Unheralded 'Subway Sam' a champion for Black ballplayers

In a career that dates back to the 1970s, Ivan Nahem has written and performed music that defies convention.

The vocalist and drummer has been a part of the proto-punk, post-punk, art rock and hardcore scenes in San Francisco and New York. His longest-running band, Ritual Tension, an experimental rock outfit formed with his brother Andrew in 1983, was once described by Spin Magazine as “uncommercial,” meaning that it refused to compromise to fit radio airplay formulas. He personally describes one of his more recent solo releases as “Yoga-Adjacent Music From a Post-Punk Sensibility,” which is not exactly a category you’d find plastered on a vinyl record store bin.

So Nahem knows something about pushing boundaries and belonging to an outsider community.

But this shaved-head, tattooed musician still might not have had a career as “punk rock” and unconventional as his bookish, bespectacled, ballplayer father -- the late Sam Nahem.

“He had a whole throughline of his life,” Ivan says of Sam, who passed away in 2004, “where he devoted himself to causes.”

If all we knew about Sam Nahem came from the back of his baseball card, there wouldn’t be much to write about here. He pitched in the big leagues for three teams -- the Brooklyn Dodgers, St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies -- across four seasons, posting an undistinguished 4.69 ERA across 224 1/3 innings, predominantly in the 1940s.

Dig deeper, though, and Sam Nahem is a fascinating figure from a fascinating period in MLB and American history.

This is evident from his upbringing as the only player of Syrian heritage and one of the few Jews in baseball in his time. It’s evident in his college education, which was also unusual for his time, and his accompanying appreciation for Russian and French literature and his pursuit of a law degree. It’s certainly evident in his political leanings, as Nahem was quite possibly the only big league player to be (secretly) associated with the Communist Party (an association that would eventually lead to him being surveilled by the FBI). It’s even evident in his pitching style, which was overhand to left-handed batters yet sidearm to fellow righties.

But what also made Sam Nahem atypical -- rebellious, even -- was his belief that Black ballplayers should have the same opportunities as whites. And it was this belief that led Nahem to play a little-known but important role in squashing baseball segregation.

* * * * * * * *

Stadion der Hitlerjugend in Nuremberg, Germany, was an unlikely place for baseball to make an advancement in the battle against bigotry. This was, after all, the same stadium where Adolf Hitler delivered his antisemitic speeches at Nazi rallies, spewing hate and vitriol to the brainwashed masses.

But by Sept. 2, 1945, Hitler was dead and Germany was defeated. It was actually on that same day that Japan signed the final surrender documents at Tokyo Bay, on the deck of the American battleship USS Missouri, formally ending World War II.

It was, in other words, a beautiful day for a ballgame.

Gathered on the makeshift field in the building that had previously served as the Fuhrer’s repulsive platform were two teams of American servicemen who had not only survived the gauntlet of war but also the round robin leading up to the European Theater of Operations Championship, otherwise known as the GI World Series.

Across the peninsula of peninsulas, some 200,000 American soldiers had spent that summer following Hitler’s suicide and Germany’s surrender playing ball, with each military branch and its divisions assembling their own squads. The last teams standing for the GI World Series were the Overseas Invasion Service Expedition (OISE) All-Stars, based in France, and the 71st Division of General George Patton’s Third Army, which had occupied Germany.

The Third Army club, known as the Red Circlers for the distinctive red circle shoulder patches worn by the players, was assembled by Harry Walker, a private first class who, prior to joining the war effort, had been an All-Star center fielder for the Cardinals in 1943 (and would be again in 1947). His 20-man roster featured nine big leaguers in all, seven of whom had conveniently been transferred to the 71st just in time for the playoffs.

In the other dugout, the OISE All-Stars, representing COMZ (the Army command overseeing communications lines and logistics in liberated territory), were managed by a New York City native known as “Subway Sam.”

Sam Nahem had faced a tall task in assembling a team that could compete in these playoffs. COMZ units had few professional players, and so Nahem got creative.

