It is not as impressive as other baseball stories, but it is much, much weirder.
When I was a kid, I was two things. I was a Jew, and I was a baseball player. More exactly, I was a Jew OR I was a baseball player. There was no logical connection between the two. When I was a Jew, I was a Jew. When I was a baseball player, I was a baseball player. But I was never both at the same time. There was no such thing as “Israel Baseball”. There was no Team Israel for the World Baseball Classic. There wasn’t even a World Baseball Classic.
Now, Israel Baseball not only exists, but I, somehow, am in charge of it. I never played in the Big Leagues. I never played in the Olympics (I was a coach at the Olympics which was cool but doesn’t count). I never even played pro ball. So, if I never did any of these things, how did I become the CEO and manager of Israel Baseball? That, I suppose, is the story I am about to tell you. I promise, what it lacks in high-achievement, it makes up for in pure absurdity. It is not as impressive as other baseball stories, but it is much, much weirder.
… eventually my life became a twisted version of my childhood fantasy. I played or coached in twenty countries on five continents over a span of nearly twenty years…
Two things… First, Jew.
I am originally from New England. We were poor hippies living in the mountains. It was beautiful. But it wasn’t the upper-middle-class-suburban-Jewish-American-dream. My mom’s response to not having a lot of other Jews around was simply to make our home the most Jewish place in a thousand mile radius. On Friday nights we lit the Shabbat candles, and on Saturday mornings we studied Torah. My sister, Dasi, secretly wanted to try bacon and Christmas, but my mom’s plan worked, mostly, and she turned us into little Jewish kids.
Two things... Second, baseball player.
I was also mildly obsessed with baseball. My first Big League game was at Fenway. I was nine or ten. It was me and my dad and Dasi. We walked the dark tunnels of the stadium, then, suddenly, I saw the field for the first time - the bright green grass and bright white lines and bright white uniforms of the Red Sox players. That was all it took, one glance, and I was hooked. After the game, I promised my family one day I would play third base for the Boston Red Sox.
I am not special for walking into my first game and being shocked by the size and precision of the field. A lot of kids walk into their first big league stadium and say they’re going to be big leaguers. Along with firefighter and astronaut, it is one of a very few acceptable job titles. There was nothing unusual about my reaction. What was unusual, maybe, was my unending commitment to that childhood promise, to play third base for the Boston Red Sox, because even when that did not happen, when I did not play third base for the Red Sox or any other Major League team, I still kept going - I kept playing, I kept training, I kept coaching - until eventually my life became a twisted version of my childhood fantasy.
Instead of playing for the Red Sox, I played for the Tel Aviv Lightning in the Israel Baseball League. I played for the Munich Disciples where I lived in a mental hospital next to the field. And I ran a school for gifted athletes in the mountains of Uganda. I played or coached in twenty countries on five continents over a span of nearly twenty years, including coaching in the Cape Cod League, working as a minor league coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and managing the Savannah Bananas. And I’ve gone to Three World Baseball Classics and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with Team Israel. But at that first game at Fenway Park, I never could have imagined any of it.
The Israel National Team lost their first ever game 54–0 in just three innings.
While the seeds of my identity were being planted, so, 7,000 miles away, were the seeds of Israel Baseball.
In Tel Aviv, a small group of kids got together in the park on the weekends to play catch. They lived in a place where virtually no one played baseball, but had cousins in New York or LA and had been to a Mets or Dodgers game, and were, like me, transfixed by the game, their cousins giving them an old glove or bat to return to Israel with.
Eventually, they asked their parents if they could form a team, and play in a “real baseball game”. Their parents, many of them Olim, American Jews who had moved to Israel, remembering the little league teams of their distant past, said yes, of course. The only problem was, there were no other teams to play. The only option was to form a national team, and send them to an international tournament to play against other nations. So that’s what they did. But to have a national team you have to have a national federation. So this small group of parents formed the Israel Association of Baseball, wrote a few bylaws, and assumed the various roles to run the team and association - president, treasurer, secretary general, third base coach, and so on.
The tournament was in Ramstein, Germany. There was a rabbi in Ramstein the team stayed with. The day of their first game, the sat outside the rabbi’s house eating cereal, wearing mismatched hats and sweatpants, ready for their first game. Their opponent was ironically another Middle Eastern country, Saudi Arabia - a team of American kids from military families. That day, the Israel National Team lost 54-0 in just three innings. They proceeded to lose all of their other games in the tournament as well, badly, but not as badly. And that was it. They had played in a real baseball game. There were no other aspirations.
