Foreign Baseball

Comment by Bill Stanton on March 25, 2010 at 10:50am

Arye- This is interesting. I always like hearing about baseball being played in non-US areas. Hiow many kids do you have in the league? Is it growing?

CheckSwing Member and forger Red Sox GM, Dan Duquette was involved in the Isreael Professional League and a very good documentary was made about the experience of building the league, which eventually did not succeed. The movie showed that Israelis had little interest in baseball. I'm curious to see what your experience is from a baseball perspective and if you'll be able to build fields and get people involved in the game.

Comment by Arye Zacks on March 25, 2010 at 11:37am

Hi Bill - Growth is an interesting question. We recently became an official Little League, and it seems like we are growing in some areas, while struggling in others.

We are divided into four age groups, Minors (Coach Pitch 8-10 year olds), Juvenile (kid pitch 10-12 year olds), Cadet (full size field 13-15 year olds) and Senior league (16+).

At the juvenile level, where I coach, we have 12 teams in our region (geographically all teams are within about a 30 minute drive, and there is a second region with 6 teams in it. At the Minor level there are 11 teams in total, and there are 12 cadet teams. The Senior League has four teams in it. So all told there are about 45 teams, each with somewhere between 11-15 players.

The league is largely made up of American immigrants, although there are some native born Israeli kids who play. I coached two national juvenile teams, and each team had about three native hebrew speaking kids and about 12 American immigrants (more on coaching a national team in another post).

I arrived here when the professional league was beginning, and it was very exciting to see. From my perspective, which was not a close perspective at the time, it seemed like the league was following an If You Build It, They Will Come marketing philosophy, and never made much of an effort to reach native Israelis. There was also some alleged financial mishandling by some of the people involved, which did not help matters.

Three years later, I am now on the board of the Israel Association of Baseball, and there is a group from the states who is interested in starting another league here. They are talking about putting some serious money into field development, and I hope it happens, but I won't get my hopes up until something actually happens.

In the meantime, I am going to continue coaching and watching my players develop, and try to encourage more Israelis to come out and play ball.

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