We’re always trying to bring short fiction to the blog and whenever we have talked about certain writers and their books we always ask for a short story. This is the second short story we’ve had that concerns baseball. We hope you enjoy it, and thank you Darin for sending it our way.
A True Story
By Darin Strauss
My grandmother’s father played for the Brooklyn Kings before the team found the name by which you know them: the Dodgers. He was their first baseman. That was the legend I grew up on, anyway. It was the crack of the 20th century. Manny Joseph, the only Jewish King, got razzed during away games. Catchers would mutter “kike” and worse when my great-grandfather stood to bat; fans yelled all the old insults.
Another Brooklyn Yeshiva Boy, Sandy Koufax, arguably the best lefty ever to pitch (or, inarguably if you’re a Jew of a certain age, a certain intensity of allegiance), won with the Dodgers half a century later. A pious Jew with ears like handles on a loving-cup trophy—old-world ears; Franz Kafka ears—Sandy Koufax skipped out on a desperate World Series opener to worship in synagogue; the game had fallen on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. This act of steep piety made him a hero—better yet, a mensch—in Hebrew School circles.
My great-grandfather held different priorities. On another Yom Kippur—at the start of my great-grandfather’s career and the 20th century—the Brooklyn Kings’ Jewish first-baseman sneaked from temple to sit for a team photo. I cherish a copy of that picture. Dapper in his straw hat and intricate necktie, Manny Joseph is the only player not wearing cleats, a Kings cap, or the old-fashioned leather mitt that looked like a cartoon-swollen hand—the habiliments of Brooklyn baseball, circa 1900.
And if he’s not exactly handsome among his scruffier teammates, his black-and-white face is lighted by one of those rakish half-smiles so beneficial to a good boy’s looks when he’s acting naughty, or thinks he is. Holidays he never cared for, his wife he didn’t like, but baseball was my great-grandfather’s delight.
Or so the story goes.
Bald, tired Manny Joseph would talk reluctantly about his sport years, his life before the emphysema, before my grandmother was born. He’d lean his hands on a table, his peanut head a little dropped. “It was great thing,” he’d say. “But it’s over now, so.”
To find out more about his playing days, I schlepped last year to the library at Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame. And this is where the story, like all family stories, gets complicated.
“No Manny Joseph here,” said the librarian, her eyes creeping like snails over a book of names listing anyone who ever played professional baseball in America.
“And,” this woman said, with a voice practiced at killing the already slain, “the Brooklyn Dodgers used to be the Superbas, not the Kings.” I went home dejected. I decided not to tell my Dad .
And yet, in writing this piece, I figured I’d give it one more shot. I found, a website called “Major League Baseball Franchise Information.” It reads that the Brooklyn Dodgers were called the Superbas until1910, but also that one of their “nicknames”—whatever that means—was the Brooklyn Kings, in the 1880s. I don’t think Manny Joseph would have been old enough to play then, but I don’t know. Also, I do have that photograph: a professional-looking team with “Kings” inscribed on their chests, and the one young Jew among them, wearing a smile and his Yom Kippur best.
One thing I do know: he loved talking baseball. The last day of his last season, a Sabbath night, my great grandfather Manny Joseph played his best game. He went five-for-five and squibbed out the game winner, a wounded pop-up that dodged the shortstop’s glove.
“Thanks God he didn’t catch it,” my great-grandfather said, for years afterward.
Copyright Darin Strauss – 2008
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