A Very Live Corpse: How a Military-Industrial Complex Saved Bay Area Baseball during World War I

Walt Whitman once said, “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.” You could look it up.

—Annie Savoy, Bull Durham

Many sports fans and pundits believed that baseball died during the summer of 1918. Nearly all minor leagues folded, one after another. Both major leagues quit early, complying with a federal “work-or- fight” order that required draft- eligible men either to find war-related jobs or to serve in the armed forces. “In a period of upwards of twenty years as a writer of baseball,” San Francisco Call columnist T. P. Magilligan wrote, “I cannot recollect the time when there was so little enthusiasm for the national pastime as there is at the present moment.”¹

Magilligan and others were right about the collapse of professional baseball but wrong about other wartime ball. The malaise didn’t affect the many semipro, industrial, and military baseball leagues that suddenly sprang up or flourished across the country, infused by an inflow of major and minor league players. The San Francisco Bay Area, which wouldn’t welcome its first big league club for forty years, particularly benefited from this surge. Although the San Francisco Seals and Oakland Oaks both padlocked their turnstiles once the Pacific Coast League (PCL) had quit, fans still had much to cheer about at area ballparks and diamonds.

“Anyone that has an idea that baseball around the bay cities is dead,” Oakland Tribune sportswriter Eddie Murphy wrote, “need just take a trip over to Recreation park the coming Saturday or Sunday afternoons, and they will find that the National game is a very live corpse. The Shipbuilders’ league teams and the army and navy clubs around here have done a lot to make the wise fans forget that the game is anywhere near dead.”²

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The first hint of the sports bonanza to come arrived in August 1917, when right- hander “Death Valley” Jim Scott, in his ninth season hurling for the Chicago White Sox, announced his intention to enroll in an army officers’ training program: “Scott was formerly in the United States army. Asked about leaving the team in a crisis, he said his country’s crisis was more vital.”³ Scott’s orders were late reaching the Windy City, going first to his home in Wyoming. When they arrived he had three hours to catch a train. He reported to the San Francisco Presidio on September 11, 1917, tardy by a day, an infraction the army overlooked. “From what I hear of Candidate Scott,” a colonel said, “I am inclined to believe he will make a first- class officer.”⁴

Scott worked more arduously in the army than he ever had during spring training. He lacked time even to check the post’s scoreboard when the White Sox faced the New York Giants in the 1917 World Series. (A wire photo showed him busy digging a trench; the club voted him a full winners’ share of the gate receipts anyway.) Scott married shortly before earning his commission in November.⁵ Early the following month, as Captain Scott, he reported to Camp Lewis near Tacoma, Washington, where he became a small arms instructor. As the camp’s director of baseball as well, he would lead an excellent army ball club to the Bay Area to play some of the most exciting games of the 1918 season.

Boston Red Sox star outfielder Duffy Lewis was the next to arrive in the Bay Area. He returned to his Northern California home during the 1917 World Series, having enlisted in Boston during the summer as a navy yeoman, along with several teammates and Boston Braves players. While the others reported for duty at the Boston Navy Yard, Lewis went to Mare Island at nearby Vallejo, California. The navy appointed him athletic director there in early November, while Scott was still at the Presidio, and soon promoted him to chief yeoman: “As the author of a plan to have the...