“Nineteen eighteen was a weird and badly twisted season, one almost beyond the pale of the ever elastic dope,” Grantland Rice wrote later. “Form was badly mixed and the entire situation out of focus.”1 But when the season ended on Labor Day, the curtailed pennant races ended in exactly the way most fans and sportswriters had expected in July.
The Cubs had bested John McGraw’s champion Giants in the National League, while the Red Sox had dethroned Charles Comiskey’s White Sox in the American. Although Chicago had lost its expensive gamble on Grover Alexander, and second baseman Pete Kilduff had enlisted in the navy early in the season, the Cubs’ roster otherwise had remained surprisingly intact. In Boston, after losing Jack Barry and nearly his entire starting lineup, Harry Frazee had restocked his club by buying four players from the Athletics and signing any others he could. “Neither the Cubs nor the Red Sox comprise a great club, but without doubt they are the best in their respective leagues,” Fred Lieb wrote in the Sun. “Both clubs have retained more players of class than any other teams in their leagues, which is one of the reasons they are on top.”2
The sixteen Major League clubs wrapped up their campaigns as their players prepared for essential work outside of baseball. The Yankees split a doubleheader with the Red Sox to finish in fourth place. “They tucked the weak, tottering baseball season away in camphor up at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon,” the New York Times reported. “The game is interned for the period of the war, along with a lot of other less useful things.”3 “Giants, Yankees and Dodgers all have been paid off, some of them undoubtedly for the last time, and the players are scattering to the far corners of the country, most of them to munition making plants, shipyards, steel yards, the farms and other ‘essential industries,’” the Sun added the next day.4
In Washington, Clark Griffith’s Senators lost the morning game of a doubleheader to Connie Mack’s Athletics. Late in the second game, forty-one-year-old coach Nick Altrock pitched, played first base, and blooped an inside-the-park home run featuring a comically drawn-in outfield, “a generous cutting of all the corners and a fancy high dive into the plate.”5 Walter Johnson appeared in relief to end the season in front of the home fans. “Big Train” clinched an 8–3 victory pitching to catcher Eddie Ainsmith.
“Never in Washington has the baseball season ended as it did yesterday,” sportswriter John Dugan wrote in a front-page piece for the Washington Herald. “The afternoon shadows of the stands had lengthened across the fields and the setting sun witnessed three thousand American soldiers standing at attention, as a military band played ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ and twelve thousand persons stood in the stands, bareheaded, thrilled, happy, yet sad.”6
The season also ended on Labor Day for the International League, the sole Minor circuit still standing. Toronto had captured the championship following an exciting pennant race that few fans had followed except in the box scores. “The International League magnates have lost money, but they have shown greater gameness in the face of difficulties than those of any other circuit in the country, not even excepting the majors,” the Washington Times declared.7 Toronto fans believed their American counterparts could learn from the Canadians.
New York sportsmen find it strange that baseball is more popular in Toronto than in any other city of the New International League. Indeed, they hint that the public patronage of the professional game ‘in war-scarred Canada’ is better than in some of the large American cities where the ‘big leagues’ are established. The reasons are natural ones. The country has discovered, after four years of war, that it is neither desirable nor necessary to walk through life to the strains of the dead march. . . . Our neighbors will discover, after they have endured the long pain of war, that base ball will revive; that crowds will be easily secured for anything that will take the mind away, even momentarily, from the contemplation of horrors.8
Not every player or team saw the season out to its melancholy conclusion. Once the White Sox had fallen from the pennant race in August, second baseman Eddie Collins enlisted in the Marines—the devil dogs, as German soldiers called them. “There’s been a lot of criticism about ballplayers seeking bomb-proof jobs, but this can scarcely be said about a man who voluntarily joins the ‘teufel hunds,’ who have a reputation of always being in the middle of it when there’s dangerous work to be done.”9 The future Hall of Famer wouldn’t have time to ship overseas or see action, however, before the armistice.
