In front of Hank Greenberg is the pitcher — menacing, mean, wanting to strike him out and make him look like a fool. Behind him, what seems like a stadium full of anti-Semites.
This is Detroit in the 1930s, home of Henry Ford, who churns anti-Jewish hatred in his Dearborn Independent newspaper with the same kind of assembly-line speed that has made his automobile factories famous. Adding to the feeling of discomfort for Greenberg, Detroit is also the home of the Jew baiter and hater of radio fame, Father Charles Coughlin.
Nonetheless, Detroit is where the big, flat-footed Jewish boy from the Bronx was destined to play in Major League Baseball. And if Greenberg couldn’t make believers out of all the fans, at least the thunder in his bat could win the respect of most American League pitchers, except one: fellow Hall of Famer Bob Feller, who somehow could always speed rockets past Greenberg, even in the best of his slugging years.
John Rosengren’s new biography, “Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes,” covers baseball with the authority of a Feller pitch smacking into a catcher’s mitt, and depicts Greenberg’s steadfastness amid the rise of Nazism in Germany and its sympathetic movements in the United States with the drama of a come-from-behind, bases-loaded Greenberg home run.
The book tells how children of Jewish immigrants were galvanized by the exploits of one of their own, and how Greenberg proved in those years leading up to World War II that one could be both Jewish and 100 percent American.
Greenberg hit 58 home runs in a single year, helped Detroit win the World Series twice, claimed some of baseball’s most vaunted hitting titles — and did so under the microscope, enduring constant taunts from haters.
It was an ordeal that in a magnified form Jackie Robinson, the first black man to play Major League Baseball, would later endure. To Greenberg’s credit, he was one of the few baseball players to encourage Robinson, urging him to hang in and ignore the taunts. (As the new movie “42” makes clear, Robinson did that and more.)
Though it is easy to glorify Greenberg as a hero, Rosengren makes it clear that, notwithstanding the large shadow he cast, Greenberg had his flaws. He had thin skin, an inflated ego and an unthinking tongue. Yet, for all that, he was known as an honest, hardworking man who spent more time at batting and fielding practice than perhaps any other big name in baseball. He would pay bat boys and neighborhood kids to shag balls for him before his games. He took batting practice before batting practice.
Greenberg also got into famous contract disputes with management, recognizing that the active life of a baseball player is short indeed, and one ought to make money while one can. But later, when he was in baseball management himself, he became known for his stinginess during contract negotiations.
When World War II came, Greenberg didn’t volunteer, but he didn’t avoid the draft either. He wounded his public standing when it was leaked that he had written to his draft board that he’d like to be deferred to continue playing baseball during the 1942 season. And probably as a result of the publicity his letter caused, the draft board felt it had no choice but to draft him right away. Greenberg went into the Army, rose through the ranks to sergeant, eventually went to officer’s school, and ended the war as a captain. He spent a good part of the war in the Pacific Theater.
When Greenberg returned to baseball after the war, his body aching, he was getting too old for the game, but helped the Tigers win the 1945 American League pennant with a grand slam. In the World Series, however, his time away from baseball was betrayed by sloppy defensive work. Even so, the Tigers won.
In the 1946 off-season, Greenberg eloped with Caral Lasker Gimbel, a divorced heiress to the department store giant. The wedding was performed in the resort town of Sea Island, Ga., where the surprised justice of the peace learned of the couple’s fame only after the ceremony.
The Greenbergs had three children, but their marriage did not last. He later married the divorcee Mary Joe DeCicco, who would be at Greenberg’s bedside when he died in 1986.
Although he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home and was a hero to the Jewish people (he refused to play during Yom Kippur when the Tigers were in the 1934 pennant race), somewhere along the line Greenberg lost interest in organized religion. He did not belong to a synagogue and his children were raised with little knowledge of Judaism.
Rosengren calls Greenberg “the greatest Jewish baseball player — nay, athlete — of all time. No other Jew has achieved his athletic prowess and cultural significance,” he writes.
Fans of Jewish Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax, of a later generation, might disagree, but such a debate is unlikely to change minds on either side of the debate. Both players unquestionably were great stars who delighted fans, and gave the Jews among those fans an extra measure of nachas. n
Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World, where this story originally appeared.
“Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes” by John Rosengren (392 pages, New American Library, $26.95)