Al Rosen - Jewish Heritage

Jewish Heritage

Rosen was tough, an amateur boxer, and had a reputation for standing up to anyone who dared insult his ancestry.

Rosen told the author Roger Kahn that as a young player in the minors he had moments when he wished his name were not as obviously Jewish as Rosen. But after he became a major league star, he actually considered changing his name to Rosenthal or Rosenstein so that no one could possibly mistake him for anything but a Jew.

In 1951, the television impresario Ed Sullivan, in his popular newspaper column, wrote about Rosen: "Of Jewish parentage, he is Catholic. At the plate, you'll notice he makes the sign of the cross with his bat." Enraged, Rosen insisted on a full and public retraction, pointing out that the mark he always made with his bat was the letter "x."

Once a White Sox opponent called him a "Jew bastard." Sox pitcher Saul Rogovin, also Jewish, remembered an angry Rosen striding belligerently to the dugout and challenging the "son of a bitch" to a fight. The player backed down.

Rosen challenged an opposing player who had "slurred religion" to fight him under the stands. When a Red Sox catcher called Rosen anti-Semitic names, he called time and "started toward him, to take him on." Hank Greenberg recalled that Rosen "want to go into the stands and murder" fans who hurled anti-Semitic insults at him. The 2010 documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story highlights Rosen, who in it is frank about how he dealt with anti-Semitism: "There's a time that you let it be known that enough is enough. . . . You flatten ."

During his career, Rosen declined to play on the High Holy Days.

In a 1976 Esquire magazine article, sportswriter Harry Stein published an "All Time All-Star Argument Starter," consisting of five ethnic baseball teams. Rosen was the third baseman on Stein's Jewish team.

Through 2010, he was fourth in career home runs (behind Sid Gordon), sixth in RBIs (behind Lou Boudreau), and eighth in hits (behind Mike Lieberthal) among all-time Jewish major league baseball players.