Author profile: Dan Schlossberg

The story of baseball’s ‘Designated Hebrew’ proved a tough pitch for NJ sportswriters

He wasn’t Hank Greenberg. He wasn’t Sandy Koufax. Heck, he wasn’t even ShawnGreen, a contemporary Jewish favorite.

What Ron Blomberg was was the first designated hitter, an invention that made its major league debut on April 6, 1972.

But Blomberg claims he’s been a DH his whole life — “Designated Hebrew,” that is.

The Yankees made the Atlanta-born athlete the number one draft pick in the nation in 1967. He was hailed (and hyped) as “the next Mickey Mantle,” and in a sense he was. Like Mantle’s, Blomberg’s playing days were cut short due to injuries. Nevertheless, he became a popular figure with New York’s Jewish fans.

Blomberg recalled the details of his walk — literally speaking — into the history books for NJ Jewish News.

He was recovering from a hamstring injury when Yankees manager Ralph Houk told him he would fill the role of designated hitter in the team’s season opener against the Boston Red Sox. “What do I do?” Blomberg asked, unfamiliar with the responsibilities of the assignment.

“You just go up to bat four times, as if you were a pinch hitter,” his manager told him.

Blomberg walked with the bases loaded to drive in a run. To mark the historic occasion, his bat and jersey were sent to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown.

“It was an unusual artifact because it’s the only bat in the Hall of Fame because of a walk,” said Dan Schlossberg, a Fair Lawn resident who collaborated with the ex-Yankee on Designated Hebrew: The Ron Blomberg Story (Sports Publishing LLC).

For Schlossberg, his 31st baseball book was something special. “It’s different because it’s my first Yankee book. But certainly it’s the first book about a Jewish ballplayer I’ve ever done, and it’s near and dear to my heart because of that.”

There are three audiences for the book, Schlossberg said: Jews, Yankee fans, and, because of Blomberg’s role as the first designated hitter, readers interested in baseball history.

“I don’t know anything about any other sport. I’ve never seen a Super Bowl or a Stanley Cup playoff or an NCAA Final Four Game. I’m all baseball, all year long,” said the author.

Schlossberg, who will be 58 on May 6 (“The same age as Israel.”) said his latest project proved a bit of a challenge.

“[Ron] is a great guy,” he said, describing Blomberg as L’il Abner incarnate. “He’s got a heart of gold, but his attention span is easily distracted.” Their conversations were constantly interrupted by phone calls. In fact, while Schlossberg was speaking with NJJN, Blomberg was on another line. “It was a lot of fun working with him, but it was really stressful.” One problem that arises in collaborating with athletes is determining the veracity of anecdotes that seem to increase in drama and stature over time. Whether they’re simply the products of a faulty memory or mild (or not so mild) exaggeration, the writer has to guide his subject to the paths of truth.

Schlossberg, a former Associated Press sportswriter, used a variety of sources to verify some of Blomberg’s recollections. “Some of those sources disagreed because at the time he was interviewed by those people, he exaggerated also, or he didn’t remember.

“His career wasn’t that long; he should have remembered,” Schlossberg laughed.

The book was originally supposed to be written by sportswriter Phil Pepe and Marty Appel, who was the public relations director for the Yankees when Blomberg was on the team, Schlossberg said. They passed on the assignment because they thought Blomberg couldn’t keep his focus long enough to complete the project.

The editors then approached Schlossberg. “I viewed it as a challenge,” he said.

He was right. The first attempt, to use football terminology, suffered from a false start. “[T]he manuscript was rejected…. They thought it was too superficial, barely skimming the surface. One of the reasons was because I interviewed only him; it was supposed to be an autobiography…. He just wasn’t forthcoming.”

