tclark 🇺🇸

Moneyball & Mr 3000 are my favorite movies and I really like baseball cards.

[tclark 🇺🇸 @DatOtherDudeTC]

dude threw one strike on a 3-0 pitch the entire inning but struck out the side.

[Prep Baseball Ohio Scouting Coverage @PrepBaseOHScout]

2027 OF Michael Quatman
@Mquatman2 | @LocosExpressLE

Quatman shows off his wheels for an infield single

#gcclassic26 #pb33

[R.C. Maxwell 🇺🇸 @RCMaxw3ll]

"The enemy assault has been repulsed. The Americans are being destroyed at the water's edge."

This is what German commanders reported in the early hours of D-Day.

By 11am, Germany got a reality check:

Scattered groups of American survivors, led by low-ranking officers and non-commissioned officers, began scaling the bluffs between the German bunkers.

When the defenders looked behind them, they realized American soldiers had bypassed their front-facing concrete pillboxes and were attacking them from the rear.

By the time German high command realized the first reports were completely wrong, Omaha Beach had been breached, and the Atlantic Wall was broken. 🇺🇸

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

June 7, 1944. D-Day plus 1.

4,414 Allied soldiers lay dead after the longest day in history. 2,501 of them American. Bodies still washing in with the tide at Omaha.

And yet in the French town of Bayeux, 10 miles from those cliffs, British soldiers were being handed wine and flowers in the street.

The SS had fled Bayeux in the night. The French Resistance sent word to the Allies: do not bomb this town, the Germans are gone. So they weren't. At 4am, a lone British tank crept in to verify. By 1pm it was official. Bayeux was the first French city liberated from Nazi occupation. Citizens who hadn't seen a free soldier in four years ran into the streets weeping, kissing strangers, pressing bottles into soldiers' hands.

The historical irony is almost impossible to believe.

Inside Bayeux sits a 900-year-old tapestry depicting William the Conqueror, a Norman, crossing the English Channel to invade England in 1066. Now, 878 years later, the English had crossed back. And the French were screaming with joy to see them.

Here is what was simultaneously happening across Normandy:

156,000 Allied troops had crossed the Channel in a single day. The French Resistance had cut the railway network in over 500 places overnight and destroyed 52 locomotives. German reinforcements were stranded, unable to move.

Germany's most brilliant defensive commander, Erwin Rommel, was not in France. He had driven home to Germany to celebrate his wife's birthday. He had bought her a pair of shoes in Paris as a gift. He was handing them to her as the first landing craft hit the sand.

Hitler was asleep.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The Fuhrer had taken barbiturate sedatives before bed. When the invasion began at 4am, his staff received the call and stood outside his bedroom door. No one dared wake him. His two elite Panzer reserve divisions, the 12th SS Hitlerjugend and Panzer Lehr, some of the most powerful armored formations in the German army, sat completely idle waiting for a release order that could not come because the man who had to give it was unconscious.

Hitler woke at noon. Eight hours after the first boots touched the sand.

He released the Panzers at 4pm. But Allied fighter-bombers owned the sky by then. The armored columns could not move in daylight without being destroyed from above. They waited for dark, burning eight more hours.

The only serious German armored counterattack on June 6 came from the 21st Panzer Division, which drove all the way to the coast, splitting the gap between Sword and Juno beaches, almost cutting the entire Allied beachhead in two. Then they looked up. 248 British gliders were passing overhead, landing troops directly behind German lines. They turned around and withdrew.

By nightfall on June 7, the beachhead was 50 miles wide and the Allies were not going anywhere.

In Bayeux, the wine was still flowing.

The most consequential military operation in human history nearly collapsed because one general forgot to buy flowers in time, and the other one could not be woken up.

[Coach Swit @CoachSwit]

Throw Strikes. Pitch backwards. Change speeds. You’ll win a lot more high school baseball games than chasing radar gun numbers! #Facts

[TheRealCherokeeOwl 🦉 @CherokeeOwl]

The Pilot Who Stole a Nazi Plane to Escape! 🦅🇺🇸

On Feb 9, 1944, 22-year-old American Spitfire pilot Bob Hoover was on his 59th mission dive-bombing German targets off southern France when an Fw 190 ripped his plane apart. He ditched in the sea, was fished out by the enemy, and sent to Stalag Luft I POW camp.
For 16 brutal months, Hoover plotted escape after escape—punished with solitary each time.

Then in April 1945, with the camp in chaos, he slipped away, hot-wired a Focke-Wulf 190 (the SAME plane that shot him down), and flew it to freedom in the Netherlands!

He later joked he was probably the dumbest AAF pilot flying an enemy fighter into Allied airspace. Bob went on to become one of history’s greatest test pilots and airshow legends—pouring tea mid-roll in his P-51.

