The Worldwide Coronavirus Pandemic Plays Hardball with Twin Cities Goodtime Softball League
Just a month after the Pearl Harbor bombing that brought America, whooping and waving, into the World War II, Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Landis sent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a hand-written missive asking if America’s Pastime should suspend operations during America’s wartime.
The POTUS responded with what is now known as “The Green Light Letter,” which supposed that baseball’s loss from popular culture would damage home front morale, indeed that displays of sportspersonship and community were more vital in troubled times than they were in less interesting ones. In other words, people need little bits of normalcy to get through culture-wide challenges. Therefore, much to the benefit of Madonna’s film career decades later, the Commander-in-Chief granted Major League Baseball his executive go-ahead.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.