In the past week, the Jewish state’s baseball team has won four consecutive victories in the World Baseball Classic (WBC), even scoring an upset against Cuba’s highly ranked team on Saturday night. Lee Smith comments on the excitement the team has generated:
[E]ven people who aren’t normally baseball fans are pulling for Israel. Even before the U.S. team took to the field (the Americans opened Friday night against Colombia), the Israeli squad had generated an unusually high level of interest in the WBC [which is] held every four years. . . . [F]or most casual fans, the WBC is essentially a string of exhibition games [as opposed to a major event]. . . . It’s different for fanatics with immigrant backgrounds from the Caribbean baseball powers, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the 2013 WBC champion Dominican Republic. Here some of the Dominican players celebrate “plátano pride,” and the Baltimore Orioles star Manny Machado explains why he’s playing for the Dominican Republic rather than the United States. . . .
I suspect there’s something similar going on with the Israeli club. American Jews are thrilled to see Jewish ballplayers take their place among the nations of baseball. Most of the Israel roster is made up of American ballplayers whose family history qualifies them for Israeli citizenship, but only two active players are Israelis. . . .
The first-base coach Nate Fish is also an Israeli citizen, having made aliyah in 2013. I spoke . . . with him as he and the club prepared for their game with Cuba. Fish . . . told me that “it’s the golden age of Jewish baseball. There were always good Jewish players in the past, but it was spread out. So you have Sandy Koufax and other [Jewish star athletes of previous generations]. But now you have numbers.”
Read more on Weekly Standard: http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-golden-age-of-jewish-baseball/article/2007174