Schlossberg went to work filling in the missing pieces. He interviewed Blomberg’s first wife, Mara, whom, coincidentally, Schlossberg knew from his days at Syracuse University. He also spoke with Blomberg’s son Adam, who is completing an anesthesiology residency at Harvard, and daughter Chesley, a sophomore at the University of Alabama. He also got a wealth of information from Sheldon Stone, a New Jersey-based attorney and Blomberg’s agent during his playing days.

“Once [the manuscript] was rejected, I was determined to go back to Ron after I interviewed all these other people, and I had a whole bunch more questions for him. It worked out pretty well in the end because he was much more forthcoming. The editor loved what I did, and now we have the book

(This article originally appeared in New Jersey Jewish News, April 20, 2006.)

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King of Knishes

SOMETIMES MENTIONING race or ethnicity or religion is not just relevant, but important to tell a story. Because it is important to this [one], and for that reason alone, you need to know that Ron Blomberg was a Caucasian, Jewish first baseman for the Yankees in the early 1970s. He was, I believe, the only Jewish player on the Yankees during his tenure with the team (or, if not the only one, certainly the most well known). His teammate for many years was Roy White, an African-American outfielder who I have been told was not Jewish; I believe he was Protestant. At the time Blomberg played for the Yankees, vendors patrolled the Yankee Stadium stands selling beer, hot dogs, peanuts, cotton candy, and knishes. Yes, knishes. For those of you who may not be familiar with them, knishes are pieces of dough stuffed with potatoes or cheese or meat. The word “knish” is Yiddish…the language used by Eastern European Jews.

Now, the knish vendors at Yankee Stadium carried their knishes in giant, lidded metal tubs much like those used to carry hot dogs. And on the side of the tubs was a large color photograph of one of the Yankees smiling while taking a bite out of a knish.

And which Yankee was it?

You guessed it: Roy White. Now, unless Ron Blomberg was allergic to knishes, I believe he had an ax to grind with the Yankees over this slight.

Michael Kun in The Baseball Uncyclopedia.

Emmis Books, 2005

Review — W.P. Kinsella: The later works

This review originally appeared in January Magazine

It’s been some time since W.P. Kinsella has come out with new baseball fiction. The author of such memorable novels as Shoeless Joe, Box Socials and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and shorter works, The Thrill of the Grass, The Dixon Cornbelt League and Other Baseball Stories, reminds us of his literary connection with the game with two new releases.

Read the full review on JanuaryMagazine.com.

Keeping track

I’ve been meaning to make a list of my baseball library for some time, but found the prospect too daunting. Util recently.

Thanks to Librarything.com, all one has to do is (usually) type in the ISBN number or title and all the info is provided in a nice format of the cataloguer’s choosing. So far, I’ve input over 1,000 titles, not counting magazines, yearbooks, etc., with several hundred more to be entered.

Cataloguing up to 200 titles is free. Anything more than that will cost, as of this writing, either $10 for an annual subscription or $25 for a “lifetime” subscription (whatever that means). It’s any interesting community, seeing who’s reading what, where.

For the curious among you, click here to view my library.

Review — Baseball Roundup, Fall 2002

(The following appeared on Bookreporter.com in October, 2002)

Baseball dodged a bullet when players and owners came to their senses and decided to sign the labor agreement that will calm fans’ shaky nerves for the next few years. As the season winds down to the World Series, the media reminds us, through flowery prose, dramatic music and sepia-toned images, of the rich tradition of the National Pastime, despite all the recent problems.Curt Smith is an extraordinary chronicler on myriad aspects of the game. He has written about ballparks (STORIED STADIUMS: Baseball’s History Through Its Ballparks and OUR HOUSE: a Tribute to Fenway Park) and broadcasters (VOICES OF THE GAME). In his new book, WHAT BASEBALL MEANS TO ME, he takes on the sport as a whole, via this collection of anecdotes from a wide variety of devotees. He blends these misty-eyed tales with pictures meant to represent the everyman quality associated with the national pastime.

