Baseball players in war

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Posted By: jay behrens

I light of Pat Tillman's funeral, someone on the SABR-L list posted all the baseball players that lost their lives in war.

Eddie Grant: Infielder with four major league teams who retired in 1915. He was killed by enemy machine-gun fire in Argonne Forest in France on Oct. 5, 1918, a month before World War I ended.

Elmer Gedeon: Washington Senators outfielder. His plane was shot down over France in April 1944, on his 27th birthday.

Harry O'Neill: Philadelphia Athletics catcher. He was killed on Iwo Jima in March 1945.

Bob Neighbors: St. Louis Browns shortstop in 1939. A World War II veteran, he was shot down over North Korea in August 1952.

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Posted By: BillyB

Jay,

I think the information you posted is very interesting. Is this an all-encompassing list or only the baseball players you know of?

I have been become very interested in the services our armed forces have performed for us and this would be a great intersection of 2 of my interests. So now I need to find out if these players were on any baseball cards. If you know so, please post. I'll post what I find.

Billy

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Posted By: jay behrens

The list is only baseball players. Here are the cards I have in my player database.

Eddie Grant: t205, e90-1, m116 and e270

Gedeon: w514, d327, d328, d329 and Zeenuts from 1912-5

O'Neill: I don't show any cards for him. He had a 1 game career with the Athletics in 1939. There might be a team issue or minor league card I don't know about.

Neighbors: I don't show any cards for him either. He had a 7 game career with the Browns. There might be a team issue or minor league card I don't know about.

Jay

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Posted By: jay behrens

found 2 more players that were KIA, both in WW1.

Alex Burr- no known cards in my database

Bun Troy- same

Here is a great site to checkout http://www.thedeadballera.com/ThoseWhoServed.html

Jay

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Posted By: BillyB

Interesting finds....

That adds some new information to this post:
http://www.network54.com/Forum/message?forumid=153652&messageid=1082743667&lp=1082775945
(which was based on information in worldwar1.com)
which has said that Eddie Grant was the only player killed in WW1.

P.S. I searched for "baseball" in that site's forum with no results.

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

Jay, the Gedeon for whom you cite card issues is Joe "Ninth Man Out" Gedeon, not Elmer.

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Posted By: jay behrens

Nice catch. Atually, the first name of both players is Elmer. One is Elmer Joe Gedeon, the other is Elmer John Gedeon. Elmer John is the one that was KIA and I do not show a card for him.

Bob, any chance you guys have a database list by player and what card they appeared on? I'd be interested in comparing it to mine to see what I've missed.

Jay

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

We've been building a by-player data base since Day 1, now approaching 100,000th name (all sports). I doubt there's any way to compare it with any other data base, however.

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Posted By: jay behrens

Any chance I couls get a printout of just the players on cards from 1900-1945? I would gladly pay for it.

Jay

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Posted By: Bob Lemke

Sorry, Jay. Somewhere in the "improvements" in the system over the past 20+ years we lost the ability to print out single-player lists, much less multiple players. We can pull single players into a Quark document for publication, but it is not an efficient process.

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Posted By: BillyB

I don't know what a Quark document is.
Any chance you can get the information onto a Word or Excel document, some other document , or some other database?

I would be willing to take that and attempt to convert it for you into something that will be more manageable and searchable for you.

Let me know if I can help.

BillyB