True American hero. What a story! 🫡

#WWII #GreatestGeneration

[Jack Carr @JackCarrUSA]

When 102-year-old World War II veteran Wally King asks you to have a beer at the Stop Bar in Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy, you have a beer (or two) with Wally King at the Stop Bar in Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy. What an honor!  Wally flew 75 combat missions in the Second World War in P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts.  He was shot down in April of 1945, parachuting out of his P-47 over Germany and becoming a POW before then evading both German and Soviet forces on his way to freedom.  Legend! 
I’ve been fortunate enough to travel to Normandy with Wally three times for D-Day commemoration events with the Best Defense Foundation over the past few years.  We always have a blast!  🇺🇸

[tclark 🇺🇸 @DatOtherDudeTC]

the reds lol

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

The idea was brilliant. The execution was catastrophic.

Allied planners knew that the men hitting the beaches of Normandy would be cut apart without armor support in those first critical minutes. The solution was the DD tank. The Duplex Drive Sherman. A standard 33-ton Sherman tank fitted with a collapsible canvas flotation screen and two small propellers bolted to the rear. Raise the screen, drop into the water, swim to shore, lower the screen, start shooting. Tanks arriving with the first wave, ahead of the infantry, suppressing German positions before the ramps even dropped.

The concept worked perfectly in testing. The designers had one requirement: waves no higher than one foot.

On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the waves off Omaha Beach were six feet high.

Nobody stopped the launch.

At 5:40 AM, the 741st Tank Battalion began dropping their DD tanks into the English Channel, six thousand yards from shore. More than three miles of open water, in seas that were six times rougher than the tanks were designed to handle. The first tank hit the water. The canvas screen, designed to hold the weight of a Sherman afloat, was immediately overwhelmed. Waves crashed over the top. Water flooded in. The tank went down.

Then another. Then another.

The canvas screens collapsed like paper bags in the swell. Tanks that had been designed to float became 33-ton anchors the moment they hit the water. Crews inside had seconds. Some got out through the hatches. Many did not. The tanks took them straight to the bottom of the English Channel.

Some crews managed to get a radio signal out as their tank went under, warning the following units not to launch. The warnings either did not get through or came too late.

29 DD tanks were launched by the 741st Tank Battalion that morning. 27 sank before reaching the beach. The entire left flank of Omaha Beach, where the 1st Infantry Division was assaulting, had five tanks to support it. Five. Against fortified German positions housing hundreds of machine guns, 88mm guns, and mortars zeroed on every inch of that sand.

The infantry arrived first. Alone.

What happened next at Omaha Beach, the 2,400 casualties, the slaughter in the first ten minutes, the near-total destruction of Company A, is inseparable from the loss of those tanks. They were supposed to be there. They were supposed to be firing at German positions while the ramps were still closed. Instead they were on the bottom of the Channel with their crews.

The story of the 743rd Tank Battalion makes it worse.

The 743rd was assigned to the western sector of Omaha Beach. Their LCT flotilla commander looked at the sea conditions that morning, looked at the waves, and made a different decision. He refused to launch his tanks into the water. Instead he drove his LCTs directly onto the beach and dropped the ramps in the shallows. The tanks rolled off onto sand.

Nine tanks were knocked out by German fire during the assault. But they were there. They were fighting. The infantry had armor.

At Utah Beach, the sea was calmer, protected from the prevailing winds. 28 of 32 DD tanks launched there made it ashore. The infantry had support. Utah Beach cost 197 casualties. Omaha cost 2,400.

The sunken tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion still lie on the bottom of the English Channel off Omaha Beach. They have never been raised. Divers have visited them. Inside some of the wrecks, they found what they expected.

They are still there today, 82 years later, three miles off the coast of Normandy, on the bottom of the sea.

Today is June 6th.

Remember them.

[tclark 🇺🇸 @DatOtherDudeTC]

⚾️ Immaculate Grid 1161 9/9:
Rarity: 17
IMMACULATE!
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Play at:
https://t.co/ZvhjSUwOyR

The Willie Edition!!

[Johnny Midnight ⚡️ @its_The_Dr]

Real Heroes!🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[tclark 🇺🇸 @DatOtherDudeTC]

Tony Santitsgone

[Baseball’s Greatest Moments @BBGreatMoments]

Have you ever been to Cooperstown?

[tclark 🇺🇸 @DatOtherDudeTC]

@karnsies817 or one car wreck away

[Baseball’s Greatest Moments @BBGreatMoments]

During Jim Brown’s senior year at Manhasset high school, he averaged 14.9 yards per carry, 39.6 PPG in basketball and pitched 2 no hitters in baseball