Andy Cohen: Jewish Baseball Star and El Paso Sports Legend (1904–1988)

Andrew “Andy” Howard Cohen, professional baseball player, was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 25, 1904, to Jewish immigrant parents Manus Cohen, a cigarmaker who had played semipro baseball, and Lena (Dishart) Cohen. He also had a sister, Eva, and a brother, Sydney “Syd” Cohen, a pitcher who also played Major League Baseball (three seasons with the Washington Senators). When he was about seven years old, Cohen moved with his family to El Paso, Texas, reportedly in the hope that the desert climate would alleviate the respiratory problems that afflicted his mother Lena.

Education and Minor League Debut

While attending Alta Vista Elementary School, Cohen and his brother were standouts in the Boyland League, a sandlot organization in El Paso. Cohen was also a multi-sport star at El Paso High School, where he lettered in football, basketball, and baseball. A member of El Paso High School’s University Interscholastic League state championship basketball team in 1921, he was also named to the all-state basketball team twice. In 1985 the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches elected him to the Texas High School Basketball Hall of Fame.

Cohen’s record at El Paso High School was good enough to warrant a scholarship to the University of Alabama, where he played basketball (guard), football (running back), and baseball (second baseman, team captain). Billed as “the Terror of Tuscaloosa,” Cohen left Alabama after his junior year to embark on a professional baseball career. In 1925, at age twenty, he joined the Waco Cubs of the Texas League. Standing five feet and eight inches and weighing roughly 155 pounds, Cohen hit .312 in 106 games in his first season in pro ball.

New York Giants

At that time, John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, was searching for a Jewish star to offset falling attendance in the face of competition from the New York Yankees, headlined by Babe Ruth. According to contemporary estimates, New York had a Jewish population of roughly 29 percent. McGraw felt Cohen had star potential and purchased his contract during the 1926 season. Cohen had his major league debut on May 31 and hit .257 in thirty-five at bats.

Given a choice between playing part-time for the Giants or playing full-time in the minors in 1927, Cohen chose to go to the Giants’ International League affiliate, the Buffalo Bisons, for whom he hit .353 with fourteen home runs (a career high). In 1928, with Cohen having performed so well at the highest level of minor league ball, and with the second base position available following the trade of Rogers Hornsby, he was brought back to the majors as the Giants’ starting second baseman.

Cohen got off to a promising start on opening day against the Boston Braves, Hornsby’s new team. In front of a crowd estimated at 30,000, the Giants won the game 5–2, with Cohen getting three hits in four plate appearances with two runs scored and two runs batted in. At the end of the game, Jewish fans ran onto the field, hoisted Cohen on their shoulders, and carried him to the clubhouse steps.

Cohen continued as a fan favorite. He hit over .300 during the early part of the season. Vendors at the Polo Grounds began offering ice cream “cohens.” He received fan letters from numerous young Jewish women anxious to meet him. Jewish fans in other National League cities presented him with gifts when the Giants came to town. The New York chapter of Sigma Alpha Mu, his old college fraternity, granted him a lifetime membership. New York sportswriters gave Cohen extensive coverage. One paper printed a daily tally sheet comparing the offensive achievements of Cohen and Hornsby. The Cohen craze even affected the Jewish Daily Forward, which featured Giants box scores on its front page.

As many ballplayers (McGraw among them) had done in the off-season, Cohen appeared in a vaudeville act. He formed a duo with hulking Giants catcher Shanty Hogan. The two split $1,800 per week. “[I]f we didn’t kill vaudeville, we sure helped,” Cohen later mused.

Cohen’s batting tailed off as the 1928 season progressed, but he finished with a respectable .274 batting average, far behind Hornsby’s league-leading .387. The Giants finished the season in second place with a 93–61 record, just two games behind the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1929 Cohen hit .294 and continued to perform well in the field but was hampered by old football injuries. McGraw sent him to the Newark Bears of the International League while veteran Hughie Critz subbed for him at second base.

Return to Minor Leagues

The 1930 season at Newark was disappointing for Cohen, but in 1931 he hit .317 and set a league record of fifty-nine games of error-free ball. Just as McGraw was planning to bring him back to New York, Cohen broke his ankle. He never returned to the major leagues as a player, but his minor league playing career was far from over. In 1932 Newark sent him to the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association. This led to the longest association that Cohen had with any team, as he remained with the Millers until the beginning of the 1939 season (1,116 of his career total of 2,178 minor league hits came while he was playing for the Millers).

At age thirty-four, Cohen pivoted to player–manager with lower-level minor league teams. He concluded his playing career with the Elmira Pioneers in 1942, when he joined the U.S. Army. A first sergeant with the Twenty-first Engineers Regiment, he was stationed in Italy and North Africa during World War II. By war’s end, he was a newlywed, having married Barbara VanDuzer on April 21, 1945. The couple had three children: Marina, Cathy, and Hank. After the war Cohen returned as a minor league manager, but not as a player. From 1946 through 1958 he managed in El Paso, Denver, New Orleans, and Indianapolis, among other locales.

Coaching Career

In 1960 Cohen began the season as a coach with the Philadelphia Phillies, who had finished last in the previous two seasons. After a 9–4 loss to the Cincinnati Reds on opening day, manager Eddie Sawyer abruptly quit and left behind a memorable quotation: “I’m forty-nine years old and I want to live to be fifty.” Cohen (who was fifty-five) took over as interim manager. In the second game of the season, the Phillies defeated the Milwaukee Braves 5–4 in ten innings. The team’s new manager, Gene Mauch, was in uniform for the team’s third game of the season, and Cohen went back to coaching duties. He thereby earned a perfect 1.000 winning percentage as a major league manager.

Cohen continued to live in his hometown of El Paso, where Texas Western College was launching a college baseball program (play began in 1963). With his brother Syd serving as pitching coach, Cohen took on the challenge of building the program from scratch. He served as head coach for sixteen years, most of them unpaid, by the end of which the school was known as the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The school dropped baseball after the 1985 season. Cohen was involved with local youth baseball and basketball teams and served as a coach and manager with El Paso’s Texas League franchise, the Sun Kings, later rebranded the Diablos. As late as 1979, he was serving as first base coach for the Diablos.

Death and Honors

Andy Cohen died at the age of eighty-four in El Paso on October 29, 1988. He was buried in that city’s B’nai Zion Cemetery, alongside his mother and younger brother Syd, the latter of whom had died earlier that year.

In 1990 the city of El Paso opened Cohen Stadium, a new home for the Diablos. Named for both Andy and Syd Cohen, the ballpark hosted Texas League contests until 2004, when the franchise moved to Springfield, Missouri. The following year a new Diablos team, playing in independent minor leagues, moved into Cohen Stadium. When El Paso was awarded a Triple-A franchise in the Pacific Coast League, a new ballpark was built downtown, and Cohen Stadium was left without a tenant after the 2013 season. The ballpark was razed in 2019.

Cohen was the first inductee of the El Paso Athletic Hall of Fame in 1955 and also one of the inaugural inductees of the El Paso Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988. In 2009 UTEP added Andy Cohen to its Athletics Hall of Fame. As Elida Perez of the El Paso Times stated in a 2018 article, “The name Cohen is synonymous with El Paso baseball.”