How the WWII Draft Resulted in a Historic Baseball Moment

In ‘This Week in History,’ as many baseball players joined the service, FDR encouraged MLB to continue throughout WWII, leading to a boy’s historic debut.
How the WWII Draft Resulted in a Historic Baseball Moment
A statue of pitcher Joe Nuxhall, the youngest baseball player to ever play MLB, by Tom Tsuchiya, Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati. NTT72USA/CC BY-SA 3.0
Dustin Bass
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During the summer of 1941, baseball witnessed an unimaginable feat. Joe DiMaggio, the New York Yankee outfielder, had hit safely in 56 consecutive games—a record deemed unbreakable. It was a memorable season, though played under the shadow of war in Europe and Asia. That shadow would soon hover over America. Before the year ended, America would become militarily involved in World War II.

A year before Imperial Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, America instituted its first peacetime draft. At the time, America was working its way out of the Great Depression, and with that, baseball attendance was back on the rise. By 1940, Major League Baseball (MLB) game attendance was nearing 10 million, as more people could afford the national pastime. But now that America had declared war on Japan and Germany, baseball’s importance came into question.

Should Baseball Continue?

On Jan. 14, 1942, MLB Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking “whether professional baseball should continue to operate.”
Dustin Bass
Dustin Bass
Author
Dustin Bass is the creator and host of the American Tales podcast, and co-founder of The Sons of History. He writes two weekly series for The Epoch Times: Profiles in History and This Week in History. He is also an author.