La Verne Ashford "Larry" Chappell was born on February 19, 1890, outside St. Louis in McCluskey, Illinois. An outfielder, he played for the Chicago White Sox in 1913, '14 and '15; the Cleveland Indians in 1916; and the Boston Braves in 1916 and '17. His lifetime batting average was .226, with 26 RBIs, but no home runs.
In 1917, he batted .325 after 77 games with the Salt Lake City Bees of the Pacific Coast League, when he left them to enlist in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. He was assigned to Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco. On November 8, 1918, he died there, a victim of the Spanish Flu epidemic that he had been treating in many soldiers. He was 28 years old.
There is no memorial to him at Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago, home of the White Sox; Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Guardians; Fenway Park in Boston, home of the Red Sox; or Truist Park outside Atlanta, to which the Braves have moved.
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November 8, 1918 was a Friday. The War Department had ordered that the baseball season end a month early, in September, and that all players obey the "work or fight order": Enlist, or get a job in an industry essential to the war effort, or get an otherwise necessary job (like police or firemen), or be subject to the military draft. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And hockey season hadn't started yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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