— A Holocaust survivor sang the national anthem before a Major League Baseball Game between the Detroit Tigers and Tampa Bay. Hermina Hirsch, 89, performed the national anthem on Saturday at Comerica Park in Detroit, fulfilling a long-time dream. Hirsch told local television station WWJ in an interview in April in which she called on…
(JTA) — Will Joc Pederson rebound from his second-half struggles of last season? Can Kevin Pillar build on his strong 2015 campaign? Will injuries derail one-time MVP Ryan Braun? These are some of the questions to be answered as these Jewish players and others get set for the Major League Baseball season that opens April…
(JTA) — Baseball doesn’t get much more Jewish than this year’s MLB National League Division Series, which starts Friday between the New York Mets and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both teams feature notable Jews: Joc Pederson in the outfield for the Dodgers and Joe Wilpon in the owner’s box for the Mets. Plus, you’ve got…
My father, a first-generation American, was an accountant, which is relevant because he was a sedentary, chubby, somewhat bookish man who never tossed a ball with me, not once, and who paid no attention to Major League Baseball. When I was growing up in the 1960s, there were millions of Jewish fathers who were accountants…
(JTA) — Jesse Agler was pretty talented as a catcher and pitcher in Little League, yet his parents benched him regularly. That’s because the Aglers had a no-baseball-on-Shabbat rule, one cloaked in sports royalty. “It was a source of frustration as a kid, but I appreciated later what they tried to do,” said Agler, a 33-year-old…
Former librarian Bennett Jacobstein has an encyclopedic knowledge of ballpark food. Bennett Jacobstein has a ballpark idea of where you can find great stadium food. In fact, he wrote the book on it. Inspired by Jacobstein’s post-retirement gig working concession stands at San Jose, California’s Municipal Stadium, surveys culinary offerings at all 30 major-league ballparks,…
The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII By John Klima Thomas Dunne Books, 432 pages, $27.99 On December 5, 1941, Hank Greenberg walked out of Michigan’s Fort Custer Training Center a free man. Seven months earlier, he had become the first…
In the top of the ninth inning of a game at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium between the Philadelphia Athletics and the Detroit Tigers on May 2, 1951, things looked bleak for the A’s. They trailed, 3-1, they had a runner on first base, and there were two outs. Manager Jimmy Dykes summoned Lou Limmer to pinch-hit…
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