Lieutenant Jimmy Gleeson can only shake his head and laugh as he watches the opposing catcher argue with the home plate umpire. It’s the middle of the summer of 1945, and by now the manager of the New London submarine base baseball team is convinced there isn’t much Seaman 2nd Class Yogi Berra can’t do with a baseball bat in his hands.
It was just a few moments ago that one of Gleeson’s players was dancing off second base with Berra at the plate. Convinced the Raider runner was going to attempt to steal third, Quonset Point Naval Air Station catcher Gus Niarhos—who played two years in the Yankee organization before the war—called for a pitch out. And his pitcher delivered the ball exactly where Niarhos wanted it—high and outside to the left-handed-hitting Berra.
But the ball never reached Niarhos. Just as the catcher was rising from his crouch, Berra stepped across the plate and slapped the pitch on a line off the left field wall. The runner scored easily as Berra pulled into second base with one of his four hits for the day, sending his future Yankee teammate into a frenzy.
“Hey, ump; hey, ump!” Niarhos is shouting at umpire Joe Rafferty. “He can’t do that.”
And why not? Rafferty asks.
“Because that was a pitch out,” an exasperated Niarhos says.
“Yeah,” Rafferty replies calmly, “but you didn’t tell that to Yogi.”
The double stands. And Gleeson—a journeyman outfielder for the Reds, Cubs, and Indians before entering the Navy three years ago—adds another item to the growing list of things he’s never seen anyone do on a baseball field.
Not that Gleeson has always been convinced Berra was a player, much less a star in the making. It was only this past January when Yogi walked into the Raider manager’s office and confidently announced he wanted to play for New London’s baseball team. Gleeson, who already had two major league pitchers and a former backup catcher for the Yankees on his roster, thought the five-foot-eight, 185-pound kid looked more like a wrestler.
But Berra kept insisting he played one season for the Yankee farm team in Norfolk in the Piedmont League before being drafted. So Gleeson and his assistant coach Ray Volpi, who pitched in the Yankee chain for several years, quizzed Berra on the Piedmont League’s managers and top players. Berra got every question right. The New London manager still wasn’t convinced but told Berra to come back in April and he’d take a look.
Gleeson didn’t have to look long once Yogi stepped into the batting cage to know he had something special. Everything his pitchers threw—fastballs or curves, high or low, off the plate or high over Yogi’s head—Berra drove on a line to every part of New London’s ballpark. And now Yogi is firmly planted in the middle of Gleeson’s lineup, the best hitter for the best team in each of the two leagues in which New London competes.
With victory over Japan seeming inevitable and the country able to see an end to years of war, playing baseball in New London is a joy. Splitting his time between catcher and left field, Yogi hits better than .400 in both the Southern New England Service League—composed of teams from the many military bases in Connecticut and Rhode Island—and the Morgan League, a five-team collection of the area’s best semipro ballplayers.
Berra is also one of the many pro ballplayers who play for semipro teams under assumed names. The military frowns on this, and every league’s rules prohibit the use of ringers. But men who have just risked their lives fighting a war can pick up $50 a game—more than half their monthly pay—so everyone just looks the other way. Berra plays for the Cranston Chiefs under the name Joe Cusano and thrills fans by regularly belting homers over the right field fence. Legend has it the city leaders in Cranston decided to update their stadium, raising its outfield fences to 30 feet, after a Berra blast hit the Cranston Bible Chapel—500 feet away in dead center field.
As July winds down, talk on the New London submarine base centers on why Japan continues to fight when all appears to be lost. Japan’s six largest cities are close to ruins—an immense bombing of Tokyo alone left 100,000 dead and 267,000 buildings flattened—and almost five million Japanese are now homeless. On July 26, the Allies issue an ultimatum, warning Japan to surrender or face “utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.” Japan rejects the ultimatum two days later.
There will be no further warnings.
