by Travis Zier
a local voice
When people ask me what I did this summer and I say, “I played professional baseball in Israel,” even I am a little surprised.
It is hard to believe that from mid-June through mid-August I was playing in the Israeli Baseball League for the Ra’anana Express, all the while seeing a side of Israel that most tourists never experience. It was truly one of the best times of my life.
Not that it was all fun and games. Like any startup company, the IBL faced some challenges. One of the fields, Sportek, located in the “Central Park of Tel Aviv,” was built two weeks after the season started, causing several games to be canceled.
Another field, Gezer, was a converted softball playground that had a light pole in the middle of right field. But on most nights Gezer drew 900 enthusiastic fans. And just beyond left field were the remains of King Solomon’s Temple, which made for a pretty cool view while taking batting practice.
Our accommodations were similar to a low-budget hostel. For almost every meal we ate schnitzel with chopped cucumber and fruit-flavored water, not quite the California cuisine most San Franciscans are used to.
But these problems made the league that much more exciting and brought the players closer together.
Living at a boarding school named Kfar Hayarok in a suburb of Tel Aviv was the oddest part of the experience. We would routinely see stray cats and chickens roaming the grounds, and every day at 5:30 a.m. as the sun came up we would hear peacocks shrieking.
No one was used to this lifestyle, and it created a bond between the players. I became closest to the Dominicans who lived next to me and barely spoke English. Our nights consisted of playing dominoes, teaching each other English and Spanish slang and talking about the intricacies of baseball. The Dominicans would tell stories about their minor league experiences and their families back home, and we would tell them about college life and America.
Once we adjusted to our living accommodations, we had to get used to an Israeli style of baseball, which featured seven-inning games and a home-run derby to break ties. The league’s talent ranged from a 6-foot-9-inch Dominican who threw 100 mph to a 17-year-old Israeli who had been playing for only a year.
The quality of play sometimes approached major league standards, while occasionally sinking to a high school level. But our fans didn’t care. They were just happy to be watching a game.
Most of the spectators were Americans who had made aliyah or American families that had moved to Israel for high-tech work. They took us in as their own and often invited us to their homes for Shabbat dinner.
Israeli children enjoyed the games the most and offer hope for the future of baseball in Israel. They would continually plead, “You, you give me ball,” or “Can I have bat?” We were fan favorites until the league ran out of official IBL balls.
By the end of the summer I had learned a great deal about religion, the Middle East, the Dominican Republic, and baseball. Being in Jerusalem on a Friday watching hundreds of people pray at the Western Wall before eating Shabbat dinner in the Jewish quarter was but one of a long list of pleasant memories.
I will never forget the nights socializing on the Tel Aviv beach at a hookah bar overlooking the Mediterranean, or going to a midnight concert on the top of Masada to see Jackson Browne and Shawn Colvin play as the sun rose over the Dead Sea.
This experience will stay with me for the rest of my life.
Travis Zier, who grew up in San Francisco and attended Haverford College, is a right-handed pitcher. He had a 1-2 record with a 3.86 Earned Run Average.
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California