Augie and Mickey - Ex POWs at odds....

I gave a talk last week, on a topic I had researched twenty years ago and had not revisited since.  I am rather implausibly the worlds leading authority on baseball as played by World War Two POWs.  I literally did "write the book" on it.

It was well attended and an interesting stroll down memory lane.  So many stories.  

The 2018 baseball season is off and running so I think I'll just toss in the occasional odd baseball story.  Today lets meet Mickey Grasso and Augie Donatelli.

Newton Michael Grasso was a minor league catcher who signed on to wear Uncle Sam's uniform after Pearl Harbor.  He was in the first batch of American POWs to enter the Stalag system, being captured in early 1943 during German counter attacks in North Africa.

Mickey spent most of his captivity at Stalag IIIb, a fairly tolerable prison camp where he was able to play ball in both the '43 and '44 "seasons".  

Post war he resumed his baseball career.  He had a brief call up with the New York Giants at the end of 1946, then went back to the minor leagues until he caught on with the Washington Senators in 1950.

He had a decent career, and was the only former POW to play in the World Series when he got into one game as a defensive replacement for the Cleveland Indians in 1954.

Perhaps because of his time in an authoritarian system, Grasso hated umpires and held a Pacific Coast League record for being ejected from games 23 times in one season!

Of course Mickey Grasso was not the only guy in baseball to be a former POW, or to have some strong opinions.  Meet Augie Donatelli.

Augie broke his ankle when his B-17 was shot down over Berlin, so his early ball at Stalag Luft IV was as an umpire.  He took a liking to it and post war went to school on the GI Bill.  To Bill McGowan's Umpiring School no less.

Augie also did his time in the minors, working his way up to the National League where he was respected as one of the best arbiters of his day.  He made it to the World Series several times as an umpire.  Never forgetting his early years digging coal a mile underground, he was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the Major League Umpires Union.

Perhaps because of his time in an authoritarian system Augie Donatelli also had a pugnacious streak.  But what he hated was unruly players and managers.  Official records are not kept but he likely set a National League record for ejections.  He once tossed two batters in a row!

All of this is lead up to a question that has been bothering me quite a bit.  Was there ever a time when Mickey Grasso played in a game where Augie Donatelli was an umpire?   It should have happened.  Not only was baseball a smaller world then than it is now, darn it all it is just something that the universe really should have arranged for us.

In private life both were said to be fine and generous men.  But after Augie called "Play Ball" I figure anything could have happened.  I have given the matter some  thought and done a bit of research.

The list of places I can document Grasso playing is:

1941 New Jersey Senators.  minor league
1945? Trenton NJ. minor league
1946 New York Giants. National League
1946/47 Jersey City. minor league
1948/49 Seattle. Pacific Coast (minor) League
1950/51/52/53 Washington Senators. American League
1954 Cleveland Indians. American League

After being released by the Indians he kicked around for another four years in assorted low minor league towns....Indianapolis, Miami, Chattanooga.

The list of leagues where Augie Donatelli umpired is:

1946 Pioneer League.  This was a low minor league out west.  Idaho, Utah, etc
1947 "Sally" League  (South Atlantic Class A).
1948/49  International League AAA level.  This was an East Coast league.
1950 to 1974 National League.

So the opportunities for Grasso and Donatelli to be in the same place were quite limited.  While they both came up through the minors in the late 1940s they were always in different leagues.  Then when they made it to the Big Leagues in the same year, 1950, one was in the American and one in the National League.  Mickey was  never a good enough player, or Augie an ump with enough seniority, to appear in an All Star Game that early.  And inter league play had not been invented then.

Of course it still could have happened, this meeting behind the plate of two former Prisoners of War.  But it would have had to be in some spring training game of the early '50s, perhaps at Tinker Field in Orlando, long the spring home of the Senators.

The best I could find in my march through the records was this: a game in 1953 where Grasso was catching and the umpire's name was Rommel!

Oddly Mickey did not get thrown out of that game but his manager did.  Maybe Rommel heard wrong.