[Syd Thrift]

The Great War. It hurt a lot of us, but no group of men more than American baseball. Congress, under pressure from the people to do something patriotic following the release of the Zimmerman Letter and the entrance of the United States on the side of the English and French, instituted a draft and, as a further show of what was expected of the people, forced every last major and minor league baseball player to register. They would all be placed together in a special force led by Christy "Big Six" Mathewson and "Harvard Eddie" Grant that was to be known as the Baseball Brigade.

Troops, leaders, and civilians from both sides initially looked upon the Baseball Brigade with derision. What do men - boys, many of them - who, for a living, run around for 2 hours a day catching balls know about fighting a war? Those jeers were soon replaced by cheers: unlike many of the Americans who came over, these boys were fit and athletic and didn't mind sacrificing their own good for their common man. After all, they'd been doing little else but sacrificing their teammates on to second base for the past twenty years.

It was that sense of sacrifice that led to their courageous stand that would turn out to be their last. Earlier bravery in combat caused the Allied forces to place the Baseball Brigade at the vanguard of the bulge around Ypres, even though this was an area that, overall, was manned primarily by Canadians and British. On the fateful evening of April 11, 1918, the Germans decided to take the bulge. They attacked from three sides. Soon, they realized that they had to time their grenade-throwing just right, because if there was any charge left in them at all when they reached the Brigade's side, the items would be batted or in some cases hurled right back at them. Machine gun fire was similarly ineffective; these Americans would simply dive back into their trenches the way they'd dived back into first base so many times earlier.

Finally, the Germans had no choice but to resort to their most cowardly of weapons: mustard gas. The Baseball Brigade was woefully unprepared for a gas attack. Only a small percentage of them even had masks, and their trainer was supposed to be Christy Mathewson himself, who through a clerical error unfortunately never got that training. It is also believed that the term "mustard gas" may have tripped some of the boys up. Numerous accounts from German soldiers report viewing Baseball Brigaders cooking up "hot dogs" for the big to-do.

Whatever the cause, by the morning of April 14 not a single member of the Baseball Brigade was left. Those that survived the first wave of gas carried on loudly as though the gassing had been completely ineffective, and this in turn caused the Germans to lob wave after wave of gas artillery at the Brigade's fortifications. Given the ease with which the Baseball Brigade had turned them back, they didn't dare send any more men in until, as the saying went, all was quiet on the Western front.

Needless to say, these Americans impressed both sides, and when Woodrow Wilson delivered the Fourteen Points to the League of Nation, he added a fifteenth point: let there be a worldwide baseball league, inhabited by the greatest countries of the world, that would honor the Baseball Brigade and, in reflection, the bravery of men in all nations. Nikola Tesla and Albert Einstein were so awed by this declaration that they collaborated on a wondrous device that would make travel time and, yes, even the space-time continuum itself moot. Their only stipulation was that it could be used for nothing but baseball.

And so began the League of Nations! 16 teams in 12 countries. Let the games begin!