Just When Things Were Looking Up. . .
French Baseball History Part 6
With so many starts and stops, even the most canny prognosticator would have been hard-pressed to predict where French baseball was heading. Was it just hype when A. G. Spalding predicted France would be “the next baseball nation?” Was it merely hot air when balloonist Emile Dubonnet bragged that baseball would become more popular in France than America? Because whenever things seemed to be looking up, they always came crashing down — as they did once again when another world war erupted.
Once more, baseball in France ground to a halt. It would have disappeared altogether had it not been for American GIs who began pouring into the country on June 6, 1944, D-Day. We’d lived near Omaha Beach for many years and had often visited the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer where 9,387 soldiers are buried.
But we never dreamed that some of those who took part in the invasion were lugging baseball equipment ashore. When we first heard about it, we were skeptical. It sounded ludicrous. But then it began to make sense. Prior to D-Day, most GIs had never set foot on foreign soil. They were young, scared and thousands of miles from friends and loved ones. The bats and balls they carried were something to cling to, a solid connection to home.
One of those soldiers was Joe Moceri, a pitcher in the Detroit Tigers system. He was seventeen when, in 1941, the Tigers invited him to spring training, a “virtual certainty to make the grade in the big show,” said the scout who signed him.
The following year, on the day Joe was married, he was drafted and sent overseas in preparation for D-Day.
On June 7, D-Day plus one, he and his unit landed on Omaha Beach where, only twenty-four hours earlier, so many Americans had died. Stepping over bodies and making their way across the beach, they began marching toward St. Lö, twenty-five miles away.
With its hedgerows and emerald-green landscape, Normandy in summer can be one of the most idyllic places on earth. But in the summer of ’44, it was also one of the deadliest. On June 30, as the regiment reached the outskirts of their destination, German defenders opened up. Moceri was hit, mortally wounded.
When Joe’s body was recovered, they discovered his baseball glove stuffed in the back pocket of his pants.
Readers interested in learning more about people like Joe, ballplayers whose dreams were cut short because of the war, should check out Gary Bedingfield’s website, www.baseballsgreatestsacrifice.com
