Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

The current crop of Jewish major league ballplayers, including Oakland A’s pitcher Craig Breslow, Milwaukee Brewers 2007 Rookie of the Year Ryan Braun and Boston Red Sox All-Star Kevin Youkilis, is the latest in a long line of standouts over the last half-century.

In their latest exploration of the topic, Burton and Benita Boxerman write about Jews and baseball growing together to become simply “American.”

The authors are members of the Society for American Baseball Research. Burton is a historian, Benita comes from public relations, and both are avid baseball fans. Their two-volume “Jews and Baseball” is an encyclopedic compilation of Jewish players, executives, owners, umpires, writers and broadcasters associated with America’s national pastime.

The Boxermans describe the Jewish connection to baseball as a “love affair.” Their own love affair with the game shows in the care and perseverance they used to track down so many stories from so many sources. This volume includes an impressive 38 pages of notes and bibliography.

The authors organize their work into mini-biographies. Readers looking for a meaningful connection between Judaism and baseball will find only a few vignettes and little supporting evidence.

For example, the only Jewish reference to Al Rosen, the former Cleveland Indians slugger and San Francisco Giants general manager, was that he endured a few anti-Semitic taunts while a minor leaguer in South Carolina.

Readers who don’t know that Mike Epstein was Jewish will learn that he penned a Magen David on his glove. However, nothing Jewish comes up in the biography of Lefty Phillips, former California Angel and minor league manager. Maybe a more apt title for these volumes would be “Jews in Baseball.”

One notable exception is an incident that exemplified both Judaism and baseball.  After Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Willie Davis made three errors in a 1966 World Series game, Sandy Koufax was the only player who comforted him, performing a mitzvah not unlike that of comforting the sick.

The first volume, published in 2007, covers the period from Lipman Pike, who played in the 1870s and has his own display in Tel Aviv’s Diaspora Museum, to Hank Greenberg, who played in the 1930s and ’40s and became the first Jewish superstar and Hall of Fame member. 

Volume 2 covers post–World War II to the present and includes 1960s star Koufax, perhaps the most overpowering pitcher of all time; less prominent players such as pitcher Ken Holtzman, a 174-game winner in the 1970s, pitcher Steve Stone, who won the American League Cy Young Award in 1980, and Shawn Green, who was only three home runs shy of Greenberg’s record during an all-star career beginning in the 1990s; and a supporting cast of mostly unknowns.

Equal time is given to nonplayers such as famed New York Yankees broadcaster Mel Allen (born Melvin Israel, he considered becoming a rabbi); statistician Allan Roth, who revolutionized the game with his extensive analyses of baseball data; and labor leader Marvin Miller, who was instrumental in giving players a say in the sport.

Jews’ love of baseball was a vehicle

for acceptance as mainstream Americans. Koufax’s well-publicized observance

of Yom Kippur in 1965 shows how they succeeded. His choosing to attend services instead of pitching that day was easy compared with Greenberg’s same dilemma  a generation before. At the time Greenberg played, Jews were struggling to be accepted as “real” Americans, but Koufax had no such problem since Jews were much more assimilated in his day.

“Jews and Baseball, Volume 2: The Post-Greenberg Years, 1949-2008” by Burton A. Boxerman and Benita W. Boxerman (340 pages, McFarland, $45)