Chapter 6 GREENBERG: A strange thing happened to me at spring training in 1935.
Before an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was comparing myself to their players. It suddenly dawned on me that no one on the Brooklyn team had my talent. It was the first time it really occurred to me that I was no longer trying to make good. From that point on I believed I was really an established, key player in the American League.
It is so important to have confidence in yourself. You can’t just tell yourself that you can do the job, but after you’ve proven you can do the job and convinced yourself that you’re capable of carrying out a certain level of performance, then you’ve really got it made.
BERKOW: Greenberg always sought ways to improve his game, a quest that included his equipment. “Hank Greenberg, the Tigers’ giant first baseman, is determined to stop all line drives which come his way, if he has to use all the cowhide in Texas,” wrote Bud Shaver in the Detroit Times on March 13, 1935.
“Last year Hank had a glove made which looked like a mattress for a Singer midget. This year he has a bigger one. It is a half-inch larger in diameter and it looks somewhat like a lobster trap. . . .
“It has a thumb as long as Jimmy Durante’s schnozzle. . . . Between the thumb and the rest of the mitt, Hank has something which looks like a fishnet.
“It is his own idea and three glove designers have quit at the place where Hank has his mitts manufactured because Hank insists on having them made that way.
“Hank is that way. He has ideas of his own, which is one of the reasons he is going to be a whale of a ballplayer. He never discards his own notions until completely convinced that someone else’s are better.
“Hank approaches life from what might be called a skeptical and scientific attitude. He takes nothing for granted and he’ll argue far into the night, if anyone is tough enough to hold out that long.
“Mr. Greenberg is something of a debunker, too. Anyone foolish enough to go around parroting common fallacies in Hank’s hearing is leading with his chin.”
On March 23, a Detroit Times eight-column headline read: GREENBERG LOOMS AS OUTSTANDING PLAYER FOR 1935, with the subhead: Tiger Slugger Training Self to Win Honor. And below that, the story by Shaver noted that “When the ballots are counted in the election of the No. 1 man of baseball at the end of the 1935 season, don’t be surprised if the name of Henry Greenberg leads all the rest.
“. . . Hank is not satisfied with mere greatness. He wants to be the best.”
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