Professional baseball makes pitch in Israel

The scene is vintage small-town America. The concession stand sells hot dogs and cold beer. Boys in baseball caps position themselves beyond right field in hope of snaring home runs. The crowd rises for the national anthem to get the game underway.

But the anthem is “Hatikva,” the teams on the field are the Bet Shemesh Blue Sox and the Modiin Miracle, and many in the crowd are more than a little mystified by the spectacle of grown men playing baseball.

On a sun-baked August afternoon, the paid, mostly foreign, players are the draw in the latest game of the Israel Baseball League, which seeks to plant professional baseball in the Middle East. This is no snazzy downtown stadium: The unadorned field sits just past the cow sheds and stucco houses of this rural collective.

Seated in the tiny bleachers and plastic chairs next to the groomed diamond, the 300 or so adult fans, nearly all transplanted American Jews, try to explain the game to their Israeli-born offspring. To the uninitiated youngsters, baseball is as alien as the two-man luge, only harder to follow.

“There’s a ball and this long stick,” offers Hadar Breen, a 12-year-old from suburban Jerusalem who sat in the front row next to her American-born father, Barry. “Hatikva” is familiar to her, but little else on the field is comprehensible.

Hadar is quick to declare the game too slow, despite a flurry of first-inning action, including a home run and a steal of home, that left the Blue Sox up, 5-3. But her 9-year-old brother, Tsur, patrolling the wilted sunflowers out beyond right field, appeared hooked.

The Breens represent the promise and potential pitfalls facing the first-year league, the brainchild of a successful Boston bagel-maker named Larry Baras.

The six teams are made up of mostly former college athletes and itinerant ballplayers who earn $2,000 for the season to cultivate baseball in Israel and nurse their own big-league dreams. Seven foreign countries are represented among the 120 players, with the biggest contingent from the United States. Israeli players account for only a sixth of the league’s roster.

Baras, a longtime baseball fan and self-described Zionist, said the venture is a natural for Israel, with its sizable community of U.S. immigrants and a tendency among natives to glom onto anything American. But attendance has been disappointing, with only a few dozen to a few hundred spectators per game, and native-born Israelis remain conspicuously absent. Some commentators say baseball, with its complex rules and methodical tempo, is unlikely to win over Israelis, who are famously impatient and like sports with speed and lots of back-and-forth action, such as soccer and basketball.

Baras, 55, isn’t buying such talk. It might take years, maybe decades, he says, for Israelis to acquire a taste.

“When I came here 25 years ago, I couldn’t get a hamburger. Now you can’t walk a block without seeing a hamburger,” he says. “This is a hard sport to understand. It will take a while.”

To make the games more accessible, the league shortened them to seven innings instead of nine, with the customary stretch coming in the fifth inning rather than the seventh. Ties are settled not by extra innings, but with a home run derby -- akin to a soccer shootout. And tickets are priced to draw: $6 for adults, less than the cost of a movie.

Although Israel has had youth baseball leagues and small-scale amateur softball for years, Baras came up with the idea of introducing serious baseball two years ago, after attending a minor league game in Brockton, Mass.

“Everyone was having such a good time. Everybody was there -- grandparents, teenagers,” he says.

Baras says baseball, besides offering entertainment, is good public relations for Israel and could help soothe the strains of a region in constant conflict. The league’s commissioner is Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

“I really do think this could do a lot for Israeli society, for North American Jewry, for the game of baseball,” Kurtzer says. He hopes, too, to make inroads among Israel’s Arab citizens and plans to explore opening a ballpark in an Arab city, an idea he acknowledges is likely to generate controversy.

“We are trying to stay apolitical,” he says.

The crowd around Baras grows noisy as the Blue Sox and Miracle swap the lead back and forth in spasms of big hits, misplayed balls and wild scoring. Hadar Breen warms up, too. By the end of the fifth inning, with Modiin now up, 12-9, she is out of her seat, snapping pictures of the action with a cellphone.

Launching a baseball league in Israel has not been easy. Added to the usual travails of a start-up has been an Israeli bureaucracy that has put up one obstacle after another, Baras says.

The league uses only three fields, and delays left one in Tel Aviv unavailable for more than two weeks at the start of the season. When it finally opened, a municipal inspector showed up with a demolition order because the improvised fences lacked a permit, Baras said. But play there has continued anyway.

Here at Kibbutz Gezer, a 35-minute drive from Jerusalem, officials adapted a field normally used for youth baseball and softball. They expanded the dimensions, but the enlarged outfield now rises at an awkward angle, creating a tricky break for fielders near the fence. To prevent injury, they padded a light pole that became part of right field.

The league has given players a chance to extend their baseball careers after college and offered a window, if narrow, on a region most had known only from the news. There is grumbling about the dormitory-style quarters they share on the grounds of an agricultural school outside Tel Aviv, and with the monotony of a diet that appears to revolve around chicken schnitzel.

But Rafael Bergstrom, a 25-year-old pitcher from Pacific Grove, Calif., near Monterey, and one of the stars of the Bet Shemesh squad, says it is a thrill to be paid to play ball six days a week. The season, which opened in June, ends Sunday with the championship game, capping a playoff series. The finalists have not yet been determined.

“We’re playing baseball in Israel,” says Bergstrom, a UC San Diego graduate who has played in Germany and Australia. “In spite of the setbacks, in my opinion, we’re doing something pretty special.”

Bergstrom’s team, down by three runs going into the seventh and final inning, stages a dramatic rally to move ahead, 14-13. A buzz surges through the crowd. The game, which has now stretched into evening twilight, will come down to Modiin’s last at-bat, and perhaps to a tie-breaking home run derby.

But it is not to be.

Before Bet Shemesh can take the field, the announcer comes on to say the game is being halted due to the encroaching darkness.

The field’s lights are not up to the task of illuminating a night game sufficiently to ensure no one gets hurt. The last half-inning will be played when the teams meet a week later.

The fans, cheated of a cliffhanger ending, erupt in boos. “Refund!” shouts a fellow from New York. But the razzing is good-natured. Most people are smiling on their way out.

Tsur Breen troops in with a home run ball, a trophy for his work in the sunflowers. Hadar, in the end captivated by the contest, asks her father to bring her back for the rematch.

The ballpark empties quickly. One of the Bet Shemesh players signs balls for children, then heads for the team bus. Under the lights’ muted glow, a lone groundskeeper rakes the infield dirt in preparation for a new game. This summer, at least, tomorrow brings more baseball.

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ellingwood@latimes.com