Determination

This is a story about having the perseverance to reach a goal, despite an obstacle that most people would find daunting.

And it's a story about life at home during World War II. You have to remember, most every able-bodied man and woman were involved in the war effort between 1941 and 1945. Men were soldiers, sailors, Marines...women worked in defense plants, building bombers and other sad but necessary tools of waging war.

When the war began, there was serious consideration to shutting down professional baseball, but President Franklin Roosevelt issued a proclamation stating that “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before."

“And that means that they ought to have a chance for recreation and for taking their minds off their work even more than before." 

So with the green light from the president, baseball looked to continue for the duration of the war. Just one problem: who would play?

The rosters of the major league teams for the war years included a 15-year-old pitcher for the Reds, Joe Nuxhall, dozens of men ineligible for service for various reasons, some men who had already served...and one man who had one arm.

His name was Peter Wyshner at birth, but he changed it to Gray to avoid the prejudice that some of Eastern European extraction dealt with in the Depression era.  “I can’t remember when I haven’t had an ambition to be a ballplayer,” he said in 1945. "Being a big-leaguer is just something I dreamed of.”

He had lost his right arm at 6 years of age, when he fell off a grocery truck and it was crushed beneath a wheel. Teaching himself to hit and throw lefthanded, he got his start in baseball as a mascot for an amateur team in Pennsylvania and worked his way into a starting slot with that squad before signing with Three Rivers of the Canadian-American League. 

From there, he played with semi-pro and minor league teams until he got the spot with the St. Louis Browns in 1945, where he played in 77 games and batted .218. And that was the year the war ended, so with hundreds of men coming back to baseball, Gray's big-league days ended. He played again in minor league ball and stayed out of the spotlight until passing in 2002.

And when asked how good a player he might have been had he not lost that arm, he replied, “Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t have done as well. I probably wouldn’t have been as determined.”

But - here is the thing few people report when telling his life story. In 1941, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Pete Gray attempted to enlist in the US Army, but was turned down because of his physical status. He said, “If I could teach myself how to play baseball with one arm, I sure as hell could handle a rifle.”

An interesting aspect to an interesting life. Never a star, but still, an inspiring figure, Pete Gray.