On a central Illinois baseball field in 1931, a 20-year-old minor leaguer named Hank Greenberg was heckled by the opposing team’s third baseman with anti-Semitic insults — language that we in 2014 would call hate speech. When Greenberg could no longer stand the provocations, which were echoed by an angry, roaring crowd, he confronted the third baseman and was rushed out of the park by local police for protection. Greenberg later said the fracas was “scary.”

Born in New York’s Greenwich Village, Greenberg, standing a little under 6 feet 4 inches, spent most of his major league career as a first baseman playing for the Detroit Tigers. He hit 58 home runs in 1938, only two short of Babe Ruth’s 1927 record, and he was twice chosen as the American League’s most valuable player. He achieved this against a recurrent aural backdrop of “Christ killer!” and other anti-Jewish taunts.

“Every ballpark I went to, there’d be somebody in the stands who spent the whole afternoon just calling me names,” Greenberg recalled in a 1980 oral history. “If you’re having a good day,” he said, “you don’t give a damn. But if you’re having a bad day, why, pretty soon it gets you hot under the collar.”

There had been Jewish baseball standouts before, but in the 1930s, Greenberg was by far the most accomplished. (He remained the most famous Jewish player until the rise of Sandy Koufax, who, like Greenberg, declined to play on Yom Kippur.)