Ten miles from Bologna, deep in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, as a soft snow fell, Lou Brissie fell into a creek and crawled for his life.
His 88th infantry unit seemed to have vanished.
Falling on his back, he could see his right foot, but his left foot, badly mangled, was hidden in the muck. It's been blown off, he told himself. Hours later, on an Army cot, on Dec. 7, 1944 — the third anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor — he whispered to a surgeon. Lou Brissie was just 20, filled with big ideas.
"Please, save it," he said. "I'm a ballplayer."
A few years later, as a pitcher with the Cleveland Indians, he played, dressed, traveled and ate hundreds of meals with Bob Feller and Al Rosen, teammates who had also fought on the front lines in World War II.
Among these men and scores of others — World War II veterans who made it to the major leagues — it was known what they had seen and endured. But their tales stayed buried.
"I can honestly tell you," said Brissie, who received the Purple Heart and a Bronze Star Medal, "not once can I remember sitting in the bullpen or dugout or clubhouse, anybody discussing what we did in the service. The idea was, just try to forget."
Tonight, Brissie, a former All-Star, now 88, will appear on the field before the second game of the World Series in San Francisco with a few other surviving old-time players in a long-coming tribute from Major League Baseball.
Nearly 70 years after the end of World War II, this will be for many their first public acknowledgement and recognition, at least as a group, for what they did in battle. "It's time," Brissie said.
Overall, about 475 major leaguers, including Yogi Berra, Ralph Kiner, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Ted Williams, saw their playing careers delayed, interrupted or foreshortened when they joined the military.
Berra was part of the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach. Kiner, a Navy pilot, patrolled the South Pacific for enemy submarines and ships.
Snider was stationed on Guam with Pee Wee Reese.
At least two major leaguers and more than a 100 minor-league players were killed in the war, and many others could not return to the game.
They left a trail of what ifs.
Williams likely sacrificed the chance at 700 career home runs after missing three seasons as a fighter pilot and close to two more in the Korean War. Feller won 266 games and would easily have eclipsed 300.
These men found comradeship with tens of thousands of Americans — machinists and miners, students and doctors, those working behind a desk or behind a plow — who joined the war effort. But the baseball players who enlisted did so with an apprehension that the livelihood they left behind might not be there on their return.
Bill Nowlin, co-author of "When Baseball Went To War," said, "Even a medic could have honed his craft. But the ballplayers, they just lost time."
Barnstorming teams hopped the Pacific Islands, even playing games on Iwo Jima soon after its capture. But many of the baseball players insisted on regular duty.
Rosen was a 21-year-old lieutenant on the first boat that landed on Okinawa in April 1945. He ferried Naval forces from the USS Procyon, as Japanese gunner planes strafed the waters. Rosen said that when he and Brissie became teammates, they respected an unspoken line to not talk about what they had experienced.
Before the war intruded, Brissie had signed an agreement with Connie Mack, the owner and manager of the Philadelphia A's: Mack would pay for college until Brissie was ready to join the team.
Stationed in Italy, Brissie was returning from an outpost ahead of the front line when an enemy shell landed within yards.
"One second, two seconds, three seconds, you hear a zip, and then your whole world closes in," he said this week from his home in North Augusta, S.C.
Shrapnel struck him in three places in his left thigh, in his left ankle and left tibia, three times in his right thigh, in his right foot and in both hands. He pleaded with doctors not to amputate his leg. At the 300th General Hospital Unit in Naples, he was operated on five times and received 30 blood transfusions.
Over the next year, he received 18 more surgeries.
To get to the Philadelphia A's in 1947, Brissie first had to reinvent his delivery. A lefty, he developed what he called "a pivot motion," more spinning on the mound than driving from it.
He managed to win 14 games in 1948, and 16 in 1949, when he made the American League All-Star team.
Over the years, big league travel gave him and the other veterans the chance to renew ties with friends they had made in battle.
"We might say to each other, 'Boy, that was tough,' " Brissie said.
"That was it. We never went deeper."
Baseball, he said, offered a respite that other veterans, perhaps, could not enjoy.
"We got to run and hit and be outside, just play the game," he said.
Craig Wolff: cwolff@starledger.com
