Military Service and 1944 Season
In October 1943, Wakefield entered the U.S. Navy as an aviation cadet and was discharged in July 1944 when the cadet program was discontinued. Upon his discharge from the Navy, Wakefield rejoined the Tigers in mid-July 1944 and went on a tear, hitting .355 in 78 games and collecting an OPS score of 1.040. Wakefield was called back to the Navy in November 1944 and remained in the service until January 1946. In all, Wakefield missed half of the 1944 season and the entire 1945 seasons to military service.
While in the service, Wakefield met Ted Williams in Hawaii and bet him that he would top him in home runs, RBIs, and batting average when the war ended. They bet $1,000 on each statistic, with Wakefield losing on all three bets, as his post-war performance never returned to its 1943-1944 levels.(Donald Honig, "Baseball Between the Lines" pp. 80–81.)
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Famous quotes containing the words military, service and/or season:
“Nothing changes my twenty-six years in the military. I continue to love it and everything it stands for and everything I was able to accomplish in it. To put up a wall against the military because of one regulation would be doing the same thing that the regulation does in terms of negating people.”
—Margarethe Cammermeyer (b. 1942)
“The master class seldom lose a chance to insult a woman who has the ability for something besides service to his lordship.”
—Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833–?)
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.... A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honourable to which a man can be called?”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)