Yankees, White Sox to play at Field of Dreams

The New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox will play a game at the famed Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa, on Aug. 13, 2020, the teams announced Thursday.

"Field of Dreams is an iconic, generational baseball story built upon a deep love of the game that transcends even the most impossible of circumstances," White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said in a statement. "The filmmakers tell a beautiful story that resonates to this day. It is an incredible honor for the White Sox franchise to be the home team against the Yankees in a special setting that will capture everyone's imagination just like the movie does. It seems very fitting that 30 years after the film's debut, MLB will build a ballfield in an Iowa cornfield where we will come to play a game so that baseball fans can create their own memories to be cherished for decades."

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Yogi-isms

35 of Yogi Berra’s most memorable quotes

1. “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

2. “It’s deja vu all over again.”

3. “I usually take a two-hour nap from 1 to 4.”

4. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”

5. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

6. “You can observe a lot by watching.”

7. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

8. “If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

9. “It gets late early out here.”

10. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”

11. “Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.”

12. “Pair up in threes.”

13. “Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.”

14. “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

15. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”

16. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

17. “Bill Dickey is learning me his experience.”

18. “He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.”

19. “I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.”

20. “I can see how he (Sandy Koufax) won 25 games. What I don’t understand is how he lost five.”

Modal Trigger

Joe DiMaggio and Yogi Berra in 1955.

21. “I don’t know (if they were men or women fans running naked across the field). They had bags over their heads.”

22. “I’m a lucky guy and I’m happy to be with the Yankees. And I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

23. “I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.”

24. “In baseball, you don’t know nothing.”

25. “I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?”

26. “I never said most of the things I said.”

27. “It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”

28. “I think Little League is wonderful. It keeps the kids out of the house.”

29. “I wish everybody had the drive he (Joe DiMaggio) had. He never did anything wrong on the field. I’d never seen him dive for a ball, everything was a chest-high catch, and he never walked off the field.”

30. “So I’m ugly. I never saw anyone hit with his face.”

31. “Take it with a grin of salt.”

32. (On the 1973 Mets) “We were overwhelming underdogs.”

33. “The towels were so thick there I could hardly close my suitcase.”

34. “You should always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise, they won’t come to yours.”

35. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

A great baseball story

From a friend:

When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was included.
 
The answer was simple: Berg was a US spy. Speaking 15 languages - including Japanese - Moe Berg had two loves: baseball and spying.
 
In Tokyo, garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an American diplomat being treated in St. Luke's Hospital - the tallest building in the Japanese capital.  
 
He never delivered the flowers. The ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and filmed key features: the harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc.
 
Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg's films in planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo.

Catcher Moe Berg
 
Berg's father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught his son Hebrew and Yiddish.  Moe, against his wishes, began playing baseball on the street aged four.
 
His father disapproved and never once watched his son play.  In Barringer High School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and French.
 
He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton - having added Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver.
 
During further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Columbia Law School, he picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hungarian - 15 languages in all, plus some regional dialects.
 
While playing baseball for Princeton University, Moe Berg would describe plays in Latin or Sanskrit.

Tito's partisans
 
During World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to the war effort of the two groups of partisans there.  He reported back that Marshall Tito's forces were widely supported by the people and Winston Churchill ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground fighter, rather than Mihajlovic's Serbians.
 
The parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was more to come in that same year. Berg penetrated German-held Norway, met with members of the underground and located a secret heavy water plant - part of the Nazis' effort to build an atomic bomb. His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy the plant.
 
The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg. There still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed in the race to build the first Atomic bomb.  If the Nazis were successful, they would win the war.  Berg (under the code name "Remus") was sent to Switzerland to hear leading German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Laureate, lecture and determine if the Nazis were close to building an A-bomb.  Moe managed to slip past the SS guards at the auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate student. The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide pill.
 
If the German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg was to shoot him - and then swallow the cyanide pill.  Moe, sitting in the front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him back to his hotel.

Werner Heisenberg - he blocked the Nazis from acquiring an atomic bomb.
 
Moe Berg's report was distributed to Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key figures in the team developing the Atomic Bomb.  Roosevelt responded: "Give my regards to the catcher." Most of Germany's leading physicists had been Jewish and had fled the Nazis mainly to Britain and the United States.
 
After the war, Moe Berg was awarded the Medal of Merit ,America's highest honor for a civilian in wartime.  But Berg refused to accept, as he couldn't tell people about his exploits.
 
After his death, his sister accepted the Medal and it hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown,
 

10/30/11: A GREAT DAY IN AMERICA

President Bush's Opening Pitch at Yankee Stadium After 9-11

Billy Sunday: 2/17/1889

A baseball star, Billy Sunday played for the Chicago White Stockings from 1883 to 1891.

Born during the Civil War in a log cabin in Iowa, his father, a Union Army soldier, died of pneumonia when Billy was only a month old. At age 15, he struck out on his own, working several jobs before being recruited to play pro baseball by pitcher and club owner, Albert Spalding, founder of Spalding Sporting Goods. Billy Sunday's career took off and he was one of the most popular athletes in the nation.

In 1887, he and his teammates were walking the streets of Chicago after drinking a few beers, when Billy Sunday heard an old gospel hymn sung at a street corner meeting of the Pacific Garden Mission. He began attending and there experienced conversion. He then went to YMCA meetings, quit drinking and got married.

A sensation occurred FEBRUARY 17, 1889, when Billy Sunday preached his first sermon as an evangelist. He went on to pioneer radio broadcasting so enthusiastically that the FCC was formed in response.

In the next 46 years, till his death November 6, 1935, over 100 million people would hear him. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson met with him. In his animated style, Billy Sunday said: "Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile."