Month: December 2022

Umpire Augie Donatelli Learned Trade In POW Camp

By Joe Guzzardi

During World War II, 130,000 American soldiers and nearly 19,000 U.S. civilians were prisoners of war. In all but the worst circumstances, usually the Japanese camps where POWs lived in brutally inhumane conditions, a little recreation was possible, and baseball was the preferred pastime.

In his book, “POW Baseball in World War II,” author Tom Wolter tells the stories of baseball played behind barbed wire in the most unlikely places that included Central Asia, along the Baltic Seacoast, in Indonesian jungles and in Japanese cities where guards challenged prisoners to games. Refusal would have been dangerous.

Games were played, said one POW, to avoid crushing boredom, and to create a “Little America.” Within the camps, the players formed leagues, and rivalries were intense. Umpiring disputes were heated, and ringer roster-stacking allegations common. Prison-run newspapers detailed the games in prose that would have made Damon Runyon proud.

Among those liberated from POW camps was Army Air Force Sergeant Augie Donatelli, a future National League umpire. Stationed in England with the 379th Bomb Group as a tail-gunner on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, one of the Air Force’s most dangerous jobs, Donatelli’s plane, during the first daylight mission over Berlin, was shot down. Looking back, Donatelli said that “fighters [were] diving at us, 20-millimeter shells exploding all around. We flew into the clouds to hide. What action! That day 68 bombers were shot down.”

Donatelli, who previously had flown 17 successful missions, parachuted out but broke his ankle when he hit the ground. Trying to escape from the forest after his fall, Donatelli recalled that he heard a Nazi soldier yell, “Halt,” and was soon a Stalag Luft IV POW.

During his 14 months as a POW, Donatelli tried to escape twice, but was recaptured. Former National League umpire and friend Doug Harvey later recalled, “He always laughed when he talked about his second attempt. He was hiding in a haystack, but didn’t get all the way in. His rear was showing. One of the German guards got him out with a pitchfork.”

As a young boy, Donatelli, the son of Italian immigrants, worked in Western Pennsylvania’s coal mines. Donatelli told the Society for American Baseball’s Oral History Committee, “It was dangerous and hard work, but what else were you going to do? I started even before graduating from high school.” But Donatelli began his 24-year career, which ended with him universally regarded as one of baseball history’s best umpires, when he presided over POW softball games.

Before Donatelli enlisted, something he said that his patriotic spirit compelled him to do, he had played shortstop in the Class D league for the St. Louis Browns. But Gus, as Donatelli’s friends called him, sensed that his skills weren’t up to MLB snuff. After graduating from umpire school, his new career began, and soon, he was umpiring in the big leagues where he became famous for his quick hook and the dramatic gestures that accompanied it.

By the time he retired, Donatelli had worked four All-Star games, five World Series, two League Championship Series. Donatelli was also behind the plate for four no-hitters, as well as when Whitey Ford set the World Series record for scoreless innings, 32, when Don Drysdale got the single season consecutive shutout innings in a season, 58, when Stan Musial hit five homers in a doubleheader, and when “The Man” got his 3,000th base hit, and when Nate Colbert hit five homers and had the most RBIs, 13, in a doubleheader.

In 1970, Donatelli helped organize the Major League Umpires Association which eventually led to today’s umpires earning an average $235,000 salary. When Donatelli looked back at his career, he pointed with pride to missing only one game in 24 years, and his patriotic World War II service; “I felt it was something I had to do, not to escape the mines but because you just felt it was up to you to get into it.” At age 75, Donatelli died at home in St. Petersburg, Fl.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Umpire Augie Donatelli Learned Trade In POW Camp

8 Billion People On Planet Earth

By Joe Guzzardi

The arrival of the planet’s 8 billionth human inhabitant, which the United Nationsexcitedly announced in mid-November, was greeted in some circles as a joyous event. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres hailed 8 billion people as an occasion “to celebrate diversity and enhancements.”

For other population growth enthusiasts, 2037 can’t come fast enough. By then, only 17 years from today, the world population will hit 9 billion. The Washington Post’seditorial board wholeheartedly agrees with Guterres. In its op-ed piece, disdainfully, the Post encouraged readers not to fret because population growth is “mostly inevitable anyway.” The editorial overlooked, perhaps purposely, other harmful population growth consequences, including, but not limited to, drought and its inevitable water shortages, megafauna extinction and ground subsidence, as well as pollution in its multiple forms.

Suddenly, or so it seems, everyone is advocating for higher birth rates, and hence more people, but without mentioning the obvious negative effects on the already eroding ecosystem and depleted, irreplaceable natural resources. Elon Musk, father of nine, is sounding alarm bells about what he refers to as a crumbling civilization, inevitable without a population spike.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has joined the more people, the merrier crowd, and uses his advocacy as an excuse to defend the U.S.’s unprecedented and unlawful border invasion. Coinciding with the UN’s gleeful announcement that world population had hit 8 billion, Schumer urged his GOP congressional colleagues to join in the effort to “welcome” more immigration and to put existing illegal aliens, as well as, presumably, those pouring across the border every hour of every day, on a citizenship path. Schumer’s reasoning: the U.S. has “a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to.” Therefore, Schumer warned, without immigration, the nation’s economy is doomed.

The magnitude of Schumer’s distorted vision is stunning. The existing illegal immigrants’ exact population is unknown. It is such a mystery that Schumer himself refuses to take a stab at the total. In his plea for a citizenship path for aliens, Schumer referred to “all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here.” Eleven million is the conservative end of the range that, in some estimates, extends upward to 30 million.

A word or two about the border invasion’s totals that must be evaluated as part of Schumer’s grand citizenship plan. Eight weeks into fiscal 2023, which began October 1, a record number of illegals have crossed the border. The number of gotaways — those seen crossing illegally but not apprehended — are on an unprecedented pace during FY 2023 to date: 134,649 since October 1, per CBP sources. Overall migrant encounters also are on an unparalleled pace, FYTD23: 349,216 compared to 275,624 this time in FY22. Assuming those statistics continue indefinitely — and there’s no reason to expect otherwise — at least 2,496 illegals per day will get away, and border agents will encounter 6,467 aliens daily.

Given that more than 5.5 million aliens have entered since President Biden took office, the U.S. population will have increased by roughly 10 million when Election Day 2024 rolls around. Schumer has nothing to worry about; family reunification will be the impetus for the 10 million total to go ever-upward.

The worldwide migrant community has every incentive to keep coming. The administration gives free-to-them, but taxpayer-funded, airline tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, cell phones, welfare, public education and health care, purposely provided incentives that will help satisfy the seditious goal of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to destroy sovereign America. For Musk, Schumer and other population growth deniers, Biden’s open borders are a dream come true.

Joe Guzzardi writes about immigration issues and impacts.

8 Billion People On Planet Earth