Leeke - From the Dugouts to the Trenches Baseball during the Great War

America wasnt prepared for war in the late winter and early spring of 1917, but it certainly was ready for baseball. The Boston Red Sox were the reigning world champions, the best of sixteen Major League clubs scattered through the Northeast and out to the Midwest as far as the left bank of the Mississippi River. Below the big leagues, twenty-two Minor League clubs were set to play ball in parks across the country, from the biggest in Class AA to the smallest in Class D . Together, these many leagues comprised Organized Baseballthe national pastime, the summer game, employment for thousands, entertainment for millions, a hardscrabble business of sharp elbows, big egos, promise, failure, and reward. What would happen if war came?

Capt. T. L. Huston, co-owner of the New York Yankees, thought he knew. Perhaps before any teams go to their training camps we will have a chance to see whether the players are as loyal to their country as to their [players] fraternity, Huston said.

Harry Frazee, who owned the Boston Red Sox, thought he knew, too. People want to get away from the war topics, and almost any kind of diversion to take their minds from the situation is welcome, Frazee said. What can fit this need better than baseball?

Both men were right, if not at the same time. America entered the war that April and nothing much changed right away, as Frazee expected. Flags flew, rhetoric soared, and the baseball season began as usual in the Major and Minor Leagues. Then as America armed and readied for battle, Organized Baseball increasingly felt the strain of the vast European war, as Huston expected. So much changed that within eighteen months the Major Leagues were scarcely recognizable. Every Minor League but one had shut down, and the World Series was a shambles. How and why did this occur? What happened to the ballplayers? Does it all still matter, a hundred years on?

In quieter times, the first two questions might have been answered a quarter century or so after the events, when ballplayers and historians naturally looked back on their lives and times. But by then, America was fighting the Second World War, and no definitive history of baseball during the previous war was written. Any history produced today has a different, less personal perspective. Details come not from participants living memory but largely from newspaper microfilm and digital archives, from old front pages and sports sections, and from many hundreds of columns and game stories and dispatches from France. The endeavor to find these pieces is itself entertaining and enlightening. Along the way, answers to the third question begin to emerge. Lets begin with spring training.