Few players in baseball history exemplify the love of the game quite like Ernie Banks did. He had an unwavering passion for the sport and his team. The Chicago Cubs icon was the embodiment of everything baseball players should strive to be today.
Ernie Banks was famously nicknamed “Mr. Cub,” and appropriately so. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Chicago Cubs player as beloved by its fans as Banks. His professional baseball career started in 1950 when he played for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues. In 1951 he was drafted by the United States Army and served in the Korean War for two two years.