Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Winds of Change
Coverage in America's major newspapers of the death of commissioner
of baseball Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis on November 25, 1944, was
subdued. Throughout 1944, almost all events of major interest were
eclipsed by news of a war that had reached its apex. German armies were
reeling, following the Allied D day invasion in June, and Japanese strength
in the Pacific continued to wane under the onslaught of increased American
military pressure.
Although the passing of Judge Landis did not go unnoticed, the implications
of his death and the effects of the war itself on the game were not
readily apparent to those who ran organized baseball. Whereas the game
would assume its familiar trappings once the war ended, baseball, not unlike
American society, would never be the same. The winds of change were
already carrying the seeds that would alter baseball's physical, economic,
and social makeup. Landis's death was the beginning of a new era.
This new era witnessed the return of hundreds of veterans hungry to
recoup lost time and income. The period was marked by labor unrest and
a serious challenge to the game's reserve system. Even more significant,
black athletes were unshackled and allowed to compete in America's most
visible arena, its national pastime. The era also ushered in a growth and
prosperity never before equaled. Attendance records were shattered, and
minor-league growth, for a few fleeting years, was unparalleled. For the
first time, players began to assert some control over their own destinies.
New minimum-salary guidelines were implemented, uniform contracts
were created, a pension plan was initiated, and player representation was
established. Moreover, the presence of television, a technology that forever
changed American leisure-time habits, began to make itself felt. Finally,
following World War II, baseball experienced one of the most
colorful, exciting, and eventful periods in its history. The postwar era
was nothing less than a watershed between the game we know today
and the game as it had existed since the 1903 National Agreement was
reached between the American and National Leagues.
The foundation of baseball's renaissance can be traced to Babe Ruth's
popularization of the game in the 1920s and to Landis, whose twenty-four-year
reign stabilized baseball. Hired by the owners in 1920 to sanitize
baseball's tarnished image following the Black Sox scandal, Landis
was the epitome of political and social conservatism. Appointed to the
federal bench by Theodore Roosevelt, Landis became famous for trying
communists, socialists, and "Wobblies" and for his attempt to extradite
the Kaiser to the United States for having sunk the Lusitania. Landis was
best known as the judge who fined the Standard Oil Company of Indiana
more than $29 million for accepting rebates from the Chicago and Alton
Railroad.
Landis first came to the owners' attention with his handling of the Federal
League case in 1915. The case, which threatened baseball's reserve system,
was settled out of court, in large part because of Landis's delay in
issuing a decision. Had Landis ruled that baseball was akin to a trust, it
would have thrown the game's structure into chaos. At the trial, it became
obvious to the owners that the Judge was an ardent baseball fan.
By 1920, the three-man National Commission, which had supervised
the game since 1903, was in disarray. Dissension among the owners prevented
the reelection of chairman Garry Herrmann, and an impasse on
the choice of his successor between American League and National League
presidents Ban Johnson and Joseph Heydler could not be resolved. When
the Black Sox scandal broke in the last week of the 1920 season, there was
a public outcry that the game needed to appoint someone from outside
its ranks who could run the game and restore its lost integrity. The desperate
owners met on November 12 and, fearing for their investments,
agreed to offer Judge Kenesaw Landis the post of High Commissioner of
Baseball. They also decided that the commissioner should be the titular
head of the game, stipulated that Landis's successor should be elected in
the same manner, and determined that a new National Agreement should
be drafted. After accepting the owners' offer of an annual salary of $50,000
for seven years, Landis told them that he would subtract his $7,500 federal
salary from that figure each year. Seeing him as baseball's savior, the
owners granted Landis great powers and thus set the tone of their relationship
for the next twenty-five years.
Three major themes emerged from Judge Landis's commissionership--his
aversion to gambling, his hatred of the farm system, and his desire to
keep baseball out of the courts. First, he was determined to rid the game
of any connection with gambling. When the trial of the eight Chicago
White Sox players charged with throwing the 1919 World Series ended in
acquittals for each, Landis quickly and arbitrarily banned the players from
the game. No pardons were ever granted. Thus, baseball, in violation of
the players' right to due process, prevented them from pursuing their
livelihood. As baseball historian David Voight wrote, "Today, such a sentence
would be preposterous." Landis, however, was consistent in his
treatment of gambling associations throughout his tenure. He banished
both player and owner alike for wagering on contests. A case in point
was William Cox, owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, who was charged
with betting on his team and was forced by Landis to sell the franchise in
1943. Landis also prevented Bing Crosby and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt
and other celebrities from buying into teams, because they owned race
horses or were affiliated with racing. In addition, in 1921 he told John
McGraw and Charles Stoneham to rid themselves of their investments in
a Cuban racetrack and casino venture, and in 1937 Landis banished future
Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby from any affiliation with the game
because of his well-known predilection for wagering on horses.