One player from that first team still plays for the national team. My friend and teammate, Shlomo Lipetz. By the time Shlomo stepped on the mound in Tokyo, Japan at the Olympics to throw a scoreless inning in relief against Team USA, a team comprised nearly entirely of Major League Baseball players, he was 42 years old. If you had told Shlomo or the other players and coaches from that first Israel National Team that thirty years later Israel would win $1,000,000 in prize money at the 2017 World Baseball Classic, and, two years after that, become one of six teams to qualify for the 2020 Olympics, they would not understand what you were saying. It did not seem possible. But that is exactly what happened.
… It was the first in a series of unexpected phone calls that would take me around the globe for the next twenty years.
Jew. I was Bar Mitzvahed, continued my Jewish education and was confirmed, and eventually even joined a separate synagogue from the rest of my family because I like the rabbi.
Baseball. I was a good high-school player. Travel ball. Scholarship to play at the University of Cincinnati.
I did not know it at the time, but Cincinnati had a history of Jewish players. Sandy Koufax had played basketball and pitched at UC before signing with the Dodgers. And my college teammate, Kevin Youkilis, would go on to become the best-known Jewish player of our generation, stealing my dream job, winning two World Series rings with the Red Sox.
I had a solid college career, but didn’t hit well enough to get drafted. After my last college game, I paced the warning track of the outfield crying. I didn’t want to go back into the clubhouse and take my uniform off. My dream was dead. I would never play again. Like Israel after losing 54-0 to Saudi Arabia, this was a terminal moment. There was no future. There was no plan. But also like Israel, I could not have possibly imagined what awaited me. It was not the end of my baseball journey. It was just the beginning.
I moved to New York and started coaching. I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else. And I kept training, for no reason, no team, no contract, but I kept throwing and kept hitting and kept moving. One day, I was hitting in the cage and my phone rang. It was the first in a series of unexpected phone calls that would take me around the globe for the next twenty years. It was the head coach of the men's fastpitch softball team for the United States for the Maccabi Games. It wasn’t the Red Sox. It wasn’t even baseball, but I said yes. We went to Israel and won a gold medal. I was back in a uniform.
The next summer I played for the New York Gremlins, the 5th ranked men's fastpitch softball team in the world. Our season started in the Dominican Republic and headed north with the weather traveling in a caravan of limousines because our sponsor owned a limo company, the Dominican players hiding in the trunk under piles of equipment bags as we crossed the Canadian border for the end-of-season tournament. Towards the end of the season with the Gremlins, I read an article in the New York Times that changed my life.
The headline was, “Israel Dreams Big, As In Big Leagues.” There was going to be a professional baseball league in Israel. For the first time, my two passions intersected. I flew from the International Softball Congress’ World Tournament in Kitchener, Canada to the Duquette Sports Academy in The Berkshire Mountains in Western Massachusetts for the first tryout of the Israel Baseball League. Two weeks later, I signed a contract to play for the Te Aviv Lightning. I was going to play professional baseball… sort of.
There were six teams in the League. 120 players were imported from nine countries, mostly Americans, twenty-something Dominicans, a handful of Australians, and one Japanese player. All 120 players were housed at Kfar Hayarok, which means “Green Village”, about 20 minutes north of Tel Aviv. It was not green. And it was not a village. It was a boarding school for kids with behavioral issues, many of whom were still at the school, staring at us, unhappy and confused, when we unloaded our bags and dragged them into what used to be their dormitories where we would stay, four-to-a-room, all summer.
The league was started by Larry Baras, a businessman from Boston who had made holeless pre-stuffed bagels called Unholy Bagels. He hired the former general manager of the Red Sox and Expos, Dan Duquette, as the head of operations. Daniel Kurtzer, former ambassador to Israel from the US and professor at Princeton University, was the commissioner. There was a nice website selling tickets to games and a draft in New York hosted by Jeremy Schapp from ESPN. The league had the appearance of a professional baseball league. But once all the players arrived in Israel, the executives left. No one knew what was going on. One of the three fields hadn't been constructed. We quickly ran out of wood bats and game balls. And there was a player strike when the league ran out of money and they stopped paying us.
Somehow, we made it through the season. The Bet Shemesh Blue Sox won the championship, and the IBL set a chain of events into motion that continue to this day, even if we didn’t know it at the time. I flew home to New York and started working at the front desk at a gym in Brooklyn.
