Peter Dreier / Research & Analysis / Players
Sam
Nahem
By
Peter
Dreier
Society
for American
Baseball Research
biography project
March
2019 https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/f0c0b0ef
Sam
Nahem
was a so-so pitcher who logged a 10–8 won-loss record and a 4.69 ERA in
four
partial seasons with the Dodgers, Cardinals, and Phillies between 1938
and
1948.
Despite
this unremarkable record, Nahem was a remarkable major leaguer in many
ways. He
was the only Syrian and one of the few Jews in the majors during that
period.
Nahem not only had a college education — a rarity among big league
players at
the time — but also during off-seasons earned a law degree, which he
viewed as
his fallback job in case his baseball career faltered. He was also an
intellectual who loved classical music and American, Russian, and
French
literature.
He
was
also one of the few big league pitchers — possibly the only one — who
threw
exclusively overhand to left-handed batters and exclusively sidearm to
right-handed hitters.
Nahem
was a right-handed pitcher with left-wing politics. He may have been
the only
major leaguer during his day who was a member of the Communist Party.
After his
playing days were over, Nahem worked for 25 years in a chemical plant,
where he
became a union leader. His political activities caught the attention of
the
FBI, which put Nahem under surveillance.
But
most important in terms of his baseball career, Nahem was a key player
in a
little-known episode in the battle to desegregate baseball. Like many
other
radicals in the 1930s and 1940s, Nahem fervently believed that baseball
should
be racially integrated. While serving in the Army during World War II,
he
challenged the military’s racial divide by organizing, managing, and
playing
for an integrated team that won the U.S. military championship series
in Europe
in September 1945, a month before Jackie Robinson signed a contract
with the
Dodgers that broke major league baseball’s color bar.
Samuel
Ralph Nahem’s parents — Isaac Nahem and Emilie (nee Sitt) Nahem —
immigrated to
America from Aleppo, Syria in 1912. Born in New York City on October
19, 1915,
Nahem, one of eight siblings, grew up in a Brooklyn enclave of Syrian
Jews. He
spoke Arabic before he learned English.
Nahem
demonstrated his
rebellious streak early on. When he was 13, Nahem reluctantly
participated in
his Bar Mitzvah ceremony, but refused to continue with Hebrew school
classes
after that because “it took me away from sports.” To further
demonstrate his
rebellion, that year he ended his Yom Kippur fast an hour before
sundown.
Recalling the incident, he called it “my first revolutionary act.”1
The
next month — on
November 12, 1928 — Nahem’s father, a well-to-do importer-exporter,
traveling
on a business trip to Argentina, was one of over 100 passengers who
drowned
when a British steamship, the Vestris,
sank off
the Virginia coast.
Within
a year, the Great
Depression had arrived, throwing the country into turmoil. With his
father
dead, Nahem’s family could have fallen into destitution. “But
fortunately we
sued the steamship company and won enough money to live up to our
standard
until we were grown and mostly out of the house,” Nahem recalled. He
remembered
how, at age 14, he “used to haul coal from our bin to relatives who had
no heat
in the bitterly cold winters of New York.” So, despite his family’s own
relative comfort, “I was quite aware of the misery all around.” That
reality,
Nahem remembered, “led to my embracing socialism as a rational
possibility.”2
Education
was Nahem’s ticket out of his insular community and into the wider
world of
sports and politics. While Nahem was still a teenager, an older cousin,
Ralph
Sutton, as well as his younger brother Joe and first cousin Joe Cohen,
exposed
him to radical political ideas. Sutton also mentored Nahem to
appreciate
Shakespeare and classical music.
In
1933,
in the midst of the Depression, Nahem entered Brooklyn College, whose
campus
was a hotbed of political radicalism and activism. It was part of the
taxpayer-funded City College system, which was known as the “poor man’s
Harvard.” At the time, many of its students came from working class,
immigrant
Jewish families. Students espoused every variety of radical ideas,
including
anarchism, socialism, and Communism. Having already been attracted to
the
Communist Party by his cousin Ralph, Sam was soon participating in its
campus
activities.
Nahem
was better off economically than most of his fellow students, but he
quickly
absorbed the campus’ leftist political atmosphere while, as an English
major,
immersing himself in his love of literature.
Although
a brilliant student
and a committed, idealistic activist, it was on the athletic field that
Nahem
really stood out. As a teenager, Nahem played baseball and football on
Brooklyn’s sandlot teams because he didn’t make the teams at New
Utrecht High
School. He started off as a catcher but shifted to pitching when he
began
wearing glasses because they couldn’t fit beneath the catcher’s mask.3 He quickly grew in
size, reaching
6-feet-1 and 190 pounds in college at a time when the average adult
male was
5-feet-8.4 At
Brooklyn College he became a top-flight athlete, pitching for the
baseball team
and playing fullback on its football team.
During
his freshman year,
Nahem recalled, “I really emerged as a personality, different from the
shy,
unaggressive, and, yes, uninteresting (but handsome) boy I was.” Nahem
began
dating girls and excelled in his English classes, where he was often
the teacher’s
pet, “especially since I was an athletic hero.” “I do recall the
interest I
awakened in my professors by my feats. ‘He throws a good curve and
understands
modern poetry! He knows how to use big words!’” He was drawn to Russian
and
French literature as well as such American writers as Hemingway,
Faulkner,
Dreiser, and Jack London.5
The New York Times,
the Brooklyn
Eagle, and
other daily papers frequently reported on Nahem’s exploits on the
gridiron and
the diamond. “Who can deny a certain thrill in seeing one’s name in
print?”
Nahem recalled years later.6 In
the spring of 1935, following a good football season, Nahem was back in
the
news as Brooklyn College’s ace hurler. “Nahem Stars on the Mound and at
Bat,”
the Times headlined
its April 26, 1935 story,
reporting that he not only defeated Fordham University by a 3-2 margin,
but,
batting fourth in the lineup, also got two hits and scored his team’s
first
run.
At
the end of his
sophomore year, Nahem earned a tryout with the hometown Brooklyn
Dodgers,
managed by Casey
Stengel.
Nahem
told two versions of how he earned a Dodgers contract.
“One
morning when I was
pitching batting practice he (Stengel) grabbed a bat and got up there
to hit
against me,” Nahem recalled. “Maybe it was because I looked easy to
hit. I bore
down hard, and Casey didn’t get the ball out of the infield. So he
promoted me
— from morning batting practice pitcher to afternoon batting practice
pitcher!”7 In another rendition,
Nahem
recollected, “I was throwing batting practice and an errant fastball
hit this
famous Okie pitcher, Van
Lingle Mungo,
in the ass. After the tryout, Stengel put
his arm around me and said, ‘We’ll sign you up. If you can hurt that
big
lard-ass, you must have something on the ball.’”8
When
Nahem told his mother that he was going to play professional baseball,
she
asked, “When are you going to quit those kid jobs and get a job?”
“I
said, ‘I’m making $100
a week,’” Nahem recalled. “She said, ‘Go play!’”9
Nahem
dropped out of
college to play professional baseball.10 The Dodgers sent him
to their minor
league franchise in Allentown, Pennsylvania (in the Class-A New
York-Pennsylvania league) for the 1935 season.11 He had a 2-5 record
and an 8.42
earned run average.12 He started the 1936
season with
Allentown but the Dodgers demoted him in Juneto a Class D team in
Jeanerette,
Louisiana (in the Evangeline League).13 He posted a 5-5
record and a
3.75 earned run average for Jeanerette in 1936. He batted .270 (10 for
37) and
was occasionally used as a pinch hitter.14
During
those two seasons
in Allentown and Jeanerette, Nahem used an alias, “Sam Nichols,”
perhaps to
maintain his eligibility as an amateur athlete in case he didn’t
succeed as a
professional athlete and wanted to return to Brooklyn College and play
on its
sports teams again. But Sam’s secret wasn’t very well-hidden. The
descriptions
of him in the newspapers that covered the Allentown and Jeanerette
teams reveal
that “Nichols” was clearly Nahem. They referred to “Nichols” as the
“bespectacled
young right hander.”15 Several stories
reported that he
had graduated from Brooklyn College.16 (He actually left
college after his
sophomore year). They identified him as Jewish. A column in the Allentown Call noted
that “The Allentown Brooks
this season may have one of the rarities of organized baseball, an
all-Jewish
battery,” explaining that the team’s catcher, Jim Smilgoff is “of
Hebraic
extraction” while Sam Nichols is “also of Jewish parentage.” The column
also
reported that “Don’t say that we told you, but Sam Nichols answers to
the name
of Hassel (sic) Naham when the tax collector comes around over in
Brooklyn,” using
an unfamiliar first name and misspelling Sam’s last name.17
Starting
in 1935, Nahem
began attending St. John’s University during his off seasons. He earned
his law
degree and passed the bar in December 1938.18
In
1937 the Dodgers
promoted him to their Clinton, Iowa team in the B-level
Iowa-Indiana-Illinois
league, where he had an outstanding season, pitching in 21 games,
winning 15
games, losing only 5, and making the league’s All-Star team.19 In 1938, the Dodgers
advanced him
to their A-level Elmira, New York team, where he had a 9-7 record.
