The Gallows Poles

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Carlos Mendoza

Carlos Mendoza—taking the fall for a deflation not of his making.

On opposite coasts, two baseball men met their unmakers toward the end of last week. One was a manager, the other was a general manager. Both weren’t exactly the prime issues with their bottom feeders.

Met and Angel fans had reason enough to feel a bit of relief after, respectively manager Carlos Mendoza and GM Perry Minasian. But they also had reason to feel frustrated. Mendoza wasn’t the problem with the Mess. Minasian wasn’t the entire problem with the Angels.

Not even bellying up to a bar and getting blinder-than-Ray-Charles drunk would compel anyone to call Mendoza and Minasian the second coming of Casey Stengel or Branch Rickey. But would the same drunk accuse either of being the second coming of Matt Williams or Frank Lane?

Strap someone into the witness chair under oath and neither he nor she will say Mendoza was mistake-free without facing perjury charges. He was executed two days after a comedy of errors against the Cubs while losing 10-5 prompted enough remaining Met fans in Citi Field and about a hundred thousand times that many out of the ballpark to clamour for Mendoza’s head at last.

But Mendoza wasn’t the man who assembled this menagerie of mismatched Mets. It wasn’t Mendoza who pinked half his coaches last winter. Including and especially pitching coach Jeremy Hefner, long since hired to that job by the National League East-leading Braves. It wasn’t Mendoza who let Pete Alonso walk into the free agency arms of the Orioles or Edwin Díaz walk into those of the Damned Dodgers. It wasn’t Mendoza who traded Jeff McNeil and Brandon Nimmo away.

And it wasn’t Mendoza who brought in successors who’d underperform and/or end up on the injured list along with one of the two best remaining Mets, Francisco Lindor. That’s on president of baseball operations David Stearns. The same David Stearns who turned a far lesser budget into consistent success in Milwaukee, once upon a time. But, now, the same David Stearns who’s proving only that if you give him a superbudget he has an apparent knack for shopping the wrong aisles for the wrong merchandise.

Too many new faces came to equal too many parts to build a car that couldn’t or wouldn’t run. This year’s Mets are baseball’s Yugo. All of a sudden, the sorry condition of the 162-224, 2023-2025 White Sox seem even more like ancient history. The White Sox today are at the top of the American League Central heap. The NL East, and everyone else in the Show, have heaped upon the Mess.

Under interim manager (and former Padres manager turned Mets farm director) Andy Green, the Mets finished play Sunday having lost two out of three, with Kyle Schwarber abusing them to become the fastest in Phillies history to hit his 30th home run of a season.

Don’t say things can only look up from here until or unless Stearns turns last week’s trade of once-successful, lately-struggling pitcher David Peterson to the Cubs into a respectable heap of on-the-fly rebuilding pieces by way of continued trade deadline-approach activity. The optimism isn’t exactly high.

Perry Minasian

Perry Minasian—how far behind his back did the Angels’s owner tie his arm?

On the same day the hapless Mendoza met the managerial gallows, Minasian met likewise on the opposite coast, right before the Angels met their longtime left coast rivals the Athletics and got slapped around, 9-3.

Minasian wasn’t exactly the willful demolition expert the likes of Lane, John Holland, M. Donald Grant, Woody Woodward, Dave Littlefield, Cam Bonifay, and Randy Smith proved to be. In all fairness, he operated under the ten-thumbed handicap of the Angels’s owner, Arte Moreno, whose pre-baseball marketing success compelled him to assemble baseball teams according to marketability first and baseball cohesion second through tenth.

It’s only fair to call Minasian out on such mistakes as almost constantly trading any Angels future for hurrying prospects to the parent club so fast it became debatable whether those who looked like real comers down on what remained of the farm would have better than replacement-level success in the Show.

But it probably wasn’t Minasian who insisted upon such blunderful moves as . . .

* Drafting all pitchers in 2021 and watching most of them become trade pieces, injury-addled, or out of affiliated baseball entirely.

* Firing manager Joe Maddon during a twelve-game losing streak to end a tenure in which Maddon (and perhaps anyone else) couldn’t overcome a lack of pitching depth and a crowd of injuries.

* Going all-in at the trade deadline during Shohei Ohtani’s final Angels season . . . but not dealing Ohtani for the badly-needed reinforcement of prime prospects and major league-ready top talent he could have drawn.

