It was the year Israel shocked the world. The baseball world, that is.
Team Israel entered the 2017 World Baseball Classic ranked No. 41. It won a qualifying round to become the 16th and final team in the tournament. It upset South Korea (No. 3), Chinese Taipei (No. 4) and the Netherlands (No. 9) to advance to the second round.
Then the team, out of nowhere beat Cuba (No. 5) in the second round before the clock struck midnight, and it lost its final two contests. The team was the subject of the 2018 documentary, “Heading Home.”
“We really put ourselves on stage,” team trainer Barry Weinberg, who has eight World Series rings as a trainer for three Major League baseball teams, told JNS.
“I got back to West Palm Beach and I’m sitting at the curb waiting for my ride, and I had my Israel baseball duffle bag,” he said. “A guy comes up and says, ‘Hey, were you part of that team?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘Man, you should be proud.’”
Almost a decade later, Israel Baseball is still basking in the glow of its upset run, as it seeks to take the next step in making baseball the next big sport in the Jewish state.
A charitable group, Israel Baseball Americas, sprang from that 2017 magical run through the World Baseball Classic and is looking at American Jewry as a source of funding, volunteers and players to help grow baseball in Israel.
“It elevated the interest in the United States 100-fold,” Shlomo Lipetz, a member of Team Israel for 34 years and a pitcher on that 2017 squad, told JNS.
“The organization is getting hundreds of emails a week saying, ‘How can I donate my time?’ ‘How can I donate the money?’ ‘How can my son play on Team Israel?’” he said.
“That connection is undeniable, and I think it plays to our advantage,” Lipetz told JNS.
‘Why not connect it?’
For Jews of a certain age, the seminal moment of their lives was Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax refusing to pitch on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series.
“We’ve had almost 200 MLB players, and there have always been Jews in baseball, so why not connect it?” Wesley Seidner of Fairfax, Va., told JNS.
At age 16, Seidner wrote a book on Jewish ballplayers, K for Kosher. (“K” is a notation for a strikeout in baseball scorekeeping.)
“There’s a sense of pride in that we’re 0.2% of the world’s population yet nearly 1% of all MLB players are Jewish,” Seidner said.
Seidner was one of the fans who attended Jewish Heritage Night last month with the Bethesda Big Train, a wood-bat summer collegiate baseball team that plays in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.
Weinberg and Lipetz threw out the first balls before the game and were interviewed between innings by Bruce Adams, founder and president of the Big Train.
Ties between the team and the local Jewish community run deep. The Big Train played an exhibition game against the Israeli national team as a tune-up for the 2021 Olympics.
“People now know who we are,” Weinberg told JNS. “We’re not just the Bad News Bears and the Jamaican bobsled team.”
Israel Baseball Americas is run by two veterans of the 2017 squad: CEO Nate Fish, who manages the Israel national team, and Adam Gladstone, chief operating officer, who was director of operations for Team Israel.
Both men were part of the 2012 and 2023 World Baseball Classic teams and the 2021 Tokyo Olympic squad.
‘Baseball is America’s pastime’
“We felt that in order to support baseball in Israel, we needed to concentrate on baseball players and fans and supporters here in the United States,” Gladstone told JNS. “Our focus is helping to grow the game of baseball in Israel.”
The group is registered as a charitable organization, which means it can accept tax-deductible contributions. That and merchandise sales are what it hopes will support Israel’s baseball squads in the Olympics, the World Baseball Classic and other tournaments.
The money is also earmarked for camps and clinics, ballfields and building a professional organization like those in the major leagues, with scouting and development.
Amid war in Israel and rising antisemitism in the United States, Gladstone said that there is eagerness to support the Jewish state. This is one way to do so.
“With what has transpired since Oct. 7, there are many people who want to support Israel in many different ways,” Gladstone told JNS. “There are a ton of people in the United States looking for things to support with the name Israel. Baseball is America’s pastime.”
“This is the best location to try to generate the donations and the interest in what we’re doing,” he said.
The 2017 run remains on everyone’s minds, he said.
“Everybody talks about it and they say it with pride and they feel a part of it,” Gladstone told JNS. “We were representing something much larger than our team. With everything that Israel is associated with today, this gives people a non-political entity with the name Israel on it.”
“This is about providing opportunities for players to wear Israel across their chest all over the world,” he said.
‘We now have role models’
Lipetz has marveled at improved talent on Israel’s rosters, and Israel Baseball Americas is one of the tools to keep that pipeline flowing, he thinks.
At 46, one of his main contributions is to serve as a role model for those up-and-coming players, he told JNS.
“When I grew up in Israel, there was no baseball on TV,” he said. “There were no baseball cards. I did not have any role models. Every player in Israel who is playing baseball knows of me” and of Ryan Lavarnway, the former major league catcher who was the most valuable player in the first round of the 2017 World Baseball Classic, Lipetz said.
“We now have role models I couldn’t even imagine having when I started playing 35 years ago,” he told JNS.
Israel didn’t enjoy the success in the 2023 World Baseball Classic that it had in 2017, but it did well enough to automatically qualify for next year’s tournament. This time, Israel will enter ranked No. 19.
Lipetz said there was hope that more Jewish major leaguers would sign up to play on Team Israel in 2026, where they would be surrounded by fellow Jews rather than being the only “chosen” player on their teams.
“The biggest leap as a team that we’ve made is, it used to be, ‘Oh, we’re happy to be here,’” Lipetz told JNS. “Now it’s, ‘We’re truly disappointed if we don’t make it to the next round.’”
“We belong here and we can beat any given team any given day,” he said. “That’s now truly rooted in Team Israel.”