Everyday life has felt abnormal for the past two years.
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and then Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has been inescapable. Those realities have altered our movements, choices, work, interactions and outlooks. Of course, the heaviest price has been paid by those who’ve lost lives or loved ones.
2022 seems unusual, even unreal, just like 2020 and 2021.
Folks who endured 1945 dealt with some pretty strange upheaval in their lives, too. For them, “normal” had begun fading away when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s and then flat disappeared when World War II broke out.
Hauteans witnessed the abnormality of 1945 in their own town.
Two major league baseball teams, the Chicago White Sox and Detroit Tigers, conducted spring training in Terre Haute. Not in sunny Florida or the warmth of the West Coast, but Terre Haute and five other Indiana cities.
Now that’s abnormal.
Owners of the White Sox and Tigers didn’t suddenly become smitten by drizzly, 50-degree climates. The big-league clubs relocated their spring training camps to Terre Haute from their previous bases in Pasadena, Calif. (for the Sox) and Lakeland, Fla. (for the Tigers) because of World War II. Sacrifices of all kinds were being made.
Americans on the home front had been asked throughout the war to restrict non-essential travel. “Is this trip really necessary?” became a catchphrase in the early 1940s, as a historical recount in the baseball publication Hardball Times explained in 2013. So, the federal defense transportation director and major league baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis agreed to keep the teams closer to home for spring training, as in north of the Mason-Dixon Line and east of the Mississippi River.
The teams, like most Americans, obliged. The greater good mattered.
Six teams chose Indiana — the Chicago Cubs and White Sox gathered in French Lick; Cincinnati Reds in Bloomington; Cleveland Indians in Lafayette; Tigers in Evansville; and Pittsburgh Pirates in Muncie, mostly college towns with decent ballparks and athletic fieldhouses. Given Indiana’s reputation for its rock quarries, the spring training circuit became known as the Limestone League, as opposed to the usual Grapefruit League in Florida and Cactus League in Arizona.
More caustic sportswriters called it the Long Underwear League.
After playing in French Lick in 1943 and ‘44, the White Sox switched in 1945 to Terre Haute, where Memorial Stadium was just 20 years old and featured many attributes of big-league ballparks. The Tigers started their 1945 camp in Evansville, then moved to Terre Haute to finish preparing for the upcoming regular season, as Terre Haute historian Mike McCormick reported in a 2004 retrospective. The Tigers made the move because they’d only gotten four exhibition games against big-league competition in Evansville, and they could compete against the White Sox by joining the Chicago club at Terre Haute, as a Michigan History magazine story stated in 1995.
The players and coaching staffs were fulfilling the objective of President Franklin Roosevelt.
FDR wanted major-league baseball to continue during the war. With 16 million Americans serving in the military during World War II, Roosevelt knew other citizens would be working longer and harder to produce goods. They’d need some form of entertainment to relax. “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” the 32nd president said.
He didn’t exempt ballplayers from military service, though. More than 500 big-leaguers and 2,000 players in the minor leagues — which primarily shut down — served in the war.
That meant the major league teams’ rosters comprised of players deemed physically unable to serve (known as 4Fs), too old to serve or returning from service (sometimes wounded).
“Even if the actual quality of the teams is lowered by greater use of older players, this will not dampen the popularity of the sport,” Roosevelt reasoned.
While the White Sox club that came to Terre Haute had spent most of the war years near the bottom of the American League, the Tigers came to town as one of that era’s most talented teams. Still, Detroit had five 4F players, two 40-somethings, three others 38 or 39, and two Tigers ages 29 and 31 who’d never played in the bigs. As the 1945 season unfolded, eight Tigers veterans rejoined the team after their military stints ended, including infielder Johnny McHale who reported to the Terre Haute camp. Detroit ended up winning the ‘45 World Series.
Two stars of the Tigers during their Terre Haute stay were pitchers Hal Newhouser and Paul “Dizzy” Trout, born and raised in Sandcut in northeastern Vigo County. Both were 4Fs, Newhouser for a heart murmur and the bespectacled Trout for poor eyesight and hearing, and both worked in war plants in the offseasons, according to a Society for American Baseball Research biography of Trout. On the mound, though, they excelled. Together, they’d won a combined 56 games in 1944 and finished first (Newhouser) and second (Trout) in the American League’s Most Valuable Player voting.
Thus, it wasn’t surprising that thousands of Terre Haute fans turned out for the four Tigers-vs.-White Sox exhibition games at Memorial Stadium. Six-thousand watched their duel on Sunday, April 8, 1945, which the declared “Paul Trout Day” in honor of the colorful Vigo County native.
True to FDR’s goal, Trout entertained baseball fans, and teammates, during the war and throughout his career with his diamond skills and antics. In previous spring training camps, Trout rode a borrowed policeman’s motorcycle around a Florida ballpark, wore loud ties and two-toned shoes and donned a comical hat and fake mustache. He gave Terre Haute fans his baseball best on “Paul Trout Day,” pitching all nine innings and smacking three hits in a 15-9 win over the White Sox.
Four days later, the White Sox headed north to Chicago for the regular season, and the Tigers left town April 16 for their season-opener at St. Louis.
The war in Europe ended in May, and in the Pacific that September. Terre Haute’s minor-league pro baseball club continued playing until July 1956, when it folded. Big-league clubs resumed their usual spring training rituals in Florida and the West Coast, never to return to Indiana.
Life eventually got back to normal — a new normal, at least. As Hall of Famer and World War II Navy veteran Yogi Berra once said, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
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