* Putting six players onto the waiver wire a month after that all-in deadline—including two of the deadline acquisitions.

* Continuing not to turn the healthy version of Mike Trout into a trade piece that, like Ohtani, would have brought badly needed youth back to commence or continue that badly-needed team and organisational overhaul.

As The Athletic‘s Sam Blum phrased it, “Minasian inherited a bad organisation and left it a disastrous one.” Really, though, Minasian probably spent his entire Angels tenure, loyal though he was to Moreno, with the proverbial arm tied behind his back.

Moreno still can’t decide whether to invest like the large market owner he is or the small market owner too many former Angel personnel have suggested he’s become. Meanwhile, the Angels spent the first weekend of the post-Minasian era taking two of three from the A’s, with Josh Lowe’s first career salami slice all the runs they needed to win, 4-1.

Will Green prove to be the manager the Mets need to stabilised while retooling? Or, will the Mets hunt other candidates, send Green back to running the farm, and put Stearns on a crazy short leash depending upon his trade deadline work? Will they hire Alex Cora as Green’s permanent successor? Carlos Beltran? Hall of Famer-in-waiting Albert Pujols? Rob Thomson?

Will John Mozeliak—who worked in the Cardinals front office for the entirety of Pujols’s original eleven seasons there, and built their 2011 World Series winner—use his interim GM time with the Angels for more than just to oversee the draft and the trade deadline? Will he leave his permanent successor, maybe, with Pujols in the manager’s chair after incumbent Kurt Suzuki’s single-year contract expires?

Forgive Mets and Angels fans if they’re putting their heads between their knees instead of answering.

Song for my father

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I’m more than certain I have other things about which to write. Such things as the season-long plate of interleague games, right down to the regular season’s final days, begging the question of why beside the sponsorship dollars and contracted-for participants’ bonuses are we still bothering with the All-Star Game at all?

Such things as, if we must have the All-Star Game still amidst the protracted gimmickry of in-season interleague play, why do the fans still have an All-Star vote they’ve proven time and again to cast wrongly? Why has the Game all but become what FanSided‘s Zachary Rotman describes, “which fan base has the strongest labor organization?”

Such things as, why is every approach to every season’s trade deadline an exercise in exposing just which teams simply refuse to even try keeping their best players in honest efforts to compete? (And, concurrently, why isn’t the Major League Baseball Players Association being as stubborn in demanding the owners open their books to prove their financial hardships as the owners are demanding salary caps?)

Such things as, why do we continue tolerating the ridiculous free cookie on second base to begin each extra half-inning of play, as if the better rule changes such as the pitch clock (yes, I was wrong to oppose that) and the universal designated hitter (I’ll die on the hill once identified by George F. Will, a convert long before I: “Only serious batters shall hit”) haven’t turned elongated game times into exceptions?

(If not that hill, then I’ll die on the hill claimed by Thomas Boswell in February 2019: “It’s fun to see Max Scherzer slap a single to right field and run it out as if he thinks he’s Ty Cobb. But I’ll sacrifice that pleasure to get rid of the thousands of rallies I’ve seen killed when an inning ends with one pitcher working around a competent No. 8 hitter so he can then strike out the other pitcher. When you get in a jam in the AL, you must pitch your way out of it, not ‘pitch around’ your way out of it.”*)

But today it’ll be a song for my father. Today is sixty years since my father passed to the Elysian Fields. (Don’t ask what he thought of the Horace Silver vintage which lent its title to mine here. My father was so sternly vanilla he made Lawrence Welk resemble Lawrence Ferlinghetti.)

The last time I addressed him was five years ago, approaching the first Field of Dreams Game between the Yankees and the White Sox. This year’s game, 13 August, will feature the Twins against the Phillies. Didn’t I just wonder why on earth we still bother with an All-Star Game when regular-season interleague play now goes down to the season’s final weekend?

That was then: I wrote the following . . .

The author’s parents, presumably around the time of their marriage in 1950.

Father and son in Field of Dreams were estranged by disputes including the one in which the son chastised the father for worshipping a badly tainted baseball hero. Father and son in my case were estranged by contradictions that would be called child abuse today, followed by the ten-month battle against cancer that my father lost in 1966, when I was ten and he, thirty-nine.

