Victory City by John Strausbaugh

Author:John Strausbaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Along with Lou Gehrig, two other native New Yorkers had interesting major league careers in the years leading up to the war. Hyman “Hank” Greenberg was born in Greenwich Village to Romanian Jewish immigrants. A rangy first baseman and power hitter in college, he was courted by the Yankees but signed instead with the Detroit Tigers in 1929. He went on to be the first Jewish star in major league ball. It wasn’t easy being the most visible Jew in Detroit in the 1930s. Besides being home base to Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and the Midwest chapter of the Friends of the New Germany, Detroit also hosted thriving contingents of the Klan and the Black Legion, a Klan splinter group.

In his 1989 memoirs, Greenberg remembered how hard it was to go up to bat “and have some son of a bitch call you a Jew bastard and a kike and a sheenie and get on your ass… If the ballplayers weren’t doing it, the fans were. Sometimes I wanted to go up in the stands and beat the shit out of them.” When the time came to fight the Nazis, not surprisingly, Greenberg would be one of the first major leaguers to sign up.

And then there was Morris “Moe” Berg, one of the oddest oddballs in major league history. There was more than a little Zelig in the way Berg managed to appear in a strange variety of settings and capacities, interacting with some of the most important figures of his time, yet always remaining something of a blur. For all his celebrity, Berg was a loner whose personality and motivations eluded both his associates and his future biographers.

He was born to immigrant parents in 1902 in “a cold-water tenement not far from the Polo Grounds on 121st Street in Harlem,” Nicholas Dawidoff wrote in his 1994 biography, The Catcher Was a Spy. Berg’s father later shifted the family across the Hudson to Newark, where he opened a drugstore. The Bergs were nonpracticing and strove so hard to assimilate that as a boy Moe gave himself a pseudonym, Runt Wolfe, that he thought sounded less Jewish. A very bright and voracious student, he managed after a year at New York University to get into Princeton, where he was the rare “Hebrew,” as his senior yearbook noted. He excelled, graduating magna cum laude in philology, proficient in at least seven languages, including Sanskrit.

Princeton invited him to stay and teach, and there was some talk of his going on to the Sorbonne. But he had another love, baseball, and the Brooklyn Robins made him an offer. He joined the team as a shortstop in 1923. He was a weak hitter and prone to errors in the field yet he would remain in the game for fifteen seasons, wandering from team to team, switching from shortstop to catcher and eventually coach, while spending most of his time on the bench. Off-season he studied at Columbia Law School, passed the bar, and joined a Wall Street firm.

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