Being a spectator at organized sporting events never found favor in the eyes of this writer, who himself sports a limited capacity for attentiveness. I had a hard time remembering the rules, and was ophthalmologically incapable of tracking the one guy holding the ball along with the several guys who are not. The lens through which I interpret most sports news may as well be labeled as “ooh, pretty colors.”
But baseball I got—or so I thought. The rules and on-the-field dynamics of baseball were relatively simple, since fly balls allowed me just enough time to figure out who was in position to catch them. But at some point in middle school, my camp bunkmates surpassed me in their comprehension of baseball’s “finer” points. When they weren’t yapping about Shabbos walks, they would furiously engage in squawking matches, carried out in a distinctly nasal pre-pubescent tone, facilely flinging around decades worth of statistical jargon that seemed completely foreign. Meanwhile, I was left to lament my discovery that each team plays over a hundred games per season; I could barely remember the details of one.
Like the scrawny asthmatic kid at the end of the bench, I was having a “put me in, coach” moment, waiting for that avuncular slap in the tuchus to usher me back onto the field that I naively thought of as my own. Enter the Israel Baseball League.
