Writer Profile: Murray Chass, NY Times

Henry Chadwick, a mid-19thcentury newspaperman, was credited with transforming baseball from a local event into the national pastime through his stories.

Will history say the same about Murray Chass, veteran New York Times sports columnist, and the Israel Baseball League?

Chass’ May 13, 2006, column, “Israel Dreams Big, As in Big League,” appeared more than a year before the first official IBL pitch was tossed this summer.

In a piece in the July 11 edition of the Brooklyn Jewish Press, Marty Appel, a former public relations director for the New York Yankees who now serves in that capacity for the IBL, gave Chass major kudos for publicizing that dream.

“Seemingly every Jew in America immediately e-mailed [Chass’ article] to everyone he or she had ever met,” wrote Appel. “Within 48 hours, there were few who hadn’t seen the column or fallen in love with the idea.”

“I’m pleased with that,” Chass told NJ Jewish News in a telephone interview. “I like the idea of helping to get that going. I hope it succeeds.”

He might have ulterior motives since one of his sons lives in Israel, where Chass visits about once a year. He did say, however, that there was a downside to pro baseball in the Holy Land: “I think the league is intruding on some of the fields my son plays on.”

In addition to the IBL, Chass has also written about a baseball card set devoted to Jewish Major

Leaguers and a clinic held in Israel by former players (he did not, however, write the Times piece about Shawn Green when the outfielder was acquired by the Mets last August).

“I’m trying to envision readers reading about it, and I don’t want to alienate anybody by having them say, ‘Jeez, he’s writing another Jewish thing again….’ I treat it as just another [story]; I don’t want to write about the same player time after time….”

The 68-year-old Chass said he is concerned about the criteria for classification of a Jewish player; some, he said, “are not legitimately Jewish if you believe only in matrilineal descent or practice. I don’t know that I’ve ever asked a player about his background and his practices, his beliefs. I just think that would be an intrusion. I wouldn’t ask a non-Jew about his beliefs, so I don’t think I should ask a Jew.”

“Jews make a very big thing about Jewish baseball players, and I can understand that because there are so few [of them]. If it makes Jews proud, that’s fine,” he said.

“Sports is not one of those things that we’re supposed to have much talent for, so when somebody does come, I guess we have reason to be proud.”

Chass’ membership card in the Baseball Writers Association of America is marked “number eight,” meaning only seven writers have been on the beat longer. He joined the Times in 1969 and in 1984 created the “Baseball Notes” column, which has become a staple of the Sunday sports section. He received the Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2003, one of only six Times baseball writers to be so honored. The same year, Chass — a Pittsburgh-born lifetime associate member of Hadassah — was also inducted into the Western Pennsylvania Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.

He considers himself “an old-fashioned guy,” who has been criticized for his disdain of the inundation of new statistics that have become en vogue in recent years. Although he does find certain Web sites useful in his research, “I try not to bury myself in the Internet,” he said. “I think that can become an illness of just constantly using it…. I’m sure there are…sites that other baseball writers use that I don’t, but they’re younger and more into this stuff. I’d be happy to still be using a typewriter.”