The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII By John Klima Thomas Dunne Books, 432 pages, $27.99 On December 5, 1941, Hank Greenberg walked out of Michigan’s Fort Custer Training Center a free man. Seven months earlier, he had become the first…
In the top of the ninth inning of a game at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Detroit Tigers on May 2, 1951, things looked bleak for the A’s. They trailed, 3-1, they had a runner on first base, and there were two outs. Manager Jimmy Dykes summoned Lou Limmer to pinch-hit…
Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary By Robert F. Burk University of Illinois Press, 352 pages, $35 This stately, well-researched study raises the question of which is more enduring, anti-Semitic hatred or the loathing — even after death — felt by plutocrats forced against their will to treat their workers fairly. Robert F. Burk, an emeritus professor…
(JTA) — To the dismay of baseball fan Kit Krieger, future travels to Cuba will no longer include get-togethers with ex-Washington Senators pitcher Connie Marrero. Marrero, who played for Washington from 1950 to 1954, died in Havana last April at age 102, a few months after Krieger’s last visit and three years after Krieger helped arrange…
Reggie Jackson wasn’t happy with the stereo. The All-Star slugger, then a few years into his career with the Oakland A’s, had earned a new hi-fi system with the royalties he’d saved from his agreement with Topps, the trading card company. As Topps executive Sy Berger told the authors of the 1973 classic “The Great…
1) 4,650 Jews live in Oklahoma. 2) Isaac Lowenstein opened Oklahoma’s first vaudeville house in 1909. 3) Seymour Heyman, who ran The Hub clothing store owned the Oklahoma City Mets, a baseball team that played in the Southwestern League and Western Association in the first decade of the 20th century. 4) The inventor of the…
(JTA) — Adam Greenberg saw one pitch in his first major league at-bat, a 92 mph fastball that struck him in the head and effectively ended his MLB career. The ball hit with a sickening thud, popping Greenberg’s helmet off and sending the young ballplayer to the ground, where he clutched his head in agony….
Leon Wieseltier, the Literary Editor of The New Republic, does not exactly look like an athlete. That’s exactly why you should watch him throw out the first pitch of a Nationals baseball game — and then leave the field as quickly as he can.
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