The green light for bright lights

“The rigid vol­un­teer rules of right and wrong in sports are sec­ond only to reli­gious faith in moral train­ing, and base­ball is the great­est of Amer­i­can sports.”

— Her­bert Hoover

“Base­ball pro­vides a recre­ation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, and which can be got for very lit­tle cost. And, inci­den­tally, I hope that night games can be extended because it gives an oppor­tu­nity to the day shift to see a game occasionally.”

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

Amer­ica was com­ing through its worst eco­nomic cri­sis ever. The world had erupted into war and now, through the attack on Pearl Har­bor, Amer­ica had been pulled into that war as well. Every able-bodied per­son was going to be needed for the war effort. It was not a time for fun and games.

And so the com­mis­sioner of Major League Base­ball, Judge Ken­ne­saw Moun­tain Lan­dis, wrote to Pres­i­dent Franklin Delano Roo­sevelt to pro­pose a halt to base­ball for the dura­tion of the war. It wouldn’t be the only sport­ing event to pause — the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup were on hold as well. Roosevelt’s response not only led to the con­tin­u­a­tion of base­ball dur­ing the war, but it also changed the sport forever.

To begin, Roo­sevelt made it clear that he had no author­ity to make a final deci­sion but that the call on whether base­ball would con­tinue fell to Lan­dis and to the own­ers, stat­ing, “What I am going to say is solely a per­sonal and not an offi­cial point of view.” He then noted that the war would have a pro­found impact on the nation.

“There will be fewer peo­ple unem­ployed and every­body will work longer hours and harder than ever before,” he said. “And that means they ought to have a chance for recre­ation and for tak­ing their minds off their work even more than before.” The war effort would take tens of thou­sands of men away from home and would result in the employ­ment of thou­sands and thou­sands more men and women.

Of course, if they were to use their leisure time to take in a ball game, it would be dif­fi­cult to do so dur­ing the day since they would be work­ing “longer hours and harder than ever before.” Roo­sevelt con­tin­ued, there­fore, “Inci­den­tally, I hope that night games can be extended because it gives an oppor­tu­nity to the day shift to see a game occasionally.”

Night games were cer­tainly not for­eign to base­ball at that point. The first night game had been played in late May of 1935 at Crosley Field in Cincin­nati. By the time Roo­sevelt wrote to Lan­dis in Jan­u­ary of 1942, base­ball had a rule in place that pro­vided that each team could play up to seven of their 72 home games at night. In response to his com­ment, that limit was dou­bled, and the fol­low­ing sea­son the Amer­i­can League removed the limit all together.

Where the war giveth, the war taketh away, too. The need to allow work­ers to see games may have led to more being played at night, but it also led to a tra­di­tion against night games. The Chicago Cubs had planned to install lights at Wrigley Field in 1942 but donated them to the war effort instead. When they tried again two years later, metal short­ages pre­vented the lights from being installed. The Cubs did not play a night game at Wrigley until August of 1988.

Roo­sevelt encour­aged play­ers to enlist or to respond to draft notices, which they did, stat­ing, “As to the play­ers them­selves, I know you agree with me that the indi­vid­ual play­ers who are active mil­i­tary or naval age should go, with­out ques­tion, into the ser­vices. Even if the actual qual­ity to the teams is low­ered by the greater use of older play­ers, this will not dampen the pop­u­lar­ity of the sport.” But the value of the national pas­time, both major league and minor league teams, was clear to Roo­sevelt. “Here is another way of look­ing at it,” he said, “if 300 teams use 5,000 or 6,000 play­ers, these play­ers are a def­i­nite recre­ational asset to at least 20,000,000 of the fel­low cit­i­zens — and that in my judg­ment is thor­oughly worthwhile.”

Roosevelt’s mis­sive is known as the “Green Light Let­ter.” In real­ity, it was the green light for bright lights and another exam­ple of the influ­ence of gov­ern­ment, pol­i­tics and war on the Amer­i­can sport­ing life.

David Hej­manowski is a mag­is­trate and court admin­is­tra­tor of the Delaware County Juve­nile Court and is thank­ful for night games, as he nearly melted at a day game in Pitts­burgh over the Memo­r­ial Day weekend.

Posted by Dave Hejmanowski on May 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.