed so far has been Pitcher [Roy] Sanders of Pittsburgh, who purposely passed the venerable Mickey Doolan in a pinch. Purposely passing Mickey, hitting around .150, gives you a pretty good tip on the present caliber of big league baseball.4
Hyatt, Hummel, Kirke, and John Picus Quinn all were in their early to mid-thirties, and each had been out of the Majors for the past three seasons. “Doc” Doolan of the Brooklyn club had played for the Cubs and Giants in 1916 and for the International League’s Rochester club in 1917, but he was now thirty-eight. Sanders, who had intentionally walked Doolan, was twenty-five and in his second Major League season. Of all these players, only Quinn remained in the Majors after the war—playing until 1933, when he pitched his last game for the Cincinnati Reds at the remarkable age of fifty. Another pitcher, Charles “Babe” Adams, thirty-six, had been out of the Majors for two seasons when he returned to the Pirates from the Kansas City Blues. He, too, remained in the big leagues, last pitching for Pittsburgh in 1926.
“It was the greatest process of disinterment ever known,” Lieb wrote of the 1918 campaign nearly a quarter-century later, when the Second World War again drained baseball’s manpower. “It was distinctly on the ghoulish side. Old players who had done nothing but wield a pool cue for 10 years were suddenly resurrected and pushed out on the diamond.”5
If the Major Leagues were in a lamentable state, military baseball had never been stronger. Infused with talent from leagues of every class, fine army, navy, and marine teams drew large crowds both Stateside and overseas. By summer, perhaps the best of these teams had already come and gone like a baseball comet.
“The flat-footed and flapjack-hatted gentry composing the baseball team of the Boston Navy Yard—they were once nearly all members of the Boston Red Sox, but you couldn’t tell it to look at them now—are going to have their first workout this week in the Harvard baseball cage,” Stars and Stripes announced in early March. The manager, of course, was former Red Sox player-manager Jack Barry, now promoted to chief yeoman. According to the army newspaper in Paris, his ballplayers called themselves the Wild Waves.6
Counting himself, Barry had fourteen big leaguers on his roster, including ten from the two Boston clubs. Among them were future Hall of Famers Walter “Rabbit” Maranville of the Braves and Herb Pennock of the Red Sox—although, curiously, Pennock never actually pitched for the team. Barry also had a handful of Minor Leaguers and collegiate players, plus Connie Mack’s son Roy McGillicuddy as treasurer and former Red Sox secretary John Lane as business manager. The navy nine was so rich in talent that Barry played Whitey Witt out of position in right field because Maranville was holding down shortstop.
“The Navy Yard team is a wonder, and would class well with any major league club in the country,” Hugh Fullerton wrote. “There are several major league owners who would listen to an offer from the Government and trade their entire teams for that bunch.”7 Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, in fact, had attempted over the winter to secure the return of his men to the field by arranging prolonged furloughs—despite very public statements to the contrary.
“Most of the boys are in the navy, and all cheerfully responded to the call when the season closed last fall,” Frazee had written to Franklin D. Roosevelt, an assistant secretary of the navy. “I do not have to say to you that if I am without the services of all these players during the season of 1918 my club will not only be out of the running professionally but that my business investment will be practically wrecked.”8 The navy hadn’t seen the matter Frazee’s way, however, and prohibited furloughs for sailor ballplayers to rejoin their teams for long periods.
For six weeks in May and June, the Wild Waves rampaged through military and collegiate teams. Forty thousand fans saw them beat Hal Janvrin’s Camp Devens team at Braves Field, one of several times the National League club donated use of its park to military teams. Fifteen thousand people saw Barry’s squad beat the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New Haven, and ten thousand witnessed their tough win over an Atlantic Fleet team at Norfolk, Virginia, on Memorial Day. Altogether, during eight wins without a loss, perhaps one hundred thousand people saw the Wild Waves play a class of baseball that the weakened Major Leagues were hard-pressed to match.
