Led by Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio’s brother Vince, who belted 21 homers and knocked in 100 runs, the 1941 Pittsburgh Pirates under future Hall of Famer Frankie Frisch finished in fourth place with an 81-73 record, 19 games behind the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers.  Two months later, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the country was embroiled in World War II. While many major leaguers left the game to enter the armed forces, including several Pirates, Pittsburgh remained one of the franchises least affected by the draft, which led to a relatively successful run between 1943 and 1945.

1942

The Pirates roster was changed more by the trade of future Hall of Fame shortstop Arky Vaughan than by the war.  Pirates management thought they had waited too long to trade another Pirates icon, Paul Waner, so they wanted  to get some good players in exchange for the 30-year-old Vaughan while he still had some value. On December 12, 1941, Pittsburgh dealt him to Brooklyn and received Pete Coscarart, Jimmy Wasdell, Luke Hamlin, and Babe Phelps in return.1

While all did contribute to the team in 1942, none were the level of Vaughan as the team sank to 66-81, fifth in the league.

Pittsburgh’s losses to the war in 1942 were minimal. Backup catcher Vinnie Smith, who had appeared in only nine games in 1941, went into the Navy and played with Bob Feller for the Norfolk Naval Base team.  Young shortstop Billy Cox actually was allowed to play for the Pirates in an exhibition game while in the military in May of 19422, and later saw action with the Army’s 814th Signal Corps in North Africa and Europe.  He was supposed to be the replacement for Arky Vaughan and did well after he returned from the Army, but was sent to Brooklyn in 1948 and became an effective third baseman for the Dodgers. Bill Clemensen pitched briefly for the Pirates in 1941 before going to the Army Air Force.  Right-hander Ken Jungels spent most of his abbreviated career with the Indians between 1937 and 1941 and finished his time in the majors with Pittsburgh early in 1942, before he entered the Army. Oad Swigart pitched in 10 games in 1939 and 1940 and was inducted into the Army shortly after the Piratrs’ 1941 spring training. While not lost to the military, third baseman Lee Handley was injured in an offseason car accident, hurting his arm; he spent the next two seasons in the minors and was never as effective as he had been before the accident.

Pirates newcomers in 1942 were led by Johnny Barrett (who later knocked in 83 runs in 1944) and Jim Russell, who became a regular in the Pittsburgh outfield between 1943 and 1947, hitting .312 in 1944.   Also debuting for the Bucs that year were Frank Colman, Huck Geary, Harry Shuman, and Johnny Wyrostek, who enjoyed a fine career with the Phillies and Reds after two abbreviated seasons with the Pirates in 1942 and 1943 in which he had a combined 114 at-bats, hitting .140.

1943

Pittsburgh improved greatly over its 1942 campaign, winning 14 more games by turning what was a minus-46 run differential in 1942 into a plus-64 a year later. Third baseman Bob Elliott, a future MVP with the Boston Braves in 1947, led the Pirates with 101 RBIs and a .315 average. Thirty-six-year-old eephus pitch practitioner Rip Sewell won 21 games, tied for the most among NL hurlers.

Perhaps the main reason for the Pirates’ dramatic improvement was the fact that their losses to the war effort remained minimal. Thirty-two-year-old second baseman Ed Leip, who had only 66 plate appearances with Pittsburgh and Washington in four seasons, went into the Army and never returned to the majors. Reserve outfielder Culley Rikard was in the Air Force and came back for one season in 1947, hitting .287 in 324 at-bats.  Pitcher Ed Albosta, whom the Pirates acquired in the 1942 Rule 5 draft, was a star pitcher in the war for Camp Livingston in Louisiana.  After he returned he had much less success for the Pirates in 1946 with a 6.13 ERA and an 0-6 mark.  Lefty Wilkie was 23-3 with the Army teams he pitched for, but had a less-than-stellar 8-11 mark for the Pirates in two seasons before the war.  He returned for one campaign in 1947 with a 10.57 ERA.  Probably the first true contributor the team lost was Ken Heintzelman.  Heintzelman once won 20 games with the Pirates’ Class-D team in Jeannette, Pennsylvania, and was 29-31 in his six years with the team from 1937-42.  He played for seven years after the war, the highlight being a 17-10 mark and 3.02 ERA with the Phillies in 1949. There was also shortstop Alf Anderson, who had played for the team in 1941 and 1942 before retiring from the game to work in his defense job.  He was drafted into the Navy and played with Ted Williams at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station before returning to the Pirates in 1946 when he had two final major-league plate appearances. Reserve outfielder Bud Stewart left for the Army after playing two years with Pittsburgh in 1941 (when he led the NL with 10 pinch hits), and 1942 before retiring.  He returned in 1948 and had a solid seven seasons with the Yankees (for whom he played only six games), Washington, and the White Sox. 

The newcomers were led by right-handed pitcher “Mr. X,” Xavier Rescigno, a stalwart out of the bullpen during the war years; Tommy O’Brien, an outfielder who played in the final three war years with the Pirates, hitting .310 and .335 in 1943 and 1945 respectively before coming back to the majors in 1949 with the Red Sox after a three-year absence; and reliever Cookie Cuccurullo, who was 3-5 in 62 games over three seasons in Pittsburgh. Added to the mix were Cuban Tony Ordenana, who had a career that lasted all of four at-bats, and 28-year old catcher Hank Camelli, whose highlight in Pittsburgh was hitting .296 in 125 at-bats in 1944. 

1944

While 1944 proved to be the high-water mark for player losses by the Pirates to the war effort, it also proved to be their most successful campaign since they won the National League pennant in 1927.  As the team hosted the All-Star Game at Forbes Field in 1944, they won 90 games that year, the last time they would do so until their memorable 1960 season. Pittsburgh’s 90-63 record was good for second place in the NL, although they were never a serious threat to St. Louis, which sauntered to its third straight pennant.

The Pirates were led by newly acquired first baseman Babe Dahlgren, whom they received from the Phillies for Babe Phelps.  Dahlgren was one of two Pirates to knock in 100 runs; the other was Bob Elliott.  On the mound, the staff finished third in the league in ERA with a 3.44 mark as the 37-year-old Sewell won 21 games for the second consecutive season.

As for the men who headed into the armed forces, it was by far the Pirates’ worst year – they lost 12 players, although only a handful had been major contributors.  Backup catcher Bill Baker, who played for Mickey Cochrane’s Great Lakes team in the Navy, returned to the Bucs in 1946 before ending his major-league career with the Cardinals in 1949.  Elbie Fletcher, who had manned first base since he came over from the Braves in 1939, was perhaps the most costly loss for the team during the war years.  After entering the Navy following the 1943 campaign, Fletcher returned in 1946 for two seasons before going back to the Braves in 1949 for one final year.  In a ranking of players by position, Bill James had Fletcher as the 46th best first baseman of all time.3  At shortstop Huck Geary, a .160 hitter in his two seasons in the majors, had left for the Navy. He never returned to the big leagues after the war.

Maurice Van Robays had a great season for Pittsburgh in 1940, hitting .273 while driving in 116 runs.  His eyesight began to worsen in 1942, prompting him to wear glasses.  His performance on the field suffered and he was sent to Toronto in 1943.  When he was brought up to the Pirates later that season, he rebounded with a .288 average.  Van Robays was drafted into the Army, and played baseball in Europe with the 71st Infantry team.  He returned for one last major-league season in 1946.

Though the team fielded a strong pitching staff in 1944, they still had heavy losses on the mound.  Russ Bauers, 29-29 with the Pirates over six years, went into the Army. After the war the Bucs cut him due to a back injury. He eventually returned, pitching in 16 major-league games for the Cubs and Browns.  Johnny Lanning, 25-31 with the Braves before winning 29 games for Pittsburgh between 1940 and 1943, went into the Army and then returned to the Pirates in 1945 and 1946, when he won four more games. Bill Brandt, who was 5-3 in his three major-league seasons between 1941 and 1943, went into in the Navy. Hank Gornicki won 14 games for Pittsburgh in 1942 and 1943 after two abbreviated seasons with the Cardinals and Cubs.  In the Army he was stationed at Camp Wolters in Texas, where he suffered from leg issues as well as pneumonia.  He pitched in only seven more major-league games for the Pirates in 1946.  Jack Hallett, a four-year vet with the White Sox and Pirates who won a single game for the Bucs in 1942 and 1943, entered the Navy.  He was 5-7 for Pittsburgh in 1946 and ended his major-league career in 1948 with the Giants.  Finally there was Bob Klinger, a fine right-hander who won 62 games for Pittsburgh in six years. He went into the Navy after the 1943 season and then pitched for the Red Sox for two seasons after the war.

Eight Pirates debuted for the team in 1944, including Joe Vitelli, an Army veteran who was hired first as a batting-practice pitcher before making some actual game appearances; as well as Vic Barnhart, Al Gionfriddo, Bill Rodgers, Hank Sweeney, Roy Wise, Len Gilmore, and Frankie Zak. None of those players would see significant major-league action after the war, although Gionfriddo is still remembered for his brilliant catch in Game Five of the 1947 World Series.

1945

Since the Cardinals had been hit hard with player losses to the military, many experts picked the Pirates to win the pennant in 1945.  While that didn’t happen, Pirates fans nonetheless witnessed a third consecutive winning season as the team finished fourth with an 82-72 mark.  Elliott once again was the offensive star with 108 RBIs while Nick Strincevich was the team’s top pitcher with a 16-10 record.

Minimal losses to the armed services for the third time in four war seasons helped fuel the winning record.  Pitcher Fritz Ostermueller, a 15-year vet who won 114 games with the Red Sox, Browns, Dodgers, and Pirates, including 16 with Pittsburgh in 1944 and 1945, went into the Army after earlier being classified as 4-F due to arthritis.  Serving only a few months, he pitched for the Pirates in 1946 and 1947, winning 20 more games. (Ostermueller was erroneously portrayed in the movie 42 as beaning Jackie Robinson.4)  The other Pirate to leave was little-used outfielder Bill Rodgers, who had five major-league at-bats before going into the Army.

Only two players made their debuts for the Pirates, Ken Gables, who won 13 games in his career between 1945 and 1947, and catcher Bill Salkeld, who cobbled together a six-year major-league career with Pittsburgh, the Boston Braves, and the White Sox after sitting out 2½ years in the minors with a severe knee injury.

Those in the Pirates system who served in the military before actually playing a game with Pittsburgh included Vic Barnhart (Army), Roy Jarvis (Navy), Ralph Kiner (Navy), Ken Gables (Army), Al Gionfriddo (Army), Burgess Whitehead (Air Force), and Joe Vitelli (Army).

Proof that the Pirates’ success during the war years was due to the fact they lost few important players to the armed forces came in 1946 after most of the game’s best players came back.  The Pirates returned to the second division with a seventh-place 63-91 record.  Between the end of World War II and 1958, they would enjoy only one winning season.

Below are the Pittsburgh Pirates starters by season, immediately before, during and immediately after the war years.

DAVID FINOLI is a 15-year SABR member who is an author and sports historian that has written 18 books, mostly dealing with the history of sports in Western Pennsylvania. He has also contributed to Pittsburgh Magazine, the Pittsburgh Pirates alumni magazine, the Pittsburgh Pirates Game Day program, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Baseball: where he wrote a chapter on the history of the baseball expansion and franchise movement. Originally from Greensburg, Pennsylvania, Finoli currently lives in nearby Monroeville and is a retail human resources/operations manager in North Huntingdon, PA.

Notes

1 David Finoli, For the Good of the Country, (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2002), 43.

2 Baseball in Wartime, “Billy Cox,” baseballinwartime.com/player_biographies/cox_billy.htm.

3 Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, (New York: Free Press, 2003), 449.

4 Bruce Markusen, “What Really Happened With Fritz Ostermueller and Jackie Robinson,” Hardball Times, hardballtimes.com/cooperstown-confidential-what-really-happened-with-fritz-ostermueller-and-j/.

Aaron and Mays were matched because they both were born in Alabama. Of course, other great players were born there, including Heinie Manush, Satchel Paige, Billy Williams, and Early Wynn, but as expected, it was a two-way race. Aaron rode the crest of his home run popularity to a victory of 39 votes to 30 for Mays.

It was another two-way race in California where Ted Williams beat out Joltin’ Joe by 38 to 34. It was even closer in Pennsylvania where Honus Wagner edged Stan Musial 31-1/2 to 29-1/2, with Christy Mathewson coming in third.

The survey was conducted in the Spring of 1974, so performance for that season had no bearing on the vote. The Society is assessing the contribution that baseball has made in this Country and the review is keyed to the coming centennial observance of the National League and the 75^th anniversary of the American League in the Nation’s bicentennial year of 1976. Last year the Society voted on the greatest foreign-born players, with Juan Marichal of the Dominican Republic winning over Luis Aparicio of Venezuela in a very close vote.

Major league baseball players have been born in all 50 states, including one in Alaska. But in several states the representation was so small that an automatic selection was made of Roger Mans in North Dakota, Dave McNally in Montana, etc. However, ballots were issued covering 44 states.

The ballot included names of the top players in each of those states, including Maryland where Babe Ruth was born, and Georgia, birthplace of Ty Cobb. As it happened, Jimmy Foxx, Lefty Grove, and Al Kaline got a vote or two in Maryland, and Jackie Robinson and Bill Terry kept Cobb from sweeping the bases in Georgia. Only in Kansas did Walter Johnson get all 77 votes cast for that state, and he didn’t have very much competition.

On the other hand, members voted for 11 different players in Illinois and in Indiana. In each case a player not then in the Hall of Fame — Robin Roberts in Illinois, and Chuck Klein in Indiana — was selected over five players already enshrined at Cooperstown. There may be a message there.

Did the voters favor modern players over the old-timers? Not necessarily. Roger Connor, 19th Century slugger, won in Connecticut. In Ohio Cy Young and George Sisler snowed under Pete Rose; and Rogers Hornsby and Tris Speaker didn’t leave many votes for Frank Robinson and Ernie Banks in Texas.

Here are the full voting results:

SURVEY OF BEST BASEBALL PLAYERS BY STATES

ALABAMA — Henry Aaron 39; Willie Mays 30; Satchel Paige 4; Heinie Manush 2; Joe Sewell 1; Billy Williams 1; Early Wynn 1.

ARIZONA — Hank Leiber 42; Solly Hemus 19; Alex Kellner 12.

ARKANSAS — Brooks Robinson 38-1/2; Arky Vaughan 15; Dizzy Dean 13-1/2; Lou Brock 6; George Kell 2; Lon Warneke 1.

CALIFORNIA-   Ted Williams 38; Joe DiMaggio 34; Harry Heilmann 3; Bobby Bonds 1; Joe Cronin 1;   Tom Seaver 1/2; Duke Snider 1/2.

COLORADO —   Johnny Lindell 47; Roy Hartzell 13; Tom L. Hughes 8; Gene Packard 3.

CONNECTICUT Roger Connor 46; Jim O’Rourke 14; Jimmy Piersall 12; Tom Corcoran 4.

DELAWARE —   Vic Willis 40; Hans Lobert 25; Chris Short 7; Sadie McMahon 2.

1. C. — Maury Wills 56; Paul Hines 10-1/2; Doc White 8; Lu Blue 2-1/2.

FLORIDA —   Al Lopez 38-1/2; Bill White 16-1/2; Steve Canton 16; Boog Powell 5; Dave Johnson 1.

GEORGIA — Ty Cobb 75; Jackie Robinson 2; Bill Terry 1.

HAWAII — Mike Lum 64; Matt Wilcox 2; Prince Oana 1.

IDAHO —   Harmon Killebrew 72; Vernon Law 4; Larry Jackson 1.

ILLINOIS — Robin Roberts 25-1/2: Lou Boudreau 12; Joe McGinnity 9-1/2; Jim Bottomley 8-1/2; Red

  Ruffing 8; Fred Lindstrom 4; Ray Schalk 2-1/2; Phil Cavarretta 2; Larry Doyle 2; Red   Schoendienst 2; Ted Kluszewskji1.

INDIANA — Chuck Klein 16-1/2; Sam Rice 13-1/2; Sam Thompson 13-1/2; Mordecai Brown 7-1/2; Edd Roush 7; Amos Rusie 5-1/2; Max Carey 4-1/2; Gil Hodges 3; Babe Adams 2; Billy Herman 2; Fred Fitzsimmons 1.

IOWA —   Bob Feller 40-1/2; Cap Anson 33; Dazzy Vance 1-1/2; Fred Clarke 1; Red Faber 1.

KANSAS — Walter Johnson 77.

KENTUCKY — Earle Combs 26-1/2; Pee Wee Reese 16-1/2; Jim Bunning 13-1/2; Pete Browning 12; Bobby Veach 3-1/2; Carl Mays 3; Gus Weyhing 2.

LOUISIANA–   Melvin Ott 44-1/2; Bill Dickey 25-1/2; Ted Lyons 7.

MAINE — George Gore 37; Fred Parent 18; Bill Carrigan 15.

MARYLAND —   Babe Ruth 71-1/2; Jimmy Foxx 3; Al Kaline 2; Lefty Grove 1-1/2.

MASSACHUSETTS Pie Traynor 34-1/2; Mickey Cochrane 26-1/2; John Clarkson 7-1/2; Tim Keefe 3; Joe Kelley 1-1/2; Jack Chesbro 1; Wilbert Robinson 1; Jimmy Ryan 1; Wilbur Wood 1.

MICHIGAN —   Charlie Gehringer 62; Kiki Cuyler 5; Ed Cicotte 4; Hal Newhouser 3; Jack Fournier 1; Ed Reulbach 1.

MINNESOTA–   Chief Bender 68; Joe Bush 5; Gene DeMontreville 1; Jerry Koosman 1; Wes Westruin 1.

MISSISSIPPI Buddy Myer 28; Guy Bush 21; Claude Passeau 7; George Scott 7; Hugh Critz 4; Gee   Walker 4.

MISSOURI —   Carl Hubbell 29; Yogi Berra 20-1/2; Zack Wheat 13; Jim Galvin 4-1/2; Casey Stengel 4;   Jake Beckley 2; Clark Griffith 1; Charlie Grimm 1; Elston Howard 1; George Van Haltren 1.

MONTANA — Dave McNally (no contest)

NEBRASKA —   Grover Alexander 61-1/2; Sam Crawford 8; Bob Gibson 6-1/2; Richie Ashburn 1.

NEVADA —   Jim Nash (no contest)

NEW JERSEY-   Joe Medwick 28; Goose Goslin 27; Billy Hamilton 13; Don Newcombe 3; Johnny Vander Meer 2; George Case 1; Kid Gleason 1; Mike Tiernan 1.

NEW HAMPSHIRE Red Rolfe 58; Arlie Latham 15; George Tyler 1; Stan Williams 1.

NEW MEXICO- Ralph Kiner 62; Vern Stephens 15.

NEW YORK —   Lou Gehrig 56-1/2; Eddie Collins 6; Warren Spahn 5; Sandy Koufax 4-1/2; Dan Brouthers 2; Hank Greenberg 1-1/2; Waite Hoyt 1; Charles Radbourn 1; Frank Frisch 1/2.