The result -- one month prior to Jackie Robinson signing his historic contract with Branch Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers -- was the only integrated baseball team in the tournament. Nahem selected two Negro League players serving in the military -- outfielder Willard Brown, a star slugger for the Kansas City Monarchs, and Leon Day, an ace pitcher for the Newark Eagles.

Both Brown and Day would eventually wind up in the National Baseball Hall of Fame for their Negro Leagues prowess. Day, a right-hander with a deceptive delivery who would help pitch the Eagles to the 1946 Negro League World Series title, was elected by the Veteran’s Committee in 1995, just six days before his passing at the age of 78. “Home Run” Brown was posthumously elected by the 2006 Special Committee on the Negro Leagues, in recognition of the center fielder’s power-hitting prowess on six pennant-winning Monarchs teams, including the 1942 Negro World Series champs.

In their time, though, these were players mostly, if not totally, unknown to whites.

But not Nahem.

To understand how remarkable his decision to roster them was, consider the treatment of Black players not just in the professional baseball environment that pretended they didn’t exist but in the military, too.

Robinson, in the most prominent example, had shown up to try out for an Army baseball team while stationed at Fort Riley, Kan. An officer told him, “You have to play for the colored team.”

It was a cruel joke. There was no colored team.

Larry Doby, who would become the first Black player in the American League during the same 1947 season that Robinson integrated the NL, was treated similarly when he tried to play baseball for the all-white Great Lakes Navy team near Chicago.

While there were a few Black players on racially integrated teams in the South Pacific, there were none in the U.S. and Europe. These servicemen could die for their country, but they couldn’t play baseball for it.

Nahem’s embrace of Brown and Day, therefore, was unorthodox.

And, if you know his background, unsurprising.

* * * * * * * *

Born in New York in 1915 and raised in Brooklyn, Sam was one of eight children of Isaac and Emilie Nahem, both of whom had immigrated to the U.S. from Aleppo, Syria, in 1912. It did not take long for his rebellious side to reveal itself, as it did when, at age 13, he refused to participate in Hebrew school classes that took him away from sports and ended his Yom Kippur fast an hour before sundown.

Nahem’s father, an importer-exporter, was one of more than 100 passengers to drown when the British steamship Vestris sank off the coast of Virginia. A successful lawsuit against the steamship company gave Nahem’s family financial comfort during the Great Depression and allowed Nahem to enter Brooklyn College in 1933. There, his rebellion continued as he began participating in Communist Party activities.

“If you were a Communist then, it wasn’t like you were a Communist in the 1960s,” his son says. “It was much more common. The reason he believed in Communism is he wanted to see everyone eating and having enough. You look around and poverty is such a terrible thing.”

Nahem recognized how his financial means were so at odds with what the country at large was going through during the Depression.

“I was quite aware of the misery all around,” he once said.

Nahem’s mindset of empathy and activism informed his attitude toward Black athletes. Meanwhile, the 6-foot-1, 190-pound Nahem himself stood out as a football fullback and a baseball player. Initially a catcher, he had shifted to pitching because his glasses could not fit behind the catcher’s mask. His mound work earned him a tryout with his hometown Dodgers following his sophomore year. Casey Stengel signed him up, and Nahem left school early to enter the Minor Leagues.

While climbing the professional ladder in baseball, Nahem took law classes at St. John’s University in the offseason. He earned his law degree in 1938 -- the same year that he made his MLB debut as a spot starter for the Dodgers late in the season. It was a good one, too: Nahem went the distance in a 7-3 win over the Phillies.

Alas, the spot start was just that -- a spot start. When Nahem spent the next two seasons in the Minors, he considered leaving the game to start a law practice.

“If I can’t advance in baseball, there’s no point in my remaining in the game,” he said at the time. “I definitely will quit baseball if some other disposition of me is not made.”

