Harry Eisenstat (1915-2003) was a Jewish major league baseball pitcher whose professional career spanned from 1935 to 1942. A native of Brooklyn, New York, he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Detroit Tigers, and Cleveland Indians. He is best known for his October 2, 1938, game when he led the Tigers to a 4-1 victory over the Indians' Bob Feller, who had struck out a record eighteen players.
Eisenstat left baseball in 1942 to work first in the Weatherhead Company war plant and later served in the United States Air Force for the duration of World War II. After the war, he opened the GAE Hardware Store in Shaker Heights, Ohio. He sold it in the 1960s to become sales manager and vice president of Curtis Industries. In 1993, he was inducted into the Michigan Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.
The Harry Eisenstat Papers, 1933-2003 and undated, consist of contracts, baseball memorabilia, statistics, newspaper clippings, books, correspondence and invitations, newsletters from Curtis Industries, photographs, and VHS tapes.
This collection is of value to researchers studying the history of Cleveland, Ohio, and baseball in the first half of the twentieth century. Researchers interested in the Cleveland Indians, Jewish baseball players, the Brooklyn Dodgers, or the Detroit Tigers will find this collection useful. All photographs and one video in which Eisenstat appears, The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, have been kept with the collection. Of special note are his 1940 baseball card and Major League Baseball contracts with the Dodgers, Tigers, and Indians.
The collection is arranged alphabetically by document type and then chronologically.
Processed by Art Newman and Samuel Milner in 2007.
None.
[Container ___, Folder ___ ] MS 4991 Harry Eisenstat Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio
Gift of Evelyn Eisenstat in 2003.
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the library's online public access catalog.