BIG MOE’S CRUSADE AGAINST JEW BAITERS

     Playing for Beaumont in the Texas League, we had a pitcher on our team named Stith, a big stocky farm-boy who belonged to a Nazi Bund. He knew I was a Jew and he started in early in the season baiting me, trying to goad me into a fight-- Jew this, Jew that, sheenie, kike. I decided to take it. I didn’t want the reputation as a troublemaker fighting with team mates, because it was hard enough in those days getting to the top, and I was on my way. But Stith wouldn’t let up. It was 1939, and the things going on in Germany and Europe, with the anti-Semitism, were still going on in this country. Stith kept putting Nazi arm bands and literature in my locker. He taunted me. There was still the stereotype that Jews wouldn’t fight back, and Stith, a bully, had no idea I could fight, and I let him and all the guys on the team who felt that way think that, played possum.

     Only a pitcher and pal of mine, John Gorsica, a Jersey guy, knew, and he wanted a piece of Stith, too.

     I had broken my leg earlier in the year and was not myself, and Stith knew this, too. Our manager, Al Vincent, knew Stith had been riding me all year with the Jew baiting and Nazi bullshit, and he and his coach let it go. Every night I came home from the park and let the rage build. Then, in Tulsa, on one of the hottest days of the year, we were staying in a hotel downtown and had just finished a series and were waiting for the bus to take us to the train station. The bus that picked us up carried the visiting team that was going to play Tulsa.

     As I came through the swinging glass doors of the hotel with the rest of the team, Stith, waiting for me on the sidewalk, ambushed me with a wild sucker punch and knocked me down. This was what I’d been waiting for. I jumped up and squared off with him just as the bus pulled in from the train station.

     Stith kept charging me, and I boxed him—jab jab jab. He was sweating and snorting like a damn pig, trying to get his hands on me, but I kept moving from side to side, hitting him with both hands until his nose and mouth and eyes were bleeding, and then I started teeing off hitting him as hard as I could. One of his eyes was in trouble and I went after it with one straight right after another until I had him out on his feet against the building.

     By this time Vincent was yelling at me, trying to pull me off Stith, and I turned on him and told him to get the hell out of my way, and then I went back to work on Stith, holding him against that building and carving out that eye, until the eye was dangling by a thread and his nose was busted flat, and I wouldn’t let him go down until his face looked like mush, and then I threw the bastard across the sidewalk into the gutter where he lay with his eye out and a black hole in the socket, and then the trainer and a few players were there, and Vincent had hold of me. I shoved him off and told him I wanted him now, because he’d condoned Stith’s Jew baiting all year, he’d enjoyed it, and Vincent, seeing the look in my eye, didn’t want any part of me, but I was just getting warmed up. I was soaked in blood and sweat and didn’t have a mark on me. By this time some of the players were filing off the bus and it was dead quiet and I looked at my team mates and some of the players getting off the bus and told them if any of them had any problems with Jews to get it off their chests and settle it right now, because I was good and warm.

     A few of the players were green around the gills at the sight of Stith. Nobody wanted any part of me, and I don’t blame them, because I was as mad-dog crazy as I’d ever been. Since the beginning of my career this had built up in me.

     “We’ve settled our differences,” Vincent said. “Let’s get back to baseball.”

      Gorsica was grinning at me. As for Stith, he was finished. He lost that eye. He never played ball again. And I feel good about that. Never regretted gutting that pig, and if I’d killed the bastard I wouldn’t have lost a nights sleep, because it would be a better world without Stith and his kind.

     (Next Sunday installment—The Phee-nom starts high school)