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Pitch counts? I always worried about pitch counts - throughout my career....
-Denton "Cy" Young
1943 - In Washington D.C., the Pentagon was completed making it the largest office building in the world. The revolutionary, five-sided building consisted of five concentric pentagons connected to each other by immense corridors covering an area of thirty-four acres and was intended to consolidate the various offices of the U.S. War Department and now the Department of Defense.
The withholding tax on wages was introduced in 1943 and was instrumental in increasing the number of taxpayers to sixty million and tax collections to $43 billion by 1945.
The Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Browns played four consecutive extra-inning games (May 31 and June 2) totaling forty-five innings. Both leagues combined to set a Major League record for overtime activity with ninety-one extra-innings in the American League and eighty in the National.
On August 24th, the miserable Philadelphia Athletics recorded their twentieth loss in a row tying the American League mark for consecutive defeats. Luckily they managed to avoid breaking the record by scoring eight runs on the home team Chicago White Sox in the bottom half of the double header.
Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Rip Sewell debuted a bizarre "softball-like" pitch that looped the ball eighteen to twenty feet high on its way down to the strike zone. The "gag-pitch" was almost impossible to judge from the batters box and was later coined as a "blooper" or "eephus ball". Despite the complaints of many batters from around the league, the approach was ruled legal and Sewell went on to a 20+ win season.
Baseball moguls Phil Wrigley and Branch Rickey established the All-American Girls Softball League as a "wartime sports backup" in case the government was forced to shut down Major League Baseball. The novelty league quickly became a very popular draw and later switched to hardball with a pitching distance of forty feet and bases set at sixty-eight feet apart.
Due to the wartime absence of sixty starters (including some of the games greatest players: Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Enos Slaughter and Johnny Mize) Major League Baseball started two weeks later than usual as teams scrambled to fill their line-up cards and owners scrambled to fill their ballpark stands.
The evening before the All-Star Game in Boston, a team of Armed Forces "all-stars" managed by Babe Ruth and featuring Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams played the visiting Braves in a war fund-raising effort. Ruth himself agreed to pinch-hit in the eighth and his team went on to win 9-8 thanks to a Ted Williams home run. The following night, the Americans went on to edge the Nationals 5-3 in the first Midsummer Classic to be played under the lights.
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