Barry’s one great problem was that most of his ballplayers were rated as yeomen, several as petty officers. That fact was still too much for some detractors. “The case of the Barry yeomen ball team has attracted most attention and criticism, but it is not to be supposed that it was any more flagrant in violation of what the nation expects of the men who wear its blue or khaki than other cases,” Sporting News huffed.9 The admiral commanding the First Naval District largely agreed with the critics. He placed several restrictions on his great Navy Yard nine before the season began, then transferred several ballplayers after the second game—which didn’t bother Maranville, who was eager to go to sea. When the navy began enlisting women as yeomen, the admiral broke up and scattered his ball team with the season barely begun. The navy cited “exigencies of the service” in announcing the move several weeks later.10
“It was surely a ball club to conjure with,” said a newspaper in upstate New York, “especially when it is considered that the best of the service clubs contained only one or two stars at the most.”11 Without a team to manage, Barry gave up his chief petty officer’s rank and entered an officers’ training program at Harvard along with Red Sox and Wild Waves pitcher Ernie Shore.
The navy had another power baseball team on Lake Michigan. “Down in Chicago at the Great Lakes naval training station they have a ball team that is said to have the White Sox and the Cubs and everybody else cleared off the map,” an Iowa newspaper said in July. “The Great Lakes nine is said to be one of the strongest military ball teams in the country.”12 Chief Yeoman Felix “Phil” Chouinard (schwee-NAHRD), a former White Sox and Federal League outfielder, had managed the team since its formation in 1917. His roster included White Sox pitcher Red Faber, Washington infielder Joe Leonard, Red Sox infielder Fred Thomas, and a handful of Major League journeymen.
Great Lakes’s natural interservice rival was Camp Grant at nearby Rockford, Illinois. The army team’s star was young Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Hal Carlson, who went on to have a fine National League career following the war. Army-navy games between these two teams routinely attracted a great deal of publicity and ten to twelve thousand fans.
The Great Lakes team also traveled to play on the East Coast during the summer. There it beat a strong Atlantic Fleet team, which following the disbandment of the Boston Navy Yard team had welcomed Rabbit Maranville, Del Gainer, Whitey Witt, and other former Wild Waves. The Rabbit was now a gunner’s mate assigned to a fourteen-inch gun aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania. Witt was on the battleship Arkansas and Gainer on the battleship Minnesota. Chouinard’s club faced the Atlantic Fleet team again in a three-game series the first week in August. Great Lakes won the third and deciding game of what newspapers called “the naval baseball championship” on August 5 before a large crowd at the Cubs’ Weeghman Park in Chicago.13
After the Major League season ended in September, Chouinard was replaced as Great Lakes manager by Lt. (JG) John “Doc” Lavan, the Washington Senators shortstop, who was also a physician. “Lavan is an officer and Chouinard is not and of course an officer could not play under and take orders from one below him in rank,” Sporting News explained. “Also Lavan has had more major league experience, which is said to count.”14
On the West Coast, Chief Yeoman Duffy Lewis, Jack Barry’s former left fielder on the Red Sox, managed a good team at the naval training center at Mare Island near San Francisco. His roster included Pirates pitcher Earl Hamilton and Cubs catcher Harold “Rowdy” Elliott. Lewis’s squad played various military teams in Northern California. “Lewis has his eyes on some big league stars still in the East and subject to the draft, and is being ably assisted by Boatswain Dan O’Connor in sending telegrams to the athletes in an endeavor to land them for his aggregation before they report to the National Army.”15
Duffy’s squad lost a hard-fought, five-game championship series in June to a Marine Corps squad managed by Sgt. Rod Murphy, former captain and third baseman of the Oakland Oaks in the Pacific Coast League. Five thousand fans saw the final game at Cyclodrome Park in Vallejo. Lewis later took a navy all-star team on the road, defeating an army all-star team before sixteen thousand fans at Camp Fremont near Palo Alto. The team kept playing, eventually adding infielders Charles “Swede” Risberg and Fred McMullin of the White Sox, along with Detroit pitcher Howard Ehmke. (The two Chicago players were later banned from Organized Baseball for their roles in the Black Sox scandal of 1919.) Doc Lavan hoped his Great Lakes team would have an opportunity to face Lewis’s club in October. “A victory over Mare Island and the naval title goes undisputed to the big inland Station of Lake Michigan.”16
The army likewise fielded many strong nines, especially after the Major League season ended. Cleveland pitcher Guy Morton managed the Camp Pike team at Little Rock, Arkansas, which claimed “the strongest army team in America.”17 Morton’s roster included Brooklyn second baseman Ray Schmandt, catcher Herold “Muddy” Ruel and infielder Aaron Ward of the Yankees, and pitcher William “Big Bill” Fincher, formerly of the Browns.
