Last update - 00:00 25/06/2007
Israel Baseball League kicks off with historic game in Petah Tikva
By Yaniv Orgad, Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies
The atmosphere at the Yarkon Sports Complex at Baptist Youth Village in Petah Tikva was alive and pastoral at the same time. Children scrambled to grab baseballs hit beyond the makeshift fences and then rushed to get players to sign them.
This is what it looked like at the first professional baseball game in Israel's history. There were no peanuts, no Cracker Jack and no Star-Spangled Banner, but the announced crowd of 3,112 cheered at the crack of the bat in the inaugural game of the Israel Baseball League.
On the foul lines, puzzled broadcasters struggled with translating baseball lingo into Hebrew - and gave up.
How do you say "home plate?" asked one of the Channel 5 announcers, who called the game in the live broadcast. No one came up with an answer.
It looked and sounded like real baseball on a minor-league level, but it seemed as out of place in the Holy Land as polo in Manhattan.
Wire fences ringed the field, and bleachers were set up along the foul lines. A fast food and snack stand did good business on the sidelines. The pitchers were a bit on the wild side, and some of the fielding was sloppy, but there was a winner - the Modi'in Miracle beat the Petah Tikva Pioneers, 9-1.
The league is the project of Larry Baras, a Boston-based bakery czar who has long dreamed of bringing baseball to Israel. To develop local talent, Baras drafted Dan Duquette, a former general manager of the Boston Red Sox, to be the league's director of player development.
"It's a proud day for Israel because this is the first professional game in 5,000 years," Duquette said.
Israel lacks much of the infrastructure needed to support a professional baseball league. The country has only three stadiums, and only the one in the Baptist Village is fully set up.
Six teams will compete in the 45-game season, with names such as the Beit Shemesh Blue Sox, Tel Aviv Lightning, Ra'anana Express and Netanya Tigers.
While the league's roster consists primarily of foreign players - only 20 of the 120 players are Israeli, said Baras, the league's organizers hope to develop enough local talent to field an Israeli team in the 2009 World Baseball Classic.
They also hope to get Israelis, and not just recent American immigrants, interested in the game.
"We expect Israelis to enjoy it for all the same reasons we do," said Duquette. "To be with family, to enjoy the sound of the bat, to see the ballet actions of the players."
Also, the league's quirky Web site includes pseudo-biblical references to baseball ("And Abner said to Joab, 'Let the young men arise and play before us,' Samuel II 2:14), as well as a detailed glossary of baseball terms in Hebrew.
This could be the bigger challenge in Israel, where soccer is king and basketball is a distant second cousin.
"In my opinion, it's impossible," said Natan Tamari, 23, who came to support his home team from Petah Tikva.
Tamari, who lived in the United States as a child, said the game is too slow and requires too much attention to small details to interest Israelis. "That's why you hear everyone speaking English around here," he said.
The hapless broadcasters on the sports channel understood the game but were stymied by the terms. After a valiant effort at rendering some of the lingo into Hebrew, they gave up - lacing their broadcast with Hebrew-accented versions of ball, strike, out, majors, pitcher and base hit.
In this first game, at least, they didn't have to deal with a suicide squeeze or a Texas Leaguer.