On
September 28,
the New
York Times reported that “Sam Nahem, southpaw
[sic]20 hurler for Elmira and
formerly of
Brooklyn College, reported to the Dodgers yesterday.” A few days later,
October
2, the last day of the 1938 season, the 22-year old Nahem made his
major league
debut. He pitched a complete game to beat the Phillies 7-3 at Shibe
Park in
Philadelphia on just six hits. He also got two hits in five at bats and
drove
in a run, thus ending the season with a .400 batting average.21
Despite
his stellar
debut, the next year the Dodgers sent him back to the minors. He began
the 1939
season playing for the Montreal Royals, where he won one game and lost
three. Burleigh
Grimes,
a
Hall of Fame pitcher who was Nahem’s manager with Montreal, taught him
how to throw
a slider. At the time, Nahem was one of the few hurlers who used that
pitch,
which he described as “halfway between a fastball and a curve.”22 In July, the Dodgers
assigned Nahem
to their Nashville Volunteers team. The Dodgers brought Nahem back to
Brooklyn
at the end of August but didn’t send him to the mound, and he was back
in
Nashville within a few weeks. He won eight games and lost six games for
the
Volunteers. The Times called
him “Nashville’s
ace hurler, Solemn Sam Nahem.”23
As
the Dodgers spring
training got underway in Florida in February 1940, the Times wrote
that Nahem “the St. John’s University
Law School graduate, is rated a great pitching prospect.”24 That same month, in a
profile of
Nahem, New
York Post sportswriter Stanley Frank called
him “the very jewel of a rookie” (even though he had pitched for the
Dodgers in
1938). Frank quoted Dodgers manager Leo
Durocher saying
“I remember him [Nahem] well. Big and strong with a
great fastball, but it didn’t do much.” Frank then quoted Nahem,
rebutting
Durocher’s assessment: “It does now. It sinks when I’m good, but my
best pitch
is that slider. I didn’t have it when the Dodgers last saw me.”25
Despite
Nahem’s bravado,
he pitched poorly during spring training. In one game, in what can only
be
viewed as an act of cruelty, Durocher allowed Nahem to face 19 batters
and give
up 13 runs in the ninth inning before taking him out. 26
An
article in the Nashville Tennessean in
March, while he was at
spring training in Florida, reported that Nahem was thinking of
returning to
New York to open up a law practice with his brother Joe.27 Nahem’s ambivalence
about his pro
baseball career was tested when, after spring training, the Dodgers
assigned
him to back to their AA level Nashville farm team instead of their top
minor
league franchise in Montreal. Nahem wasn’t eager to return there. “I
would go
to Nashville outright,” Nahem told the Times,
“but I now go
back there on option. I made good there once, and if I can’t advance in
baseball there’s no point in my remaining in the game. I definitely
will quit
baseball if some other disposition of me is not made.”28
Instead,
Nahem arranged
to be optioned to another AA level team, the Louisville Colonels, a Red
Sox
farm team in the American Association (where he was 3-5 with a 4.43
ERA).29 Even though he was
playing for a
team affiliated with the Red Sox, baseball’s reserve clause guaranteed
that he
remained the Dodgers’ property.
Whether
or not Nahem’s
resistance played a role, in June 1940 the Dodgers traded him (and
three other
players, along with $100,000) to the St. Louis Cardinals organization
in a deal
that sent star outfielder Joe
Medwick to
Brooklyn.30 The Cardinals assigned
Nahem to
their Texas League team, the Houston Buffaloes. During the second half
of the
season, Nahem pitched in 15 games for Houston (10 of them complete
games) and
posted an 8-6 won-loss record with a league-leading 1.64 ERA in 104
innings.
Nahem’s pitching led Houston to the Texas League championship.31
The
Cardinals brought
Nahem up to the big league club the following season. They paid him
$3,20032 — about $55,000 in
today’s dollars.
Cardinals general manager Branch
Rickey had
a “heart to heart” talk with Nahem that helped restore
his confidence. According to Nahem, Rickey told him that “he had faith
in me.
What a psychologist he is! He said I was his boy, and he was picking me
to make
good. He told me I would pitch well the rest of the season, and darned
if I
didn’t.”33
Nahem
recalled that when
he joined the Cardinals in 1941, “I got a new concept of pitching” by
watching
his teammate Lon
Warneke,
an
outstanding veteran. “I saw that it wasn’t like how I pitched them:
High, low,
inside, outside. He threw low and inside, high and outside. He threw
inside and
he threw outside. This farmer had a theory of pitching far more
complicated
than me, a law school graduate and bar-passer first crack. And his
theory was
really fascinating. Balance is everything in hitting, and if you can
get the
guy just a tip off balance, that really does something.”34
Discussing
Nahem, Dodger
outfielder Roy
Cullenbine told
the Brooklyn
Eagle: “With that sidearm delivery of his, he
fools you. His fastball is on top of the plate before you think he’s
let go of
the ball. Besides he’s big and with that sidearm motion he somehow
manages to
fire the ball at you with his uniform for a background. He’s tough.”35 Cardinals catcher Gus
Mancuso told
the Sporting
News:
“Nahem is not a speed-ball pitcher like these others, but he has a
better
all-round variety of stuff, and fine control. He can pitch to spots,
and he is
smart. His slider is a real humdinger.”36 Nahem credited Mancuso
with being a
big help. “I owe my steadiness and confidence to him,” Nahem told
the Brooklyn
Eagle.37
In
his first starting
assignment for the Cardinals, on April 23, 1941, Nahem showed great
promise. He
pitched a three-hitter, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates 3 to 1, striking
out
three and giving up only one walk. The Times called
it
“the Redbirds’ best hurling performance of the season.”38
That
victory was “the
greatest game I ever pitched in my whole career,” Nahem recalled many
years
later. “Tell me about heaven.”39 Explaining his
accomplishment,
Nahem said that the Cardinals had five rookie pitchers competing for
two slots
on the roster. “There’s something in the blood that inspired me in
certain
moments.”40
A
week later, on April
30, Nahem won his second game in a row, over the New York Giants.41
On
May 30, against the
Cincinnati Reds, Nahem gave up only seven hits and two runs in nine
innings,
but after nine innings the score was tied 2-2 and manager Billy
Southworth replaced
Nahem with reliever Ira
Hutchinson,
who gave up a run in the 13th inning and took the loss.42 On July 5, he faced
the Reds again.
He pitched a complete game, giving up only six hits and two runs (one
of them
unearned), but he lost to the Reds’ ace Johnny
Vander Meer,
who allowed the Cardinals only one run.43
Against
the Giants at
the Polo
Grounds on
June 7, Nahem gave up three runs in the first two innings before being
removed
for a reliever. As the Times reported,
“Sam Nahem, the Brooklyn barrister, was chased back to his law books in
less
than two rounds.”44
During
the 1941 season, Nahem started eight games and relieved in 18. He won
five
games before losing two. He pitched 81 2/3 innings and registered a
2.98 ERA.
Despite
this excellent
performance, in August the Cardinals shipped Nahem to their AA minor
league
team in Columbus, Ohio. Again, Nahem voiced his objections to being
sent to the
minors. “I am not reporting [to Columbus],” he told the Columbus team
president
Al Banister, according to a newspaper story. But he soon “cooled off,”
the paper
reported. “realizing his career was at stake.”45 He pitched five games
at Columbus,
went 0-2, and had a disastrous 9.41 ERA.
On
February 19, 1942, the Cardinals sold Nahem to the Phillies. That
season he
made 35 appearances for the Phillies, posting a 1-3 won-loss record and
a 4.94
ERA. After the season was over, Nahem joined the military. It looked
like his
pro baseball career was over, but he would have a brief encore in 1948.
During
his 11 years playing pro ball — interrupted by World War II and several
seasons
with a semipro team — Nahem spent more time in the minors than in the
majors.
He had a 51-44 record in the minors, including his first two years in
Allentown
and Jeanerette, where he had a 7-10 record under his alias, “Sam
Nichols.”
Nahem
described the
minors as “hot dusty bush leagues” characterized by “long night bus
travel,
small crowds, crummy food, small time love affairs.” He dealt with the
boredom
and isolation by reading. “I read my way through those years. What does
one do
in Columbus, Ohio for the summer? The complete works of Honoré de
Balzac. What
about Jeanerette, Louisiana? Of course, the complete works of Theodore
Dreiser.”46
Nahem
would sometimes bring his books into the dugout. He’d quote Shakespeare
and Guy
de Maupassant in the middle of conversations. News stories about Nahem
frequently emphasized his education, legal training, and erudition as
well as
his glasses.
After
he was assigned to
the Montreal Royals, one newspaper reported: “Montreal fans will find
Sam
Nahem, one of the Royals’ new pitchers, unusually interesting. He
speaks
French.”47 During spring training
in 1940, an
Associated Press reporter wrote: “Sam wears spectacles and talks less
like a
ballplayer than any diamond star this reporter knows. For reading
material
Nahem does not devote his time to pulp magazines — the Westerns,
Adventure
stories and whatnot — but goes for the realistic Russians, Dostoievski,
Gorki,
Chekov, and Tolstoi.” 48 Nahem clearly enjoyed
his
reputation as a highbrow hurler, telling the reporter: “I am a great
believer
in psychology and I admire the Russian outlook on life. On those days
when my
pitching has been horrible I lost myself in the Russian classics. I
read much
more when things are going bad for me than when I’m winning.”
But
Nahem insisted that
“My heart is wrapped up in making good in the majors. Of course, if I
don’t,
I’ll always have something to fall back on and even if I make good in
the big
show I can’t last forever and when I’m washed up my law will be good to
fall
back on.”49
Another
Associated Press
story the next year, when Nahem was trying to make the Cardinals’
roster,
began: “Bespectacled Sam Nahem is a scholarly gent” and “a full-fledged
attorney who can spiel 50-cent words in several languages and likes
nothing
better than a good argument with a rival batsman or on the relative
importance
of environment and heredity.”50 Nahem’s “[b]lack hair
curling back
over his high forehead gives him a professorial air, accentuated by the
glasses
he wears,” wrote the Brooklyn Eagle’s
respected sports columnist Tommy Holmes, adding that with Nahem’s law
degree
from St. John’s, “the Dodgers have actually come up with a clubhouse
lawyer.”51 Throughout Nahem’s
career,
newspapers routinely referred to his bald head. He took it all in
stride.
“Euphemistically, I could say I had hair, but euphemistically,” he once
said.52
Though
better-educated than most other players, Nahem was gregarious and
extroverted,
with a boisterous sense of humor, which made him popular with his
teammates.
But occasionally Nahem’s background impeded his relationships with
other
players. He once recalled:
“Andy
Seminick [the
Phillies’ catcher] really put me in my place once. He
once said to me: ‘Sam, we all know that you went to college and that
you’re a
lawyer from New York. For heaven’s sakes, Sam, I come from a coal
mining
family.’ Then I realized that I had a condescending attitude toward
them. It
was arrogant of me. That wasn’t right because everybody is interesting
in their
own way and I hadn’t been pursuing that. So I was well chastised.” 53
“It
was almost
detrimental to him at that age. He was almost too bookish for the jocks
he was
around,” explained his son Ivan. “He might have gone further [in
baseball] if
it weren’t for his bookishness, but that’s who he was.” “I remember my
dad said
once he couldn’t understand James Joyce, and that was inconceivable to
me. He
was so well-read,” Ivan told a reporter.54
Nahem
once recalled that,
“I wasn’t a natural woman-hunter, and most players, even the
successfully
married ones, were skirt-chasers, they really were. I wasn’t too happy
at that.
[But] the class of women in the big leagues was higher than in the
minor
leagues. That was another reason to aspire to the big leagues.”55
Few
of
Nahem’s minor league teammates had ever met a New Yorker before.
Someone gave
him the nickname “Subway Sam,” which lasted throughout his baseball
career.
