Sam Nahem: The Right-Handed Lefty Who Integrated Military Baseball in World War II

Abstract

Sam NahemThe Right-Handed Lefty Who Integrated Military Baseball in World War II Peter Dreier (bio) Sam Nahem was a so-so pitcher who logged a 10-8 win-loss record and a 4.69 earned run average (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 during off-seasons he also 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—and possibly the only—big league pitcher who threw exclusively overhand to left-handed batters and exclusively sidearm to right-handed hitters. In his Major League Baseball (MLB) career, he was inconsistent—occasionally brilliant, but mostly unexceptional—on the mound. 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 (CP). After his playing days were over, Nahem worked for twenty-five years in a chemical plant where he became a union leader. During the Cold War, 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 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 US military championship series in Europe in [End Page 184] September 1945, a month before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers that broke MLB's color bar. early days 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 thirteen, 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 one hundred 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 fourteen, 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 brooklyn college: athletics and activism Education was Nahem's ticket out of that 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...