NORTH —- Luke Appling 53; Hoyt Wilhelm 10-1/2; Enos Slaughter 7; Wes Ferrell 2-1/2;

CAROLINA —   Gaylord Perry 2; Jim Hunter 1.

NORTH DAKOTA   Roger Mans (no contest)

OHIO — Cy Young 39-1/2; George Sisler 29; Pete Rose 4; Ed Delahanty 3-1/2; Buck Ewing 1.

OKLAHOMA — Mickey Mantle 52; Paul Waner 21-1/2; Johnny Bench 2; Willie Stargell 1; Lloyd Waner 1/2.

OREGON  —   Ken Williams 41; Mickey Lolich 23; Johnny Pesky 8; Larry Jansen 2.

PENNSYLVANIA   Honus Wagner 31-1/2; Stan Musial 29-1/2; Christy Mathewson 10; Hack Wilson 3; Richie Allen 1; Roy Campanella 1; Eddie Plank 1.

RHODE ISLAND Nap Lajoie 65-1/2; Gabby Hartnett 9-1/2; Hugh Duffy 2.

SOUTH —-   Joe Jackson 67; Larry Doby 3; Bobo Newsom 3; Van Mungo 2; Marty Marion 1-1/2; CAROLINA —   Al Rosen 1/2.

SOUTH DAKOTA James Scott (no contest)

TENNESSEE–   Vada Pinson 17-1/2; Tommy Bridges 16; Bobby Caruthers 14; Ben Chapman 11-1/2; Clyde Milan 7; Red Lucas 4; Jim Gilliam 2; Tim McCarver 1; Claude Osteen 1.

TEXAS — Rogers Hornsby 43; Tris Speaker 24-1/2; Frank Robinson 4; Ernie Banks 3-1/2; Eddie   Mathews 2.

UTAH —   Duke Sims 37; Fred Sanford 19; Gordon Rhodes 10; Ed Heusser 5.

VERMONT —   Larry Gardner 37; Birdie Tebbetts 34; Ray Collins 2; Ernie Johnson 2.

VIRGINIA — Eppa Rixey 53; Deacon Phillippe 10-1/2; Willie Horton 5; Granny Hamner 3; George McQuinn 3; Steve Brodie 1-1/2.

WASHINGTON-   Earl Averill 56-1/2; Ron Santo 17-1/2; Earl Torgeson 1; Rube Walberg 1.

WEST —-   Jess Burkett 40; Bill Mazeroski 18; Lew Bundette 15; Arlie Cooper 3; Andy Seminick 1.

VIRGINIA —

WISCONSIN–   Al Simmons 48-1/2; Kid Nichols 12-1/2; Burleigh Grimes 8-1/2; Addie Joss 4-1/2; Ken   Keltner 1; Andy Pafko 1.

WYOMING —   Dick Ellsworth (no contest)

SURVEY OF BEST ALL-STAR TEAM BY STATE

In the second part of the survey, Society members were asked to pick the state that could put forth the best all-star team over the last century. New York edged out Pennsylvania and California, while Ohio trailed in fourth place. Texas finished fifth and would have received more votes except that its battery was weak. If Nolan Ryan has a few more good seasons, that would help remedy that situation. Here are the state all-star teams.

*Points are based on 6 for a first place vote; 5 for 2^nd; 4 for 3^rd, etc. Other states receiving 10 or fewer points include Alabama, Indiana, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Georgia, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Some voters substituted players, such as Jake Daubert for Mickey Vernon; Tom Seaver for Lefty Gomez, etc.

One former Washington Senator who played during Hudson’s tenure as pitching coach, Del Unser (center fielder, Washington Senators, 1968—71)2 explains the esteem Hudson earned in the capital city. “He’s a gentle- man,that what he is, a Texas gentleman,” Unser said.3 Hudson first took the mound for Washington on April 18, 1940.The tall, lanky, rawboned rookie, 6′ 4″ and 180 pounds4 of nerves, was the losing pitcher in Washington’s 7—0 defeat against the Boston Red Sox.5 Hudson finished his rookie season with a 17—16 record, 252 inningspitched, and a 4.57 ERA for the woeful 60—94 Senators. He led all major league rookies in starts (31) andcomplete games (19). He Hudson soon became the club’s top pitcher, earning berths on the 1941 and 1942 American League All-Star teams.6

Hudson played a major role in the 1941 Mid-Summer Classic. He surrendered Arky Vaughan’s first home run, launched to the right-field upper deck of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium (then Briggs Stadium) in the seventh inning. Hudson’s performance helped set the stage for Ted Williams’s legendary game-winning homer off of Claude Passeau with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning.7

Hudson and Williams crossed paths again in Boston during the last week of the 1941 season. Hudson’s Senators hosted the Red Sox. Teddy Ballgame intercepted Hudson on his way out of the Washington clubhouse. According to Hudson, Williams asked, “You pitching today?”

Hudson replied, “Yeah, I am. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll throw you nothing but fastballs unless I’m in a jam and then you’re on your own.”

Williams looked at him and said, “You wouldn’t do that.”

Honest to the core, Hudson kept his word. He recalled, “I got him out three out of four times. The center fielder had to take a couple off the wall, but he didn’t get a hit. Of course, he got six or seven hits the last day of the season [to hit above .400].”8 The two would face each other and work together many times in the future.

In October 1942, 27 years old and poised to enter his prime as a ballplayer, World War II intervened. Hudson served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Air Force for three years, serving at the Waco Army Air Base and in the Pacific theater.9 He came back an older and less effective pitcher. In his first three seasons, Hudson never pitched fewer than 239.3 innings and earned a 40—47 record for Washington teams that never won more than 70 games. On his return, he never pitched as frequently (237.7 innings in 1950 was closest) or as well (64—105) when he returned from war.10

In 1952, the Senators traded Hudson to Boston, reuniting him with Williams. The veteran pitcher enjoyed having baseball’s best left-handed hitter as a teammate. He described his favorite memory of their three seasons together, September 17, 1953:

“Ned Garver of the Tigers was pitching against me. In the eighth inning the score was 1—0 in favor of Detroit.We have one man on first and it’s Williams’s turn to hit. He patted me on the fanny and said, ‘Go on and get your shower. I’ll hit that little slider of Garver’s into the right field seats.’11

“And he did. He was something.”12

Hudson retired as a player in 1954, but soon returned as a scout for Boston. He joined the new Washington Senators organization in 1961, serving as the team’s pitching coach for manager, former teammate, and life-long friend Mickey Vernon, who died September 24, 2008.

The two remained close. In 1998, Hudson helped arrange a surprise party for Vernon’s eightieth birthday. “He sure was surprised, too,” Hudson remembered. Hudson coached Washington pitchers for nine seasons, 1961—65 and 1968—71.13

One season, he watched a right-hander in the San Francisco Giants’ farm system pitch with poise and pinpoint control. Hudson learned the impressive hurler’s name—Dick Bosman. He said, “He looked like a veteran. Itold our organization that if we had a chance to get this kid, why, don’t hesitate. That year (1964), the Giants left him off the roster and we got him.14

“He learned how to move [his pitches, how to pitch to different hitters, and became a good pitcher. He threw a sinking fastball, a slider, and he could really spot it.”

Bosman, the expansion era Senators’ (1961—71) most successful pitcher, with 49 wins,15 credits Hudson for refining his mechanics. He said, “Sid was really the first pitching coach I ever had. He taught me a lot of the physical parts of pitching. How you spin this curveball, how you make this ball sink, how you hold it.”16

When he became a pitching coach himself for the Baltimore Orioles (1992—94) and Texas Rangers (1995— 2000)17 Bosman often visited his mentor and friend for counsel and to catch up on old times. Bosman, who now instructs minor-league pitchers in the Tampa Bay Rays organization, explained, “Sid’s style, his modus operandi of coaching and teaching is a lot of what I do.”

Former Washington relief pitcher and SABR member Dave Baldwin, who threw with a sidearm motion, also praised Hudson. He said, “Sid was a side-armer. He knew how a side-armer should grip and release the various pitches. Sid also understood when I was slinging the ball. In order for my ball to move, I had to have an awful lot of arm action, a really flexible arm, and a real snap on the ball in order for the ball to sink or for the curve to curve or for the screwball to screwball. Sid watched me very carefully. He would tell me, ‘you’re beginning to sling the ball again, you’re beginning to sling.’”18

Baldwin also remembered a unique device Sid Hudson invented to teach pitchers the proper grip for a curve ball. The “Hudson Harness” included an elastic band that held the pitcher’s thumb behind the ball. Once a pitcher learned the proper grip the ball spun faster and had, according to Baldwin, “greater deflection,” making the pitch more difficult to hit. Ever generous, Hudson shared his unique device with other major-league and college pitching coaches. A photograph of the Hudson Harness appears in an article by Baldwin, Terry Bahill, and Alan Nathan entitled “Nickel and Dime Pitches” in Baseball Research Journal 35.19

In 1969, when Senators owner Bob Short persuaded Ted Williams to become the team’s manager, the Splendid Splinter decided to keep his old foe and teammate on the coaching staff. Twenty-eight years after their conversation outside the visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway Park and 15 seasons after they played together in Boston, the two men joined forces again.

Hudson said Williams “just turned the pitchers over to me. He called me into his office and said, ‘Sid, I’ve known you for a long time. You have all this experience. I’ll just turn it over to you and if I don’t like what you’re doing, why, I’ll tell you so.’’’

Williams rarely needed to say a word to Hudson. In 1969, Senators pitchers turned in a 3.49 ERA, fifth-best in the American League.20

Hudson’s service to Williams included some unpleasant collateral duties, like weighing in massive slugger Frank Howard. Hudson recalled, “Frank got pretty heavy back then. I could never get him on the scale, so I begged him and begged him. Well, one day he finally got on and topped it at 300 right on the button.”

Howard said, “Sid could never get me on the scale because I was always overweight.”

Howard, known for his kindness to teammates and fans alike, gives Hudson high praise. “Sidney Hudson is an outstanding man,” Howard said.21

Hudson went out of his way to introduce new members of the Washington organization to the joys of living in the D.C. Metro area. Senators broadcaster Ron Menchine (1969—71) fondly recalls the kindness and generosity of the southern gentleman. Menchine recalled many instances when Hudson invited newcomers out for dinner or showed them the best place in the area to rent an apartment or get a tasty, affordable meal. The Senators pitching coach also helped a rookie broadcaster cope with baseball’s constant travel. Menchine said, “Sid introduced me to the top restaurants in major-league baseball.”

Menchine said that Hudson made him and countless others feel connected to the team, welcome and valuable.“Sid was a classy guy all the way. He was one of the greatest men I ever met in my life,” he said.22

Like most coaches, Hudson enjoyed the camaraderie that developed between members of Williams’ staff—Nellie Fox, Wayne Terwilliger, Joe Camacho, George Susce, and Doug Camilli.23 He especially enjoyed pitching batting practice to Fox and Williams in the morning hours before players and fans arrived at RFK Stadium. He tried to throw pitches between belly laughs as the two Hall of Famers exchanged good-natured debate over who hit better. Hudson said, “Boy, we had a lot of fun.”

When Short moved the Senators to Texas for the 1972 season, he retained Williams as manager. Hudson followed the Splendid Splinter to Texas to coach the Rangers pitchers. He remained with the Texas organization until 1986 After leaving the Rangers, Hudson coached Baylor University’s pitchers for seven seasons. In 1993, he retired with 56 years devoted to baseball. “I figured 56 was enough,” he said.

Of those five and a half decades, Hudson contributed more than a third to Washington baseball.

Other than the 1969 season, when the Senators thrilled the city with an 86—76 record, Hudson usually knew defeat on the ball field or watched it unfold from the dugout or bullpen.

He refused to let losing diminish his generosity or blunt his desire to play and teach the game. Hudson dedicated his life to baseball, sharing his craft, inventions, experience, knowledge, and oral history as a labor of love, day after day,season after season. His longevity and quiet dignity won him honor from peers, students, and friends. Though few Washington baseball fans remember him, Hudson made lasting contributions to the history of the game in this city. When baseball greatness is measured in kindness, faithfulness, creativity, and zeal to help others, Sid Hudson stands near the top of Washington’s all-time best. 

Notes

1. Retrosheet, Sid Hudson: http://retrosheet.org/boxesetc/H/Phudss101.htm.
2. Retrosheet, Del Unser:http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/U/Punsed101.htm.

3. Author’s interview with Del Unser, 18 March On October 10, 2008, Sid Hudson, who had been living in Waco, Texas, died there at the age of 93.
4. Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette, The Baseball Encyclopedia (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 963.
5. Retrosheet, 1940 Washington Senators regular-season game log: retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1940/VWS101940.htm.
6. Palmer and Gillette, The Baseball Encyclopedia (2004), 963.
7. Retrosheet, American League 7, National League 5: retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1941/B07080ALS1941.htm.
8. Author’s interview with Sid Hudson, 29 May In the last week of the season, in the game (it was at Washington) in which the Red Sox faced Hudson, Williams got a double, going 1-for-3. Hudson may have conflated hismemory of that game with the game of August 17 (also at Washington), the first time the Red Sox faced Hudson since theAll-Star Game; on this earlier occasion, Williams did go hitless, 0-for-3, against Hudson.

9. Gary Bedingfield, Baseball in Wartime, baseballinwartime.com/player_biographies/hudson_sid.htm.
10. Palmer and Gillette, The Baseball Encyclopedia (2004), 963.
11. SABR, Home Run Log, Ted Williams, 17 September 1953, http://members.sabr.org/.
12. Author’s interview with Sid Hudson, 29 May 1998.
13. Retrosheet, Sid Hudson.
14. Retrosheet, Dick Bosman: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/B/Pbosmd101.htm.
15. Palmer and Gillette, The Baseball Encyclopedia (2004), 784.
16. Author’s interview with Dick Bosman, 6 January 1999.
17. Retrosheet, Dick Bosman.
18. Author’s interview with Dave Baldwin, 25 April 2007.
19. Dave Baldwin, Terry Bahill, and Alan Nathan, “Nickel and Dime Pitches,” Baseball Research Journal 35 (2007): 26—27.
20. Palmer and Gillette, The Baseball Encyclopedia (2004), 1539.
21. Author’s interview with Frank Howard, 9 February 1999.
22. Author’s interview with Ron Menchine, February 2005.
23. Washington Senators 1969 Press-Radio Television Guide, 4—8.

We modern fans have trouble imagining how no one had any landscape of baseball data in the 1970s. To provide any answer beyond The Baseball Encyclopedia’s simple totals and averages, we needed play-by-play information. The Elias Sports Bureau had that sort of data, the official data.1 But Elias’s data were certainly not available to satisfy fans’ curiosity. Elias worked for their own pleasure (both personal and financial) and for their patrons, the league offices of the major leagues. In short, Elias did not share with “just anyone,” at least not publicly.

Beginning in the 1970s, SABR’s Statistical Analysis Committee had more than a few members who wanted access to that quality of play-by-play data. Pete Palmer, Dick Cramer, and David Smith (co-chairs of the committee) wanted to know who did what, and when they did it. Not satisfied with the counting stats and career totals provided by The Baseball Encyclopedia, these studious, serious fans needed play-by-play data for their rigorous baseball analysis.

The first effort to gather such data began in 1983 when Bill James organized an army of volunteers in an effort he dubbed “Project Scoresheet.”2 His idea was to gather play-by-play data through volunteers dedicated enough to record every play of every game and send in their scoresheets. “The Project,” as veterans of that effort still call it, generated enough data and made enough money to collapse eventually under the weight of its success. By the early 1990s, the remaining volunteers ended the Project. But some of them, under the leadership of David Smith, saw potential beyond anything James had imagined.

At a late 1978 SABR (Philadelphia chapter) meeting, Smith had met Carl Lundquist, a retired UPI sportswriter who had saved his professional scorebooks from 460 New York games (all three teams) from 1949–56. Lundquist shared copies of all of them with Smith. Working with David Nichols (another Scoresheet volunteer) in 1988, Smith successfully entered a single Lundquist-scored game into a modified version of the Project Scoresheet software, to prove older games could be captured and coded using the same data format as modern seasons. While James’ original vision had not included computerization of the data, Smith correctly reasoned that if he could aggregate as many games as he could find in a common data format already proven useful, the analysis possibilities would be limitless.

Smith’s personal motives went beyond the desire for simply more data. For Smith, capturing the seasons of the past in an organized way, and making them available for both reflection and analysis, was and is “hugely important. To catalog the basic events of the national game [is] something of a moral obligation.”3 As Jayson Stark sees it, Smith’s idea for Retrosheet eventually made today’s “Baseball-Reference.com and their Play Index possible. It fuels the research that literally thousands of us do every week of every year. And it’s an invaluable resource in every way, the gift that never stops giving.”4

But to get his idea off the ground, Smith needed more scoresheets, lots of them.

Bill James’s public approach had alienated both the insular major league teams and their official statisticians (Elias) so Smith began with a more personal appeal. Smith began contacting other SABR members and Project Scoresheet volunteers, hoping to fill file cabinets with scoresheets for eventual translation into computer data, to be shared via floppy disk. One of the first to reply was Pete Palmer, who promptly introduced Smith to Eddie Epstein.5 This moment was a true breakthrough for Retrosheet because Epstein knew about “the stash.” And Eddie soon learned that his new friend Dave Smith wanted it. Specifically, Dave wanted to copy it.

The stash was a collection of scoresheets for every Baltimore Orioles game since 1954. It wasn’t Eddie’s to share, but he knew how to pitch the idea to the Orioles front office. An early believer in the power of analytics, Epstein had come to work for the Orioles as a consultant in the mid-1980s, using his economics training to help the team make smart contract offers during player salary negotiations. So, while not in the public relations department himself, Eddie knew who was in charge of keeping up “the books.” He knew it was the public relations department who cared about that history and used it to create daily game notes for the broadcast teams and more in-depth articles for all kinds of Orioles profiles and pieces.

