Alex Bregman, a Jewish player and one of Major League Baseball’s top prospects, has been called up by the Houston Astros. Bregman, 22, will make his debut on Monday night against the New York Yankees after being promoted the night before from Houston’s Triple A Fresno minor league affiliate. He will likely play third base…
On a warm afternoon in the autumn of 1976, my friend Jonathan took me up to his family’s dusty attic playroom and introduced me to something that would change my life forever. No, it wasn’t my first puff of weed, my first look at National Lampoon (or Hustler), or even my first listen to the…
(JTA) — It was a question fans were asking themselves last season during the team’s run to the World Series. Despite his surname, which is a syllable away from the word for unleavened Passover bread, the answer is no. But it turns out Matz gets the question all the time. So much so that when he met…
— A Holocaust survivor sang the national anthem before a Major League Baseball Game between the Detroit Tigers and Tampa Bay. Hermina Hirsch, 89, performed the national anthem on Saturday at Comerica Park in Detroit, fulfilling a long-time dream. Hirsch told local television station WWJ in an interview in April in which she called on…
(JTA) — Will Joc Pederson rebound from his second-half struggles of last season? Can Kevin Pillar build on his strong 2015 campaign? Will injuries derail one-time MVP Ryan Braun? These are some of the questions to be answered as these Jewish players and others get set for the Major League Baseball season that opens April…
(JTA) — Baseball doesn’t get much more Jewish than this year’s MLB National League Division Series, which starts Friday between the New York Mets and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both teams feature notable Jews: Joc Pederson in the outfield for the Dodgers and Joe Wilpon in the owner’s box for the Mets. Plus, you’ve got…
My father, a first-generation American, was an accountant, which is relevant because he was a sedentary, chubby, somewhat bookish man who never tossed a ball with me, not once, and who paid no attention to Major League Baseball. When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were millions of Jewish fathers who were accountants…
(JTA) — Jesse Agler was pretty talented as a catcher and pitcher in Little League, yet his parents benched him regularly. That’s because the Aglers had a no-baseball-on-Shabbat rule, one cloaked in sports royalty. “It was a source of frustration as a kid, but I appreciated later what they tried to do,” said Agler, a 33-year-old…
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