Judge Landis's support of independent ownership of minor-league
teams and his hatred of the farm system led to several clashes with the
creator of the farm system, St. Louis Cardinal general manager Branch
Rickey. In 1938, Landis freed ninety-one players from the Cardinals system,
charging the club with hiding players and preventing them from
playing at higher classifications. Those released included Pete Reiser, who
became the 1941 National League batting champion with the Brooklyn
Dodgers. Similarly, he freed 106 Detroit Tiger farmhands in 1940. Landis
was also hard on Cleveland. In 1936, he freed Tommy Henrich from the
Cleveland organization after uncovering a series of agreements that allowed
the team to circumvent the option system. In 1940, Henrich hit
.307 for the Yankees, and Cleveland lost the American League pennant
by one game. Cleveland was also fined $500 by Landis in 1944 for tampering
with then-high-school player Richie Ashburn, another player destined
for the Hall of Fame.
In direct contrast was overnight sensation Bob Feller--an eighteen-year-old
pitcher put on the Cleveland roster in 1936 in violation of the
major-minor-league agreement that prevented major-league teams from
directly signing amateur players. Had Landis ruled that Feller was a free
agent, a huge bidding war would have ensued. Instead, Cleveland was
fined $7,500 and was allowed to retain a player who would become one
of the greatest pitchers in the game's history. The real reason behind
Landis's decision in the Feller case involved the Landis principle of keeping
baseball out of the courts. Both Feller and his father, through whom
he had signed originally, wanted the pitcher to remain with the Indians.
According to Feller, it was his father's threat to sue Landis in civil court if
the Judge nullified his contract with Cleveland that affected the commissioner's
decision. "The Judge was no dummy," recalled Feller. "He let me
play with Cleveland."
Finally, Landis was protected from court action by U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's decision in the 1922 Federal League suit,
in which the court ruled that baseball's involvement in interstate commerce
was incidental and thus that the game was not subject to antitrust regulation.
In addition, the Holmes decision buttressed baseball's claim that it
was more a sport than a business. The major court test to Landis's authority
came in 1931 when St. Louis Browns' owner Phil Ball challenged the
commissioner in federal court over a decision that freed one of his players.
When the lower court ruled in favor of Landis, Ball threatened to take the
case to the Supreme Court. Repeating a tactic he had used against the owners
in his 1927 dispute with Ban Johnson, Landis threatened to resign unless
the owners stopped Ball from pursuing further legal action. True to
form, the ploy worked, as the owners derailed Ball's efforts.
World War II also posed a major threat to baseball. Landis, who referred
to Franklin Roosevelt as "that bastard in the White House," swallowed
his pride and sent a note to the president following the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor. In it he requested guidance on whether baseball
should be suspended or whether the nation would be best served by the
game's continuation. Clark Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators,
was called to the White House, where he argued persuasively for maintaining
the game on the assumption that it would provide a much-needed
diversion for war-weary workers. Convinced by Griffith's words,
Roosevelt sent his so-called Green Light letter in reply. Although he disclaimed
that the letter contained an official point of view, the president
noted that he honestly felt "that it would be best for the country to keep
baseball going."
In spite of the fact that Landis, Griffith, and Roosevelt preserved baseball
during World War II, the game struggled to maintain any semblance
of its former identity. One after another, some of its best-known players
were inducted into the armed services. Hank Greenberg, at age thirty,
was the first player called by the newly instituted draft, in October 1940.
On December 6, 1941, Congress passed a law exempting all men over
twenty-eight from the draft, and Greenberg appeared in newspaper photographs
the next day "tying a civilian tie, turning in his equipment, shaking
hands with his barracks buddies, [and] tossing a final salute to the
guard at the gate." The next day, December 7, Japanese forces attacked
Pearl Harbor, and Greenberg, determined to forget baseball for the duration,
reenlisted to become the first player to enter the war. He was followed
by Bob Feller, who joined the Naval Physical Training Division
two days later as a chief petty officer.
Other ballplayers soon followed--even such stars as Joe DiMaggio and
Ted Williams enlisted after the 1942 season. More than a thousand men
who played major-league baseball during the period 1931-46 served in
the armed forces during the war. By the spring of 1945, only 18 percent
(26/144) of those major leaguers who were in their team's starting lineups
in 1941 were still there, and no team possessed more than four of its 1941
starters. In 1944, Landis's last year as commissioner, most teams competed
with a motley group of old veterans, 4-F players, and youngsters.
