Earning Medals, Winning Rings: 7 World Series Winners Who Were Also Veterans
It’s that time of year again! Pumpkin spice season? Spooky season? Leaf-peeping season? Technically, yes, in late October it’s all of those things. But for baseball lovers, the changing leaves and cooler fall temperatures mean one thing - the World Series is coming!
This year’s matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers has already kicked off. We’re just a few innings away from determining this year’s best-in-the-league, and the players on the winning team in this 122nd World Series will each receive a championship ring to commemorate their achievement.
Since the World Series was first played in 1903, thousands of professional baseball players have earned a championship ring. However, what you may not know is that quite a few of these star players demonstrated a devotion to our country that went beyond their love for America’s pastime.
Today, we’re highlighting seven World Series-winning baseball players who also proudly served in the U.S. military.
Major League Baseball and the US Military
There is a long history between professional baseball and the US military. The National League introduced organized professional baseball in 1876. A handful of the earliest professional baseball players were Veterans of the Indian Wars and the Spanish American War.
The first time pro baseball players served in large numbers came less than 20 years after the first World Series, when the US entered World War I. The US was involved in World War I for just over a year and a half, and in that time more than 440 major and minor league players from the National and American Baseball Leagues either enlisted or were drafted into service.
Even more professional players served in World War II. It’s estimated that more than 500 major league players and 4,000 minor league players served. In an article about the Navy’s relationship with baseball during that time, Navy Historian Gordon Calhoun shared,
“America’s game went to war and sacrificed right along with everybody else.”
This is the era in which many baseball giants headed to war - Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and many more.
During World War II, many baseball pros served in regular military jobs and combat roles, while others who were more well known ended up serving in morale-boosting roles, playing ball for ship or base teams. In the Navy, in particular, on-post baseball games were used to boost morale and keep the troops out of trouble.
“It’s something to distract you. Officers like this because [their subordinates] are not drinking, they're not doing something stupid - they’re actually doing something they may consider wholesome,” Calhoun added.
During the Korean War, similar patterns were repeated, though on a smaller scale. Some well-known players like Ted Williams and Jerry Coleman were even called back to serve in Korea after serving in World War II.
The Vietnam War saw a shift in Major League Baseball’s approach. In an article for his digital archive of baseball research, expert Charlie Bevis explains,
“Unlike the stance taken in World War II and Korea, Organized Baseball did not encourage ballplayers to enlist in the military to support the Vietnam War effort.”
It wasn’t unusual for teams to try and protect their players from the draft. One way to do so was to join the National Guard or the Reserves, as many teams encouraged their players to do.
According to Bevis, "Both approaches involved a limited prospect of being called to active duty and a remote prospect of seeing combat duty overseas.”
However, minor and major league players didn’t avoid the draft entirely. Some were still called upon to serve, while others made the choice to volunteer.
With the end of the draft after Vietnam and changing sentiments amongst the general public in the US, military service declined overall. Fewer and fewer professional baseball players served in the military over the following decades. Even with the post-9/11 spike in enlistments, there was no major mobilization of professional baseball players as there had been 60 years prior.
“While the relationship has evolved over time, its foundation remains a shared appreciation for service and sacrifice,” explained Jon Shestakofsky, Vice President of Communications and Content at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.
As Shestakofsky put it, “These stories remind us that baseball's greatest heroes were often American heroes as well. Their willingness to sacrifice personal achievement for a cause larger than themselves continues to inspire baseball fans across the country.”
That’s why the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum makes a point to recognize and honor their service at the Hall of Fame, and why we want to showcase their service today.
Without further ado, let’s look at just a few of the many players who made their mark on the baseball field and in the field of war.
Grover Cleveland Alexander
Grover Cleveland “Pete” Alexander was born in 1887 in Elba, Nebraska. He grew up on a farm in Nebraska before finishing high school and getting a job as a lineman, so he had weekends free to play baseball. He played for years in local and regional leagues before finally breaking into the Big Leagues in 1911.
Alexander played seven seasons for the Philadelphia Phillies, where he proved himself to be a formidable pitcher. Despite his early successes, the Phillies took the opportunity to trade him in 1917, assuming he was likely to be drafted to serve in the Great War.
Shortly after settling in with his new team, the Chicago Cubs, Alexander was drafted into the Army. He spent seven weeks on the front lines in France. Like many of his fellow soldiers, Alexander returned home with both physical and mental wounds. He’d been exposed to German mustard gas, caught shrapnel in one ear and gone deaf in the other, and sustained muscle damage in his right arm from firing howitzers. Worse, he suffered from shell shock, what we know as PTSD, and developed alcohol problems and epilepsy.
