SPORTSMANSHIP CITIZENSHIP THROUGH
A Century of Citizenship Through Sportsmanship
3 Founding vision
World War I veterans came home with a dream of creating a program that would instill the values of citizenship, fi tness, sportsmanship and discipline among young people. Future Hall of Famer Bob Feller was one of more than 10 million athletes who lived up to that vision.
14 A “code that’s not going to change”
No one is sure who initially drafted the Code of Sportsmanship, but its words have resonated for nearly a century, as guiding principles for players.
16 Survival during hard times
Americanism Division Director Dan Sowers raised funds and built relationships that pulled the program through the Great Depression.
21 War and growth
American Legion players left the diamond to serve in World War II, and the program flourished in the late 1940s, with help from the Ford Motor Co.
31 American Legion Ambassadors
Under the guidance of combat-wounded former pro player Lou Brissie, the program took its values on the road in a tour of Latin America.
35 The legacy of George W. Rulon Program coordinator for whom the American Legion Baseball Player of the Year is named left his mark across three decades.
55 Home base for the ALWS
Shelby, N.C., became the singular venue for the American Legion World Series in 2011, and attendance records have been continuously shattered since, with millions viewing the tournament on ESPN, and fueling the local economy.
70 “Different than any other baseball”
Over the last century, American Legion Baseball players have learned much more about the game, and life, than catching, throwing and hitting.
Top photo (opposite): One of the oldest known American Legion Junior Baseball team photos was taken in 1928 of the team sponsored by the all-women USS Jacob Jones District of Columbia Post 2, whose commander, Mabel F. Staub, appears in the center of the group.
Bottom photo (opposite): Dubuque County, Iowa, stands for the national anthem before game 7 of their American Legion World Series game against Idaho Falls, Idaho, at Keeter Stadium, Shelby, N.C., in 2021. Photo by Ben Mikesell
In
first
the
game of the Dixie Championship Series in 1938, a Charlotte, N.C., player is called out at the plate in a double play by Palm Beach. American Legion Archives photo
Founding vision of American Legion Baseball extends beyond the diamond
Bob Feller was a cow-milking, hay-baling farm boy who grew up near Van Meter, Iowa. When he wasn’t doing chores, he was throwing and catching with his dad behind the barn. At 12, the boy’s skills were so remarkable that his father believed he was ready for American Legion Baseball, among older players. No one could have known then the iconic fi gure Bob Feller would become, not only as an athlete but as a model of responsible citizenship.
Over the last century, more than 10 million young people have followed that model, learning to play “the right way” and respectfully serving as citizens, through American Legion Baseball.
Mentored by American Legion coaches who had fought in World War I, young Bob quickly understood that this kind of baseball was different. It was not simply about striking out opposing batt ers. He att ended ceremonies, parades and other community activities of The American Legion, inspired by his Legionnaire coach, Les Chance. He soaked it in.
“Mr. Chance was the rural mail carrier,” Feller later recalled. “He would chug up to our farm in his Model-T Ford and deposit the mail in our box. I can shut my eyes and see him now, a stocky man, just a litt le on the plump side, with a friendly grin. He had a fi ne sense of humor and laughed easily.
Whenever I think of American Legion ball, I think of Lester Chance. A World War I veteran, he organized and coached the American Legion team at Adel, Iowa. I still can hear his pleasant laugh. Whenever he rode up to our farm with the mail, Mr. Chance and Dad would talk baseball, and apparently, they did some talking about me.”
Feller started at third base in his fi rst year of Legion ball and moved to the pitcher’s mound the following season. The third year, he and some of his teammates transferred to a bigger team, sponsored by the Highland Park American Legion post in Des Moines, with the blessing of Mr. Chance. By age 15, Bob Feller was striking out 15 to 18 batt ers an outing, and he transferred to the Valley Junction post team in West Des Moines. There, an umpire, who also happened to be a scout for the Cleveland Indians of Major League Baseball, was astonished by the teen prodigy. Soon, representatives of the Indians were att ending his games.
At 17, he was a starting big-league pitcher for the Indians, taking the fi rst steps on a journey that would ultimately land him in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. But that is only part of Bob Feller’s story and the example he would set for the entire American Legion Baseball program, which turned 100 years old in 2025.