Eddie began with the assistant public relations director, Rick Vaughn, asking him to open the Orioles’ books to an outsider. Vaughn, who began with Baltimore in 1984, remembers being “extremely excited” when Eddie first told him about Smith’s project, which would soon have a name: Retrosheet. Vaughn remembers that his boss, Bob Brown, head of Orioles public relations, was also excited, as both men loved the historical aspects of the game. Rick was happy to ask Brown for permission to share all his “working copies” of the scoresheets with Smith. Part of Vaughn’s responsibilities in those days was “to make sure we copied the scoresheet after every game and put it in the loose-leaf binder we had for that season. They were kept in a bookshelf in [Vaughn’s Memorial Stadium] office. The loose-leaf notebooks held up much better than the original scorebooks, but we had those as well. [The original scorebooks] were kept in Bob Brown’s office, and eventually moved to a larger research area at Camden Yards.”6

Vaughn cautions that while he was personally enthusiastic, nothing would have been shared between the team and Retrosheet without Bob Brown’s endorsement. Brown was already an Orioles legend, having joined the team in 1958, alternating as traveling secretary and public relations director during his (eventual) 35-year Oriole career. Brown was chosen as the second recipient of the Robert O. Fishel Award for public relations excellence in 1982 (the first winner after Fishel himself), and there were few PR men in the game with more clout.7 Vaughn remembers, “When I started, I was living in Virginia, and I drove 61 miles each way to Memorial Stadium. The primary reason I took the job was to work under Bob Brown. No one worked harder or cared more about baseball than Bob.”8 By 2000, the Camden Yards press box would be renamed after Brown.9

Vaughn remembers that the mechanics of maintaining and collecting Orioles scoresheets went something like this: “The current [season] book was kept in the PR bag that we had with us for home and road games. Before the PR staff started traveling (in 1988 during the 0-21 start), the traveling secretary would maintain the scorebook on the road. I was the primary user because I was responsible for the game notes. I referred to them daily, but Bob and others used them as well, just not as much. We maintained it that way because that is not a project you want to get behind on. It just made sense to make a copy of the scoresheet and file it after every game. That was how thorough Bob was.”10

According to Vaughn, Smith had “someone” come by and borrow all 30 binders during the 1988–89 off-season. Smith recalls, “The person who came by to borrow the binders was me. I drove to Baltimore in a huge rainstorm and collected all 30, brought them back to Delaware and copied them, returning them in about a month. [My wife] Amy still talks about seeing the binders on our coffee table and marveling at them, since she had always been an Orioles fan.”11

And so just like that, for only the asking, Retrosheet had over 4,700 games to begin translating into the computer. Smith recruited volunteers to use a new Retro-version of the software by David Nichols and Tom Tippett, based on what they originally created for Project Scoresheet. The benefit of Retrosheet beginning with Baltimore would be evident for years to come, as Bob Brown proved influential with other major league teams reluctant to open their archives to outsiders. Slowly, many of the same teams who had rebuffed James years before would respond to Retrosheet’s more personal approach, and to Bob Brown’s professional reputation, as he vouched for them directly with the front offices and public relations departments of the Phillies, Padres, Tigers, and Mets.12

The Orioles data would serve other purposes as well. Retrosheet volunteers over the years became experts on one Orioles game in particular: the June 27, 1982, contest at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium against the Tigers. Smith selected the Baltimore play-by-play in that game to serve as training material for any volunteer wanting to enter data using the Retrosheet format.13

Years later, Bob Brown’s choice to help Retrosheet with data would cost his team a little money. A Retrosheet volunteer discovered a discrepancy in the RBI totals for the 1961 season, resulting eventually in a revision to the official record. Instead of a single winner of the RBI crown that season (Roger Maris of the Yankees), there were in truth two, the other being Oriole Jim Gentile. Gentile remembered his contract negotiations with Orioles GM Lee MacPhail the following season, with MacPhail telling him that if he had won the RBI race, his contract would have been “worth $5000 more.” The Orioles made it right, when then-GM Andy MacPhail (Lee’s son) delivered Gentile the money at a Camden Yards ballgame in the summer of 2010.14

David Smith wouldn’t have an Eddie Epstein in every baseball club’s front office. He would request the support of the president of the National League and even the Commissioner of Baseball in years to come, but ultimately it would be his success with the Orioles, parlayed into introductions to nearly every other team, that enabled Retrosheet to create and deliver the treasure trove of detailed play-by-play baseball data that is available, all for free, at their website today.

JAY WIGLEY first joined SABR in 1999 after discovering Retrosheet in 1996. His earliest baseball memory is of the scoreboard animations at the Astrodome during a game in the early 1970s. Jay lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he works in the medical device industry as a Quality professional.

Notes

1 As Leonard Koppett reminded us, official means “of the office”, not necessarily correct. See Koppett’s article, “BACKTALK: Official is a Relative Term, and It Always Will Be” New York Times, April 25, 1993, Section 8, page 9.

2 Bill James, “Introducing Project Scoresheet”, Baseball Analyst, Issue 8 (October 1983): 5-6.

3 David Smith, email to the author, November 2, 2018.

4 Jayson Stark, email to the author, July 11, 2019.

5 Smith, a professor in the University of Delaware’s Biology department, had never met Epstein, though Eddie was a Delaware graduate (with a Master’s degree in Economics), until Pete Palmer introduced them. A friendship began between Smith and Epstein, one further enhanced when Smith realized that Eddie’s Delaware advisor was one of Smith’s faculty friends.

6 Rick Vaughn, email to the author, September 18, 2018.

7 John Steadman, “Brown: Peerless among PR men, pride of O’s”, The Baltimore Sun, April 30, 2000.

8 Vaughn, email.

9 Steadman, “Brown: Peerless. . .”.

10 Vaughn, email.

11 David Smith, email to the author, February 10, 2020.

12 Smith, email.

13 Smith chose a 13-1 Orioles victory, unintentionally but completely appropriately. Visitors to the Retrosheet website today can view the training material for new volunteers at “Example Scoresheet,” Retrosheet.org, https://www.retrosheet.org/ex-sheet.htm.

14 Mike Dodd, “Ex-Oriole Jim Gentile lost $5,000 over error giving Roger Maris RBI crown,” USA Today, July 30, 2010.

1942

Citing the sport’s value as a morale-booster to Americans, President Roosevelt wrote, “I honestly feel it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.”1  But he also stressed that individual players eligible for the military should go into the service.  This so-called Green Light letter let America know that baseball was indispensable and that the game should give a business-as-usual appearance.  Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Larry MacPhail responded, “We can’t adopt any ‘business as usual’ slogan for baseball.  There is no business in this country so dependent upon the good will of the public as baseball.”2  On February 19 the Dodgers front office announced that for the duration of the war, any serviceman in uniform would be admitted to Ebbets Field free.3

The Dodgers began their first wartime spring training with several games in Cuba, and then they traveled northward to Daytona Beach, Florida. With the war on two fronts, there was now a sense over the course of the season that 1942 might be the last normal season.  The Dodgers adopted an unofficial win-now philosophy, as among their key players only Hugh Casey, Kirby Higbe, Mickey Owen, Pee Wee Reese, and Pete Reiser were under 30. It seemed that most teams would play the wartime seasons with “4-Fs, has-beens, and never-would-bes.”4

With the war under way, players had begun to make their way to the service.  First to leave the Dodgers was third baseman Cookie Lavagetto.  He was replaced by Arky Vaughan, for whom the Dodgers traded four players.5  Cookie was followed into war by teammates Herman Franks, Joe Gallagher, Joe Hatten, Don Padgett, and Tommy Tatum.

In the 1942 home opener, Durocher and Giants manager Mel Ott were handed war bonds by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in a home-plate ceremony.  As part of the program, the two skippers announced that each had diverted 10 percent of his first paycheck to the war-bond drive.6

A few practices started across the country in 1942.  The “Star Spangled Banner” was played before every game, not just on special occasions.7  Further, for the duration of the war, fans were asked to return balls hit into the stands.  The balls were then donated by the clubs to various recreation departments of the armed forces.

The Dodgers won four more games than the pennant-winning club of 1941 but still ended two games short of a return trip to the fall classic, with a record of 104-50.  They had endured a fierce pennant race with the St. Louis Cardinals.  Some historians believe that Brooklyn actually lost the race on a July afternoon in St. Louis when Pete Reiser crashed into the center-field wall pursuing a drive off the bat of Enos Slaughter.8  Slaughter raced around the bases for an inside-the-park home run while Reiser lay unconscious with a concussion and fractured skull.  Pete’s batting average tumbled to .310 (still fourth best in the league), due to constant blurry vision.  Before the accident, over three consecutive games (May 31 through June 2), Reiser had collected 11 hits in 13 at-bats, including two home runs, a triple, and four doubles), and his offense had kept Brooklyn ahead of the pack.  Largely due to his absence, the Dodgers’ 10-game lead in early August disappeared. 

The 104 wins that season is the most ever by a Brooklyn club.  The New York Giants finished in third place in the NL, 18 games behind Brooklyn.  Dolph Camilli finished second in home runs and RBIs.  The Dodgers drew just over one million fans in 1942, which led all of baseball, and they once again sent seven players to the All-Star Game. 

On September 23, in the midst of the pennant race, Larry MacPhail lobbied for and accepted a commission in the Army.  A month later, on October 29, the Dodgers organization announced that MacPhail’s replacement as general manager and president would be his former classmate at the University of Michigan, Branch Rickey, who just happened to be general manager of the rival Cardinals.

1943

All major-league teams had conducted spring training in 1942 at their traditional Florida and California locations.  However, by late 1942, the general picture of World War II had changed.  In early 1943, Commissioner Landis decreed that clubs should conduct spring training in the North, in order to relieve rail congestion, causing major-league teams to search for suitable spring-training facilities north of the Mason-Dixon Line.  On January 15, 1943, Brooklyn general manager Branch Rickey announced “that the Dodgers, still as much in character as ever, would do their 1943 ‘Southern’ spring training 45 miles north of New York City.  They will pitch their camp at Bear Mountain, noted ski-jumping resort, and have permission to assail (sic) themselves of Army’s magnificent field house at West Point should weather conditions prevent working outdoors.”9  Three decades before, the baseball diamond at Bear Mountain had been the site of a Sing Sing prison stockade.10

On the afternoon of April 2, 1943, the Brooklyn Dodgers had a practice game against West Point in which the batteries were switched.  Dodgers Roy Sanner and Bob Chipman “did the pitching for the cadets, while Paul Steinle, Randolph Heard, and Dave Zillmer of West Point performed on the mound for Brooklyn.”11  The Dodgers sluggers prevailed, 12-8, in an eight-inning game.  Billy Herman and Roberto Ortiz connected for home runs for the Dodgers.  Manager Durocher started the game at shortstop, had a hit in two plate appearances, and even stole a base.   

During the 1943 season, Brooklyn lost Hank Behrman, Hugh Casey, Cliff Dapper, Bruce Edwards, Larry French, Carl Furillo, Chet Kehn, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Lew Riggs, Johnny Rizzo, and Stan Rojek to a different uniform.  Reiser had tried to enlist in the Navy after the 1942 season but was rejected.  So, in January 1943, he tried for the Army and was waved through.  He was sent to Fort Riley, Kansas.  Larry French was a lieutenant junior grade at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  The proximity to Ebbets Field inspired him to ask the chain of command for a favor.  At the time of his entry into military service, French had attained 197 career victories.  His last outing in a big-league uniform was on September 23, 1942, and Larry pitched a gem, allowing a single hit against the Phillies in a 6-0 victory.  He was 34 years old.  Therefore in 1943, he sought permission to pitch for his old club, the Brooklyn Dodgers, while on leave so he could get three more wins and number 200.  He even offered to donate his Brooklyn salary to the Navy Relief Society. But Admiral W.B. Young denied the request, fearing a flood of such requests from other ballplayers.12  French saw action at Normandy the next year on D-Day.  When the war ended, he remained in the service instead of returning to baseball, and he served during the Korean War.

On July 9 Bobo Newsom had an argument with catcher Bobby Bragan after a passed ball that cost the Dodgers a run.  Newsom continued the tirade against manager Durocher, who subsequently suspended Bobo.  The next day, the Dodgers team threatened to strike, upset over Newsom’s suspension.  Facing a forfeit, Durocher finally persuaded the team to take the field.  Only Arky Vaughan did not, sitting in street clothes in the stands next to Newsom.  Brooklyn exploded offensively against the Pittsburgh Pirates, winning 23-6.  Newsom was traded to the St. Louis Browns five days later.13

Brooklyn finished third in 1943; their 81-72 record placed them 23½ games behind the Cardinals, who ran away with the pennant.  Brooklyn drew 661,739 fans in 1943, almost 375,000 fewer than the season before, yet they still led the league in attendance.  In 1941 Dodgers sluggers belted out 101 home runs; in 1942 the total was 62. The 1943 squad hit only 39 round-trippers, tied for lowest in the league (Augie Galan led the team with nine home runs.) Second baseman Billy Herman and outfielder Galan led Brooklyn in most offensive categories.  Whit Wyatt won a team-high 14 games and led in most pitching categories. Five Dodgers were among the league’s oldest players (Johnny Cooney was 42) and three were among the league’s youngest.  Herman, Galan, Dixie Walker, and Mickey Owen made the All-Star team.

1944

In February 1944 the newspapers said that manager Durocher was going overseas with Danny Kaye to entertain the troops.  Unfortunately, the trip had been delayed, but Leo was confident he could “leap overseas, tour a sector, and leap back in time to take command of his team by March 15.”14 

On March 21, 1944, as the Germans pushed eastward in Europe, the Japanese pushed into India, and the Allied forces pushed northward in Italy, Durocher watched the snow at the Dodgers’ Bear Mountain resort, and worried about his infield. The day before, a 6-inch snowstorm had hit spring training.  As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it, Durocher had become “half manager and half detective.”15  Branch Rickey had filled spring training with teenagers not old enough yet to be drafted, including Hodges, Duke Snider, and Ralph Branca, all of whom were years from fulfilling their potential.  Filling in for Vaughan was 18-year-old Gene Mauch, who would eventually become a big-league manager, but who in 1944 was only one year removed from serving as his high-school class president.  Durocher played second base and broke his thumb taking a throw from Mauch in an exhibition game against the Red Sox.

Before the 1943 season began, Rex Barney, Al Campanis, Dutch Dietz, Billy Herman, Kirby Higbe, Gil Hodges, and Bill Sayles had entered the military service. Additionally, once the season began, Jack Bolling, Ed Head, Roy Jarvis, Gene Mauch, and Lou Rochelli all either enlisted or were drafted.

The season did not start well. On April 27 Jim Tobin of the Braves no-hit the Dodgers and hit a home run in a 2-0 victory.  Three days later the Giants beat the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, 26-8.  The Giants set a major-league mark with 26 RBIs and tied another with 17 walks.  Phil Weintraub drove in 11 runs, one shy of the major-league record.  Weintraub recalled that “Babe Ruth was at the game and came in the clubhouse afterward, and in his big roaring voice said, ‘Where is the guy who knocked in enough runs for a month?’  This was the great Babe.”16

In the summer of 1944, so many Brooklyn Dodgers left for their World War II service that Branch Rickey had to call up or sign several players 18 or younger to fill the void. Among them were three pitchers, Branca, Charlie Osgood, and Cal McLish , a trio so young that Harold C. Burr of The Sporting News dubbed them “Brooklyn’s Nursery School.”17  McLish was wearing a Brooklyn uniform even before finishing high school in Oklahoma City.18 Other Dodger youngsters included Clyde King, Eddie Miksis, Tommy Brown, and Mauch, who played in just five games.

On June 6 all major-league games were postponed in observance of D-Day.  President Roosevelt strongly urged Americans to spend the day in prayer for the men in combat. That same day, Branch Rickey traded pitcher Bob Chipman to the Chicago Cubs for second baseman Eddie Stanky.  Stanky was well-known as someone with a small strike zone who pestered opposing pitchers, and he lived up to his nickname, “The Brat.”  Rickey described Stanky as a player who “can’t hit, he can’t run, he can’t field, he can’t throw.  All he can is beat you.”19

The Dodgers went from bad to simply dreadful.20  On June 28, playing after the Tri-Cornered War Bond Baseball Game involving all three New York area teams, they dropped a doubleheader to the Cubs at Wrigley Field and didn’t win again until the second game of a July 16 doubleheader against the Braves.  Their 16-game losing streak was the longest in the club’s history.

On September 1 the Dodgers beat the Giants 8-1 in a home game.  Giants Hall of Famer Joe Medwick had to leave the game temporarily after being hit on the elbow by a pitch. The Giants asked Brooklyn manager Durocher if Medwick could re-enter the game. Leo agreed, only if he could choose the pinch-runner for the Giants while Medwick was treated. Mel Ott agreed, and Durocher selected Gus Mancuso, a 38-year-old catcher with six career stolen bases at the time (he retired with eight).  As if on cue, the Dodgers then turned a double play.  That same day, Brooklyn released 41-year-old Paul Waner. 

The next day, on September 2, Dixie Walker hit for the cycle against the Giants.  Walker, whose nickname was “The People’s Cherce,”21 played in 147 games, belted a career-high 191 hits, and batted .357.  This mark was good enough to win the National League batting title. Walker, Augie Galan, and Mickey Owen played in the All-Star Game.  Attendance in Brooklyn dropped to just over 600,000 fans, third in the National League. However, Brooklyn finished a disappointing seventh, with a record of 63-91, 42 games behind the Cardinals.  No pitcher was ranked in the top five in any major pitching category; Curt Davis had a team-high 10 victories (against 11 losses).  The staff ERA of 4.68 was a full two runs higher than that of St. Louis.  Four of the oldest players in the league still wore Brooklyn uniforms.

1945

The 1945 season found the Dodgers training at Bear Mountain and West Point for the last time.  The first competitions of their spring season were against the cadets on March 24, 1945.  The Dodgers won the first, but Ralph Branca issued a walk with the bases filled in the 10th inning of a second game to give Army a 5-4 victory.  Manager Durocher played all 10 innings at second base, turning a double play but going hitless at the plate.22  The material with which Durocher started at Bear Mountain in the spring of 1945 was as sparse as it had been the year before.  In the offseason, Bobby Bragan, Rube Melton, Cal McLish, and Eddie Miksis had all left the team for military service.  Mickey Owen departed after the season began.  Branch Rickey asked Durocher to start the 1945 campaign at second base, and he is credited with saying, “I’ll add a thousand dollars to your salary if you will play the first fifteen games.”23  Rickey was seriously hoping that Leo’s hustle might have an inspirational effect on the team.

Some players returned from the war to the Dodgers, and the ballclub steadily climbed out of the cellar, up to third place.  On June 8 Durocher was charged, arrested, and indicted for assault on a Brooklyn fan.  So much for inspiration.

Pitcher Ben Chapman was on Brooklyn’s roster for the 1944 and 1945 seasons, winning eight games and losing six.  Rickey traded Chapman to the Phillies on June 15, 1945, where Ben became their manager for the next four seasons.24

Floyd “Babe” Herman came back to Brooklyn during the 1945 season.  He had played for the Dodgers from 1926 through 1931, and he retired from the game in 1937.  The fans loved Babe because they remembered him as one of the best hitters Brooklyn ever had.  The beat writers loved Babe because he was great copy, never denying even the most outlandish things written about him.25  Unlike many of the wartime old-timers, Babe Herman needed neither baseball nor money.  He owned a California poultry farm that made him wealthy. After being away from baseball for seven seasons, Babe returned in 1945 and batted .265 with one home run and nine RBIs. 

On September 15 the Dodgers and Pirates played a game in Pittsburgh, with Brooklyn winning, 5-3. Brooklyn had arrived in Pittsburgh after being involved in a train accident out of St. Louis. At 6:30 A.M., the train struck a gasoline truck, and the ensuing explosion engulfed the train in flames.  The heat was enough to shatter the train’s windows.  The train’s engineer was killed, but none of the Dodgers players suffered anything worse than a bruise. 

