Creative Deck
Courage Wears Two Uniforms
HOME & AWAY
Baseball's Greatest Heroes
70
Hall of Famers
4
Wars
1
Nation
In Partnership with the National Baseball Hall of Fame
Courage Wears Two Uniforms
Baseball's Greatest Heroes
In Partnership with the National Baseball Hall of Fame
01 — The Series Opening
It's a fighter plane, from the pilot's eye and it's flying over Korea... slow and sunny and then bang! Wham! Boom! The biggest g--damn explosion you ever saw... and then it goes dark. Dark! For maybe 10 seconds... And then when it comes back, there's the ballpark. And the crowd. Roaring. And that's how it's supposed to begin. Ted Williams to Richard Ben Cramer
This is how HOME & AWAY begins.
It begins with the crash. A fighter jet over Korea, a flash of light, a gut-wrenching explosion. Then, darkness. Silence. Followed by the roar of a ballpark crowd. This is our opening, the visceral hook that poses the central question of our story. It is the vision Ted Williams himself demanded.
02 — The Constant
The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. James Earl Jones, Field of Dreams
03 — Episode One • League Championship Series Premiere
Yogi Berra • Jack Buck • Joe Garagiola
Prologue
The Flow of Time
Christmas 1862. Hilton Head Island. A leather ball arcs through gray December sky. Tens of thousands of Union soldiers watch two teams of their brothers play. The Civil War will claim 600,000 lives—but not this afternoon.
Baseball spread through military camps from Virginia to Tennessee. What began as a way to cope—a reminder of home, of life beyond the killing—became something more. The sport that helped soldiers survive war would help heal a divided nation—defining America, generation to generation.
Morgan G. Bulkeley. 13th New York Militia. Survives the war. Becomes first president of the National League. The only Civil War veteran in Cooperstown. The pattern established.
France, 1918
The Chemical Warfare Service—Gas and Flame Division. Branch Rickey commanding Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Rivals on the diamond. Brothers in service when their nation called. Mathewson inhales mustard gas in a training accident. Dead at 45. At the funeral, Cobb blamed the gas. Rickey denied it ever happened. The truth died with them.
War changed them all. We will meet Rickey again—twice more—before this story ends.
Part 1
The Hill
Elizabeth Avenue, St. Louis
Italian immigrant neighborhood. Fathers in the brickyards. Two boys—Yogi at 5447, Joey at 5446—playing catch across the street. Baseball is what makes them American.
Cardinals tryout. Branch Rickey offers Yogi $250. Half what he gave Garagiola. Yogi refuses. “If Joey gets $500, I want $500.”
The Yankees match it. Rickey’s lowball accidentally sends Yogi toward pinstripe immortality.
Rickey alone in his Brooklyn office. He’s lost this one. But he’s thinking about something bigger now. Something that will change everything.
Yogi’s headed for the Yankees. For ten rings. For Cooperstown.
But history wasn’t done with Rickey.
Honolulu • December 5, 1941
A young Black athlete boards the SS Lurline. Headed home to sign with the LA Bulldogs. Two days before Pearl Harbor.
Interstitial
The Gathering Storm
Aboard the SS Lurline • Mid-Pacific • December 7, 1941
Jackie Robinson is playing poker with his teammates. Halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco. The crew starts painting the windows black.
A day that will live in infamy.
President Franklin D. RooseveltThe captain summons everyone on deck. Pearl Harbor has been bombed. His hands trembled in disbelief.
The Lurline runs dark. Zigzag navigation. Life jackets at all times. Six days to San Francisco—arriving at 2 AM during an air raid alert.
The Nation Mobilizes
Draft notices. Enlistment lines. Ballplayers signing up. The game would wait. America was going to war.
And on Elizabeth Avenue, a 16-year-old catcher named Lawrence Peter Berra would soon trade his mitt for a machine gun.
Part 2
D-Day
June 6, 1944 — Utah Beach
Lawrence Peter Berra. Nineteen years old. Machine gun on a 36-foot rocket boat. LCSS—Landing Craft Support Small. The crews called them something else: Landing Craft Suicide Squad.
Being a young guy, I thought it was like the Fourth of July.
Yogi BerraThe Cost
D+1. D+2. D+3. Body recovery. Pulling American and German boys from the cold Channel waters. The bodies of men who would never go home.
Fifty Years of Silence
Yogi didn’t talk about it. Not to reporters. Not to teammates. Not to his sons. Until 1998—Saving Private Ryan—when he finally told them what the second and third days were like.
The philosopher of baseball earned his wisdom in horror. The man who saw humanity at its worst chose joy anyway.
