Jewish Major Leaguers in Their Own Words by Peter Ephross

Author:Peter Ephross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2014-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

SAUL ROGOVIN

Detroit Tigers, 1949–1951; Chicago White Sox, 1951–1953; Baltimore Orioles, 1955; Philadelphia Phillies, 1955–1957

(1923–1995)

I’d be sitting on the bench in the summertime, it’s hot to begin with, the pressures are in me, with me, and all of a sudden I’d just fall asleep.— Saul Rogovin, interviewed in April 1982

I felt like the outsider as a Jew. I didn’t feel like I was one of them, basically. Deep down inside I never felt that I was accepted, whatever accepted was. Now this wasn’t a reaction from my teammates. This was an inward feeling, a deep, gut feeling that I was a Jew and a Jew is oppressed: A Jew is always oppressed. Be on your guard because basically no one likes Jews. That’s the gut feeling. Get close, but not too close. Keep everyone at a distance. That was deep in my gut, and that’s one of the reasons I felt like an outsider, and I guess I was an outsider because of that. It was a really lonely, very lonely, feeling. Being paranoid because you’re a Jew? Yes, it was a lonely feeling.

Well, I guess as time goes by Opening Day still means something. It used to mean more, years ago, you know, when I first left the game, but I haven’t been that close to the game as the years have gone by. I’m working and I’m busy doing something else. I watch the box scores, but there’s always the feeling that you ... this time of the year that you’d like to go down to spring training, you know, that old feeling to get away from the cold and the wintertime here and join the club in the spring and ... it’s something that stays with you. I replay it every spring, you know.

I wasn’t really born October 10, 1923 ... that’s a little baseball age. We take off ... some of us, at least I did, took off, oh, I’d say about a year and a half of my age, with the naïve expectation that you’re more desirable as a younger player than an older player. I was really born March 24, 1922. I discovered that when you lose your fastball, it really doesn’t make any difference. [laughs] I was born in Brooklyn and I went to Lincoln High in Coney Island. It was a predominantly Jewish and Italian area. My father and mother bought a little house there and that’s where I started to play ball. We had an empty lot across the street and that lot stayed empty, oh, for many, many years and had a semipro baseball team playing across the street. I spent my youth in that lot, you know.

My parents came from Lithuania—Kovno and Vilna. I think that my dad came here in 1880-something, the latter part of the 1880s. I think he mentioned one time that he was seventeen when he came here. I was an only child. My mother gave birth to me when she was in her forties, early forties.

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