Nahem
enjoyed the
physical and psychological aspects of being a good athlete, but, he
recalled,
“when I became political and radicalized I tried to think of sports in
political and social terms.”56
Nahem
had to deal with
anti-Semitism among his teammates and other players. “I was aware I was
a
Jewish player and different from them. There were very few Jewish
players at
the time,” Nahem said. (There were 10 Jews on major league rosters in
1938,
Nahem’s rookie year.) “I don’t blame the other players at all. Many of
them
came from where they probably had never met a Jewish person. You know,
they
subscribed to that anti-Semitism that was latent throughout the
country. I
fought it whenever I appeared…Much of it was implicit: Jews and money,
Jews and
selfishness.” To combat the stereotypes, “I especially made sure I
tipped as
much or more than any other player.”57
As
a
left-wing radical and a Jew who faced anti-Semitic bigotry, Nahem was
sympathetic to the plight of African Americans.
“I
was in a strange
position,” he explained. “The majority of my fellow ballplayers,
wherever I
was, were very much against black ballplayers, and the reason was
economic and
very clear. They knew these guys had the ability to be up there and
they knew
their jobs were threatened directly and they very, very vehemently did
all
sorts of things to discourage black ballplayers.”58 His views were
particularly
selfless, because as a marginal player he was more likely than a real
star to
be replaced by a black pitcher if major league baseball ended its ban
on black
players.
Nahem
talked to some of
his teammates to encourage them to be more open-minded. “I did my
political
work there,” he told an interviewer years later. “I would take one guy
aside if
I thought he was amiable in that respect and talk to him, man to man,
about the
subject. I felt that was the way I could be most effective.”59
“That’s
why he was so
political,” his daughter Joanne explained. “He believed that people
deserved
more, so he had a great faith in humanity.”60
It
is not surprising that
Nahem was attracted to the Communist Party (CP).61 From the 1920s through
the 1940s,
the CP — although never even approaching 100,000 members — had a
disproportionate influence in progressive and liberal circles. It
attracted
many idealistic Americans — including many Jews and African Americans —
who
were concerned about economic and racial injustice. In the U.S., the CP
took
strong stands for unions and women’s equality and against racism,
anti-Semitism, and emerging fascism in Europe. It sent organizers to
the Jim
Crow South to organize sharecroppers and tenant farmers and was active
in
campaigns against lynching, police brutality, and Jim Crow laws. The CP
led
campaigns to stop landlords from evicting tenants and to push for
unemployment
benefits. In Harlem, it helped launch the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t
Work”
campaign, urging consumers to boycott stores that refused to hire
African-American employees.62
The
cause of baseball’s
color line was a natural for the Communist Party. It was no accident
that
Lester Rodney, sports editor of the CP-sponsored newspaper, the Daily Worker,
was one of the leading figures in the
effort to integrate baseball. Beginning in the 1930s, the CP, along
with the
Negro press, civil rights groups, progressive white activists, and
radical
politicians waged a sustained campaign against baseball’s Jim Crow
system. They
believed that if they could push baseball to dismantle its color line,
they
could make inroads in other facets of American society. In 1938, the
CP-led
American Youth Congress passed a resolution censuring the major leagues
for its
exclusion of black players. In 1939, New York State Sen. Charles Perry,
who
represented Harlem, introduced a resolution that condemned baseball for
discriminating against black ballplayers. In 1940 leftist sports
editors from
college newspapers in New York adopted a similar resolution. Black
sportswriters — particularly Wendell
Smith of
the Pittsburgh
Courier and Sam
Lacy of
the Baltimore
Afro-American —
made baseball part of a larger crusade to confront Jim Crow laws. After
the
U.S. entered World War II in 1941 Negro papers enthusiastically
supported the
“Double V” campaign — victory over fascism overseas and over racism at
home.
For
several years,
left-wing unions marched in May Day parades with “End Jim Crow in
Baseball”
signs. On July 7, 1940, the Trade Union Athletic Association, comprised
of 30
left-wing unions, held an “End Jim Crow in Baseball” demonstration at
the New
York World’s Fair. Progressive unions and civil rights groups picketed
outside
Yankee Stadium, the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets
Field in
New York City, and Comiskey
Park and Wrigley
Field in
Chicago to demand an end to baseball’s color line. In June 1942,
several major
unions — including the United Auto Workers and the National Maritime
Union, as
well as the New York Industrial Union Council of the Congress of
Industrial
Organizations (CIO) — sent resolutions to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw
Mountain Landis demanding
an end to baseball segregation. That December,
ten leaders of the CIO, the progressive union federation, went to the
winter
meetings of baseball’s executives at Chicago’s Ambassador East Hotel to
demand
that major league baseball recruit black players, but Landis refused to
meet
with them.63 In December 1943, the
publisher of
the Chicago
Defender, a leading black newspaper, arrange
for the well-known actor, singer and activist Paul Robeson to head a
delegation
(that included Wendell Smith) to meet with Landis and major league
owners at
the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. Robeson told them: ”The time has
come
when you must change your attitude toward Negroes. . . . Because
baseball is a
national game, it is up to baseball to see that discrimination does not
become
an American pattern. And it should do this this year.”64
It
is unlikely that Nahem
actively participated in many of these protests, since he was playing
pro
baseball and attending law school or working during the off-season. He
was
probably the only Communist Party member on a professional baseball
roster, but
none of the profiles about him during his playing days referred to his
left-wing politics. It is possible that he didn’t discuss his political
ideas
with reporters, or perhaps they liked him enough to keep his
controversial
views out of their stories. As Nahem recalled, “The sportswriters liked
me a
lot, since no matter what, I always had some cliché I could twist
around for
them.”65 He was well-educated,
articulate
and quotable, and had a quick wit. For example, when a sportswriter
asked him
about his lackluster performance during spring training in 1940, Nahem
replied,
“I am now in the egregiously anonymous position of pitching batting
practice to
the batting practice pitchers.”66 When a radio
interviewer asked him
how to say “Merry Christmas” in Arabic, Nahem responded with the name
of a
Syrian cheese omelet.67
During
World War II, the
American military ran a robust baseball program at home and overseas.
President
Franklin Roosevelt believed it would help soldiers stay in shape and
boost the
country’s morale. Many professional players were in the military, so
the
quality of play was often excellent. After Germany surrendered in May
1945, the
military expanded its baseball program while American troops remained
in
Europe. That year, over 200,000 American soldiers were playing baseball
on
military teams in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Britain.68
Many
of the Negro
Leagues’ finest ballplayers saw military service during the war, but
like other
African Americans they faced discrimination and humiliation as
soldiers. Most
black soldiers with baseball talent were confined to playing on
all-black
teams. When Jackie
Robinson went
out for the baseball team at Ft. Riley, Kansas, a white player told him
that
the officer in charge said, “I’ll break up the team before I’ll have a
nigger
on it.”69 Larry
Doby,
who would later become the first African American in the
American League, was blocked from playing baseball for the all-white
Great
Lakes Navy team near Chicago. Monte
Irvin,
a Negro League standout who later starred for the New York
Giants, recalled that, “When I was in the Army I took basic training in
the
South. I’d been asked to give up everything, including my life, to
defend
democracy. Yet when I went to town I had to ride in the back of a bus,
or not
at all on some buses.”70 A few African
Americans played on
racially integrated military teams in the South Pacific, but not in
other
military installations.71
Nahem
entered the
military in November 1942. He volunteered for the infantry and hoped to
see
combat in Europe to help defeat Nazism. But he spent his first two
years at
Fort Totten in New York. While stationed there, however, he pitched for
the
Anti-Aircraft Redlegs of the Eastern Defense Command. The team was part
of the
Sunset League comprised of teams from military bases in the New England
area. In
1943 he set a league record with a 0.85 earned run average. He also
finished
second in hitting with a .400 batting average and played every
defensive
position except catcher.72 These military games
were important
enough to be reported in the New York Times and
other local papers.
While
stationed at Fort
Totten, Nahem pitched in several exhibition games with current and
former major
leaguers serving in the military. In June 1944 he pitched in the Polo
Grounds
in a game to raise money for War Bonds before 30,000 spectators.73 On September 5, 1944,
his Ft.
Totten team beat the major league Philadelphia Athletics by a 9-5
margin in an
exhibition game. Nahem not only pitched six innings, giving up only two
runs
and five hits, but also slugged two homers, accounting for seven of his
team’s
runs.74
Sent
overseas in late
1944, Nahem served with an anti-aircraft artillery division. From his
base in
Rheims, he was assigned to run two baseball leagues for servicemen in
France,
while also managing and pitching for his own team, the Overseas
Invasion
Service Expedition (OISE) All-Stars, which represented the army command
in
charge of communication and logistics in the liberated areas. The team
was
comprised mainly of semi-pro, college, and ex-minor-league players.75 Besides Nahem, only
one other OISE
player had major league experience — Russ
Bauers,
who had compiled a 29-29 won-loss record with the Pirates
between 1936 and 1941.76 When Nahem wasn’t
pitching, he
played first base.77
Defying
the military
establishment and baseball tradition, Nahem insisted on having African
Americans on his team. One was Willard
Brown,
an outfielder with the Kansas City Monarchs and one of the
Negro Leagues’ most feared sluggers.78 The other was Leon
Day,
a star pitcher for the Negro League’s Newark Eagles.79
Each
branch of the
military and different divisions had their own teams. The competition
among the
American teams in Europe was fierce. Nahem’s OISE team won 17 games and
lost
only one, attracting as many as 10,000 fans to their games.80 Nahem beat the Navy
All-Stars in
England, then pitcher Bob Keane beat the same team in France, to
advance the
OISE team to the semi-finals.81 On September 1, in the
semi-final
round, Nahem pitched the OISE All-Stars into the European champion
series by
beating the 66th Division team, representing the Sixteenth Corps, by a
5-4
margin in 11innings. Nahem also got four hits in five at-bats.82
The
other team that
reached the finals was the 71st Infantry Red Circlers, representing the
3rd
Army, commanded by General George Patton and named for their red
circles
shoulder patches. One of Patton’s top officers assigned St. Louis
Cardinals
All-Star outfielder Harry
Walker to
assemble a team — the Red Circlers — to represent the
3rd Army. Given Patton’s clout, it probably wasn’t difficult for Walker
to arrange
for eight other major leaguers to be transferred to his team. Besides
Walker,
the Red Circlers included Cincinnati Reds’ 6-foot-6 inch sidearm
pitcher Ewell
“the Whip” Blackwell, 83 Reds second
baseman Benny
Zientara,
Pirates outfielders Johnny
Wyrostek and Maurice
Van Robays,
Cardinals catcher Herb
Bremer,
Cardinals pitcher Al
Brazle,
Pirates pitcher Ken
Heintzelman,
and Giants pitcher Ken
Trinkle.
