Two dozen sailors and a handful of officers have come to McClure Field on a Tuesday to play softball. Some have their shirts off on this steamy summer day as they toss the ball a few times to warm up before the first pitch.
McClure is a lot of field for such an informal game. It seats 3,500 and is the second-oldest brick baseball stadium in the country. Games have been played here for almost a century. Years ago, the Navy put up a series of markers to tell its history, but these days few stop to read them.
The one near the entrance on the first base side has been bleached by the sun.
"During World War II all Americans pitched in for victory. Several major league baseball players enlisted in the United States Navy and reported to Norfolk for training."
And then you see the names.
Phil Rizzuto. Pee Wee Reese. Bob Feller. Dom DiMaggio.
In September 1943, the best baseball on Earth was being played on this field, because almost all of the day's star players had enlisted.
Naval Station Norfolk had two of the best military teams going, the Naval Training Station Bluejackets and the Naval Air Station Airmen. Both teams routinely defeated major league squads in exhibition games - War Bond exhibitions as they were called back then - and each had a future Hall of Famer.
The station commander had fallen in love with the game, and he had an idea: Pit the two teams against each other in a best-of-seven series.
The 1943 Navy World Series went on for 11 days that September, and it was a thrill ride. But almost no one outside the gates could see it.
German U-boats still loomed off the coast, the U.S. still kept thousands of people in internment camps, and Norfolk Naval Station was close to total lockdown.
Civilians weren't allowed on the base, so the series essentially took place in a vacuum, watched only by those wearing "Dixie cup"sailors' caps and the peaked hats of officers.
It received only three paragraphs in The New York Times. The Norfolk newspapers covered it as best they could, but that meant taking reports by telephone.
McClure Field is at the corner of Farragut and Pocahontas in the heart of the base. The tree-lined streets intersect two blocks from Admirals' Row, a collection of stately homes on Dillingham Boulevard looking out over Willoughby Bay.
Built in 1919, the park was originally called the Naval Training Station Stadium. It was renamed McClure Field in 1944 to honor Capt. Henry A. McClure, the man responsible for the '43 series. It was one of the first structures built on the base and is just five years younger than Chicago's Wrigley Field.
By 1943, more than 16,000 active duty officers and sailors were stationed at Norfolk Naval Station. Many were baseball fans, and quite often McClure was too small for its World War II crowds.
"Major league baseball players held value in the war effort as entertainment and morale boosters," said John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian. "The homebound troops and sailors in training needed these games. And those in charge realized it."
Before World War II, Capt. McClure had not been much of a baseball fan, but as the commander of Naval Station Norfolk, he saw what it did for the morale of his charges. And McClure didn't want the '43 season to end without fanfare.
There had been talk of a fall series between all-star teams from Norfolk and the Great Lakes Training Station, just north of Chicago. But wartime travel restrictions and gasoline bans put a halt to that idea.
What didn't require travel would be a series between Norfolk's two outstanding teams. They had met 44 times during the season, with the Bluejackets winning 24, the Airmen winning 19, and one game ending in a 1-1 tie after 11 innings.
What played out was better than anyone could have imagined. The series lasted seven tense games, two of which went to extra innings. It ended with Reese ripping a line drive into right field with two out in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 7.
Hooks DeVaurs raced toward the corner, dove for the ball, and...
"I knew they played some World War II-era baseball on that field, but I had no idea it was of that level," said Cmdr. Byron Ogden, who plays shortstop for his helicopter squadron's softball team. "When I think about the fact that Pee Wee and Phil were playing shortstop on that field.... Every time I go out there to play short from now on, I'm going to be thinking that I better not desecrate the honor of playing where they played."
Almost from the moment the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, baseball's stars took up arms.
Bob Feller, with his 100 mph fastball, enlisted in the Navy the day after the attack. Hank Greenberg, a two-time American League MVP, re-enlisted in the Army the next day.
There were only 16 major league teams, and only about 400 players were in the bigs at any given time.
And yet, 500 major leaguers joined the military during World War II.
