Yom Kippur and the Game Schedule

On September 10, 1934, Hank Greenberg played baseball on Rosh Hashanah — after consulting a rabbi — and hit two home runs, including the game-winner, to beat Boston 2-1 for a Detroit team chasing its first pennant in a generation. Nine days later, on Yom Kippur, he did not play. He spent the day at Congregation Shaarey Zedek, where the congregation gave him a standing ovation; the Tigers lost to the Yankees 5-2 without him. Edgar A. Guest put it in verse in the Detroit Free Press: "We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat / But he's true to his religion — and I honor him for that!"

Thirty-one years later the question reached the World Series. Game 1 of the 1965 Series in Minnesota fell on October 6 — Yom Kippur — and Sandy Koufax, the best pitcher alive, did not take the mound. "There was never any decision to make," he wrote later, "because there was never any possibility that I would pitch." Don Drysdale started instead and gave up seven runs in two and two-thirds innings; as manager Walter Alston came to pull him, Drysdale is said to have offered, "I bet you wish I was Jewish, too." The line may be legend — no one ever sourced it properly — and biographer Jane Leavy concluded that Koufax spent the day not in a synagogue, as several rabbis later claimed, but quietly in his hotel room in St. Paul. What is certain: he lost Game 2, then threw shutouts in Games 5 and 7, and the Dodgers won the Series.

Shawn Green faced the arithmetic twice. In 2001 he sat out on Yom Kippur and ended his consecutive-games streak at 415, then the longest among active players, with the Dodgers two games out of first. In 2004 the calendar was crueler: the fast ran from Friday sundown into Saturday night, straight through a decisive Dodgers-Giants series with the division lead down to half a game. Green split it — he played Friday night and hit the home run that won the game 3-2, then sat Saturday. "Playing one of the two is the most consistent with my beliefs as a Jewish person," he explained, having first talked it over with Koufax himself.

The tradition runs wider than baseball, though baseball keeps the best records: Art Shamsky, Brad Ausmus and Kevin Youkilis all sat out games on the holiday. In 2005, Jeff Halpern of the Washington Capitals skipped a game in Carolina — believed to be the first NHL captain to sit for the observance. At the 1988 Olympics the choice arrived before the Games even began: Lydia Hatoel-Zuckerman, Israel's champion foil fencer, stayed home from Seoul because her competition was scheduled on Yom Kippur. College football has its own chapter, written mostly in Wisconsin: fullback Matt Bernstein fasted through Yom Kippur in 2004, broke the fast on the sideline and ran for 123 yards against Penn State, and lineman Gabe Carimi fasted until an hour before kickoff against Iowa in 2007.

This year the fast begins at sundown on September 20. Somewhere a schedule maker has already created the conflict, and somewhere an athlete is deciding. The purest recent answer may belong to tennis: in 2017 Dudi Sela simply stopped playing mid-match when the sun went down — forfeiting the match, and the prize money with it.