Photo © Peter S. Horvitz Inset courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Cyberspace

To baseball fans, names and facts go together like bagels and lox. Ask any fan to name the all-time homerun champion and you’ll always get the right answer.

But here’s a switch: ask a group of die-hard baseball fans to name the first professional baseball player and you’ll either get blank stares or some good but inaccurate guesses.

Truth is, going by the strict technical definition of what constitutes a professional—being paid for what one does consistently and with a high degree of output and efficiency—then the mystery man is a Jewish guy from Brooklyn. The first salaried player of America’s favorite pastime was a powerful hitter and enormously fast runner named Lipman Pike.

A Dutch-Jewish New Yorker born on May 25, 1845, “Lip” Pike became baseball’s first professional player in 1866 when the Philadelphia Athletics engaged him at $20 a week to play third base. You won’t learn that in most baseball almanacs and other sports reference books, which, notably, don’t even mention Pike, primarily because the first all-pro team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was created in 1869—three years after Pike received his first paycheck.

Not much is known about Pike’s early years in Brooklyn beyond the fact that his name appears on the roster of an amateur neighborhood game in 1858, one week after his bar mitzvah.

In July 1866, his first year playing with the Philadelphia Athletics, the left-handed Pike established baseball’s first homerun record, hitting six homers in one game against another Philadelphia team, the Alert club. The Alerts had to be alert with Pike playing against them. After all, thousands of fans had already started to talk about his power behind the bat and his speed around the bases, not to mention the intensity and earnestness he brought to the relatively new sport.

After his season with the Athletics, Pike, who played second and third base as well as the outfield, joined the Irvingtons of New Jersey in 1867, the Mutuals of New York in 1868, and then the Atlantics of Brooklyn in 1869 and 1870. In 1871 he became a player/manager for the Troy Haymakers in upstate New York, then moved to Baltimore to join the Canaries, and later worked for teams in Hartford and St. Louis.

The year 1871 also saw the establishment of the game’s first official governing body, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players—in effect, the first baseball league, akin to today’s National and American Leagues. Although homers were not common in those early years—the game was very different then, with its soft balls and huge outfields—Pike was still one of the homerun leaders of his day, sporting ten during his six-year National Association tenure. Also impressive was his cumulative .321 batting average.

In one of professional baseball’s earliest publicity stunts, in August 1873 Pike raced a famous trotting horse named Chronicle in a 100-yard dash. Even though Chronicle had a 25-yard head start, Pike is reported to have won the race in ten seconds flat and claimed the $250 prize.

In 1887, Pike retired from the game at the age of forty-two, thereafter living a quiet life working in Brooklyn as a haberdasher and attending his local synagogue, Temple Israel.

Lipman Pike’s legacy as the first professional baseball player was buried with him on October 10, 1893, when he died of heart disease at the age of forty-eight. His passing received no notice in The New York Times. The top sports historians have never considered him one of the greats, though in 1985 he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, a partnership between several Israeli- and American-based sports and physical education organizations. It’s possible that in his own lifetime, the modest Pike felt no need for glory. But just in case the Brooklyn slugger might have wanted a modicum of recognition, let’s give it to him now.

Journalist and playwright Joel Samberg is the author of The Jewish Book of Lists, Reel Jewish: A Century of Jewish Movies, and Grandpa Had a Long One: Personal Notes on the Life, Career & Legacy of Benny Bell.