Cecil Travis: The MLB Star Who Lost The Most Because Of WWII‏

CECIL TRAVIS, shortstop
Born: Aug. 8, 1913, in Riverdale, Ga.
Died: December 16, 2006 in Riverdale, Ga. (Age 93)
Batted: Left Threw: Right
Height: 6’1.5″ Weight: 185

Perhaps no major-league baseball star who served in the military paid a higher price for his service than Cecil Travis.  At the peak of his baseball career, Travis missed three full seasons and most of a fourth while serving in the U.S. Army, suffering frostbite in both feet during the Battle of the Bulge.  Travis, who was 93 when he died in 2006 of congestive heart failure, was 87 when I interviewed him in March 2000 for a package of essays I was writing about the All-Time Military Baseball All-Star Team, selected at my request by the Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown.

Saying he said he had no long-term health effects from the frostbite, Travis said it is irrelevant whether his diminished skills were from the aftereffects of frostbite, rustiness from not playing baseball at the major-league level or simply the aging process that affects shortstops sooner than most other players.  Like most of the Greatest Generation who helped win World War II, Travis said fighting the war was what had to be done. He said he had no regrets. “I would like to have done better when I came back, but I feel lucky to have come back at all.”

Travis was 19 when he burst onto the major-league scene with a flourish, knocking five singles for the Washington Senators in his major-league debut, an 11-10 win over Cleveland on May 16, 1933.

“It was the first time since Fred Clarke’s debut in 1894 that anyone had collected five hits in his first game; no other player has since managed this feat,” Rob Kirkpatrick wrote in his biography of Travis for the SABR BioProject.

After nearly making the team that spring, Travis had been called up from Chattanooga to start in place of injured third baseman Ossie Bluege and arrived an hour before the game.  Travis hit .302 in 18 games for the Senators in 1933. Though he was on Washington’s roster for the 1933 World Series, he did not appear in their five-game loss to the New York Giants.  Despite missing about two weeks of games in May 1934 after being beaned by Cleveland lefty Thornton Lee, Travis batted .319 in his first full season in Washington.

The three-time All-Star hit over .300 in seven of his first eight seasons, with an “off” year at .292 in 1939 when he lost considerable weight from his slender frame due to two bouts of the flu.  With Europe already torn apart by war in 1941, Travis enjoyed his finest season, leading both major leagues in hits. In Travis’s ninth major-league season, only the incredible .406 batting average by Ted Williams was higher than the .359 he posted.  At age 28, batting cleanup for the punchless Senators, Travis drove in 102 runs despite only seven home runs, his career high. He also had career bests in almost every other major offensive category, helping the Senators to the second-highest team batting average in the American League despite the team finishing seventh in OPS.

Some thought Travis was well on his way to earning a plaque at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, so for him World War II could not have come at a worse time.  He was drafted into the U.S. Army on Christmas Eve 1941, only weeks after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor finally catapulted the United States into the war.  Among the first and most prominent players to put on Uncle Sam’s uniform. Travis played with the semi-pro team at Camp Wheeler in Macon, Ga., during basic training and through his first 2½ years in the Army.

While stationed at Camp Wheeler in September 1942, Travis married Helen Hubbard of Atlanta. They had three sons.  In the fall of 1944, Travis was with the Special Forces of the 76th Infantry Division, which had crossed the English Channel and marched through France into Belgium.  Travis and his unit were among thousands of U.S. troops caught in the German counterattack that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Stationed in a frozen foxhole for days without dry socks, Travis said he suffered frostbite in both feet. Military doctors were able to avoid amputating his frostbitten feet, and after a couple of weeks in the hospital Travis was sent back to the front lines.  Travis earned a Bronze Star while his outfit, nicknamed the Onaway Division, pursued Hitler’s army into Germany and remained there as part of occupying forces after Germany surrendered in May 1945.

Returning to the Senators for the last 15 games of 1945, he hit .241. At 32, an age at which most shortstops begin losing range and speed, the frostbite damage to his feet already had robbed Travis of whatever range he might have had.  It didn’t get much better for Travis the following season.  Moved to third base midway through the 1946 season, Travis hit only .252. Teams were required to keep returning veterans on the roster for two years, but after his two-year exemption expired late in the 1947 season, Travis — his batting average a career-low .219 — was released. He declined an offer to manage in the minor leagues, choosing instead to return to his family farm, though he did also work as a scout for the Senators.

Despite holding the third-highest all-time batting average among shortstops at .314 (his prewar .327 average is second among shortstops only to Honus Wagner), Travis never received a single vote from the baseball writers after he became eligible for election to the Hall of Fame in 1952, Travis would not campaign for himself. “I was a good player, but I wasn’t a great one,” he told Furman Bisher of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1999.  The youngest of 10 children of James and Ada Travis, Cecil Howell Travis was raised on his family’s 200-acre farm in Riverdale Ga., south of Atlanta.

Travis and his five brothers worked on the family farm. “I naturally had my share of farm work to do … but being the youngest of the children, escaped much of the hard work,” Travis told The Washington Post when he reported to spring training in 1935.  He turned down a scholarship from Georgia Tech, instead taking one to attend Tubby Walton’s Baseball University, a baseball training school in Atlanta, but at age 17 signed with the Chattanooga Lookouts, the Washington Senators’ affiliate in the Southern Association.

In May 1942, the Army granted him leave to play in a benefit game at Griffith Stadium for Dean’s All-Stars, organized by Dizzy Dean, who were pitted against the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues.  A highlight of the game was Travis’s at-bats against the inimitable Satchel Paige, whom the Grays had borrowed for the exhibition. Travis singled in the first at-bat but Paige struck him out his second time up.  The Paige-Travis confrontations have been cited as an important moment in the early stages of integrating the sport. Travis and the Camp Wheeler club played in the national semipro tournament in August and won the championship.

On August 15, 1947, more than a month before Travis’s final game, The Senators celebrated “Cecil Travis Night” at Griffith Stadium. With General Dwight D. Eisenhower the future president and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, in attendance, Travis was showered with gifts, including a De Soto automobile and a 1,500-pound Hereford bull.

Paul Ivice is a freelance business and courts reporter writer in Palm City, Fla., who also works as a minor-league official scorer and enjoys writing about baseball, his hobby and passion.