It is strange to imagine that, once upon a time, major league baseball players left the game to go fight in a war. Well, I mean in most cases, fight is not really literal here. It’s not a coincidence that just two MLB players out of the more than 500 who served died. Nonetheless, for a period of four seasons, teams regularly had to replace multiple players who went overseas.
The Cardinals, throughout the course of the war, had 30 MLB players serve and 13 minor leaguers. They all left between 1942 and 1945, which means 30 MLB caliber players needed to be replaced within just three years.