Smith has amassed the sentimental views of over a hundred famous and semi-famous people, from politicians, musicians, actors, athletes (and not just baseball players) and journalists. Among those giving their voice to WHAT BASEBALL MEANS TO ME are such notables as George Bush and George W. Bush, Dan Rather, Tim Russert, Marvin Hamlisch, Dave Barry and Billy Bob Thornton. Their memories might consist of a single Little League at bat, or something much deeper, such as how baseball brings people together socially.

Many of the contributors for Smith’s collection doubtlessly can quote verbatim the timeless poem, CASEY AT THE BAT. Since its debut over 100 years ago, dozens of versions have been published, either continuations of the legend of Casey “Casey’s Daughter,” “Casey’s Revenge”, or parodies following the same fashion and general meter.

One of the most renown artists of our generation, LeRoy Neiman, has lent his unique style to illustrate the words of Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Joe Torre, manager of the New York Yankees, offers his thoughts of the importance of this classic in the book’s introduction.

Most illustrators put the brawny batter in turn of the 20th century attire, with high collars and pillbox style caps worn at the time. Neiman, however, takes a rather unconventional step, depicting the mighty Casey as a modern-day player, perhaps with a nod to younger readers. Some might consider such a view as heretical, preferring that comforting illusion of baseball played in a simpler, more rustic time. Nevertheless, no one can argue with Neiman when it comes to expressing the dynamic imagery of sports.

When it comes to penning a primer on how to play the game, could you find a better choice than the Yankee Clipper, Joe DiMaggio? BASEBALL FOR EVERYONE, written with Tom Meany, one the great New York sportswriters of the era, was originally released in by McGraw-Hill 1948, when the Yankees were in the middle of establishing their great dynasty. With the New York team celebrating its centennial, what better time to remind readers about the team’s heydays?

One of the most graceful players ever to don Yankee pinstripes, DiMaggio followed in the footsteps of Ruth and Gehrig to lead the team. Taking advantage of his superstar status, he collaborated on this instructional primarily for the aspiring athletes (although the subtitle reads “A Treasury of Baseball Lore and Instruction for Fans and Players”). He offered detailed information on both offensive and defensive aspects, although when he lectures on how to play each position, one might wonder what a Hall of Fame centerfielder could offer in the way of pitching tips. The title page gives credit to an “advisory board” consisting of such experts in the field as New York Giants pitcher Carl Hubbell, St. Louis Cardinals infielder Frankie Frisch, and his own Yankee teammate, catcher Bill Dickey.

DiMaggio also delved into the mental part of the game such as working with coaches and dealing with slumps. There’s also a chapter by the dean of sportscasters, Red Barber, on how to keep score.

And while the Yankees might have missed the Series this year, they are still the most celebrated team in sports, as evidenced by the large number of titles about the Bronx Bombers. One of the most comprehensive is YANKEES CENTURY, by the team of Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson.

Stout, series editor of The Best American Sports Writing since its inception, and Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England, collaborated on Red Sox Century: 100 Years of Red Sox Baseball as well as similarly handsome volumes on Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson.

With all the new titles about the Yankees out this year — Harvey Frommer’s A Yankee Century: A Celebration of the First Hundred Years of Baseball’s Greatest Team (Berkeley) and Pennants and Pinstripes: The New York Yankees, 1903-2002 (Viking Studio) by Ray Robinson and Christopher Jennison are examples of other coffee table books — YANKEES CENTURY might just be the most comprehensive, combining text by Stout and other notable writers such as Ring Lardner, Ira Berkow and David Halberstam, with dozens of illustrations selected by Johnson.

Many Yankee fans are only familiar with the team in recent years, whose ranks included Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neill, Roger Clemens and David Wells. But students of the game will no doubt find the early history fascinating, before the team became perennial pennant contenders.

Fans of the baseball literary genre might ask “Do we really need another book by Yogi Berra?”, the man who has made a cottage industry of befuddled speech.