Bob Feller, in his first baseball uniform, on his family’s Iowa farm.
were one among four teams to play in the first
The El Dorado, Kan., Wildcats of Post 81
American Legion World Series in 1926.
The whole concept of American Legion Baseball was borne of World War I and the experiences of those who served overseas among young people who were not especially fit, nor particularly literate, or knowledgeable about the reasons they had been called to arms. All of those conditions were reasons for The American Legion’s first generation to develop programs to strengthen the nation by mentoring youth.
“You remember it was only a few years ago we commenced hastily and earnestly to take stock of our boy power and manpower, because we realized in those days that it is the nation of physically fit men who would win the war,” John L. Griffith told delegates to The American Legion Department of South Dakota Convention on July 17, 1925. “We took stock and found approximately half of our boys were physically defective.”
Griffi th, an Army major in World War I who went on to serve as the fi rst commissioner of athletics in the Big 10 Conference, was invited by his friend and fellow veteran, Department
Commander Frank McCormick, to address Legionnaires in Milbank, S.D.
There and then, the seeds of American Legion Baseball were sown.
Griffith had led physical fitness training for troops during the war and believed there was more to the value of competitive sports than trophies and bragging rights. He told the South Dakota Legionnaires that organized athletics could not only correct physical fitness deficiencies of young men at the time, but The American Legion was extremely well-suited to prepare a new generation for war, if one should come, in other ways, as well.
“And if we do not have another war, at least they will be better citizens,” Griffith suggested.
The South Dakota Legionnaires drafted and passed a resolution to advance the concept up the chain. Four months later, at The American Legion National Convention in Omaha, Neb., the program was authorized as a nationwide initiative.
WHEREAS, Athletic competition conducted under proper direction are the best-
John L. Griffi th
known means of teaching boys good sportsmanship, an essential of good citizenship, and in addition have genuine civic value; and
WHEREAS, A more physically fit citizenship can be obtained by extending the benefits of athletic training to the greatest possible number of boys and young men, a large percentage of whom are not receiving adequate training at present. Be it, therefore,
RESOLVED, That The American Legion, in seventh annual convention assembled, adopt the general policy of extending athletic competition to more boys in America, and that the organization promote and cooperate with other organizations in promoting athletic programs and in securing playgrounds and other facilities therefore; and, be it further
RESOLVED, That the National Americanism Commission be empowered to appoint a man to be designated as the national athletic director, to direct the general athletic program of The American Legion, of which junior baseball championships should be a part.
McCormick played in the first pro football championship
South Dakota American Legion Department Commander (192425) Frank McCormick’s love of athletics – and skill in sports –ran deep. The World War I veteran started as a wingback for the Akron Pros in the first American Professional Football Association championship game – predecessor of today’s Super Bowl –in 1920. The association was renamed the National Football League in 1922.
Prior to that – and prior to his wartime service – he was captain of the University of South Dakota football and baseball teams. He played football, basketball and baseball for four years at USD, starting in 1912.
While serving in the 337th Machine Gun Battalion of the 88th Army Division in the war, McCormick continued to compete on military football and baseball teams. He played pro baseball and football after discharge, landing a spot on the Pros, first as a guard and later as a wingback. That
team went on to beat Jim Thorpe’s Canton Bulldogs 7-0 on the way to the APFA championship, awarded on the basis of Akron’s leaguebest 8-0-3 record.
McCormick also coached at his alma mater, as well as the University of Illinois, and was athletic director at Columbus College in Sioux Falls, S.D., from 1922 to 1925.
He did all that prior to leading The American Legion of South Dakota and calling on his friend and fellow veteran, Big 10 Athletics Commissioner John L. Griffi th, who planted the seed that became American Legion Baseball at the 1925 department convention.
After his stint as department commander, McCormick went on to coach football and baseball at the University of Minnesota, where he later served as athletic director from 1931 to 1941 and from 1945 to 1950.
The 1930 Milbank, S.D., American Legion Baseball team.
Over the next century, millions of young people from all walks of life and skill levels would learn teamwork, discipline, sportsmanship and citizenship from the veteran-run program. For many of those players, the game they loved would be hard-wired into their sense of Americanism.