Against
the powerful Red Circlers, few people gave Nahem’s OISE All-Stars much
of a
chance to win the European Theater of Operations (ETO) championship,
known as
the G.I. World Series.It took place in September, a few months after
the U.S.
and the Allies had defeated Germany.
The
OISE All-Stars and
the Red Circlers played the first two games in Nuremberg, Germany, in
the same
stadium where Hitler had addressed Nazi Party rallies. Allied bombing
had
destroyed the city but somehow spared the stadium. The U.S. Army laid
out a
baseball diamond and renamed the stadium Soldiers Field. 84
On
September 2, 1945,
Blackwell pitched the Red Circlers to a 9-2 victory in the first game
of the
best-of-five series in front of 50,000 fans, most of them American
soldiers.85 In the second game,
Day held
Patton’s army all-star team to one run. Brown drove in the OISE’s team
first
run, and then Nahem (who was playing first base) doubled in the seventh
inning
to knock in the go-ahead run. OISE won the game by a 2-1 margin. Day
struck out
10 batters, allowed four hits and walked only two hitters.86
The
two teams flew to
OISE’s home field in Rheims for the next two games. The OISE team won
the third
game, as the Times reported,
“behind the
brilliant pitching of S/Sgt Sam Nahem,” who outdueled Blackwell to win
2-1,
scattering four hits and striking out six batters.87 In the fourth game,
the 3rd
Army’s Bill
Ayers,
who
had pitched in the minor leagues since 1937, shut out the OISE squad,
beating
Day by a 5-0 margin.88
The
teams returned to
Nuremberg for the deciding game on September 8, 1945. Nahem started for
the
OISE team in front of over 50,000 spectators. After the Red Circlers
scored a
run and then loaded the bases with one out in the fourth inning, Nahem
took
himself out and brought in Bob Keane, who got out of the inning without
allowing any more runs and completed the game. The OISE team won the
game
2-1. 89
A
Jewish Communist and
two Negro Leaguers had helped OISE win the GI World Series. The Sporting News adorned
its report on the final game
with a photo of Nahem.90
Back
in France, Brigadier
Gen. Charles Thrasher organized a parade and a banquet dinner, with
steaks and
champagne, for the OISE All-Stars. As historian Robert Weintraub noted:
“Day
and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat with their teammates in many
major-league towns, celebrated alongside their fellow soldiers.”91
Having
won the ETO World
Series, the OISE All-Stars traveled to Italy to play the Mediterranean
Theater
champions, the 92nd Infantry Division Buffaloes, an all-black division.
Several
major league players on the 5th Army’s Red Circles — Blackwell,
Heintzelman,
Van Robays, Zientara, Garland
Lawing,
and Walker — got themselves added to the OISE All Stars
roster, which meant that some of OISE’s semipro, college, and minor
league
players were left behind.92 The OISE All-Stars
beat the
Buffaloes in three straight games, with Day, Keane, and Blackwell
gaining the
wins. Then Day switched to the all-black team and beat Blackwell and
his former
OISE teammates, 8-0, in Nice, France.93
One
of the intriguing
aspects of this episode is that, despite the fact that both major
league
baseball and the American military were racially segregated, no major
newspaper
even mentioned the historic presence of two African Americans on the
OISE
roster. If there were any protests among the white players, or among
the fans —
or if any of the 71st Division’s officers raised objections to having
African
American players on the opposing team — they were ignored by reporters.
For
example, an Associated Press story about the fourth game simply
referred to
“pitcher Leon Day of Newark.” 94
In
October 1945, a month
after Nahem pitched his integrated team to victory in the military
championship
series in Europe, Branch Rickey announced that Robinson
had signed a contract with
the Dodgers.
Nahem
played high-caliber baseball during his almost four year service in the
military. He was only 30 when he was discharged from military service.
Major
league teams were supposed to give their military veterans a chance to
resume
playing, but when Nahem came back from the war in early 1946, he did
not return
to the Phillies. Under the reserve clause, he was still the Phillies’
property
unless they formally released him, but there is no record that they did
so.
Whether the team let him know he wasn’t wanted or whether Nahem decided
to give
up on the majors and finally start practicing law is not known.
After
returning to New
York, Nahem worked briefly as a law clerk and intermittently in his
family’s
export-import business. He played baseball on weekends for a top-flight
semi-pro team, the Brooklyn Bushwicks, who were on a par with, and
occasionally
even better than, the best minor league teams.95 The Times and
other New York papers regularly covered the Bushwicks’ games and
Nahem’s
exploits on the mound. In August he pitched an 11-inning no-hitter
against the
Seaport Gulls, giving up only two walks and facing only 35 batters,
winning by
a 1-0 score. It was the first no-hitter by a Bushwicks pitcher in ten
years.
Nahem’s performance with the Bushwicks revealed that he was still an
excellent
pitcher, so his absence from a major league roster remains a mystery.96
In
June 1946, a columnist
for the Nashville
Tennessean reported that while pitching
on Sundays for the Bushwicks, and practicing law during the week, Nahem
was
also a candidate for the New York State Assembly from a Brooklyn
district.
The Sporting
News and the Chicago Tribune both
published brief notes
reporting Nahem’s candidacy, too.97 But an article in
the Brooklyn
Eagle the following month reported that
Nahem “has given up any idea of running for the State Assembly.”98 In August, however,
the Sporting
News wrote that Nahem was thinking of
running for Congress from Brooklyn.99 Little is known about
this aspect
of Nahem’s life and there’s no evidence that he actually ran for any
public
office. His oldest son Ivan wasn’t aware that Nahem had ever run, or
considered
running.100
Nahem
couldn’t have mounted much of a campaign because by October 1946, he
was with
the Bushwicks in Caracas, Venezuela, representing the United States in
the
Inter-American Tournament. Against teams representing Mexico,
Venezuela, and
Cuba, Nahem won three and lost one. He clinched the tournament title
for the
Bushwicks with a 7-6 win over Cuba.
Nahem
was back with the
Bushwicks for the 1947 season. In June, he pitched the team to a 4-1
victory
over the Homestead Grays of the Negro Leagues, striking out eight
batters.101 In July he threw a
six-hitter and
struck out 10 hitters to beat the Memphis Red Sox, another Negro League
team,
by 7-2.102 On October 12, 1947,
he pitched
the Bushwicks to a 3-0 victory with a one-hitter against a barnstorming
team,
the World Series All-Stars, that included major leaguers Eddie
Stanky, Phil
Rizzuto,
and Ralph
Branca,
who
was the losing pitcher. It was Nahem’s 17th win that season.103 He eventually won 21
games in a
row. During the 1946 and 1947 seasons, Nahem was 33-6 for the Bushwicks.104
During
those two years,
while still playing for the Bushwicks, Nahem also played for the Sunset
Stars,
a semipro team based in Newport, Rhode Island. The Stars played their
games on
Wednesday nights and Nahem — who had played in the same league in 1943
while
stationed at Ft. Totten — was popular with the Rhode Island fans.105 The Stars played local
Rhode
Island teams as well as Negro League teams and barnstorming teams like
the
House of David.106 In a game in June 1946
against the
Boston Colored Giants, Nahem pitched 12 innings and struck out 22
batters, only
to lose 3-2.107 That year he played in
16 of the
Stars’ 18 night games and struck out 193 hitters in 147 innings,
posting a 1.81
earned run average.108
Nahem
played winter ball with the Navegantes del Magallanes club of the
Venezuelan
Professional Baseball League. There he pitched 14 consecutive complete
games in
the 1946-47 season to set a league record that still stands today.
Nahem
once explained that
he made more money playing for the Bushwicks, the Sunset Stars, and the
Venezuelan club in the same year than he made as major league pitcher.109
At
the start of 1948,
Nahem was still pitching with the Bushwicks. But by April, the Phillies
beckoned again and he began another brief fling in the major leagues.110 On April 30, his first
game that
season in a Phillies uniform, he pitched two innings in relief against
the
Dodgers, allowing only one hit but walking five batters and giving up
four
runs.111
The
Phillies were one of
baseball’s most racist teams, known for verbal abuse toward Jackie
Robinson in
his rookie season the previous year. Manager Ben
Chapman had
gained notoriety for his vicious taunting of Robinson
and was still managing the team during the first half of the 1948
season.112
Years
later, Nahem
recalled that “he [Chapman] left me in once to take a real beating.
When you’re
a racist you are also an anti-Semite. Some reporters asked him about
it,
whether he kept me in there for some reason other than the demands of
the game.
He denied that it was anti-Semitism.”113
“I
was very much for Jackie
Robinson and at one point I tried to counter some of this racist stuff
openly,”
Nahem recounted. “One of the southerners was fulminating in the
clubhouse in a
racist way and I made some halfway innocuous remark defending blacks
coming in
to baseball. Boy, he went into a real tantrum and really came down on
me. So I
decided I would not confront anyone openly. Your prestige on a ballclub
depends
on your won-loss record and your earned run average. I didn’t have that
to back
me up. I only had logic and decency and humanity. So after that I would
just
speak to some of the guys privately about racism in a mild way.”114
In
one game, Nahem threw
a pitch that almost hit Roy
Campanella,
the Dodgers’ African American rookie catcher.
“He
had come up that year
and had been thrown at a lot, although there was absolutely no reason
why I
would throw at him,” Nahem said. “A ball escaped me, which was not
unusual, and
went toward his head. He got up and gave me such a glare. I felt so
badly about
it I felt like yelling to him, ‘Roy, please, I really didn’t mean it. I
belong
to the NAACP.”115
Given
his poor
performance with the Phillies in 1942, and his disagreements with
Chapman, it
is surprising that the Phillies invited Nahem back. It is possible that
Nahem’s
friend Eddie
Miller —
an All-Star shortstop whom the Phillies acquired before the 1948 season
—
persuaded the team to give Nahem another chance.116 During that season
Nahem went 3-3
for the Phillies, mostly in relief, on a sixth-place team that had its
16th
straight losing season. He pitched his last major league game on
September 11,
1948, giving up one hit and one run, and striking out two batters, in
the ninth
inning against the Boston Braves.117 A week later, the
Phillies
released him.118
During
four seasons
spread over ten years, Nahem pitched 224 innings in 90 major league
games.