The war also prolonged the careers of several major-league veterans, as a
total of sixty-one players aged thirty-five years or older appeared on team
rosters. Many players represented household names out of the 1930s, including
Paul and Lloyd Waner, Stan Hack, Jimmy Foxx, Thornton Lee, Paul
Derringer, Ernie Lombardi, Jim Turner, Claude Passeau, Chuck Klein, Mel
Ott, Joe Kuhel, Whitlow Wyatt, Al Lopez, Rip Sewell, Billy Jurges, and Joe
Cronin. At the other end of the spectrum was a group of predraft youngsters--men
who would someday make their own mark on the game -- including
Art Houtteman, Billy Pierce, Carl Scheib, Cass Michaels, Ed Yost,
Herm Wehmeier, Ralph Branca, Tommy Brown, Granny Hamner, and the
youngest player to play major-league baseball in the twentieth century,
Cincinnati's fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall.
Baseball's 4-F classification players, those exempted from the draft, in
large measure carried the game during the war. They were players whose
physical disabilities made them unacceptable for military service. Any
number of maladies would suffice. The Dodger's Curt Davis suffered from
an ulcer and often pitched in pain. Catcher Paul Richards, shortstop Marty
Marion, and outfielder Danny Litwhiler had trick knees. Relief pitcher
Ted Wilks suffered from a chronic stomach disorder, and the ace of the
Giants' pitching staff, Bill Voiselle, was hard of hearing. Pitchers Hal
Newhouser and Russ Christopher both had heart ailments that kept them
out of the service. Newhouser's faulty heart certainly did not prevent
him from dominating the American League in 1944 with a 29 and 9 record.
Other 4-F players returned from the service before their normal tours of
duty were completed. Red Schoendienst was discharged because of a vision
problem, and St. Louis Browns' catcher Frank Mancuso ended his
military career as a paratrooper when he was badly injured during a jump.
Many of the athletes were recruited by the services themselves. As William
Meade wrote in Even the Browns, "America's best baseball teams
during the war may not have been in the major leagues at all, but rather
in the Army or Navy." Even before the war began, the Navy had signed
up boxer Gene Tunney to organize a physical fitness program. After the
outbreak of hostilities, he assisted the Navy in forming a baseball team at
its base in Norfolk, Virginia, that included such players as Phil Rizzuto,
Pee Wee Reese, Dom DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Fred Hutchinson, and Eddie
Robinson. The Navy also commissioned catcher Mickey Cochrane to coach
its Great Lakes team. With stars such as Billy Herman, Johnny Mize, Gene
Woodling, Walker Cooper, and Schoolboy Rowe, the team was 163 and
26 in the period 1942-44. Conversely, the Army dispersed the athletes it
signed up and did not begin to bring them together until 1944, when an
Army-Navy series was initiated in Honolulu. In both services, most of
the men put in full days, supervising calisthenics and other recreation
programs.
Although many major-league baseball players received special treatment
in the service, none of the game's major stars requested special consideration.
Joe DiMaggio, the darling of New York, was originally placed
in the class C section of the draft--a classification reserved for married
men with children--and did not enlist in the Army until February 1943.
Initially assigned to a Special Services unit in California, he was sent to
Hawaii to play with the Seventh Army Air Force team, which hoped to
contend for the Far Eastern Service title. Plagued by marital problems
and a duodenal ulcer, DiMaggio was reassigned in September 1944 to an
air transport command responsible for ferrying wounded soldiers between
Hawaii and the mainland. Late in 1944, DiMaggio was reassigned again--this
time to a physical training section at Atlantic City, New Jersey, where
he spent the remainder of the war.
For Ted Williams, the war provided another quest--the art of flying.
Not unlike hitting or fishing, flying was an activity that took concentration,
could be analyzed and dissected, required excellent eye-to-hand
coordination, and still retained enough unknown variables to make it a
constant challenge. Classified III-A in 1943 because he was supporting
his divorced mother, Williams soon tired of a negative press questioning
his patriotism and signed up for Naval Aviation School with Johnny Pesky
and Johnny Sain. Williams took to flying quite easily and eventually became
a flight instructor, flying Navy SNJs (North American Texan Trainers)
out of Pensacola, Florida. In 1945, when the war ended, his combat
orders were canceled as he was en route to the Pacific theater. The bulk of
his ball playing in the service came after the conflict had ended.