One army team that could have given Jack Barry’s Wild Waves an unforgettable contest was the 342nd Field Artillery nine at Camp Funston. “The spring season found the regiment well stocked with some of the best baseball players in the country, and the Divisional Team itself used eight of our players,” states a regimental history, adding that the 342nd’s athletic prowess “was largely instrumental in cementing it into a unit.”18 The star pitcher was that famously reluctant soldier and would-be sailor Grover Cleveland Alexander. Other units had tried to “secure him as if he had been a new type of machine gun or the latest invention in long range cannon,” according to Sporting News.
The artillery was successful in landing him, it seems, not because Alex himself had any particular choice, but the artillery at Funston happened to have the best ball team in camp and an addition like the One and Only Alex was calculated to make it even more famous. Grover was assigned to the 342d Field Artillery, which already had the pick of soldier athletes, and it is announced he probably will be assigned to clerical work to save his strength for athletics.19
Sporting News spared the pitcher the criticism it generally directed toward the navy’s yeomen ballplayers. “He went to the Army camp ready to take his chances,” the publication wrote of Alexander. “That he should land in a favored position was inevitable and consistent with the principle that the government believes for the best interest of the military service, the principle laid down by General Wood when he said: ‘Men must be taught to play before they can fight efficiently.’”20
The 342nd’s roster included Alexander; pitcher Win Noyes of the Athletics; pitcher and utility man Clarence Mitchell of the Dodgers; pitcher Otis Lambeth of the Indians; infielder Chuck Ward of the Pirates and (briefly) the Dodgers; and several good collegiate and independent-league players. Unlike many other military ballplayers, these men belonged to a combat unit. The regiment sailed from New York at the end of June, arriving in France via England in mid-July. The baseball team, with the Cubs star on the mound, “did some touring during the summer and cleaned up everything in sight, as it naturally would do with the great Aleck on the mound.”21 By fall, however, Alexander and his teammates would be far more concerned with surviving German artillery barrages than playing any game of baseball.
The War Department had prohibited players from taking extended leaves or furloughs to rejoin their old teams. Grover Alexander didn’t throw another pitch for the Cubs before shipping out to France. Boston’s Hal Janvrin never rejoined the Red Sox while serving in the Signal Corps at nearby Camp Devens. Still, a few former Major Leaguers did suit up while off active duty for short periods. Navy players seemed especially able to jump temporarily back into the big leagues.
Brooklyn pitcher Jeff Pfeffer, for example, while training at Great Lakes, once ventured into Chicago to watch his old teammates play the Cubs. “He was cheerfully received, and was implored to get back and show his old speed. Pfeffer answered Manager Robinson’s request by asking for a uniform,” the New York Tribune gleefully reported. “Many of his sailor mates recognized him in his playing togs and cheered him wildly. He was also roundly cheered by the five thousand spectators when he was announced as the Dodger pitcher.”22 The tall right-hander threw a nifty 2–0 shutout.
Chief Yeoman Bob Shawkey pitched two Saturday games for the Yankees at $100 apiece, forcing him to miss scheduled turns for the League Island navy team down in Philadelphia. The decision had “an altogether retrogressive effect on the great twirler’s popularity in Philadelphia naval circles.”23 Reassigned to the battleship USS Arkansas, the right-hander later concluded that the navy had actually done him a favor. Shawkey wrote to Harry Sparrow after the armistice of “dodging torpedoes from Hun submarines, on board the Arkansas up near the Arctic Circle, and of other exciting experiences in foreign waters.”24
Walter Maranville, in addition to serving at sea on the USS Pennsylvania and playing ashore for the Atlantic Fleet club, appeared in eleven games for the Braves during a two-week leave in July. The shortstop was “enthusiastically greeted by the fans, who recognize the midget as a real warrior,” Sporting News reported.25 “The Rabbit has been across to the other side as convoy to escorts twice and says it’s [a] great life and that he thinks it would do some ball players who kick on Pullman berths and $5 a day hotels good if they would take a swing at it.”26
Brooklyn’s Leon Cadore, now an army lieutenant, pitched twice for the Dodgers in June while on furlough from Camp Gordon, Georgia. The second game came on Cadore Day at Ebbets Field. “At the suggestion of admirers of the Brooklyn team, C. H. Ebbets announced last night that several women will be at the entrance of the park soliciting subscriptions for a fund which will be expended in purchasing an officer’s outfit for Cadore.”27 Brooklyn won both games the soldier pitched.