With the end of the war in 1945, attendance surged in Brooklyn, and the Dodgers drew 1,059,220 fans, enough to once again lead the National League.  Their 87-67 record left them 11 games behind the pennant-winning Cubs.  The .271 team batting average was above the league mean and the 3.70 ERA was below the league average. Augie Galan, Eddie Stanky, Dixie Walker, and Goody Rosen ranked fourth through seventh in Position Players WAR (Wins Above Replacement) for the National League.  Twenty-three-year-old Hal Gregg paced the club with 18 wins. There was no 1945 All-Star Game, but Gregg, Walker, and Rosen were selected to the NL squad. 

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, a bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.  Less than three weeks after that, on August 28, an explosion would hit Major League Baseball, as Jackie Robinson met Branch Rickey.  By that fall, Rickey would announce that he had signed Robinson, an infielder who had played that year with the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League, to a contract.  Rickey told the media, “I have never meant to be a crusader, and I hope I won’t be regarded as one.  My purpose is to be fair to all people, and my selfish objective is to win baseball games.”26 By 1947, Robinson’s first season with Brooklyn, the Dodgers were back in the World Series.

MIKE HUBER, a SABR member since 1996, is Dean of Academic Life at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he regularly sponsors undergraduate research in sabermetrics, focusing on modeling, simulation, and prediction. He has been publishing his sabermetrics research in books and journals for close to 20 years. He has been rooting for the Baltimore Orioles for more than 45 years.

Sources

Allen, Lee, The Giants and the Dodgers: The Fabulous Story of Baseball’s Fiercest Feud (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964).

Cohen, Stanley, Dodgers! The First 100 Years (New York: Birch Lane Press/Carol Publishing Group, 1990).

Goldstein, Richard, Superstars and Screwballs: 100 Years of Brooklyn Baseball (New York: Dutton Publishers, 1991).

Graham, Frank, The Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945).

Huber, Mike, West Point’s Field of Dreams: Major League Baseball at Doubleday Field (Quechee, Vermont: Vermont Heritage Press, 2004).

Marzano, Rudy, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s: How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser, and Rickey Changed Baseball  (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2005).

Snyder, John, Dodgers Journal: Year by Year & Day by Day With the Brooklyn & Los Angeles Dodgers Since 1884 (Cincinnati: Clerisy Press, 2009).

Stout, Glenn, The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).

Newburgh (New York) News

New York Times

The Pointer of the United States Military Academy, Volume XX, Number 16, April 9, 1943.

Akers, W.M., “Spring on Bear Mountain,” found online at sportsonearth.com/article/69334480/brooklyn-dodgers-spring-training-world-war-ii-bear-mountain-state-park.  Accessed March 23, 2014.

examiner.com/article/charlie-osgood-teenage-pitcher-for-the-brooklyn-dodgers-dies-at-87.  Accessed March 23 2014.

Statistics taken from baseball-reference.com.

Notes

1 Richard Goldstein, Superstars and Screwballs: 100 Years of Brooklyn Baseball, 219.

2 Frank Graham, The Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History, 216. 

3 John Snyder, Dodgers Journal: Year by Year & Day by Day with the Brooklyn & Los Angeles Dodgers Since 1884, 306. 

4 Glenn Stout, The Dodgers: 120 Years of Dodgers Baseball (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 114.

5 Stanley Cohen, Dodgers! The First 100 Years, 64.

6 Goldstein, 222.

7 Snyder, 306.

8 Cohen, 66.

9 New York Times, January 16, 1943.

10 Goldstein, 229.

11 New York Times, April 3, 1943.

12 Goldstein, 228.

13 Snyder, 315.

14 Graham, 245.

15 W.M. Akers, “Spring on Bear Mountain.”

16 Goldstein, 237.

17 Examiner.com/article/charlie-osgood-teenage-pitcher-for-the-brooklyn-dodgers-dies-at-87.

18 Goldstein, 233.

19 Snyder, 320.

20 Goldstein, 238.

21 Graham, 246.

22 New York Times, March 29, 1945.

23 Graham, 248.

24 Rudy Marzano, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s: How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser, and Rickey Changed Baseball, 98.

25 Marzano, 101.

26 Snyder, 328.

Early in the morning of August 14, 1940, Constable Arthur C. Mosley and Deputy Charles Gordon of Clayton, Mo. (a suburb of St. Louis), came upon a strange car parked in a driveway on Lindbergh Boulevard. Upon investigating, they found a horrible sight – lying next to the auto was a man with his throat torn apart by the self-inflicted blast of the 16-gauge shotgun found under his arm. On the dashboard was a note saying, “Call Walnut 4123, Mrs. Ruth Hollocher.” The suicide victim was Charlie Hollocher, who 20 years earlier had been one of the most highly-touted players in the National League.

His was a short life and a meteoric career, filled with triumph, mystery and ultimately sorrow. Born in St. Louis on June 11, 1896, Charles Jacob Hollocher learned his baseball in city streets, back alleys and schoolyards. While playing for a local amateur team called the Wabadas, he caught the eye of sportswriter John B. Sheridan, who taught him the game’s finer points. As young Hollocher graduated from the amateur ranks to semi-professional status, his friends urged both the Cardinals and the Browns to give him a tryout, but the scouts of both teams declined, citing his alleged inability to hit.

On Sheridan’s recommendation, Keokuk of the Central Association signed Hollocher to a contract in 1915. Charlie’s brother Louis, who died in 1937, also appeared on several minor league teams but never made it to the majors.

After a year at Keokuk, Hollocher was drafted by Portland of the Pacific Coast League, then farmed to Rock Island of the Three-I League early in the season.  Recalled to Portland in 1917, he appeared in 200 games, batting .276 and leading the league’s shortstops in putouts, assists and errors. The Chicago Cubs, badly in need of infield assistance, purchased Charlie’s contract for a reported $3,500.

However, it was not Hollocher the Cubs were after but rather Rogers Hornsby of the Cardinals, who had just given baseball a preview of coming attractions with a .327 average. For the next several months the Cubs dangled Charlie and cash in front of the Cardinals as trade bait, but to no avail. They were stuck with Hollocher whether they wanted him or not. (The Cubs did obtain Hornsby years later but via a different route.)

Realizing that his survival depended on his hitting ability as well as his glove work, Hollocher altered his batting stance. The results were amazing.

There were no Rookie of the Year honors in 1918, but had such awards existed Charlie would have been a prime candidate. A quick thrower and a smooth fielder who covered all his ground and then some, Hollocher made the Cubs solid at shortstop for the first time since Joe Tinker had left the team six years earlier. He became especially renowned for his ability to haul down Texas League pop flies.

Nicknamed “Holly” for obvious reasons, the pint-sized (5 feet, 7½ inches and 158 pounds) Hollocher belied his previous reputation by swinging the hottest bat on the team. Charlie’s team-leading .316 average was fourth highest in the league, while he led the circuit in hits (161), at-bats (509) and total bases (202) and was third in  stolen bases (26). Thanks in no small part to Hollocher’s  efforts, the Cubs leaped from fifth place to the pennant.

Hollocher, who generally batted second, was an intense hustler who was adept at beating out bunts and who sometimes even slid into first base on ground balls in hopes of beating the throw. Teammate Bob O’Farrell, the last survivor of the 1918 Cub champions, described Charlie nearly 60 years later as “the sparkplug of the team.”

O’Farrell also recalled, significantly, that “he had a very nervous stomach.”

As World Series time with the Boston Red Sox approached, Ring Lardner waxed poetic in the Chicago Tribune:

H is for Hollocher, Hendrix and Hooper.

You’ll see them all play if you’re not in a stupor.

The young phenom was of little help in the Series, however, batting only .190 as Boston took the  Cubs in six games, with Babe Ruth beating them twice.

In the meantime, Charlie had received “greetings from Uncle Sam.” Scheduled to enter the Army, he was attacked by the influenza epidemic then ravaging the Western hemisphere. By the time he recovered the Armistice had been signed, and as a result he was not drafted.

Perhaps weakened by the flu, Hollocher fell to .270 in 1919 as the Cubs slipped to third place. On September 12 he took part in the first of two triple plays he would participate in during his career. In the sixth inning the Dodgers had Hy Myers on second base and Zack Wheat on first when Ed Konetchy came to the plate. He drove a sharp liner to Hollocher, who stepped on second to double Myers, then fired to first base to retire Wheat.

By the spring of 1920 Charlie’s hitting was back in stride. It was then that the first storm warnings appeared. On June 8 he took ill on a train en route from St. Louis to Philadelphia with what was reported as ptomaine poisoning. He appeared somewhat better two days later when he had three hits in a 9-8 loss to the Phillies, “but was weak from his sickness before the game was over.” By June 16 he was back in the hero’s role when his eighth-inning triple drove in Max Flack with the game’s only run as Jim Vaughn won, 1-0, at Boston.

The attack had been all but forgotten by July 15, when the Chicago Tribune disclosed that “Hollocher was laid up with another attack similar to that which incapacitated him on the last eastern trip. . . .” Charlie returned to the lineup on July 24 but played only two more games before another departure. Following a long silence, it was announced on August 15 that he was hospitalized. Strangely, the papers did not mention what hospital he was in or what he was suffering from.

On August 17 it was announced that Charlie had been released from the hospital but would play no more that season. The Chicago Herald-Examiner passed a comment that would have been funny had future events not taken the sad turn that they did:

Charley Hollocher escaped from the hospital and came out to see the game. He denied that the doctors found a prune seed in his appendix.

While Hollocher was out for the remainder of the 1920 season, nothing appeared wrong the following year as he played in 140 games and performed better than ever defensively. Making fewer errors than any other regular shortstop in the National League, Charlie led the circuit with a .965 fielding average. And on August 30, 1921 he participated in a unique coincidence.

It was the bottom of the third inning at the Polo Grounds, with Johnny Rawlings on second and Earl Smith on first for the Giants. There were none out and the hit-and-run was on. Cub second baseman Zeb Terry snared Art Nehf’s liner and flipped to Hollocher to double Rawlings. Charlie then fired to first baseman Ray Grimes to complete the triple killing. Before the day was over Charlie would go 4-for-4 with a double and a home run, scoring twice in a losing effort as the Cubs bowed, 5-3.

On the same afternoon the Braves pulled a triple play against the Reds with the bases loaded in the sixth. It went from second baseman Hod Ford to shortstop Walt Barbare to first baseman Fred Nicholson. This was the only time in major league history that two triple plays were completed on the same day. Ironically, the Braves were losers also as Cincinnati won, 6-4.

In 1922 Hollocher looked like the reincarnation of Honus Wagner. Again leading the league in fielding with a .965 average, he batted .340 for the highest average by a shortstop since Wagner hit .354 for the Pirates in 1908 and the best by a shortstop in the majors that season. Reaching career highs with 37 doubles, 69 RBIs and 90 runs scored, he became only the second Cub player in history to attain the magic 200-hit figure with 201. Moreover, he set a National League record that still stands (500 at-bat minimum) by striking out only five times in 592 trips to the plate.

On August 13 he became the third of only four Cub players to gamer three triples in a game, leading Chicago to a 16-5 romp over the Cardinals at St. Louis. (The three others are Marty Sullivan in 1887, Bill Dahlen in 1896 and `98, and Ernie Banks in 1966.) Another great performance again came at St. Louis on August 29. Behind 10-5 after six innings, the Cubs rallied for four runs in the seventh, four in the eighth and two in the ninth to outslug the Cardinals, 15-11. Charlie’s contribution was a 4-for-4 outing with four runs scored, two walks and a double.

Just as Hollocher seemed to be reaching superstardom his problem began to resurface. Following a bout with the stomach flu in January of 1923, Charlie seemingly recovered, only to suffer a relapse at the Cubs’ spring training camp at Catalina Island. Returning to.St. Louis, he was examined by the famed Cardinal physician and surgeon, Dr. Robert F. Hyland. Cub president Bill Veeck, Sr., later sent him to a specialist in Chicago. Hollocher did not get into a game until May 11, 1923 at New York.

As had been the case three years earlier, there were no outward signs that Charlie had been ailing. If anything, he came across as being fitter than ever during the next two and one-half months. On June 7 he went 5-for-5 with a double and two runs scored in a 9-7 victory over the Giants at Chicago. Charlie enjoyed a 4-for-5 outing at Boston on July 7 and duplicated this effort against the same team two days later, pulling a steal of home in the latter contest. The Cubs won both games, 9-1 and 4-1. By July 22 Hollocher was hitting .350, but by July 26 he had slipped to .342.

That afternoon he was absent from the lineup and two days later it was announced that he was “ailing.” On August 3 the Chicago Tribune stated that Hollocher was “to be back Sunday,” only to eat its words. That night, without notifying the front office, he jumped the team and departed for St. Louis, leaving the following note to manager Bill Killefer:

Dear Bill –

Tried to see you at the clubhouse this afternoon but guess I missed you. Feeling pretty rotten so made up my mind to go home and take a rest and forget baseball for the rest of the year.  No hard feelings, just didn’t feel like playing anymore.

Good luck,

As Ever,

Holly

Hollocher then wrote to Veeck stating that he was too ill to play and to Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis asking to be placed on the voluntarily retired list for the balance of the season. Never renowned for his consistency in disciplinary matters, Landis on August 11 gave Charlie a full absolution, even though Hollocher was technically a deserter.

That winter Hollocher held out for $4,200 for the period of his absence, but the Cubs refused to do business on those terms. For the next several months they made no effort to sign him, probably because of his erratic behavior and unknown illness that many thought to be imaginary. Missing all of spring training, Charlie finally signed a two-year contract at $12,000 a year. On May 20, 1924 sportswriter Irving Vaughan of the Chicago Tribune reported, “The X-ray plates of Charlie Hollocher’s stomach have definitely determined that there is nothing organically wrong with the star shortstop.”

Although Hollocher was back at his station, his stomach problem (or perhaps missing spring training) was now taking its toll. After going 0-for-8 in a doubleheader loss to the Braves on August 20, his batting average sank to .245.

For the next two weeks Hollocher was again conspicuous by his absence. On September 4 manager Killefer announced that he had given Charlie permission to return home to regain his health. Ominously, the Tribune admitted that “there is a big question mark around whether he will ever again don a baseball uniform.”

He did, but just barely, appearing at second base in place of Bob Barrett for the last two innings of a City Series game against the White Sox, going hitless in his only time at bat as the Cubs lost, 6-3, on October 3. That was his last appearance on the diamond. Retiring shortly thereafter, Charlie left behind a .304 batting average and 894 hits in 760 major league games. Over the next several years he made some announcements of intended comebacks, the last in 1930, but never went to camp.

Probably to fulfill the remainder of his contract, Charlie returned to the Cubs as a scout in 1931 but left after one year. In an interview with The Sporting News published on January 26, 1933 he lamented:

My health first broke at Catalina Island in the spring of 1923. I returned to St. Louis for an examination by Dr. Robert F. Hyland, who examined me and then turned me over to a specialist. They advised me that I would ruin my health if I played ball that season. But Bill Killefer, then manager of the Cubs, came to St. Louis and urged me to join the team, telling me that I didn’t have to play when I didn’t feel well. I yielded to Bill and, once in uniform, couldn’t stay on the bench. I played when I should have been home. During the following winter I rested up and felt fairly well in the spring of 1924, but my health gave way during the season and I had to go home. Now I realize I made my mistake in playing the 1923 season.

This statement tended to contradict the Chicago Tribune of May 11, 1923, which stated, “The little shortstop declared today that he has entirely recovered from his illness.” Furthermore, if Hollocher’s health problems began “in the spring of 1923,” how did that account for his earlier difficulties in 1920?

In Hollocher’s later years he operated a tavern in suburban Richmond Heights for a while, then became an investigator for the Prosecuting Attorney’s office in St. Louis County while moonlighting as a night watchman at a drive-in movie. In March of 1939 he divorced his first wife, the former Jane Allen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann. Several weeks later he married the former Mrs. Ruth Fleming. Then came the sad, gruesome finale.

When news of Hollocher’s suicide broke, the Chicago Herald-American commented:

The death of Charley Hollocher at his own hand came as no surprise to baseball folks who knew the one-time Cub shortstop when he was rated the top man at his position in the big leagues. Even when he was breaking in at Portland, Oregon, Hollocher  was a moody, neurotic boy.

Hollocher’s mysterious malady was obviously very real to him, because it drove him to self-destruction. His widow stated that he had been complaining of severe abdominal pains when last seen alive. At the inquest, St. Louis County Coroner John C. O’Connell concurred with the police that Hollocher’s death was an apparent suicide, and Charlie was gradually forgotten. Whether his sickness was something unknown to medical science of that era or largely psychosomatic will probably never be known. Equally, one can only speculate on the great career that might have been.

Baseball players have participated in all U. S. military conflicts from the Civil War (Doug Allison of the Cincinnati Red Stockings) to the Viet Nam War (Al Bumbry of the Baltimore Orioles). Some major league players appeared in more than one war. Arlie Pond, for example, was a medical officer in the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurrection, and returned to active duty as Assistant Surgeon General of the Army in World War I. Hank Gowdy was in both World Wars, and Ted Williams saw his career interrupted by service in both World War II and the Korean War.

According to available information, six men who played in the major leagues lost their lives in foreign wars. The last was Air Force Major Robert Neighbors, who died in North Korea in August 1952. It was his second war, as he also had served in World War II. In fact, the military had become more of a career for him than baseball, because he had only played in 7 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1939. Still, that brief fling (only 11 at bats) must have given him some special status. After all, in a game against the Red Sox on September 21, 1939, he had matched home runs with Boston playing manager Joe Cronin.

Neighbors was one of three American League rookies in 1939 who later died in overseas conflicts. Harry O’Neill, who caught one game for the Athletics, died in the World War II assault on Iwo Jima in 1945. Elmer Gedeon, outfielder for the Senators in 5 games in 1939, died in France in 1944.

In France a generation earlier, two former AL players gave up their lives. Alex Burr, who had played the outfield for the Yankees in one game in 1914, died on his 25th birthday, November 1, 1918, just 10 days before the armistice. A month before, on October 5, Robert Troy died at Meuse. He had pitched and lost one game for the Tigers in 1912. Ironically, he had been born in Germany.

Also in October 1918, Eddie Grant lost his life in the Argonne Forest. The Harvard graduate was a captain of an infantry battalion and was hit by a shell. He had never been a real star, but had played steadily for 4 teams between 1905 and 1915, and was by far the best known former player to die in military combat.

*Assisted by Tom Shea

A number of players served in the military in peacetime. It is interesting to note that Oscar Charleston, the great Negro League star recently named to the Hall of Fame, was in the Army 1911-15, and became a recognized player while assigned in the Philippines. “Barnicle Bill” Posedel, who hurled for the Dodgers and Braves and later became a pitching coach, spent 4 years in the Navy as a youngster, 1925-29, and then had another 4-year stretch during World War II, 1941-45.

Several former players had careers in the military. However, most of these had just token baseball careers. There was Dave Wills, for example. He was a medical student at the University of Virginia in 1899 playing on the college nine when the Louisville National League club came through for a spring exhibition game. Manager Fred Clarke and Honus Wagner were impressed with Wills, and when the Louisville first baseman was injured, they talked the youngster into joining the club. He quit school and played 24 games for Louisville in 1899.

