Routine Moments in Baseball History: Skeeter Newsome During Wartime

Welcome back to Routine Moments in Baseball History, a running weekday feature that looks back at plays that have been ignored by the history books because history books only talk about things that are important or interesting. Today's installment is "Skeeter Newsome During Wartime."

It's OK for you not to know that Boston Red Sox shortstop Skeeter Newsome didn't get a hit on August 1, 1944, in a game against the Cleveland Indians at League Park. Even if you were there and saw him not get a hit in person you wouldn't have cared or remembered. At the time America was at war against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific, so it might have felt odd to go to an Indians game when all that was going on—and anyway, it's not like the Indians were a big draw back then. Most of the time only a few thousand people showed up to games, and I imagine it felt weirdly lonely to sit in the stands under the immense Midwestern sky and watch baseball.

Newsome was 33 years old that season and probably a little old and creaky out there at short. He was never a great hitter but his bat was especially weak and slow that year, and he clocked in a .242 average without getting a single home run. He was 5'9" and weighed 150 pounds and if you saw him when he wasn't wearing one of those ugly baggy uniforms all ballplayers had back in those days he would have just been another guy in the crowd, a round-faced Southerner with a hint of baby fat about him. An average-looking man, an average ballplayer who made a couple of easy outs that day, then got pulled for a pinch hitter.

Because Newsome was so unremarkable over his 12-year career, there aren't many details floating around online that could shed light on his biography or his personality. In photos he seems pleasant and almost detached, and you can't picture him getting pissed off over his lack of hits or his getting pulled late in the game. He would have just shrugged at sat down in the dugout, looking around the empty ballpark, probably thinking about more important things than his batting average, or how the Red Sox's mediocre season was going (the team was without Ted Williams, who was in the Navy at the time, and would finish fourth in the American League). The world was big and frightening in 1944, and a baseball game in Cleveland would have felt like the middle of nowhere.

This has been Routine Moments in Baseball History. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.