4. World War I affected baseball and the World Series in 1918
The United States government issued a war-related mandate in 1918 which affected that year’s season and World Series. Men of draft age were compelled to either obtain a job in a war-related industry or be subject to selective service. In a gracious gesture to his fellow millionaires who owned Major League Baseball clubs, Secretary of War Newton Baker granted an extension of the deadline for compliance to baseball. Baseball players had until September 2, Labor Day. Accordingly, both leagues shortened their seasons, which ended on that date. The ensuing World Series remains the only series to be played entirely in the month of September. It was also the World Series which introduced the world to a young Red Sox pitcher by the name of George Herman Ruth. Red Sox fans called George the Babe. It was a name which soon gained global fame.
The Red Sox faced the Chicago Cubs, who borrowed their American League counterpart’s Comiskey Park for the games played in Chicago. During the first game in Chicago, a US Navy band played the Star-Spangled Banner during the seventh inning stretch, as a salute to the nation at war (the song would not become the national anthem for another 13 years). Ruth spent much of the World Series in games in which he did not pitch lying down in the clubhouse tunnel, either hungover as some attest, or suffering from Spanish Flu, according to others. The 1918 World Series demonstrated the effect baseball had on national morale and patriotism, as reports of the games appeared on front pages across the country, supplanting the news from the trenches in France. Boston won, four games to two.