Despite these immense challenges, Grover Cleveland Alexander returned to baseball in 1919. He played another six years with the Cubs, seeing mixed success and continuing to struggle with alcoholism. Finally, after a disappointing last-place finish in 1925, the Cubs traded Alexander to the St. Louis Cardinals.
The 1926 World Series saw the Cardinals up against the New York Yankees, a team stacked with soon-to-be legends like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The series went to a tie-breaking 7th game. When it looked like the Cardinals might lose their slight lead in the 7th inning, Alexander was put in to relieve the starting pitcher, striking out multiple Yankee sluggers to clinch the win for the Cardinals.
This career highlight essentially marked the end of Alexander, who didn’t play for much longer in the Major Leagues, though he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938. Unfortunately, the physical and mental wounds he sustained in service during World War I continued to cause him great difficulty and struggle throughout the remainder of his life both on the field and off.
Warren Spahn
Another of the Major League’s greatest pitchers, Warren Spahn, also interrupted his baseball career to serve in the US Army.
Warren Spahn had grown up in Buffalo, NY, with a father who loved baseball and taught him to pitch through backyard games of catch. Spahn first started making a name for himself as a pitcher in high school, catching the eye of a scout for the Boston Bees (before they changed their names back to the Braves in 1940). Fresh out of high school, Spahn started playing minor league baseball for a Boston Braves farm team.
Spahn officially debuted in the Majors in 1942, playing for the Boston Braves. However, seeing the writing on the wall as war began to rage in Europe, Spahn chose to enlist in the US Army just a few months later. He became a Combat Engineer and spent his first couple of years in service playing baseball on a base team.
However, in November 1944, he boarded a ship bound for France. By that point, Spahn was a staff sergeant in the 176th Engineer Combat Battalion. Spahn notably fought in the Battle of the Bulge before his platoon pushed on to the Rhine River, where they were tasked with securing the Remagen Bridge so that Allied forces could cross the Rhine into Germany.
Despite harrowing challenges, they persevered, though the bridge later collapsed after the majority of the Allied forces had crossed it, leaving many soldiers dead and Spahn with a shrapnel wound.
By the end of the war, Spahn was one of the decorated professional baseball players of World War II, having earned a Bronze Star, a Purple Heart, a battlefield promotion to Second Lieutenant, and a Presidential citation.
When he returned home after the war, Spahn was immediately pulled back up to the Majors. This kicked off an impressive 21-season career, the majority of which he spent with the Braves. In 1957, he won a World Series ring with the Braves, who were now playing out of Milwaukee, though that was far from his most impressive feat as a ballplayer.
Spahn remained a formidable pitcher well into his mid-40s, and recorded the most career wins of any left-handed pitcher in Major League Baseball history at 363 games. Though he retired from MLB in 1965, over 60 years later his record remains intact.
According to some sources, Spahn credited his time in the military for his career longevity, explaining that the experience matured him and taught him to see baseball as a challenge, rather than as hard work.
Yogi Berra
Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra was a first-generation Italian-American who grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. Berra played sandlot baseball with his neighborhood friends as a child. As a teen, he left school to work and continued playing baseball in the American Legion League for 13- to 19-year-olds.
Berra’s first opportunity to go pro came with a tryout for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1941.
After turning down a low-ball offer from the Cardinals, he signed with the New York Yankees and started playing on one of the Yankees' farm teams playing out of Norfolk, VA, when he was just sixteen.
Very shortly after, World War II broke out. In 1943, at the age of 18, Yogi Berra put his professional baseball career on hold and enlisted in the US Navy. Not only did he volunteer to serve, but he also volunteered for a dangerous role in an important mission that he had to keep secret from everyone he knew: the D-Day Invasion.
Berra was part of a group of specially trained sailors who boarded Landing Craft Small Support (LCSS) boats and were tasked with getting close enough to shore to fire rockets at German machine gun nests so that other soldiers attempting to land on the beaches would have a better chance of surviving.
Berra and his crew accomplished their mission on D-Day and also supported later invasions in southern France as a part of Operation Dragoon. During one of these invasion attempts later in the summer of 1944, Berra was actually struck in the hand by enemy fire. Though this should have earned him the Purple Heart, the injury was not reported at the time, so he never actually received the medal.
After returning from the war and being honorably discharged from the Navy in 1946, Yogi Berra went on to have a long and decorated career in Major League Baseball, winning the most World Series Championships of any player in history (10).
