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How do you say ‘Play ball!’ in Hebrew?
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BY: Douglas J. Guth Senior Staff Reporter
Two ex-Clevelanders set to play for Israel’s new pro baseball league
“Baseball Is Life” reads the message on a popular T-shirt. If that’s the case, Josh Epstein has been living the “grand old game” early and often.
Growing up in Beachwood, which had no Little League, Epstein practiced pitching and hitting with a tennis ball in his front yard. He honed his skills further in middle school, high school, and in various summer leagues. After four years of playing college baseball, however, Epstein wasn’t picked in Major League baseball’s yearly entry draft, nor was he offered a free agent contract from any team.
Epstein was working as an advisor for Ameriprise Financial last November when he received the e-mail that pulled him back into the game he loves. It came from a highly unexpected source n the brand new Israel Baseball League (IBL).
“I figured my career was over and I’d be (reduced to) playing softball during the summers,” admits the 23-year-old.
Epstein was working as an adviser for Ameriprise Financial last November when he received the e-mail that pulled him back into the game he loves. It came from a highly unexpected source n the brand-new Israel Baseball League (IBL).
The IBL is a 120-player, six-team league that will play a 45-game schedule this summer. (See related article on page 21.) The eight-week season includes an all-star game and a championship tilt between the two top teams.
Opening day is June 24, when the Modi’in Miracle takes on the Petach Tikva Pioneers. Epstein will play for the Pioneers. He is one of two former Clevelanders in the nascent league; the other is Shaker Heights native Nate Fish.
“This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me,” beams Epstein during a phone interview from his home in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
Players from nine different countries were drafted to play in Israel, as were about a dozen native Israelis. According to the league, about 40% of the players are Jewish.
Nearly a third of the players have previous professional experience, while some have played college baseball. Epstein falls into the latter category. He pitched for Ramapo College of New Jersey, a liberal arts school in the northern part of the state. The right-hander’s best season was in 2006 when he threw 24 innings while compiling a 1-0 record with a 2.59 ERA.
The lack of velocity on Epstein’s fastball prevented him from moving to the next level, he says. When the IBL called in November, Epstein was unsure he would be able to commit to a summer in Israel away from his new job.
However, he admits, the pull of playing professional baseball became “overwhelming.” Epstein, who says he models his pitching style after major leaguer Greg Maddux, contacted the league in early March and drove to Massachusetts for a tryout. Although he hadn’t thrown a baseball for almost a year, Epstein tossed enough strikes to impress IBL director of baseball operations Dan Duquette, a former Major League general manager.
Epstein signed a contract the following Monday and was picked in the second round during the IBL’s April 26 draft. The last few whirlwind months have been “pretty unbelievable,” he says.
Busy, too.
Epstein has been running and lifting weights while pitching for a traveling team from New Jersey. (He left for Israel June 19.) This won’t be Epstein’s first time in the Jewish state. He’s visited half a dozen times before. His parents, Barbara Margelefsky and Philip Epstein, lived there for several years, and his grandparents have an apartment in Tel Aviv.
Opening day will be a family affair. Epstein’s mom will be in the stands. His father and sister Ariella will visit in July. “Josh spells life b-a-s-e-b-a-l-l,” says his dad. “He is truly living his dream.”
‘Perfect timing’
Former Clevelander Nate Fish tended the infield at the University of Cincinnati with future Jewish Major League star Kevin Youkilis, who plays first base for the Boston Red Sox. Youkilis won a World Series ring with the team in 2004 and is hitting .336 so far this season.
Fish, 27, doesn’t have any delusions about playing alongside Youkilis in the majors. He knows he’s probably too old to qualify as even a minor league prospect. But after getting drafted to play professional baseball in Israel, he can’t help but dream.
“I want to prove to myself that I can play at this level,” says Fish. (IBL players are expected to perform on the level of a “good independent league to Class A” team in the U.S. minor leagues, IBL’s director of operations Duquette recently told the Chicago Tribune.)
Fish, who was picked in the fifth round by the Tel Aviv Lightning, will split his playing time between third base, shortstop and catcher. The last two months have been his “spring training” n working out near his Brooklyn home and playing semi-pro ball with the New York City Thunderdogs.