WHAT TIME IS IT? DO YOU MEAN NOW? is unlike previous collection of Berra’s mangling of the English language. Written with Dave Kaplan, director of the Yogi Berra Museum in New Jersey, Yogi gets serious, about life, goals, dreams and other philosophical issues not normally associated with the former Yankee catcher. Despite the weighty issues (Yogi on death and dealing with the bad times?), he manages to infuse each item with his self-deprecating humor. This slim volume may not rank up there with the writings of the Dali Lama, but the man known to some as Lawrence Berra proves that he’s not called “Yogi” for nothing.

Review — On the mound

(This review first appeared on Purebaseball.com in 2002)

Depending on whom you listen to, pitching is anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of the game — even more for the math-challenged.

Christy Mathewson is credited with authoring one of the first treatises on that position with Pitching in a Pinch, first released in 1912. Of late, several titles extol the highest levels of pitching, including 300-game winners; no-hitters and their sub-classification, the even more elusive perfect game; and those special match-ups that pit one team’s ace against another.
With five-man rotations and the concomitant lack of opportunity, 300-game winners are an endangered species. The only two pitchers are within striking distance of that magical number: Roger Clemens, age 40, who finished the 2002 season with 293 victories, and Greg Maddux, age 36, with 273. No doubt they will be included in the next edition of 300 Game Winners.

As it is, Rich Westcott has highlighted the 20 pitchers who are already members of this exclusive club. More recent stars, like the incomporable Nolan Ryan, are within easy memory. Others, like those who played in the formative years of the game, need re-introduction.

Ninteenth-century moundsmen Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, Mickey Welch, Hoss Radbourn and John Clarkson had the advantage of earning their stripes when the mound was only 54 feet from home plate. Some athletes could not make the transition when the rubber was moved to its present distance of the storied 60′6″ in 1893. Others were more successful, like Kid Nichols and Cy Young, whose 511 victories remains one of the unassailable records in sports.

Westcott, the author of several baseball titles, includes the record-reaching box score for each pitcher, all of whom are ensconced in Cooperstown.

More than 225 no-hitters have been tossed since they started keeping track of these things. That’s less that one percent of all the games played in the major leagues. Two books pay tribute to these rare occasions. No-Hitters offers a recap of each game, complete with box score. Westcott and Lewis conclude their comprehensive volume with appendices regarding combined “no-nos”; shortened games; and no-hitters prior to the relocation of the mound.

Rich Coberly goes somewhat farther in his No-Hitter Hall of Fame. He includes newspapers accounts of each contest for a nice historical context. He, too, tacks on an exhaustive appendix, full of trivia and statistics that make baseball so much fun.

Since no-hitters have been thrown in nearly the years since Westcott/Lewis was published, both books are in need of revision, but they are still the best sources for capturing the excitement and tension of each nail-biter.

Rarer still is the perfect game. Out of those 200-plus no-hitters, only sixteen have occurred with no opposing batter reaching base by any means.

Buckley does a fine job of recounting these prized few, from J. Lee Richmond’s in 1880, to David Cone’s in 1999. The Yankees have been on the winning side in three of those sixteen perfectos and there’s a great deal of karma involved in the two most recent. David Wells threw his against the Minnesota Twins in 1998. He attended the same California high school, as Don Larsen, who still has the only World Series no-hitter/perfect game on the books. Cone’s game occurred on a day saluting Yogi Berra. (It also happened to be Joe Torre’s birthday.) Who threw out the opening pitch for that one? None other than Larsen himself. Interestingly enough, Jim Bunning, with two no-hitters of his own (one of which was a perfect game against the Mets on Father’s Day in 1964), wrote the foreword for both the Westcott/Lewis and Buckley books.

The only thing keeping Perfect from living up to its title is the error of omitting the box scores.

Fans drool over match-ups which pit two teams’ aces against each other. For the most part, they can be assured of tight, well-pitched, low scoring affairs. That’s the sense that John Klima provides in Pitched Battles.