Cleveland owner James Dunn didn’t wait until the season’s official end, either. Immediately after the work-or-fight order, his club had announced plans to shut the ballpark July 21, but Dunn was talked into continuing. The Indians now closed their season a day early by skipping a road doubleheader with the Browns. Finishing second in the American League, the Cleveland players “preferred to disband at once and start useful work tomorrow instead of running a chance of violating Gen. Crowder’s orders.”10 The Browns actually took the field on the holiday to claim both games by forfeit. Bill Macbeth angrily wrote in the New York Tribune that Dunn’s departed club had “disgraced baseball in its refusal to keep scheduled obligations at St. Louis Labor Day.”11
Dunn was unrepentant and offered a gloomy assessment of Organized Baseball. “I don’t know what my colleagues think about continuing next year, but if I must build up a team of schoolboys and old men I will not open my gates,” he said. “I am not in favor of minor league baseball in a big league town. We had better let the amateurs have the field to themselves until the war is over, when the game will come back to its own.”12
At least two other owners appeared to agree that the Major Leagues wouldn’t return in 1919. Charles Ebbets had already announced plans to convert his park into a vast cold-storage warehouse. “Immediately after the final home game of the curtailed season . . . special structures will be erected upon certain portions of the field, and these, in conjunction with space in and under the grandstands, utilized for storage purposes.”13 Giants owner Harry Hempstead was considering something similar at the Polo Grounds. Washington Park, former home of the Brooklyn Tip-Tops in the Federal League, was already in use as a government warehouse. “If the movement extends to the other ball grounds throughout the country it means there will be no professional baseball next year,” a wire story stated.14 Owner Ebbets estimated that the space beneath his grandstand would provide enough storage for one hundred thousand cases of goods. “It is heartbreaking to the fans, of course,” another wire service added, “but they realize that it is not a good-by, but an au revoir, to baseball.”15
The players on the fourteen clubs not playing in the World Series now headed for home or to new jobs. Rogers Hornsby paused to marry his fiancée before reporting to work as a plate-setter (and part-time ballplayer) at the Harlan yard in Wilmington. White Sox catcher Ray Schalk took a job at the Great Western Smelting Company in Chicago and set out to learn the industry. “Baseball has been pretty good to me, but now I realize how little I knew about business, so I’m glad I can learn while I’m still young,” he said. “For eight years I did nothing to speak of except to play ball. I don’t know whether I’ll ever play any more professionally or not.”16 Other players had similar doubts about giving up newly learned skills, but the great Chicago backstop returned to the White Sox after the war and played in the Major Leagues until 1929.
Managers also found new jobs. Yankees skipper Miller Huggins was appointed assistant athletic director at Pelham Bay Naval Training Station and reported for duty early in October. Jack Hendricks of the St. Louis Cardinals signed on as an athletic secretary for the Knights of Columbus. “I have been anxious for some time to do my bit on the other side,” Hendricks said. “I feel like a youngster, although I have a son now in an officers’ training camp.”17 He briefly served in France toward the end of the war. The Tigers’ Hughie Jennings also became a K of C secretary, but didn’t have an opportunity to work “over there.”
Ban Johnson had announced the World Series schedule August 24, before the Cubs and Red Sox officially clinched their pennants. The first three games were slated for Chicago and all remaining games for Boston. Johnson made the announcement for the National Commission, not as the American League president.
Playing the first three games of a seven-game series in one city was unusual, but did have a precedent. The Cubs had done it in 1907, winning a five-game series with the Tigers. Now a coin flip determined that Chicago again would host the long opening series. The home-and-home format also eliminated the need for an extra round-trip of nearly a thousand miles by rail if the series went to the limit. While logical, the plan upset Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, who said he wouldn’t abide by it.
