Baseball During World War II: The Green Light Letter, Depleted Rosters and the All-American Girls League

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 11 min read

How baseball kept playing from 1942 to 1945: the presidential letter, the stars who left for service, the teenagers and one-armed outfielder who filled in, travel limits, the women's league and the 1946 boom.

Baseball did not stop for World War II. Five weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt to ask whether the major leagues should shut down for the duration. Roosevelt's reply, dated January 15, 1942, became known as the Green Light Letter. It told Landis to carry on, with the line that gave the document its place in the sport's history: "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going." The leagues played every season from 1942 to 1945, and the game that went on looks, in the record book, like a strange cousin of the one that came before and after it.

The strangeness is the point of this article. Between 1942 and 1945 the major leagues lost many of their best young players to the armed forces, drew on teenagers, older men and players classified as unfit for service, shifted spring training north to save train miles, and played with a ball made with a substitute material. At the same time a new women's professional league was founded in the Midwest, and the Negro leagues prospered on wartime paychecks. The numbers below come from the historical record; the story around them comes from widely documented history.

The letter that kept the lights on

The record of that winter is simple. After the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941, baseball's owners faced an uncomfortable question: was it right to play games while the country mobilized? Landis put it to the president directly, in a letter dated January 14. Roosevelt answered the next day, and his reply is short. He said that he thought baseball should go on, because working people would need recreation more than ever, and that any player who was fit for military service should serve like anyone else. He added a practical point: more night games would let people who worked day shifts see a game.

Three things in that answer shaped everything that followed. First, there was no exemption for players. Anyone who was drafted or enlisted would go. Second, the president wanted the games to be accessible to the war workforce, which pushed the clubs toward more evening baseball. Third, the letter was not a mandate. It was a permission, and it came with the expectation that the sport would behave as a patriotic enterprise. Clubs held benefit games and promoted war bonds, and fans were asked to hand back foul balls so that they could go to servicemen.

Landis remained commissioner until his death in November 1944. His successor, Happy Chandler, took over in the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe was ending.

Who left, and what the record shows

Nothing makes the thinning of the talent clearer than the career lines of the biggest stars. The historical record shows these seasons for five of the game's best players:

Feller enlisted in the Navy within days of Pearl Harbor, and his row in the database shows the cost: no appearances from 1942 through 1944, then nine games in 1945. Williams, who had batted .406 in 1941 and won the Triple Crown in 1942, spent 1943 to 1945 in naval aviation. DiMaggio was out for the same three seasons. Greenberg had been drafted in 1941 and discharged just before Pearl Harbor; he re-entered the service and did not play again until midway through 1945, when he hit 13 home runs in 78 games. Musial was a star for the Cardinals through 1944 and then missed 1945.

The hardest thing to measure is the talent that never reached the majors. Hundreds of players who would have filled minor-league rosters, and some who would have reached the big leagues, went into service instead, and many minor leagues shut down. The historical record does not carry the minors, so the best evidence is indirect: look at who led the leagues. In 1944, Snuffy Stirnweiss of the Yankees led the majors with 205 hits and 55 stolen bases. In the National League, Bill Nicholson of the Cubs led the league in both home runs and runs batted in during 1943 and again in 1944, with 33 home runs and 122 RBI in 1944. Those are fine seasons, and the historical record cannot say how they would have compared against the full pre-war talent pool, but it is fair to note that none of these leaders belonged to the group of stars who were away.

The pennant races

The war years had real pennant races, and some of them were good. Here is how the four seasons look in the database.

The 1942 Cardinals beat the Yankees in a Series that most observers had expected the Yankees to win. The 1944 World Series was an all-St. Louis affair, with both teams sharing Sportsman's Park, and the Browns' pennant was the only one the club won in St. Louis before it moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles after 1953. The 1944 Browns finished 89-65, one game ahead of the Detroit Tigers at 88-66. Hal Newhouser, the Tigers' left-hander, won 29 games with a 2.22 ERA and 187 strikeouts, and was voted the AL's Most Valuable Player; teammate Dizzy Trout won 27 with a league-leading 2.12 ERA. In 1945, Newhouser repeated as MVP with a 25-9 record and a 1.81 ERA. Newhouser had been classified as unfit for military service, and he is sometimes used as an example of the way the war helped certain players. The better reading is that he was a gifted left-hander who became a great one at age 23, in a league whose best hitters were away; the database cannot separate those two things.

