Marvin Joseph Rotblatt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marv_Rotblatt

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/sports/baseball/marv-rotblatt-pit...

Marv Rotblatt, Pitcher Celebrated Through Softball Marathon, Dies at 85 By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN Published: July 22, 2013

At 5 feet 6 inches, Marv Rotblatt was one of major league baseball’s shortest pitchers, and his career was short as well. A left-hander used mostly in relief, he pitched in 35 games for the Chicago White Sox over three seasons in the late 1940s and early ’50s.

Marv Rotblatt, shown in 1951, was one of major league baseball’s shortest pitchers at 5-foot-6. Rotblatt pitched in 35 games for the White Sox in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Rotblatt, who died on July 16 at 85 in Evanston, Ill., was celebrated at the annual softball game at Carleton College that was cited by Sports Illustrated in 1997 as the “longest intramural event” in the nation.

Carleton students played a 100-inning, one-day, nine-hour softball game they christened Rotblatt in the spring of 1967, to mark the 100th anniversary of the arrival on campus of the college’s first class. The game was an outgrowth of the intramural Marvin J. Rotblatt Memorial Softball League — named, according to college lore, by a student who had a vintage Rotblatt bubble gum trading card.

Each year since 1967, students at Carleton, located in Northfield, about 40 miles south of Minneapolis, have added an inning to their marathon Rotblatt, which begins at dawn, somehow is completed by nightfall, and at last count amounted to a 147-inning game. Players hit and field using one hand; they are required to hold a cup, with beer a preferred libation, in the other. Student bands serenade the players.

Rotblatt the pitcher was well into his second career, as an insurance salesman, and had never heard of Carleton when he became a campus celebrity and was invited to Rotblatt games.

As he told The Chicago Sun-Times in 2005 in recounting one appearance, “I swung three bats over my head going up to hit, threw them all aside, walked back to get one, thumped my chest, pointed to the outfield like Babe Ruth and hit the first pitch into the lake.”

Not bad given that he was 0 for 15 at the plate in the major leagues.

Marvin Joseph Rotblatt was born on Oct. 18, 1927, in Chicago, where his father, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, owned a lamp business.

“Hank Greenberg was my idol, one of the great players of all time,” Rotblatt said in the 2010 documentary “Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story,” directed by Peter Miller, from a script by the former New York Times sportswriter Ira Berkow. “And the Cubs had a guy named Cy Block that got kind of — we call it a cup of coffee, just a short jaunt with the Cubs — and I remembered him being proud that he was Jewish.”

After pitching for the University of Illinois, Rotblatt appeared in 7 games for the White Sox in 1948, 2 in 1949 and 26 in 1951. He won four games and lost three, and then entered the Army and never returned to baseball.

Rotblatt, whose death was announced by his family, lived in Skokie, Ill. He is survived by his sons, Steven and Richard, and three grandchildren.

He was listed at 5-7 or 5-8, but said he exaggerated his height. His contemporaries Bobby Shantz, an outstanding pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Yankees, and Connie Marerro, who pitched for the Washington Senators and at 102 is major league baseball’s oldest living former player, may have been a shade shorter than Rotblatt’s 5-6.

In the spring of 1951, Rotblatt appeared on “You Bet Your Life,” the television quiz show hosted by Groucho Marx. He was selected at an audition over his pitching teammate Bob Cain, who knew something about short players. While with the Tigers in August 1951, Cain walked Eddie Gaedel, the 3-foot-7 dwarf pinch-hitting for the St. Louis Browns in the master owner-showman Bill Veeck’s most audacious stunt.