Wills’ father was quite upset that he would quit school to play ball, even in the majors. His feeling was “If you’re going to quit school, you ought to join the military.” Willis hit only .223 with Louisville so decided to join the Marines in that Spanish-American War period. He stayed in the Marines, serving as Paymaster in the European Theater with the rank of major in World War I. After 20 years in the Marines he left to go into business. Upon his death in 1959 he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

To the best of our knowledge, the only graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy to play major league ball was Nemo Gaines. He was a star pitcher for the Annapolis team, and upon graduation in 1921, was given special military leave to play baseball. He pitched in 4 games for the Senators before resuming his Navy career. He retired from the Navy in 1946 as a captain.

A rival player at the U. S. Military Academy in 1920-21 was Walter French, but he did not graduate. In addition to being a baseball and basketball letterman, he won recognition at West Point as an All American football player. He left the Academy in the fall of 1922, and had a fling at pro football. The next spring he went south with Connie Mack’s Athletics but was sent out for some baseball experience. He was called up that fall and played 6 years with the Athletics as a substitute outfielder and pinch hitter. He had a .303 career batting average in the majors and made a brief appearance in the 1929 World Series against the Cubs. He did not give up on football, however, playing with the powerful Pottsville Maroons in the NFL in 1925.

French played baseball several years in the high minors, leading the Southern Association three years in hits, 193 1-33. He was a good bunter and a very fast runner. In 1936 he went back to the Military Academy to coach baseball. At the start of World War II he went on active duty with the Army as a reserve officer. He continued on active duty after the war in the Air Force. He retired in late 1959 as a light colonel. He now lives in retirement near San Jose, California. Colonel French had a heart attack in 1972, but says he is now holding his own. The former star of baseball, basketball and football now keeps in shape by playing golf three days a week.

The only 10-year man in the majors who made the military his post-playing career was Larry French, southpaw hurler with the Pirates, Cubs, and Dodgers 1929-42. He was a steady winner who never quite reached the 20-victory mark. However he topped Carl Hubbell in career shutouts 40 to 36. French had some exciting games, working in the Cubs’ pennant drive of 1935, the World Series that fall, and the Series again in 1938 with the Cubs and the Dodgers in 1941.

Ironically, his greatest game was his last one, on September 23, 1942. He beat the Phils 6-0 on a 1-hitter. French faced only 27 batters as Nick Etten, who singled off the glove of Pee Wee Reese, was doubled up on the next play. He finished the season with a 1 5-4 record for the top percentage, and he had an ERA of 1.83. No other player ended his playing career on such a high note.

At the end of 1942 French received his commission as a lieutenant (junior grade) in the Navy Supply Corps. He was ordered to the Naval Shipyard in Brooklyn. He had 197 career victories and hoped to pitch for the Dodgers on weekends and on his own time. The Navy turned him down and he never had an opportunity to go for 200 victories. He participated in the Normandy landing in June 1944 and the following year he was in the Pacific for the Okinawa invasion.

He was released from active duty in November 1945 and shortly started an automobile agency in the Los Angeles area. He considered returning to baseball in 1946, but felt his age (38) was against him after the long layoff. He stayed in the Naval Reserve and after the Korean War broke out, he was recalled to active duty in January 1951. He was promoted and given important assignments and stayed in the Navy. He recalls that “In 1960, about ten minutes after Mazeroski hit the home run to win the World Series for Pittsburgh, I received a collect call notifying me of my selection for captain.”

In 1965 he became Commanding Officer, Navy Regional Finance Center, in San Diego, the largest such center in the Navy. He remained there until his retirement at age 62 in December 1969. He had 27 years as a Reserve Officer, including 22 on active duty. He jokingly refers to his retirement from the Navy as “statutory senility.” He continued to live in San Diego with his wife Thelma, playing golf, squash, and gardening. He keeps his hand in baseball activities by organizing old-timer games for the San Diego Padres. He also serves as president of the Board of Directors of the San Diego Federal Credit Union. He annually visits the foreign offices, including one in Japan. This serves as a reminder to him of his major league tour there in the fall of 1931.

Larry French combined the best of two careers, one in baseball and one in the Navy. He never won 200 games and he never made rear admiral, but he was in there pitching all the way. Even Abner Doubleday would have been proud of him.

“These men couldn’t do what I did because they didn’t have the chance. But they dreamed the dreams I did when they were 15, too. And they taught me and they gave me the combat training so that I could do it.” – Willie Mays on the Birmingham Black Barons.1

Performance can mean two things. Typically, when a baseball player is recognized for on-field performance, it’s about success, execution, achievements, and excellence. But performance can also refer to spectacle, exhibition, presentation, putting on a show. Regardless of which definition one chooses, Willie Mays was one of baseball’s greatest on-field performers.

At a time when major-league outfielders were taught to field groundballs on one knee, Mays charged them as if he was playing shortstop. He wore caps a size too big for his head so they would fly off when he ran the bases or chased down a fly ball, creating the illusion that he was moving faster. Every kid is taught the proper way to field a fly ball, but Mays was just as likely to catch the ball at his waist, over his shoulder, or barehanded. He made hard plays look easy, but also made easy plays look hard to keep fans in the stands on the edges of their seats, and he learned it all years before he ever stepped on a major-league diamond. “In the Negro Leagues, we were all entertainers,” Mays reminisced. “And my job was to give the fans something to talk about each game.”2

Mays was a multisport star in high school. In the fall, he was the starting quarterback for the Baby Hornets of Fairfield Industrial High School, a team that scrimmaged against college players. As a freshman, he made the team as a halfback, capable of breaking tackles and outrunning anyone on the field. The coach moved him under center because of his powerful arm and long fingers that let him effortlessly hurl accurate passes “sixty, seventy, eighty yards on a line,” according to a childhood friend’s recollection.3

In the winter he took his dominant athleticism to the basketball court, where he played with a quickness that few defenders could counter and a skyhook similar to the signature move that would take Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the Basketball Hall of Fame decades later. Mays earned the top spot on the Birmingham World newspaper’s all-county basketball team after winning the Jefferson County scoring title by averaging just over 20 points per game and leading his team to a state championship.4

But even though it was only his third-best sport, it was understood that Willie’s future was in baseball. The Negro Leagues provided opportunity for Black athletes that neither football nor basketball could. With the exception of the Harlem Globetrotters, professional teams in both sports featured all-White rosters.5 “There were no blacks in the majors, but guys were making money in Negro Leagues,” Mays said. But then his outlook and his prospects changed. “It became real. I was in high school, about 15, when Jackie [Robinson] played his first year in Montreal.”6

The only other job the teenage Mays pursued was washing dishes. He was hired by a cafeteria but walked away after only a few hours. He went home and told his father, William Howard Mays Sr., that baseball was his only career plan. The elder Mays, a mill worker whose quickness and reflexes playing outfield in the semipro Industrial League had earned him the nickname Cat, accepted his son’s decision. “You play baseball,” he agreed, “and I’ll make sure you eat.”7

Fairfield Industrial High didn’t have a baseball team, so instead boys played on community teams. As a 10-year-old, Willie held his own on teams with 15-year-olds. As a seventh-grader, he joined Industrial League games when a team was missing players or the score was lopsided enough that neither team cared if a teen patrolled left field alongside Cat and other grown men. So, against other high-schoolers his own age, Mays was a force of nature.

Initially, Cat Mays had plans for his son to be a shortstop in the mold of Willie Wells. The legendary middle infielder was considered one of the greatest defensive shortstops ever but also won three home-run titles and led the Negro National League in all Triple Crown categories in 1930. That plan didn’t work out, however, because the boy’s arm was too strong. William “Cap” Brown, a first baseman for the Fairfield Gray Sox, a local sandlot team that showcased players who might one day play in the Industrial League, remembered, “He used to throw the ball down to me so hard it made my hand numb. I said, ‘We’ve got to put this joker in the outfield.’”8

It’s easy to understand how a coach would see the pitching mound as the best outlet to harness the teenager’s rocket-like throwing ability – and, in fact, several major-league scouts would feel the same in the years to come – but it was the last place Cat wanted his son to be. “He didn’t want me pitching or catching,” Mays explained. “He always tried to make sure I didn’t get hurt, and he wanted me to play every day. You can’t play every day if you pitch or catch.”9

The elder Mays also understood that a pitcher was vulnerable to the whims of his coach. An arm injury could end a pitcher’s career in the blink of an eye, and Cat didn’t trust high-school coaches, community volunteers, or sandlot managers to prioritize his son’s longevity above their own short-term success. Most of the kids on those teams were destined to a life of backbreaking labor in steel mills or coal mines, so what difference would it make if a teenager tore some ligaments in his shoulder throwing too many pitches on the way to winning a regional championship?

Cat Mays understood that young Black men were disposable in America. After a game for the Fairfield Gray Sox, a local sandlot team meant to showcase players who might one day play in the Industrial League, Cat saw his concern justified. Manager Cle Holmes put Willie on the mound, where he pitched nine innings and hit the game-winning home run, only to collapse from exhaustion after crossing the plate. Cat laid out an ultimatum: If you want Willie Mays on your team, keep him off the mound. Holmes put the teen in center field, where his legend grew beyond Jefferson County, even to other states.

In Tennessee, the lore of Willie Mays reached the ear of Beck Shepherd, owner of the Chattanooga Choo Choos of the Negro Southern League. The team served as a minor-league feeder for the Birmingham Black Barons. Shepherd offered a contract for the 1948 season, but Willie couldn’t join the team until he finished the school year. Cat drove his son to Chattanooga and dropped him off to join the team for the summer. Willie was initially penciled in at shortstop until he fielded a grounder in the hole and his throw took off the first baseman’s glove. He was moved to center field.

When the Birmingham Black Barons visited Chattanooga for a game against the Black Lookouts, Mays spoke with manager Lorenzo “Piper” Davis in a hotel lobby. The veteran infielder had heard rumors of the teenage phenom but had more insight into the boy, having played with and against Cat Mays since the two were in high school. He warned Willie about losing his eligibility to play high-school sports if he was caught playing baseball for money, but the teenager didn’t care. Understanding that the phenom had chosen his career path, Davis told Mays to have his father contact him if he was serious about playing ball for money.

In a June doubleheader in Memphis, Mays got attention after going a combined 5-for-7 with a home run as the Choo Choos swept the hometown Blue Sox.10 The same article that praised Mays indicated that Chattanooga would be playing in several Midwest cities in the coming week, such as “Ipsilanti [sic], Detroit, Dayton, South Bend, and Grand Rapids.” Bad weather on that trip forced several games to be canceled, which meant players, who were earning a percentage of the gate, didn’t get paid. Mays would later recall eating “stale bread and sardines … in Dayton, Ohio, at the time – I said to myself, if this ever gets over, I’m quitting.”11 When the team returned to Tennessee, Willie asked for bus fare home and never returned, ending his tenure as a Choo Choo after roughly a month.

Birmingham needed a fourth outfielder, and shortly after Mays returned from Chattanooga, Cat took his son to Rickwood Field for a tryout. Davis sent Willie out to shag fly balls. “I heard he had a good arm,” Davis recounted. “Then I saw him throw.”12 Any questions Davis had about whether Mays belonged on the team vanished.

Officially, Mays made his first start in the second game of a Fourth of July doubleheader against the Memphis Red Sox. According to legend, after his impressive tryout, Mays sat on the bench with orders from Davis to “watch. Watch what’s going on.” After a Black Barons win in the first game, Davis wrote “MAYS, LF” batting seventh in his lineup card for the second half. When some players complained, Davis gave them the option of “take off the uniform if you want to.”13 After the game, Mays was offered a contract.

Unofficially, it’s likely that he took part in some exhibition games played away from Birmingham prior to that doubleheader, using a fake name to preserve his eligibility to play high-school sports. The start shouldn’t have surprised anyone and if it was a secret that Mays was on the team, it was a poorly kept one considering that the morning of the game, the Birmingham News reported:

Willie Mays can pound the ball. … Outfielder Mays, a youngster who joined the club recently, shows promise of being a topnotch player, too. He can field with the best of them and packs plenty of dynamite for a man of his size.14

Some players took issue with Mays getting a start, primarily Jimmy Zapp, the regular left fielder. The doubleheader marked the end of the first half of the season, and Birmingham had clinched a playoff spot by finishing with the best record in the Negro American League. While the players saw the potential in Mays to be a superstar of tomorrow, he couldn’t hit a breaking pitch today. A playoff team needed production, not potential.

Mays signed a contract that paid him $250 per month, plus a $50 bonus for every month that he batted over .300.15 He wouldn’t earn the bonus during his first season, but Mays managed to win over his teammates with his infectious energy and defensive mastery. “Mays was a happy-go-lucky kid,” Zapp once said. “He didn’t act like a kid on the field. That was the difference. He acted like a veteran on that ball field. Other than that, Mays was a baby.”16

Davis would put him in as a defensive replacement for Bobby Robinson in center field, and when Robinson broke his leg, Mays became the regular starter. Even when he was batting below .200, he made an impact with his glove and arm.

First baseman Joe Scott recalled chasing a hit into the gap in right-center field. He got to the ball, but his momentum was taking him away from the diamond. Mays had also been running down the ball, and Scott relied on his teenaged teammate. “I sure couldn’t throw as well as him … so I just flipped it to him so he could throw it to second.”17 The runner retreated to first and settled for a single rather than challenge the high-schooler’s arm.

Mays became so adept at covering the outfield that his teammates would get caught taking it easy. During one game, Davis chewed out left fielder Zapp and right fielder Ed Steele in the dugout for “running that boy’s legs off.”18 When Mays was in center, the two corner outfielders played closer to the lines and for every ball in the gaps, they’d yell, “Come on, Willie!” and watch the teenager do what he did best.

On his first road trip, Mays learned that playing ball was not all it took to be a ballplayer. Davis did all he could to protect his prospect, having him room with the following day’s starter since the pitcher wouldn’t be out carousing the night before a start. “We had 25 guys on the club, and all 25 would put me to bed every night. I didn’t get to meet many girls that way, but I got plenty of sleep,” Mays later joked in his Hall of Fame speech.19

Davis and the rest of his teammates didn’t want Mays to get a reputation. As quickly as word of his talent could spread, rumors of laziness, belligerence, complacency, drunkenness, or any other negative trait that White scouts might use to justify not giving him an opportunity to play in the majors would proliferate even faster. While some of them would one day play for White teams, the Black Barons recognized that Mays was positioned to do something none of them ever could, and they weren’t going to let him spoil it.

Word of Mays’ talent was, in fact, spreading. Two weeks after making his official debut, he was the third Birmingham hitter spotlighted in an article previewing a weekend series against the Cleveland Buckeyes in Ohio. After touting Artie Wilson, the Black Barons’ shortstop, who was leading all of baseball with a .412 batting average, and Davis, who was hitting .373 and leading the team to a playoff berth as a first-year manager, the Newark Advocate predicted that “the new utility outfielder, Willie Mays, only turning 17 years of age, will be a sensation within the present baseball season.”20 When the team rolled into Chicago, Abe Saperstein was in the stands. The founder of the Harlem Globetrotters was now scouting for Bill Veeck’s Cleveland Indians, but also had connections to the New York Giants. Davis made certain that Saperstein, who was there to report on Wilson, knew about Mays.

Among the highlights Saperstein may have caught was a long drive by Chicago American Giants catcher Quincy Trouppe to deep center field. He rounded first and sprinted into second for what he thought was an easy double, only to be tagged out by a waiting Wilson. “Mays got it,” he informed the dumbfounded batter.21

A month earlier, Trouppe had contacted Mays after getting a hot tip about an up-and-coming outfielder with a tremendous arm. He offered him a tryout in Chicago. When Cat Mays sent the American Giants a letter asking for $300 a month, the team made clear that no teenager was worth that much money and passed. When Trouppe’s hit went to the wall in center, Mays saw a chance to show what he was worth. He bolted in all the way from left, hollering at Robinson to let him take it, and rifled the ball to Wilson for the out, leaving Trouppe to reflect how the American Giants had let him slip through their fingers.

In Cleveland, Davis decided it was time for Mays to learn a new lesson. Mays dug in against veteran right-hander Chet Brewer, who drilled the young player with a fastball to the arm and sent him sprawling to the dirt. Davis shouted as he walked down from the third-base coaching box and even gave his crying outfielder a little kick, but didn’t make any effort to help him to his feet.

“These men gave me my combat training,” Mays reflected decades later. “And what was combat training in the Negro Leagues? It was getting knocked down and either laying in the dirt and crying or getting up again.”22

“Boy, do you see first base?” Davis barked. “Get up and go down there, and the first chance you get, you steal second, and then third.” Mays did as he was told and scored on a fly ball. When he returned to the dugout, Davis told him, “That’s how you handle a pitcher.”23

However, Davis may have been the one handling the pitcher. The two were old friends and former teammates and, though he never admitted it, it’s more than likely Davis asked Brewer to plunk his rookie to see how Mays would react.24 Both Brewer and Davis told this story for many years, laughing off the suggestion that they’d been in cahoots.

During a game against the Kansas City Stars, a feeder team for the Monarchs, another Negro League legend cast his eyes on Mays for the first time and saw the potential for greatness. Stars manager Cool Papa Bell, years past his prime, recognized much of his own playing style, his speed and defensive range, in Mays. But the teen had a powerful swing capable of clearing the most distant fences, which Bell never possessed, and while Bell was certainly capable of throwing out baserunners from the outfield, his arm strength paled compared with that of Mays. He begged the Monarchs to sign Mays away from Birmingham and let him tutor the young outfielder for a year.

Monarchs owner Tom Baird refused. The Ku Klux Klan member, who had purchased the team from founder J.L. Wilkinson earlier in the year, didn’t trust Black players from the South25 and wasn’t going to spend hundreds of dollars for the services of an Alabama outfielder who hadn’t even started his junior year of high school.

When the Monarchs and Black Barons met in August, the Monarchs proved too much for Birmingham and won the series, which led to a playoff series between the two for a bid to the Negro League World Series. But Mays showed that his hitting was improving. He slapped a leadoff single to start the third inning of the first game of the series and scored on a single by Wilson. And his talent was beginning to draw the attention of “White folks’ ball.”

The Black Barons derived their name from the city’s White minor-league team, the Birmingham Barons, whose name was inspired by the coal and steel barons who built their wealth on the labor of families in and around Birmingham. The teams shared Rickwood Field, though the Barons owned the ballpark and the Black Barons paid them rent.

The Barons were the Double-A Southern Association affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. One might think this would give the Red Sox some sort of edge on courting Mays, but the team seemed to have no interest.

Barons GM Eddie Glennon pleaded with Boston’s front office to send scouts who could watch Mays in action. They could arrive in town a few days early, take in a Black Barons game, and still have time to watch the Barons. Al LaMacchia, then a pitcher for the Barons, saw Mays play while recovering from a broken wrist, but his enthusiastic scouting report failed to spark any interest.

