SALT LAKE CITY — As the NBA prepares to resume play in its Disney World bubble and NFL and college football are planning their seasons in some form, they should visit the past to chart the future. They should start here: The 1918 World Series probably played a big role in starting a second wave of the deadly Spanish flu.
Looking at the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 is like looking in a mirror from 2020. Masks were de rigueur. In many cities, public gatherings were banned — schools, churches and businesses were shut down. Makeshift hospitals were built and filled. Sports canceled games and altered schedules. Governments suppressed news about the pandemic for political reasons.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about one-third of the world’s population was infected with the Spanish flu virus and at least 50 million people died.
And that was only half of the nightmare that the world was living then. World War I was raging simultaneously. World war and a virulent virus created the perfect storm for a pandemic, a contagious illness and a rapid means of spreading it. Millions of soldiers were sent to war around the globe, sowing the virus wherever they went.
It was nicknamed “Spanish flu” but not because it originated in Spain (it originated in the U.S.). According to History.com, among many other sources, news of the flu was suppressed by countries at war because they thought it would hurt morale; Spain was neutral and freely reported on the disease, thus earning the dubious distinction of having the country’s name attached to one of the biggest pandemics ever. By then, a quick response to slow the spread of the illness was lost.
Major League Baseball considered canceling the 1918 season, but President Woodrow Wilson decided the nation needed the sport, although he requested the regular season end by Sept. 1 (decades later, Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump would also declare that sports should go on for the good of the country, despite another world war and another pandemic, respectively).
The 1918 regular season was reduced from 154 games to 130. The players wore masks — even in the batter’s box — as did the umpires, coaches and fans, per Yahoo Sports. There was a shortage of players because so many of them were overseas fighting the war. Boston Red Sox manager Ed Barrow went searching for replacements for his best hitters and found one among his regular pitchers, a 23-year-old named Babe Ruth. He hit 11 homers — which tied for the league lead that season — as well as 26 doubles and 66 RBIs in just 95 games. Ruth missed some games that season; he caught the Spanish flu and was hospitalized. He almost died — reportedly, not from the illness, but the treatment for it.
The Spanish flu came in three waves — the spring of 1918, the fall of 1918, the winter of 1918. During the summer, the spread of the illness slowed, but then it returned as a more virulent strain in Boston, site of the World Series between the Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs. The series was played the first 11 days of September. According to History.com, health officials warned against public gatherings, but the Series went on. The first three games were played in Chicago, the next three in Boston at the same time soldiers were returning from the war with Spanish flu. Once again, it was a perfect storm of events for spreading infection.
Johnny Smith, a sports history professor and co-author of “War Fever: Boston, Baseball, and America in the Shadow of the Great War,” explained it for Forbes this way: “In late August of 1918, you have soldiers and sailors coming back from (fighting in World War I in) France. They dock at the Commonwealth Pier in Boston, and this is the beginning of the second wave of influenza to strike in the United States, and it’s the most devastating by far. Most of the Americans who died from the influenza outbreak of 1918 would die between September and December.”
A few months later, in March of 1919, the Stanley Cup Finals was canceled, according to CBS Sports, just hours before Game 6 was scheduled to start, this because several players became ill. Years later, the Stanley Cup trophy was engraved with the following: 1919 Montreal Canadiens/Seattle Metropolitans/Series Not Completed.”
The 1918 football season was a mishmash of canceled seasons and truncated schedules, depending on the school and the conference. All seven members of the Missouri Valley Conference — which would become the Big 8/12 — shut down football completely. Eight other schools did the same thing. Most schools cut their schedules almost in half, playing five games.
Some 102 years later, the country finds itself forced to make many of the same decisions about sports in the age of another pandemic.