If the point of "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" is lost on the viewer, then history itself put the writing on the wall when the owner of the Detroit Tigers misunderstood the meaning of an old photograph of Greenberg and traded his star to the Pittsburgh Pirates for the 1947 season. Greenberg's last season in the baseball was Jackie Robinson's first, and Greenberg was in the National League to witness it first hand. Not surprisingly, Greenberg was one of the few opposing ball players to offer Robinson encouragement in breaking baseball's color line. But then, as this 1999 documentary proved repeatedly, no white player in the history of the game had been subjected to the abuse Greenberg suffered because his was Jewish. Without a doubt Robinson suffered more, maybe even more that first season than Greenberg his entire career. But this documentary also shows that Greenberg was as important to the American Jewish community as Jackie was to African Americans.
I remembered that Greenberg was the first person to win the MVP award at two different positions and that in 1935 he had 100 R.B.I.'s at the break and was not selected for the All-Star team (Manager Mickey Cochrane did not want to be accused of playing favorites with someone from his own team and picked Lou Gehrig and Jimmy Foxx instead). But what I really picked up from this documentary was how good Greenberg made the Detroit Tigers during his career. If you look at his career batting statistics you will see that Greenberg played eight full seasons and batted in over 100 runs seven times for the Tigers between 1933 and 1946 (several seasons were lost to injury and military service). The Tigers played in the World Series in 1934, 1935, 1940, and 1945, and Greenberg was the common denominator for those teams. You will be hard pressed to find a major league baseball player with that sort of success ratio since Greenberg's day outside of New York Yankees like Berra, Ford, Mantle, and Jeter.
Writer-director Aviva Kempner balances Greenberg's playing career with the impact he had as baseball's first Jewish star. There are some clips from an old interview with Greenberg, who died in 1986. But most of the talking heads are from contemporary clips of Greenberg's family, former teammates, reporters, and lifelong fans. The last category are the most interesting, because it includes not only famous people like Walter Matthau and Alan Dershowitz, but ordinary fans, including several rabbis and a self-admitted "groupie." These are the people with whom "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" resonates the most. Clearly this is a documentary which will be of interest to baseball fans but also to those interested in the story of a true American hero.
Final Note: The documentary does not point out that in 1938 when Greenberg hit 58 home runs, two short of Babe Ruth's record, he hit two balls into a screen that were ground rule doubles; however, that screen was not there when Ruth played in 1927