Klima recreates the excitement of these special rivalries. Some put Hall of Famers against each other during the regular season (Warren Spahn vs. Juan Marichal, Steve Carlton vs. Phil Niekro), while others came in more dramatic circumstances (Dwight Gooden vs. Mike Scott in the 1986 National League Championship Series; Johnny Podres besting Tommy Byrne in 1955 to give Brooklyn its only World Series title; and Larsen’s Fall Classic perfect game the following year at the expense of Sal Maglie). Other Pitched Battles include Pedro Martinez’s 2-0 victory over Roger Clemens in another classic Red Sox-Yankees face-off; Sandy Koufax’s perfect game over the Cubs in 1965 in which his opponent, Bob Hendley, allowed only one hit of his own; and Jack Morris’s leading the Twins to the 1991 World Championship with his 10-inning complete game 1-0 shutout over John Smoltz and the Braves; and Harvey Haddix’s lost extra-inning perfecto against Lew Burdette.

The stories are told in riveting detail; again, the only thing lacking are box scores to statistically document the mound gems.

Finally, for a “bizarro” spin on things, take a look at The Worst Baseball Pitchers of All Time, by the father and son team of James C. and Allan S. Kaufman. Let’s face it, a sadistic part of human nature takes a small measure of satisfaction in the failings of others. The Kaufmans divide their poor performers by timeframe: the “Skunk in a Box” epoch, pre-1893; the dead ball and long ball years; the post-Jackie Robinson era; and the age of expansion, which just about every baseball commentators declares diluted the pitching pool.

There are all sorts of reasons (or alibis, if you prefer) as to why a pitcher might fare poorly: lousy defense, absent offense support, poor timing. Regardless, the authors document dozens of hapless hurlers, from Hugh “Losing Pitcher” Mulcahey to Anthony Young of the Mets, who lost 27 games in a row over two seasons and became something of a cult hero for futility.

As the saying goes, though, you have to be pretty good to have the opportunity to lose so many games, especially year after year.

Review — The Golden Voices of Baseball

I doubt there’s a baseball fan around who has not heard Russ Hodge’s triumphant cries hailing the New York Giants victorious in their playoff game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951. “The Giants Win the Pennant!” is a staple of baseball’s all-time highlights reel.

Younger fans might recall Jack Buck’s astounded call of Kirk Gibson’s “wounded warrior” homer off Dennis Eckersly in the 1990 World Series.

Then there are the poets of the broadcast booth, like Vin Scully. Or familiar voices like Harry Carry, Curt Gowdy, Mel Allen and Red Barber, whose fame is not based on one incident, but a lifetime of achievement.

These are the broadcasters that made baseball come alive for millions of us down through the years, ever since Harold Arlin spoke into a microphone to transmit that first game between the Pirates and the Phillies for KDKA in 1921.

Ted Patterson, a sportscaster for WCBM Radio in Baltimore, captures these men and memories in The Golden Voices of Baseball. Patterson, one of the foremost authorities on the history of the medium, has compiled a warm tribute to his predecessors, both those familiar to us and others less well known on a national level but beloved nonetheless by their regional followings.

Where today’s broadcasters are content, for a fair part, to sit and repeat anecdotes from their memory banks, the gentlemen in Golden Voices were real storytellers and word painters. Before the advent of television coverage, they had the pleasure and responsibility to provide the mental pictures with their descriptions.

Many older fans will tell you that they developed their love for baseball through these broadcasters. Whether listening surreptitiously at night when they should have already been asleep or sneaking a transistor to class (in the pre-walkman days), the older generation often waxes nostalgic on these moments as some of the happiest of their lives.

In addition to the text and pictures, the book includes a two-CD set narrated by the author. The sound bites, a combination of game calls and personal recollections, serve as a paean to the broadcasters featured therein, making Golden Voices an even more welcome look at the golden age of baseball broadcasting.

News Update — Balco reporters facing harsh penalites (from LA Times)

This isn’t something I’d normally include on this Blog, but I felt it was important enough to mention, since it is publishing-related.

