Today is SABR Day, SABR's annual celebration of all things baseball with a national program starting at 2 PM Eastern time and many chapters having activities throughout the day. As with everything else during COVID, this year's SABR day is virtual, which actually lets everyone visit more of the chapters. (If you're interested, you can click here to join SABR and learn more. There is also a YouTube channel that archives most of the meetings and presentations.
Earlier this month, the Southern Michigan chapter held a symposium on the life of beloved Detroit Tiger Hank Greenberg in celebration of his 110th birthday. The panel on his life and legacy was incredible. It included Aviva Kempner, who made a magnificent biographical film of him, and his son Steve, who both shared reminiscences of him. They are both great storytellers, and it was wonderful to hear from Aviva about the film (and heartening that she is working on getting it onto streaming services), and from Steve about Hank's work after he retired with Bill Veeck on the Cleveland team. Steve remembered that Hank had expressed concern about the team's name, which is interesting in the context of today's discussions in renaming the Cleveland baseball team and the Washington NFL team.
Growing up in Washington in the 1970s and 1980s, I'll confess that I heard more about Sandy Koufax as a Jewish MLB player than Greenberg, but I did know that both of them hadn't played on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. The movie was extraordinary, though -- I hope it becomes available on streaming services soon so that I can share it with my family. I'm also starting to read Hank Greenberg in 1938, Ron Kaplan's account of the 1938 season when Greenberg was tearing up the American League and experiencing antisemitism while the Nazis were beginning to tear apart Europe.
I've paid tribute to Hank Greenberg in my card paintings, many of which you can see in the galleries by following this link, but I also have them on this page. The painting at the top of the 
page pays homage to the work of Marc Chagall, who created fanciful scenes based on his growing up in a small town in the Russian Empire, while the painting here reminds me of the sumptuous covers made for Torah scrolls in synagogues. I hope you enjoy them, and hope you enjoy SABR day when we celebrate the best of baseball, its history, and its potential, as with all sports, to unify all of us.
page pays homage to the work of Marc Chagall, who created fanciful scenes based on his growing up in a small town in the Russian Empire, while the painting here reminds me of the sumptuous covers made for Torah scrolls in synagogues. I hope you enjoy them, and hope you enjoy SABR day when we celebrate the best of baseball, its history, and its potential, as with all sports, to unify all of us.
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