The Golem's Mighty Swing [2001] (Random Comics Theatre)

Random Comics Theatre

The Golem's Mighty Swing [2001]

This book features a 100-page story by James Sturm about a travelling baseball team in in early 1920s America, the Stars of David, which traded on the gimmick of being Jewish players in an era where many people in small-town America would never have seen a Jewish person. A fictional story, but based on real baseball history.

The story is told by the manager of the team, Noah Strauss, a short-timer in the major leagues now leading a team of Jewish players (and one black man passing as Jewish) through a grueling schedule of play and travel from town to town where they're greeted with at best curiosity and often outright racist violent hostility. 

Eventually, needing an extra financial boost, he reluctantly agrees to a slick promoter's idea to costume his large black player as a mythic "Golem" to play off the attitudes of the audiences, which forms the crux of this story.

A very entertaining book, does a great job setting up situation and characters and bringing everything to a resolution. I thought the bits of actual baseball play were surprisingly good, given how I feel about most sports comics. I'm kind of surprised they haven't made this into a movie in the last two decades.

The book has been in print in several editions since it was published, and also packaged with two other bits of fiction set in the same period by Sturm in JAMES STURM'S AMERICA: GOD, GOLD, AND GOLEMS. Sturm also wrote another comic about baseball in a slightly later era, a biography of Satchel Paige.