Nahem caught a break midway through the 1940 season, when the Cardinals traded for him. They brought him to the big league club the following year, and Nahem, who by now had developed a sharp slider, succeeded with a 2.98 ERA across 81 2/3 innings as a starter and in relief.

Regardless, the Cards sent him back down to the Minors late in the season, then sold him to the Phillies in the offseason. He made 35 appearances in the bigs in 1942, before joining the military after the season.

During his time in baseball, Nahem had been accurately painted by the press as unusually erudite.

“Sam wears spectacles and talks less like a ballplayer than any diamond star this reporter knows,” a reporter for the Associated Press wrote in 1940. “For reading material Nahem does not devote his time to pulp magazines -- the Westerns, Adventure stories and whatnot -- but goes for the realistic Russians, Dostoievski, Gorki, Chekov, and Tolstoi.”

As the rare Jewish ballplayer, Nahem also faced anti-Semitism, which certainly contributed to his outlook on Blacks playing the game. Though his influence was limited given his tenuous claims on roster spots, he would, wherever possible, impart upon his fellow players his beliefs, which he said were rooted in “logic and decency and humanity.”

“I was in a strange position,” he once said. “The majority of my fellow ballplayers, wherever I was, were very much against Black ballplayers, and the reason was economic and very clear. They knew these guys had the ability to be up there and they knew their jobs were threatened directly and they very, very vehemently did all sorts of things to discourage Black ballplayers.”

This underscores how impressive it was for a player like Nahem to embrace the idea of integration, which certainly would have threatened his own job.

“I think he had too much empathy, in a way,” his son says. “He didn’t want to beat people down. A lot of great players have that. He didn’t really have that as much. But because of his empathy, he did have this shining moment where he was able to see a social issue very much aligned with his views.”

It happened in Europe.

* * * * * * * *

From the time he had entered the Army, Sam Nahem had regularly competed in baseball on his bases. He was first stationed at Fort Totten in New York, where his team played in some notable games, including a September 1944 exhibition against the Philadelphia Athletics in which he pitched six innings and also belted two homers in a 9-5 win.

Once sent overseas with an anti-aircraft artillery division in Reims, France, Nahem ran two baseball leagues for servicemen while also pitching for the OISE All-Stars in 1945. It was Nahem’s strong pitching and four hits in the semifinal round that helped the OISE club reach the GI World Series.

Because OISE’s opponent, the Red Circlers, had so many proven players -- Walker, Reds pitcher Ewell Blackwell and second baseman Benny Zientara, Pirates outfielders Johnny Wyrostek and Maurice Van Robays and pitcher Ken Heintzelman, Giants pitcher Ken Trinkle and Cardinals catcher Herb Bremer and pitcher Al Brazle -- they were certainly expected to win the best-of-five series against Nahem’s squad. And sure enough, in that first game in the “Stadium of the Hitler Youth,” which had been renamed “Soldiers Field” by the American troops, Blackwell outpitched Nahem in a 9-2 victory.

In Game 2, however, Day was the star. He had served his military unit by driving an amphibious vehicle to deliver supplies to Utah Beach just prior to D-Day, and now the Negro Leagues great served his military team by striking out 10 batters and allowing only four hits. With Nahem playing first base and driving in the winning run, the OISE All-Stars were victorious, 2-1.

The GI World Series shifted to Reims, where it resumed at Headquarters Command Athletic Field. There, in Game 3, Nahem threw a four-hitter in a 2-1 win that temporarily gave OISE the series edge. The series was tied the following afternoon, when Walker took Day deep in a 5-0 win for the Red Circlers.

And so a decisive Game 5 was necessary. It took place back in Nuremberg on Sept. 8, in front of about 50,000 spectators, most of whom were servicemen.

Once again, it was Blackwell vs. Nahem on the hill. The Red Circlers struck first to make it 1-0 and threatened to break the game open with the bases loaded in the fourth. Nahem unselfishly removed himself in favor of reliever Bobby Keane, who escaped the jam. And when the OISE All-Stars stormed back with two late runs, the underdogs came out on top, 2-1, to win their unlikely championship.