“At a reception at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2005, President Bush praised Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada of the San Francisco Chronicle for their award-winning stories on steroid use in professional sports. But today the two journalists face longer terms in prison than the combined sentences of all the defendants convicted in the scandal they helped expose.”

Read the full LA Times story.

Review — Extra Innings: Writing on Baseball

The following appeared in American Book Review, November/December 2001.

It has been estimated that more words have been written about baseball than all other sports combined. Such quantity obviously leads to widely-ranging quality. Cutting through the chafe – the juvenile literature, the statistical analyses – the persistent and curious fan can find those fine stalks of wheat.

Richard Peterson examines these pieces in Extra Innings, a thoughtful look at some of the more “important” books on the national pastime.

 

Read the full review of Extra Innings .

Review — Books on Bob Feller and Cleveland’s Jacobs Field

The following appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 9, 2004.

Looking back at Cleveland Indians Baseball

Review — Baseball: A Literary Anthology and The Heavenly World Series: Timeless Baseball Fiction

This review appears in American Book Review, March-April 2003.

And so it begins anew.

Opening Day.

The teams take to unblemished green fields in dazzlingly clean uniforms amid much pomp and ceremony. Fans on the East Coast shake off the early spring chill, even some leftover snow, warmed by the thrills they’ve been awaiting since November.

Hundreds of articles are written about this special time of year, and not just by the sports media. Editorials joyously welcome the new season and with it the carefree times spring and summer portend. Sports pundits invoke memories of past favorite players and deeds, and feature writers seek out the human interest stories, such as the ex-Oriole Johnny Oates, suffering from brain cancer, throwing out the first pitch as his old team took on the Yankees.

All this serves to remind us that baseball, more than any other sport, is a game of words. Some writing is transitory, like the daily game recaps, but others are timeless, linking generations of fans.

Two new books reaffirm this tradition.

Read the full review from American Book Review (requires Adobe Reader).

Author Profile: Henry Dunow

This article originally appeared in New Jersey Jewish News, March 30, 2006

Baseball’s opening day is just about here. And not just for the professionals. According to the Little League Baseball and Softball 2006 Media Guide, more than 2.6 million kids participated in 7,408 baseball or softball leagues last year.

Dunow, a New York literary agent, is one of several fathers who have chronicled their coaching experiences. But his book, The Way Home: Scenes from a Season, Lessons from a Lifetime (Broadway), plays both sides of the generation line, looking at the ups and downs of trying to guide his then eight-year-old son, Max, and his little cronies, while also recognizing the influence of his own father, Moishe Dluznowsky, on his life.

Three years ago, Dunow moved his family to Rhinebeck, NY, two hours away from his Mannhattan. While Max still participates in Little League, as does his twin sister, Maddy, the distance proved too much for Dunow, who still commutes to his office in the city, to continue coaching.

Max and Maddy are taking the year off from Little League as they prepare for their b’nei mitzva.

“Probably the thing that I most regretted in leaving New York was giving up Little League coaching. I wish I was still doing it today,” he told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview. “It was one of the most rewarding, enriching experiences I’ve ever had. I love what it brought out between my son and me, and I loved the opportunity it gave me to be part of a community.”

So what lessons did he learn from coaching a squad of third-graders?

• Understand why you want to coach — “You hear a lot of scary things about Little League, about the competitiveness, the out-of-control parents, the coaches who are not always the people you want as role models for your kids. My feeling was that if Max was going to do it, I was going to be there with him. I wanted to be part of that experience.”
• Patience — Especially at the youngest stages. Remember, some of these kids aren’t that removed from having mastered basic motor skills. And mentally, they find it difficult to maintain full concentration on one task for hours at a time. How many adults can do that?” Since he gave up that job, Dunow, 53, is grateful that his son has had good coaches who keep things in perspective.
• Perspective — “What do you want to teach the kids? The fundamentals of the game? Winning? Having fun? Are these concepts mutually exclusive?”
• Realize that there are coaches who will take the game way too seriously and try not to get caught up. “There are some crazy coaches and there are some crazy parents who may or may not be coaches; they work their mishegas from the sideline,” Dunow said, grateful that his kids’ experience in both Manhattan and Rhinebeck have been positive. “Things were kept in their proper perspective. Teams played to win and coaches coached to win but if you lost a game, it was all the same. “At the end of the game, the mood, the spirit among the boys is exactly the same whether they’ve won that game or lost.”