“Such a schedule is not only very unfair to the Boston club, but it is an insult to Boston fans and to the best baseball town in the American league,” Frazee fumed. The magnate wanted the first two games played in one city—preferably Boston—followed by two in the other, as had been the case during Boston’s championship run in 1916. Frazee didn’t specify where any additional games should be played. “The national commission will not pay any attention to Harry Frazee,” Johnson retorted. “Frazee probably forgets that it is necessary in these times to relieve the railroads of all unnecessary burdens. In normal times we would arrange a schedule such as Frazee demands, but it was impossible this year.” “It is possible that Chicago got a ‘break’ by being awarded the first three games, but it was not our doing,” said Cubs business manager Walter Craighead. “Frazee’s attitude is not in keeping with the times, when everything possible should be done to relieve the transportation systems.”18
The 1918 series also differed in other significant ways. The National Commission decided “to materially reduce the prices of admission in order to enable the patrons to attend the games at reasonable prices.” In 1917 a box seat for a single game had cost $5. Now a box seat for all three games cost just $9—or $9.90, including war tax. A one-day bleacher seat was fifty-five cents. The players would earn less, too. Under an agreement between the leagues and the National Committee reached the previous winter, each of the players on the winning and the losing clubs was to receive $2,000 and $1,400, respectively, instead of a fixed percentage of gate receipts, as in earlier seasons. The White Sox’s winning share in 1917, by comparison, was nearly $3,700, and the Giants’ losing share about $2,400. “It is estimated that owing to the reduction of the admission charges the gate receipts will fall nearly 50 per cent,” one newspaper reported. “Umpires and all others, aside from the players, who share pecuniary benefits from the series will have their compensation cut in half.”19
Knowing the payout and the precise limit of Secretary Baker’s work-or-fight extension, the Red Sox handed Frazee another setback. “The Boston players before coming East waited upon Harry Frazee with the ultimatum that they would not engage in the titanic struggle even for the proscribed rich spoils of $2,000 per man win or $1,400 per man lose unless the Boston magnate would agree to pay pro-rata season’s contract salary in full up to September 15,” Bill Macbeth wrote in the New York Tribune. “The Red Sox carried their point, needless to say. Also, needless to say, the Cubs will do likewise when they hear of the Hub coup.”20
The Cubs and Red Sox headed west by rail for the Windy City after ending their seasons in the East. Many fans across the country had bigger things on their minds than baseball and simply shrugged at the championship series. The government had scheduled a third Registration Day for September 12. Young men from eighteen to twenty-one were required to register, along with older men from thirty-four to forty-five. The change vastly expanded the pool of manpower available for military service.
It is estimated that at least 12,278,758 men will register, compared with nearly 10 million between 21–31 June 5, 1917. Of those who enroll . . . it is estimated that 2,300,000 will be called for general military service and will be in France before July 1st. The idea is to take the eligible men 31–37 first, then 37–45, then 19–20 and leave the 18-year-old boys to the very last.21
Few sportswriters saw signs of fan interest in the World Series. Tickets sales for the opening games in Chicago, while brisk, fell short of previous years. “There is none of the wild clamor and fighting for tickets that have marked other World’s Series, but the early sale of box and reserved seats has been quite large,” Hugh Fullerton wrote from Chicago. “To-day a block of box seats will be sold at open sale, breaking another World’s Series record, and the three ticket speculators I called upon yesterday to inquire concerning tickets yelled, ‘Nothing doing!’ They do not want them at any price.”22
Interest in smaller cities and towns was equally slight. Fans in Maysville, Kentucky, had always avidly followed the World’s Series. “But this year there has been absolutely no interest taken in the affair and there are very few people who know that the series started today. There is nothing in the series that would cause Maysville people to be very much interested.”23
American soldiers and sailors overseas would receive news from the series if they cared to read it, although not in the weekly Stars and Stripes. The Federal Committee on Public Information was set to cable a daily report and the score of each game to Paris for publication in the European editions of the New York Herald and Chicago Tribune. “The cooperation of this agency is the result of the official approval of the series by the Federal government, as expressed by the Secretary of War and Provost Marshal General Crowder.”24
