Work, Fight, or Play Ball: How Bethlehem Steel Helped Baseball's Stars Avoid World War I

by William Ecenbarger

In 1918, Bethlehem Steel started the world’s greatest industrial baseball league. Appealing to Major League Baseball players looking to avoid service in the Great War, teams employed “ringers” like Babe Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, and Shoeless Joe Jackson in what became scornfully known as “safe shelter” leagues. In Work, Fight, or Play Ball , William Ecenbarger fondly recounts this little-known story of how dozens of athletes faced professional conflicts and a difficult choice in light of public perceptions and war propaganda.

Some players used the steel mill and shipyard leagues to avoid wartime military duty, irking Major League owners, who saw their rosters dwindling. Bethlehem Steel President Charles Schwab (no relation to the financier) saw the league as a means to stave off employee and union organizing. Most fans loudly criticized the ballplayers, but nevertheless showed up to watch the action on the diamond.

Ecenbarger traces the 1918 Steel League’s season and compares the fates of the players who defected to industry or continued to play stateside with the travails of the Major Leaguers, such as Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, who served during the war.

Work, Fight, or Play Ball reveals the home field advantage brought on by the war, which allowed companies to profit from Major League players.

212 pages, Hardcover

Published February 2, 2024

Reviews

[Calvin Daniels · Rating 2 out of 5]

A 2.5

Less than I had hoped, but quick to read

[Nina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting topic, so it’s too bad it was so poorly written. Back in the nascent days of pro-baseball, there were industrial leagues. Companies fielded their own teams to discourage unionizing, bolster morale, keep workers from drinking on their days off, and “Americanize” their immigrant workers. The players were paid as company workers, not as baseball players. The games attracted thousands of spectators. During WWI, major league players knew their jobs were not “essential,” but steel and shipyard jobs were. So they dodged the draft by going to work in industry. And you can use the term “work” loosely. Babe Ruth dressed in his Sunday clothes, walked around the plant chatting, and never did a lick of work. (Unlike Ty Cobb, who said he would never wear a company uniform, and even enlisted at the end of his season).

Another famous draft dodger was Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father), who used his connections to get a job as an assistant general manager at today’s equivalent of $300,000 per year and was so ineffective that they moved him over to manage the company baseball team. His biographer wrote, “Job Kennedy…did not want to wear the uniform of the nation…He just wanted to make enough money to be a millionaire by the time he was thirty-five.”

An interesting bit was that Allied propaganda put out fake news, e.g., that the Germans were replacing church bells in Belgium with hanging nuns. It was because the public later learned they had been lied to that when the stories of the German death camps came out in WWII, the public was disinclined to believe it. Oh, the ramifications of sensationalizing and lying!

Anyway, the book could have been an interesting long magazine article instead of a tedious book. Much of it was just recitation of facts (who played on what team, how old they were, what position they played, who made what plays during what games, who died later from what). There was even a totally extraneous paragraph on a Yale track star who never had anything to do with baseball.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Due to having attended Lehigh University in Bethlehem where the Steel plant was part of our everyday scenery, I hoped for some local history as well as baseball knowledge. Although I found some of each in this book, the repetition of the same items in different chapters, and the printing errors in the Kindle version where just part of the reason this book got only 2 stars from me. I did not need to have so many mentions of the MLB teams of a player on a company team, nor did I need so much detail of who got hits in so many games. The stories in the book became monotonous in some chapters, where other items from ‘over there’ could have included more depth. I am not sorry I read this, but near the end I really wanted to get to the end of the book and start reading something else.

[Luke V · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but very slight book, never really got past the surface: steel leagues formed in 1917 and 1918, and many MLB players signed up for the steel mills to avoid being drafted, and played in the league... I would have loved to see more humanity in the book, but much of the short book was filled with game by game recaps and roster reviews. We can assume these players wanted to avoid the draft, but the author lacked the sources to truly explain players' thought processes.

[Budd Margolis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never knew this and it was fascinating to see another view of the origins of Baseball with some war politics impacting owner & players decisions.

[Ed Dorsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject and well researched, but a lot of roster listing which could have been in an appendix.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seemed it was written on a whim. Fun, not a fascinating read. But such is war and mass confusion. A very light antidote on the game of baseball.