When he wasn’t selected in the baseball draft after college, Fish, like Epstein, figured his career was over. He moved to New York City, he says, to pursue various interests, including a creative writing program at The New School, located in Greenwich Village. He also took a job at an indoor baseball facility, giving batting clinics and individual instruction.
Coaching has made him better as a player, he believes. “Mechanically, my swing is much better than it was when I was in college,” Fish told haaretz.com in November.
Fish found out about the IBL after his father Jerry saw an ad for a league tryout in The New York Times. Fish, who is single and between semesters at school, jumped at the opportunity. His passport is ready, and even packing will be easy, as Fish has been living out of a suitcase at a friend’s apartment ever since his lease expired. It is, he says, ”perfect timing.”
This year in Israel
Israel may seem an unlikely outpost for the American pastime, admits Epstein. Attending Israeli sports camps as a youngster, he played soccer and basketball, the country’s two athletic passions. Epstein tried to teach his Israeli friends how to play catch with a baseball, but there weren’t enough gloves to go around, and his friends weren’t much interested anyway.
Baseball is a thinking man’s game, he notes, one that “has the potential to take off (in Israel), even with native Israelis.”
Preparing to play pro ball in Israel brings back fond memories for Fish. He was recruited by the 2005 U.S. Maccabiah softball team, he says, and had a “completely amazing experience.”
Fish can’t wait to go back and relive that experience, albeit at a higher level. He’s certainly not doing it for the money; each team will have a salary cap of $45,000 per player for its entire 20-player roster. (According to mlbplayers.com, the average Major League salary for the 2006 season was $2,699,292. The minimum salary was $380,000.)
“Money is the least motivating factor for me,” Fish maintains. He admits he is a little nervous about his first at-bat with the Lightning. However, he expects those butterflies to dissipate after a game or two. It will also help to have his family in attendance. Fish’s mother, Marcia Bloomberg, will be there along with his father Jerry Fish and sister Dasi.
“We want to see Nate live out his goal of playing pro ball,” says Bloomberg, executive director of The Cleveland Hillel Foundation. The game can also have the attendant effect of boosting Israel’s image abroad, she believes.
PBS will broadcast the IBL’s opening game Sunday, July 1, on a delayed basis, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, and West Palm Beach. While the IBL has no official connection with Major League Baseball, the league’s website (www.MLB.com) will carry coverage of Israel’s games.
These are small steps, admits Fish, but any media coverage showing Israel as a country not just at war is a positive step. “My friends don’t know much about Israel,” he notes. “All they see (through the media) is explosions. They think it’s a dangerous place.”
While Israel is more restive than usual these days, Fish is thinking more about his batting mechanics than about rocket attacks and skirmishes between Hamas and Fatah.
Energy is a big part of Fish’s makeup. The former Clevelander sprints to his position between innings and likes talking to his teammates throughout the game. He hopes his energy translates to fans who have never seen baseball before. “I’ll play hard. It should be a lot of fun.”
Epstein is excited for the season to start, but he can’t help thinking about the future. He hopes a solid year with Petach Tikva leads to a multi-year contract with the team. If the IBL extends its season to 80 games as league officials have discussed, that could mean living in Israel for an even longer period of time while trying to maintain a job back home.
“I’d consider it,” Epstein contends.
Philip Epstein says he will support his son through any decision he makes. He knows what baseball meant to Josh even at an early age, when father and son played catch waiting for the school bus and Josh asked for a batting cage as a bar mitzvah present.
Now that Epstein is back on the baseball diamond, the senior Epstein has sensed a change in his son’s demeanor. “The stars are shining in his eyes.”
Fish is ready to take that first sprint out to third base. The fact that he’ll be doing it 3,000 miles away from home makes no difference. “I’m just ready to go, man.”
with reports from the Chicago Tribune
dguth@cjn.org
If you build it…
Israel Baseball League (IBL) founder Larry Baras, a Jewish businessman from Brooklyn, created the IBL with the thought that a “relaxing” spectator sport might provide relief for a nation under frequent stress.