One day during the off-season, my phone rang. It was a team in Germany. They saw my numbers from the IBL and offered me a contract. I hadn’t planned on playing more. I had satisfied my curiosity about my own abilities, and, if I am being totally honest, I was scared to go to Germany. But I uttered what was quickly becoming my favorite word, “Yes”. Four days later I was in Munich.
The team was called the Disciples. They played in the Bundesliga, known for soccer, not baseball. The “housing” that had been negotiated in my contract was a small room in a mental hospital next to the field. For six months, I lived in the largest functioning mental hospital in Germany, played a little baseball between trips to Italy and Paris and Vienna, and finally got over my fear of German accents. It turned out they were incredibly nice people.
In the case of Israel, to be eligible for citizenship, you needed only to have at least one Jewish grandparent. It was the same rule the Nazis used to define who was Jewish, so when Israel was established, they figured if you were Jewish enough to be killed by the Nazis, you were Jewish enough to be a citizen of Israel.
Since the late eighties, Israel Baseball had maintained a low-profile, but a profile nonetheless. It turned out there were more than twelve kids in the country that wanted to play baseball. There were a couple hundred scattered through a band of towns in the middle of the country between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem where American Olim typically lived– Raanana, Modiin, Bet Shemesh. So the small group in charge created a little league program for the 250-or-so kids across the country that liked baseball and shuffled positions on the board of directors when the bylaws called for it. And it went on this way for fifteen, twenty years.
The Israel Baseball League was the first big boost Israel Baseball received– a professional baseball league in Israel funded entirely by American money. What could be better? And it was good, in a way. Kids came to games and got excited about baseball. But it also nearly sank the ship. Larry, the bagel man from Boston who founded the IBL, was legally held in Israel at the end of the season because the league was bankrupt and he still owed vendors so much money. It turned out the nice website selling tickets hadn’t sold enough. Haim Katz, president of the Israel Association of Baseball during the one season of the IBL, was wise to not sign a document tying the financial fates of the two organizations together. If he had, both would have been bankrupted, and it would have been the end of Israel Baseball.
But the biggest boost, the one no one saw coming, was when, five years later, Israel was invited to qualify for the World Baseball Classic.
The World Baseball Classic was Major League Baseball’s answer to the World Cup. The first one was in 2006. Japan won. The second was in 2009. Japan won again. For the 3rd WBC, MLB wanted to expand the tournament by inviting 16 new countries to qualify for the final four spots in the tournament. And Israel, amazingly, was one of those countries.
Why, you are probably asking, would Major League Baseball invite a small country with only a couple hundred kids playing and no national team to speak of, to the best baseball tournament in the world? You do not have to be a citizen of the country you play for. You only need to be eligible for citizenship. It’s called the “heritage rule”. MLB used the heritage rule to make the teams better, so Mike Piazza could play for Italy, and Bo Bichette, who is not Brazilian but whose mom is, could play for Brazil. In the case of Israel, to be eligible for citizenship, you needed only to have at least one Jewish grandparent. It was the same rule the Nazis used to define who was Jewish, so when Israel was established, they figured if you were Jewish enough to be killed by the Nazis, you were Jewish enough to be a citizen of Israel.
By this measure, MLB recognized Israel could put together a pretty good team. There were dozens of Jewish guys throughout Major and Minor League Baseball. So Israel was invited to the WBC, and the proverbial baseball sea split open. Israel Baseball now had access to the commissioner of Major League Baseball and professional players and coaches. This is how a small group of volunteer parents in Israel with no previous experience in baseball were tasked with assembling what would no doubt be the best Jewish baseball team ever.
… ten years after college, after thinking my career was over, at 32 years old, I stepped into a Big League clubhouse for the first time.
I was, by now, an honorary Israeli. I was running my own baseball academy in New York and would return to Israel to help coach the national team in the summer. So I got an invite to training camp in Florida for the World Baseball Classic. I was not good enough to take one of the roster spots from the American guys playing pro ball. And I was not Israeli enough to take one of the three roster spots reserved for Israeli players. But there was a loophole, a 29th man on a 28 man roster, a third catcher to catch bullpens and be activated if someone got hurt. And so, ten years after college, I stepped into a Big League clubhouse for the first time.
