Harry Danning, 93, Backstop for N.Y. Giants in 1930s and 1940s

Harry Danning, who died Monday in Valparaiso, Ind., at age 93, played catcher for the New York Giants for 10 years, starting with the 1933 season. He was the oldest surviving Jewish major leaguer.Danning could hit for average and for power, and he had a thick skin, too. In addition to being among the league leaders in being hit by pitches, he endured taunts for his religion.The taunts were not toxic, certainly nothing like what blacks faced two decades later, and in an interview in September with Canadian Jewish News he laughed about the taunts, which he said included: “Pitch under his nose, he can’t see the ball.”Because the Giants had so many Jewish fans, the team’s manager, John Mc-Graw, had “looked far and wide for an outstanding Jewish baseball star,” according to “The Jew in American Sports” by Harold Ribalow.Danning said he never played on Rosh Hashana or Yom Kippur, but he seems not to have attracted much attention for his principled stand, perhaps because the Giants were never in a pennant race during Danning’s years as an everyday player.Certainly, Danning never faced anything like the attention garnered by Sandy Koufax when the Dodger’s star southpaw refused to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series. Hank Greenberg, a Bronx native and the biggest Jewish star of the 1930s and 1940s, played on Rosh Hashana for the Tigers during the 1934 pennant race, clubbed two homers to win the game, and was hailed by a headline in Hebrew in the next day’s paper.If his feats as a Jewish player were eclipsed by those of Greenberg, who hit 58 home runs in 1938, Danning was still among the best catchers of his time. He was on four straight All-Star teams, from 1938 to 1941. He sported a solid .285 career batting average and at one point batted over .300 for three straight seasons. Sportswriter Ted Husing dubbed Danning “Harry The Horse,” after a tough-guy Damon Runyon character.Danning was born in Los Angeles and grew up in an impoverished family that had gone to California from Poland via Philadelphia. Danning’s father had abandoned Judaism, but he loved baseball and took his family to see the Negro and Mexican semi-pro leagues that played nearby. Danning was a high school baseball standout and soon after graduation joined a team sponsored by a local Mexican grocery store called “El Porvenir” (The Future), getting paid $7.50 a game. The team paid more for skilled positions, and so Danning played catcher.Danning was scouted by the Giants and began a short stint in the minor leagues that culminated in 1932, when he hit .349 while starting as catcher for the Buffalo Bisons of the International League. In 1933, Danning was the youngest player in the majors when he went north from spring training with the Giants. He played under Manager Bill Terry, McGraw having retired after the 1932 season. McGraw died in 1934 and never witnessed his dream of seeing a Jewish slugger in a Giants uniform.Danning warmed the bench for several seasons, seeing only occasional duty behind the veteran Gus Mancuso as the Giants won National League pennants in 1936 and 1937. In 1938, Terry made Danning the starting catcher over the flagging Mancuso, and Danning averaged more than 120 games behind the plate for the next five years. Those were wilderness years for the Giants, who never finished better than third despite Danning’s expert handling of a pitching battery that included Carl Hubbell, Harry Gumbert, and Hal Schumacher. The team would not win another pennant until 1951.After the 1942 season, during which his batting production dropped dramatically and his number of games caught dipped below 120 for the first time since 1938, Danning was drafted by the Army but was given a medical discharge after doctors discovered that his knees were bad. Danning’s baseball career was over, too.Danning had saved some money from his baseball years and opened a Kaiser and Hudson car dealership in Los Angeles, but he was not successful. Later, he came to New York to work in newspaper and magazine distribution, then returned to California for a job at an insurance company. “That’s probably the one big mistake I made in my whole life – I didn’t plan for after I got through baseball,” Danning told the Baltimore Sun in August.Danning was extensively interviewed at the time on the occasion of a conference at the Baseball Hall of Fame celebrating the contributions of the 243 (more or less) major leaguers documented as Jews. (Danning’s brother Ike, also a catcher, had a two-game cup of coffee with the St. Louis Browns, making the Dannings one of six sets of Jewish brothers to have made the major leagues. Ike Danning retired with a career batting average of .500.)Wheelchair-bound and ailing but full of memories and voluble, Danning was too frail to attend the Cooperstown conference.

Harry Danning, 93, Backstop for N.Y. Giants in 1930s and 1940s

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