Jews & Baseball

Designated Mensch Hank Greenberg is as famous for being Jewish as for what he did in the batter's box

By JOSEPH EPSTEIN

Baseball trivia quiz: (1) Name a Methodist first baseman who won the triple crown. (2) Name a Baptist right-hander who led the National League in ERA in five different seasons. (3) Name two Catholic outfielders—one from each league—who hit more than 450 home runs and had lifetime batting averages above .330. Are you having trouble coming up with the names Jimmie Foxx, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Stan Musial? Maybe it's because the religion of athletes strikes you as superfluous? And so it should, unless they happen to be Jewish ballplayers and you happen to be Jewish.

Only among Jews is there a set of baseball cards, put out by the American Jewish Historical Society, devoted exclusively to Jewish players. Only Jews bother to discover, and then take exuberant pride in, the fact that such un-Jewishly named ballplayers as Shawn Green and Kevin Youkilis are members of the tribe, by which I don't mean the Cleveland Indians.

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The Hebrew Hammer Hank Greenberg practicing his swing in 1935.

Is there something a bit parochial and chauvinistic but also unconsciously condescending in this interest on the part of Jews in Jewish ballplayers? Samuel Johnson's remark about lady preachers and dogs that walk on their hind legs, that "it is not done well, but you are surprised to find that it is done at all," often, alas, applies to the delight that Jewish fans take in their athletes. This exaggerated interest is partly owing to the relative paucity of Jewish ballplayers who made it to the majors. Between 1871 and 2003, there were only 142 of them, which averages out to roughly one a year. Perhaps a dozen Jews are playing major-league baseball at present, the best among them being Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers' star

left fielder.

Of the Jewish ballplayers who played major-league baseball, a small number were truly standouts; the Indians' third baseman Al Rosen and the Cubs' pitcher Ken Holtzman come to mind.

Many more were journeymen, like the catcher Moe Berg, who was said to be able to speak six languages and was unable to hit above .240 in any of them.

Two Jews were genuinely great ballplayers. One is the Dodgers' Sandy Koufax, who between 1961 and 1966 compiled some of the most astonishing records in baseball; in three of those years he won the Cy Young Award and the triple crown for pitchers: leading the league in wins, strikeouts and ERA. The other is Hank (born Henry, called Hymie by his family) Greenberg, who played only nine full seasons in the majors and—owing to injury and the nearly four years he served in the Army during World War II—parts of three others.

Greenberg is best known for driving in 183 runs in 1937 (one short of Lou Gehrig's American League record), hitting 58 home runs in 1938 (two short of Babe Ruth's record) and twice winning the American League's Most Valuable Player award while playing for the Detroit Tigers. Yet Greenberg may be quite as famous for being Jewish as for what he did in the batter's box.

Undeniably Jewish by name and by countenance, Hank Greenberg (1911-86) was not avid in his religious practice.

Though brought up in an Orthodox Jewish home, he was, as a Jew, more respectful than devout. Early in his career he did not play baseball on the Jewish high holidays, though he did so later. (Koufax, by contrast, never played on them, including famously choosing not to pitch Game One of the 1965 World Series when it fell on Yom Kippur.) Greenberg's first wife, Carla Gimbel, was a nonpracticing Jew; his second wife was a Christian. He raised his own children without religious

observance. Still, as a Jew in baseball in the 1930s, he was an anomaly. When an Irish cop once stopped him for speeding and asked what he did for a living, he answered that he was a baseball player, causing the cop to respond: "Who in the hell ever heard of a professional baseball player named Greenberg?"

A new biography of Greenberg, written by John Rosengren, offers much interesting information admixed with hyperbole.

The book's subtitle, "The Hero of Heroes," is characteristic of the approach. The English call exaggerated expression "overegging the pudding"; of Mr. Rosengren's biography, centered on Greenberg's Jewishness, we might more accurately say that he over-eggs the kugel. "Hank had not bettered Ruth and he had not stopped Hitler, but he had single-handedly succeeded in changing the way Americans saw Jews. . . . A single word that could stand up to any form of prejudice: Greenberg." Wouldn't it, as Jake Barnes says in "The Sun Also Rises," "be pretty to think so"?

Mr. Rosengren is fearless in his use of clichĂŠs. In his pages "fans go wild" and "crowds thunder their approval," then sometimes "solemnly file out of Briggs Stadium." Scores tend to get "knotted," "scribes" "pen" articles, photographers "snap photos," and losing teams "take comfort in John Barleycorn."

Hank Greenberg, you should know, "was not master of his own destiny," though he would "bask in the glory of his return" to baseball as the story of his first marriage "crackled over the wires and dominated the front pages of Detroit's newspapers."

