Thirty-nine baseball Hall of Famers served in World War II.
They don’t call it the Greatest Generation for nothing. Of the hundreds of ballplayers who have been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, 39 belong to an extra-special class: those who served in the military during World War II. That list includes such all-time greats as Yogi Berra (Navy), Ted Williams (Marines), Jackie Robinson (Army), and Joe DiMaggio (Army), all of whom put up some of the most impressive numbers in baseball history despite losing several years of their careers while on active duty. Robinson, who broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, did so after attaining the rank of second lieutenant as part of the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion — a segregated unit whose motto was “Come Out Fighting.” Like baseball, the military did not officially desegregate until after the war.
Anyone who’s seen A League of Their Own knows that World War II led to another massive change in the sport: the creation of women’s leagues, most notably the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. Active in the Midwest between 1943 and 1954, the league consisted of 15 teams whose players were themselves inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.