My parents were foolish enough to believe nothing but physical discipline, with no concurrent attempt at real teaching, applied to mere human childhood mistakes the same as to real misbehaviour or disobedience. Confirmed decades later by an unimpeachable source (my father’s sister), my parents wanted children in the worst way possible—only to have no patience for children merely being children.

My father, alas, was even more foolish for believing the way to teach a son who didn’t know how to fight was to beat him even more violently, accompanied by every demeaning insult he could throw. The thought that a son needs to be taught to defend himself, that it isn’t knowledge with which you’re born, was never programmed into his software.

My father’s death stole any hope of eventual rapproachment in this world from me. Fantasy thought it is, the rapproachment between John and Ray Kinsella to conclude Field of Dreams was and remains something I envied every time I watched the film. The few things I had in common with my father included baseball. (And, in fairness, music, my interest in and facility for which my father encouraged but my mother rejected.)

I don’t remember whom he declared to be among his baseball heroes, other than his having been a Dodgers fan since their Brooklyn years. He spoke of various players without singling one out as a particular favourite, at least within my earshot, while I had as heroes assorted hapless 1962-66 Mets plus Sandy Koufax, Willie Mays, Juan Marichal, Henry Aaron, and Bob Gibson, among others.

But I do remember numerous catches, a few trips to the Polo Grounds and then Shea Stadium to see those embryonic Mets, and, in one fathers-and-sons game, my ripping a line drive off his crotch when he deliberately lifted his glove above it because (he admitted it later) he didn’t want to be the reason I made a hard out.

For all the contradictions and abuse, whenever I watch the Field of Dreams climax I’d give whatever I have to give to see my father walk toward me one more time, whether or not he wore a baseball uniform, and slip a baseball glove onto his left hand when I slip mine on and say, “Dad, want to have a catch?”

This is now:

Before he passed, Dad managed to find and give me my first guitar. I try to believe it was his way of saying he was sorry for the damage he did. Enough so that I don’t know what I’d love to do first, if he could walk toward me again: Pick up a guitar and play for him now . . . or slip my Rawlings glove onto my left hand and say, “Dad, want to have a catch?”

* When I sat down to write this morning, the designated hitters entered Monday’s play with a cumulative .746 OPS and a .244 batting average. From the end of the dead ball era’s final decade through the last day a pitcher not named Shohei Ohtani batted in a major league game, the pitchers posted a .344 OPS and a .162 batting average.

Slaughter on Sunday: the Mets and the Nats

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Mike Yastrzemski

Yastrzemski’s first-inning throw, flying toward the net pole it hit in the bottom of the first in Citi Field. It helped the Mets’s A.J. Ewing hit one of the strangest RBI doubles of the decade Sunday.

Don’t look now, but one pair of National League East teams don’t look quite as beaten down now as their season openings left them. No matter what their fans might tell you.

I give you the Nationals. At the end of April: 15-17. Since the first of May, including Sunday: 22-18. They’re two games over .500 as I write. Even if they’re ten games out of first place, they’re not exactly the most grotesque thing in the nation’s capital, either. (For starters, they never thought of having UFC cage matches outside Nationals Park for an added distraction.)

Now, I give you the Mets. At the end of April: 10-21. Since the first of May, including Sunday: 22-18. They’re still eight games below .500, but they’re not exactly the most grotesque thing in New York anymore, either. For now. Why, there but for the disgrace of that twelve-game losing streak in April might they be fully equal to the Nats. Might.

Both teams acquitted themselves more than admirably Sunday afternoon. Matter of fact, both their opponents could accuse them of human rights violations. The Mets bushwhacked the Braves, 8-1, handing the NL East leaders their second series loss of the year. The Nats might be called in front of the Hague for the 10-1 sinking they laid upon the Mariners.

Each team had to shake off first-inning trouble, though the Mets might have had the slightly tougher time of it. The Nats only surrendered a single run by way of an outfield bobble; Mets starting pitcher Freddy Peralta had to wrench, twist, and turn his way out of a bases-loaded jam, escaping with no damage worse than a sacrifice fly.

From there?

Nats pitcher Mike Mikolas pitched seven shutout innings after taking over for opener P.J. Poulin. Peralta went forth to throw four shutout innings before four Mets relievers pitched four more to finish the Braves. They didn’t have even close to all the fun.