The Red Sox went on to be the last major-league team to integrate when they added Pumpsie Green to their 1959 roster, 13 years after Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers. LaMacchia summed it up nicely: “You’d have to be a horseshit scout to pass up Willie Mays.”26

On their way home from a season-ending series against the American Giants, the team took a detour through Missouri. The Indians were playing the St. Louis Browns and Satchel Paige was starting for Cleveland on September 4. The Browns were one of only two teams in the majors that still had segregated seating,27 so the team’s view may not have been the greatest, but for the first time in his life Willie Mays got to see a Black player in a major-league game.

The Monarchs came to Birmingham to open the NAL championship series. Since the teams’ last meeting, Mays had continued to improve his game. He was now the regular starting center fielder and had raised his average from .222 to .246 in the last month. Davis displayed his confidence in his rookie when he turned in his lineup card with “MAYS, CF” written in the cleanup spot.

The Black Barons won the series, with Mays contributing key hits, timely RBIs, and superlative defense. Birmingham went on to face the Homestead Grays, and though they lost the series four games to one, the one victory was a showcase for Willie Mays’s talents. He robbed Bob Thurman of a sure double at the center-field fence, threw out Buck Leonard going from first to third on a single, and hit a comebacker through the pitcher’s legs for the game-winning RBI in a 4-3 final.

With the season over and school back in session, many of Mays’ classmates were upset that their star quarterback had abandoned their team.28 The principal threatened to suspend Mays for not taking his education seriously, but Cat and Willie’s aunt intervened and forged an agreement that school would come first and Willie would play only weekend home games the following spring.

Before leaving to play winter ball in Puerto Rico, Davis made a special arrangement for his rookie star. A barnstorming tour featuring Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella would be coming through Birmingham, and Davis made sure Mays would be in center field for the locals. Mays doubled for one of his team’s only two hits but demonstrated that he belonged on the same field as two men who would win four of the next seven National League MVP Awards.29

There was no official Rookie of the Year Award in the Negro Leagues, but that didn’t stop Mays from being labeled such. The Alabama Tribune bestowed the title, and declared Davis the Manager of the Year.30 When the team opened training camp the following March, “Willie Mays, the rookie find of last season” was listed among the returning veterans,31 and when the school year was nearing its end, it was predicted that “fans will swarm into Rickwood tomorrow just to see the kid who was named as rookie of the year in 1948 turn on the astonishments.”32

As the 1949 season approached, the team had undergone a few changes, the biggest of which was that Artie Wilson’s contract had been sold to Cleveland. That move prompted a protest by the New York Yankees, which, in turn, played a role in the team that ultimately landed Mays.33 The other big change was to be expected. Mays was the starting center fielder with Robinson now in left.

While front offices’ opinions on the likelihood of his making the majors differed, Mays was known to every team. Even while playing only weekend home games, “Birmingham’s school-going centerfielder,” as the Pittsburgh Courier identified him, was making national news for making “a perfect throw [that] cut down [Jesse] Douglass [sic] at the plate trying to score after Lonnie Summers hoisted out.”34

The Sunday before the final three days of the school year, the Birmingham News reminded fans that Mays, who had “become one of the sensations of Negro baseball … and many figure he is marked for the majors in another year or so,” would “become a full-fledged Baron, eligible to play games on the road as well as at home” after “school is out the coming Wednesday.”35 A charity game to raise money for a hospital to serve Birmingham’s Black community was promoted with the promise that “fans will have a chance to see the sensational Willie Mays perform in the Black Barons centerfield. … Many observers believe Mays is a clinch for future major league stardom.”36

With school out, Mays could join the team for its Eastern road trip, where he would play center field for the first time and hit his first career home run, an inside-the-parker, in the New York Cubans’ home ballpark, the Polo Grounds. Despite having been aware of Mays for almost a year, the New York Giants declined the chance to talk to him yet as they knew he was still untouchable. Major-league rules didn’t allow teams to sign players until after they graduated from high school, but that didn’t stop teams from looking at Mays.

Bill Maughn, a scout for the Boston Braves, remembered watching Mays throw out a runner on a ball fielded by Robinson. A batter banged a hit off the scoreboard in Rickwood Field, and Robinson scooped it up. Mays ran over yelling for the ball and “be-doggoned if the left fielder didn’t shovel pass like a football player,” he said with amazement. “The centerfielder threw out the runner trying to go from first to third.”37

The White Sox also took interest when John Donaldson, a former Negro League pitcher and the first Black scout hired by a major-league team, rated Mays above his other top prospects, Ernie Banks and Elston Howard.

Glennon finally cornered a scout who’d come to assess the Barons and their competition and persuaded him to stick around one more day to see Mays. The scout graded Mays with an A or A+ in all five categories: hitting, power, running, throwing, and fielding. Scouts rarely gave A+ ratings, which translated to a prediction that the prospect would be a “superstar” and “a consistent MVP candidate and the best at his respective position in the major leagues”38 in any category, much less all five.

The Red Sox did eventually make a move to get Mays, though indirectly. General manager Joe Cronin approached Davis and offered to buy his contract with an agreement that he could finish the 1949 season with the Black Barons and join Boston in 1950. The idea was that Mays would be more likely to go to a team where his mentor could be his roommate in the minor leagues.39

By mid-June, Mays was batting .421. When the Black Barons traveled to Kansas City for a rematch of the previous year’s NAL championship, the Kansas City Star wrote, “Major league scouts have labeled Mays as the greatest young prospect they have seen in action.”40

Mays was held out of the 1949 East-West All-Star Game, as was the Monarchs’ Howard. Both players’ owners already had suitors for their contracts and worried that putting them on the biggest stage possible ran the risk of souring any deals in the works.

Meanwhile, Artie Wilson, whom the Indians and Yankees had been fighting over earlier in the season, was now with neither team. Instead, he was in California, playing for the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League.41 The dispute had been ugly and complicated, and Birmingham owner Tom Hayes came out of the experience embarrassed and irate with the Yankees brass. He vowed to never work with them again. In fact, if he had the opportunity to gain some revenge by refusing to sell them a highly prized prospect no matter what they offered and, even better, sending said prospect to another New York team out of spite, that was exactly the sort of thing he would do.

When summer ended, Mays returned to school and the baseball season concluded without a Negro League World Series. Again, Mays proved himself capable of playing with major-league stars in the barnstorming game against Robinson and Campanella, who called Branch Rickey after the game and urged him to send Dodgers scouts to assess Mays. He was told Wid Matthews, one of Rickey’s most trusted scouts, already had and returned the verdict that Mays couldn’t hit a curveball.42 Matthews, who’d labeled Jackie Robinson a “hot dog” and expressed “reservations” about his on-field demeanor when he’d scouted him in 1946,43 and who, as general manager of the Chicago Cubs, was accused of being slow to integrate the team, earned a reputation “that he didn’t care for Black players.”44

That winter and the subsequent spring were just a countdown to graduation. Davis left for spring training with the Red Sox. He wasn’t allowed to dress and shower with the White players, instead using the visitors’ locker room on practice days, and the umpires’ on game days. He was assigned to their Double-A affiliate in Scranton, Pennsylvania – the team to which Boston hoped to send Mays – where he wasn’t allowed to stay in the same hotels as his White teammates.

On May 15, a week and a half before Mays graduated, the Red Sox released Davis to avoid paying a bonus to Birmingham. Boston bought his contract for $7,500 with the agreement that Hayes would get another $7,500 if he remained with the franchise beyond the 15th. There was no guarantee that having the man who’d become like a second father to Mays on their payroll would have landed them the phenom, but cutting that man over a few thousand dollars and letting him return to Birmingham and tell the Black Barons of his treatment guaranteed that the dream outfield of Ted Williams and Willie Mays would never be.

Mays returned to the Black Barons as a full-time player, but everyone knew it would be for a limited time. “The big question on the club right now is can the Black Barons keep the youthful Willie Mays all summer?” wrote the Birmingham News.45 “Mays may not be making many more appearances with the Black Barons, as it is known that several big league scouts are watching him closely. The Boston Braves and Chicago White Sox are reputed to have the inside track.”46

Like the Red Sox, the Braves lost their chance to field a future Hall of Fame pairing in the outfield of Mays and Hank Aaron when the team refused to approve Maughn’s request for $15,000 to purchase the contract from Hayes. The team was also considering Mays as a pitcher, which may have left him less inclined to sign.

On June 11, the Black Barons were on their annual East Coast road trip. Their bus entered the Holland Tunnel in New York City, but it didn’t come back out. One by one, players began to smell smoke. The driver pulled over and everyone leapt out before flames consumed the vehicle that had shown Mays the world for two summers, along with their uniforms and equipment. When the team reached the ballpark, they were forced to borrow the Cubans’ gray road uniforms and wear them inside out.

An obituary of Black Baron first baseman Alonzo Perry identified him “as the player the New York Giants came to scout and discovered Willie Mays.” He related the story that “Carl Hubbell of the Giants began following me. He saw Willie and asked me who was the kid we had in centerfield. I told him ‘Willie Mays.’”47 This was a Giants’ myth, repeated often enough to almost seem true. But the notion that Mays was “accidentally” scouted or that Hubbell was oblivious about one of the most coveted prospects in baseball is laughable.

Rather, the huge home-run hitter Perry provided cover for Hubbell, who’d been well aware of Mays for almost two years and had seen him play on multiple occasions. Hubbell worried about word spreading that the Giants were close to signing Mays, so instead muddied the waters by letting it get out that they were interested in Perry, giving a reason for their scouts’ sudden interest in Black Barons games.

Ed Montague was one of several big-league scouts in Birmingham for a high-school all-star game on Friday, June 16. During the game, Maughn tipped him off to check out the Black Barons’ center fielder the following day.

Montague had never seen Mays play before, and since there were no records of his being scouted because the Giants wanted to keep their interest in Mays a secret, the scout may have believed he’d discovered the future superstar. “I had no inkling of Willie Mays,” Montague later claimed, “but during batting and fielding practice, my eyes almost popped out of my head. … This was the greatest young ballplayer I had ever seen in my scouting career.”48

Willie Mays played on Saturday, hitting a single and a double with four RBIs against the Cubans, unaware that he was playing his last Negro League game as his future was being negotiated while he was on the field. The Giants agreed to pay $15,000 – $10,000 to Hayes and $5,000 to Mays – to acquire the 19-year-old, reported as “a record price paid for a Negro player.”49 Montague approached a freshly showered Mays in the clubhouse, awed by the towel-clad player’s physique, and asked if he would like to play in for the Giants.

The rest of the Black Barons found out the next day when their center fielder wasn’t in the clubhouse to suit up for Sunday’s doubleheader, and the newspapers reported later in the week that “the New York Giants have purchased the contract of Willie Mays, sensational Birmingham Black Barons centerfielder.”50

Though he left the team and the league behind him, Mays would never leave the lessons he’d learned, and for more than two decades, he would show major-league fans and owners all that segregation had made them miss.

JAKE BELL is a former sports journalist, a children’s author, and was briefly a media relations intern in the press box of the Milwaukee Brewers, but now he writes and edits government documents. He lives in Baltimore, 2.8 miles from Camden Yards.

Author’s note

This has been the most frustrating, most interesting, and most fun project I have tackled for SABR to date. As with much Negro League-related research, records don’t always exist and one is reliant on oral histories and imperfect memories. Timelines don’t always match up, details change from one telling to another, statements can be misunderstood, and misstatements get repeated by others. For example, Mays tells a reporter he’s been playing baseball professionally since he was 14, referring to the first time he was paid to play a game with the Industrial League, and the reporter assumes he means that he joined the Black Barons at 14, spreading the story that Birmingham had a 15-year-old center fielder in the 1948 World Series, which gets stated as a fact by Buck Leonard and others in later interviews and becomes a throwaway line in Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary.

The epitome of this would be the tale Mays has often shared – and that some readers may have been upset to see excluded – of hitting a double in his first ever at-bat against Satchel Paige during a game against the Kansas City Monarchs in Memphis.

The story goes that after Mays slid into second, Paige asked his third baseman to let him know “when that little boy comes back up.” When Mays later walked to the plate for his next at-bat, Paige informed him that he was “not going to trick you. I’m going throw you three fastballs and you’re going to sit down.”51 He did exactly that, much to Willie’s delight.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear when – and if we’re being honest, if – this showdown took place. Paige signed with the Cleveland Indians on July 7, 1948, three days after Mays made his Black Barons debut. Paige was also pitching for the Kansas City Stars, not the Monarchs, in 1948. This seems a minor detail, but it points to the larger problem of the story’s evolution.

Sometimes the double comes off a fastball, sometimes a breaking ball. In an earlier autobiography, Mays implied he got his hit off Paige’s “hesitation pitch” and that he struck out on three swings in each of his ensuing three at-bats, but “I never saw a fastball from him, only those crazy curves and other soft stuff.”52 Even earlier, in his 1972 autobiography, Mays says only, “I got to hit against Paige one game. I was one for two.”53

It’s possible Mays and Paige faced off, perhaps when Paige was barnstorming and Mays was playing for a community team or an Industrial League squad, but not as a Black Baron and a Monarch, respectively, and certainly not in the playoffs, as some versions of the story suggest. It seems likely that the retellings of the event were influenced by Buck O’Neil’s story of Paige facing Josh Gibson in the 1942 Negro League World Series.

I’ve done my best to reconcile conflicting timelines and acknowledge some of the discrepancies in the endnotes.

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Baseball-Reference.com, Seamheads.com, and The Sporting News via Paper of Record, and consulted several other sources including:

Greene, Lee. Willie Mays: A Baseball Life (New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1972)

Holway, John. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2010)

Say Hey, Willie Mays!, directed by Nelson George, HBO Sports/Major League Baseball Productions/Company Name/Zipper Bros Films/Uninterrupted, 2022

NOTES

1  Owen Caufield, “Mays Says Thanks to Black Leagues,” Hartford Courant, June 25, 1981: D3.

2  James Hirsch, Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend (New York: Scribner, 2010), 46.

3  Hirsch, 30.

4  Hirsch, 30; Allen Barra, Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age (New York: Crown Archetype, 2013), 54.

5  Even as football and basketball began to integrate during Willie’s high-school years – in 1946 and 1950, respectively – the decision to pursue a career in baseball remained paramount due to football or basketball requiring that Mays play in college first.

6  Willie Mays and John Shea, 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020), 27.

7  Hirsch, 32.

8  Roger Shuler, “‘Say Hey Kid’ Has Little Good to Say about His Hometown,” Birmingham Post-Herald, September 17, 1981: B6.

9  Mays and Shea, 23.

10 “Choo Choos Take Pair from Memphis Blue Sox,” Chattanooga Daily Times, June 14, 1948: 10. The first record of Mays playing for Chattanooga appears roughly two months earlier in a recap of a game played in Macon, Georgia, between Chattanooga and the Newark Eagles: “Choo Choos, Champs in 12-Inning, 1-1 Tie,” Chattanooga Daily Times, April 20, 1948: 13. This article, however, raises some questions. For starters, it identifies the Eagles as “champions of the [Negro] American League.” The Eagles won the Negro League World Series in 1946, but moved from the American to the National League in 1947, where they finished second in the standings. Further, according to both Hirsch and Klima, Mays was not allowed to play for Chattanooga until after the school year ended, and April 19, 1948, was a Monday while school was in session. On pages 44-45 of Willie’s Boys, Klima quotes former Black Barons second baseman Tommy Sampson as claiming he included Mays on a traveling team after the 1947 season, and that they played the Eagles in Macon, but then he lost Mays to Chattanooga. In the same paragraph, Klima indicates, however, that Mays has no recollection of ever playing for Sampson.

11 Hirsch, 33.

12 John Klima, Willie’s Boys: The 1948 Birmingham Black Barons, the Last Negro League World Series, and the Making of a Baseball Legend (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2008), 91.

13 Willie Mays and Lou Sahidi, Say Hey: The Autobiography of Willie Mays (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 23; Hirsch, 43; Klima, 97. While Klima’s book correctly identifies Memphis as the opponent, the others have Mays debuting against the Cleveland Buckeyes with starting pitcher Chet Brewer. That matchup didn’t happen until a few weeks later.

14 “Black Barons Face Red Sox in Twin Bill,” Birmingham News, July 4, 1948: 18.

15 Mays’ contract is archived at the Memphis Public Library and Information Center. In 1972 Mays claimed these amounts were $70 per month with a $5 bonus every month he batted over .300. Willie Mays and Charles Einstein, Willie Mays: My Life In and Out of Baseball (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972), 69.

16 Klima, 105.

17 Klima, 99.

18 Klima, 152.

19 Joseph Durso, “A Legend Named Willie,” New York Times, August 6, 1979: C6.

20 “Barons, First Half Negro Champions, Here Thursday,” Newark (Ohio) Advocate, July 20, 1948: 9. This included both the National League and the American League.

21 Klima, 108.

22 Caufield, “Mays Says Thanks.”

23 Hirsch, 46

24 When Mays relates this story, the plunking comes in his second at-bat as retaliation for a home run in his first at-bat. Mays’ only official home run of the 1948 season was hit off Brewer, but it came in a later game.

25 This bit of racist rhetoric was rooted in the practice of selling slaves who acted disobediently or harbored any other trait a slaveowner might find objectionable to other plantations to the south, where treatment would be more harsh the farther south one went. This practice was the origin of the threat to “sell someone down the river,” as Mississippi was commonly known to be the worst state for treatment of slaves. Years after emancipation, racists began positing that Blacks living in Deep South were less intelligent, less capable, less civilized, less whatever-nonsense-they-wanted-to-spout than their Northern counterparts because they were descended from what they perceived as the worst stock of slaves.

26 Klima, 144.

27 The Washington Senators were the other team.

28 Though he wasn’t eligible to play any longer, when the team would play out-of-state games against teams that wouldn’t recognize him, Mays would sometimes put on a different jersey and use a fake name and throw a 50-yard touchdown or two.

29 Mays would win one of the other three.

30 Emory O. Jackson, “Hits and Bits,” Alabama Tribune (Montgomery), December 31, 1948: 8.

31 “Black Barons Open Spring Drills March 21,” Birmingham News, March 6, 1949: C-5.

32 “Black Barons and Buckeyes Collide Today,” Birmingham News, May 22, 1949: C-6.

33 Or, more accurately, the teams that didn’t.

34 “Powell’s Seven Hit Pitching Wins for Barons,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1949: 24; “Black Barons Lose, 6-2, 4-1,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 14, 1949: 24.

35 “Black Barons and Buckeyes Collide Today,” Birmingham News, May 22, 1949: C-6.

36 “Black Barons to Play Negro Hospital Benefit Contest,” Birmingham News, May 24, 1949: 20. On a side note, the article mentions that “Jefferson County has no Negro hospital now. There are only 574 hospital beds for Negroes, of the county’s 2,286, although Negroes make up 34.7 percent of the county population.”

37 Klima, 195.

38 Klima, 199.

39 The signing may have also just been a publicity stunt. Since the color line had been broken, some teams were accused of having a quota for how many Black players they would sign, but Boston was beginning to attract attention for not signing any. The signing of Davis checked a box serving only to silence critics who “could no longer charge that the Red Sox organization had never signed an African American.” Bill Nowlin, ed., Pumpsie and Progress – The Red Sox, Race, and Redemption (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2010.)