Brad Ausmus was our manager. Gabe Kapler was the bench coach. Within five years, they would both be managing in the Major Leagues. Shawn Green was the DH and hitting coach. Joc Pederson played right field. And the rest of the lineup was filled with guys who would dip in and out of the Major Leagues as role players for years to come. But somehow, we didn’t win. On paper, we were the best team by far. But Spain beat us in the final and qualified for the 2013 WBC. That’s how it goes in baseball. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. But how did we lose this one? - “The best Jewish team ever assembled”. Jews everywhere were watching and rooting for us, and we should have won. It was another terminal moment for Israel Baseball, and for me. No plan. No future.
Before we left, Peter Kurz, the GM of the team, said, “Fish, do you want to move to Israel and run the baseball program there?” And what did I say? Ye– Actually, I said no. I was still thinking about the loss and I had never considered moving to Israel. But I called Peter back a month later, and said yes. So I packed my bags, again, moved to Israel, and became an Israeli citizen.
The IAB used the little bit of money they got for participating in the WBC qualifier to hire me, their first full-time employee. I inherited thirty years of organizational history and the keys to the kingdom, literally. On my first day on the job, Yaron, our treasurer, handed me a set of keys and told me I was driving a bus load of kids from Tel Aviv to Kibbutz Gezer for summer camp. I got lost and ended up driving in circles around Ben Gurion Airport. For three years I was the idiot and the expert. I coached, I umped, I delivered uniforms, and, sometimes, I drove the bus - whatever needed to be done. I played for the Jerusalem Lions in the Premier League, the shabby mens league that replaced the IBL, and played shortstop for the national team. A career I thought had been cut short was now being extended beyond any advisable length. Youkilis had already made multiple all-star teams, won a gold glove, and retired a legend after ten years in the Major Leagues, and I was still playing in front of two fans and hiding in the bomb shelter at Kibbutz Gezer when rockets came from Gaza.
After three years, it was time for the World Baseball Classic again. This time, we got it right. We won the qualifier and went to Korea for the opening round of the 2017 World Baseball Classic where we won our first four games. Our run was eventually ended by Japan in the Tokyo Dome, but we had arrived. We finished sixth in the world and won a million dollars in prize money. ESPN called us the Jamaican bobsled team of the WBC and Yahoo Sports said it was the greatest miracle since the candles burned for eight days.
I returned to the States. Working 100 hours a week and hiding from rockets had taken its toll. I wanted a job in pro baseball. I got a job doing the next best thing, the Cape Cod League, the best college summer league in the country, and would fly to Europe to play in tournaments for the National Team.
One day during the off-season, waiting for a train at Penn Station, my phone rang. It was an assistant general manager of a Big League team. He said, “Fish, I think we have a job for you.” This was it! In my own weird way, I had climbed the ladder of the baseball world. Big League GMs were calling. Nearly twenty years after college, I would work in professional baseball. I could stop traveling and settle down. “It’s in Uganda,” he said. I covered one ear and repeated back to him. “Did you say Uganda?” “Uganda,” he said, clearly this time. “Do you want the job?” I suppose if you were going to run a baseball program on a continent without baseball, I was, by then, the right man for the job. I had accidentally become an expert in international baseball. I hesitated and said, “Yes.” I was off to East Africa. This was my destiny, to wander the earth playing baseball.
The organization that had been started thirty years earlier so a group of kids could play in “a real game”, was going to the Olympics.
While I was spending a year in the mountains outside Kampala, Israel Baseball went on another miraculous run. This one was even more unlikely than winning four games in a row at the WBC.
When I started playing for the national team, we competed in the “C Pool” of European Baseball. We had won the C pool and moved up to the B Pool, but we had not been able to break into the A-pool for the best teams in Europe. Peter was still general manager and had slowly added guys to the roster. Unlike in the WBC, you need an Israeli passport to play for the national team in the European Championships and Olympics. A few guys from the World Baseball Classic team made aliyah, and we won the B-Pool for the first time.
Baseball had not been an Olympic Sport since 2004. But because the 2020 olympics were scheduled for Tokyo, baseball was reinstated. I had flown to Tokyo seven years earlier to cast the vote on behalf of Israel. At the time I slipped that small piece of paper with my favorite word into the ballot box - yes, Israel votes in favor of reinstating baseball back into the Olympics, it never occurred to me we might actually be one the teams in the tournament. But after winning the B-Pool, Peter added more players to the roster, and we advanced through the A-Pool to the Olympic qualifier. The winner of the qualifier would be the sole representative from Europe and Africa at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. We beat South Africa in the final game of the qualifier. On the mound, Shlomo Lipetz, now in his forties, put his hands on his head and fell to the ground.
