Late Night with Jerry Izenberg

Our Continuing Conversation: At A Split Rail Fence In Baltimore

Jerry, who will turn 147 in September, called last night to say his fantasy novel about Negro baseball will be published later this year or in early 2026. This is a love story between Jerry and the ghosts — alive, dead, and imagined — who embodied Black baseball in the 20s, 30s and 40s, including those of his hometown Newark Eagles of the Negro National League from 1936 to 1948. It was a time and a world that Jerry, a Jew from Newark, found fascinating and poetic. John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil Jr., who died in October 2006, told Jerry he needed to write the stories of that America in those years and of those men because there would soon come a time when there would be no one left who would remember them. Jerry’s previous book, Larry Doby in Black and White: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer, was in that spirit. They were friends, he and Doby, but that was just part of it. Jerry wasn’t going to go to his grave without letting America know that Doby, the second African American in Major League Baseball, was more than an asterisk in the Baseball Digest.

Speaking of death, Jerry’s good friend, trainer D. Wayne Lukas, died last Saturday. After Lukas was hospitalized but before his death, Jerry wrote . . .[

As I write this, Wayne Lukas is fighting for his life. This is the guy who won a TKO over covid. This is the guy who won the Preakness at age 88. It may be a fight he cannot win but he will fight the fight of the warrior he is. Down at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore there is a white split rail fence that runs behind the stakes barns parallel to a street they call Winners Circle. Every Preakness week he and I would sit side by side on that fence and talk. Well, mostly he would talk and I would listen.

I know that feeling.