The opening three games in Chicago weren’t slated for Weeghman Park, the Cubs’ home field, but for the White Sox’s bigger South Side facility. The two owners had struck a deal. “The Old Roman, Charles Comiskey, who can have the mayoralty any time he asks the honor, never overlooked any bets, nor is he now,” Macbeth informed his New York Tribune readers. “Commy made himself strong with local fandom by tendering his spacious South Side Park for the use of the rival Cubs. It means more money, provided there happens to be enthusiasm enough to crowd a ground as cramped as the cigar box of the North Side on which Weeghman’s team plays its games.”25
The weather was equally uncertain. After two dry months that some likened to a drought, rain threatened the series’ opener, scheduled for Wednesday, September 4. “No one would be greatly surprised if a whole week’s activities were to be washed away,” Macbeth wrote on Monday. “And that would be a real disaster, for this particular series needs all the press agenting it can possibly get, with no interruptions of any kind, to place it among the classics of the years gone by when baseball was considered an essential everywhere.”26
The rains arrived as predicted to wash out Game 1. “Even the weather bureau was crossed by the storm which blew into Chicago yesterday morning and spilled so much water on the south side ball park that the impending battle was called off before 11 o’clock,” I. E. Sanborn wrote in the Chicago Tribune. “As the disturbance came on the wings of an east wind, it looked as if the elements were conspiring to aid the eastern representatives—namely: Red Sox.”27
The assembled sportswriters passed the rainy day discussing the same topics that no doubt occupied the Boston and Chicago ballplayers—departed friends, the work-or-fight order, and what they would do following the series. “That intense interest in the big baseball classic, so apparent in other years, was not present,” the Chicago Tribune reported. “Instead, the writers seemed to feel sort o’ ashamed of themselves for being here while the boys ‘over there’ (among them several members of the Writers’ association) are engaged in the biggest game the world ever had.”28 The scribes even mused about forming a unit of their own. Compounding the gloom already surrounding the series, the day also brought news of the first violent wartime death of a ballplayer widely known in a Major League city.
Two big leaguers had already died in the armed forces, although neither in combat. The first was Seaman Newton S. Halliday, an infielder who had appeared in one game for the Pirates in 1916 and later played for the Great Lakes navy team. “Newt” died of pneumonia at the big naval station April 6. The second casualty was Cpl. Ralph Sharman, a rookie outfielder for the Athletics in 1917. He drowned in the Alabama River on May 24 while training with the Ohio troops at Camp Sheridan. Now Pittsburgh pitching prospect Marcus Milligan was gone, too. The aviation cadet died from injuries suffered in an air crash September 3 at an army flying field outside Fort Worth, Texas. The accident also killed his flying instructor. Milligan had never appeared in a regular-season game for the Pirates, but magnates and sports editors paid homage as if he had been a star. The youngster had played in the Virginia and New York State leagues before spending the 1917 season with Class A Birmingham. “He caused many a thrill in the Southern League [sic] and was just about ripe for regular duty in the majors when he offered his services to the higher cause,” a Pittsburgh sportswriter wrote.29
“Milligan is the first prominent ball player to give his life in his country’s service,” said National Commission chairman Garry Herrmann. “His death which places the first golden star in the National League’s service flag proves the patriotism of the professional ball players.”30 The twenty-two-year-old was buried in Anniston, Alabama, where his mother and sister lived. A newspaper there offered a moving editorial: “Mark Milligan did not get to face the Hun, but he is a hero nevertheless; for he sacrificed a brilliant career to enter the army, he underwent great hardships to train himself for service abroad, and he died for you and me just the same as if he had been to France.”31
The World Series finally started a day late, Thursday, September 5. The official attendance was 19,274—more than could have shoehorned into Weeghman Park, but less than two-thirds the capacity of Comiskey Park. Large swaths of seats lay empty. Charles Comiskey tried to give the attendance figure a positive spin. “When you stop to think that most of our boys between 21 and 31 years of age are gone, and most of those at home too busy to get away, I think the attendance was large,” Comiskey said. “Then, too, there are few out of town patrons because of the high railroad rates and busy times. I don’t know that there has been as big a crowd as that present at a ball game in Chicago this year.”32
Fans who did turn out saw a tremendous pitchers’ duel between Boston’s Babe Ruth and Chicago’s Hippo Vaughn. Ruth won, 1–0, in what baseball historians Cecilia Tan and Bill Nowlin rank among the greatest Red Sox games ever played. Still, despite the brilliant play, the park remained eerily quiet. People paid less attention to the field than to six army airplanes doing dives and spins nearby. “The effect of the war was everywhere apparent, especially in the temper of the crowd, which, largely local, saw the home team drop the first game without a protest,” the Boston Globe reported. “There was no cheering during the contest, nor was there anything like the usual umpire baiting.”