Hank Bauer
One of Berra’s teammates, Henry “Hank” Bauer, also served honorably in World War II before joining the NY Yankees. Bauer grew up in East St. Louis, Illinois, one of nine children to two hardworking immigrant parents.
In 1941, he followed his older brother Herman into the pros. Herman had signed with the White Sox to play on one of their minor league teams before being drafted into the Army in 1941. Before he left, he got his younger brother Hank a professional tryout. Hank managed to land a spot in the minors, but shortly after he followed in his brother's footsteps again - this time by joining the military.
Just about a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 18-year-old Hank Bauer enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and later volunteered to join the elite Marine Raiders.
He served in the Pacific Theater, surviving jungle combat in Guam and at the Battle of Okinawa. In both of these engagements, he fought bravely despite being injured, earning him both a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart at each battle.
The wounds Bauer sustained left him with bits of shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. He returned home from the war having lost his brother Herman, who was killed in action in France in 1944, and he’d lost his chance at a successful baseball career due to his injuries.
While he got a job as an ironworker and attempted to forget about baseball, baseball didn’t forget about Hank Bauer. A scout for the Yankees remembered him from before the war and signed him to a Yankees farm team in 1946.
In 1948, Bauer was finally called up to the Majors and started playing for the New York Yankees. Over the course of 12 seasons with the Yankees, Hank Bauer won seven World Series rings to add to his personal list of medals earned.
Jackie Robinson
Most people know Jackie Robinson as the first Black player in the modern MLB. When he was called up to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Robinson famously opened the door for other professional Black baseball players who had previously faced discrimination and segregation in the sport, being forced to play in separate African American-only leagues.
What many people do not know about Jackie Robinson is that this was not the first time he faced segregation and stood up against it.
After growing up with a single mother in Pasadena, California, Robinson distinguished himself in multiple sports at the high school level before going on to win varsity letters in four different sports while attending the University of California at Los Angeles.
In 1942, Jackie Robinson was drafted into the Army and later commissioned a Second Lieutenant. He was stationed in Fort Hood, Texas, where he joined the all-Black 761st "Black Panthers" tank battalion. While the 761st did serve honorably in Europe, Robinson did not ship out with them due to ongoing complications from an old sports injury.
While he didn’t see combat, Robinson still had a somewhat unique military experience worth knowing about. One day in July 1944, Robinson boarded an Army bus and refused to sit at the back when ordered to by the bus driver. The driver called the military police, and Robinson was quickly taken into custody and court-martialed.
While it unfortunately wasn’t unusual for Black servicemembers to experience this kind of discrimination during World War II and to be punished for challenging segregation in the Jim Crow South, the outcome for Robinson was quite unique.
In many cases, a Black servicemember in Robinson’s position was found guilty of insubordination and discharged from service. In fact, Black servicemembers were often discharged for even less by racist White leaders.
However, Robinson’s court-martial resulted in an acquittal, and he was honorably discharged a few months later. Robinson’s success at trial likely resulted from his exceptional legal team and the fact that he was a fairly high-profile athlete, even before he played for the Dodgers.
Jackie Robinson, of course, went on to become one of the most famous baseball players of all time. Winning the World Series with the Dodgers in 1955 was just one of the many accolades he received over the course of his Major League career.
Jerry Coleman
In his biography for the Society for American Baseball Research, historian C. Paul Rogers III describes Jerry Coleman as “a true American war hero who played a little baseball for the New York Yankees during the times the Marines did not demand his services.” Jerry Coleman is distinct from the other players on this list because he served on active duty in not one, but two major conflicts.
Coleman grew up in San Francisco, California. Despite a challenging childhood, Coleman’s athletic abilities landed him a spot at a prestigious high school and a spot on the local semipro baseball team in the Bay Area.
As a high school senior, he turned down an early offer from the Dodgers because he’d initially planned to go to college. However, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he decided to join the military. He wouldn’t be old enough to enlist until the summer, so he took an offer to play in the minor leagues for the Yankees.
In the summer of 1942, he was accepted into the Navy’s V-5 flight training program. He later decided to become a Marine pilot and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1944. Coleman went on to fly over 50 missions in the Pacific Theater during World War II.
Jerry Coleman was sent home in 1946 and returned to baseball, playing for Yankees farm teams until he was finally called up for the Majors in 1949. That same year, the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers to secure victory in the World Series. Coleman was declared Rookie of the Year by the Associated Press.
