Re: Most Jewish baseball team (Oct. 14)

Posted

To the staff at JTA, great story about “which major league baseball team is the most Jewish,” but you left out some famous stars like Hank Greenberg and Moe Berg. Hank is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, plus he refused to play baseball on Yom Kippur. Moe, besides being involved with baseball, was a spy for the United States during WWII. Then there is Craig Breslow, a Yale University graduate, who was nicknamed the “smartest man in baseball” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune (for a while he played for the Red Sox). An unknown Jewish baseball star to most of the world is Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodger pitcher who delivered the home run ball to Bobby Thompson which allowed Bobby’s home run to be dubbed “the shot heard round the world.” Ralph discovered late in life that his mother was Jewish; coincidently, my father was his dentist and Ralph was his patient. 

Michael Schlesinger

Cranston

Former Brooklyn Dodgers fan, then a Met fan; now a PawSox and Red Sox fan