40 “A Series with Barons,” Kansas City (Missouri) Star, June 26, 1949: 3B.

41 The dispute over Wilson’s contract had stemmed from a simple problem. The Yankees didn’t want Wilson – or any other Black players, frankly – but they also didn’t want talented players going to their competitors. When they got word that Cleveland was looking to buy Wilson, the Yankees claimed that Wilson and the Black Barons agreed to sell him to New York, which both the player and the owner denied. When the league awarded Wilson to New York, the Yankees turned around and sold him to Oakland. Cleveland had paid Hayes $15,000 for Wilson’s contract. When Wilson was instead given to New York, Hayes was unable to pay back the money until the Yankees paid him, which wasn’t for several months.

42 Campanella was frustrated by the shortsightedness of the scouting report. “Who ever heard of a 17-year-old hitting a curveball?” Bob Broeg, “Campy, a Man Paid to Play a Boy’s Game,” The Sporting News, July 24, 1971: 20.

43 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 368.

44 Klima, 22.

45 “Black Barons Play Memphis Wednesday,” Birmingham News, May 30, 1950: 23.

46 “Black Barons Battle Stars at Rickwood,” Birmingham News, June 7, 1950: 34.

47 Bill Lumpkin, “Memories Abundant of ‘El Gigante Azul,’” Birmingham Post-Herald, September 18, 1982: B3.

48 Joseph Durso, “A Shaking Rookie Who Became a Wonder,” New York Times, September 21, 1973: 29.

49 “Mays, Black Baron Star, Is Going Up,” Birmingham News, June 22, 1950: 18.

50 “Mays, Black Baron Star.”

51 This quote can be found in a GQ interview and two biographies. Jason Gay, “Willie Mays Comes Home,” Gentleman’s Quarterly, February 1, 2010; Mays and Shea, 35; Hirsch, 47.

52 Mays and Sahidi, 20.

53 Mays and Einstein, 32.

On a sunny day in the middle of December 1930, the House That Ruth Built was converted into a football stadium. Yankee Stadium hosted America’s Rivalry – Army vs. Navy – in a postseason football game “on the turf hallowed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.”1

This was nothing new. The first football game played at Yankee Stadium took place on October 20, 1923, as Syracuse defeated Pittsburgh, 3-0, before an estimated crowd of 25,000.2 Less than a week before, in baseball, the Yankees had beaten the New York Giants to win the 1923 World Series in six games. Ruth smashed three home runs, batted .368 and posted a 1.556 OPS as the Yankees captured their very first World Series crown. In the days afterward, the diamond was transformed into a gridiron.

Army’s football team also played at Yankee Stadium. On October 17, 1925, Army battled the University of Notre Dame in the Bronx before 80,000 fans. The two teams had started an annual rivalry in 1913, played at West Point. However, West Point’s Michie Stadium (capacity 38,000) could not hold the ever-larger crowds anticipated for this game, so in 1923 Army played Notre Dame at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The 1924 contest was held at the Polo Grounds; then, from 1925 until 1946 (except for 1930, when Notre Dame was the home team and the game was played in Chicago’s Soldier Field),3 Army battled the Fighting Irish in the Bronx at Yankee Stadium. However, it was not until 1930 that Army met its rival Navy at Yankee Stadium.

Army and Navy first met on the gridiron on November 29, 1890, playing on The Plain, the parade field at West Point.4 The tradition continued, off-and-on, through 1927. Then, on January 8, 1928, it was revealed that the superintendents of both academies (Rear Admiral Louis M. Nulton of Annapolis and Major General Edwin B. Winans of West Point) had met in Washington on January 7. The two schools were unable to reach an agreement pertaining to the three-year eligibility rule for their players and “mutually agreed that the Army-Navy game for 1928 [would] not be played.”5 The impasse was not prevented the next year, either, so the heretofore annual rivalry was canceled again in 1929.

So Army and Navy did not have each other marked on their schedules when the 1930 football season began. Economic struggles facing the country forced a change, however. America was in the Great Depression, with millions of people out of work. Thus, the two teams forgot their differences, so that “the hungry might be fed, the homeless sheltered!”6 Proceeds from an exhibition game were to benefit the Salvation Army, “for the relief of the unemployed.”7 A capacity crowd (reported at 70,000) welcomed the rivalry’s return on December 13, 1930. This was the first time the two teams had played each other at Yankee Stadium,8 and “there were no vacant patches visible anywhere in the towering steel stands or the broad reaches of the open bleachers.”9

Army sported a record of 8-1-1. Under their first-year head coach, Major Ralph Sasse, the Cadets had shut out their previous opponents six times, and in their one defeat (November 29 to Notre Dame), they had fallen 7-6.10 In those 10 games, Army had outscored its opponents by a total of 262 to 22.11

Navy had not beaten Army since 1921.12 Now, in their fifth season under head coach Bill Ingram, the Annapolis Eleven had won six of its 10 regular-season games, four by shutout. This game against Army was to be a defensive battle; scoring would be difficult and both sides knew it.

To start the pageantry, 1,200 cadets from West Point marched onto the field, “rolling steadily through the portal and spreading over the field to stand finally a motionless picture of military precision.”13 Then came the 2,000 midshipmen, who filled the entire field. The weather was “glorious.”14 The New York Times reported, “The trumpets and the flourish of military swank, the bands and the hoarse, never-ending shouting of the corps of cadets from West Point and the regiment of midshipmen from Annapolis completed the picture.”15

Approximately one hour before kickoff, “hostilities commenced”16 as the mascots, Army’s mule and Navy’s goat, were brought onto the field. Suddenly, the mule lifted a front foot and brought it down onto the goat’s head, causing the Navy mascot, although unharmed, to “beat a hasty retreat.”17

The team captains, Bob Bowstrom for Navy and Charles Humber18 for Army, met at midfield for the coin toss. Navy won19 and elected to defend the north goal. Army received the kickoff.

As anticipated, much of the game was played in a scoreless tie. West Point’s Thomas Kilday caught the opening kick at Army’s 7-yard line and raced 23 yards before being tackled. The offense drove down the field, ultimately reaching Navy’s 20-yard line before yielding the ball. Navy’s first possession started in disaster. The snap was sent skidding 19 yards behind the quarterback, where “the frantic [Lou] Kirn clutched it and fell on it one yard from his own goal.”20 For the rest of the first quarter, the two teams “see-sawed up and down the field in fitful spurts as if regulated by invisible green and red traffic lights.”21 Army gained yardage but could not push the ball over the goal line. The first quarter ended with Army in possession at midfield again, but neither team had scored.

In the second period, “the elevens waged a punting duel.”22 Navy could not move the ball. Each time Navy attempted a long pass, the ball was “slapped down by alert Army secondaries.”23 Army established one promising drive, but it ended in an interception. The ball had been in Navy’s territory for much of the first half, which ended in a scoreless tie. Navy had not yet made a first down.

The third quarter was no different. Army made a few first downs, but the third period ended still in a tie. The good news for Navy was that it was able to keep Army off the scoreboard. With eight minutes left to play in the game, however, Army quarterback Wendell Bowman took the snap and “thrust the ball into the belly of Cadet Ray Stecker,”24 who “faked giving it to another Army back,”25 then burst through the right side of Navy’s defensive line “to the distant goal where a late afternoon sun slanted through the stands of the Yankee stadium.”26 Touchdown, Army! Charles Broshous attempted a drop-kick for the extra point, but he missed. West Point led, 6-0.

Navy had a chance to win the game on its final possession. Army’s Bowman fumbled a punt on his own 37-yard line, and Navy recovered. The offense drove 12 yards, but was stopped on downs. Army took over and advanced to the Navy 7-yard line as time ran out. Army had won its 16th game in this rivalry.

The Cadets finished with 238 yards of total offense, compared with 86 for the Midshipmen.27 Army had gained 182 yards with 12 first downs on the ground, compared with Navy’s 63 yards and three first downs. The game produced 25 total punts, seven fumbles (each team lost only one fumble to the other side), and 110 penalty yards. Yet the game was a success; “No game of football has ever yet been played with teams so ready, down to the last man, to give everything.”28 That spirit has come to describe many of the contests in this storied rivalry.

Afterward Coach Sasse praised his team, saying, “For absolute unselfishness of spirit I have never seen a bunch like this one. It has been an inspiration to work with them.”29 Sasse further praised the opponent, saying that Navy “was a fine team and gave us the opposition we looked for.”30

Likewise, Coach Ingram commended his Navy players: “I’m delighted with the fight the boys showed. It was fight, fight, fight from the start and the Navy can feel proud of the game our boys put up. We were overpowered by a bigger and stronger team. But they can’t say heads down to me.”31

The game was a financial success. Ticket sales exceeded $600,000, which “would go to the Salvation Army fund for the unemployed, most of it to be used to relieve conditions in the city.”32 In addition, an autographed football was auctioned off, bought by the Salvation Army’s Commander Evangeline Booth, for $5,000.33

The famed and fierce football rivalry continued in 1931, played once again at Yankee Stadium. In an action-packed 60 minutes, Army won, 17-7. Since 1930, the two teams have competed on the fields of friendly strife annually, just not again at Yankee Stadium.

MIKE HUBER joined SABR in 1996, when he first co-taught a Sabermetrics course at West Point. In the many years that followed, he would often take his class to Yankee Stadium, to meet with the Yankees’ staff, tour the Stadium, sit in the dugout and appreciate all that the Yankees have accomplished. He enjoys writing for SABR’s Games Project and has been rooting for the same American League East team since 1968.

SOURCES

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, much of the play-by-play was taken from the following sources:

Danzig, Allison. “Army-Navy Contest Described in Detail,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S3.

Powers Jimmy. “Army Gets Navy Goat, 6-0,” New York Daily News, December 14, 1930: 86, 88.

Lewis, Perry. “Hazleton Lad Runs 57 Yards to Score as 70,000 Look On,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 14, 1930: 41, 42.

Amazingly, audio-video footage of the event (from MyFootage.com), including the touchdown score, can be found online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlKeTemjOXM. Accessed July 2022. The television was invented in 1927, so this is a major achievement in the early days of TV broadcast.

NOTES

1 Perry Lewis, “Hazleton Lad Runs 57 Yards to Score as 70,000 Look On,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 14, 1930: 41, 42.

2 “Football Games at Yankee Stadium,” found online at http://www.luckyshow.org/football/ys.htm. Accessed July 2022. A total of eight football games were played at Yankee Stadium in 1923, including the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Championship, when on December 9 the USS Wright team played to a 6-6 tie against the USS Wyoming squad. For the next several years, New York University played its home football games in the Stadium. In addition, the New York Yankees football team (also known as the Grangers) began playing at Yankee Stadium in 1926. The NFL’s New York Giants played all of their home games at the Stadium from 1956 to 1973.

3 Instead of playing Notre Dame at Yankee Stadium in 1930, Army hosted Illinois on November 8, defeating the Fighting Illini 13-0, before an estimated 74,000 fans.

4 The Midshipmen prevailed, 24-0, and one of America’s most traditional football rivalries had begun. The next three years saw the venue alternating between The Plain and Navy’s Thompson Stadium in Annapolis. See “Army-Navy Game Scores,” found online at the Naval History and Heritage Command website, https://history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/heritage/customs-and-traditions0/navy-athletics/army-navy-football-game.html. Accessed July 2022. Navy won three of those first four encounters. No games were played between 1894 and 1898, and when the rivalry resumed, the two teams agreed to play in Philadelphia, which is roughly equidistant from the two academies. In 1909 Army suddenly canceled the rest of its season after Cadet Eugene Byrne, a left tackle, died in a game against Harvard on October 30. An Associated Press story told readers, “The army is accustomed to death, but not in this deplorable form, and this tragedy of the gridiron has brought such poignant grief to officers and cadets alike that the end of football at West Point and Annapolis is predicted by many.” No games were played in 1917 or 1918, due to World War I, but the series resumed again in 1919. See Deb Kiner, “110 Years Ago, the Army-Navy Football Game Was Canceled After the Death of a Cadet,” found online at the PennLive website, www.pennlive.com/sports/2019/12/110-years-ago-the-army-navy-football-game-was-canceled-after-the-death-of-a-cadet.html. Accessed July 2022.

5 “Officials Cancel Army-Navy Game.”

6 Lewis.

7 “Notables Present at Service Game,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S1.

8 The football teams of Army and Navy had competed at a stadium in New York City before, on several occasions. The two squads played each other at the Polo Grounds nine times, between 1913 and 1927. Army had won five of those contests; Navy had won three times, and there was one tie.

9 Robert F. Kelley, “70,000 Watch Army Beat Navy, 6 to 0: Gate Over $600,000,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S1.

10 1930 was the final season that legendary coach Knute Rockne coached at Notre Dame, leading them to an undefeated national championship. (Rockne was killed in a plane crash on March 31, 1931.)

11 “1930 Army Black Knights Roster,” found online at www.sports-reference.com/cfb/schools/army/1930-roster.html. Accessed July 2022. The 22 points allowed ranked third-fewest out of 106 college teams across the country. The 24.4 points scored per game was 15th-best in the country.

12 In the six games played from 1922 to 1927, Army had won four times; there were two ties. Coming into this game, Army held the series advantage with 15 wins against 12 losses (there had been three tie games as well).

13 Kelley.

14 Kelley.

15 Kelley.

16 Arthur J. Daley, “Navy Wig-Wag Talk Keeps Crowd Happy,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S3.

17 Daley.

18 Team captain Humber played as a left guard for Army. In 1930 Humber received second-team All-America honors from the International News Service. See James L. Kilgallen, “All-American Team Selected,” Chester (Pennsylvania) Times, December 1, 1930: 15.

19 According to Perry Lewis of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Navy had not lost a coin toss all season.

20 Jimmy Powers, “Army Gets Navy Goat, 6-0,” New York Daily News, December 14, 1930: 86, 88.

21 Powers.

22 Allison Danzig, “Army-Navy Contest Described in Detail,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S3.

23 Powers.

24 Powers.

25 Kelley.

26 Powers.

27 Associated Press, “Statistics Reveal Why Cadets Won,” San Bernardino County (California) Sun, December 14, 1930: 24.

28 Kelley.

29 “Major Sasse Pays Tribute to Cadets,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S3.

30 “Major Sasse Pays Tribute to Cadets.”

31 “Navy Coach Proud of Middies’ Battle,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: S2.

32 Kelley.

33 “Army Eleven Defeats Navy, 6-0, Before 70,000; Jobless Fund Gets $600,000 From Stadium Game,” New York Times, December 14, 1930: 1.

Fort Hood’s Student Regiment Team, from the September 23, 1943 issue of The Hood Panther. (Courtesy of tankdestroyer.net) 

When searching “Camp Hood Baseball,” three words come up often: Jackie, Robinson, and court-martial. Numerous articles have been written about Robinson’s time at Camp Hood—many about his August 1944 court-martial after refusing to move to the back of a non-segregated bus1—but far, far less attention has been paid to the baseball actually played at the camp. This article intends to rectify that oversight. Camp Hood featured a full baseball league, with a skillful mix of pro, semipro, and amateur players, as well as multiple segregated Black teams which formed their own ecosystem in the camp and surrounding areas.

Initial construction for Camp Hood was completed in September 1942, and the camp was quickly used to begin training Tank Destroyer (TD) Battalions.2 These Battalions were formed, unsurprisingly, with the goal of destroying Axis tanks and other armored vehicles during World War II. As Army members and their families moved in, they increasingly needed facilities for recreation and non-military uses. Sports at Camp Hood exploded in popularity; by September 1943, an estimated $75,000 had been spent on 140 softball fields, 15 baseball diamonds, a dozen tennis courts, two swimming pools, and more smaller recreation areas than the camp newspaper could be asked to count.3

The baseball diamonds played host to a camp-wide baseball league that ran throughout the summer, featuring 15 teams and weekly standings reports in the Hood Panther, the camp newspaper. Many games were reported on, and I have reconstructed as much of each roster as possible. Teams were divided by military units and split into “A” and “B” Leagues, reminiscent of the AL and NL. The victors of each league, based on win percentage, faced off in a three-game series to decide the year’s champion. The A League consisted of the Student Regiment, the Academic Regiment, the 605th, 635th, 651st, 652nd, and 825th Tank Destroyer Battalions, and the 520th Ordnance Company. The B League consisted of the 113th Cavalry Regiment, the Officer Candidate School, the 744th Tank Battalion, and the 603rd, 650th, 653rd, 656th, 657th, and 801st Tank Destroyer Battalions.

By May 27, the season was underway. The first games were reported in the May 27 edition of the Hood Panther, which ran every two weeks until becoming weekly in early July 1943.4 The Panther was an invaluable resource for my research, and almost all my data on rosters and games come from it. To open their season, the Officer Candidate School (OCS) played against the 520th Ordnance Company, winning, 6-5, on five hits.5

The exact status of this game in the standings is questionable; the 520th only begins appearing in standings at the end of July, with a 0-0 record.6 The early season was marked by a feeling-out process, in which teams were formed and disbanded as games were played and reported on inconsistently, and with indeterminate effects on standings. It was only in July, when the paper began running weekly, that games were more well-reported and overall standings were published semi-regularly.

Several teams disbanded early in the season, or joined the season late and did not substantially affect the standings. These teams include the previously-mentioned 520th Ordnance Company, the 744th Tank Battalion, and the 603rd and 656th Tank Destroyer Battalions. The 744th team withdrew prior to June 8, replaced with the 657th Tank Destroyer Battalion. Their final record was 2-1; their one loss came at the hands of the 801st TD Battalion, 11-9.7 The 520th Ordnance Company officially joined the standings at the end of July, but (excluding the previously mentioned game) only played their first games in mid-August; the final reported record was 0-4.8 The 656th TD Battalion also only played games in late August, with a final published record of 0-3, with no further information.9 The 656th was eventually deployed to Europe, serving in the Rhineland and Central European campaigns.10

The 603rd Tank Destroyer Battalion fared much better than its other late-joining compatriots. By August 26, the team had accumulated 4 wins and 1 loss, including a win over the high-performing 113th Cavalry Regiment.11 The team unfortunately fell at the end, losing out to the OCS in a three-game series to determine the B League champion.12 They went on to play another game against the 635th TD Battalion after the season had concluded.13 The baseball roster included Pvt. Bud Giannini (RF), Pvt. Bill Christopher (P), and “Babe” Goforth (P).14 The Battalion landed in France in July 1944 before fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45. The Battalion would also help to liberate Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945.15

The 650th, 651st, 652nd, and 653rd TD Battalions all had middling, but full, seasons; their games were largely unreported except where they played the top teams, and their roster info is near non-existent. The two notable games are a 651st win over the 652nd, 7-3, early in the season, and a 17-0 trouncing of the 651st by the Camp Training Brigade.16 The only players noted are from the 651st: Cpl. Jack Jiacomini (P) and Pvt. Savage (C).17 The 650th, 651st, and 653rd were all reorganized into other units; The 652nd served only in the US, guarding and escorting German POWs.18

The Academic Regiment also had little luck during their season, albeit with a few interesting games. The first came in the week before July 29, when they suffered a hefty 22-2 loss to the 635th Tank Destroyer Battalion.19 The second was a victory over the McCloskey Hospital team, played in Temple.20 This game (among others) indicates that off-camp games were not unheard of, even outside of specific events.

