The Birth of Israeli Baseball
By A TIJ Writer
Israel is not a country known for its team sports. The most popular sport in the state is probably soccer, yet the country isn’t particularly good at it, only producing a few good footballers here and there. Basketball is another team activity frequently played by Israelis, but only a few Israelis have ever played in the NBA and their domestic league is consistently ranked outside of the elite leagues internationally. This is not to say Israel has been without sporting success — Israel has earned thirteen olympic medals in its history, including three gold. However, all of these medals have been won in individual sports — gymnastics, sailing, Judo, canoeing, and Taekwondo. All this makes the emergence and success of the Israeli national baseball team all the more stunning.
Starting in 2006, Major League Baseball, the American baseball league, began hosting the World Baseball Classic, an event sometimes likened to the World Cup of Baseball. Running every four years, the event features the twenty best teams from around the globe who compete in a tournament. At the moment, the 5th World Baseball Classic (WBC) is being held in various cities across the globe, with the United States attempting to defend its title from 2017.
There are almost no baseball stadiums in Israel, and the country has produced no professional baseball players of note. The majority of the baseball-watching community in Israel, small as it is, is composed of American transplants. This is not to say that Jews do not play baseball — quite the opposite. As of last season, around a dozen players in Major League Baseball were Jewish, and there are over 100 Jews in the MLB Hall of Fame. These two factors — the lack of Israeli baseball talent and the plethora of skilled American Jews — came together in remarkable fashion during the 2017 WBC. Unlike the World Cup, which requires that citizens play with their own countries, the World Baseball Classic has comparatively lax eligibility requirements that allow players to play for countries besides their own. One rule unique to the World Baseball Classic states that any player that is eligible for citizenship in a given country can play for that nation. For Israel this means that anyone can play for Israel so long as they qualify under the Right of Return, allowing Israel to field a team made up of anyone who was Jewish or had at least one Jewish parent or grandparent. As a result, the Israeli team was filled with Jewish Americans, many of whom had never been to Israel.
In 2017, Israel began the strategy of aggressively recruiting non-Israelis to their baseball team. The team they came up with was a self-titled “island of misfit toys,” a group of players that all had something to prove and were proud to represent the Israeli flag. Before the tournament, however, most players had little idea what Israel was. Before flying to the tournament in South Korea, the team first traveled to Israel, to see what they were playing for. Many of the players found the experience to be an opportunity to connect with their Jewish roots. Besides taking place in the normal fun Israel experiences — hiking up Masada and touring the graffiti of Tel Aviv, as well as holding baseball camps for local kids, the trip also included more somber moments. The group visited the Western Wall and the Holocaust museum, with the latter being particularly impactful, as many players were descendants of victims of Nazi persecution.
Despite being loaded with imported American talent, the 2017 team faced an uphill battle. They opened the tournament with 200–1 odds of winning, the worst chance in the tournament. The team felt insulted by an ESPN article that described the group as “a rag-tag bunch of MLB has-beens and wannabes.” Despite their massive underdog status, however, the team performed remarkably well, winning their first four games against formidable opponents, including Cuba and South Korea. The team’s Cinderella run eventually came to an end against powerhouses Japan and the Netherlands (citizenship laws cut both ways — many of the Dutch players came from the nation’s former colonies), but the legacy of the team lives on.
In this year’s tournament, postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic, Israel hoped to recapture the magic of 2017. The tournament began on March 12th, but Israel failed to find the success it previously enjoyed. Despite the addition of all-star Joc Pederson and coach Ian Kinsler, himself a former MLB veteran, the team fell far short of their goal, winning only one out of their four games and being outscored 26–4 in the aggregate. Luckily for team Israel, they only have to wait until 2026 for a chance to reclaim their glory.
