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September 3, 2004/Elul 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 50
Home run hit for Jewish major leaguers
PETER EPHROSS
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. - Sandy Koufax isn't the only major league baseball player who refused to pitch on Yom Kippur.
It was the fall of 1963, and Larry Yellen was slated to make his major league debut for the Houston Colt .45s against the New York Mets when he received a call from his mother.
"Larry," Yellen remembers his mother saying. "I read about it in the paper. You're embarrassing us. It's Yom Kippur."
Yellen hewed to the fifth commandment and respected his mother's wishes: He told his general manager that he couldn't pitch and sat the game out.
Yellen's story hasn't received much publicity, most likely because his major league career was short - in fact, he only pitched in 14 big league games before his career ended in 1964.
But the cloud of obscurity surrounding Yellen and other Jewish players is beginning to clear.
A series of events - sparked by the publication of the first-ever complete set of Jewish major leaguer baseball cards and culminating in a historic two-day event held at Baseball's Hall of Fame in upstate New York this week - is shining the spotlight on professional Jewish ball-players.
It all began with a frustrated baseball card collector.
Depending on which list you choose to follow, there have been somewhere between 140 and 160 Jews who have played major league baseball since the late 19th century.
In 1999, while assembling his collection, Martin Abramowitz realized that a host of players were not included - either because they played in an era when cards weren't produced or because they didn't play long enough to merit one.
After he complained about the players who didn't have cards, his son Jacob suggested he make his own.
The result: a 142-card set - available at www.ajhs.org - that could sell out its run of 15,000 by the end of Hanukkah.
Beginning with Lipman Pike, who played in the 1870s and is believed to have been the first professional Jewish baseball player, Jewish players have made their mark on the baseball diamond.
Like Yellen, many of the Jewish players are obscure, known only to the most ardent followers of Jewish sports.
None of them enjoyed careers as spectacular as Hall of Famers Koufax or Hank Greenberg, a slugger in the 1930s and 1940s, but most hung around in the big leagues for a bit longer than Yellen.
After a dry spell in the 1980s, there has been a renaissance of Jewish major leaguers in recent years. Depending on what standard of Jewishness is applied, there are currently between 10-12 members of the tribe playing pro ball, led by Los Angeles Dodgers star outfielder/first baseman Shawn Green.
In fact, according to Abramowitz's own research, Jewish players historically have a higher collective batting average and the pitchers have a better win-loss record when compared with all players.
Perhaps just as important, baseball has served as a microcosm of the American Jewish experience.
Like many of the professions in which Jews have worked, baseball was a field - a particularly public one - in which Jews tried "to make a name for ourselves while maintaining a sense of Jewish identity," Abramowitz says.
Harry Danning, 92, is the oldest living testament to that balancing act.
Danning, an All-Star catcher for the New York Giants in the 1930s, said he wasn't bothered too much as a Jewish player. After all, he says, there were three other Jews on the team.
Sure, he says, there were "bench jockeys" who needled him about his large nose - "Pitch under his nose, he can't see the ball," he remembers them saying - but they got on all the players, he says.
And once, when a hotel in Florida refused during spring training to house Danning and another Jewish Giant, Phil Weintraub, the team's manager, Bill Terry, said he would house the entire team elsewhere unless the hotel took the whole squad. The hotel acceded to Terry's request.
Danning, who lives in Valparaiso, Ind., was unable to attend the conference because of his age.
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