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the doors on the bay of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay swing open and the world’s first atomic bomb floats by parachute toward the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima. When it falls to just 2,000 feet above the city of 350,000, the bomb is detonated, unleashing a blast equal to 15,000 tons of TNT, which immediately kills 80,000 people and destroys almost everything standing within five square miles. Tens of thousands more Japanese citizens—at least half of them children under 10—will die from severe burns, injuries, or radiation poisoning within weeks.
This is what utter devastation now looks like.
The decision to drop the bomb was made by President Harry Truman, who’s been commander in chief since the death of Franklin Roosevelt 16 weeks ago. Continuing conventional bombing and then invading the Japanese mainland would cost as many as one million American lives, Truman was told by his military experts, which the new President found unacceptable. Truman hoped using the “Cosmic Bomb,” the result of work by an international team of scientists five years in the making, would bring an end to war.
“The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought the war to the Far East,” President Truman told the nation the next morning in a radio address. “Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan’s power to make war.”
Truman’s decision, made over the objections of several key advisers, including General Dwight Eisenhower, will be debated for decades to come. But Japan does not surrender, and Truman approves a second bomb, this one even more powerful than the first. At 11:02 a.m. on August 9, the bomb called Fat Man is detonated 1,650 feet over the port city of Nagasaki, and 40,000 people—a quarter of the city’s population—are killed instantly. Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki will see tens of thousands more Japanese die from their wounds.
The leaders of Japan have finally been through enough. With America readying yet another bomb—and others in the works—Japan surrenders on August 14. Like all of America, Berra and the rest of the sailors on the New London submarine base cheer the news and celebrate the end of the war. The Army and Army Air Corps began discharging troops after Germany surrendered, but the Navy and Marines were waiting for the end of fighting in the Pacific before releasing their men.
New London was closing in on titles in its two leagues when the news of the atomic bombs arrived and everything was put on hold. But Berra and his teammates have other things on their minds than baseball. Yogi can now check in with the base commander and find out when his service time will end—and his professional baseball career can resume.
Jimmy Gleeson is leaning against the backstop of his Raiders’ baseball field, watching his team take batting practice before a game in late August. Standing next to Gleeson is Mel Ott, the legendary player-manager of today’s opponent, the New York Giants. Now 33, Gleeson is hoping to find a managing or coaching job somewhere in pro ball after he leaves the Navy.
The player he’s telling Ott about is certainly helping Gleeson’s prospects. Yogi Berra’s already won two batting titles, hitting .429 in the Service League and .449 in the Morgan League, leading his team to first place in both leagues. And Yogi’s hit better than .300 against the first three major league teams—the Boston Braves, Washington Senators, and Philadelphia A’s—to face New London this summer.
“He doesn’t look much like a baseball player,” Gleeson tells Ott, whose own squat body and unusually high leg kick have produced 507 home runs since 1926, the most in NL history. “But he has the finest swing you’ll ever see.”
Ott is spellbound as Yogi lashes one line drive after another. The future Hall of Famer sees Berra’s quick wrists and his ability to reach and drive an outside pitch—and pitches over his head and almost off his shoes, too. This 20-year-old’s hand-eye coordination is off the charts. There’s just one other thing Ott should know, Gleeson tells the Giants star.
“The Yankees have him under contract,” Gleeson says.
“Damn,” grumbles Ott, who can already envision Berra’s sweet left-handed swing sending one ball after another over the right field fence at the Polo Grounds—the Giants’ home field—all of 258 feet from home plate. When the game starts, Ott watches Berra smack a pair of singles off veteran reliever Ace Adams, who has 10 wins and 15 saves this season for the fourth-place Giants. But it’s Berra’s 400-foot drive to center, hauled in at the wall, which really sticks in Ott’s mind after his team’s 8–3 loss.
Ott says a hurried goodbye to Gleeson and rushes to catch a train to New York, a plan formulating in his mind. Gleeson finds Berra in the clubhouse after the game and tells him about his conversation with Ott. The Giants manager was disappointed to hear you were Yankee property, Gleeson tells him. “But he was still interested,” Gleeson says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard from him.”