The unconscious comic touches I think of as empty historical montage also play through Mr. Rosengren's pages. A hypothetical example of empty historical montage might run: "As Big Bill Tilden served his last ace at Wimbledon, a mere four hundred miles away in a quiet laboratory in Berlin Max Planck failed yet again to discover quantum physics." Or, to quote an example from Mr. Rosengren: "Two days after a U.S.

B-29 dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Hank collected three hits, including two doubles, in the first game of a twin bill at Briggs Stadium against the Red Sox." The question arises whether an entirely successful biography of an athlete can be written. At its best, biography entails a tripartite view of its subject: as the world sees him, as his family and friends see him, and, perhaps most important, as he sees himself. In this last aspect most biographies of athletes fail, for introspection is a rare quality among athletes and may even be a hindrance to them. Some biographies of athletes are iconoclastic—one thinks of Richard Ben Cramer's "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life." Most are idolatrous. In any case, the literary net is lowered for biographies of sports stars.

Hank Greenberg was intelligent but, on the evidence Mr. Rosengren provides, without keen self-knowledge. For himself, as my sainted mother used to say, he was smart. He was a near genius at salary negotiations with Walter Briggs, the parsimonious owner of the Detroit Tigers, and in the final years of his career was the highest-paid player in baseball. He was smart, too, in knowing his own weaknesses as a ballplayer. Unlike his near contemporaries, Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio, Greenberg was not a natural athlete. He was large—6-foot-3 by the age of 17—and klutzy, with flat feet.

Apart from his great strength, he had no special gifts for the game. But he put in vast hours to improve his fielding, initially as a first baseman, then as a left fielder, going so far at one point as to take dancing lessons to sharpen his coordination.

He paid people to pitch to him and others to shag balls for long stretches of early-morning and postgame batting practice.

Hank Greenberg was 30 when he was drafted into the Army in 1940 and 34 when he came back to baseball. He could have returned to baseball after a year but chose to serve until the war was over. He never saw action, but, unlike so many of the 470 major leaguers drafted during the war, who played on

armed-services baseball teams, he had serious administrative positions, which he performed ably.

Greenberg's courage was called upon more during his baseball days than during the war. When he began his professional career, anti-Semitism, rife in American life, was especially virulent in Detroit, where Henry Ford published the Dearborn Independent. Ford had the Jew-bee in his bonnet.

He blamed the advent of jazz ("Moron Music") on Jews and claimed that Jews were natural traitors: "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold" was a characteristic Dearborn Independent headline. Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest and another professional anti-Semite, broadcast out of suburban Detroit.

Then there were the major-league players, many of them uneducated Southerners, for whom Jew-baiting was a second national pastime. Greenberg heard ethnic slurs not only from the stands but also from opposing teams' dugouts. Mr. Rosengren's book contains a number of anecdotes about Greenberg facing down anti-Semites on the field and in the locker room. After taking abuse from the bench of the Chicago White Sox during a game in 1939, Greenberg walked into the Sox clubhouse and announced: "I want the guy who called me a 'yellow Jew bastard' to get to his feet to say it to my face."

As Mr. Rosengren recounts: "No one moved. Hank walked slowly around the room and looked at each of them. . . . Not one of them dared stand up. Hank walked out, paused at the door to look back, then left."

One comes away from Mr. Rosengren's biography with a firm notion of Hank Greenberg as a decent human being, a man of integrity and honor, what Jews call a mensch. He seems only rarely to have been swept away by his own fame and good fortune. He was invariably kind to young fans. Traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1947, his final year in baseball, he tutored the rookie Ralph Kiner, who attributed much of his

success as a slugger to Greenberg. He encouraged Jackie Robinson, when Robinson, under extreme pressure, broke the color line in major-league baseball that same year.

Would Hank Greenberg be as well-known today if he weren't Jewish? Although he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956, his statistics, owing to his war-shortened career, are not as impressive as they might otherwise be. He hit 331 career home runs and had a lifetime batting average of .313, numbers that are respectable but less than dazzling.

Statistically he resembles Johnny Mize and Chuck Klein, both deserving hall-of-famers but not the sort of ballplayers who get their biographies written. According to the Society for American Baseball Research, had Greenberg enjoyed a full career he would, to quote Mr. Rosengren, have ranked "26th all-time for home runs (502), 11th for RBI (1,869), and tied for 54th for runs scored (1,554)." The baseball sabermetrician Bill James believes that, given the poor quality of wartime pitching, had he not gone off to the Army, he would have hit more than 600 home runs. But all this is extrapolation, not reality.

On any all-time all-star baseball team one's first baseman would not be Greenberg but, indubitably, Lou Gehrig. Clumsy afield, neither would Greenberg find a place in the outfield.

Hank Greenberg's place on this all-time team, for which he has no rivals in major-league baseball, would be that of designated mensch. —Mr. Epstein's "Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet," co-written with Frederic Raphael, will be published this month by Yale University Press. He is writing a book Â