The Mets dropped a four-run bottom of the first on Braves, including and especially A.J. Ewing hitting one of the most unusual RBI doubles you’re likely to see. Not because of how he hit it but because of how Braves left fielder Mike Yastrzemski’s play on it developed.

Yastrzemski retrieved the ball cleanly and threw in, but the ball escaped him and rang off the netting pole behind the third base line, allowing Young (RBI single) and Juan Soto (safe on a previous fielder’s choice bunt) to score. One out later, Ewing came home on Brett Baty’s single.

Except for James Wood abusing Mariners starter Emerson Hancock with a bottom of the first-opening homer, the Nats were quiet at the plate until the fourth. Then rap-bang-bang-crack-bang! Dylan Crews—leadoff double. CJ Abrams—base hit up the middle, first and third. Kiebert Ruiz—RBI base hit, first and second. Daylen Lile—RBI double, second and third. Nasim Nuñez—two-run single.

James Wood

Wood’s leadoff launch off Hancock in the first only started the Nats’s Sunday punching.

Five straight hits and the fun wasn’t quite done. Nuñez ended up on third thanks to a throwing error on a pickoff attempt and came home when Jorbit Vivas grounded out to first.

The Mets tore another pair out of Braves starter Bryce Elder in the fifth when Ewing and Marcus Semien homered back to back to open the inning. Then, they took another pair out of Braves reliever Molina when Soto slashed a two-run single up the pipe. The Nats had an eighth-inning dance yet to come, a pair of RBI doubles and a run-scoring groundout.

What was it all about? The Mets were written off as such a Mess you’d have thought games such as this would be the kind in which they were the battered and not the battering. The Nats have been hitting tons as a team for much of the season but their pitching wasn’t exactly striking fear into the hearts of opposing lineups.

Come Sunday, the Nats’ pitchers posted an ERA of 1.00 for the day while their batters partied like it was 2019. A team whose pitching took a 4.88 fielding-independent pitching rate into Sunday’s game needed and got a big-game performance up and down the staff. Especially considering how brittle their bullpen really looked after blowing their way to a walkoff 11-10 loss to the sad-enough-sack Giants last Wednesday.

The Mets were pitching only slightly better entering Sunday while their team hitting made a lineup of Bob Ueckers resemble a lineup of Willie Mayses. But their pitching on Sunday, too, showed a game ERA of 1.00. And their hitters posted a .371 game batting average. If only they could lather, rinse, repeat all that most of the time from here.

If only.

Things are intriguing enough in their division right now, especially with the Braves learning the hard way why Spencer Strider hasn’t looked his normal self on the mound (elbow inflammation and an injured list stay) and having to continue compensating for Ronald Acuña, Jr.’s health. (Hamstring; injured list.) And, with the gang from Philadelphia being 26-13 since the first of May and 8-3 so far in June.

The Phillies have dates to play the Mets and the Nats this month. The Mets still have a lot farther to go before they can say they’re anywhere near past the worst of it. The Nats are better off than the Mets but still vulnerable on the mound. These Phillies might struggle even in second place but they’re not yet in the pushover class.

Meanwhile, there are those fellows down Miami way. Through the end of May, the Marlins were 26-34. Their June, so far? 10-2, after they outlasted Paul Skenes and the Pirates. But they, too, have more of a question mark than an exclamation point over their heads.

Bank on it. Even with the Mets and the Nats resembling threshing machines on Sunday, there are gears turning in both front offices. And those in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and even Miami won’t necessarily take breathers just yet.

Six to nine–what a way to make a living

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Sebastian Rivero

Sebastian Rivero starting his Sunday mayhem against Dodgers starter Emmett Sheehan in the second inning . . .

Baseball’s first June weekend finished rather eventfully. Especially if you wore Dodger uniforms, in your own playpen, facing the patsies from down the freeway who came into Sunday’s game hoping to find some way to avoid being swept in your season series.

Who knew? All the Angels had to do was trust in the bottom of their batting order. Except for Zach Neto hitting a three-run homer late in the game, the top five in the lineup might as well have taken the day off, for all that they weren’t hitting.

Cue Dolly Parton: Working six to nine—what a way to make a living.