After initially receiving choice assignments, Hank Greenberg and Bob
Feller both requested combat duty. In 1943 Captain Greenberg was assigned
to the first group of B-29s sent overseas, where he spent time in
India and China. In one incident, Greenberg was blown off his feet by a
bomb explosion as he raced along a runway to assist the crew of a stricken
B-29. "Some of them were pretty banged up but no one was killed,"
Greenberg told reporter Arthur Daley of the New York Times. "That was
one occasion," he continued, "when I didn't wonder whether or not I'd
be able to return to baseball. I was quite satisfied to be alive."
After six months working with the physical fitness program, Bob Feller
attended gunnery school and was then put in charge of an antiaircraft
battery on the USS Alabama, a 35,000-ton battleship. While aboard ship,
Feller usually worked out below decks to keep in shape and was occasionally
able to do some throwing and running when he could get to an
aircraft hangar ashore. While the Alabama was based in the Pacific on the
New Hebrides, Feller formed a team on the ship, outfitted it with equipment
sent by the Indians, and supervised the building of a couple of
ballfields. In 1944, the Alabama provided support for Allied landings on
several island chains. The most intense activity experienced by Feller's
battery came during the battle for Saipan on the day called "the Great
Marianas Turkey Shoot"--a period that saw Japanese forces lose more
than a hundred aircraft. Although the Alabama dodged several near misses
from torpedoes, bombs, and Kamikaze pilots, whom Feller likened to
"blind maddened bulls," the ship came through unscathed. On January
14,1945, a war-weary but pleased Bob Feller returned home.
St. Louis star Stan Musial escaped being drafted until late 1944 and as
a result was able to lead the Cardinals to two straight National League
pennants in 1943 and 1944. Musial's deferment was based on his need to
support both his parents and his immediate family. Moreover, he was
fortunate to be in a local Pennsylvania draft pool that was well stocked
with men of draft age. Beginning in 1945, he served a fourteen-month
hitch in the Navy and was assigned to a ship repair unit in Hawaii, where
he played three or four times a week with players such as Billy Herman,
Bob Lemon, and Cookie Lavagetto. Musial was pleased that he joined
the navy instead of heeding Pete Reiser's advice to join the army's great
Fort Riley, Kansas, team. Not long after, recalled Musial, many of the
army players "like Harry Walker, Murry Dickson, Al Brazle, and Peter
Reiser ... ended up in the Battle of the Bulge."
In 1943, St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Harry Walker played in the All-Star
game and the World Series. Exactly one year later, he and teammate
Al Brazle were with General George Patton's Third Army in Europe. Although
stricken with spinal meningitis while at Fort Riley, a disease that
sent most GIs home, Walker was retained by the Army because he was a
ballplayer and his discharge might cause the Army bad publicity. After
seeing action during the Battle of the Bulge, Private First Class Walker's
reconnaissance unit plunged deep into Bavaria and found itself in combat,
defending a bridge. "I shot maybe about fifteen before we got out of
that thing--with a machine gun. They thought we were Germans at first
... then I saw the gun. [When] I asked him to drop his gun, he threw it up
in my face." Walker also recalled the internment camps. "We saw people
slaughtered like animals. We buried them by the hundreds.... We do not
know what suffering is like." Even in the field, Walker could not escape
his baseball past. General Emil Reinhardt asked him to form a baseball
team to compete on weekends for the entertainment of the troops. Arguing
that the team would have to travel over torn-up bridges and roads
with the possibility of snipers still in the woods, Walker demanded air
travel. When "I told him that," remembered Walker, "it like to have floored
him." The Cardinal outfielder got his aircraft--first a B-25 and then a B-17
named Bottoms Up. He put together a very competitive team that included
teammate Al Brazle, Ken Heintzelman of the Phillies, and the
Dodgers' Rex Barney.
The vast majority of professional ballplayers who saw action were
minor leaguers--several of whom were destined to become major-league
players. For instance, eighteen-year-old Yogi Berra, property of the New
York Yankees, served on a converted LCT (landing craft, tank) fitted with
rocket launchers and participated in both the D day and Mediterranean
landings in southern France. He was sent home with a hand wound. Another
future Yankee catcher, Ralph Houk, was wounded during the Battle
of the Bulge. One of the most courageous actions of the war involved Bill
Reeder, a young Shreveport, Louisiana, pitcher who had a trial with the St.