The one roaring moment came during the seventh-inning stretch. Boston rookie Fred Thomas was playing third base. Thomas had managed to enlist in the navy despite a rejection by the army because of his diabetes. Now serving at Great Lakes, he was on a two-week leave to rejoin his club for the series. When a military band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the stretch, the sailor didn’t remove his cap or hold it over his heart like the civilian ballplayers. He kept his cap on, turned toward the flag, and delivered a crisp military salute.
The crowd noticed Thomas “as he stood erect, his eyes set on the flag which fluttered at the top of the flagpole in right field. First the song was taken up by a few, but others joined and when the end of the song came, a great volume of melody was rolling across the field. It was at the very end that onlookers exploded into thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.”33 Although the song had been played many times in ballparks since America had entered the war, and indeed occasionally had been played at baseball games as early as the Civil War, the rendition today became a turning point. “The Star-Spangled Banner” would be played at every subsequent World Series game and season opener. Playing it before every Major League baseball game would begin during the Second World War, after the song became the national anthem.
Game 2 followed on Friday. Although attendance ticked up slightly, gate receipts fell. “It seems there was a lot more bleacherites present and fewer box seat patrons.” Unlike the opener, the contest provided “such a thrilling afternoon that the crowd forgot to watch the aeroplanes doing nose dives.”34 The Cubs evened the series by beating the Red Sox, 3–1, overcoming a Boston rally in the ninth. The Red Sox then regained the advantage in the third contest on Saturday. Hippo Vaughn again took the mound for the Cubs, and pitched well in a 2–1 loss to Boston’s unpopular submarine pitcher, Carl Mays. The game ended when Fred Thomas muffed a catch at third, but threw out Chicago’s Charlie Pick at the plate. Attendance improved to about 90 percent of capacity at Comiskey’s ballpark, with the total dampened somewhat by sprinkling rain and threatening skies.
Altogether, paid attendance for the three games totaled 66,368, with receipts barely topping $100,000. “For the first three games last year the attendance was 97,616 and the receipts $219,368,” the Chicago Tribune noted.35 The abysmal figures added up to trouble and dominated the ballplayers’ talk during their long train ride to the Northeast. The two teams left Chicago at eight o’clock Saturday night on the Michigan Central line. By the time they chugged into Boston in a heavy rainstorm twenty-six hours later, the championship series had taken a lamentable if not unforeseeable turn.
