As the Nats’ baseball season ends today, we look back as the Nationals, who we hoped would be better, end their season just about equal to how they ended their year in 2023. Both years, there were times (early in the year) when things looked good, then performance dipped and ownership decided to trade veteran players for youngsters, and the team pretty much tanked the rest of the year. Now, we look forward to 2025 with a very young team, but a team with very young players with another year under their belts and the possibility of their having matured that much more. We look forward to the return of three players who were injured most of this year – pitchers Travis Williams and Josiah Gray, and outfielder Stone Garrett.

But enough of that (I could go on and on). Let’s talk about baseball in a more general sense, and about a film, “Hank Greenberg”, we just saw, and a book “Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball” that I just read.

Aviva Kempner’s film “Hank Greenberg” was released 25 years ago. Now, it has been remastered (I have no idea what that really means or accomplishes, but it does sound good) and re-released with a brief ending featuring …….. but maybe that’s supposed to be a surprise.

Hank Greenberg was the Detroit Tigers’ first basement from 1930 to 1946 (with four years off for a little thing called World War II), and then played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for a year. He was a rarity in at least three ways – he was very tall for a baseball player of his time (6’4″), he was really good (well, he hit really well), and he was Jewish. He grew up in the Bronx and he spent most of his career in Michigan.

Aviva Kempner grew up in Detroit. The stories about the relationship of Greenberg and the Detroit Jewish community are legend, and many are retold in the film. The relationship between Greenberg and his home borough of The Bronx (and in truth the rest of New York City) are also legend. For the Jewish community, a star baseball player was more than a novelty – it was proof that the Jews were integrating into American society. And it didn’t hurt that Greenberg was clearly an exceptionally nice guy.

The film tells the story of the relationship of Greenberg to the greater Jewish community. But my reaction was similar to the reaction I had when I watched the film “The Catskills”, which I wrote about a week or so ago. Growing up Jewish in St. Louis, I didn’t know anything about the Catskills, so the film, on that level, did not connect with me. The same thing is true of Hank Greenberg.

Yes, he was out of baseball by the time I started following baseball. But that didn’t stop the Jews of Detroit remembering him and talking about him. In St. Louis, we talked about Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra grew up in St. Louis. He never played for a local team – he was always the Yankee catcher (and of course, his background was Italian, not Jewish), but we talked about him all the time in St. Louis. He was ours. (I remember the story of when his wife asked him, late in his life, where he’d like to be buried. “St. Louis where you grew up, New Jersey where we live, or New York where you played?” Berra’s response: “Surprise me!”.) I imagine Greenberg is to Detroit and the Bronx as Berra is to St. Louis and New York.

But it’s a very, very good film, and one of the things you learn is how pervasive, before World War II, antisemitism was in this country. Not only antisemitism, but prejudice against other ethnic minorities as well. And how it was politically correct in those days to use pejorative ethnic or religious adjectives or nouns to insult fellow Americans. This was true on the baseball field, as it was elsewhere. (My favorite quip from the film was not on the field, but when Greenberg was in Army basic training, a famous trainee, and the sergeant in change of his unit said that he didn’t want any “Goldbergs or Rosenbergs” in his group. Hank said “you know, I am a Greenberg”, to which the sergeant responded: “I didn’t say anything about Greenbergs, did I?”)

After seeing “Hank Greenberg”, I read “Jackie Robinson…..”, a book by NPR’s Scott Simon that came out just a few years after Aviva Kempner’s film. It’s a short book, and clearly not the most detailed or nuanced of the many books about Robinson, but it serves its purpose. Its purpose is in showing the racism in American professional sports, and especially baseball, and the difficulties in, but the necessity of, integrating the sport. What Hank Greenberg went through with antisemitic insults was, frankly, nothing like what Jackie Robinson went through. And Robinson’s perseverance was remarkable; his ability to hold his temper was one of the reasons Branch Rickey chose him as the first Black signed by a major league team. (And the fact that Robinson and Greenberg felt allied in their fight against prejudice is highlighted in both the book and the film.)

Seeing this film and reading this book are a good way to see American racism and nativism at work. If you get a chance, and want a third leg for this chair, go to the Negro League museum in Kansas City (MO), where they trace the remarkable Negro League’s chronology and, at the same time, the course of anti-Black racism in the country. It will give you a way to get an understanding that might be harder to find elsewhere, particularly if you are of an age that did not live through the time prior to the Civil Rights movement’s successes. Yes, they were major successes, although today sometimes it is hard to see them.

One last thing. Hank Greenberg was 6’4″. Yogi Berra was only 5’7″. Yes, Yogi was small for a player in his day, but Greenberg was a mountain compared with most. He stood out when standing next to fellow major leaders. Today? I looked at the Nationals’ roster (assuming each team is basically the same): The Nationals have six pitchers 6’4″ or taller, and 2 position players. That is about 1/3 of their roster. As to players under 6′? They have 5 (3 are 5’11”).

That is a major change. Maybe 1/3 of the team is Black today. No one is Jewish. But almost half of the team is Hispanic. One quarter of the team was born outside of the United States.

Yes, time have changed.