This excerpt is from the new book, “GAMES OF DECEPTION: The True Story of the First U.S. Olympic Basketball Team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany.”
With four-inch-wide white tape pressed down on the grass of the Olympic Stadium serving as foul lines and a soccer goal used as a backstop behind home plate, two teams of obscure American amateur baseball players drawn from college and club teams played a seven-inning exhibition game on Aug. 12, 1936, invited by German Olympic officials to demonstrate their sport. Turns out basketball wasn’t the only American pastime introduced to the Germans in Berlin in the summer of ’36.
At a time when the mighty New York Yankees led Major League Baseball with an average attendance of 12,687, this meaningless game drew nearly 10 times as many fans, 110,000, the most ever to watch a baseball game at that point in history.
That was an amazing feat considering baseball wasn’t played in Germany, and just about the only people who had any idea of what was happening were the players and the American sportswriters in the press box.
Before the game, the German crowd cheered heartily when the Americans lined up on the basepaths and greeted the fans with a Hitler salute, an awkward moment for Herman Goldberg of Brooklyn, a catcher and the only Jewish member of either baseball team. It was just one of many such moments for Goldberg. He cringed at the sight of a magazine left in his dormitory featuring photos of Hitler and Goebbels. And one day he and the Jewish-American track star Marty Glickman had been hitchhiking to Berlin when they were picked up by a pair of German soldiers. Halfway through the trip, one of the Germans asked Glickman and Goldberg to produce their passports; they had heard Goldberg slip up and use a Yiddish word when trying to communicate in broken German. As the soldiers examined the Americans’ documents on the side of the highway, Goldberg listened nervously as the Nazis discussed the fact that the two Unites States athletes were Jewish. But then relief. The soldiers asked for autographs.
And now here was Goldberg, crouching behind the plate for the biggest baseball spectacle the world had ever seen, under the lights of the Olympic Stadium.
That was noteworthy for two reasons. First, night games were a rarity in the United States, with the Cincinnati Reds having played the first major-league night game just a year earlier. Second, the lights themselves weren’t positioned properly for a baseball game, illuminating the action to a height of just 50 feet. Fly balls disappeared into the darkness.
As far as the German fans were concerned, the baseballs and the game itself might as well have vanished into the night and never come back. The spectators were, in the words of one American sportswriter, “unbearably bored” by the game.
Thousands of fans hadn’t realized the game had started and thought the players were still warming up. There were more cheers for pop-ups than base hits. Fans debated whether the catcher was “neutral” or playing for one team or the other.
They laughed at the way the umpire loudly called out balls and strikes. But with no understanding of the rules of the game, even that measure of fun lasted only so long.
Thousands of fans started heading for the exits in the third inning. By the fourth, it became a stampede; only a few thousand stragglers remained. “And thus a contest that drew the largest crowd in history,” lamented the New York Herald, “was played out to the most colossal indifference any baseball game has ever known.”
Finally, the spectators let out a wild cheer. Nothing had happened in the game and the American ballplayers didn’t know why. The public-address announcer had declared, in German, that the game was almost over.
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