Plagued with control problems, he struck out 101 batters but walked 127.119
Nahem
took full advantage
of his pitching repertoire. As noted, pitching exclusively overhand
(mostly
curves and fastballs) against left-handed batters and exclusively
sidearm
(mostly sliders and fastballs) against right-handed hitters was rare
and
perhaps unique.120 Not surprisingly, he
performed
better in righty-righty matchups (.232 during his major league career)
than
against lefty swingers (.307).121
Nahem
was grateful for
the friendships, experiences, and notoriety that his major league
career
provided. But looking back, he noted that he wasn’t very happy in his
big
league days. Part of it was a matter of lifestyle. “We traveled a lot;
we
didn’t have a stable place to stay.” Another part was his failure to
live up to
his expectations as a player. “One day I’d pitch OK in relief, the next
day
they hit the shit out of me. It’s hard to be happy in something you’re
doing in
just a mediocre way.”122
He
once said: “I often
wish that God had given me movement on my fastball, but he didn’t.”123 In another interview,
he observed,
“I had just-above-mediocre stuff. Just enough to flash at times.”124 He particularly
regretted that,
even as a big leaguer, he never received the mentoring that could have
helped
him improve his pitching. Long after he retired, he learned that
coaches for
opposing teams noticed that he tipped his pitches — he raised his arms
higher
during the windup when throwing a curve — but his own coaches had never
spotted
this flaw. “If I had some decent coaches, they would have spotted it,
too,”
Nahem said. 125
Looking
back on his major
league career, Nahem wistfully observed that “if I executed what I
understand
now, I could have been quite a decent pitcher. I had enough stuff to be
a
fairly good pitcher…I was a smart pitcher out there, but at the last
second, I
wouldn’t have confidence in my control, so I would forget to pitch high
or low
or outside and just try to get it over the plate.”126 In a revealing
exchange, he once
asked Phillies teammate Robin
Roberts,
a future Hall of Fame pitcher, if he was ever scared when he
was on the mound. Roberts said he wasn’t. “That is what really pisses
me off,”
Nahem responded. “I’m scared stiff out there.”127
Despite
his trepidation
on the mound, Nahem kept his sense of humor intact. While with the
Phillies, he
was brought in as a reliever to face three of the Cardinals’ best
hitters
— Red
Schoendienst, Enos
Slaughter,
and Stan
Musial.
He retired Schoendienst and then signaled Phillies’ first
baseman Dick
Sisler to
come to the mound. As Roberts recalled: “We all saw Dick laughing while
he
trotted back to first. After the inning was over Dick said that Sam had
told
him, ‘I got the first guy, you want to try these next two?’”128
After
leaving the
Phillies, Nahem pitched briefly for the San Juan team in the Puerto
Rican
League at the end of 1948.129 Then he rejoined the
Bushwicks for
the 1949 season. He won seven games in a row by the end of June and
finished
the season with a 10-7 record.130 That season he still
occasionally
played for the Sunset Stars. He was so popular that the local paper,
the Newport
Mercury, published a story about his wedding.
According to the June 10, 1949 edition, “After playing in the 13-inning
game
Wednesday which ran past midnight Nahem caught the 2:10 train at
Providence and
arrived in New York three hours before his wedding.”131 In August, Nahem’s
Stars lost to
the Boston Colored Giants, but he struck out seven batters and got
three hits
in five at bats.132 He pitched his final
game for the
Bushwicks in October, then hung up his spikes.
By
the time Nahem ended
his playing career, the Cold War was in full swing, casting a chill on
American
radicals, but he remained a committed leftist. Just as he had
participated in
radical causes during the 1930s, like raising money for the
anti-fascists
during the Spanish Civil War, Nahem continued his political activism.
In 1949,
at age 34, he married art student Elsie Hanson, whom he’d met at a
Communist
Party-sponsored concert and fundraiser.133 In 1950, his name
appeared on a
list of candidates running for the New York State Assembly from New
York City
as the candidate of the American Labor Party (ALP), a left-leaning
group whose
most prominent member was Congressman Vito Marcantonio.134 Perhaps the ALP
thought that his
fame as a former ballplayer would garner votes. Whether he actually
campaigned
for the seat isn’t known, but he didn’t win. In 1951, according to his
son
Ivan, he participated in protests against the controversial conviction
of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were sentenced to death for being
Soviet spies.
During
that period, he
worked briefly as a law clerk in New York. Nahem told an interviewer
that he
wanted to practice civil liberties law, but that the jobs in that field
were
dominated by graduates of Ivy League law schools, stiff competition for
a
graduate of St. John’s School of Law.135 During the Cold War,
even
organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, much less
mainstream law
firms, were wary of hiring lawyers with left-wing views, especially
Communists.
“He
went into the law
thinking he’d be Clarence Darrow,” his son Ivan explained, “but he was
soon
disillusioned and bored, and quit.” He worked briefly for his family’s
import
business,136 as a door-to-door
salesman, and
then as a longshoreman unloading banana boats on the New York docks.
The
FBI kept tabs on
Nahem, as it did with many leftists during the 1950s Red Scare. FBI
agents
would show up at his workplaces and tell his bosses that he was a
Communist. He
lost several jobs as a result. It isn’t clear when their surveillance
of him
began or ended, but as late as 1961 — when he had moved to California
and was
working in a chemical fertilizer plant and was a union leader — the FBI
was
still keeping a file on him.137
To
escape the Cold War witch-hunting, and to start life anew, Nahem, his
wife
Elsie, and their two children (Ivan, born in 1950, and Joanne, born in
1953)
moved to the San Francisco area in 1955. They settled first in Mill
Valley, and
then blue-collar Richmond in the East Bay. A third child, Andrew, was
born in
1961. Elsie found work as a commercial artist.
Nahem
got a job at the Chevron fertilizer plant in Richmond, owned by the
giant
Standard Oil Corporation. During most of his 25 years at Chevron (more
than
twice the time he spent playing professional baseball), he worked a
grueling
schedule — two weeks on midnight shift, two weeks on day shift, then
two weeks
on swing shift.
By
1957, like many other Communists, Nahem and Elsie became disillusioned
with
Russia’s stifling of democracy in Eastern Europe and within its own
borders,
and left the Communist Party. But he remained an activist. He served as
head of
the local safety committee for the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers
union at
the Richmond plant. Nahem was often offered management positions, but
he
refused to take them, preferring to remain loyal to his coworkers and
his union.
He ended as head operator, the best job he could get and still stay in
the
union.
Nahem
liked to relax by watching football and baseball on television and
passing on
his enthusiasm for sports to his kids. “When I was a kid,” son Ivan
recalled,
“some of my best times with him were playing catch.”
While
still working at Chevron, Nahem moved to nearby Berkeley in 1964. That
year the
Free Speech Movement started on the nearby University of
California-Berkeley
campus and the town became a hotbed of radicalism. Despite his grueling
work
schedule, Nahem immersed himself in the new wave of activism. He took
his
children to civil rights and anti-war demonstrations. His son Ivan
recalled
Nahem hosting lots of dinner parties where the talk was all about
politics. In
1969, Nahem helped lead a strike among Chevron workers that attracted
support
from the Berkeley campus radicals.
After
he retired from
Chevron in 1980, he volunteered at the University Art Museum and
frequented a
Berkeley coffee shop, where he loved engaging in political discussions
with
local students, artists, and activists. After George Bush defeated Al
Gore for
president in 2000, Nahem told a nephew: “For much of my adult life I’ve
seen
the working class vote against their long-term interests. This is the
first
time I’ve seen them vote against their short-term interests.”138
Sam
and his brother Joe
remained close until Joe’s death in 1992. “They were hilarious together
at parties, reminiscent
sometimes of their heroes the Marx Brothers,” recalled Joe’s daughter
Beladee.139 At a dinner party in
the 1990s,
Nahem told his fellow diners, “Many people used to compare me with Sandy
Koufax.
They would say ‘You were no Koufax’. I told them thanks for
putting me and Koufax in the same sentence.”140
Elsie
Nahem died of
cancer in 1974. Sam never remarried but he had a long-term relationship
with
Nancy Shafsky. He died on April 19, 2004 in Berkeley at age 88.141 Nahem was survived by
his three
children and three grandchildren. His older sister Victoria and her
husband
Abraham Silvera had a son, Aaron Albert (Al)
Silvera,
who played in 14 games for the Cincinnati Redlegs in 1955 and
1956, making Nahem the uncle of another major leaguer.
Nahem
was proud of his accomplishments on the diamond, which gave him a
lifetime of
memories and stories that he shared with his friends and family.
“I
loved the feeling of a
baseball in my hand. And the perfect meeting of the bat with the ball
was the
nearest thing to an orgasm,” he wrote in his autobiographical essay
during his
later years. “In both you are disembodied, weightless.”142
Although
he often talked about his days as a major league pitcher, he rarely
discussed
the accomplishment that best combined his athletic talent and his
political
views — his role in integrating military baseball.
Acknowledgments
The
author wishes to thank Ivan Nahem, Beladee Nahem Griffiths, Joel
Isaacs, David
Nemec, Bill Nowlin, Robert Elias, Mike Lynch, Robert Weintraub, Lee
Lowenfish,
Shawn Hennessy, John and Dan Wormhoudt, Isaac Silvera, Colleen
Bradley-Sanders
(Brooklyn College archivist), and Cassidy Lent (Baseball Hall of Fame
reference
librarian) for their help.
A
version of this paper
was originally presented at the Thirtieth Cooperstown
Symposium on
Baseball and American Culture, 2018.
This
version was reviewed by Rory Costello and Warren Corbett and
fact-checked by
Alan Cohen.
Sources
Interviews
Ivan
Nahem (Sam’s son), January 3, 2017.
Beladee
Nahem Griffiths (Sam’s niece), January 7 and 14, 2018.
Correspondence
Email
from Nahem’s cousin Joel Isaacs, January 9, 2017.
Email
from David Nemec, December 12, 2017.
Email
from Robert Weintraub, December 27, 2017.
Email
from Beladee Nahem Griffiths, January 9, 2018.
Email
from Colleen Bradley-Sanders, May 25, 2018.
Email
from Sam Bernstein, June 5, 2018.
Email
from Dan Wormhoudt, June 23, 2018.
Unpublished
essay
“The
Autobiography of Samuel Ralph Nahem” (15 pages) provided by Ivan Nahem
(hereafter “The Autobiography”).
Books
Boxerman,
Burton, and
Benita Boxerman, Jews and Baseball,
Vol. 1 (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland, 2007).
Ephross,
Peter, with
Martin Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their
Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players (Jefferson,
North
Carolina: McFarland, 2012).
