Hank Greenberg, slugging baseball player for the Detroit Tigers, remembered one incident well.
He played left field for a minor league team in Waco, Texas. He ran hard after a fly ball and caught it for the third out in the inning. As he ran toward the dugout, Greenberg received a nice round of applause from the fans in the grandstand.
However, one man sitting in the middle of the crowd did not applaud.
He waited until Greenberg was near the dugout before booming in a voice loud enough to be heard in Philadelphia, “Just like the rest of the Jews. Take everything they can get their hands on.”
The remark should have stung Greenberg but it did not. Unfortunately, he was getting used to it.
While most accounts of baseball players having difficulty in the major leagues because of race or ethnicity focus on Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg’s struggles were, in many cases, just as difficult. He was baseball’s first Jewish superstar, and his high profile made him a target of bigots and racists. Yet because he was white, there is the perception that somehow things were easier for him — that racism took a holiday in his case, and the barbs and catcalls hurled his way were kinder and gentler.
Nothing was further from the truth.
Greenberg knew early in life that playing baseball was going to be difficult for him. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. Yet, he stuck to his guns and continued to play baseball, although his reputation suffered greatly for it. His parents’ friends saw him as a “bum,” the kid who refused to follow a professional path.
Greenberg’s raw skill at the game resulted in the Detroit Tigers signing him. The Tigers sent him to the minor leagues in the hope of shaping that talent. In 1930, Greenberg went to a Tiger farm team in Raleigh, N.C., where the big Jewish kid from New York City found himself playing with several country boys from the south.
One day, he was standing on the baseball field when one of his teammates walked slowly around him, staring at him intently. When Greenberg asked him what he was looking at, the player said, “I’ve never seen a Jew before. I’m just looking.” Finally, the player said, “I don’t understand it. You look like anybody else.”
Later that year, while in New York City, a traffic cop pulled him over for running a red light. The cop looked at his driver’s license and asked him what he did for a living. When Greenberg said he was a professional baseball player, the cop laughed sarcastically and said, “Who in the hell ever heard of a professional ballplayer named Greenberg?”
By 1933, Greenberg was with the Tigers. Years later, he recalled the racial slurs hurled at him during that first year: “They [the New York Yankees] always had a couple of guys in the dugout just doing that to you. Some of the things they yelled were pretty nasty…Italians were wops, Germans were krauts, and the Polish players were dumb pollocks. Me, I was a kike, sheeny, or mockey. …I was the only Jewish player who was making a name for himself, so they reserved a little extra for me.”
By the next year, Greenberg became the Tigers’ top star and a vital part of their lineup because of his fierce hitting. That year, the Tigers were fighting the Yankees for first place when Rosh Hashanah arrived on September 10. Greenberg was conflicted about whether to play baseball on that solemn Jewish holy day. The question ignited a fierce national debate: Should Greenberg play or not? Many Americans, like some of Greenberg’s teammates, had never heard of Rosh Hashanah, but had no trouble advising him on this deeply personal matter.
Many newspapers lectured Greenberg on his responsibilities to his teammates and to the city of Detroit. People wrote letters saying that Rosh Hashanah came every year, but the Tigers had not fought for the pennant since 1909.
Finally, a Detroit rabbi decided that Jews had always played games at the start of the New Year, so it was all right if Greenberg played. He did and hit two home runs, the second of which won the game for the Tigers. Yom Kippur came 10 days later. The Tigers were even further ahead in the race for first place, so Greenberg did not play. When he went to temple that day, Greenberg received a standing ovation from the congregants. In the years to come, the decision about whether to play on Rosh Hashanah came to define Hank Greenberg almost as much as his Hall of Fame career. The idea that a person could put their religion — especially one as foreign as
Judaism — ahead of their profession was shocking.
As Greenberg matured into an outstanding ballplayer, his name appeared more and more in print, but it invariably included the words “Jewish” or “Hebrew,” as if to remind everyone that Greenberg was somehow different.
In the field, he continued to receive an overwhelming verbal barrage of abuse. During the 1935 World Series, the opposing Chicago Cubs were so vile toward him — a typical comment was “throw him a pork chop, he’ll never hit it!” — that an umpire finally had to tell the Cubs that if he heard any more profane remarks directed at Greenberg, he’d start throwing people out of the game.
Normally, Greenberg was immune to the cruel taunting he had to endure, but occasionally it got the best of him. One time the Tigers were playing the Chicago White Sox and somebody from the Sox called Greenberg a “yellow Jew son of a bitch.” After the game was over, Greenberg stormed into the White Sox clubhouse and demanded to know who had made that remark. At 6’3” and 210 pounds, Greenberg presented a sight that no one wanted to confront.
“There was nobody in the history of the game who took more abuse than Greenberg, unless it was Jackie Robinson,” remembered a former teammate, Birdie Tebbetts.
In 1947, Greenberg spent his final year in the major leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates in the National League. That year was also the year that Jackie Robinson broke in with the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League, so the two men saw each other periodically. At one point, Greenberg said to Robinson, “Stick in there. You’re doing fine. Keep your chin up.” Perhaps no other person could have said that to Robinson with such conviction.
Greenberg retired after that season, and went on to become a baseball executive. Ironically, in his new role, many of the former players who demonized him as a player suddenly started treating him as a friend.
Greenberg once said, “But no matter what the words said, I knew and still know that…a lot of men…in baseball hated my guts and resented my success all the more because I am a Jew.”
However, as a man who was proud of his heritage, Hank Greenberg never acted on that knowledge.