While their respective units were segregated, African American army teams occasionally played their white counterparts. Longtime Yankees pitcher Ray “Schoolmaster” Fisher led a team from Fort Slocum, New York, in a May benefit game at the Polo Grounds versus the 349th Field Artillery team from Camp Dix, New Jersey. “The Camp Dix outfit was composed entirely of colored players, many of whom were well known to the fans, having pastimed hereabouts with the famous Lincoln Giants.”28 Fisher went the distance in a shutout, with Brooklyn Royal Giants alumnus Jess “Mountain” Hubbard appearing in relief for Camp Dix. “While Fisher showed all his former major league ability, the feature of the game was the twirling of the rangy Hubbard. . . . Hubbard had a total of fourteen strikeouts, retiring the side in both the third and ninth frames in this manner in order.”29 The New York World said the game “served to demonstrate the high plane of the national pastime which our soldiers are capable of holding.”30
Few military teams participated in organized leagues in the United States, but the AEF assembled a huge circuit in France. The Paris Base Ball Association, sometimes called the American Soldiers Baseball League by newspapers back home, fielded thirty teams outfitted with gear supplied by Clark Griffith’s Bat and Ball Fund. Most of the ballplayers involved weren’t front-line infantrymen but rear-echelon troops attached to Service of Supply units.
“The league comprises teams made up of men of all the different branches of the service in the country—the aviation service, the engineers, the military police, the soldiers and sailors’ club, the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the quartermaster’s department.”31 All played at a huge athletics complex in the Paris suburb of Colombes. “The field is over 50 acres in extent, and at least ten games can be played at the same time,” Stars and Stripes reported. “A monster grand stand with a seating capacity of over 25,000 persons surrounds part of the field. The practice games will be played on various local gridiron fields, but all league battles will be staged at Colombes on Sunday afternoons.”32
The AEF had several other circuits around France as well, including a large YMCA league in Tours. “There are 16 clubs in this league, as many as there are in the American and National combined,” the army newspaper reported. “Five other teams are playing in the same town, but there was no room for them in the circuit and they are holding an overflow meeting of their own.”33 Segregated African American soldiers cheered very good ball clubs of their own. Perhaps the best was the 312th Labor Battalion team, formed after the armistice at Saint-Sulpice. Soldiers there called the club the Clean-up Squad, “with particular reference to the manner in which it has walloped the tar out of all contenders in that section for diamond honors. . . . There is no league for colored players at the base, so the team has to play independent ball.”34
When the YMCA and the Bat and Ball Fund couldn’t supply enough equipment for all the soldier teams in France, the army turned to local manufacturers. Although the French-made bats and gloves were somewhat successful, the baseballs proved generally disappointing. They were likely to disintegrate on contact into “a white puff resembling a burst of shrapnel.”35
Unlike Stateside cantonments and naval bases, the AEF leagues included few Major League ballplayers. Before disbanding its sports page in July, Stars and Stripes mentioned only former Senators Gabby Street and Mike Menosky, along with several Minor Leaguers and collegiate players. Hank Gowdy, Eddie Grant, Harry McCormick, and other former big leaguers played only in pickup, regimental, or inter-company games when not in the trenches. “The baseball giant . . . has been educated to baseball and very little else, and consequently, when he becomes a soldier, is the ordinary fighting man, and goes with as little delay as possible to the quarter where he is most needed,” the Times of London explained.36 Sporting News might have phrased it differently but certainly would have agreed with sending ballplayers to the front.