Horvitz,
Peter S., and
Joachim Horvitz, The Big Book of
Jewish Baseball (New
York: SPI Books, 2001).
Klima,
John. The
Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days
of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII (New York: St.
Martin’s
Press, 2015).
Mead,
William B. Baseball Goes to War (Washington:
Farragut
Publishing Co., 1985).
Roberts,
Robin, and C.
Paul Rogers III, The Whiz Kids and
the 1950 Pennant (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2000).
Weintraub,
Robert. The
Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of
Baseball’s Golden Age (New York: Little Brown &
Co., 2013).
Newspaper
articles
Eskenazi,
Joe. “Artful
Dodger: Baseball’s ‘Subway’ Sam Strikes Out Batters, and with the
Ladies’
Too,” J
Weekly, October 23, 2003 jweekly.com/article/full/20827/artful-dodger.
Eskenazi,
Joe.“ ‘Subway’
Sam Nahem, Ballplayer and Union Man, Dies at 88,” J Weekly,
April 23, 2004. jweekly.com/article/full/22430/-subway-sam-nahem-ballplayer-and-union-man-dies-at-88.
Isaacs,
Stan. “Major
Leaguer Sam Nahem Was One-of-a-Kind,” TheColumnists.com,
2004.
Kelley,
Brent. “Sam
Nahem: The Pitching Attorney,” Sports Collectors
Digest,
December 23, 1994.
Miller,
Stephen. “Subway
Sam Nahem, 88, Pitcher and Briefly a Dodger,” New York Sun,
May 4,
2004.
Parrott,
Harold. “Nahem
Fortunes Curved Up and His Pitches Over Plate On Rickey Biblical
Quotation and
‘Psychology Séance,’” The Sporting News,
May 22, 1941.
Yollin,
Patricia. “Samuel
Ralph Nahem — Big-Leaguer in Many Ways,” San Francisco
Chronicle,
May 3, 2004. sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Samuel-Ralph-Nahem-big-leaguer-in-many-ways-2762291.php.
Notes
1 Sam
Nahem, “The Autobiography of Samuel Ralph Nahem” (15 pages), provided
by Ivan
Nahem (hereafter “The Autobiography”), undated.
2 “The
Autobiography.”
3 Harold
Parrott, “Nahem Fortunes Curved Up and His Pitches Over Plate on Rickey
Biblical Quotation and ‘Psychology Séance,’” The Sporting News,
May 22, 1941.
4 ncdrisc.org/data-downloads-height.html.
5 “The
Autobiography.”
6 “The
Autobiography.”
7 Parrott,
“Nahem Fortunes Curved Up.”
8 “The
Autobiography.” Nahem also tells this story in an interview for Ephross
with
Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words;
in Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers III, The Whiz Kids and
the 1950
Pennant (Philadelphia:
Temple
University Press, 2000); and in an interview in Brent Kelley, “Sam
Nahem: The
Pitching Attorney,” Sports Collectors
Digest,
December 23, 1994. Nahem was wrong about Mungo’s origins. He was from
South
Carolina, not Oklahoma.
9 “The
Autobiography.”
10 During
his playing career, many news stories about Nahem reported that he
graduated
from Brooklyn College, but research by Brooklyn College archivist
Colleen
Bradley-Sanders indicates that he left Brooklyn College in 1935 after
his
sophomore year. Email from Colleen Bradley-Sanders, May 25, 2018.
11 Burton
Boxerman and Benita Boxerman, Jews and Baseball,
Vol. 1 (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland, 2007); Peter S. Horvitz and Joachim
Horvitz, The Big Book of
Jewish Baseball (New
York: SPI Books, 2001).
12 https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/team.cgi?id=bab1fb39
13 “Brooks
Drop Nichols,” Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette,
June
16, 1936.
14 https://www.baseball-reference.com/register/team.cgi?id=c4f629c6;
“Blues Even Series,” Alexandria (LA) Town Talk,
August
29, 1936; “Dynamite Dunn Sets Evangeline Pace with Willow,” Alexandria
(LA) Town
Talk, September 12, 1936.
15 “Brooks
Blast Out 17 Blows to Beat Binghampton, 13-8,” Reading
Times, July 18, 1935.
16 “Along
Sport Lane,” Hazleton (PA) Standard-Sentinel,
May 14, 1936; “Inside Stuff,” Allentown (PA) Morning Call,
June
15, 1936; “Brooks Drop Nichols,” Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette,
June
16, 1936.
17 “Allentown
Brooks Hope to Get into Initial Spring Drill This Afternoon,” Allentown Call,
April 7, 1936. It is not clear why the
reporter used the first name “Hassel” in referring to
Nahem.
Nahem’s son Ivan has never heard that name used to refer to his father.
18“Priest,
Pitcher, Cop Pass Tests for Bar,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
December 23, 1938; George Kirksey (Associated Press), “Dodger Fans May
Demand
Nahem Plead Own Defense,” Nashville Tennessean,
March 7, 1940. Nahem also took courses at Brooklyn College during the
Fall 1938
semester. He earned a grade in one class and an incomplete in the other
course.
Interview with Brooklyn College archivist Colleen Bradley-Sanders,
January 23,
2018. He may have used the course credit toward his law degree at St.
John’s
University.
19 baseball-reference.com/register/player.fcgi?id=nahem-001sam.
20 The Times was
mistaken. Nahem was a right-handed
pitcher, not a “southpaw,” baseball slang for left-handed.
21 baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHI/PHI193810021.shtml.
22 Peter
Ephross with Martin Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their
Own Words: Oral Histories of 23 Players (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland, 2012). For
Grimes’s influence on Nahem, see also Robert B. Cooke, “Nahem, Lawyer —
Plea to
Dodgers,” New York Herald
Tribune, February
10, 1940.
23 “14
From the Minors Recalled by Dodgers,” New York Times,
August 29, 1939; “Series Lead to Nashville,” New York
Times, October
2, 1939.
24 Roscoe
McGowen, “Mungo of Dodgers Bent on Comeback,” New York Times,
February 18, 1940.
25 Stanley
Frank, New
York Post, February 22, 1940. This article is from
the Nahem file in the Baseball Hall of Fame archives. The headline is
missing.
26 Roscoe
McGowen, “19 Dodgers Face Nahem in Inning,” New York Times,
March 5, 1940.
27 Kirksey,
“Dodger Fans May Demand Nahem Plead Own Defense.”
28 Roscoe
McGowen, “Dodgers Abided by Landis Hints, Not ‘Orders,’ MacPhail
Explains,” New York Times,
May 29, 1940.
29“Cards
Option Three Players,” New York Times,
July
2, 1940.
30 Kingsley
Childs, “Star Outfielder Traded by Cards,” New York Times,
June
13, 1940.
31 “Exports
Face Buffs Today,” Brownsville (Texas) Herald,
September 17, 1940; “Vols Rest for First Game
of Dixie Series,” Jackson (Tennessee) Sun,
September 24, 1940; “Cards and Browns Draw 4
Texas Aces,” The Sporting News,
October 31,
1940; “Nashville Takes Lead Over Buffs in Dixie Series,” Waco News-Tribune,
September 26, 1940; “Volunteers Take
Shutout Triumph Over Bison Team,” Waco News-Tribune,
September 30, 1940. Harold Parrott, “Nahem Fortunes Curved Up and His
Pitches
Over Plate on Rickey Biblical Quotation and ‘Psychology Séance,’” The Sporting News,
May 22, 1941.
32 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
33 Parrott,
“Nahem Fortunes Curved Up.”
34 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
In 1941 Nahem told the New York Daily News that
Warneke helped him improve his slider. See also Joe Trimble, “Cards
Keep Nahem
as Starting Hurler,” New York Daily News,
May 14, 1941.
35 Tommy
Holmes, “Nahem in Strong Bid for Dodger Pitching Job,” Brooklyn Eagle,
February 22, 1940.
36 Parrott,
“Nahem Fortunes Curved Up.”
37 James
Murphy, “Sammy Eyes Series Dough,” Brooklyn Eagle,
July
11, 1941.
38 “Nahem,
Cardinals, Halts Pirates, 3-1,” New York Times,
April 24, 1941. Box score: baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN194104230.shtml.
39 “The
Autobiography.”
40 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
41 “Nahem
Sets Back Terrymen by 6-4,” New York Times,
May
1, 1941. Box score: baseball-reference.com/boxes/NY1/NY1194104300.shtml.
42 baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN194105302.shtml.
43 “Vander
Meer Tops Cards for Reds, 2-1; Stars on Mound and in Field — St. Louis
Is
Turned Back Fourth Straight Time; Victors Score in First; Nahem Suffers
Only
Defeat in Six Starts,” New York Times,
July
5, 1942. Box score: retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1941/B07050CIN1941.htm
44 John
Drebinger, “19 Hits by St. Louis Crush Giants, 11-3,” New York Times,
June 8, 1941
45 This
information is from an article in the Nahem file in the Baseball Hall
of Fame
archives dated August 21, 1941. The name of the newspaper and headline
are
missing.
46 Nahem,
“The Autobiography.”
47 This
article is from the Nahem file in the Baseball Hall of Fame archives.
It is
dated April 6, 1939, but the name of the newspaper and the headline is
missing.
48 Harry
Grayson, “Russo Hurls One-Hitter as Yanks Extend Hit Streaks,” Arizona
Republic (Phoenix), June 27, 1941.
49 George
Kirksey (Associated Press), “Dodger Fans May Demand Nahem Plead Own
Defense,” Nashville Tennessean,
May 7, 1940.
50 James
Lawson (Associated Press), “Subway Sam, the Nahem Man, Is Poison to
Cardinal
Foes,” Cumberland (Maryland) Evening Times,
June 2, 1941.
51 Tommy
Holmes, “Nahem in Strong Bid for Dodger Pitching Job,” Brooklyn Eagle,
February 22, 1940.
52 Joe
Eskenazi, “Artful Dodger: Baseball’s ‘Subway’ Sam strikes out batters,
and with
the ladies’ too,” J Weekly,
October 23, 2003 jweekly.com/article/full/20827/artful-dodger.
53 Roberts
and Rogers, The Whiz Kids and
the 1950 Pennant,
147.
54 Joe
Eskenazi, “Subway Sam Nahem, Ballplayer and Union Man, Dies at
88,” J
Weekly, April 23, 2004. jweekly.com/article/full/22430/-subway-sam-nahem-ballplayer-and-union-man-dies-at-88.
55 Eskenazi,
“Artful Dodger.”
56 “The
Autobiography.”
