Out of Left Field: Jews and Black Baseball

Abstract

The literature on black baseball has traditionally focused on the likes of Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and James “Cool Papa” Bell, among other Negro league players, whose on-field excellence stood as the strongest argument against organized baseball’s color line. Less told is the story of black baseball’s entrepreneurs (the historian Neil Lanctot’s compelling Negro League Baseball [2004] is a notable exception). Rebecca T. Alpert’s Out of Left Field is a welcomed addition, given her focus on the little-studied role of Jewish entrepreneurs in black baseball, most notably that of Eddie Gottlieb, Syd Pollock, and Abe Saperstein. Alpert’s exploration of the reasons Jewish entrepreneurs pursued opportunities in black baseball reveals how organized baseball’s color line curtailed the involvement of Jewish businessmen in the major leagues’ official operations even as it positioned Jews as middle men with the Negro leagues as booking agents scheduling games at major league stadiums. Jewish sporting entrepreneurs, Alpert contends, enjoyed “a great opportunity to wield power beyond what they could have achieved in the wider society in an era when they were subject to discrimination themselves” (p. 3). Yet their participation in black baseball unveiled “the complex process of racialization” in which “their whiteness was less provisional and more an established fact” (p. 11).