The situation on the other side of the English Channel was very different. The U.S. Army normally had about fifteen thousand Air Service men training and studying at British flying fields, most of them technicians and aviators. Along with sailors serving in London, they constituted the nucleus of the Anglo-American Baseball League, a military circuit in England. The league was smaller than the Paris or Tours circuits, but vastly more influential for the United States. Thirty wealthy American businessmen formed the circuit early in 1918, American and Canadian forces fielding four teams each. The league played on weekends and holidays at venues in and around London, often on diamonds laid out at the Highbury and Stamford Bridge football (soccer) stadiums. The American squads represented U.S. Army and U.S. Navy headquarters in London and two Air Service fields outside the city.
The U.S. Navy squad boasted two former Wild Waves: pitcher Herb Pennock and infielder Mike McNally. Naval officers had transferred both men to London headquarters the moment they arrived in Ireland, bound for other duties. “Minooka Mike” was soon named the team’s captain, despite the presence of two officers on the roster. The U.S. Army team had former Detroit Tigers and Federal League pitcher Capt. Edward F. “Doc” Lafitte, a dentist assigned to a hospital outside London that specialized in repairing soldiers’ damaged faces. Both squads had a number of good Minor Leaguers as well. The league’s spokesman and chief umpire was Walter Arlington “Arlie” Latham, a colorful, controversial character known as “the freshest man on earth” when he played third base for the St. Louis Browns and other clubs in the 1880s and 1890s. Latham also had coached—and occasionally gotten into a game—for John McGraw’s New York Giants as recently as 1909.
On the Fourth of July, at Stamford Bridge, Chelsea, Pennock and Lafitte met in a special holiday game. The occasion marked Great Britain’s first-ever observation of its former colonies’ Independence Day. When King George V announced that he would attend, the event immediately gained international attention and became the most important sporting event of the Great War.
City newspapers enthusiastically boosted what they called the “baseball match” and printed helpful guides so Londoners might vaguely understand the game. An enormous crowd of Allied soldiers, sailors, and ordinary Londoners trooped out to Chelsea on the sunny midsummer afternoon. The league later said that attendance was thirty-four thousand. McNally, who had played in the 1916 World Series, estimated fifty thousand, which may have been more accurate. King George V attended with Queen Mary, Queen Mother Alexandra, and Prince Albert. The king was prevented from throwing out a ceremonial first pitch, stymied by tennis netting hastily strung to protect the royals from foul balls. Instead, he walked onto the field, where Adm. William Sims (USN) introduced him to McNally and the army team captain. George V then personally handed an autographed Spalding baseball to umpire Latham, who had earlier taught the monarch how to throw it.
The game was as good as anyone had dare to hope, exciting even Londoners who barely comprehended the action. “I don’t know what he did, but I’m for him!” Queen Alexandra exclaimed as the navy’s Harvard-educated catcher slid across the plate to score.37 Both pitchers were dazzling, Pennock taking a no-hitter into the ninth before finally defeating Lafitte and army, 2–1. The American teams delivered a raucous display of vigor and athleticism at a time when doughboys were only beginning to reach the front lines in meaningful numbers. The thrilling afternoon cheered war-weary Britons and helped to solidify the great transatlantic alliance.
The game “took us completely away to those distant times when we could rejoice under a blue sky, without looking for Zeppelins and Gothas,” commented the Times.
The afternoon was crammed full of extraordinary moments. It passed in such a pandemonium as was perhaps never heard before on an English playing-field; not even on a football ground. The United States seemed to be shouting in chorus, and Great Britain joined in, a little breathless, but determined to make a good show of lung power. . . . The pitching of Pennock, for the Navy, and Lafitte, for the Army, was the feature of the game, and these two players, who are famous in the United States, worthily upheld their reputations.38
McNally would recall for the rest of his life shaking hands with the British monarch. Pennock and Lafitte chatted briefly with King George about the game afterward. No other ballplayers would play such important roles in their country’s international relations until Babe Ruth’s great All American tour of Japan in 1934.
“If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton,” a British newspaper concluded, “it may be that it will be said hereafter, in the same symbolic sense, that the Great War was won on the baseball ground at Chelsea.”39