“There’s something well-paced about it that fits the way life should be,” Baras said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
“In Israel, everyone’s on edge, jostling and honking, ears to the radio. They really would benefit from just being able to relax a couple of hours at a game.”
IBL teams represent six Israeli cities and towns and will share three fields. Players will live together in a dormitory-style complex in Ramat Hasharon near Tel Aviv. There will be no games on Friday nights or Saturdays, and all ballpark refreshments will be kosher.
IBL officials hope the league will spur Israeli interest in American baseball. The season will be accompanied by a summer-long series of baseball camps for Israeli youth. One of the league’s goals is to raise the level of play throughout the country (which hasn’t developed much beyond Little League) so that at least 25% of players in the IBL are Israeli.
The league’s target audience is the more than 120,000 Israelis from the United States, as well as American tourists and students there on study programs. But organizers also plan to reach out to native-born Israelis.
Three of the six managers in the Israeli league are former well-known Jewish players in the Major Leagues: Ken Holtzman, a star pitcher with five World Series rings; Art Shamsky, a member of the 1969 “Miracle” New York Mets who later played for the Cubs; and Ron Blomberg, who played for the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox and was baseball’s first designated hitter.
Holtzman admits he did a double-take when he was offered a managerial post with Petach Tikva. “I never associated baseball with Israel or any place in the Middle East,” Holtzman told the CJN in a phone interview from his home in St. Louis.
But after some online research and talks with league officials, Holtzman, 61, signed on for the IBL’s inaugural season. The former big leaguer has never been to Israel before and views his first trip as a chance to share the game with another part of the world.
IBL’s website (www.israelbaseballleague.com) calls Holtzman the “winningest Jewish pitcher in Major League history.” His 174 career victories top pitching legend (and fellow landsman) Sandy Koufax’s 165. Both men sat out Jewish High Holidays during their playing days, so a Sabbath-observant baseball league suits Holtzman just fine.
If the game takes off, notes Holtzman, Israel may field a team for the 2009 World Baseball Classic, an international baseball tournament sponsored by Major League Baseball that was first played last year. “The opportunity here is very appealing.”
DJG
“Baseball Is Life” reads the message on a popular T-shirt. If that’s the case, Josh Epstein has been living the “grand old game” early and often.
Growing up in Beachwood, which had no Little League, Epstein practiced pitching and hitting with a tennis ball in his front yard. He honed his skills further in middle school, high school, and in various summer leagues. After four years of playing college baseball, however, Epstein wasn’t picked in Major League baseball’s yearly entry draft, nor was he offered a free agent contract from any team.
Epstein was working as an advisor for Ameriprise Financial last November when he received the e-mail that pulled him back into the game he loves. It came from a highly unexpected source n the brand new Israel Baseball League (IBL).
“I figured my career was over and I’d be (reduced to) playing softball during the summers,” admits the 23-year-old.
Epstein was working as an adviser for Ameriprise Financial last November when he received the e-mail that pulled him back into the game he loves. It came from a highly unexpected source n the brand-new Israel Baseball League (IBL).
The IBL is a 120-player, six-team league that will play a 45-game schedule this summer. (See related article on page 21.) The eight-week season includes an all-star game and a championship tilt between the two top teams.
Opening day is June 24, when the Modi’in Miracle takes on the Petach Tikva Pioneers. Epstein will play for the Pioneers. He is one of two former Clevelanders in the nascent league; the other is Shaker Heights native Nate Fish.
“This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me,” beams Epstein during a phone interview from his home in Franklin Lakes, N.J.
Players from nine different countries were drafted to play in Israel, as were about a dozen native Israelis. According to the league, about 40% of the players are Jewish.
Nearly a third of the players have previous professional experience, while some have played college baseball. Epstein falls into the latter category. He pitched for Ramapo College of New Jersey, a liberal arts school in the northern part of the state. The right-hander’s best season was in 2006 when he threw 24 innings while compiling a 1-0 record with a 2.59 ERA.
The lack of velocity on Epstein’s fastball prevented him from moving to the next level, he says. When the IBL called in November, Epstein was unsure he would be able to commit to a summer in Israel away from his new job.
