In 1942, the Philadelphia Phillies were at the very bottom of baseball. Many teams were missing players because of the World War raging in in Europe and the Pacific, but for the Phillies the military draft only made worse an already miserable situation. They were bad, and had been bad for more than a decade.
They were also broke. After their owner went bust, the young former owner of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers stepped up with an offer to buy the team. Bill Veeck knew that he needed to increase attendance by fielding a winning team, but the talent pool in baseball was being drained by the war. So Veeck did what many had considered but none had the guts to try: he signed players from the Negro Leagues to play Major League baseball.
Veeck began with the three black players whose fame extended even to white fans: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard. From there, he worked with Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Birmingham Black Barons, to sign the best players in Negro League baseball and make the Phillies a powerful, if controversial contender. Besides Paige, Gibson, and Leonard, the team that met for spring training in Gettysburg in 1943 included: Ray Dandridge, Willie Wells, Gene Benson, Willard “Home Run” Brown, Roy Campanella, Hilton Smith, Dave Barnhill, Sam Jethroe, Verdell Mathis, and Mahlon Duckett.
There were white players, too, the best of the 1942 Phillies who had managed not to be drafted into the Army and had not been traded away for cash to purchase other contracts: Ron Northey, Danny Murtaugh, Pinky May, Mickey Livingston, Si Johnson, Walter “Boom-Boom” Beck, Johnny Podgajny, and Johnny Allen. To lead the diverse crew, Veeck hired a rookie manager who also happened to be the greatest player ever to step on a baseball diamond: Babe Ruth. Along with coaches Lloyd Waner, Chuck Klein, and Biz Mackey, Ruth work to fuse these disparate men into a winning team.
