The ground rules of the interview are as clear as the position of the billed cap that flanks the ambassador's broad desk.
Baseball. No geopolitics, nor backroom diplomacy, nor the West Bank separation barrier. The only fences to be discussed will be those in left field, center, and right. The only hardball to be dealt with today will be hardball.
The long but comfortable office of the American ambassador has an array of hats lining the picture window overlooking the Mediterranean. It is no coincidence that it is the New York Yankees cap that takes pride of place.
An avid ballplayer in his youth, a lifelong savvy fan, Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer is the United States' ranking diplomatic representative to a sports-obsessed country that cares nothing about the sport he loves.
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Amb. Kurtzer: My favorite position was catcher. I pitched for a while in Little League, and I was actually not bad, but I didn't have pitching skills that would go beyond Little League.
In other words, I had a fastball that was faster than the kids could hit, but it never got faster, so as you grow older, the kids are able to hit it better. So I moved.
I played third base for a while, but catcher was by far the best. You're involved in every play out in the field. You have a certain amount of control over the game, with the relationship with the pitcher.
You're also watching the whole game. You're facing the field. It's really an extraordinary position.
U.S. Embassy Press Officer Paul Patin: I was also a catcher. This is what I remember: If it's a bad inning, it's worse for the catcher than anybody.
Amb. Kurtzer: Yeah - You get hit. In fact, my youngest son became a catcher, and he loved it, because at critical moments, you're the difference between winning and losing. If you block the plate properly, and a guy comes barreling into you, if you hold on to the ball, you got the game.
How would you explain this position of catcher to Israelis who don't know the game?
Amb. Kurtzer: The catcher has been called the Beast of Burden, because there is a significant burden on the catcher. Number one, you have balls being thrown at you very fast, and if anything goes wrong, either with your own coordination or foul tips [balls deflected by the batter - BB] you're going to get hit.
Secondly, it's the one place where at some point in a game, or certainly in a couple games, you're going to get knocked over real hard at home plate, which makes it look like football rather than baseball.
It's very wearing physically, in terms of the knees and the rest. But as far as I was concerned, it is the most involved position in the game. Pitchers pitch once every three or four days in professional ball. Catchers will catch sometimes the whole season, and they are involved in every single play.
You are the onfield captain, as it were. You're going to call the pitches, you're going to position the players. You're the only player who is facing your team. And you have to know the opposing team, if you're playing the game seriously. You've got to remember what happened the last time the guy faced the pitcher, because if you served up an easy pitch, that's the last thing you're going to throw again.
For many Jewish kids growing up in America, one of the elements of Yom Kippur was somehow finding out the score of the World Series while spending the day in synagogue. How was information passed along in your congregation?
Amb. Kurtzer: [Smiling] The answer is: I don't know, but it was magic. There was always somebody in the synagogue who knew the scores.
This was an Orthodox congregation.
Amb. Kurtzer: Yes. We just assumed it was some heavenly voice that was projecting.
In literature and social science, much is made of a special relationship between American Jews and baseball. In your experience, does the game have that genuine grip over U.S. Jews?
Amb. Kurtzer: Definitely. It's part of a grip that baseball has over immigrant communities generally in the United States.
Many Jews from the immigrant Jewish community saw this as a way of mainstreaming into American life. If you didn't know the game, if you weren't able to play it or participate in it, or you didn't know the terminology, then you would remain a greenehr [American Yiddish for a newly-arrived immigrant], for as long as that was the case.
This was true for other communities as well, the Italian community's attachment to it, the DiMaggio brothers. If you watched the [2003] World Series, before the game they told you the countries that players came from. The [Florida] Marlins had five of six starting players from Latin America, the Yankees had three or four.
For the Jewish community in the States, this was a way of Americanizing.
We saw this in a microcosm in our own kids. When we went overseas the first time, in 1979, our eldest son at that point was a little over four, and our youngest son was about two weeks old. So they spent those seven years, from the ages of zero to seven and four to 11, overseas.
I'd played baseball with them, but when we got back, they attached themselves to it incredibly fast, and I think this was a subconscious way of saying, 'We're not going to be left out of our little communities - I'm going to wear my baseball hat, I'm going to figure out how to play this game, and talk the talk.'
My wife is probably more informed about baseball than most Americans, only because we had three sons, and she sat through these interminable discussions of which [Major League players] were better, were bats loaded, was the ball dead?
Also in the Jewish community, you learn Jewish trivia. Who was the first Designated Hitter in the American League? Ron Blomberg, a Jewish guy who played for the Yankees. He was the first guy to step up to bat as the DH. That's the kind of thing that you pick up.
If you were to explain to Israelis what you love about baseball, what would you tell them?
Amb. Kurtzer: I grew up with it, and I just like it, I like the pace of the game. A lot of Americans like football because it moves faster, and it's contact, and you have these brief moments of tremendous excitement, when everybody's hitting each other.
Baseball has very few moments of such high drama. But the pace and the overall gestalt of the game I find very interesting. It's so much better to watch it in person, because you can see how much subtle movement there is out on the field, that you don't see by just watching it on television.
On television, you get the pitch, the hitter and the catcher standing behind him. But if you know what you're doing when you're watching the game, everybody's adjusting a bit.
If it's a fastball pitcher, they're going to assume that the guy's going to be a little late on the swing, and they'll shade a little bit to the weak side. If they know there's a curveball coming, they may figure the guy'll come around on it, and they'll shade the other way.
When the ball is hit, it's not just the player to whom the ball is hit that moves, but four or five players are moving, to back up. I just like the whole thing - I don't know why.
You helped teach baseball to Jewish and Arab Israeli kids at the Peres Center workshop.
Amb. Kurtzer: The Peres Center invited me to this activity, and it was attractive for two reasons. One, as a government, we try to help people-to-people exchanges, and this was one in which kids were being brought together in an activity around sports.
From that perspective, in a sense, no matter what they were doing I would've probably found time to go.
The fact that they had started this baseball clinic with the objective to at least get some kids to understand what the game is, and teach them basic skills, it was like 'Cancel the rest of my schedule.' Definitely, I was going to show up.
The kids were all wearing the same uniforms, so you couldn't tell who was who. They knew, obviously, they came from different schools, but as far as they were concerned, they were there to learn this game which was so unfamiliar to them.
So along comes this fat ambassador and he's wearing a baseball hat and swinging the bat.
Ron Pundak [who helped draft the Oslo Accords] pitched to you during the clinic. How does he rate as a pitcher?
Amb. Kurtzer: He wasn't bad. He was serving up fairly easy pitches.
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