However, he admits, the pull of playing professional baseball became “overwhelming.” Epstein, who says he models his pitching style after major leaguer Greg Maddux, contacted the league in early March and drove to Massachusetts for a tryout. Although he hadn’t thrown a baseball for almost a year, Epstein tossed enough strikes to impress IBL director of baseball operations Dan Duquette, a former Major League general manager.
Epstein signed a contract the following Monday and was picked in the second round during the IBL’s April 26 draft. The last few whirlwind months have been “pretty unbelievable,” he says.
Busy, too.
Epstein has been running and lifting weights while pitching for a traveling team from New Jersey. (He left for Israel June 19.) This won’t be Epstein’s first time in the Jewish state. He’s visited half a dozen times before. His parents, Barbara Margelefsky and Philip Epstein, lived there for several years, and his grandparents have an apartment in Tel Aviv.
Opening day will be a family affair. Epstein’s mom will be in the stands. His father and sister Ariella will visit in July. “Josh spells life b-a-s-e-b-a-l-l,” says his dad. “He is truly living his dream.”
‘Perfect timing’
Former Clevelander Nate Fish tended the infield at the University of Cincinnati with future Jewish Major League star Kevin Youkilis, who plays first base for the Boston Red Sox. Youkilis won a World Series ring with the team in 2004 and is hitting .336 so far this season.
Fish, 27, doesn’t have any delusions about playing alongside Youkilis in the majors. He knows he’s probably too old to qualify as even a minor league prospect. But after getting drafted to play professional baseball in Israel, he can’t help but dream.
“I want to prove to myself that I can play at this level,” says Fish. (IBL players are expected to perform on the level of a “good independent league to Class A” team in the U.S. minor leagues, IBL’s director of operations Duquette recently told the Chicago Tribune.)
Fish, who was picked in the fifth round by the Tel Aviv Lightning, will split his playing time between third base, shortstop and catcher. The last two months have been his “spring training” n working out near his Brooklyn home and playing semi-pro ball with the New York City Thunderdogs.
When he wasn’t selected in the baseball draft after college, Fish, like Epstein, figured his career was over. He moved to New York City, he says, to pursue various interests, including a creative writing program at The New School, located in Greenwich Village. He also took a job at an indoor baseball facility, giving batting clinics and individual instruction.
Coaching has made him better as a player, he believes. “Mechanically, my swing is much better than it was when I was in college,” Fish told haaretz.com in November.
Fish found out about the IBL after his father Jerry saw an ad for a league tryout in The New York Times. Fish, who is single and between semesters at school, jumped at the opportunity. His passport is ready, and even packing will be easy, as Fish has been living out of a suitcase at a friend’s apartment ever since his lease expired. It is, he says, ”perfect timing.”
This year in Israel
Israel may seem an unlikely outpost for the American pastime, admits Epstein. Attending Israeli sports camps as a youngster, he played soccer and basketball, the country’s two athletic passions. Epstein tried to teach his Israeli friends how to play catch with a baseball, but there weren’t enough gloves to go around, and his friends weren’t much interested anyway.
Baseball is a thinking man’s game, he notes, one that “has the potential to take off (in Israel), even with native Israelis.”
Preparing to play pro ball in Israel brings back fond memories for Fish. He was recruited by the 2005 U.S. Maccabiah softball team, he says, and had a “completely amazing experience.”
Fish can’t wait to go back and relive that experience, albeit at a higher level. He’s certainly not doing it for the money; each team will have a salary cap of $45,000 per player for its entire 20-player roster. (According to mlbplayers.com, the average Major League salary for the 2006 season was $2,699,292. The minimum salary was $380,000.)
“Money is the least motivating factor for me,” Fish maintains. He admits he is a little nervous about his first at-bat with the Lightning. However, he expects those butterflies to dissipate after a game or two. It will also help to have his family in attendance. Fish’s mother, Marcia Bloomberg, will be there along with his father Jerry Fish and sister Dasi.
“We want to see Nate live out his goal of playing pro ball,” says Bloomberg, executive director of The Cleveland Hillel Foundation. The game can also have the attendant effect of boosting Israel’s image abroad, she believes.
