Chass responds

Yesterday I posted a piece on a baseball blogger calling out veteran sportswriter Murray Chass for an column he wrote last year about the Baseball Chapel.

In an e-mail, he wrote:

I really don’t want to dignify Schiller’s inane piece of garbage with a comment, but if you’re writing something, you might want to point out that he is commenting on columns that were written nearly two years ago (February and March 2008), which doesn’t exactly make his views timely.You might also point out that the baseball chapel I wrote about was for minor league umpires, not major league players, and I wrote it because Jewish minor league umpires had complained abut the Sunday chapel services because they were held in the umpires’ locker room and they had nowhere to go to get away from them.

Schiller, course, undoubtedly sees nothing wrong with forcing Jews to participate in Christ-loaded services.

Two other points: The chapel column resulted from a letter I received from a rabbi to whom one of the Jewish umpires complained. And once the column appeared in the Times, minor league officials instituted changes in the conduct of the chapel services. Minor league umpires still hold those chapel services but not in the umpires’ locker rooms. I am proud of having been able to help the Jewish umpires, who had no other recourse to escape the unwanted intrusion in their religious lives.

Chass retired from the Times‘ but continues to provide his commentaries at MurrayChass.com.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2009 New Jersey Jewish News

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