Bob Feller was such an American Legion Baseball alum. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy two days after Pearl Harbor was att acked, leaving his professional baseball career and a lucrative contract (even with a deferment at his disposal because his father was terminally ill) to fi ght in the Pacific Theater of World War II. Serving his nation at that critical moment in history was a bigger responsibility to him than playing baseball.
He was assigned to the USS Alabama as a gun captain. By the time of his discharge on Aug. 22, 1945, he had six campaign ribbons and eight batt le stars.
“I think I had the war in a more realistic perspective than seamen who hadn’t grown up among Legionnaires,” Feller later wrote. “I knew it would be a long war, a bitter, bloody one. I wasn’t as impatient as many of my mates, and I didn’t gripe about the fact that it was cutt ing into the prime of my baseball career. I knew there was danger of death daily, but I
knew there was a job to do, a job that had to be done to keep our nation strong at the risk of grave personal sacrifices.”
Two days after his discharge from the Navy, Feller was back in uniform, once again for the Indians. He threw a complete game in his fi rst return start, striking out 12 in a 4-2 win over the eventual World Series champion Detroit Tigers.
His pro baseball career, divided into two parts – prewar and postwar – included eight Major League All-Star Game appearances and one World Series title. He was the American League wins leader six times and Major League strikeout leader seven. He threw three no-hitters as a pro, one before he went to war, and two others aft er he came home. The Sporting News in 1999 ranked him 36th among the 100 Greatest Baseball Players of all time.
In 1962, Feller was the fi rst former American Legion Baseball player enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. At the time, in the company of then-American Legion Baseball Program Coordinator George W. Rulon, Feller presciently said, “I may have been the fi rst Legion Baseball graduate in the Hall of Fame, but I won’t be the last.”
LEFT: Bob Feller in the Navy
RIGHT: As a star pitcher for the Cleveland Indians
“The girl Babe Ruth”
The hard-hitting 13-year-old infi elder/pitcher/captain for Blanford, Ind., drew national media attention in 1928 not just because of a .571 batting average on a state American Legion Baseball championship team. The New York Times dubbed Margaret Gisolo “the girl Babe Ruth.”
The newspaper story appeared after the runners-up, Clinton Baptist, protested Blanford’s title on account of her gender.
The Legion consulted Major League Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis before ruling that nothing prevented Gisolo from playing American Legion Baseball. She went on to play in one regional tournament game, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. It was a season-ending loss.
Gisolo played throughout the 1930s on all-women traveling baseball teams, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees by 1942, and then, like so many of her male counterparts who had played American Legion Baseball, stepped into military service. She was a U.S. Navy WAVE during World War II, rising to lieutenant commander.
She continued in athletics throughout her life, teaching dance at Arizona State University and, in her 60s, competing in a senior tennis circuit. She played competitive tennis into her late 80s, was inducted into the Indiana State University Athletics Hall of Fame in 1996 and the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in 1998. She was 94 when she died on Oct. 20, 2009.
Photo published in The American Legion Magazine, October 1928.
Get Involved with
American Legion Baseball
American Legion Baseball would not have lasted a century without support from volunteers, spectators, donors, sponsors, buyers of merchandise and members of The American Legion Family. The program and its future depend on you.
Find a local American Legion Baseball team, learn more about the program in your community and, above all, get involved!
Visit legion.org/baseball to learn more.
CELEBRATE A CENTURY
Support through American Legion Charities, Inc,
the QR code to the left or visit the URL below to order.
American Legion Charities offers supporters an opportunity to make taxdeductible contributions that can be placed in honor, or in memory, of a veteran, volunteer, player or team.
Visit legion.org/donate to contribute to the next century of citizenship through sportsmanship via American Legion Baseball.
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Photo by Chet Strange
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
WE ASSOCIATE OURSELVES TOGETHER FOR THE FOLLOWING PURPOSES:
To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America;
To maintain law and order;
To foster and perpetuate a one hundred percent Americanism;
To preserve the memories and incidents of our associations in all wars;
To inculcate a sense of individual obligation to the community, state and nation;
To combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses;
To make right the master of might;
To promote peace and goodwill on earth;
To safeguard and transmit to posterity the principles of justice, freedom and democracy;
To consecrate and sanctify our comradeship by our devotion to mutual helpfulness.
Photo by Ryan Young