The box score for the Angels’s less-than-likely 13-5 demolition of the Big Bad Dodgers Sunday afternoon only hints at the bottom boys’s destruction: 13-for-15 with four walks, ten runs scored, and ten driven in. Shall we go into the details? Of course we shall. The stars of the show: Jo (Heads Up) Adell, Nick Madrigal, Jose Siri, and Sebastian Rivero.

Adell—4-for-5 including a second-inning single and run scored; a fourth-inning leadoff single and run scored; a base hit setting up first and third and another run scored in the fifth; and, a one-out yank into the left center field seats with one on in the seventh to start putting the game out of the Dodgers’s reach.

Madrigal—1-for-3 with three walks: a walk in the second after an overturned pitch call on the twelfth pitch of his plate appearance, and a run scored; a walk after Adell’s infield hit and a run scored; a walk in the fifth, though he was thrown out at the plate trying to score behind Adell and Wade Meckler; and, a base hit and run scored in the seventh.

Siri—a walk to load the pillows for Rivero’s two-run single in the second; a sacrifice bunt with nobody out to set second and third up for another Rivero two-run single; and, his own two-run single in the fifth, the one on which Madrigal got thrown out trying to make it a three-run job. Siri also singled in the seventh, setting Madrigal up to score from second on another Rivero single.

Are you getting the impression that that’s all just the prelude to the main event? Good. Because Rivero certainly was the main event at the bottom of the heap. You might have forgotten his .220/.264/.260 slash line watching him Sunday. He went from the Mendoza Line to the Carnival Cruise Line.

Second inning: Two-run single. Fourth inning: Two-run single. Sixth inning: Leadoff single. Seventh inning: One-run single. Ninth inning: RBI double. And, as the invaluable Sarah Langs unearthed, Rivero’s five hits and five steaks out of the number nine lineup slot is only the fifth since ancient Yankee pitcher Johnny Murphy did it in 1936.

The three in between, says she: Scott Fletcher, 1992 (on 28 August, same day as Murphy in ’36); Jackie Bradley, Jr. (seven ribs), 2015; and, Austin Wynns (six ribs), 2025. Wynns is the only one of the quintet to nail more than five hits (he had six) cooking his ribs.

The Angels needed something, anything, from somewhere to avoid the sweep, on a weekend when the once-redoubtable Mike Trout—still second on the team in WAR this season—had a weekend slump on his hands. (Hitless in thirteen tries including six strikeouts.)

They got to batter five of seven Dodger pitchers on a day their own starter Jose Soriano got spanked for five runs (four earned) in six innings before their bullpen worked three shutout innings of three-hit ball to finish off. Not even back-to-back Dodger bombs in the sixth (Dalton Rushing, a three-run job; Ryan Ward, a solo) could keep the Angels bottom in its seat.

Suddenly, nobody’s going to say backup catchers aren’t supposed to turn up looking like reincarnated Benches, Berras, or Fisks anymore. It was as if Rivero wanted to tell his fellow bottom-of-the-order boys, “You’re not blocking me at this party’s door.”

Batting six to nine—what a way to make a living. Makes you wonder why the Angels didn’t think of that cup of ambition sooner.

“It was a wacky war”

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Yogi Berra

A colourised version of perhaps the most familiar image of Yogi Berra in his Navy uniform.

Note: Today is the eighty-second anniversary of history’s largest amphibious war invasion. Officially named Operation Overlord; colloquially known as D-Day from then until now. It began  the liberation of France and in due course all western Europe from the grip of the Third Reich.

Among those of the U.S. Navy playing an active role in the invasion was a Yankee prospect who’d survive the war to become a Hall of Fame catcher against whom all to follow would be measured. I republish this essay in his honour (with a very few necessary changes) and as a tribute to those who served with him but didn’t make it home.

Yogi Berra once gave a half-puckish beginning explanation as to how he became part of D-Day, World War II’s major Allied invasion of Europe from the Normandy beaches, as an eighteen-year-old Navy seaman. He made it sound like relief from boredom. As he so often did with his fabled Yogiisms, he had a knack for good humoured understatement.

Something still seems to be missing from America since Berra’s death over eleven years ago, which was also more than a year and a half after his beloved wife, Carmen, preceded him. And there may be worse reasons to think about the Hall of Fame catcher and personality than remembering how he got himself aboard a Navy rocket boat in time to be part of D-Day.

