Baseball goes to war 98 years ago — Baseball Commemorative Half Dollar Coin

Today, the Baseball Commemorative Half Dollar Coin remembers when the Secretary of War ended the major league season on September 1, 1918. However, he did allow the World Series to be played early in September.

Collier’s The National Weekly, September 14, 1918, included an article by Jerome Beatty titled “Baseball Goes to War:”

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When the Secretary of War decided that after September 1, 1918, all professional baseball players of draft age must work or fight there was a heap of hullabaloo raised by the immediate relatives of the National and American Leagues.

“Dear old B. Ball!” they cried out in anguish. “Innocent, hard-working, patriotic, glorious old Mr. Ball, friend of everybody, an ever-present help in trouble, cheerer of the downcast, strength giver to the weak, the national hero. Though fifty million people can’t get along without him, they’re going to starve him to death by taking away the young men who keep him alive.”

Well, it did look tough, at first. But the immediate relatives kept on talking and so annoyed us that we began to investigate a situation that we were about to dismiss with “It is a darn shame, isn’t it?”

In the hope of establishing the idea that professional baseball was essential, the relatives pointed out that in the first two months and a half of the season — up to July 1 — the major leagues paid $88,715.66 in war taxes.

We were just curious enough to figure it out.

Allowing for the Sundays on which some of the clubs were idle, the major leagues were paying about $1,267 a day in war taxes, or about $158 a performance.

The war tax is 10 per cent, therefore the average day’s receipts were $1,580.

Take 50 cents as the average price paid — any fan will admit that this is giving baseball all the best of it — the average daily attendance for a major-league game from April 15 to July 1 was 3,160.

If eight games were played in the two leagues each day, only 25,280 persons, according to the average, were seeing major-league baseball every day!

In other words, all the American and National League clubs combined were not drawing — day for day — as many persons as attend only three of New York’s leading motion-picture theatres.

To carry farther the motion-picture comparison: the Government, we learned, estimates that 12,000,000 persons go to motion pictures every day, so that in the summertime, therefore, 475 times as many persons go to the movies as go to major-league baseball games.

We began to wonder about old Mr. Ball — was he losing his friends?

He was a great help in relieving nerves put on edge by war times, we heard.

We looked about us, the next time we went to the Polo Grounds. It was a Thursday afternoon. The attendance was about 3,000.

Perhaps 500 soldiers and sailors were there. Fine! But the rest of the men, what about them?

It was necessary to admit that they did not seem torn by war work. They were just out having a good time — as we were.

It looked had for old B. Ball.

Then some of the relatives, arguing that professional baseball was essential, reminded us that King George had witnessed a ball game in London between the army and navy teams.

Somebody else told how Jim Scott, former White Sox pitcher, now Captain James Scott, at Camp Lewis, had organized a complete league among the soldiers — dozens of teams, dozens of diamonds.

The Clark Griffith Bat and Ball Fund had passed the $100,000 mark and had equipped several thousand teams of soldiers in France.

Johnny Evers had just joined the Knights of Columbus to go to France to direct the soldier teams.

John McGraw had a plan to take an all-star team to France to play a series of games with an army team led by Hank Gowdy.

“In spite of all this that we’re doing for the Government,” one of the relatives protested, “they’re killing baseball!”

Killing baseball!

But were they? Not on your life! Old Mr. B. Ball had simply jumped out of bed, put on his clothes, and had hotfooted it off to war, leaving the mourners flat!

Professional baseball never has been able to stand away and look at itself. Because it received all the publicity, it thought it was baseball.

Professional baseball is dead for the duration of the war. It never realized, as the public did, that to real Americans there was more joy in playing baseball than in watching it.

A kid has more fun after the circus, imitating the acrobats, than at the show.

You can do three things with baseball — you can play it, you can read about it, and you can watch it being played.

The minority does the latter.

Baseball is bigger than ever. It is being played by more men, it is furnishing more recreation, it is relieving more tired nerves, it is giving more cheer than the wildest fanatic would have dared a year ago to predict.

Baseball is a big part of the war among the fighting men in France and here.