Nearly every star player - from Joe DiMaggio to Ted Williams to Stan Musial - was in some branch at some point. Many ended up in Norfolk. And in 1943, baseball was king.
The game was so entrenched in society that G.I. Joes were known to use baseball knowledge to weed out the enemy.
"Halt, who goes there?" was often followed by "Who is the second sacker for the Bums?"
Anyone who couldn't answer might get shot. There were a lot of moving parts to the question.
First, you had to know a second sacker was a second baseman. Then you had to know the Bums were the Brooklyn Dodgers. Then, you had to know who was playing second.
Anybody following the 1942 season knew Billy Herman played second base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. They also knew his teammate Pee Wee Reese had joined the Navy by the following spring.
It originally looked as if Reese would join Rizzuto on the Bluejackets squad, forming a ridiculously talented middle infield. As a chief warrant officer, Bluejackets coach Gary Bodie spent much of his time weeding through new arrivals lists, looking for players.
But by then, Naval Air Station Capt. James Marshall Shoemaker had begun to make a stink about how the Naval Training Station team seemed to get all the good players.
Bodie transferred Reese across the base to play for the Airmen, appeasing Shoemaker, who had been Pearl Harbor's commanding officer during the attack.
With the addition of Reese and a handful of other major league-caliber players, the Airmen became a true force... and a match for the Bluejackets. That was saying something, for the Bluejackets were good enough to challenge the Washington Senators in the spring of '43.
As the Senators headed north after spring training, they stopped off in Norfolk for a goodwill game. By then McClure had become rabid about his baseball team, his fire fueled by a '42 Bluejackets squad that featured Feller and went 92-8.
McClure tacked a notice to the clubhouse bulletin board the morning of the Senators game.
Then the Bluejackets went to Washington and beat the Senators, 4-3, in a Navy War Bonds game that raised $2 million. The Bluejackets would also beat the St. Louis Browns and the Boston Red Sox that summer. The game against the Red Sox drew a McClure Field-record 7,000 fans. The Bluejackets won 4-3 in 10 innings.
Not to be outdone, the Airmen also went to Washington and beat the Senators.
"It's not a surprise that they could beat major league teams," baseball historian and author Bill Nowlin said. "Most of the talent went into the military. What was left were major league teams with players who wouldn't have been good enough to play in the big leagues otherwise."
Throughout the summer, the Bluejackets and Airmen pounded on each other during the weekends and spent their weekdays beating up on the likes of Curtis Bay's Coast Guard, the Fort Belvoir Soldiers, Camp Pendleton, and a North Carolina Preflight team out of Chapel Hill dubbed the Cloudbusters.
That Cloudbusters team was pretty good, too. It had a young Johnny Pesky, who the year before had become the first major leaguer to collect 200 hits or more in his rookie season. And Ted Williams, who two years earlier had batted .406.
Eddie Robinson, 90, is one of two who played in the Norfolk series known to be alive.
"We had six different sets of uniforms in Norfolk, all different colors," Robinson, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, writes in his recently released book "Lucky Me: My sixty-five years in baseball."
"We had the best gloves and all the bats we wanted. We had what amounted to a major league operation. In fact, it was better than what the major league clubs had at the time because they couldn't get good equipment. We had it."
During the series, Robinson batted cleanup for the Bluejackets while manning first base.
"Bodie even managed to get the Washington Senators' groundskeeper to come down to Norfolk to make our infield major league caliber," he said. "Our dugout bench was padded with tilted backs and armrests so that we had individual seats and could recline with our feet up on the edge of the dugout."
By the time the 1943 Navy World Series was over, the seven games had drawn about 29,000 people to McClure Field.
The conditions for Game 1 were perfect - a beautiful, sunny September afternoon, the stands packed. Fans who couldn't find seats were lined up beyond the foul poles in the outfield.
The Airmen were the home team, and Bluejackets leadoff hitter Hooks DeVaurs dug in to face Hugh Casey.
Casey had already pitched in a real World Series and been in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway.
As the newspaper hawkers of the era would shout on street corners: "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!"
Source:
No comments:
Post a Comment