I suspect that most people who serve two years in the service serve those years before they reach 25. On the other hand, I would guess that a minority of MLB players are under age 25.
Perhaps, but the players who are developing critical skills are between 17 and 25. Two years in the military would tend to remove those people from the pool of people who eventually reach the major leagues.
Well this is my last comment. The subject arose because I was becoming nauseated from all of the pseudo-patriotic bushwa that was taking place during the baseball game I was trying to watch on July 4th. I finally had to turn the sound off. It suddenly occurred to me that this was baseball’s method of being patriotic. In place of actually serving in the military, they will pander to those who do and at the same time demonstrate to the nation where there values are. I am sure that it is not lost on the MLB heirarchy that popularity among the hoi polloi is what helps municipally owned stadiums get built etc. etc. etc.
But I also knew that some of my all-time favorite players actually served in the military during WWII and Korea or more in my lifetime, served in the reserves or National Guard during the VietNam era. Bur what about since then, or about the fact that one (as near as I can tell) MLB player served in VietNam. This is statistically impossible (no I don’t have a cite.) How did it occur?
When WWII was declared Hank Greenberg went almost immediately to enlist. He was told he was over the age limit and it was not necessary but he enlisted anyway. There were no fewer than 500 baseball players, many Hall-of-Famers, who served. When Dick Groat graduated from Duke he played basketball for a season and then did two years of military service before playing baseball for the Pirates. Roberto Clemente was in the U.S. Marine Reserves after doing 6 months active duty. In VietNam era one player, who had a total of one major league at bat, served in VietNam and he was drafted. And no one, to my knowledge, since.
My feeling is this: If you don’t want to promote military service among your employees, stop bombarding the public with your claims of appreciation.
WWII was different. Lots of people signed from EVERY profession.
Now Baseball has a season that streaches over some of our most patriotic holidays.
Memorial Day, 4th of July, Flag day and 9/11
In fact, it was the return of playing baseball after 9/11 that some extra patriotic fervor got added to the games. I don’t recall God Bless America being sung quite so much. Now we seem to be stuck with it.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with showing appreciation to the military, even if you don’t join up.
People who were drafted are presumably more patriotic than people who never served in the military? Don’t buy it.
How does one define “promoting” military service among your employees? It’s not as if someone can do both at the same time.
And as far as military appreciation, there’s this for starters, and no thread about military appreciation in baseball would be complete without mentioning the outstanding effort put forth by the San Diego Padres.
My feeling is this: Encouraging elite athletes to join the military in the prime of their careers is pointless and frankly, pretty silly.
It is statistically impossible but it occurred? The vast majority of people born since 1972 have not served in the military. There’s nothing statistically impossible about it.
And, frankly, elite sports have changed since Hank Greenberg’s day. The basic fact is, someone who takes two years to serve in the military is reducing his chances of ever making it to the major leagues. So it’s not that the major leagues are preventing their players from serving in the military. It’s that serving in the military makes it very unlikely that you’ll ever become a major league player.
The generational cohort born in the midst of the Great Depression in 1935 was the smallest cohort in recent American history. There were so few people of a certain age that someone like Ted Williams could serve for four years in World War II, and then he could come back and keep playing, not only because he himself was an exceptional baseball player, but also because he was competing against far fewer people. Elite athletes have a lot more competition now than they did in the 1940s. You take four years off, you’re taking a very big chance that you’re not coming back.
And then there is Pat Tillman. He was an extraordinary individual who made an extraordinary choice. He surely knew that he was probably never going to play in the NFL again, even if he hadn’t been killed by friendly fire.
I don’t understand, and I don’t think anyone else does, what the issue is here.
Someone who is at a major league baseball game is, by definition, not simultaneously abroad serving in the armed forces. The United States does not want or need all 300,000,000 citizens signing up.
Is it pandering? Sort of, but the thing is that MLB as an organization really has very little choice from a PR point of view. If they don’t do the God Bless America thing and have warplanes zoom over World Series games, right wingers will flip out.
What’s happened since then is that they cancelled the draft and there haven’t been any World Wars. No major league ballplayers served in the 1920s, either, for exactly the same reason. No draft, no major wars. There was way more reason for people to sign up in 1941 than there is today.
I find the noisy patriotic crap nauseating too, but likely for a different reason than you do; when I turn on a baseball game I want to watch baseball, not some goddamned weird-ass militaristic pep rally. (To be fair, baseball isn’t as bad as football and auto racing in this regard; to watch the start of a NASCAR race you’d think it was actually a military event.) If it were up to me I’d not even have them sing the anthems.
I agree with this 100%. I resent having “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” replaced by “God Bless America.”
I think it was the late, great Bill Veeck who said, “Look, we play the National Anthem before every game. You want us to pay income taxes too?” 
I never saw it replaced, just in addition to.