57 Eskenazi,
“Artful Dodger.” Figures on the number of Jews in the majors for each
year come
from Jewish Baseball News: jewishbaseballnews.com/
58 Eskenazi,
“Artful Dodger.” Eskenazi conducted the interview with Nahem for the
book Jewish
Major Leaguers in Their Own Words by
Ephross with Abramowitz. There are slight differences in the wording in
the two
interviews. Unless otherwise indicated, I’ve used quotes from Nahem in
the
Eskenazi article.
59 “Artful
Dodger.”
60 Eskenazi,
“‘Subway Sam Nahem.”
61 Nahem’s
membership in the Communist Party was confirmed by his son, Ivan, his
niece
Beladee Griffiths, and his cousin Joel Isaacs; mentioned in several
obituaries,
and hinted at in Nahem’s unpublished “Autobiography.” Phone interviews
with
Ivan Nahem on January 3, 2017; and with Beladee Nahem Griffiths on
January 7
and 14, 2018; email from Joel Isaacs, January 9, 2017; Email from
Beladee Nahem
Griffiths, January 9, 2018; Patricia Yollin, “Samuel Ralph Nahem —
Big-Leaguer
in Many Ways,” San Francisco
Chronicle, May 3,
2004. sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Samuel-Ralph-Nahem-big-leaguer-in-many-ways-2762291.php;
Stan
Isaacs, “Major Leaguer Sam Nahem Was One-of-a-Kind,” The Columnists.com,
2004; Stephen Miller, “Subway Sam
Nahem, 88, Pitcher and Briefly a Dodger,” New York Sun,
May 4,
2004.
62 The
Communist Party’s involvement in the civil-rights and labor movement,
particularly during the Depression, are discussed in Hosea Hudson and
Nell
Irvin Painter, The Narrative of
Hosea Hudson, His Life As a
Negro Communist in the South (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard
University Press, 1979); Robin Kelley, Hammer and Hoe:
Alabama
Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill:
University
of North Carolina Press, 1990); Robert Korstad, Civil
Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the
Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of
North
Caroline Press, 2003); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and
the Rise of the UAW (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1981); Mark Naison, Communists in
Harlem During the
Depression (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
2004); and
Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity:
Communists and African
Americans, 1917-36 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi,
1998).
63 The
protest movement to integrate major-league baseball is discussed in
Jules
Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
(New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983); Chris Lamb, Conspiracy of
Silence:
Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Irwin Silber, Press Box Red: The
Story of Lester Rodney, the Communist Who
Helped Break the Color Line in American Sports (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2003); Lee Lowenfish, Branch
Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln:
University of
Nebraska Press, 2009); and Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A
Biography (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 1997).
64 Silber, Press Box Red.
65 “The
Autobiography.”
66 “The
Autobiography.”
67 Jennifer
Felicia Abadi, A Fistful of
Lentils: Syrian-Jewish Recipes
from Grandma Fritzie’s Kitchen (Boston: Harvard Common
Press,
2007).
68 Discussion
of World War II military baseball is drawn from the following sources:
Robert
Weintraub, The Victory Season:
The End of World War II
and the Birth of Baseball’s Golden Age (New York:
Little Brown
& Co., 2013); John Klima, The Game Must Go
On: Hank
Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front
in WWII (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015); William B. Mead, Baseball Goes to War (Washington:
Farragut
Publishing Co., 1985); Steven Bullock, Playing for Their
Nation:
Baseball and the American Military During World War II (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2004); David Finoli, For the Good of the
Country: World War II Baseball in the Major
and Minor Leagues (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland
&
Company, 2002); “OISE Base Takes GI World Series: 50,000 See All-Stars
Defeat
Third Army by 3-2 in Ninth Inning of Deciding Game,” New York Times, September
9, 1945; Tim Wendel,
“The G.I. World Series,” December 10, 2015, thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/gi-world-series;
Robert Weintraub, “Three Reichs, You’re Out: The Amazing Story of the
U.S.
Military’s Integrated ‘World Series’ in Hitler Youth Stadium in
1945,” Slate,
April 2013, slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/04/baseball_in_world_war_ii_the_amazing_story_of_the_u_s_military_s_integrated.html.
69 Rampersad, Jackie Robinson: A
Biography, 91. See also Tygiel, Baseball’s Great
Experiment, 61-62.
70 Quoted
in Jackie Robinson, Baseball Has Done It (Philadelphia:
Lippincott, 1964).
71 Bullock, Playing for Their
Nation, 60-61.
72 “Nahem
Sets Sunset League Pace,” The Sporting News,
October 7, 1943; “Les Horn Wins Batting Crown,” Newport (Rhode
Island) Mercury,
September 17, 1943.
73 “Big
War Bond Show Is Set for Tonight,” New York Times,
June
17, 1944; “Sports Carnival Attracts 30,000; Varied Program Staged at
the Polo
Grounds,” New York Times,
June 18, 1944.
74 “Nahem
Stages One-Man Show,” The Sporting News,
September 14, 1944.
75 Captain
Robert H. Wormhoudt from Iowa helped Nahem organize the OISE All-Stars,
although it is unclear what his role was; he did not play on the team.
The Des
Moines Register reported that “It was he
[Wormhoudt] who organized the OISE base nine, which won the G.I. world
series
from the Third Army’s 71st Division team, 3 games to 2, last fall.” See
Sec
Taylor, “Sittin’ In With the Athletes,” Des Moines Register,
January 27, 1946. Wormhoudt’s sons John and Dan knew nothing about
their
father’s involvement with baseball during the war. But in a phone
interview Dan
explained that his father grew up in and around Des Moines, dropped out
of the
University of Chicago, and in the early 1930s moved back to Iowa, where
he
worked as a union organizer in a steel mill in Davenport. According to
Dan
Wormhoudt, his father was a member of, or close to, the Communist Party
and
remained a radical for the rest of his life. He also loved literature
and later
became a published poet. Nahem pitched for the Dodgers’ minor league
team in Clinton,
Iowa, during the 1937 season, so it is possible that these two radicals
met in
Iowa and then joined forces when they were both stationed in Rheims,
France,
eight years later to pull together the OISE team. It is more likely,
however,
that they met for the first time in France. Both were stationed in
Rheims as
part of the antiaircraft artillery division. They shared political
views and
literary tastes, so it wouldn’t be surprising that they met each other
and
became friends. After the war, Wormhoudt moved to New York City to work
in
broadcasting, but was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and moved to
California, where he eventually became manager of public relations for
Disneyland. Phone conversations with John Wormhoudt (June 11, 2018) and
Dan Wormhoudt
(June 22, 2018); email from Dan Wormhoudt (June 23, 2018).
76 Nahem
and Bauers had pitched against each other in 1935 when Nahem played for
Allentown and Bauers played for Hazleton in the New York-Pennsylvania
league.
See “Miracles? — Just Two Hazleton Victories As Wilson Pitches, Dormat
Hits
Home Run,” Hazleton (PA) Plain Speaker,
August 27, 1935.
77 “70th
Anniversary of the 1945 ETO World Series,” Baseball in Wartime,
Issue 39, September/October 2015 baseballinwartime.com/BIWNewsletterVol7No39Sep-Oct2015.pdf.
78 sabr.org/bioproj/person/49784799.
79 sabr.org/bioproj/person/f6e24f41.
80 “70th
Anniversary of the 1945 ETO World Series.” An Associated Press story in
the Des
Moines Register a few months later claimed
that the OISE team was 37-3 that season. See Sec Taylor, “Sittin’ In
With the
Athletes,” Des Moines Register, January
27, 1946.
81 “70th
Anniversary of the 1945 ETO World Series.”
82 “3d
Army, Oise Nines Gain ETO GI Finals,” New York Times,
September 1, 1945.
83 Blackwell
was one of the strongest opponents of baseball integration and Jackie
Robinson.
Rampersad, Jackie Robinson,
183; Roger Kahn, Rickey and
Robinson: The True Untold Story of the
Integration of Baseball (New York: Rodale, 2014), 255.
84 The
stadium’s playing surface was so big that it fit a baseball diamond, a
soccer
field, and a football field at the same time. German POWs had been
ordered to
build extra bleachers to accommodate the large crowd. Putting a
baseball field
in Hitler’s stadium was a powerful symbol. “We had a conqueror’s frame
of
mind,” recalled one American soldier. “The Germans had surrendered
unconditionally, and this proved it.” See Weintraub, The Victory Season. See
also Raymond Daniell, “Nazi
Shrine in Nuremburg Stadium Now Serves as a Ball Field for GI’s,” New York Times,
June 28, 1945.
85 “3d
Army Nine Slaps Com Z, 9-2, in Opener,” London Stars and
Stripes,
September 4, 1945; “3rd Army Cops Series Opener at Nuremburg,” The Sporting News,
September 6, 1945.
86 “Com
Z Evens Series With 2-1 Decision,” London Stars and
Stripes, September
5, 1945.
87 “Oise
Nine Beats Third Army,” New York Times,
September 6, 1945.
88 Ibid.
89 Contemporary
accounts of the final game agree that Keane took over for Nahem in the
fourth
inning and pitched the rest of the game, and that Richardson knocked in
Smayda
for the winning run. See “OISE Base Takes GI World Series: 50,000 See
All-Stars
Defeat Third Army by 3-2 in Ninth Inning of Deciding Game,” New York Times,
September 9, 1945; “All Stars Win
European Title in GI Playoff,” The Sporting News,
September 13, 1945; and “OISE Nine Captures ETO Baseball Crown,” London Stars and
Stripes, September 10, 1945. The
account on the Baseball in
Wartime website agrees with
these accounts. The accounts in Weintraub’s The Victory Season (page
61) and in SABR’s profile of Russ Bauers (sabr.org/bioproj/person/4c6acb7c)
report that Bauers came
in to relieve Nahem. But Bauers relieved Day in the fourth game for 5⅔
innings,
making it unlikely that he would have pitched in the next game. baseballinwartime.com/player_biographies/bauers_russ.htm. The Victory Season also
has a different account of
the OISE win. Weintraub writes that Nahem put Leon Day in the game as a
pinch-runner in the seventh inning and that Day quickly stole second,
then
stole third base, and then raced home on a shallow fly ball, tying the
score.
Weintraub also reports that Willard Brown knocked in the winning run in
the
eighth inning. I’ve found no other accounts of the final game that
corroborate
this version of events. In an email to me on December 28, 2017,
Weintraub
generously acknowledged that his account of that game is probably
mistaken.
90 “All
Stars Win European Title in GI Playoff,” The Sporting News,
September 13, 1945.
