No matter where I am, MLB Opening Day is a big day for me. Even on deployment I take with me digital versions of all my baseball movies and a few historic games saved from YouTube. Deployments are certainly different these days than they were back in my enlisted days. The nice things about stories from sports is that there is plenty of grist to mill for how a man or woman can live a good life in a regular job. Sometimes our values come into conflict with those of our employer. What do we do then? I got to see how far some Sailors would go to uphold their values during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Navy lost a lot of very good Sailors over just such a conflict. Hank Greenberg’s story reinforces that, though in some areas one can compromise, there are others in which one must stand fast, true to one’s beliefs. I believe that the time will be soon—if it isn’t here already—that Christians will be facing unprecedented conflict with our society. Are we prepared to stand fast no matter the cost?
This week happens to be Opening Day for the Major League Baseball season. It also happens to be the same week that in 1936 Hank Greenberg signed his contract with the Detroit Tigers for $20,000. Though extremely modest by today’s standards, at the time it made Greenberg one of the highest paid players in Major League Baseball.
If you don’t know who Hank Greenberg is, you should. In 1956 he was the first Jewish player to be elected to the MLB Hall of Fame, and Joe DiMaggio once described him as “one of the truly great hitters.” A prodigious slugger, he hit 58 home runs in 1938 alone (two shy of Babe Ruth’s single season record at the time), and that same year he had 11 consecutive games with multiple home runs, a record that stood for 60 years. He finished his career with 331 home runs, 1276 RBI, and a career batting average of 0.313. Those numbers may seem modest for a hall-of-fame first baseman/outfielder until you consider another fact about Greenberg that deserves even more respect.
His Career spanned only 12 years, because it was interrupted by nearly four years of military service. He was the first American League player to register for the draft, was enlisted in 1941, and served for 47 months—longer than any other MLB ballplayer. So not only was he a hero on the diamond, he was also a war hero.
But there’s another, even bigger reason for which Hank Greenberg deserves to be remembered. In the 1934 season, Greenberg’s Tigers were locked in a pennant race with the Yankees and were hopeful of getting to the World Series for the first time in 25 years. Late in the season, Greenberg announced that he would not play ball on Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year), or on Yom Kippur (The Jewish Day of Atonement), the holiest days in Judaism’s calendar. Both fell in September that year, during the height of the pennant race.
Fans were incensed that he wouldn’t play, saying things like “Rosh Hashanah comes every year, but the Tigers haven’t won a pennant since 1909.” Greenberg stood his ground, but consulted his rabbi, and after much prayer and consideration found that he could play on Rosh Hashanah, but absolutely not on Yom Kippur. Dramatically—and in what I think of as a nod of approval by the Almighty—in the game that fell on Rosh Hashanah Greenberg homered twice in the Tigers’ 2-1 win over Boston. The next day the Detroit Free Press, in a banner front-page headline, wished him—in Hebrew—Happy New Year.
By his actions and the way he lived his life, Hank Greenberg demonstrated that he valued both his faith and his country. His values came first and could easily be seen in the choices that he made.
The same is true for all of us. People can tell just what our values are by paying attention to the choices that we make and the things that we do. We should all take a moment now and then to reflect on whether we act in accordance with what we claim we value. Have we identified what we value most? Do we let those values affect our decisions? It was obvious that Hank Greenberg did. I pray the same can be said for all of us.
LET US PRAY
Lord, God, help us to conform our lives to the ways that reflect the values we espouse. Give us the eyes to see what we ought to value and the wisdom to make our choices accordingly. It isn’t easy to do sometimes, but guide us by your divine wisdom and power so that we might lead righteous lives, faithfully, diligently, and aspiring to all virtue. For it is by Your grace that we are transformed and it is in Your name that we pray.
AMEN
An Orthodox Priest Abroad 