“When the world’s series players arrived here late tonight,” the Chicago Tribune reported in a dispatch datelined Sunday, “it became known that they had got together on the train and appointed a committee to interview members of the national baseball commission, expected here tomorrow, and to voice the dissatisfaction of the Boston and Chicago players over the proposed reduction of their receipts from the first four games to $1,200 each for those on the winning team and $800 for the losers.”36 The New York Times added that if their original agreement wasn’t carried out, the players said they “would refuse to play any more games.”37
The Boston Globe tried to explain the situation while downplaying prospects for a strike. “The National Commission had stipulated that the students [sic] on the winning team would receive $2,000 and the losing athletes $1,400 each, provided the players’ share for the first four games amounted to $150,000,” sportswriter Edward Martin wrote. “It will not amount to $75,000, and out of that must come 60 percent to be divided between teams that finished second, third and fourth in the two major leagues.”38
The ballplayers chose catcher Bill Killefer and outfielder Leslie Mann from the Cubs and outfielder Harry Hooper and infielder Dave Shean from the Red Sox to represent them in a special meeting with the National Commission on Monday morning. The quartet would act as the players’ representatives throughout the dispute. The money question was especially important to Killefer, who expected to report to the army soon after the series ended. After the athletes and commission agreed to keep talking, the World Series resumed on Monday afternoon.
Twenty-two thousand fans saw Game 4, the first contest at Fenway Park. Among them were fifty-four wounded American soldiers and sailors from Boston City Hospital. Two of the soldiers wore the French Croix de Guerre. Fans stood to cheer them all when they arrived and would cheer them again as they escorted the warriors out of the park after the game. The wounded troops were lucky in attending Game 4, “the most exciting and desperately fought game of the 1918 world’s series.”39
Babe Ruth again took the mound for the Red Sox, despite a finger that was grotesquely swollen “due to some mysterious altercation on the train from Chicago to Boston, one that put his fist into contact with either a solid steel wall, a window, or the jaw of another passenger.”40 The Babe defeated the Cubs, 3–2, pitching into the ninth inning before shifting to left field and giving way to reliever Leslie “Bullet Joe” Bush. Ruth’s record of 29⅔ scoreless World’s Series innings, dating back to the 1916 championship series with Brooklyn, had ended with Chicago’s two runs in the eighth. Boston’s big pitcher also tripled to help his own cause against Cub starter George Tyler. Chicago reliever Phil Douglas took the loss, giving the Red Sox a commanding 3–1 lead in the series.
That night, the unhappy ballplayers tried again to meet with the National Commission to discuss their share of the gate receipts. “But the commission had ducked, in its customary backstairs policy; had gone to see a portrayal of the drama ‘Experience,’ the young lady of the Copley Plaza switchboard informed every one,” wrote Macbeth, up from New York to cover the series. “The jaded committee, sometime about 1 a.m., retired to repose against the prospective battle of the morrow without having crossed the trail of a single commissioner.”41
Despite the desperate win-or-go-home scenario for the Cubs, Game 5 on Tuesday was completely overshadowed by the crisis. Both teams refused to play unless they reached an agreement with the National Commission. Stuffy McInnis, Boston’s first baseman, was the only uniformed player on the field at the scheduled starting time of 2:30. “Minute after minute and half hour after half hour the issue remained at a deadlock,” Macbeth wrote. “The commission refused to see the strikers. The strikers in their civilian clothes played pitch in their quarters.”42 A Philadelphia sports editor described the scene in a sardonic poem.
’Twas on an autumn evening
A goodly crowd was there,
That nigh filled Frazee’s ball park,
A mile from Copley Square.
The commission cut the divvy,
The players chewed the rag,
But no one hit a baseball
And no one touched a bag.43
The commission members and city officials grew anxious about the mood of the large crowd in the stands. “A squad of mounted policeman came on the field half an hour after time for starting the game for the purpose of quelling any unruly spirits who resented the long delay, but their services were not required.”44 The crowd remained quiet and bemused throughout the delay. When the ballplayers and the commission finally began talking in the umpires’ room, pleas by Ban Johnson and Garry Herrmann left the players largely unmoved. Macbeth credited the commission’s newest member for breaking the deadlock.