Analysis — Literary heavy hitters: Jewish writers and baseball fiction

There was a time not too long ago when Jewish parents would argue with their sons about wasting time playing baseball. Stick to more academic or artistic pursuits, they implored. A nice Jewish boy doesn’t try for a career in professional sports.

Could it be that because, as one observer said, “Jewish sons should not…actually play baseball professionally, many wrote plays, novels, stories, songs, and poems about the national game”? Some of the greatest contributions to baseball fiction have come from Jewish pens. These authors wrote about the game in general or worked Jewish themes into the story lines. Their novels contain not merely evocative sports writing but great writing, period.

Among these authors are such major players as Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, whose baseball stories are but a portion of their greater output, and Mark Harris, who writes almost exclusively on the game.

The Brookyn-born Malamud (1914-1986) is given the most credit for wresting baseball fiction away from juvenile literature, away from the Frank Merriwells and Jack Armstrongs, young men — universally Caucasian and Christian — whose noble qualities of sound mind and body appealed greatly to the youth of America. The home team always won at least moral victories and the action took place mostly on the field.

But Malamud’s The Natural, published in 1952, introduced adult themes into the genre. The author based Roy Hobbs, his doomed hero, on real-life ballplayer Eddie Waitkus, a first baseman for the Philadelphia Phillies who was shot by an obsessed fan in 1949. The author also incorporated gambling and corruption problems that hindered Hobbs from his long since lost goal of being known as “the best there ever was.” Producers of the movie version felt compelled to change Malamud’s original ending — in which Hobbs deliberately strikes out to tank the game — to the implausibly pyrotechnical home run that won the pennant.

Gambling is a common theme in baseball fiction. One wonders if it has anything to do with the fact that Arnold Rothstein was the mastermind behind the granddaddy of all sports disgraces, the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox received lifetime bans from organized baseball for throwing the World Series.

Desire to fit in

Every writer dreams of producing The Great American Novel. Philip Roth pulled it off, even going so far as to use that somewhat vainglorious title. His version, published in 1999, centers on the efforts of an old sportswriter to prove the existence of the fictional Patriot League, purged communist-style from baseball’s historical annals after World War II, and one of its teams, the Port Ruppert Mundys, operating out of New Jersey. This band of misfits — another oft-used literary convention — was forced to wander around the league (like the Jews of ancient Egypt?) because their home stadium was used as an embarkation point for American troops.

Mark Harris is most known for Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), the story of Henry Wiggins, a bright and talented pitcher for the New York Mammoths (think Tom Seaver), and his dimwitted and mediocre catcher, Bruce Pearson. When Pearson is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Wiggins nobly takes on the burden of watching over him, trying to keep the routine as regular as possible. Bang the Drum Slowly is actually part of “The Southpaw Trilogy,” all of which are narrated by Wiggins. A more recent addition, It Looked Like Forever, picks up the story as the pitcher approaches the end of his career.

The conflict of maintaining old traditions juxtaposed with the desire for acceptance, to fit in with the larger society, is another common theme in baseball novels that feature Jews as lead characters.

