Baseball in Israel

Last year, when we were in Israel, my wife's cousin told us that there's baseball there but that the "Anglos" are pretty much the only participants.

This article by Jerry Crasnick over at ESPN suggests that maybe things will change when the Israel Baseball League opens its season next June. (hat tip: "Harold Clark")

And you don't even have to be Jewish to play.

The league's commissioner, Daniel Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel and later Egypt (or was it the other way around?), says this about baseball: "Baseball is a hard game to learn, but it's not unlike studying Talmud. It's very complicated, but once you get it, it's interesting. You have a lot of statistics you can follow, and you can spend hours discussing it."