“John A. Heydler, acting president of the National League, a man of sober judgment and more sober deportment, saved the situation,” the Tribune scribe wrote. “While his conferrees [sic] of the National Commission were babbling about their self-importance John was working frantically and in secret for the good of the game to which he has devoted a brilliant life. He suggested that the issue involved should remain in status quo pending a reference to those clubs of the first division interested in a division of the spoils. He pointed out to the players’ committee what a travesty on the name of sport would result from not satisfying the sport-loving thousands already chafing at the delay.”45
The ballplayers held the weaker position and had no choice but to give way or go home. Many reports pointed to Hooper, the Red Sox captain who would retire after the series, as the man who swung the players around to playing. Herrmann then tried to shake Hooper’s hand, but Red Sox manager Ed Barrow brushed him aside. “We have wasted enough time already,” Barrow barked. “To the field, everybody!”46
Hooper spoke for both teams to waiting sportswriters. “We will play, not because we think we are getting a fair deal, because we are not,” he said. “But we’ll play for the sake of the game, for the sake of the public, which has always given us its loyal support, and for the sake of the wounded soldiers and sailors who are in the grandstand waiting for us.”47 The sentiment was a fine one, but too little and too late. The publicity was brutal for everyone.
“But for presence at Fenway Park of a number of Pershing’s veterans, some minus legs, others without arms, and all wounded, the fifth game of the 1918 world’s series might never have been played,” snarled the Washington Times.48 “‘For the good of baseball, we will play,’ said these 30-odd young gentlemen the other day after they had held a crowd of 25,000 waiting in the bleachers for an hour while they and their owners wrangled over the division of the proceeds—after they had wasted 25,000 man hours, made trebly precious by war needs, not counting their own,” Stars and Stripes sniped from Paris.49
The Chicago Tribune acidly reported that during the delay at Fenway—“while players and promoters were fighting over pennies”—American soldiers had carried two wounded comrades down to the boxes on their shoulders.
As the wounded men were borne to the seats reserved for them the big crowd jumped to its feet, bared heads, and under the leadership of a fan down in front, gave three cheers for the boys who have been in the only game that counts. Those cheers nearly raised the roof off the Fenway plant. They were echoed back from the pavilions and bleachers with a will when the fans out there learned the cause of them. Still the players of the two teams imagined themselves heroes.50
Many sportswriters were equally unhappy with the National Commission. Macbeth wrote of “the many rebuffs the players experienced from the high and lofty National Commission Poo Bahs, when nothing more than a heart-to-heart conference was requested at first.”51 Even Sporting News, so often disdainful of ballplayers whose wartime actions or choices had offended its editors’ sensibilities, angrily indicted both sides.
However, we decline to join in the general chorus of roasts for the diamond heroes [at Fenway], badly as they acted. They had some cause for a grievance. . . . The players are blamed for forcing the issue the way they did. But how else were they to force it? Having never been consulted by the magnates in their beneficent plan to dispose of the players’ money, and not being given to reading anything in print except their batting averages, they had a very hazy notion of what had been done for them or to them.52
Perhaps the only person to benefit from the brief strike was John Heydler. He would be elected as Governor Tener’s permanent replacement as National League president in December.
