With the war over and the guns silent, Organized Baseball strove for what presidential hopeful Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio (one of the game’s great political supporters) would famously call a “return to normalcy.” But what actually had changed for magnates and ballplayers? What had the World War meant for the Major and Minor Leagues?
Despite the valor of its warriors, professional baseball made no appreciable difference to the military conduct of the war. The numbers simply were too small—cumulatively, no more than one army regiment and a small ship’s company. But Hank Gowdy, Grover Alexander, Leon Cadore, and other battle-hardened ballplayers at least had mitigated charges of slackerism aimed at the Major Leagues. While fewer fought in front-line units than critics might have preferred, ballplayers were fairly well represented within the American armed forces by the end of the war.
Contemporary newspaper accounts show about sixty current or former Major Leaguers serving in the American Expeditionary Forces in November 1918. Several others were in the navy with the fleet. To these numbers we can add the sportswriters and columnists also in the army, plus the managers or former players who went overseas as uniformed officials of the YMCA and the Knights of Columbus. Realizing the publicity value, and hoping to win back disgruntled fans, the Major Leagues waved the flag by releasing tabulations of their ballplayers’ participation in the war. The two circuits used different formulas, each spinning the result to its own advantage.
The American League said shortly before the armistice that 264 ballplayers were under contract or reservation, an average of thirty-three men per club. Of these athletes, 144 (or 55 percent) were in the army, navy, or marines. The National League offered its own figures a month later, basing its calculation on active rosters of twenty men for each of its eight teams. Of the 160 National League players, 103 were serving in the military (64 percent). The league added that it had a total of 257 reserved players. “The facts probably are that baseball gave as great if not greater percentage of its employes [sic] than any other occupation,” John Heydler said for the National League.1
The Major Leagues’ figures seemed to compare favorably with those from the first Selective Service draft in June 1917, when registration totaled nearly 9.6 million men. “Experience to date has shown that 34 per cent, or slightly over one-third, of these men are eligible for service,” the Washington Herald had reported. “The remaining two-thirds, because of dependency of families, industrial exemptions, and physical disability, are not eligible for present service.”2
Altogether, the government registered 10.4 million men in the first and second drafts. The immense third draft in September 1918 came too late to have much effect. About 3 million men served in the U.S. armed forces during the war—roughly 30 percent of the useful draft pool, with enlistments before June 5, 1917, lowering that percentage somewhat.
The higher percentages claimed by the American and National leagues were contestable, however. The Major Leagues’ tabulations included numerous ballplayers who had made a club in earlier seasons, but who hadn’t played in 1917 or 1918. The figures also included prospects such as Mark Milligan, who might have been called up to a big club if they hadn’t already entered the armed forces. Many men whose names appeared on an American or National League roster during the talent-drained war seasons played only briefly, and some never appeared again in the Majors. Hugh Fullerton particularly challenged the American League numbers. “Ban Johnson says 50 per cent of the American league players are in the service. His figures are wrong,” the sportswriter wrote. “He probably means that the total number of players who belonged to American League clubs at various times are in the service. I have tried to secure a complete record of all major and minor league players (active) who went into the war, and it indicates that fewer than 20 per cent. of the major league players joined in active service, although undoubtedly many more were called in the final calls of the first draft and the first of the second draft.”3
Nevertheless, many hundreds of American ballplayers clearly had entered the armed forces during the war. The Baseball and the Armed Forces Committee of the Society of the American Baseball Research (SABR) has identified 777 veterans of World War I, including players, umpires, scouts, and league officials. The list is eccentric and somewhat flawed. It has minor omissions, but includes such tangential figures as Dwight Eisenhower (who once reportedly played in the Minors) and Buster Keaton (who hired many Major Leaguers for his movies). It also mistakenly includes a few civilians such as Johnny Evers and Arlie Latham, who performed war-related work overseas, and adds several shipyard players as well. Nonetheless, the list is useful. Most of the listed men clearly were Major Leaguers in the seasons before, during, or after the war. The list also includes the names of fourteen African American players, including Dick “Cannonball” Redding and Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston, who played for independent teams before the first Negro Leagues were organized.4
Perhaps the simplest way of determining whether the Major Leagues’ war effort compared favorably with that of the American male population as a whole is to consider only active ballplayers who entered the armed forces during the war, while omitting such men as Eddie Grant and Tillie Shafer, who had already retired. Of the 777 ballplayers on SABR’s list, only 196 appeared in one or more games for a Major League club during the war. Using the American League’s formula, based on reserved men (521 for the sixteen Major League teams), 196 represents nearly 38 percent of the players from both circuits. Using the National League’s method, based on sixteen 20-man rosters (320 total), the figure is 61 percent. Either way, these percentages are lower than those originally claimed by the respective leagues.
The National League estimated, in addition, that more than one hundred of its players had found essential jobs in compliance with the work-or-fight order, “either during or just after the pennant season in ordnance, in nitrate and steel works, shipyards, aeroplane factories, or on farms.”5 The American League provided no corresponding number, but its total likely was similar.
