John Klima is the author of the new book The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII.From his Q & A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: What were some of the reasons Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to support the continuation of baseball through World War II?--Marshal Zeringue
A: Public morale, public relations, something people could feel connected to during the war. Roosevelt saw it as a political device to connect himself to something people loved and didn't want to lose during the war.
He also saw the practical value of baseball as a social institution and a worthy piece of the domestic wartime economy.
Q: Two of the people on whom you focus in the book are Hank Greenberg and Pete Gray. Why did you select them?
A: I like right-handed power and guys who can run. Actually because they represented the two ends of the wartime baseball spectrum -- the guy who had it all and the guy who had nothing -- each giving themselves to the war effort in different ways.
Greenberg was the highest paid player in baseball, the most feared right-handed power hitter in the game, and he did not want to be seen as a guy who used baseball to get out of his duty.
Gray was ridiculed all the way up because...[read on]