The Celebrant (1983), by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, is one of the most acclaimed offerings of the past half-century, focusing on immigrant Jews striving to assimilate into American culture. And what better way to do that than to adopt the American national pastime? Jackie Kapp (nee Yakov Kapinski) is a jewelry designer with a special affinity for New York Giant ace Christy Mathewson. Kapp, a pretty fair amateur pitcher in his own right, recalls his glory days on the ballfield: “I threw a submarine ball, my knuckles grazing the dirt as I released it. ‘Get those knuckles dirty, Jackie!’ my infielders would shout — Jackie, not Yakov.”

Peter Levine’s The Rabbi of Swat (1999) involves an anomaly of a Jewish superstar, also playing for the Giants. The team’s manager, John McGraw, made a conscious effort to seek out Jewish athletes in a marketing effort to attract the city’s large Jewish population. (Levine also wrote From Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, a nonfiction examination of Jews and sports.)

Both Levine and Greenberg play up ethnic stereotypes, referring to Jewish mothers and Sabbath meals, as well as the anti-Semitism of both opponents and teammates in a less tolerant era. They both mix in real-life players, in the manner of many historical fiction writers. Rogers Hornsby — an early superstar although not much of a human being — makes an appearance in The Rabbi of Swat, where Levine uses him as an example of an intolerant boor.

Elliot Asinof — whose Eight Men Out (1977), a nonfiction treatise on the “Black Sox Scandal,” is still a sports classic — was a minor league player in his youth. Perhaps that gave him the insight to write Man on Spikes (1955), a tale about the frustrations of a bush leaguer trying to advance through the system. Asinof was one of the first authors to deal with African-American players, which in this story pose an impediment to Mickey Kutner, the hero of this sad tale.

For some reason, Jewish baseball fans of a certain age, at least in the New York area, have a special affinity for the Brooklyn Dodgers, more so than for, say, the Yankees (too waspy) or the Giants. Perhaps it was because “Da Bums,” who opened the door to Jackie Robinson, were more sensitive to minorities. When it comes to playing a role in baseball fiction, the Dodgers seem to be the favorites, especially circa World War II, when baseball in the Big Apple enjoyed its golden era. (Although not a Jew, Pete Hamill tells the story of a young Irish Catholic who befriends an immigrant rabbi through a shared admiration of the Dodgers in Snow in August, 1997.)

Philip Goldberg cashes in on this boomer nostalgia in This Is Next Year (2000), a paraphrase of the annual Dodgers fan warning, “Wait’ll next year!” (Next year in Jerusalem?) Goldberg’s novel follows the relationship between the ball club and the Stone family, including the obligatory teenage boy of boundless faith.

So what is it about the Jewish sensibility that has produced such an impressive block of work? Stephen Riess, a history professor at Northeastern Illinois University, believes that “by and large these are simply excellent writers, writing about what’s most American. They grew up in the 1930s to 1950s, when baseball was the quintessential element of what it meant to be an American.” He singles out The Celebrant as a “good history and a good story.”

Eric Solomon, an English professor from San Francisco State University, goes further. Speaking at a panel discussion on “The Charisma of Sport and Race” sponsored by the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, Solomon observed, “Since Jewish sons should not, according to their families’ oldest beliefs…actually play baseball professionally, many wrote plays, novels, stories, songs, and poems about the national game.” He elaborated much further on this phenomenon in his paper, “Jews, Baseball and the American Novel,” published in the Spring 1984 issue of Arete, an academic journal of sport and society.

Over the past 60-plus years, Jewish fans have had few stars to call their own. First it was Hank Greenberg. Then Sandy Koufax. Now it’s Shawn Green. Such players come and go in relatively quick fashion, but literary superstars like Malamud, Roth, Greenberg, and company enjoy more staying power and have the ability to enthrall across generational lines.

This article appeared in NJ Jewish News, April 8, 2004

Review — Remembering the Expos

This review appears on JanuaryMagazine.com.

Memory plays tricks on us. You and I could see the same thing, but years later recall it differently. Can we both be right? Yes, as Danny Gallagher and Bill Young prove in their nostalgic recollection Remembering the Montreal Expos.

Read the full review on JanuaryMagazine.com.