Not too many men not sitting on Bay Area barstools at this very moment remember who Ernie Riles was. For the rest of you, “Easy” was the San Francisco Giants’ bit player who swatted the franchise’s 10,000th home run in 1988, and thus earned an alcove in the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite a .254 career average and 48 homers in parts of nine seasons.
Easy Riles, meet your Semitic equivalent, Ron Blomberg. Now Blomberg you may remember. Big, hulking Jewish kid from Atlanta. Drafted first overall by the Yankees in 1967. Anointed “The Next Mickey Mantle” but never held a candle to the Mick in either the baseball or drinking and carousing departments.
But Blomberg (pronounced “Bloomberg”) also earned a spot in Cooperstown as the first designated hitter in 1973 — a feat that, unlike Riles’ was, cannot be undone by a recount.
“Designated Hebrew” is Blomberg’s retelling of his years with the “Bronx Zoo”-era of the Yankees, playing alongside characters such as Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and wife-swapping pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson.
Unfortunately, like Blomberg’s injury-riddled career, the autobiography doesn’t come within light years of its potential. The cover notes this book is “as told to Dan Schlossberg,” but it feels as if it ought to read “as told to Dan Schlossberg really quickly.”
And that’s a damn shame, because everything required for a great sports memoir is here. Blomberg is a likable man who seemed to pay rapt attention to everything that went on around him. And he wasn’t playing in the Quad Cities, but in New York City in the 1970s, at an era when George Steinbrenner had just bought the club and started bringing in lunatics and sociopaths who also happened to be fantastic ballplayers.
And Blomberg was also the first Jew of note to don the pinstripes, and was feted by every fellow lantzman in the Big Apple, from the Yankee Stadium ushers, to wealthy machers who saw fit to buy him thousands of dollars worth of gifts, to every Jewish mother in the realm.
Add to this that Blomberg suffered through a career kneecapped by bad managers, debilitating injuries and surgical and physical therapy techniques that resembled medieval trials by ordeal.
Unfortunately, Blomberg doesn’t seem as interested in telling this story as we are in hearing it. Whole seasons are written off in a paragraph. Most of them read like this: We finished in fourth place and I hit .330 and knocked 14 home runs, but could only play in about 100 games because I had problems with my shoulders and knees and the manager wouldn’t bat me against lefties.
That’s how it went until Blomberg really injured himself (a torn rotator cuff, which was a career-killer in the 1970s, followed by a horrific knee injury the next year), was run out of town by an angry, spiteful Billy Martin and Co., and had his body pretty much fall apart before his 31st birthday.
Blomberg could have been Mantle-esque on the field if he hadn’t been undercut by bad managers and so damn unlucky injury-wise. And the story of an intelligent Jewish ballplayer — who enjoyed hanging out with the writers just as much as his teammates, battled some pretty overt anti-Semitism, became a celebrity largely because of his Judaism and witnessed the chaotic clubhouse of one of the most dysfunctional championship teams of all-time — could also have been so much more.
Two things we learn, however: First, thanks to a sponsorship, Blomberg played his games wearing an elaborate hair weave. Second, he missed his true calling as a competitive eater. On several occasions, he earned a free dinner by downing a 72-ounce steak, three vegetables and a dessert in less than an hour. Once he even did it in half an hour.
See Mantle top that!
“Designated Hebrew” by Ron Blomberg as told to Dan Schlossberg (SportsPublishingLLC.com, 176 pages, $19.95).