Scheduled to pitch for the "55th Fighter Group" in England during WWII, but as his plane was shot down, he radioed his fellow pilots: "Tell the boys I won’t be back for the game." After his plane crashed, he was captured, held in a POW camp and had his right leg amputated by a POW doctor. Bert Shepard’s recovery and running so impressed a POW camp doctor, that he asked Shepard to demonstrate his mobility for the hospital staff. After WWII, on the day that he officially signed with the Washington Senators, Bert Shepard caught a cab and returned to "Ward 49" at Walter Reed Medical Center, where he was fitted for a new artificial leg; His "Baseball leg". "I got an awful lot of publicity right away. That sort of helped me to stay with the ball club until I could prove myself. I pitched several exhibition games and got ‘em out each time." His first MLB game box score after the war..... 5 1/3 innings, three hits, one walk, one hit batter, two strikeouts and one earned run. "The Boston Globe" called it: "By far the most inspiring performance by a limbless veteran of WWII." Bert Shepard remains the only player to have ever played in the major leagues on an artificial leg. Late in his life, when Bert Shepard was in his 70's, he said he often wondered: "Who carried me from the wreck?" and "Who saved my life?" Little did he know that around the same time a British businessman, who knew of Bert Shepard's legend, went on a hunting trip to Hungary. There he met a fellow hunter, a retired doctor named Ladislaus Loidl, who told a story of how he had once rescued a wounded American flyer from his downed plane. Loidl recalled that his wife had made a dress out of the airman’s parachute, and remembered reading the name Bert Shepard on the pilot’s dog tags. The British hunter suggested Loidl contact Shepard. He did! In May of 1993, the two men met at the doctor’s home in Austria, 49 years after their first meeting on a German battlefield. "I prayed for this. And after half a century, my dream has incredibly come true." Bert Sheppard.

"I’ll never forget the night I went home and told my mother that I was going to quit college and go into baseball. She broke down and cried when I told her. She insisted that I should stay on in school. "I’ll be well again soon," she said. "And then everything will be all right." Like me, she didn’t think I could make good in baseball, and she was afraid that I would be let out in a few weeks, and then I’d be out of college as well as out of a job, too. It was a tough spot!" Lou Gehrig. "You think you’re a ballplayer," Ty Cobb said to me one day at the Stadium. "All you can do is hit that ball. If you’re a ballplayer, I’m the King of Siam." And Cobb said it in a nasty tone of voice. Once in 1925, when I was getting in the game only now and then, I went to Yankees Mgr. Miller Huggins and asked him to get waivers on me and send me to the minors, where I could play regularly. Ty Cobb, then-Detroit’s manager, apparently heard about it. For the next time I saw him, he came over where I was. "So you want to go to the minors do you? Say, listen, rookie, you’ll never get away from me. I’ll claim you, and when I get you, I’ll send you to China, where it’ll take the rest of your life to get back." Ty Cobb is one of my best boosters today. When I finally got a job as a regular, Cobb was one of the first men in the league to congratulate me. And many times he has gone out of his way to show me little tricks in hitting and in base running; Tricks that only Ty Cobb can show." Lou Gehrig.