The 1945 pennant race was close. Detroit won the American League by a game and a half over the Washington Senators, 88-65 to 87-67, with Greenberg's grand slam on the last day of the season often cited as the clincher. The Cubs, who won the NL with 98 wins, would not win another pennant until 2016. Phil Cavarretta hit .355 for them and was named the league's MVP.

Travel limits and spring training in the north

Baseball in the 1940s was a train sport. Clubs moved between cities by rail, and the heaviest burdens on the railroads were troop movements and freight. In January 1943 the government's transportation office asked the leagues to cut unnecessary travel, and Landis announced that most clubs would train in the North, north of the Ohio and Potomac rivers and east of the Mississippi. The Brooklyn Dodgers trained at Bear Mountain, New York; the Cubs set up at French Lick, Indiana. Teams worked out in gymnasiums and on whatever fields the weather allowed, so players often started the season in worse shape than usual.

The effect on the field is hard to isolate, because the lost talent and the ball were also changing the game. What the limits did change was routine. Florida and the rest of the South were not back as spring-training sites until 1946, and for four springs the clubs lived with a map drawn by the railroads.

The ball, the runs and the attendance

The numbers behind the whole stretch tell a consistent story. Here is the league environment, computed across both major leagues from the historical record:

Several patterns are visible. Scoring fell from 4.49 runs per team per game in 1941 to 3.92 in 1943, the low point. Home runs fell from 0.53 to 0.37 per team per game over the same two years. Part of that drop was the talent, and part was the ball: with rubber rationed, the manufacturer used a substitute material for the 1943 baseball, and players widely called it dead. The 1943 home-run rate is consistent with that complaint, though the database cannot isolate the ball from the lineups. Attendance fell from nearly 9.7 million in 1941 to 7.5 million in 1943, then recovered to 10.8 million in 1945 as the war's end approached. The jump to 18.5 million in 1946, a figure the game had never seen, was the result of returning stars and a public ready to spend money again.

For the history of how the ball and the era changed scoring across the century, see the live-ball era and, for the earlier contrast, the deadball era.

Teenagers, veterans and one-armed Pete Gray

Rosters filled with players who would not normally have been in the majors. Some were too young. On June 10, 1944, the Cincinnati Reds used Joe Nuxhall, a left-hander who was 15 years old. He pitched two-thirds of an inning and gave up five earned runs, which works out to an ERA of 67.50. He did not appear in the majors again until 1952, and went on to a career that ended in 1966 with 135 wins.

Some were older than usual. Others had physical limitations that would have kept them out of any normal pro roster. The most famous is Pete Gray, an outfielder who had lost his right arm as a child. Gray played 77 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1945 and batted .218 with 51 hits, six doubles, two triples, no home runs, 13 runs batted in and five stolen bases. Those numbers are not good. They are not a joke either. Gray had worked out a method of catching a fly ball, tucking the glove under the stump of his arm, rolling the ball across his chest and throwing it, all in one smooth motion. He struck out only 11 times in 234 at-bats. The Browns' use of him drew criticism at the time, and it still divides opinion: some saw a publicity move, others a courageous man given a real chance. He never returned to the majors.

Another story, less known: Bert Shepard, a pitcher who lost a leg when he was shot down over Germany, was fitted with an artificial leg, learned to pitch again, and appeared in one game for the Washington Senators on August 4, 1945. He pitched 5 and one-third innings, allowed three hits and one earned run, and struck out two. His ERA of 1.69 is the entire record. These are not major chapters in the sport's history, but they show how the war reshaped what counted as playable.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League

In 1943 Philip K. Wrigley, the chewing-gum magnate who owned the Chicago Cubs, helped found a professional league for women. The worry behind it was that the major leagues might be shut down or reduced and that ballparks would sit empty. The All-American Girls Softball League, as it was first called, opened its first season with four teams in Midwestern cities: the Rockford Peaches, Racine Belles, Kenosha Comets and South Bend Blue Sox. The league recruited players from softball diamonds across the United States and Canada, held tryouts, and paid salaries that compared well with factory work.