The 1950 season was even better for Coleman, resulting in another World Series win and being named MVP of the Series. 1951 saw another great season and another World Series ring, but there was a ticking clock on his career.
At the end of World War II, officers like Coleman were made inactive, but were not discharged. They could be recalled to service at any time, and with the conflict in Korea raging, he knew he was likely to be called back. Early in the 1952 season, Coleman was called back for flight training, and he deployed to Korea in January 1953.
Coleman’s experience as a pilot in the Korean War was harrowing. After a few close calls and more than 60 missions, Coleman returned to the Yankees. However, the stress and fatigue he experienced in Korea negatively affected his depth perception. Though he stayed with the Yankees for a few more seasons, he was never quite the same player after he returned.
However, taking off the (baseball) uniform was not the end of Coleman’s career in the sport. He went on to become an announcer, first for the Yankees and later for the San Diego Padres, earning a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. One more accolade to add to his three championship rings, plus the two Distinguished Flying Crosses, 13 Air Medals, and three Navy Citations he earned as a Marine.
Al Bumbry
While the overlap in World Series winners and Vietnam Veterans is smaller than for World War II Veterans, there are still some notable standouts like Al Bumbry.
Al Bumbry was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1947. As a kid, he was more interested in basketball than baseball, and even went on to attend Virginia State College with a basketball scholarship. However, his height didn’t lend itself to a professional basketball career.
His senior year of college, Bumbry pivoted to baseball and caught the eye of the Baltimore Orioles. He started playing on one of their minor league affiliates in California, but just two months into the season, he was drafted to serve in Vietnam.
He served as an officer in the US Army for just under a year, leading his platoon through the jungles of Vietnam. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his actions in Vietnam. In a 2014 interview with biographer John McMurray (writing for the Society for American Baseball Research, Bumbry shared,
“The only thing I can say about that experience was I’m no hero, but I committed to being an officer.”
Al Bumbry returned to the US and re-entered the minor-league system for the Baltimore Orioles, and at a higher level than when he’d left. He was finally called up to the Majors late in the 1972 season. He played so well the next season that he won the American League Rookie of the Year Award.
Over the next decade, Bumbry’s career saw ups and downs, and in 1978 he sustained a major ankle injury that could have taken him out of the game completely. However, Al Bumbry persevered and continued to play.
After a devastating loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979, Al Bumbry finally secured his World Series ring with a win over the Philadelphia Phillies in 1983. He played one more season for the Orioles before being released and signing with the San Diego Padres for the last two seasons of his career.
Recent Changes Could Mean More Servicemen in the Pros
The drop in rates of professional baseball players serving in the military has mirrored overall sentiments toward military service amongst the American population - these days, joining the military is seen more as one potential career path among many, rather than a duty to the country that one must fulfill.
However, recent changes to federal policy could mean that the number of service members in pro sports begins to increase again in the near future. In 2024, Congress passed a new National Defense Authorization Act (FY 2025 NDAA) which added a provision that would make it easier for some service academy graduates to defer their required Active Duty service in order to pursue a career in professional sports.
Under previous policy, a graduate was required to complete two years of active duty service before they could transfer to the Reserves and pursue professional sports. With the changes in the FY2025 NDAA, only a limited number of graduates could skip active duty service and go straight to the Reserves and a professional sports team. Now, the proposed FY2027 NDAA, which has passed the House and awaits a vote in the Senate, would remove that cap entirely.
A New Addition to the List?
That said, we may not have to wait for that law’s approval to see another service member join the list of World Series winners who are also Veterans, thanks to Tampa Bay Rays starting pitcher Griffin Jax - or as his Airmen know him, Captain Jax.
Jax graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 2017 and served two years on active duty before switching to the Reserves and officially beginning his Major League Baseball career in 2019. He continues to serve in the Air Force Reserves.
If the Rays get the win, Jax will not only be the Air Force Academy graduate to play in the Major Leagues, but he’ll also be the first to win a World Series. If he does get the ring, Jax will be joining a list of servicemen and veterans that includes some of the greatest baseball players of all time.
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BY DANA CONGELOSI
Military Spouse and Contributing Writer at VeteranLife
Marine Corps Veteran
Dana is a military spouse who has spent more than five years navigating the unique rhythms of military life alongside her partner. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Anthropology from St. Lawrence University and has built her career across museums, public libraries, and recreation. Thro...
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Dana is a military spouse who has spent more than five years navigating the unique rhythms of military life alongside her partner. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and Anthropology from St. Lawrence University and has built her career across museums, public libraries, and recreation. Thro...
