War & Baseball

Many a baseball expert predicted at the beginning of the season that this year's World Series, if played at all, would take place on the Fourth of July. But last week U.S. baseball, major and minor, had survived the Fourth, had staged their midseason all-star games and were making elaborate plans for their October finales.

The minors, backbone of U.S. baseball, have been hardest hit. Of their 41 leagues, twelve have folded this year: ten were frightened out of starting the season, two gave up when seacoast dimout regulations prevented night games. Approximately 25% of their players have been lost to the armed forces and higher-paid defense jobs. Another wartime blow to the night-playing, bus-traveling minor league clubs was the recent ODT ban on chartered busses. But as long as they can get around in borrowed station wagons, baseball's bush leaguers have no intention of quitting.

The majors have had fewer problems. The only night games affected by the sea-coast dimout are those held at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and Manhattan's Polo Grounds, where the Dodgers and Giants now play at twilight instead. Some big-league stars have walked off to war; many more will follow. But up from the minors have come a bumper crop of rookies who have helped fans forget the Greenbergs, Fellers, Padgetts, Travises.

Still, last week one of the biggest baseball crowds of the year (62,000) showed up in Cleveland's Municipal Stadium to get what might be a last look at some of the big-leaguers who are now in the Army & Navy. The game was the second of three all-star affairs staged on three successive nights for the benefit of the U.S. and Canadian armed forces.

Off the Bat. The first, played in Manhattan's Polo Grounds between a thunderstorm and a blackout, was all-civilian: between picked teams of American and National Leaguers. The Americans, hopping on the National's super-duper Pitcher Morton Cooper before he had worked the dampness out of his mighty right arm, scored three runs in the first inning, starting with a homer by Cleveland's Lou Boudreau on the second pitch. That was enough to win the game (3-to-1) and the chance to represent the big leagues in the skirmish with Uncle Sam's club in Cleveland the following night.

That, too, was settled in the first inning, and once again by American League power. The Red-White-&-Blues had Sluggers Cecil Travis, Sam Chapman, Don Padgett, and Morrie Arnovich; but they were no match for razor-sharp batsmen like Ted Williams, Lou Boudreau, Joe Di Maggio, Rudy York. So Manager Mickey Cochrane, onetime Tiger mastermind, stepping out of comfortable retirement last spring to take over the barnstorming baseball team of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station and drafted to manage Uncle Sam's allstars, had to rely on superior pitching.

In Fireball Bob Feller, he thought he had it. But in the first inning, Feller was nicked for two runs. In the second, he was knocked out of the box. For the next four frames, Johnny Rigney, the Great Lakes' No. 1 pitcher, succeeded in keeping the Americans away from home plate. But by game's end, the Red-White-&-Blues had been whitewashed, 5-to-0.

The third all-star game, at Buffalo, was the first ever played in the minor International League. Contestants were its "northern" (Montreal, Toronto, Rochester, Buffalo) and "southern" (Newark, Jersey City, Syracuse, Baltimore) teams. There, too, the game was clinched in the first inning. Led by Newark's George Stirnweiss and Baltimore's Hank Edwards, the southerners pounded four northern pitchers for eleven hits, won 6-to-1.

Net proceeds of all three games was $171,000, more than half of which goes to Baseball's bat-&-ball fund (for the armed forces), the rest to Army & Navy Relief.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.