Counting Minor League ballplayers who had donned khaki or blue during the World War is more difficult. No one assembled a roster or calculated a grand total. In what it acknowledged was an incomplete list, Baseball Magazine named 298 players from nine Minor League circuits who served in the armed forces during the war. The Southern Association alone claimed 53 men in service, including 11 of the 14 players on the Chattanooga Lookouts’ roster—“which should forever silence the cry of slackers at Dixie major ball players.”6
Secretary Farrell’s earlier estimate of eight hundred Minor Leaguers in the armed forces was likely fairly accurate. By the armistice, the number certainly exceeded one thousand. The Minors’ percentages, whatever they were, almost certainly matched or exceeded those of the Major Leagues. “The minor circuit players made a much better showing in France in 1918 than their more gifted comrades from the ‘big time,’” said Spalding’s Guide. “There were dozens of them in the army and some have paid the price of liberty with their lives. The great proportionate representation of minor leaguers in the American army last summer may be attributed to the fact that many small leagues had closed their gates early in the season.”7
In addition to player enlistments and conscriptions, the Major Leagues significantly contributed to many civilian war efforts. Clubs and ballplayers helped to sell millions of dollars in Liberty Loan bonds, with the players themselves purchasing bonds worth more than $250,000. Tris Speaker personally bought the first bond of the second Liberty campaign from Secretary McAdoo in Cleveland in October 1917; Christy Mathewson sold $100,000 in bonds in one day. Led by Charles Comiskey, Major League clubs contributed tens of thousands of dollars to the American Red Cross during the two wartime seasons; players alone donated more than $14,000. The Boston Braves and the other fifteen clubs opened their parks for service games and other events, at which large crowds generously donated to soldiers’ and sailors’ recreation funds and various war-related charities. When he ended his Bat and Ball Fund in Spring 1919, Clark Griffith had raised and spent nearly $150,000—the equivalent of about $2.4 million a century later—on baseball equipment for American troops at home, in the AEF, and as far away as Jerusalem.8
Although too small to field a large body of men for military service overseas, the Major Leagues clearly had performed admirably at home—if no more so than many other American businesses and industries.
Complicated stories seldom have neat endings. Neither the country as a whole nor Major League baseball in particular ever really returned to “normalcy” after the World War. The United States went on to experience the lawless, failed experiment of Prohibition, the rise and boom of the Roaring Twenties, and the descent into the hard times of the Great Depression.
Baseball returned not to glory but to the worst disgrace in its history. The Black Sox scandal and corrupt World Series of 1919 permanently tarnished Joe Jackson’s reputation and brought a lifetime ban from the sport for all eight implicated Chicago players. “Shoeless Joe” might better have remained “Joe the Painter” at the Harlan & Hollingsworth shipyard in Wilmington. The fallout also delivered Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner, a necessary and overdue change that further reduced Ban Johnson’s power and influence.
That Major League baseball managed to recover during the 1920s was due in no small part to the power game ushered in by slugger Babe Ruth and to construction of Yankee Stadium, the magnificent House That Ruth Built. “Colonel Huston, a trained engineer, was on site almost every day, overseeing the sinking of the foundation, the pouring of the concrete, and the erection of the steel girders.”9 Huston sold his share of the club to Colonel Ruppert shortly after the great stadium opened in 1923.
Grantland Rice covered the heady days ahead in baseball, football, and other sports, and recounted them later in his autobiography. But like many old soldiers, the former artilleryman also discovered that his dreams sometimes took him to darker places. “My days were about to be caught up in the fantastic boom of business and sports, the Golden Twenties,” Rice remembered. “But for years my dreams were of France and of those who made a crossing much bigger than those of us who made the long voyage home to the U.S.A.”10
The world repeated the catastrophe one generation later. Former West Point baseball coach Harry “Moose” McCormick, shell shocked in the First World War, returned to duty during the Second. He was the only civilian director in the Army Air Forces, supervising physical training for the First Air Force at Mitchel Field, Long Island. Cincinnati Reds coach Hank Gowdy actually went back into uniform, as an army Special Services (athletic and recreational) officer attached to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. McCormick was past sixty, Gowdy in his fifties.
“I advise all baseball players in service to play as much as possible while in uniform,” Major Gowdy said in 1943. “It makes them top attractions in exhibition games for service men; meanwhile preventing them from thinking about losing their playing edge.” He didn’t know at the time whether the Major Leagues would continue playing throughout the war or end early as they had in 1918. “But I advise all baseball players in service to play as much as possible while in uniform. It makes them better soldiers now, and better players when the war is over.”11
The old Braves catcher often worked in Georgia at Gowdy Field, the army ballpark dedicated in his honor in 1925. “I frankly tried to get the authorities to name the field . . . after Captain Grant, but was informed that the field must be named after an enlisted man,” Major Gowdy said. “That’s how it happens to be Hank Gowdy Field, an honor I’ll treasure the rest of my days.”12 Captain Eddie Grant, whose bones lay interred in German-occupied France, would have approved.