PBS will broadcast the IBL’s opening game Sunday, July 1, on a delayed basis, in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, and West Palm Beach. While the IBL has no official connection with Major League Baseball, the league’s website (www.MLB.com) will carry coverage of Israel’s games.
These are small steps, admits Fish, but any media coverage showing Israel as a country not just at war is a positive step. “My friends don’t know much about Israel,” he notes. “All they see (through the media) is explosions. They think it’s a dangerous place.”
While Israel is more restive than usual these days, Fish is thinking more about his batting mechanics than about rocket attacks and skirmishes between Hamas and Fatah.
Energy is a big part of Fish’s makeup. The former Clevelander sprints to his position between innings and likes talking to his teammates throughout the game. He hopes his energy translates to fans who have never seen baseball before. “I’ll play hard. It should be a lot of fun.”
Epstein is excited for the season to start, but he can’t help thinking about the future. He hopes a solid year with Petach Tikva leads to a multi-year contract with the team. If the IBL extends its season to 80 games as league officials have discussed, that could mean living in Israel for an even longer period of time while trying to maintain a job back home.
“I’d consider it,” Epstein contends.
Philip Epstein says he will support his son through any decision he makes. He knows what baseball meant to Josh even at an early age, when father and son played catch waiting for the school bus and Josh asked for a batting cage as a bar mitzvah present.
Now that Epstein is back on the baseball diamond, the senior Epstein has sensed a change in his son’s demeanor. “The stars are shining in his eyes.”
Fish is ready to take that first sprint out to third base. The fact that he’ll be doing it 3,000 miles away from home makes no difference. “I’m just ready to go, man.”
with reports from the Chicago Tribune
dguth@cjn.org
If you build it…
Israel Baseball League (IBL) founder Larry Baras, a Jewish businessman from Brooklyn, created the IBL with the thought that a “relaxing” spectator sport might provide relief for a nation under frequent stress.
“There’s something well-paced about it that fits the way life should be,” Baras said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
“In Israel, everyone’s on edge, jostling and honking, ears to the radio. They really would benefit from just being able to relax a couple of hours at a game.”
IBL teams represent six Israeli cities and towns and will share three fields. Players will live together in a dormitory-style complex in Ramat Hasharon near Tel Aviv. There will be no games on Friday nights or Saturdays, and all ballpark refreshments will be kosher.
IBL officials hope the league will spur Israeli interest in American baseball. The season will be accompanied by a summer-long series of baseball camps for Israeli youth. One of the league’s goals is to raise the level of play throughout the country (which hasn’t developed much beyond Little League) so that at least 25% of players in the IBL are Israeli.
The league’s target audience is the more than 120,000 Israelis from the United States, as well as American tourists and students there on study programs. But organizers also plan to reach out to native-born Israelis.
Three of the six managers in the Israeli league are former well-known Jewish players in the Major Leagues: Ken Holtzman, a star pitcher with five World Series rings; Art Shamsky, a member of the 1969 “Miracle” New York Mets who later played for the Cubs; and Ron Blomberg, who played for the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox and was baseball’s first designated hitter.
Holtzman admits he did a double-take when he was offered a managerial post with Petach Tikva. “I never associated baseball with Israel or any place in the Middle East,” Holtzman told the CJN in a phone interview from his home in St. Louis.
But after some online research and talks with league officials, Holtzman, 61, signed on for the IBL’s inaugural season. The former big leaguer has never been to Israel before and views his first trip as a chance to share the game with another part of the world.
IBL’s website (www.israelbaseballleague.com) calls Holtzman the “winningest Jewish pitcher in Major League history.” His 174 career victories top pitching legend (and fellow landsman) Sandy Koufax’s 165. Both men sat out Jewish High Holidays during their playing days, so a Sabbath-observant baseball league suits Holtzman just fine.
If the game takes off, notes Holtzman, Israel may field a team for the 2009 World Baseball Classic, an international baseball tournament sponsored by Major League Baseball that was first played last year. “The opportunity here is very appealing.”
DJG
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| CJN annual meeting: Shamis takes the gavel | Clevelander awarded Fulbright to study in Egypt |
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