April 6, 1918: Newt Halliday Dies In Service

April 6, 1918: Newt Halliday becomes the 1st major league baseball player to die in military service during World War I -- but not in combat.

Newton Schurz Halliday -- German on his mother's side, Irish on his father's -- was born on June 18, 1896 in Chicago. He appeared in just 1 major league game, on August 19, 1916. He was a defensive replacement at 1st base for the Pittsburgh Pirates, recording 3 putouts and an assist, and striking out in his only at-bat. The Pirates lost to the Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were known while Wilbert Robinson was their manager), 1-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Rube Marquard, a future Hall-of-Famer, pitched a 5-hit shutout for Brooklyn, which went on to win the National League Pennant. The legendary Honus Wagner got 1 of those hits.

Little else is known about Halliday. In fact, in a very odd instance, Baseball-Reference.com has no record of him playing in the minor leagues. Surely, he must have. It might be different if his one and only big-league appearance was at the end of the season, when the Pennant race was already decided, and maybe he was played as a favor to a friend. But that was not the case.

I can't even be sure that the photo above is of him, since the player it shows is wearing a uniform that reads "REDS." He appears never to have been connected with the Cincinnati Reds organization. Maybe he played for a minor-league team called the Reds. But a website named Baseball's Greatest Sacrifice, which covers major-league and minor-league players who served in the armed forces, whether they survived their service or not, says it's him.

When America declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, Halliday enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago. But he contracted tuberculosis. After fighting the disease for months, he succumbed to it on April 6, 1918, only 21 years old.

Of the 8 former MLB players who died in military service during World War I, he was the 1st. If you don't count the National Association of 1871 to 1875 as a "major league," thus ruling out Bill Stearns, who died as a result of malaria he contracted during the Spanish-American War of 1898, then Newt Halliday was the 1st former major leaguer to die in a war.

There is no commemoration of this one-day Pirate at the Pirates' current home, PNC Park.

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April 6, 1918 was a Saturday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And the hockey season ended 7 days earlier, when the Toronto Arenas, Champions of the NHL in its 1st season, beat the Vancouver Millionaires, Champions of the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, to win the Stanley Cup. The Arenas became the Toronto St. Patricks in 1920, and the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1927.

But there were scores on this historic day -- though, with some appropriateness, "over there." Although England's Football Association had suspended both Football League and FA Cup play for the duration of the war, there were localized leagues to fill the gap, and to keep travel costs down, and to make the coal and electricity needed for long-distance travel available for the war effort.

In one such example, Arsenal, the North London team that I would one day support, went to West London, and lost to Fulham, 2-1 at Craven Cottage.