The 605th TD Battalion began the season strong, winning three out of their first four games to sit second in the A League.21 However, the wheels quickly fell off; their first loss, to the 635th TD Battalion, came off four home runs.22 The 605th failed to win a single game over the next month, falling to 3-4 and out of contention.23 The unit later served in the Rhineland and Central European campaigns. Regrettably, no information on the baseball roster is provided in any sources, however the 605th Tank Destroyer Battalion website— created and maintained by families of those in the unit—has a wealth of information, including a step-by-step look at the entire unit history.24

The 801st Tank Destroyer Battalion had a season middling in results, but with a number of standout games. Their final reported record was 6-7, but the newspaper tells some further stories.25 They held close contests with some of the high performing teams, including a victory over the 657th TD Battalion, and a tight 3-2 loss to the 113th Cavalry Regiment.26 Towards the end of August, however, the team was falling short; an early August loss to the OCS left the team needing a spark.27 They tried to fan the flames of competition before a game with the 603rd, with the 801st Drum and Bugle Corps playing the team into the game. Unfortunately, the grand entrance seemed to have the opposite effect—the 801st lost, 19-0.28

As the season came to a close, the needs of the Army clashed with the 113th Cavalry Regiment’s baseball schedule. While the unit departed Camp Hood the week after August 26, the baseball team stayed behind to make a last gasp at the Camp Championship.29 The 113th had a very strong season, with a 14-3 record just before playing a final game against the OCS team, also 14-3, to determine who would play the 603rd for the B League title.30 The 113th had beaten the OCS recently: a 7-0 win the week before August 5 and an 8-2 victory off 10 OCS errors a week later.31 T-5 Walter Wlazlek started for the 113th and went three scoreless innings before leaking two runs in the fourth. In the fifth, however, the dam burst, with four additional runs coming off Wlazlek and his replacement, Cpl. John Hubiak, the game ending, 6-2, along with the 113th’s season.32 The unit eventually served in the European Theater, seeing action in Normandy, Northern France, the Rhineland, and Central Europe.

THE SEMIPRO TOURNAMENT TEAMS

From July 15 through August 8, the Texas State Semi-Pro Tournament was played.33 The tournament was also open to military teams, and this drew three participants from Camp Hood: the 657th and 635th Tank Destroyer Battalions, and the Student Regiment Team.

The tournament also welcomed a number of teams and players from other military bases, including some bona-fide professional players.34 In all, the estimated value of the contracts of players in the tournament was greater than $1,000,000 (approximately $18,250,000 inflation-adjusted).35 This included The Fort Worth Army-Air Field, featuring Dutch Meyer and Clyde “Rabbit” McDowell; Camp Wallace, featuring Bruce Divers; San Marcos, featuring McLee Baker.36 The tournament winner would be Waco Army-Air Field, featuring Buster Mills, Hoot Evers, Ernest Nelson, Birdie Tebbetts, and Sid Hudson.37

The Camp Hood Teams interrupted their normal seasons to participate in the tournament. The 657th TD Battalion had a middling performance in both their season and the tournament. They ended 5th in the B League, as well as suffering a difficult 8-1 no-hit defeat at the hands of Jack Smiley and the Camp Wallace team in the semipro tournament.38 The 657th’s colleagues performed much better in the tournament. The 635th would eventually fall in the A League to the Student Regiment at the end of the season but would finish with an impressive 13-2 record.39 The team also made quite a bit of noise in the semipro tournament. Pvt. Bob Shepard pitched the first no-hitter in the tournament’s history (about a week before the above-mentioned Smiley performance), leading the team to an 18-0 win over the Bryan Navigators.40 They would eventually bow out of the tournament at 1-2 but would be awarded the tournament’s Sportsmanship Award due to their cheering section.41 The 635th landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day before participating in campaigns in Northern France, the Rhineland, Ardennes-Alsace, and Central Europe.42 The Student Regiment also managed to pull out a victory, defeating the San Marcos Flying School, 1-0, off the pitching and batting of Herb Karpel, before falling, 8-3, to the Houston Shipbuilders.43

THE “WORLD SERIES”

At the end of the season, the winners of the A and B Leagues faced each other. Emerging from the A League was the Student Regiment, a collection of students now in the military and including an impressive lineup with genuine professional-level talent. From the B League came the Officer Candidate School, a collection of prospective officers and those who trained them. Both teams had dominated their respective leagues but were set on a three-game series to decide the champion of the 1943 season.

The highlights of the Student Regiment lineup come from two players in particular: T-5 Herb Karpel (P) and Pvt. Henry Stram. Karpel, the team’s ace, was in the Yankees farm system before beginning his military service. He would make several solid performances during the 1943 season and eventually be called up to the Yankees in 1946. There, he would pitch 1.2 innings across two games, giving up two runs. Perhaps more time in the league could have steadied him out, but he never received the opportunity; he languished in AAA until his retirement. Hank Stram has a far more interesting and fruitful story. He never made it to the majors, but after playing football and baseball for Purdue he became a professional football coach, going on to coach the 1960-62 Dallas Texans of the AFL, just before the team became the Kansas City Chiefs. The team won three AFL Championships and a Super Bowl in Stram’s 15 years with them. He went on to be inducted into both the Chiefs and Pro Football Halls of Fame.44

The OCS won an overwhelming majority of their games. The roster consisted of no major-league talent, but some players had amateur and semi-pro experience: David Madison (P) had played previously at LSU, James Newberry played at Texas A&M, and Al Scanland had played football at Oklahoma St. and was selected in the 1943 NFL Draft.45 The graduates of the school would become Second Lieutenants before being distributed across the Army.46 Of players on the team, 2nd Lt. James Newberry, 2nd Lt. Al Scanland, and Cpl. John Scroggins would be killed in action in Europe.47

Game One saw Karpel, the Studes’ ace, hold the OCS to a measly two hits to preserve a 7-0 victory for the Student Regiment.48 Game Two saw the series draw even when the OCS’s David Madison held the Students scoreless in a 5-0 rout, forcing a winner-take-all Game Three.49 Before a crowd of 7,500, Karpel once again took the mound for the Student Regiment, facing off against 2nd Lt. Therone Botoher for the OCS.50 The OCS got off to a strong start, with a pair of singles forcing one man across the plate in the top of the third.51 Karpel quickly regained his composure to shut down the Candidates for the inning.52 Help arrived in the bottom of the fourth, with two runs scoring for the Studes and knocking Botoher out, with the OCS bringing in Madison to attempt to clean up the game.53 Madison stemmed the bleeding in the fourth, but gave up one in the fifth, the game ending in a 3-1 Student Regiment victory off only six hits allowed by Karpel.54

THE “NEGRO LEAGUE” TEAMS

Segregated Black units also formed their own baseball teams at Camp Hood. While they did not play in the A or B Leagues or the semi-pro tournament, they did play fairly consistently against each other and competition outside of Camp Hood. Two teams were particularly represented in the Panther articles: the 827th and 829th Tank Destroyer Battalions.

The 829th “Black Panthers” were reported to have won two games, one against the Trucking Battalion and one against the 827th.55 They also lost two against competition outside of camp, but those were the team’s only two losses by August 12.56 No 829th players are named in the articles. The unit only served in the continental US before being disbanded in March 1944.57

Before serving in the European Theater, the 827th Battalion more regularly caught the eyes of the authors of the Panther, with 10 games explicitly mentioned.58 These include victories throughout the year against the Trucking Battalion and the 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion, as well as draws to the 614th (11-1159)and the 758th Tank Destroyer Battalions (6-660). All units mentioned thus far were explicitly Black Battalions, though some were headed by White officers. Outside of the camp, the 827th played the Temple All-Stars and Marlin All-Stars, semipro teams from those towns.61 I could find no evidence of the racial makeup of those teams, including in the Marlin Democrat.

One Camp Hood team, most likely the 827th, also played and defeated the Dallas Green Monarchs, a Black semipro team.62 The last game we know the 827th played, however, is exceptional. Reported in the Panther, the 827th played Camp Hood’s Student Regiment.63 This is the only game I could find evidence for where a White unit played a Black one. It is, to an extent, the “exception that proves the rule”: racism’s longstanding hold on American life and baseball were still firmly in place. But it also illustrated the start of a wider sea-change across American culture. In 1945, the OISE All-Stars, an integrated team, would win the GI World Series in a defeated Germany.64 The next year, Bob Feller and Satchel Paige would lead a “Major League vs. Negro League” barnstorming tour, before finally Camp Hood’s own—or perhaps disowned—Jackie Robinson would break the segregation barrier in 1947.

Rosters and other details regarding Camp Hood baseball can be found in the online appendix.

ANDREW JETT is a lifelong Texas Rangers fan who graduated from Trinity University with a Bachelor’s of Political Science in 2023. Since then, he has volunteered with Retrosheet rectifying discrepancies in play-by-play data of the 1911 and 1910 MLB seasons and worked to deduce play-by-play for Negro Leagues games based on newspaper stories. He currently works at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum. This upcoming fall, he will begin a Master’s program in Holocaust Studies at Royal Holloway in London.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Aaron Jett, Anne Hanisch, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library for their assistance in my research.

Notes

1. Erin Clancey, “United States v. 2LT Jack R. Robinson,” National World War II Museum, accessed February 17, 2025, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/united-states-v-jack-r-robinson.

2. Frederick L. Briuer, “Fort Cavazos: History, Significance, and Community Impact.” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed February 17, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/fort-hood. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

3. PFC Keith Quick, “On The Ball,” Hood Panther, September 16, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_26_Vol._1_9-16-43.pdf.

4. “OCS Baseball Nine Defeats Ordnance,” Hood Panther, May 27, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_13_Vol._1_5-27-43.pdf; “Panther Now Published On Weekly Basis,” Hood Panther, July 8, 1943, 1, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_16_Vol._1_7-8-43.pdf.

5. “OCS Baseball Nine Defeats Ordnance,” Hood Panther, May 27, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_13_Vol._1_5-27-43.pdf.

6. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf.

7. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, July 8, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_16_Vol._1_7-8-43.pdf.

8. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, August 26, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_23_Vol._1_8-26-43.pdf.

9. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, August 26, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_23_Vol._1_8-26-43.pdf.

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11. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, August 26, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_23_Vol._1_8-26-43.pdf; “Undefeated in Eight Games,” Hood Panther, August 19, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_22_Vol._1_8-19-43.pdf.

12. “OCS Nine Wins 3 To 1 From 603rd in Seventh,” Hood Panther, September 2, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_24_Vol._1_9-2-43.pdf; “OCS Nine Wins ‘B’ League Title; Post Series Starts Friday Night,” Hood Panther, September 9, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_25_Vol._1_9-9-43.pdf.

13. “635th Wins From 603rd,” Hood Panther, September 30, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_28_Vol._1_9-30-43.pdf.

14. “OCS Wins 3 To 1 From 603rd,” Hood Panther, September 2, 1943, 1, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_24_Vol._1_9-2-43.pdf; “OCS Nine Wins 3 To 1 From 603rd in Seventh,” Hood Panther, September 2, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_24_Vol._1_9-2-43.pdf; PFC Walter H. Glaser, “OCS Nine Wins ‘B’ League Title; Post Series Starts Friday Night,” Hood Panther, September 9, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_25_Vol._1_9-9-43.pdf.

15. “603rd Tank Destroyer Battalion,” tankdestroyer.net, accessed February 12, 2025. https://tankdestroyer.net/units/battalions600s/198-603rd-tank-destroyer-battalion/.

16. “651st Bn. Ball Club Victors,” Hood Panther, July 22, 1943, 5, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_18_Vol._1_7-22-43.pdf; “Training Brig. Wins 17 to 0 Game From 651st Battalion,” Hood Panther, September 9, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_25_Vol._1_9-9-43.pdf.

17. “651st Bn. Ball Club Victors.”

18. “652nd Tank Destroyer Battalion,” tankdestroyer.net, accessed February 12, 2025. https://tankdestroyer.net/units/battalions600s/240-652nd-tank-destroyer-battalion/.

19. “635th Team Back In Race,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf.

20. “Academic Team Wins 6 To 2 From Hospital,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf.

21. “Baseball Standings,” July 8, 1943.

22. PFC Keith Quick, “On the Ball,” Hood Panther, July 8, 1943 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_16_Vol._1_7-8-43.pdf.

23. “Baseball Standings,” August 5, 1943.

24. See https://www.605tdb.com/.

25. “Baseball Standings,” Hood Panther, August 26, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_23_Vol._1_8-26-43.pdf.

26. “801st Baseball Team Wins From 657th 7 to 6,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf; “113th Wins Again,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf.

27. “OCS Team Wins 7-0 From 801st,” Hood Panther, August 5, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_20_Vol._1_8-5-43.pdf.

28. “Undefeated in Eight Games,” Hood Panther, August 19, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_22_Vol._1_8-19-43.pdf.

29. “113th Team Stays Here But Loses,” Hood Panther, September 2, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_24_Vol._1_9-2-43.pdf.

30. “Baseball Standings,”August 26, 1943. “113th Team Stays Here But Loses.”

31. “113th Cavalry Adds Another Win To List,” Hood Panther, August 5, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_20_Vol._1_8-5-43.pdf; “113th Cavalry Defeats OCS Regiment Players,” Hood Panther, August 12, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_21_Vol._1_8-12-43.pdf.

32. “113th Team Stays Here But Loses.”

33. “Semi-Pro Tourney Opens at Waco,” The West News, July 16, 1943, 9, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth589773/m1/9/.

34. “Semi-Pro Tourney Opens at Waco.”

35. “Semi-Pro Tourney Opens at Waco.”

36. “Texas Semi-Pro Opener Tonight,” Abilene Reporter-News, July 22, 1943, 9, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1757685/m1/9/; “Camp Hood Teams Set New Records in Semi-Pro,” Hood Panther, August 5, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_20_Vol._1_8-5-43.pdf; “No Hitter Features Semi-Pro Tourney,” Abilene Reporter-News, July 29, 1943, 11, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1635806/m1/11/.

37. “Waco Fliers Win,” Abilene Reporter-News, July 24, 1943, 2, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1635801/m1/2/; PFC Keith Quick, “On the Ball,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf; “Waco Nabs Texas Semi-Pro Title,” Abilene Reporter-News, August 9, 1943, 7, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1635817/m1/7/.

38. “Baseball Standings,” August 26, 1943. “Camp Hood Teams Set New Records in Semi-Pro,” Hood Panther, August 5, 1943, 8, https://tankde-stroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_20_Vol._1_8-5-43.pdf.

39. “Baseball Standings,” August 26, 1943. “Studes Win ‘A’ League,” Hood Panther, August 26, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_23_Vol._1_8-26-43.pdf.

40. “No Hitter Features Semi-Pro Tourney.”

41. Quick, “On The Ball.”

42. “635th Tank Destroyer Battalion,” tankdestroyer.net, accessed February 17, 2025. https://tankdestroyer.net/units/battalions600s/222-635th-tank-destroyer-battalion/; Gene Smith, “Kansans retrace their steps from Omaha Beach to Austria,” Topeka Capital-Journal, June 3, 1984. https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/635th-Top-Cap_Jnl_Article.pdf.

43. “Student Nine Wins Opener In Semi-Pro,” Hood Panther, July 29, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_19_Vol._1_7-29-43.pdf; Quick, “On the Ball.”

44. “Hank Stram,” Sports Reference, accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.pro-football-reference.com/coaches/StraHa0.htm; “1987 I Hank Stram I Coach,” Chiefs Hall of Honor, accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.chiefs.com/hallofhonor/players/hankstram.

45. “OCS Team Wins 7-0 From 801st,” Hood Panther, August 5, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_20_Vol._1_8-5-43.pdf; “James Newberry,” Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice, accessed February 17, 2025, https://www.baseballsgreatestsacrifice.com/biographies/newberry_james.html; “1943 NFL Draft,” Sports Reference, accessed February 17, 2025, https://www.pro-football-reference.com/years/1943/draft.htm.

46. “Sport Stars to Get Bars,” Hood Panther, November 4, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_33_Vol._1_11-4-43.pdf.

47. “James Newberry,” Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice, accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.baseballsgreatestsacrifice.com/biographies/newberry_james.html; “38th Armored Infantry Battalion Deaths in Europe,” 7thArmdDiv.org, accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.7tharmddiv.org/38deapho.htm; “Cpl. John Paul Scroggins,” findagrave.com, accessed February 17, 2025. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/62987595/john-paul-scroggins.

48. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt,” Hood Panther, September 16, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_26_Vol._1_9-16-43.pdf

49. PFC Keith Quick, “Two Baseball Squads Finish Unusual Season,” Hood Panther, September 23, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_27_Vol._1_9-23-43.pdf.

50. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt,” Hood Panther, September 16, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_26_Vol._1_9-16-43.pdf.

51. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt.”

52. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt.”

53. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt.”

54. “Student Regt. Camp Champs Defeats OCS Nine, 3 To 1, In Last Tilt.”

55. “The ‘Black Panthers’ Win Baseball Game From Trucking Bn.,” Hood Panther, August 12, 1943, 7, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_21_Vol._1_8-12-43.pdf; “829th Bn. Ball Club Victors,” Hood Panther, July 15, 1943, 8,. https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_17_Vol._1_7-15-43.pdf.

56. “The ‘Black Panthers’ Win Baseball Game From Trucking Bn.”

57. “829th Tank Destroyer Battalion (AA),” tankdestroyer.net, accessed February 14, 2025. https://tankdestroyer.net/units/battalions800s/287-829th-tank-destroyer-battalion/.

58. “827th Tank Destroyer Battalion (AA),” tankdestroyer.net, accessed February 17, 2025. https://tankdestroyer.net/units/battalions800s/285-827th-tank-destroyer-battalion-aa/.

59. “827th and 614th Teams Battle To Tie,” Hood Panther, September 2, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_24_Vol._1_9-2-43.pdf.

60. “827th Ties With 758th,” Hood Panther, September 23, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_27_Vol._1_9-23-43.pdf.

61. “827 Bn. Club Beats Temple Team, Truck. Bn.,” Hood Panther, July 15, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_17_Vol._1_7-15-43.pdf; “827th Loses Two Games,” Hood Panther, August 19, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_22_Vol._1_8-19-43.pdf.

62. Elgin Hychew, “Monarch Face Army in Three Gamer at Rebel,” Dallas Express, June 19, 1943, 10, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1760037/m1/10/.

63. “827th Loses Two Games,” Hood Panther, August 19, 1943, 8, https://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs2/CHP_Issue_22_Vol._1_8-19-43.pdf.

64. John Rosengren, “GI World Series of 1945 Featured Diverse Heroes of the Diamond,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, accessed February 17, 2025. https://baseballhall.org/discover/gi-world-series-of-1945-featured-diverse-heroes-of-the-diamond.