Mickey Rutner as muse

World’s oldest Jewish ex-major leaguer tells all
Just over 60 years ago — Sept. 13, 1947 — Mickey Rutner hit his only major league home run.
He did it as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics in an 8-2 win over the Chicago White Sox.
Rutner, who has made his retirement home in Georgetown, Tex., displayed that fabulous “athlete’s recall” for NJ Jewish News. “The guy threw me a curve ball, and I hit it quite well, and as I was rounding second I was thinking to myself, ‘Holy cow!’”
He also had his first base hit, which had come a few days earlier in Yankee Stadium, against Joe Page. “That’s what you dream about. You always want to play at the Stadium against the Yankees,” said Rutner, who was born in Hempstead, NY, and attended St. John’s University.
Actually, retirement is a relative term. Rutner, at 87, the oldest living Jewish ex-major leaguer, has been working for the public relations department of the Round Rock Express, the AAA affiliate of the Houston Astros owned by Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan. “I work as a greeter in the luxury suites,” he said. “I keep them away from Nolan so they don’t bother him during the game. I enjoy being out there. The people are very nice to me. I do a lot of handshaking.”
Rutner played with Lou Limmer — who had been the oldest Jewish ex-major leaguer before passing away last April — in the Puerto Rican winter leagues. Like Limmer, he was a basically a New York kid who was shocked by the anti-Semitism he faced in the Deep South towns of the minor leagues. “It was an experience,” Rutner said.
One of his teammates when he first started out was the author Eliot Asinof. “The manager of the team…said, ‘I can’t have two Yids on my team,’ so he released Eliot,” Rutner recalled. It turned out to be a good career move for his friend. “He was a bright man and he went on to play in a different league and then he wrote a few books.” One on those books, Eight Men Out, became the seminal account of the 1919 Black Sox gambling scandal.
Rutner himself was the subject of a novel by Asinof, Man on Spikes, the fictional account of Mike Kutner, a good career minor leaguer struggling to break into the bigs.
“[Asinof] was visiting us at the house…and he was taking notes and he asked me if it would be all right if he wrote this book about me — but he wouldn’t use my name.”
In Memories of Summer: When Baseball Was an Art, and Writing about It a Game, author Roger Kahn cites Man On Spikes as one of his favorite baseball books and offers an insightful observation on the subtleties of discrimination.
“Rutner was Jewish; apparently Connie Mack held that against him,” Kahn wrote. “Asinof’s hero is not Jewish. He wears eyeglasses. The techniques of novelists can be every bit as fascinating as the techniques of lefthanded pitchers and center fielders.”
Rutner said he hoped the novel, originally published in 1955, will be turned into a movie some day.
Although he still enjoys good health and as much as he still loves baseball, Rutner doesn’t know if he’ll return to the Express in 2008; it might interfere too much with his weekly golf game.