If Hank Greenberg were Catholic…

Some Christian fans of the Detroit Tigers are upset that opening day this year falls on Good Friday. Get over it, say some locals in The Detroit News, noting that the legendary Tiger Hank Greenberg skipped a World Series game in 1935 game during the 1934 pennant race because it fell on Yom Kippur.

John O’Neill:

Many Detroit area Catholics are upset Opening Day for the Tigers this year is on Good Friday. Wake-up call to my fellow Catholics: Neither Major League Baseball nor the Detroit Tigers are responsible for your religious observances.

Moreover, for a devout Catholic, the choice on Good Friday between contemplating Christ’s Crucifixion or going to a baseball game should not be hard. That Catholics in Metro Detroit have overreacted is especially disturbing when considering the dilemma faced by Tigers great Hank Greenberg in the 1935 World Series.

For the slugging Hall of Fame first baseman, who was Jewish, playing on Yom Kippur was a no-brainer. He wasn’t playing baseball on the holiest day of his year.

Nor would Greenberg’s teammate (and Catholic) Charlie Gehringer have much sympathy with today’s Catholic baseball fans. Gehringer, who attended church daily, supported Greenberg’s decision, including when the Tigers made it back to the World Series in 1945.

When asked his feelings about whether Greenberg would again sit out on Yom Kippur, Gehringer (whose nickname was Quiet Charlie) admonished the reporter that America had just spent years fighting Adolf Hitler and had evidently not learned much from the experience.

The Rev. Harry Cook, rector of a local Episcopal church:

Many devout Christians supposedly hate the idea of Opening Day falling on Good Friday — or is it the other way around? Let them do what Detroit Tigers slugger Hank Greenberg did on that long ago October day when Yom Kippur fell on one of the World Series game days. He just didn’t play.

Greenberg seemed to have understood that there is more than one calendar in the world, and it is inevitable that their particular observances will sometimes clash. The Tigers’ home opener surely was not scheduled to annoy the faithful.

So Christians who divide their loyalties between religion and baseball will just have to make a choice: Opening Day or the solemnity of Good Friday? It poses a similar dilemma for Jews, who will be celebrating the second day of the Jewish feast of Passover.

And, no, says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL, in The Washington Post, the Boston Red Sox opener is not being postponed for Passover:

Boston Cancels Home Opener for Passover?

There’s a little problem with this claim that has been swirling about the blogosphere: it’s not true! And neither are many of the other claims made in this message, which travels under the title "Only in America!"

What’s the lesson here? (This is CLAL — of course there has to be a wider lesson!):

But the popularity of the piece and the readiness of so many to accept (wish?) it were true, speaks to some pretty weird conceptions of Jewish pride and what it is that many Jews think it is that makes America great. In fact, it opens up the question of how any religious or ethnic group experiences pride in who they are, their expectations of others, and what is it that really makes this country great. …

Why should we be proud of Red Sox General Manager, Theo Epstein, canceling the opening game? Because it would be a 21st century "Sandy Koufax moment"? Not hardly! Forget how strange it is to think that the condition of Jews in America is the same as it was in Koufax’ day — that we should even carry around the worries about our acceptance in general society that our older brothers and fathers did. That would be strange enough. But this false rumor which delighted so many is not even comparable to what Koufax did.

Koufax refused to pitch a particular game in the 1965 World Series because it was Yom Kippur. In this case, we are supposed to delight in the fact that a Jewish GM was prepared to make it impossible for an entire team to play because it was his holiday! Far from being an assertion of personal religious freedom, this would have been a case of precisely the kind of religious coercion which concerns Jews and so many other members of minority religious groups in America. …

Worse still, one of the reasons — according to the false rumor — that Epstein canceled the opener was that many of the (high-priced) box seat ticket holders were Jewish and they objected to the schedule. In other words, a small cabal of rich Jews manipulated the schedule affecting an entire team, its fans and the league, to meet their own narrow needs. Very nice! And this is what gives us pride? What are we going to do to celebrate this amazing achievement, pollute some communion wafers or kidnap a little Christian child and get away with it? I don’t think so.

America is great, and it is especially great for religious minorities, precisely because it secures our rights not at the expense of others’. The majority must always wrestle with the fact that their influence is not proportional to the size of their community but to the parameters of the constitution. And minorities must always wrestle with the desire to make ourselves feel big by making others small. When each side successfully wrestles that way, we really do earn the right to proclaim, "Only in America!"