For every Lawrence Peter who returned, thousands didn’t. Eddie Grant. Elmer Gedeon. Harry O’Neill. MLB players who gave everything. Not Hall of Famers—they never got the chance. The ghosts of what might have been.
Next: Episode 2
1944. Fort Hood, Texas. A young Black lieutenant refuses to move to the back of an Army bus. The courage that would change America was forged in that courtroom. And Branch Rickey was waiting on the other side.
04 — Episode Two • World Series Games 1-2
Jackie Robinson • Larry Doby • Hank Greenberg
Three men who faced prejudice in their own uniforms before facing the enemy abroad.
Jackie Robinson. Before making baseball history, his refusal to move to the back of an Army bus at Fort Hood led to his court-martial. The courage that would change America was forged in that courtroom.
Larry Doby. Navy veteran. Eleven weeks after Jackie broke the National League barrier, Doby integrated the American League—with none of the fanfare, all of the hatred.
Hank Greenberg. Baseball’s first Jewish superstar. Son of Romanian immigrants. Faced vicious antisemitism while becoming the first MLB star to re-enlist after Pearl Harbor. Served 47 months—among the longest of any Major League player. Nearly killed when an airfield explosion sent him racing toward burning wreckage.
If I hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler.Hank Greenberg
The man who signed Jackie: Branch Rickey. The same WWI veteran who commanded Cobb and Mathewson. War had taught Rickey what sacrifice looked like. Now he would ask Jackie to sacrifice his right to fight back—for something bigger than both of them.
In 1947, Greenberg became one of the first players to publicly encourage Jackie Robinson—connecting their parallel struggles against prejudice, passing the torch from one outsider to another.
Vin Scully joined the Dodgers broadcast booth in 1950—three years after Jackie broke the barrier. A Navy veteran himself, every June 6 for decades, he told D-Day stories during broadcasts. The voices of the game painted imagery with words, bringing the ballpark to life in the imagination of millions. The veteran who honored those who saw action.
05 — Episode Three • World Series Games 5-6
Warren Spahn • Monte Irvin • Engineers at War
Two future Hall of Famers. Same theater. Different wars within the war.
Warren Spahn. 276th Engineer Combat Battalion. Battle of the Bulge. Wounded at Remagen Bridge—the only intact crossing over the Rhine. Survived the bridge’s collapse by minutes. The only MLB player to receive a battlefield commission.
Monte Irvin. 1313th Engineer General Service Regiment—a Negro Leagues legend assigned to a segregated unit, denied the combat role his talent demanded. Same hell, different cages.
Both forged legacies in Cooperstown. Both carried the war home with them.
Jack Buck returns. The voice we met in Episode 1 was wounded at that same bridge—Remagen. The threads of this tapestry weave tighter. A St. Louis kid, a southpaw pitcher, and an engineer who would become a Giant—all connected by one bridge, one moment, one impossible crossing.
The voices of the game: men who painted imagery with words, bringing the ballpark alive in the imagination of millions. Jack Buck would carry Remagen with him for 47 years behind the microphone.
06 — Episode Four • Veterans Day 2026
Ted Williams • Jerry Coleman • Marine Pilots
We return to where we began. Ted Williams. Called to serve twice. Thirty-nine combat missions in Korea—more than half as wingman to John Glenn. One near-fatal crash.
February 16, 1953. Williams’ F9F Panther takes heavy fire. Hydraulics gone. Radio dead. Plane on fire. He belly-lands at 200 mph, skidding nearly a mile before climbing out of the flames.
Watching from the runway: Jerry Coleman. Yankees second baseman. The only MLB player to see combat in both World War II and Korea. As Williams emerged alive, Coleman called out: “Hey Ted—that’s a lot faster than you ever ran around the bases!”
Yankees and Red Sox. Both Marines. Both nearly died. Both lived to tell the story—Coleman for 42 years as the voice of the Padres.
We witness the reluctant warrior who just wanted to hit, now bleeding through bare hands at Fenway, reclaiming his identity swing by painful swing.
The explosion that began our story finds its answer in one defiant crack of his bat.
07 — Production
08 — The Team
The Close
When you sit down in the theater and the lights go off... what's the first g--damn thing you see? Ted Williams to Richard Ben Cramer
70 Baseball Hall of Famers served in wartime. Their stories have never been told at this scale. The Hall of Fame is in. The America 250 window is open. The Navy named a warship for them — USS Cooperstown, “America’s Away Team.” Four episodes. LCS through Veterans Day.
Partner with us to tell America’s greatest untold stories.
09 — The Path Forward
Partner with us to tell America’s greatest untold stories. Deck, budget, and partnership tiers available.