Former Delle Star’s Flight Presumed Downed Over Trat’eo Gulf
by Angela Hernankez for Uplantica Today
June 13, 1932
STARS BALLPARK OF DARLING, DELLE, MEDLAND – Heartbroken fans and well-wishers began gathering outside of Stars Ballpark in the early hours of Monday morning to share memories and leave their respects for former Stars baseball player Yassine Joseph.
After attending the Stars’ home stand over the weekend, during which he threw out Saturday’s ceremonial first pitch, Yassine Joseph boarded a flight bound for his home of Sun Beach, D’Aeko late Sunday night. The flight containing Joseph, his wife Emily, and 56 other passengers including the flight crew, lost communication with the ground at 11:51 pm CST. Search crews reached the area directly beneath the flight’s last known location and began to dive and scan the water’s surface early this morning, looking for survivors and wreckage from the missing flight. As of this writing, there has been no trace found. There has been no official announcement from authorities, but all 58 people onboard are widely presumed dead.
Yassine Joseph is being remembered fondly this morning throughout the baseball and sporting communities as a kind yet quiet man who possessed great patience as a mentor and a deep love for the game of baseball.
Joseph’s baseball career spanned over 20 years. He was an original member of the inaugural Amblint College Baseball Club in 1908. After his graduation with a degree in rhetoric, he stayed in Amblint and worked with the college team until 1914, when he joined up with the Elderwood Lakers in their first season as a touring team. He played for various touring clubs until his initial retirement as a player in 1926. He managed a small-time touring squad, the Richman Truth Dealers out of Plains City, during the summer of 1927. When the Delle Stars put together their UA team leading up to 1928, they reached out to Joseph as a player, who jumped at the chance to play one last season of ball in the brand new organized league.
The Stars brought Yassine Joseph on primarily in a leadership role as a baseball elder, but to the surprise of coaches and management, his skills were as sharp as ever, and he became an everyday player who finished as a top-ten hitter in 1928 at the age of 40. The Stars renewed his contract yearly until he announced his retirement during last year’s season. Joseph ended his career on top of the baseball world, helping Delle to their first Windsor Cup title last autumn.
Details surrounding the disappearance of Joseph’s flight late Sunday remain murky, but an anonymous source within the National United Aviation Service reported the final moments of the communications transcript from the cockpit:
“Are you seeing anything on your end? It’s bright! So bright! That pink, I…are you seeing this? Are-”
There has been no official comment from the NUAS or the Uplantic government, but a small contingent of demonstrators at this morning’s impromptu memorial in Delle are vocally questioning whether there’s a connection between this mysterious tragedy and the freak electrical storm that wiped out electricity for most of the continent last September.
One such demonstrator said to reporters: “We never had a storm like that in me or my daddy’s or my grand daddy’s life, and then a few months later they’re talking about they been using these crystals to mess with space and time. You ever seen a syelti crystal while it’s receiving transmissions? It glows bright pink! I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, but the pilot of this flight said there was a pink glow right before they went down. These things are connected, and me and my friends here aren’t going to just ignore it.”
Yassine Joseph leaves us just a few days before his 44th birthday. He and his wife, Emily, had no children. They leave behind a brand new school for impoverished kids that they founded this year in their home of Sun Beach, to which they were returning to help prepare for its first year of operation when this tragedy took place.
As we await a press conference from authorities later this afternoon, we will all keep Joseph’s surviving extended family in our thoughts. His former team, the Delle Stars, will wear a black armband throughout this season to remember their teammate. The league has announced this morning that all of today’s games will observe a moment of silence before the first pitch to honor the life of Yassine Joseph.
Uplantic Sports Today 