A World Series warning… about Hitler

By Rafael Medoff/JNS.org

Leo Durocher and Larry McPhail

The 1941 World Series is widely remembered as the first “Subway Series,” when two New York City teams vied for baseball’s championship. It was also the scene of one of the most famous plays in baseball history, when a rare dropped third strike changed the outcome of a game and, ultimately, the series.

But that year’s World Series can also be remembered as the series that featured a player, a manager, and an owner who tried to warn the world about the danger of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

The New York Yankees won the opening game, 3-2. The Brooklyn Dodgers took the second by the same score. It was shaping up to be one of the most exciting World Series contests ever.

For the third game, the Yankees turned to their young pitching sensation, Marius “Lefty” Russo. In just his second full season as a Yankees starter, the Queens, NY, native had become arguably the best pitcher on the team. Russo won 14 games in 1941, including a one-hitter, and had made the All Star team.

As Russo took the mound that afternoon, very few in the Ebbets Field stands realized that he actually was one of the era’s rare two-sport stars. As a student at Long Island University in the 1930s, Russo excelled on the baseball diamond, but he was also a starter for the LIU Blackbirds’ basketball team, a national powerhouse. In the 1935-1936 season, Russo and his teammates won 33 straight games, by an average margin of 23 points.

Leo Durocher

Photo credit: Press Association.

The 1936 Olympics, scheduled to be held in Nazi Germany, marked the first time basketball would be part of the competition. The Long Islanders stood a strong chance of being chosen to represent the U.S. in Berlin—until the players’ consciences got the better of them. In March 1936, on the eve of the qualifying tournament at Madison Square Garden, university president Tristram Metcalfe shocked the sports world with his announcement that the Blackbirds had decided to boycott Hitler’s Olympics.

In view of Hitler’s anti-Jewish abuses, Metcalfe explained, the players decided “that the United States should not participate in Olympic Games since they are being held in Germany,” and would “not compete [in the tryouts] because the university would not under any circumstances be represented in the Olympic Games held in Germany.”

Such a stance was almost unheard of in the sports world. Even more so in those days than today, athletes seldom spoke their minds on public affairs, much less put their careers on the line to protest events overseas. Sadly, however, few followed their lead. Aside from Russo and the Blackbirds, only a handful of other American athletes boycotted the 1936 games. The U.S. team proceeded to Hitler’s Berlin.

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