Many of the enjoyable days and nights of my life have been spent in baseball parks, past and present. Images of those days were rekindled in early November, the weekend before Veterans Day, when I attended a program at Nationals Park in Washington. The panel discussion on baseball was part of a conference put on by the American Veterans Center. Included in the excellent three-day event were dozens of firsthand accounts from veterans whose experiences spanned the period from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a smorgasbord of memories and had the benefit of expanding the mind but not the waistline.
Patriotism was a recurrent theme throughout the baseball discussion. Honored in absentia was 92-year-old former Cleveland Indian Bob Feller, who was once the most dominating pitcher in the major leagues. Illness prevented him from taking part in the conference. The players who did attend spoke of his enlisting in the Navy right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He served as head of a 24-man 40-mm antiaircraft gun crew on board the battleship Alabama (BB-60) during operations in both the Atlantic and Pacific. Those who analyze baseball statistics often wonder what his final numbers would have been if he hadn’t ungrudgingly given up nearly four seasons during the prime of his career.
One of Feller’s teammates on the Indians in the early 1950s was left-handed pitcher Lou Brissie. Like Feller, he had experienced a great deal of combat during the war. Unlike Feller’s case, the damage was to much more than his place in baseball records. He was severely wounded in December 1944, when he was an Army infantryman in northern Italy. An exploding German artillery shell ravaged his feet, shattered one leg, and hit his shoulder as well. He successfully argued against amputation. Being restored to health was not so easy; the process required 23 operations and dozens of blood transfusions. Supported by crutches that night in Washington, he told his listeners that a big factor in keeping him going during the medical procedures was a letter from Philadelphia Athletics owner-manager Connie Mack, who promised him an opportunity to pitch if he could get his mobility back. Opportunity can be a precious thing, and Brissie made the most of it. He became an All Star with the A’s.
Opportunity came in a different form for another member of the panel, John “Mule” Miles. He got the nickname from a manager who said he could hit as hard as a mule could kick. During World War II he was an aircraft mechanic who serviced AT-6 trainers and P-51 fighters flown by the black pilots known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Because the major leagues were only just beginning to integrate in the postwar period, Miles’ chance to play was for the Chicago American Giants in the still-segregated Negro Leagues. As he told the audience: “I didn’t make a lot of money playing baseball, but I enjoyed it. . . . I’m not complaining, just explaining.”
Jerry Coleman, who at 86 still keeps his hand in baseball by broadcasting some games each season for the San Diego Padres, was a member of the New York Yankees dynasty that ruled baseball in the 1940s and 1950s. His service as a Marine Corps pilot earned him a unique distinction as the only major-league player who fought in combat in both World War II and the Korean War. He flew an SBD Dauntless dive-bomber in the former and an F4U Corsair fighter-bomber in the latter. During one mission in Korea, he saw his roommate’s plane shot down and crash. After the war ended, Coleman rejoined the Yankees. He said that he never again played as well as he had before he went to Korea, but harbored no bitterness. As he put it, “Seeing friends die and families cry is enough to remind me of the proper place to put baseball.”
One of his Yankee teammates is an American institution. Lawrence “Yogi” Berra earned ten World Series rings during his career. As he described his service experiences, Berra was unaffectedly natural. In 1944 he was a member of the crew of a Navy landing craft modified to fire rockets in support of troops ashore. Berra’s boat did so during the Normandy landings at Omaha Beach in June and the invasion of southern France in August. When he managed to sneak away for liberty in Rome, he imagined what he might say to the pontiff, Pius XII: “Hi, Pope.” That drew a big laugh.
When he returned to the States, Berra was assigned to the submarine base in New London, Connecticut. Alarmed, he said he hadn’t volunteered for submarines, but then found out he would instead play for the base’s team. The coach was a former major-league player named Jim Gleeson. That night at the ballpark, the compact, solidly built Berra gleefully told the audience of the skeptical Gleeson’s initial assessment of him, “You don’t look like a ballplayer.” He credited the coach with improving his baseball skills, looks notwithstanding.
During a question-and-answer session, one member of the audience said that he didn’t think baseball players should be viewed as heroes. He did note that he was making an exception for the four men on stage. Clearly, they did much more than just play baseball.