New Jersey Jewish News
Sports Feature
The Jew who ruined the national pastime
I screwed up the game of baseball,” Ron Blomberg says proudly. The former New York Yankee will forever be remembered as the first designated hitter in the major leagues, a position created 33 years ago and a topic of consternation to this day.
Blomberg and New Jersey author Dan Schlossberg spoke to a group of fans April 23 at the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls about the joys and pressures of being a Jewish ballplayer, as related in Designated Hebrew: The Ron Blomberg Story (Sports Publishing LLC).
Growing up as a Jew in the South was quite a different experience from the North, the Atlanta native said. He recalled players on his school teams and in the minor leagues who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. “They’d finish the game, put on the sheets and hoods, and go out and burn crosses,” he said.
Blomberg was drafted as the Yankees top player in the 1967 amateur draft. New Yorkers, especially Jewish fans, embraced Blomberg immediately. An instant celebrity, he even had a sandwich named in his honor at the Stage Deli in Manhattan.
He noted he was only the team’s second Jewish player; Jimmy Reese, who roomed with Babe Ruth in the early 1930s, was the first. During Blomberg’s time on the team, the Yankees had two other Jews on the roster: Elliott Maddox, an African-American who had converted to Judaism, and Kenny Holtzman, who currently works at a Jewish Community Center in St. Louis.
“It was an honor playing on the same field where Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Mantle once played,” Blomberg said. Like Mantle — the legend he was slated to replace — he instead suffered from an onslaught of injuries that shortened his career to nine years.
Despite the disappointments, Blomberg said, “I lived my fantasy. I grew up a Yankee fan, a Mantle fan, and I had the chance to live my dream.
“We didn’t have the millions of dollars they have now, but we had fun.”
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