91 Weintraub, The Victory Season.
92 There’s
no record of how Walker, an Alabaman, felt about playing on a team with
two
black players or about competing against an all-black team. He and his
brother Fred
“Dixie” Walker,
a
Dodgers outfielder, were unhappy when the Dodgers brought Jackie
Robinson to
the big leagues. Accounts vary about whether the grumbling by the
Walker
brothers and other players (particularly those, like Harry, who played
for the
Cardinals) evolved into a plan by some players to go on strike rather
than play
against Robinson. If such a plan was ever hatched, it quickly fizzled,
but both
Walker brothers were branded as racists and were both soon traded.
Years later,
Harry Walker was asked about the incident but avoided a direct answer.
“Nothing
was ever concrete on it,” he said. “There was a rumor spread through
the whole
thing. And everybody was involved to a point, but that was never done.”
George
Vecsey, Stan
Musial: An American Life (New York: ESPN,
2011), cited in sabr.org/bioproj/person/3bbe3106#sdendnote14sym.
The
players’ rebellion against Robinson is described in Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey:
Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman,
Rampersad, Jackie
Robinson; Kahn, Rickey &
Robinson, and Tygiel, Baseball’s Great
Experiment. Kahn claims that Dixie
Walker explained the secret plan to him in detail. Corbett disputes the
existence of a players strike against Robinson in Warren Corbett, “The
‘Strike’
Against Jackie Robinson: Truth or Myth?”, Baseball Research
Journal (SABR), Spring
2017. sabr.org/research/strike-against-jackie-robinson-truth-or-myth.
93 “Leon
Day,” Baseball
in Wartime, baseballinwartime.com/player_biographies/day_leon.htm.
94 “71st
Division Wins ETO Game by 9 to 2,” New York Times,
September 3, 1945; “All Stars Win European Title in GI Playoff,” The Sporting News,
September 13, 1945; “Third Army
Loses to All-Stars, 2-1: Four-Hit Hurling of Leo [sic] Day
of Newark
Squares GI Series of One Each,” New York Times,
September 4, 1945; “Third Army Nine Loses to Oise,” Plainfield (New
Jersey) Courier
News, September 6, 1945; “Third Army Nine Evens
Series,” Des Moines Register,
September 7, 1945.
95 Founded
in 1917, the Bushwicks fielded an ethnically mixed team that included
many
future and former major leaguers, frequently played exhibition games
with
major-league players, and regularly scheduled games with Negro League
teams,
which helped pave the way for baseball’s eventual racial integration in
1947.
Advertising “Big League Baseball at Workingman’s Rates,” their games
attracted
an average of 15,000 paying fans for Sunday doubleheaders in the 1930s
and
1940s. The team folded in 1951.Thomas Barthel, Baseball’s
Peerless Semipros: The Brooklyn Bushwicks of Dexter Park (Harworth,
N.J.: Saint Johann Press, 2009).
96 “Nahem,
Bushwicks, Tosses No-Hit Tilt,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
August 19, 1946.
97 Red
O’Donnell, “Top o’ the Mornin’,” Nashville Tennessean,
June 2, 1946. O’Donnell wrote: “Sam Nahem, former Nashville Vol
pitcher, is a
candidate for assemblyman from New York. … Lawyer Nahem is no longer in
organized baseball, but pitches on Sundays for the Bushwicks, Flatbush
semi-pro
nine. … Sam attended the Vine Street Temple while with the Dellers”;
“Errors
Cost Mort Fourth Loss,” The Sporting News,
June 26, 1946; Arch Ward, “In the Wake of the News,” Chicago Tribune,
July 18, 1946. It is possible
that The
Sporting News’s and Tribune’s articles
simply picked up the story of
Nahem’s candidacy from O’Donnell’s column.
98 Ben
Gould, “Below the Majors,” Brooklyn Eagle,
July
27, 1946.
99 Dan
Daniel, “Early Sign-Ups Sought to Block Pasquel Raids,” The Sporting News,
August 14, 1946.
100 Sam’s
younger brother Joe was also an outstanding athlete, playing baseball
and
football at Brooklyn College. He was a year behind Sam at Brooklyn
College but
graduated from St. John’s law school in 1937, a year before Sam. In
1937, while
Sam was in his third year in the minor leagues, Joe signed a contract
with the
Brooklyn Dodgers and pitched that season with their Class D
minor-league team,
the Reidsville (North Carolina) Luckies. The Brooklyn Eagle reported
that in his debut with the team he pitched a five-hitter, winning the
game 5-2.
In 1940 and 1941, Joe pitched for the semipro Queens Club in the same
league as
the Brooklyn Bushwicks, which Sam joined after the war. Joe also
pitched and
played the outfield for military teams during World War II. After
Germany and
Japan had surrendered and combat ended, Joe Nahem was a leader of the
GI
movement that emerged at bases around the world (including India,
Germany,
France, the Philippines, Hawaii, and elsewhere) to demand that the War
Department send them home more quickly as well as improve conditions
for
non-officers. He was almost court-martialed for his involvement in the
protests. Upon returning to New York City after the war, Joe worked
primarily
as a social worker and remained active in the Communist Party for many
years,
taught classes at the CP-sponsored Jefferson School of Social Sciences
in New
York City, earned a Ph.D. in psychology, and wrote a book, Psychology &
Psychiatry Today: A Marxist View (New
York: International Publishers, 1981). International Publishers was
another
institution with close Communist Party ties.
101 “Bushwicks
Score Tenth Win in Row,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
June 12, 1947.
102 “Bushwicks
Face House of David, Bristol Bees,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
June 19, 1947.
103 “Branca
Beaten as Stars Lose Pair to Bushwicks,” New York Times,
October 13, 1947; Jack Lang, “World’s Series Stars Bums to Bushwick
Club,” The
Sporting News, October 22, 1947.
104 “Sam
Nahem Loses After 21 Wins,” The Sporting News,
September 3, 1947.
105 “Ex-Sunset
Star Seeks City League Role,” Newport (Rhode
Island) Mercury,
April 19, 1946.
106 “Sunset
Stars Lose, 5-3 to House of David,” Newport Mercury,
August
30, 1946; “Sports in the News,” Newport
Mercury, August
25, 1955; Lawrence D. Hogan and Jeffrey L. Statts, “Baseball in the
Ocean
State: Rhode Island Black Baseball, 1886-1948,” in William M. Simons,
ed., The
Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2000 (Jefferson,
North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2001).
107 “Sports
in the News: Strikeout Heroics,” Newport (Rhode
Island) Daily
News, July 28, 1953.
108 “Sam
Nahem Marries New York Commercial Artist,” Newport Mercury,
June 10, 1949.
109 “Sports
in the News,” Newport Mercury,
September 20,
1968.
110 “Sam
Nahem, Vet Hurler, Back on Phillies Staff,” The Sporting News,
May 5, 1948.
111 retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1948/B04300PHI1948.htm
112 Marc
Tracy, “69 Years Later, Philadelphia Apologizes to Jackie
Robinson,” New York Times,
April 14, 2016. nytimes.com/2016/04/15/sports/baseball/philadelphia-apologizes-to-jackie-robinson.html?_r=0; Robin
Roberts and C. Paul Rogers III, The Whiz Kids and
the 1950
Pennant.
113 Roberts
and Rogers, The Whiz Kids,
119.
114 Roberts
and Rogers, The Whiz Kids,
51.
115 Ibid.
This story was also recounted by Nahem’s son Ivan, who explained: “For
Sam,
this was an unpardonable error. He wanted to apologize, but baseball
protocol
prohibited any show of remorse.” According to official records, Nahem
faced
Campanella only once that season — on August 17. He came in to relieve
in the
sixth inning and struck Campanella out. It is likely that Nahem threw
the
errant pitch to Campanella during that at-bat. retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1948/B08170PHI1948.htm.
116 This
is based on David Nemec’s interview with Nahem, recounted to me in an
email on
December 12, 2017.
117 baseball-reference.com/boxes/PHI/PHI194809112.shtml
118 “Phils
Drop Padgett, Nahem,” New York Times,
September 18, 1948.
119 baseball-reference.com/players/n/nahemsa01.shtml;
http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/N/Pnahes101.htm.
120 Trimble,
“Cards Keep Nahem as Starting Hurler.”
121 John
Kiernan, “Warm Words From Onkel Franz Frisch,” New York
Times, May 5, 1941;
baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Sam_Nahem; http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/N/Lnahes1010.htm;
baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=nahemsa01&year=Career&t=p;
Rob
Neyer, “Hot Corner Book Club — After WW2 the Big One,” SB Nation,
April 3, 2013, sbnation.com/2013/4/3/4178784/hot-corner-book-club-after-ww2-the-big-one.
122 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
123 Roberts
and Rogers, The Whiz Kids,
148.
124 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
125 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
126 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
127 Roberts
and Rogers, The Whiz Kids,
147.
128 Ibid.
129 Santiago
Llorens, “Howell, Cincy Draftee, Stars in Puerto Rico,” The Sporting News,
November 24, 1948.
130 “Bushwicks
Take Twin Bill,” New York Times,
June 27, 1949.
131 “Sam
Nahem Marries New York Commercial Artist.”
132 “Boston
Colored Giants Outscore Stars, 6-4,” Newport Mercury,
August 12, 1949.
133 “Sam
Nahem Marries New York Commercial Artist.”
134 “List
of Designations for the Primaries Due on Aug. 22,” New York Times,
July 19, 1950.
135 Ephross
with Abramowitz, Jewish Major
Leaguers in Their Own Words.
136 “Sam
Nahem Marries New York Commercial Artist.”
137 In
early 2018, Nahem’s son Ivan requested copies of his father’s FBI file.
The FBI
sent him 11 pages of his father’s file and indicated that other records
had
been destroyed. Among the records sent to Ivan Nahem, a memo from the
FBI’s San
Francisco office dated October 31, 1960, indicates that Nahem was under
surveillance
at least since January 1956. (It is likely that the FBI was tracking
him before
that, when he was still living in New York.) The memo notes that Nahem
was a
member of the Communist Party and that he was an elected member of the
Oil
Chemical and Atomic Workers union’s safety committee at the Standard
Oil plant
in Richmond. It appears that the FBI was trying to determine if Nahem’s
membership in the Communist Party and his leadership position in the
union
violated the union’s bylaws.
138 Email
from Joel Isaacs, November 26, 2017.
139 Email
from Beladee Nahem Griffiths, January 7, 2018.
140 Email
from Sam Bernstein, June 5, 2018.
141 According
to Ivan Nahem, the cause was simply “old age.”
142 “The
Autobiography.”