Berra was a Yankee prospect playing for their Norfolk, Virginia farm in 1943. Norfolk also just so happened to be the headquarters of the Fifth Naval District. Which meant it was also the governing center of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Which also meant Norfolk and nearby Newport News overrun with sailors and civilian defense workers, an estimated 750,000 of them in a pair of towns whose populations combined weren’t quite as large as that of the Bronx.

His biographer Allen Barra, in Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee, has written that the lad’s first real problems in Norfolk were long lines at the movie houses he loved and trying to stretch his $90-a-month minor league salary. “I never got too hooked on cigarettes, because I couldn’t afford them,” he once said. “Maybe starvation kept me from getting cancer.”

Once, knowing his team’s two other catchers were ailing, Yogi launched a unique version of a strike, telling his manager he wasn’t well for lack of food and the ploy worked toward getting him a $5 a month raise. His mother, Paulina, helped by slipping him a few extra dollars in the mail with instructions not to tell his father. And Berra became popular enough on the Tars that one ardent fan, a lady, provided him a full hero sandwich of salami and provolone every Sunday game.

That sandwich, Barra wrote, “was for Yogi what spinach was for Popeye.” After he received the first such gift, he smashed twelve hits and drove in 23 runs in two games against Roanoke. (This was the doubleheader that prompted Carmen Berra to remember, “When I heard about the 23 RBI day, I figured he had a future.”) He played well enough to be able to think an equal or better 1944 would get him a Yankee call-up. “Yogi was looking forward to an explosive 1944,” Barra wrote. That’s a polite way to describe the one he got.

Berra knew only two things: 1) He’d be in military service soon. 2) He had no idea where. Told his draft papers were drawn back home in St. Louis, he asked for and got them sent to Norfolk. After the Tars played an exhibition game with the Norfolk Air Station (some of the Norfolk players included such Show men as pitchers Fred Hutchinson and Hugh Casey, outfielder Dom DiMaggio, and Yogi’s future Yankee teammate/fellow Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto), he talked to a warrant officer at Norfolk’s Navy training station and took the man’s suggestion to enlist in the Navy.

When his boot camp in Maryland ended, his mother underwent surgery; he was allowed to be with her until she could return home. After that, Yogi went to Little Creek to train for the amphibious service. The routine otherwise was so hurry-up-and-wait that the kid relieved his boredom at the base movie theater and with the comic books he fell in love with. Then one night he was watching Boomtown, the Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy film, when the film suddenly stopped and the theater lights suddenly came back up.

Berra and all the other sailors in the theater were ordered to line up. Officers asked for volunteers—for rocket boat duty. None of the young swabbies had a clue about rocket boats but when someone called them rocket ships, Yogi perked up. The idea that volunteering in military service was tantamount to being very careful what you wish for hadn’t yet been programmed into his mental data base.

The boats, as Barra noted, “turned out to be small landing craft, LCSSs (Landing Craft Support Small), whose purpose was to spray rockets on the beach before troop landings. There were duller things to train for. Some of the men got the hint that they might be participating in a major troop landing, perhaps the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe that the papers were always writing about.”

The sailors called the rocket boats big bathtubs. If you played with toy boats in the bath when you were a small child, try now to imagine having a bath with 48 rockets, one twin .50-caliber machine gun and two .30-caliber machine guns. The boats affirmed the aforementioned hints: their purpose in life was to hammer the Normandy beaches and clear the way for the troops’ landing crafts. Yogi and his fellows had a name for themselves: “The landing craft suicide squad.”

The rocket boatmen first went to Plymouth, England. Once again it seemed to be hurry up and wait. Three weeks after they arrived, though, Berra’s LCSS was attached to what was thought to be the smallest transport ship in the Coast Guard fleet, the USS Bayfield. It made for Normandy early on 4 June. The Bayfield carried six LCSSs. “Just before dawn, on the morning of June 6, 1944,” Barra wrote, “their rocket boat was lifted on the davits and lowered over the side and, in Yogi’s words, ‘expendable as hell, we headed in for Omaha Beach’.”

The LCSSs were the tiniest boats on the waters heading into firing position.

“It was scary,” Yogi would remember, “but really something to see. I was only eighteen, and I didn’t think anything could kill me. I didn’t know enough to be scared. I had my head up over the side of the boat all the time, looking around like it was the Fourth of July in Forest Park and after the fireworks we were going to go over and get some hot dogs and Cokes.”