Back in France, Nahem’s club was celebrated with a parade and a steak and champagne banquet.

As noted in the 2013 book “The Victory Season,” author Robert Weintraub notes, “Day and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat with their teammates in many Major League towns, celebrated alongside their fellow soldiers.”

“‘Sam the Syrian Jew’ being the hero was not the point,” Nahem’s son says. “[Day and Brown] are the real heroes.”

Very true. But just as Jackie Robinson needed Branch Rickey to give him the earned opportunity that no one else would, Day and Brown needed “Subway Sam.”

* * * * * * * *

Nahem returned from the war in early 1946. He spent that year and the next in the working world as a law clerk and as a salesman in his family’s import-export business while playing ball on the weekends for the semipro Brooklyn Bushwicks, for whom he went 33-6 over two seasons. He also played semipro ball in Rhode Island and winter ball in Venezuela, where his 14 consecutive complete games in 1946-47 set a league record.

In 1948, Nahem had one last dalliance with the Phillies, who still owned his contractual rights and summoned him for 28 games, including one start.

This led to some interesting, uncomfortable encounters.

The Phillies’ manager at the time was Ben Chapman, who, prior to a series against Jackie Robinson’s Dodgers, told his players they could call Robinson anything they wanted. The Phillies’ resulting racist taunting of Robinson was severe enough to merit a warning from Commissioner Happy Chandler.

So one can understand Nahem’s suspicions when, in one particularly brutal blowout, Chapman left him in to pitch well past his expiration.

“[Chapman] left me in once to take a real beating,” Nahem recalled many years later. “When you’re a racist, you are also an anti-Semite. Some reporters asked him about it, whether he kept me in there for some reason other than the demands of the game. He denied that it was anti-Semitism.”

Chapman and his racism were infamously portrayed by Alan Tudyk in the 2013 movie "42."

Nahem also drew the ire of a teammate when he openly defended the arrival of Blacks in MLB.

“Boy, he went into a real tantrum and really came down on me,” Nahem recalled of the unnamed teammate. “After that, I would just speak to some of the guys privately about racism in a mild way.”

Nahem was playing in racially tense times. When one of his pitches nearly struck the Dodgers’ Black rookie catcher Roy Campanella in the head, Campanella, likely inferring racist intent, glared at him.

“I felt so badly about it,” Nahem later recalled, “I felt like yelling to him, ‘Roy, please, I really didn’t mean it. I belong to the NAACP!’”

Released by the Phillies that September, Nahem returned to the Bushwicks the following season before calling it a career in baseball. His political beliefs caught the attention of the FBI, which kept tabs on him and informed several of his employers that they had hired a Communist, costing him jobs.

For a fresh start, Nahem relocated his family to the San Francisco Bay area, where he and his wife, Elsie, raised three children. Nahem spent 25 years working for the Chevron fertilizer plant, where his loyalty to his coworkers and his union caused him to turn down various management positions. He left the Communist Party in the late 1950s, when he felt disillusioned with Joseph Stalin and Russia’s stifling of democracy.

As his children grew, Nahem would take them to civil rights and anti-war demonstrations.

“When I was very young,” his son recalls, “he said something to me along the lines of, ‘You know, there are people of all kinds of skin colors, and some people think that’s important. But there are good people in every race.’ That was a really good influence on me.”

In his retirement years, Nahem would frequent coffee shops and engage in political discussion. He passed away in Berkeley, Calif., on April 19, 2004, at the age of 88, having never really discussed at length his most important contribution to the game of baseball.

“We knew all his fun stories, and he was very much into joking about stuff,” his son says. “But this one thing that has seemed to be a great legacy with him, he really downplayed. Now, I have so many questions.”

All we know is that Sam Nahem was unafraid of pushing baseball’s boundaries and unconcerned with what anybody else thought about it.

Doesn’t get more punk rock than that.