The game evolved quickly. The ball started as a large softball and gradually shrank toward baseball size over the years. Pitching began as underhand and changed to overhand by 1948, and base paths and the pitching distance were lengthened to more closely match the men's game. The league changed its name to reflect that shift. It operated through 1954, and over its history about 600 women played in it. The league also expected its players to follow a code of conduct and dress in skirted uniforms, with etiquette lessons in the early years, which sat uneasily with the athletic skill the players showed.

The historical record does not carry the league, so there are no season tables here, and what survives of its record comes from the players, the league's own publications and later research. The 1992 film "A League of Their Own" brought the story to a wide audience, with the usual dramatic license. For readers who want the broader story of women in the sport, the site's softball section and the article on fastpitch versus slowpitch softball offer the nearby context.

The Negro leagues in the war years

The war years were a high point for Black baseball. Defense-industry paychecks put money in the pockets of fans in the cities where the clubs played, and by most accounts crowds were strong. The historical record includes Negro league statistics for 1920 to 1948 as major-league data, and the records show real competition. The 1942 championship series went to the Kansas City Monarchs, who swept the Homestead Grays four games to none. The Grays won the series in 1943 over the Birmingham Black Barons, four games to three, and again in 1944, four games to one. In 1945 the Cleveland Buckeyes won the Negro American League with a 52-15 record.

One entry from the 1943 leaders list is worth pausing on. In the combined historical data, the leaders in runs batted in for 1943 include Josh Gibson of the Grays with 112, behind only Bill Nicholson's 128 and Rudy York's 118. It is a small reminder that the best players in the Negro leagues were players of major-league caliber, and that the color line, not the quality of play, kept them out of the majors. In 1945 Jackie Robinson played for the Monarchs, and in October the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization announced that it had signed him. How the line fell, club by club, is told in the integration era.

1946: the return

The 1946 season is the war's closing statement. The major leagues drew 18,523,289 fans, nearly double the 1945 figure. Williams returned and hit .342 with 38 home runs, helping the Boston Red Sox to a 104-50 record and the American League pennant. DiMaggio hit .290 with 25 home runs. Greenberg led the American League with 44 home runs. Musial hit .365 for the Cardinals, who won 98 games and took the NL pennant after a playoff with Brooklyn. Feller, back from the Navy, went 26-15 with a 2.18 ERA and 348 strikeouts in 371 and one-third innings.

The returning players pushed out many of the wartime substitutes. Gray and Shepard were gone from the majors. Nuxhall was back in the minors, where he would stay for years. The rosters returned to the pre-war pattern, with the exception of the color line, which was about to change. Baseball had learned that it could survive a war, and the 1946 crowd taught it that the public would turn out in far greater numbers than before.

Common questions

What was the Green Light Letter? It was President Roosevelt's reply, dated January 15, 1942, to a letter from Commissioner Landis asking whether baseball should continue during the war. Roosevelt said that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.

Which stars missed time because of the war? Among the best known: Bob Feller (1942 to 1944), Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio (1943 to 1945), Hank Greenberg (most of 1942 to 1945) and Stan Musial (1945).

Was Pete Gray really a major leaguer? Yes. He played 77 games for the Browns in 1945 and hit .218. The debate has always been about whether he was there because of his ability or because of the war, and his record, a low slugging average but few strikeouts, shows a player with real skills but limited power.

Who played in the All-American Girls league? Women who came mostly from softball, in four Midwestern cities at first, from 1943 to 1954. The historical record does not cover it.

Did the war change the rules? Not in any lasting way. The major changes were practical: more night games, northern spring training, fewer long road trips and a different ball in 1943.

Where to go next

To follow the story forward, read the integration era, which picks up in 1947, and the expansion era and the Year of the Pitcher for the 1960s. To explore the data, visit the leaders pages and sort by season for 1942 to 1945.