A Little Girl, A Great War, A Baseball Triumph

The year was 1946.

Life in the United States was slowly returning to normal. The war in Europe had ended in May 1945. By September the War in the Pacific was over. Soldiers like my Dad were returning from World War II and reuniting with their eager families. More than five hundred had been Major League baseball players.

Months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Major League Baseball had reached new heights of popularity. In Philadelphia’s Shibe Field, home of the Philadelphia Athletics, Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams crushed a ball into the right field speaker to lift his average to .406, winning the batting title and, unknown to him at the time, becoming the last Major Leaguer to hit over .400.

In Cleveland’s League Park, Yankee centerfielder Joe DiMaggio set another record, hitting safely in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. At Fenway Park, forty-one-year-old Red Sox pitcher Lefty Grove got his three-hundredth career win.

The war changed everything. Detroit’s Hall of Fame slugger “Hammerin” Hank Greenberg was one of the first to be drafted, giving up his $55,000 yearly salary for $21 per month Army pay and telling the Sporting News, “If there’s any last message to be given to the public, let it be that I’m going to be a good soldier.”

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The Cleveland Indians’ Bob Feller had a family-related draft exemption. He was on his way to Chicago to discuss his 1942 contract when he heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Instead of negotiating a new contract, he told Indians General Manager Cy Slapnicka that he was enlisting in the Navy, giving up a $100,000 salary to become a Chief Petty Officer aboard the USS Alabama.

Ted Williams enlisted in the Navy in May 1942, became a second lieutenant and a Marine fighter pilot, setting records for aerial gunnery. Warren Spahn fought in the Battle of the Bulge after pitching just one Major League game. Yogi Berra was a minor leaguer for the Norfolk Tars with a .396 batting average when he was drafted. He became a gunner’s mate and volunteered to pilot the rocket boats that led the landing craft on D-Day.

Team owners scrambled to find replacements for the hundreds of Major and Minor League players they lost. When New York Giants Manager Leo Durocher found he had only two regulars left on the team, he put himself in the lineup. A forty-six-year-old named Hod Lisanbee pitched for the Cincinnati Reds. Former prisoner of war Bert Shepard pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers with an artificial leg. One-armed outfielder Pete Gray was a St. Louis Brown. Former Red Sox slugger Jimmy Foxx came out of retirement to play for the Philadelphia Phillies. Women also played pro ball when Phillip K. Wrigley founded the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

The war had changed everything for our small family, too. I was five years old when my Dad left, wrenched from his desk at the Travelers Insurance Company at thirty-six years of age, exchanging his well-worn pen for a dangerous rifle, his warm front porch for the frozen trenches of Alsace, his much-loved wife and child for the company of bloodied soldiers he’d never met.

With my childish reasoning, I blamed my mother for his going, believing the bacon and eggs she’d cooked for breakfast the day of his physical were the reason he’d been classified I-A. When the officer asked what branch of the service he preferred, he said the Navy—so they promptly put him in the Army infantry and sent him to the front lines in France.

I didn’t understand why he couldn’t stay with us. He’d been supporting the war, taking a second job making rifles at the Underwood Typewriter factory, and serving as an air raid warden. I remember him tapping at our kitchen window while my mother read me a book by candlelight. No lights were allowed, even for your own wife and daughter.

He...