The streak spanned over twenty games in five countries. Eric Holtz, the manager of the team who had been my roommate in the IBL all those years earlier, said if we had to play those games again, even if we had a thousand chances, we couldn’t do it, we couldn’t navigate the maze of transactions and travel and winning, errors, bloopers, and walk-offs. As my year in the jungle ended, my phone rang again. “Fish. It’s Holtzy,” the voice on the other line said, “I need a third base coach.” I did not hesitate this time. We were going to the Olympics– the organization that had been started thirty years earlier so a group of kids could play in “a real game”, was going to the Olympics.
No other country had to hide their flags, not speak their language, or wear security devices in the cafeteria. It is just part of being an Israeli athlete, of being a Jew. We have gotten used to it.
My phone kept ringing. The next call was from the Savannah Bananas. If you were going to bring baseball to Africa, I was the right man for the job, and if you were going to reinvent baseball, evidently I was the right man for that job too. I said yes, of course, and went to Savannah to manage the team for the first year of Banana Ball. When we traveled to Mobile, Alabama, to play at Hank Aaron Stadium, there were thousands of people in line waiting to get into the stadium two hours before the gates opened, and we knew then that the experiment was going to work. This year, the Bananas will play a seventy-five game schedule across the country including six Major League stadiums. Every game is already sold out.
It was time for the Olympics. The games had been postponed a year because of Covid, and we weren’t sure if they would even happen. No fans were allowed to attend events, and we were told just before opening ceremonies, no staff members would be able to walk, only athletes. But I took my chances. I hid my staff credential under my arm and snuck into opening ceremonies with the players.
At opening ceremonies, there was a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes that had been killed at the 1972 Munich Olympics. I had been thinking about them a lot.
It is a tradition at the Olympics that each nation flies its flag on the windows and balconies of their housing, but for security reasons, since ‘72, Israel never did. This was the first time Israeli flags were displayed in the village. We could fly our flag, but we stayed isolated from the rest of the village on the 14th floor of a building with extra security, no elevators, and we had to wear trackers anytime we left the building to go eat or workout. In the village, many of the other nations would not trade pins with us. When we travel to compete in tournaments, we cannot speak Hebrew, tell strangers why we are there, or wear travel gear or bags with Israeli flags on them. We always travel with security and bomb sniffing dogs and agents board our team buses before we can. We do not think about it or talk about it very often. It is just part of our routine. But we are the only team in the world that has to take these precautions. No other country has to hide their flags, not speak their language, or wear security devices in the cafeteria. It is just part of being an Israeli athlete, of being a Jew. We have gotten used to it.
We did not medal. But we became the first Israeli team to win a game at the Olympics since 1968 when we beat Mexico. After the Olympics, Holtzy resigned, and I was promoted to manager. I had been the bullpen catcher, executive director, shortstop, first base coach, and third base coach for the team, now, for the first time, I would manage. Three weeks after the Olympics, at my first tournament as manager, we went on our third improbable winning streak.
Just six weeks after the Olympics, we couldn’t construct much of a roster for the European Championships. The guys were tired and going home to their families. In the end, we scratched together a roster of sixteen players compared to the other teams’ twenty-four. We had teenagers who had never been in a big tournament and forty-somethings who hadn’t played in years. But we won five games in a row and finished second in Europe. Looking at our roster before the tournament, our goal was to not finish in 15th or 16th place and be relegated back to the B Pool. Instead, we nearly won the tournament.
… we had to do something or be banished back to the dark days of Israel Baseball.
We couldn’t rely on miracles anymore. With another WBC the following year, we would have been to three World Baseball Classics and the Olympics in a ten year span. Our World Ranking had improved from 47 to 19. And we had fans all over the world. But the well was running dry. Like me, many guys extended their playing careers far longer than they ever expected just to keep playing for the national team. But it was over. They couldn’t keep playing forever. They had to start a “real life”. And we had to do something or be banished back to the dark days of Israel Baseball, a plummeting world ranking and a few hundred kids playing baseball on soccer fields in Israel. So we are starting a professional baseball organization in the States to look for the next generation of Team Israel players.
Finally, I don’t have to be a baseball player OR a Jew anymore, I can be a baseball player AND a Jew. I can be both at the same time. There is a logical connection between the two, because we built one.
Israel Baseball Americas is a 501c3 whose mission is to give Team Israel players and fans a common outlet for their interest in Israel Baseball and provide human and financial resources to the Israel National Team program.
Visit https://www.israelbaseball.org/ for more information.
