Why MLB’s most famous combat death isn’t in the Hall of Fame

Major League Baseball is lucky in at least one respect. While not many players have died in military service, many have fought, including members of the Hall of Fame.

Ted Williams flew 39 combat missions and was shot down during the Korean War. Warren Spahn suffered a splintered foot in World War II and was awarded the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, a battlefield promotion, and a Presidential Citation, according to his SABR biography. Grover Cleveland Alexander suffered shell shock in the trenches in World War I and was never the same again.

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Some would say that Christy Mathewson was baseball’s most famous war casualty. His last game was two years ago, when his lungs were burned by poison gas during a practice in 1918. Technically, however, the practice took place in New Jersey, and Mathewson lived another seven years before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1925.

Mathewson has long been in the Hall of Fame, and rightly so. He is considered one of the best pitchers in MLB history and was easily selected in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s first Cooperstown ballot in 1936.

The most famous baseball player killed in the war is far less well known than Mathewson and would statistically be a tremendously poor choice.

However, there was a time when a number of influential people called for Eddie Grant to be added to the throne.

Cooperstown odds: 5 percent

Why: On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, killing over 1,500 people and plunging the United States into World War II.

At that point, Grant had barely made an impression on the Hall of Fame ballot, receiving one vote from the writers in 1938 and two in 1939. There is nothing in Grant’s statistics to suggest that the writers unduly disparaged him. The numbers most unfavorable to Grant – an OPS+ of 78, a WAR of 4.4 and a win average of -7.5 – were not created until decades later. But voters may have known about Grant’s .249 batting average over his lifetime.

Moreover, he was little more than a part-time player for much of his career. A monument was dedicated to Grant at the Polo Grounds in 1921, but even casual fans would have known that it had little to do with his on-field work.

In the years before Pearl Harbor, the United States was also debating whether to intervene in the military conflicts simmering elsewhere. American newspapers in the 1930s reported on the rise of Nazi Germany and the Japanese occupation of China. The United States even introduced a peacetime military draft that cost Hank Greenberg most of the 1941 war season. Nevertheless, Pearl Harbor was the reason America declared war.

A war hero might simply not have resonated with Hall of Fame voters in the 1930s, although Bill James noted in his 1994 book The Politics of Glory that Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wanted Grant to be among the first inducted into Cooperstown.

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A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, a campaign for Grant’s inclusion in baseball began. Columnist Bob Considine wrote in a January 6, 1942, article in the Morning News of Wilmington, Delaware, that “the effect of the war on the memory of older baseball fans is reflected in the surprising (and touching) number of votes for Eddie Grant.”

Two days later, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch writer named J. Roy Stockton, who later served on the Veterans Committee, reported the idea of ​​a St. Louis baseball fan named JJ Mahoney.

“Mahoney proposes that a plaque bearing the name of Edward L. Grant be placed in the Hall of Fame,” Stockton wrote in a column on January 8, 1942. “The idea will undoubtedly prevail.”

Stockton described Grant’s transition from his last game in 1915 to military service, although the author somewhat exaggerates the truth.

“When the Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, he announced that he would enter the bigger game and fight for his country,” Stockton wrote.

In fact, Grant played his last game on October 6, 1915, ending a season in which he posted a .208 batting average in limited action for the New York Giants. Grant then practiced law for a year, according to his SABR biography, before joining the Army in 1917, becoming the first former baseball player to do so. He attained the rank of captain during his training and was killed in the Argonne Forest in France on October 5, 1918, during a mission to rescue a famous unit, the Lost Battalion.

Stockton was aware of the challenges facing Grant’s campaign.

“Many of the ballots have already been sent in by baseball writers, and probably none of them thought to put Eddie Grant’s name on the list,” Stockton wrote. “But those who hear of JJ Mahoney’s suggestion will probably be happy to send a request that Grant’s name be written at the top of the ballot.”

Others took notice. Sporting News noted on January 15, 1942: “Although he admitted that his nomination ‘is unlikely to receive enough votes,’ Cy Casper, sportscaster at KXOK, St. Louis, suggested last week on one of his ‘Sports Shots’ (programs) that Captain Eddie Grant, former third baseman of the New York Giants, be nominated for a place in the game’s Hall of Fame.”

Cooperstown ultimately wasn’t for Grant. On January 20, the writers chose the long-overdue Rogers Hornsby as their only choice for 1942, with Grant receiving only three votes or 1.3 percent from the writers.

An old-timers committee inducted 21 early baseball stars in 1945-1946, but not Grant. He later made the Veterans Committee’s list of candidates for the 1957, 1959, 1961, 1962 and 1963 elections, although it is unlikely that he came close to being inducted. His candidacy was marred by a shift over time whereby players were inducted primarily based on their career accomplishments. As a result, Cooperstown no longer has baseball pioneers or iconic figures for the game.

Over time, Eddie Grant almost completely disappeared from baseball memory. But every year on Memorial Day, the day on which America remembers its fallen soldiers, Grant is at the top of the list of former players.