Nine Innings from Home

When the United States entered World War II, the Navy faced a problem no admiral had trained for: how to keep hundreds of thousands of young, frightened, and restless men psychologically intact between the terror of combat and the grinding monotony of base life. The answer, improbable and enduring, was baseball. More than 500 Major League players and 4,000 minor leaguers enlisted or were drafted into the armed forces, and the Navy — with characteristic institutional purpose — put them to work not only in uniform, but at bat. At Naval Training Station Norfolk, the program became something extraordinary. Led by Bob Feller and Fred Hutchinson, the NTS Bluejackets compiled a stunning 92–8 record in 1942, fielding a roster that included three New York Yankees — Phil Rizzuto among them — and regularly defeating visiting Major League teams brought in specifically to play them. In May 1943, the Red Sox and Washington Senators traveled to Norfolk not as entertainers but as opponents, facing a Navy squad that was, by any measure, one of the finest baseball teams in wartime America. The games raised millions in war bond sales, kept sailors out of trouble, and gave 18- and 19-year-old recruits something achingly familiar in the most unfamiliar season of their lives.