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 and lawyers and doctors and teachers and salesmen, but (understatement) there weren’t many professional Jewish athletes, much less one like Dodger ace Sandy Koufax, who 50 years ago October 6 abdicated pitching the first game of the World Series in Minneapolis against the Twins — the World Series! —because it happened to fall on Yom Kippur. The heavens shook. God may have sanctified Yom Kippur. For American Jewish boys like me, Koufax’s gesture that day re-sanctified it and re-sanctified us. It is fair to say that we would never be the same.
Even before that day, Koufax filled a niche — actually a canyon. Sure there had been a few Jewish ballplayers; the Dodgers in the late ’50s had the Sherry brothers, catcher Norm and pitcher Larry — both of whom, by the way, played on Yom Kippur. But Jews were generally journeymen, marginalized in sport as they had so often been marginalized in life. Only towering slugger Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers, nicknamed the “Jewish Babe Ruth,” and Cleveland Indian third baseman Al Rosen qualified as stars — the kind to whom Jews could point with pride. Greenberg, in fact, had foresworn playing on Yom Kippur in 1934, which earned him genuflection among Jews then, but the Tigers had already all but captured the pennant, so it was an absence without sacrifice, and Rosen had told himself he wasn’t going to play on Yom Kippur during the 1954 World Series, which would have fallen on Game 6, but the Giants made the point moot when they swept the Indians.
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