The "Paint and Putty" Leagues: Industrial Baseball during World War I

Organized baseball during 1918 experienced what Grantland Rice later described as "a weird and badly twisted season."¹ With American troops fighting in France during World War I, the minor leagues collapsed while the major leagues limped toward an early conclusion. Shipyard and steel-mill teams, in contrast, flourished in what were widely called "paint and putty" leagues. Every section of the country saw good industrial baseball. The Northeast and Atlantic Seaboard had three leagues, the Northwest and West Coast a total of four, the Great Lakes two, and the Gulf Coast one. A pair of small leagues scattered across remote Southwestern mining towns plus one league in the Midwest brought the total to thirteen circuits, comprising seventy-four teams altogether.

A new federal regulation known as the "work-or-fight" rule spurred the flow of baseball talent into industrial leagues. Most men of draft age were required either to join the armed forces or to find jobs essential to the wartime effort. Crucially, such jobs provided draft exemptions. The rule affected fourteen major league clubs beginning on Labor Day, the close of the war-curtailed season, while the Cubs and Red Sox had until the end of their early World Series in September. A significant number of players chose not to wait, however. They jumped to shipyard or mill leagues or to semipro circuits that included one or more industrial clubs.²

The "paint and putty" appellation was attributed to Charles Dryden of the Chicago Examiner, author of numerous colorful sports nicknames. It spread quickly among scribes and columnists who objected to the influx of ballplayers into industrial leagues. Critics charged that players signed with teams at high salaries simply to avoid conscription. Stories circulated of nominal or nonexistent duties for ballplayers in the yards and mills. Authorities took charges of "slackerism" seriously and investigated allegations of athletes doing little or no meaningful work or of receiving unmerited draft exemptions. The army even yanked two shipyard ballplayers—pitchers Ed Monroe of the Yankees and John Russell of the Dodgers—into service. But an internal investigation by Emergency Fleet Corporation Vice President Howard Coonley found that "with very few exceptions" ballplayers were performing the jobs they'd been hired to do.³

Some ballplayers undoubtedly did receive much higher pay than their coworkers. Although unseemly, such arrangements weren't illegal, and the government later stopped reimbursement for exorbitant player salaries. Some leagues enacted regulations that ballplayers had to be employed for a minimum period—usually a week or two—before being eligible to play. Writers, officials, and fans expected these men to work in the mill or shipyard they represented during the week before taking to the diamond on weekends. But at least one exception arose during the season: The San Francisco Union Iron Works team threatened to drop out of the local Shipbuilders' League because it lacked enough players working in the yard. The three other teams in the circuit represented shipyards situated across the bay in Oakland and Alameda. "A league with no team in the city would be a sorry looking thing," the San Francisco Chronicle reported, "so it was decided to pack that rule away in moth balls and forget about it, and let each manager get the best talent available."⁴

All draft-eligible players still had to hold down essential wartime jobs, whether they worked in plants or not. San Francisco Seals pitcher Spider Baum, who signed on as the San Francisco Union Iron Works' player-manager in mid-July following the shuttering of the Pacific Coast League, was a clerk for a local exemption board—an essential position, indeed. Oscar "Happy" Felsch, who jumped from the White Sox to the Kosciuskos in the semipro Lake Shore League, worked during the week for the Milwaukee Gas Light Company.

The Bethlehem Steel League in the Northeast was the behemoth of paint-and-putty circuits. Charles M. Schwab, head of the steel company (not related to the founder of the brokerage firm), had inaugurated the six-team league in 1916. "I want some good wholesome games that will furnish...