Berra goes back to his job taking tickets at the base movie theater and sweeping it out after shows until the next Raider game. He doesn’t mind the work and loves that he sees all the movies for free. Ott returns to New York determined to get “that little catcher in New London” and pitches the idea to Giants owner Horace Stoneham soon after returning home. “He could be worth $500,000 in a few years,” says Ott. Fine, the owner tells his star manager, then gives him $50,000 to close the deal.
It’s a few days later when Ott visits Yankee President Larry MacPhail in the Yankees’ new Fifth Avenue office. MacPhail returned from the war in 1944 after two years of service and put together an ownership team to buy the Yankees for just under $3 million from the trust of Colonel Jacob Ruppert, who built the franchise into a powerhouse before his death in 1939. One partner is Dan Topping, a 33-year-old socialite and heir to a tin-mining fortune who is married to Olympic skater turned actress Sonja Henie, his third of what will be six wives. The other is construction magnate Del Webb, who likes to boast that his booming Southwest-based company built one of the internment camps for the Japanese in America.
Both men loaned MacPhail the money to buy his share of the franchise, agreeing to let the longtime baseball executive run the team and repay his $1 million in loans out of his share of the team’s profits.
The blustery MacPhail—who brought night games to baseball when he ran the Cincinnati Reds in the mid-1930s and winning baseball to the Brooklyn Dodgers before the war—was an unlikely choice to run the staid Yankees. And true to his reputation, he came in like a storm. He renovated the stadium with new box seats and a private club for wealthy fans. He put more seats in the bleachers for everyone else and added a host of promotions. He began installing lights in time for the ’46 season, convinced night baseball—like all his changes—would hasten his ability to repay his loan.
The Yankee players grumble MacPhail will do anything for a buck, like traveling to Panama to play lucrative spring training games. And there’s more than a little truth to their beliefs. So when Ott calls to say he’s interested in one of the Yankees’ minor league catchers and has $50,000 to spend, MacPhail is happy to take the meeting.
Ott tries a bit of misdirection, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket and running down a list of names of Yankee prospects. He finally gets around to saying he wants Berra. The Yankee boss has never heard Yogi’s name before and is eager to bank a big check. But there’s something odd about a smart baseball man like Ott willing to go so high for a kid who’s played all of one season in the low minors.
“The little catcher. You like him?” MacPhail says to Ott. “Well, I think we can work something out. I have to check with my farm-system men, but I think we can work out a deal.”
The moment Ott is gone, MacPhail bellows for head scout Paul Krichell, who’s been with the team since 1920 and discovered Lou Gehrig, among many other Yankee stars. Krichell finds his boss pacing in his office.
“Who’s this Berra kid?” MacPhail demands.
Krichell says Berra is a raw but powerful left-handed hitter, perfectly suited for Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch—296 feet away with a waist-high wall. The Yankee President instantly decides against the trade. MacPhail inherited an aging team; most of his stars are in their 30s. If Ott likes this Yogi kid so much and Krichell is right, maybe Berra can play an important role in the team’s future.
“Let’s get Berra up here as soon as you can,” MacPhail tells his top scout.
A few weeks later there’s a knock on MacPhail’s door.
“You want to see me, mister?”
It’s Berra, and when MacPhail looks up he’s astonished. Yogi’s wearing his Navy uniform, which only exaggerates his oddly shaped body, especially the ill-fitting white sailor’s cap, which makes his already oversized head look even larger. Years later, MacPhail will tell people he thought Berra looked more like the bottom man of an acrobatic pyramid team than a baseball player, and wondered if he could still make a deal with Ott.
Berra remembers that they had a pleasant 20- to 30-minute conversation about baseball. When MacPhail realizes this kid knows the game, he tells Berra he’ll probably send him to Newark, the Yankees’ top farm team in the tough International League, when Yogi leaves the Navy. Berra thanks MacPhail, asks whom he should see to get payment for his traveling expenses, and heads back to New London confident that his chosen career—the one he’s had to fight so hard for—is right on track.