The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [82]
In the days when the Detroit Tigers were the main challengers to the Yankee dynasty, native New Yorker Greenberg’s star shone brightest. Because Hank lost five years of his career to military service, he finished his career with just over 5,000 at-bats. That’s about one-half of the at-bats that most legendary batters reach. How good a player was he? In the sixty-year stretch beginning in 1933, only one player—the great Ted Williams—had a higher slugging percentage than Greenberg.
Greenberg was only sixteen years old when Babe Ruth hit his record sixty homers in 1927. Greenberg was of course aware of the Yankees, and in short order they became aware of him. But the Yankees also had a first baseman named Lou Gehrig. The Yanks offered Greenberg a contract, but Greenberg didn’t think it was smart to sign with a team that already had a star first baseman. Other teams coveted Hank and he decided to sign with Detroit, which agreed to wait until he had completed college and to pay for his tuition.
The slugger lasted just one year at New York University, unable to resist the craving to test himself in the Majors. The Tigers brought him up from the Minors in 1933. In his rookie season, he played in just 116 games, and drove in eighty-seven runs. In 1934, Greenberg batted .339, with twenty-six homers, 139 RBI, and a League-leading sixty-three doubles. He led the Tigers to the American League pennant that year, although the Tigers lost the World Series to the Cardinals.
Greenberg’s career began during the Depression, and he had to face a torrent of anti-Semitic behavior from those in and out of baseball. In Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 classic of sports literature The Glory of Their Times, Greenberg said that when he was in the Minor Leagues, he was probably the first Jew many people in some southern towns had ever seen. “They seemed surprised I didn’t have horns and a long beard,” he was quoted as saying. In the 1934 World Series, it was reported that St. Louis shortstop Leo Durocher shouted to Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean, “Don’t waste your fastball. Throw the son of a bitch a ham sandwich!”
Several weeks earlier, Greenberg (who had been raised in an observant Jewish household) made big news in the September pennant race by playing—and belting a pair of home runs—on the Jewish high holiday of Rosh Hashanah. But Greenberg made even bigger news the next week, when he sat out against the Yankees to observe Yom Kippur as his father ordered.
In 1935, Greenberg had a truly great season. He drove home 170 runs, fifty-one more than his closest competitor, Lou Gehrig. (If you’re really into conspiracy theories, you could point to the fact that Greenberg—the MVP of that 1935 season—didn’t even make the All-Star team, despite having 110 RBI at the All-Star break! However, let me point out the two established first baseman that made the team ahead of Greenberg. Gehrig finished second in the League to Hank Greenberg in RBI in 1935, and third in homers. Gehrig batted .329 and walked a League-leading 132 times. And Jimmie Foxx batted .346, was third in the American League in RBI behind Greenberg and Gehrig, and had a .636 slugging percentage.
Greenberg’s Tigers again made the World Series in 1935, this time facing the Chicago Cubs. The Cubs were no angels, having famously tormented the aging Ruth in the 1932 World Series. Ruth’s biographer, Robert Creamer, told me in 2003, while researching another book, “In 1932, the Cubs were calling Ruth the n-word from the bench. The Yankees weren’t much better. They would heckle Cubs pitcher Guy Bush, who had a dark complexion and curly hair, and say that he looked black himself. The anti-black prejudice was just so strong in America then, it’s hard to imagine the inferior place in society black people occupied.” Some