Israel on rousing WBC ride
Why, not even the great Sandy Koufax was perfect.
For the first time Monday, the darlings of the World Baseball Classic, Team Israel, lost a game.
It was crushed 12-2 by the Netherlands at the Tokyo Dome. It was the team’s first defeat in five games in this international tournament, delaying its all-expenses-paid trip to Dodger Stadium for the WBC finals.
Still, if you know Jerry Weinstein, the 73-year-old manager of Team Israel, it’s nothing more than a detour.
That’s the way he is handling the team’s first setback, knowing that if it can knock off two-time champion Japan on Wednesday, his team could still advance to the finals or at the least force a tiebreaker to get there.
“It’s our World Series,” Weinstein says, “but it really feels bigger than the World Series to be honest with you. The World Series has only two teams. We’ve got 16. This is unbelievable.”
Weinstein, who was on the U.S. Olympic baseball coaching staffs in 1992 and 1996 and coached Team USA to a gold medal in the 2005 Maccabiah Games, will start his real job this month. He recently was named manager of the Hartford Yard Goats, a Class AA affiliate of the Colorado Rockies.
But for now, some 6,721 miles away in Tokyo, Weinstein has a higher calling.
“I’m not a real emotional guy,” Weinstein says, “but this is emotional because just how meaningful this is to so many people.”
Weinstein’s Team Israel has shocked the world by staying alive among the final nine teams in the World Baseball Classic.
The way Weinstein figures it, since the team has gotten this far, why not take the next step and advance to the final four next week at Dodger Stadium, the same field Koufax — undoubtedly the greatest Jewish ballplayer ever — once stood.
“Hey, if you run across him,” Weinstein told USA TODAY Sports of the Hall of Fame lefty, “please tell him we need him.”
Koufax might be 81, but since this vagabond team has just two Israelis — pitchers Dean Kremer and Shlomo Lipetz — Koufax’s mere presence would bring down the house. Nearly 1.3 million Jews live in the Los Angeles area.
“That was my guy,” says Weinstein, who was at UCLA in 1963 when Koufax led the National League in wins (25), ERA (1.88), strikeouts (306) and shutouts (a staggering 11). “The fact that he didn’t pitch in the ’65 World Series on Yom Kippur really hit home with me. It was significant to me his religion was that important to him.”
Weinstein and his players are trying to make a similar impact in Israel, introducing baseball to a country that began playing the sport only 40 years ago. The country has just a couple of baseball fields, with only 100 men playing adult baseball. Most of the local youth play baseball on a football field.
Peter Kurz, president of the Israel Association of Baseball, dug deep into player heritage to come up with a team composed almost exclusively of Jewish-American players. Some of the names are familiar, such as first baseman Ike Davis, pitcher Jason Marquis, outfielder Sam Fuld and catchers Cody Decker and Ryan Lavarnway.
Yet not a single player on Team Israel is on a major league 40man roster.
The best Jewish players in baseball, such as Ryan Braun, Ian Kinsler, Kevin Pillar, Joc Pederson, Scott Feldman and Alex Bregman, declined invitations. Kinsler and Bregman are playing for Team USA, and the others stayed with their MLB teams in spring training.
“I don’t necessarily feel the connection to Israel as much as I would the United States,” Pillar, whose mother is Jewish, told the
Toronto Star.
“I know it’s politically incorrect, but if it was Team Jewish or The Jews, I think there would be a little more connection to it. I’m not from Israel. I’ve never been to Israel.”
So Kurz sought anyone eligible to hold passports in his country. They had to have at least one Jewish grandparent to be eligible to be on the team.
But despite many of the players last stepping inside a temple when they were children, much less being practicing Jews, they are deeply proud of their heritage. Eight players toured Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for a week in January.
“Two generations ago, we were being killed, being picked out, just because of our lineage,” Lavarnway, MVP of the first round in South Korea, said at his news conference. “But two generations later, for us to be able to stand up here and to have the Israeli flag and the Jewish star hanging in the stadium, means a lot to a lot of people around the world.
“We’re here, we’re competing in a sport on the highest level, and we have the right to be here.”
They earned the right when they won the qualifying tournament in Brooklyn in November, and when they convened in Arizona for their first workouts of the spring, they were ranked 41st in the world. They were the last team to qualify and the lowestranked team in the WBC. They opened as 200-1 underdogs, but considering most of the players have never had their stats on a bubblegum card, let alone a shoe contract, it might as well have been 200 million-1.
“Our guys are not shocked by the results,” Weinstein says. “Our guys know who we are. We expected this. We knew we would compete. The standard deviation for baseball players on any given day is small. If you’re talking about a 162-game series, or a long tournament, it’s different.
“But in a short tournament like this, they can compete with anyone.”
In the meantime, they’re taking Israel by storm. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted out a greeting. Fans are wearing “Jew Crew” T-shirts. Their mascot is the Yiddish “Mensch on the Bench,” a 5-foot Jewish version of “The Elf on the Shelf.” It sits on the bench every game and even had its own seat on the team flight.
And no one is having more fun than Weinstein.
“We’re the flavor of the month right now,” he said. “But this is all about them, not me. It’s a playerdriven sport. It’s about the inmates, not the warden.
“It doesn’t take Einstein to figure that out.
“Or even Weinstein.”
Mazel tov!