STARRING FDR, AS GOLIATH:

The 1945 Tucson Badgers were incredibly confident coming into their game on April 18, and why shouldn't they have been?

They were reigning, six-time high school state champions. They'd won 52 straight games. They were sending ace Lowell Bailey to the mound -- a senior who had a 0.00 ERA in 1944, just the fourth U.S. high school pitcher (up to that point) to finish a season without giving up any runs.

"He was a star pitcher," Joan Bailey, widow of Lowell, told me in a call. "He was really a big deal -- I mean, they all were. They were the state champions. Probably a little cocky."

But the Badgers may have underestimated who they were playing that day.

Their opponents were the Butte Eagles, a high school team that played at the Gila River Relocation Center -- one of 10 incarceration camps Japanese-Americans were forced into during WWII. They built and maintained their own fields, they installed seating, they took pride in playing America's pastime ... even when their lives in this country had been brutally uprooted.

"I look at it as kind of David versus Goliath," Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project told me. "Here was this All-Star team inside an incarceration camp against this powerhouse Badgers team. It was almost like a Hollywood script."

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