Former Boston mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, whose one-year-old grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would one day be elected president of the United States, announced to the fans that the game would be played. Their reaction was muted. “When the players came on the field an hour late some of the fan started ‘booing’ them, but the majority cheered the athletes and drowned out the ‘boos.’”53
The game began with little warm-up by either team. Hippo Vaughn’s excellent pitching for the Cubs was largely overlooked amidst the strike debacle. Throwing nine scoreless innings in his third complete game in six days, he lowered his earned run average for the series to a magnificent 1.00—among the best mound performances in championship history. Yet the shutout was his sole victory in the World Series and earned him only a grudging, backhanded headline in the hometown Chicago Tribune: “Cubs Grab Victory under Shadow of Dollar Sign, 3-to-0.”54
The Red Sox clinched their fifth world’s championship on Wednesday, September 11, in Game 6. It was another close-fought 2–1 affair. Boston scored both of its runs on a muffed fly ball to right in the third inning. “Boston is the luckiest baseball spot on earth, for it has never lost a world’s series,” wrote the New York Times.55 The club wouldn’t win another for eighty-six years. “If the Cubs could have cut out the fourth inning in the series they would be world’s champions,” noted the Chicago Tribune.56 “Chicago’s once loyal fans had a feeling of relief that baseball was over, rather than a feeling of sorrow in the loss of the championship,” the newspaper added in another column. “When the ninth inning was posted on the various score boards about town the common expression among those present was: ‘Well, it’s all over. Now those fellows can go to work.’”57
The club owners had promised the players’ representatives before Game 6 to lobby the National Commission and league officials for an increase in the players’ pool, enough to deliver something nearer the payout the two teams had anticipated. “The division of the pool under national commission rules is so far below normal, however, that it is doubtful if the club owners will be able to make up the deficit, without going into their own pockets for the expenses of the series, and the players are not avaricious enough to expect that.”58
The fourteen Red Sox regulars and manager Ed Barrow each received $1,108.45 for their winning series work. They voted $750 for Fred Thomas and smaller sums for trainers, groundskeepers, players in the armed forces, and others. “The check did not include 10 per cent which it had been voted to donate to charitable organizations, and the players instructed Capt. Harry Hooper to obtain the amount from the commission and distribute it among Boston war charities.”59 During their long train ride back to Chicago, the losing Cubs voted twenty-two shares of $574.62 apiece for their regulars, with lesser amounts to other players who had contributed and $140 apiece for the five men away on military duty. The Chicago team, too, contributed 10 percent to war charities. The two teams’ hopes that they might see extra shares from their respective leagues were never realized.
Charles Weeghman, at least, was happy. The Cubs chief offered Charles Comiskey his “very sincere thanks” for the free use of his South Side park during the series. “Although of different and rival leagues,” Weeghman wrote to his rival owner, “the wholeheartedness of your invitation and the many courtesies extended to us during the series have added to your nation-wide reputation for good sportsmanship and to our admiration of you”—sentiments that the Old Roman’s own ballplayers emphatically would not share while throwing the series during the Black Sox scandal a year later.60
As the other fourteen teams had done two weeks earlier, the Red Sox and Cubs now quickly disbanded. “‘Babe’ Ruth says he has seven offers to go to work and because he’s going to accept one of them he will do no through-the-ice fishing up at South Sudbury this Winter,” the Globe reported.61 Ruth accepted a job with the Bethlehem plant in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and briefly played exhibition ball for the company team. He remained a civilian throughout the war, but in 1924 greatly boosted an army recruiting push by enlisting as a private in the New York National Guard—and, of course, reporting for duty personally to General Pershing.
Following the World Series, most of the Babe’s teammates scattered to their homes, new jobs, or military camps. Sam Jones, Joe Bush, Everett Scott, Walter Mayer, and Hank Miller, however, along with George Burns of the Athletics and “Pep” Young of the Tigers, put together a travel squad to play exhibitions along the East Coast under the Red Sox name. Harry Frazee quickly complained of what he called this “fracture of a national commission order against barnstorming.”62
From Chicago, Bill Killefer and four other Cubs soon headed into the army. Rollie Zeider retired from baseball and returned to his farm in Indiana, while Fred Merkle went back to his own farm in Florida.63 Other teammates took up new jobs in power plants, shipyards, and chemical companies. Professional baseball was finished for the duration, and none too soon in the opinion of many. From his regiment in France, T. L. Huston expressed a common weariness and frustration.
“I believe that baseball will be very much better off if it is permitted to lie dormant until at least 1920,” the Yankees co-owner wrote to sportswriter Tom Rice. “It needed a rest. The slate can be wiped off and a new start made. The fans had absolutely gotten tired of the incessant wrangling between the club owners themselves and between the club owners and the players.” Huston added what fellow magnates might have considered a warning: “When this great war is over our United States will be run by the soldiers who fought to save it and the national game will probably enjoy the same blessing.”64