Then and now, Jewish baseball players have contributed significantly to the game.
In a scene from the 1980 movie Airplane!” the stewardess approaches an elderly lady passenger and asks, “Would you like something to read?” “Do you have anything light?” the lady asks in return. “How about this leaflet? ‘Famous Jewish sports legends,’” the stewardess replies.
Of course, Airplane is fiction. Meanwhile, in the real world, Alex Bregman, Joc Pederson, and Harrison Bader are current Jewish major-league baseball players.
Moreover, historically, many Jewish baseball players have stood tall in our National Pastime. Here are a few.
Hank Greenberg, the first Jewish player to be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame, led the league in home runs four times, drove in an incredible 184 runs in a season, and won two MVP awards in a 13-year career. He is the all-time Jewish home run king with 331 dingers. He did not play on Yom Kippur in 1934, predating the more famous decision by Sandy Koufax by 31 years.
Sandy Koufax, the greatest Jewish pitcher of all time, is also considered by some to be the greatest pitcher of all time. (photo courtesy Baseball Hall of Fame)
In 1965, the first game of the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Minnesota Twins fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday. Ordinarily, Koufax would have pitched that game, but he decided not to play on the holiday. Don Drysdale pitched for the Dodgers and lost. When manager Walter Alston came out to the mound to take the ball from Drysdale, the pitcher quipped, “I bet you wish I were Jewish too.”
Koufax’s 1963-66 statistics are hard to believe: three Cy Young Awards, an MVP, three strikeout titles, four ERA titles, and 97 wins. The southpaw won four World Series, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and is considered one of the greatest pitchers ever.
Then there’s third baseman Al Rosen, who made his mark in only seven full seasons in the majors in the 1950s. Hall of Famer Early Wynn once told Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, “Believe me, the two best clutch hitters in the game are [Yogi] Berra and Rosen.” Rosen led the league in home runs twice, made four straight All-Star teams, and won the 1953 MVP award. As general manager for the Giants, Rosen became the first former player to win Executive of the Year honors.
At his peak, outfielder Shawn Green regularly hit 35-45 homers and stole 20 or more bases a year playing for teams such as the Los Angeles Dodgers, Toronto Blue Jays, and New York Mets. He batted .283 in his 15-year major league career and is one of only 16 players to hit four home runs in a game. In 2002, against the Milwaukee Brewers, he grabbed 19 total bases, which is still an MLB record.
Sid Gordon played 13 years in the big leagues in the 1940s and 1950s. He made two All-Star teams and was an exceptionally disciplined hitter, walking over twice as much as he struck out. The outfielder had a career batting average of .283.
There has been a spate of excellent Jewish ballplayers in the Major Leagues in recent years. June 8, 2018, was the most productive day for Jewish batters in Major League Baseball history—five Jewish ballplayers combined to hit six home runs to help their respective teams to victory. Ryan Braun hit two round-trippers for the Brewers. Kevin Pillar (Blue Jays), Alex Bregman (Astros), Ian Kinsler (Angels), and Joc Pederson (Dodgers) hit one apiece.
One of the more interesting Jewish baseball stories is about former big leaguer David Newhan, mainly because some did not accept Newhan—a Jew who believes in Jesus—as Jewish. When Newhan was traded from the Orioles to the Mets in 2007, The New York Times wrote, “Newhan’s religious odyssey… has taken him so far outside the Jewish mainstream that many Jews probably no longer consider him Jewish.”
Newhan found that reasoning absurd because many of the Jewish ballplayers he knew were agnostic, non-practicing, or dabbling in Eastern religion. Ironically, Green, the baseball idol of Jewish kids until he retired in 2007, did not attend Hebrew school or have a bar mitzvah; Newhan did both.
David Newhan (photo courtesy Chron)
The controversy even spilled over into the world of baseball cards. Jewish Major Leaguers, a company that issues an annual set of Jewish player cards, discontinued Newhan’s card in 2008.
David’s father, Ross Newhan, a Hall of Fame baseball writer for The Los Angeles Times, told this reporter, “The position of (owner) Mr. Abramowitz and his card company is utterly ridiculous. David was born to Jewish parents. He was a bar mitzvah. He has read thoroughly about Judaism and celebrates the Jewish holidays. I became so frustrated trying to explain all this to Mr. Abramowitz that I finally told him to do what he saw fit. However, to exclude him is wrong. His card collection is incomplete.”
Not all Jewish baseball aficionados dismissed Newhan. Howard Megdal, who ranked all Jewish players in the history of baseball by position in his book, The Baseball Talmud, rated Newhan #4 among second basemen. As to why he included Newhan, who he knew to be a Messianic Jew, Megdal displayed a sense of humor: “We as the Jewish people cannot afford to cast aside middle infielders.”
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Matt Sieger, now retired sports reporter/columnist who worked for New York State and California newspapers, did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and received a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978. This article first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on April 9, 2020, and was contemporized for publication here.