It’s the play that keeps the Yank from being a dull boy.

If Ty Cobb hits a ball over the fence and scores a run that wins for Detroit, a crowd of three thousand cheer.

Next morning men glance over the box scores in their papers and say: “Well, Ty still seems to be doing it.” And that’s the end of it.

But if Jim Jones from Junction City, Kansas, busts one over the roof of a French chateau and wins for the — th Infantry a game that the whole camp has bet its shirts upon— Lord help the Germans when they meet either the winners or the losers!

Secretary Baker’s work or fight order merely put the major leagues out of their misery.

Doubtless his investigations had shown him what was known to everybody connected with baseball except a few stupid officials who refused to open their eyes and look upon their gasping business; namely, that the public had given up professional baseball for the Big Game.

Before there was any definite action by General Crowder, the Pacific Coast League and the American Association had been pinched out by lack of patronage. Smaller leagues died in midsummer.

Even in the large cities there was no profit in baseball. The people were too busy. They couldn’t get afternoons off, and except on Saturdays professional baseball was mostly heard about and not seen.

The newspapers, of course, always have stimulated baseball.

Even if you didn’t see the Giants or the White Sox, you read about them, followed their work, day by day.

But the public is too busy following the hitting of Foch and Pershing to pay homage to Cobb or Speaker.

Baseball, the National Sport, has left the professional fields and has gone to war.

And not a soul has complained, except a few magnates who are chagrined to learn that Old Mr. B. Ball can get along without them.

Major T. L. Huston of the Engineer Corps, one of the owners of the New York Americans, told baseball what was what last spring in a letter written from France.

He is nearly fifty years old and has a son in the service. He said, in effect, that as far as he could learn professional baseball had never taken time to read the front pages of the newspapers, and that he was telling them there and then that there was some war going on and that he knew because he had been in it and that if they didn’t get in voluntarily they’d be forced in.

Major Huston was a first-class engineer and contractor who served in the Spanish-American War, had charge of the sanitation of Havana after that war, and went into baseball for the fun of it.

He got into the big war in the summer of 1917 and was the first baseball man to realize that there was a fight going on of more importance to the United States than the question of whether players could be released on ten days’ notice.

Close on Major Huston’s heels went Hank Gowdy, first ball player to enlist.

Hank, you remember, was the hero of the 1914 world series. He was the Boston catcher who beat the Athletics by making one single, three doubles, one three-bagger, and one home run in eleven times at bat in the four straight games that the Braves took.

He also received five bases on balls in those four memorable games, and stole two bases, besides making thirty-one put-outs and four assists without an error. That’s Hank, now Sergeant Gowdy of the Rainbow Division.

He told them. And so did Jim Scott of the White Sox, who even passed up baseball’s world series to get into the real World Series.

And “Rabbit” Maranville, shortstop of the Braves, Jack Miller of the Cardinals, and a bunch of the younger fry — who since boyhood had longed for the day that they could wear a big-league uniform, but who found another uniform that was a lot more worth wearing.

There hardly was a week toward the end of last season that some former baseball player in khaki didn’t drop in at the Polo Grounds to shake hands and to pass out the information that the people were more interested in bayonets than they were in bats.

When this season opened the draft began picking the men out, one by one; some went because they had to, and some because they wanted to — just as they did in any other occupation.

That was where professional baseball suffered from its own overexploitation.

Players actually believed the things written about them. They considered themselves of great importance because their pictures always were in the papers and because crowds of kids followed them down the street.

Baseball magnates thought their petty difficulties were of consequence in the general scheme of things.

The public looked on baseball players as supermen, national figures, heroes who would lead the way in everything heroic.

But the war bared professional baseball. The public found that great players were great players — not necessarily great men.

As men they averaged first class — nothing more.

It was the game that was heroic, national, and when the test was applied to institutions as well as to the men who man them baseball proved its worthiness.

It is truly the national game now.

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The Baseball Commemorative Half Dollar Coin shows with a cartoon image of a soldier playing baseball with his gun for a bat.

Baseball Commemorative Half Dollar Coin