Louis Cardinals in 1949. When Reeder's infantry unit was pinned down
by mortar attacks on the island of Okinawa, Reeder heaved several grenades
toward the mortar position while under constant fire from the enemy.
After several tosses, the position was silenced. When the distance
was paced off between Reeder's "pitching mound" and the mortar position,
much to everyone's amazement it was discovered to be more than 300
feet. Asked about his exploit, Reeder replied, "Way I look at it, it is better to
have a dead arm on a live body than the other way around."
Another unsung baseball campaigner was southpaw pitcher Warren
Spahn of the Boston Braves. Up for only a few games with the Braves in
1942, Staff Sergeant Spahn saw action with the 276th Engineer Combat
Battalion in the Ardennes, Alsace, the Rhineland, and in Central Europe.
The future Hall-of-Fame star was also at the Remagen bridgehead, where
his unit worked feverishly for six days under constant fire to keep this
key entrance into Germany under repair. On March 17, 1945, Spahn went
to the center of the bridge to confer with some officers. Only moments
after he walked off the span, the bridge took a direct hit at the exact spot
where the conference had taken place. Spahn and his men turned around
just in time to see the men with whom he had been speaking, along with
a section of the bridge, plunge into the swiftly flowing Rhine River. A few
months later Spahn became one of the few professional baseball players
to receive a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant.
Minor-league player and former college basketball star Frank Baumholtz
almost spurned baseball to become a physician when he returned
from the service in 1945. As a child, Baumholtz often buried himself in
medical books. While serving as a gunnery officer aboard a series of naval
vessels in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, Baumholtz carried a medical
kit with him and was often called on to attend injured sailors. In one
instance, while aboard a cargo ship in the Atlantic, the outfielder was
asked to stitch up a sailor who had been badly cut in a fight. When the
sailor returned to New York, physicians were amazed by Baumholtz's
handiwork. In another instance, while his ship was under attack from
Kamikazes off Okinawa, Baumholtz was asked to assist the ship's doctor
in reconstructing a sailor's hand injured by a twenty-millimeter gun fragment.
The fear generated by the Kamikaze attacks remained with
Baumholtz long after the war. He witnessed a Kamikaze as it plunged
through the smokestack of a big battleship anchored off Okinawa. "It
was a horrible, horrible thing," he recalled.
Baseball executives also were not exempt from the war. Private First
Class Bill Veeck, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, ran his team in
absentia while serving with an antiaircraft outfit on Bougainville in the
South Pacific. Veeck was trained as an ammunition passer, gunner, and
searchlight operator. He noted, "Our battery did get a couple of Jap bombers.
They provided the most thrilling moments I can remember. Whenever
our lights would catch one of them in the sky at night, the boys
would all gather around and cheer themselves hoarse ... yelling, `Get
that Imperial son of a so-and-so.'" In November 1944 Veeck returned to
the States, suffering from an ankle that collapsed because of an old football
injury and from jungle rot--conditions that eventually resulted in
the loss of both legs.
For some minor-league ballplayers, the war permanently changed their
careers. August Donatelli was a shortstop who played at Penn State and
in the Class D Kitty League before the war. During March of 1944 he was
a tail gunner on a B-17 that was shot down during the first daylight raid
over Berlin. Suffering from a broken leg as the result of his fall, Donatelli
was interned in two different prisoner of war camps. He was beaten, suffered
a broken toe, and was taken on a forced march to evade the oncoming
Russian Army. He escaped and spent several days hiding in hay lofts
before he was recaptured. At his last prison camp, Donatelli was forced
to bury Russian dead and was present when Russian tanks came and
"crushed the camp all to hell." When liberated, the once-healthy ballplayer
weighed only 130 pounds. With all aspirations of a baseball career gone,
Donatelli used his entitlements under the GI Bill to become an umpire--a
profession that later allowed him to reach the National League.
By the beginning of 1945, with many of its young men at war, the game's
status was cloudy at best. As if the world was not already turned upside
down, the St. Louis Browns appeared in the World Series--the franchise's
first and only time. Most of the game's identifiable stars were in uniform,
as were hundreds of minor leaguers. Others, such as pitcher Mel Harder
of the Cleveland Indians, who also worked at the Ohio Rubber Company,
were forced to split their time between baseball and laboring in
war plants. The game, which was now being played by youngsters, old-timers,
and 4-F players, had slipped badly in quality. Permission to continue
play hinged largely on an informal letter from a sympathetic
president. Finally, baseball's savior and spiritual leader, Judge Kenesaw
Mountain Landis was dead. At a critical time, baseball was leaderless.
