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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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--THEN & NOW |
 Artist's impression of a Shawn Green baseball card from his L.A. Dodgers years. He's now with the Mets. |
Shawn Green now, Andy Cohen Once Upon a Time
By STAN ISAACS
|of TheColumnists.com|
The recent acquisition by the Mets of outfielder Shawn Green means that the most prominent Jewish player in the major leagues is in New York. There will be at least a bit of fuss over him by the large Jewish population in New York because there have been so few Jewish players on New York teams.
It raises memories here of the stir about a young man named Andy Cohen in 1928. He became a story in New York when Giants’ manager John McGraw traded future Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby and brought up the 22-year-old Cohen to replace him. There was excitement about a Jewish kid on the Giants and it built when Hornsby got off to a bad start in Boston and Cohen led the league early in the season.
The Graphic, one of more than a dozen newspapers in New York at the time, published a daily comparative box score of Cohen and Hornsby’s batting average. This motivated Hornsby to say, “You are being unfair to the kid. I’m not hitting now, but when I do, I’ll leave him in the dust.”
The Cohen story was a footnote to the history of the 1920s along with Jack Dempsey and Babe Ruth and Leopold-Loeb, F. Scott Fitzgerald and all the other storied figures of that over-sentimentalized decade. I came across Cohen in 1960 at spring training in Clearwater, Fla. ,when he came back to the majors as a coach of the Philadelphia Phillies.
“Yes, it was all true,” he said about his time in the majors. “I got off to that good start and they kept that box score. The thing people forget is that Hornsby not only left me in the dust, but passed everybody else. He hit .387 that year. I hit a respectable .274.”
Cohen said it was true about the way he was lionized by the Jews of New York. They flocked to see McGraw’s sensational new player just as the blacks later flocked to see Jackie Robinson.
Many of them wined and dined the personable young man from El Paso, Texas. A man who knew him then said, “He could have anything he wanted. Some of those garment-center barons couldn’t do enough for him. They threw their daughters at him. Don’t think some of them didn’t offer him big money--$100,000-to marry their daughters.”
Cohen played a full season in 1928 and the next year he hit .294, but McGraw thought he was too slow around second base. He pinned a “football legs” rap on him and sent him to Newark where the riches-to-rags angle followed the dreary script. “In the two years I was at Newark,” Cohen said, “none of the people who fussed over me in New York came over to see me.”
He had one chance to return to the big leagues, but he broke his ankle on the day in 1931 that McGraw came over to bring him back from Newark. He went to Minneapolis for seven years, hitting above .300 most of the time, then began a career as a minor-league manager that took him all over the country.
He was a renowned figure in El Paso, the first living man to be voted into the El Paso Sports Hall of Fame. Just when he was resigned that he would never make it back to the big leagues, he was called back to be a coach by an old employer, Phils general manager John Quinn, who had checked and found that, “Everybody had a good word for Andy Cohen.”
When I met him he was 55, a down-to-the-end cigar smoker, rich with the years in the minors, with jet-black, pasted-down hair, a prominent nose that was broken five times--“in three sports,” he said--on a cheery, red-splotched face. He looked like a man who sung bass in a barber-shop quartet. He walked out to the coach’s box with a big-in-the-belly shuffle, not unlike Charlie Chaplin, only slower. It was the serio-comic locomotion of a manager giving dignity and pomp to his movements on the diamond. It was the walk of 20 years of managing in the minors.
At spring training he sat back, puffed on a cigar and said, “This is where everyone wants to be. No one wants to put on that uniform tomorrow more than I do. Thirty years is a long time to wait to get back to the majors.” And he had stories.
He told of the time at Pine Bluff, Ark.,
where his team had to push a rickety bus 300 yards to a Mississippi
river ferry; of the time he roomed with [later-to-be western
actor] Johnny Mack Brown while playing football for Alabama;
of the fact that he was the first man drafted off the Elmira,
NY team into the Army in 1942 at 36, the oldest man on the team.
He had that one year with the Phillies, actually managing for
a game--the Phillies won it--leaving when Gene Mauch succeeded
Eddie Sawyer as manager.
He never accepted those marital offers when he was the toast of New York. He married much later and had three young children at the time he came up to the Phillies. I recall him saying, “I am the kind of a guy who always has a shirt that is too clean to send to the laundry but not clean enough to wear to a nice affair.”
Shawn Green tops the list of a half-dozen or so Jews in the majors now, among them Brad Ausmus, Kevin Youklis, Gabe Kapler, Jason Marquis, David Newhan and Mike Lieberthal. He said that playing in New York “has always intrigued me. I’m looking forward to being part of the Jewish community here.”
Green is married, so there shouldn’t be any garment-center barons throwing their daughters at him.
©2006 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This
column first posted Aug. 28, 2006.
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