Bless his innocent soul, Yogi probably had no idea how vulnerable the LCSSs were. The sides of those boats weren’t exactly thick. One errant enemy shell, especially one hitting any of the boats’ rockets, would have made not the Fourth of July hot dogs but them into duck soup. Berra’s peekings over the edges to see the show ended when his lieutenant advised him to put his head down if he had plans to keep it.

The LCSSs waited for their lead boat to fire a test and see if it reached the beach. If it did, the other boats would move in close. It did. And inimitably, Yogi described the boats moving in “closer than the hitter is to the left field [wall] at Fenway Park.” One and all of them began firing. “I couldn’t see all the bloodshed that they showed in the movie [Saving] Private Ryan,” he remembered years later, “but I did see a lot of guys drown.”

Berra’s and all the LCSSs did what they were sent to do. Well enough that by D-Day’s afternoon they could actually relax, though they were under orders to remain through 9 June for cover fire in the event the Nazis had ideas about the counterattack that never came.

They had more trouble from an anticipated storm smashing in on 8 June, battering the boats and even flipping Yogi’s over. Before that they had trouble through no fault of their own—a friendly fire incident. Three fighter planes appeared above and the LCSSs were under orders to shoot down anything flying below cloud level. The LCSSs fired and hit one plane. The pilot bailed and parachuted before the plane hit the drink. Yogi ordered his boatmates to keep him covered, expecting to hear a stream of German.

What he heard was a stream of English language swearing. The crew had shot down an American plane whose markings they couldn’t see in the murk of the storm. When the storm worsened, Berra’s boat flipped over. Try to resist the temptation to say that only Yogi Berra and his boat crew could survive D-Day just to get thatclose to drowning after the artillery stopped.

They hung on until they were rescued and returned to the Bayfield. A Nazi bomb fell near the ship but no serious damage occurred, according to Barra and others. Berra said later he was too tired to be scared. Years later, when he met D-Day’s mastermind, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, he couldn’t bring himself to ask Eisenhower about the invasion. “I never talked about D-Day,” Yogi remembered. “It didn’t seem right, but now I wish I had.”

With good reason. Numerous sailors believed Eisenhower was aboard one of their ships on D-Day. This was because of his soon-to-be-immortal radio message (You are about to embark on a great crusade) that was actually recorded at the 101st Airborne’s headquarters while watching the first Allied aircraft reach for the skies on that day. Even today, it sounds so clear that when you play it it sounds as though Ike’s telling it to you side by side as you’re about to hit the links.

Berra and his squadron got a break to rest at Portsmouth before going to Bizerte, the North African coastal town, and by 15 August 1944 he was part of the LCSS force hitting Marseilles and strafing hotels and other facilities co-opted by German forces. Berra’s boat was almost hit by mistake by a British shell that turned out to be a dud.

Berra himself got close enough to death when ships of the British Royal Navy behind the LCSSs fired at targets past the hotels and, while holding a rocket, one of his crew hollered to hit the deck. As he ducked under a gun mount, Yogi accidentally dropped the rocket. “It did not go off,” Barra wrote, “or you wouldn’t be reading this book.”

During a furious barrage, Berra got nicked by a bullet from a German machine gun before he manned his twin .50s and fired to cut down fleeing Nazis. As American troops landed, the locals swarmed the sailors with gifts and song. “It was a wacky war,” Yogi would remember. “A half hour after we were getting shot at by the Germans, the French were welcoming us.”

He rarely talked about his World War II experiences in the decades to follow. When he did so, even that provoked a little humour, as in the Los Angeles Times overhearing Berra talking to Hall of Fame pitcher Jim Palmer and Hall of Fame broadcaster Tim McCarver. Wrote the Times: “Yogi survived D-Day and George Steinbrenner, and all in forty years.”

He had to survive a more sensitive customer, though: his mother. After receiving a month’s leave for the Christmas holidays, Berra went home and showed his family his hard-earned decorations: a Distinguished Unit Citation, two battle stars, a European Theater of Operations ribbon, and a Good Conduct Medal.

Paulina Berra was already in tears as it was. Her boy also earned the Purple Heart when he was nicked by that Nazi bullet, but Yogi didn’t dare make the formal application for that medal. He figured that if Mama Berra knew what the Purple Heart really meant, she’d suffer a purple heart attack.