Luke Ford

TabloidBaby reports:

World-renowned journalist Elli Wohlgelernter– known here as Our Man Elli In Israel– is already causing shockwaves around the sportsworld with his exposé of the new Israel Baseball League. In this sidebar story, he explores one of the most embarrassing incidents of this first season: the outburst and ouster of one of the league’s most high-profile figures, team manager and former Major League pitcher Ken Holtzman:

by ELLI WOHLGELERNTER

In an interview on July 20 with the Israeli Web portal Walla!, Petah Tikva manager and former Major Leaguer Ken Holtzman let loose with a sweeping broadside against the Israel Baseball League, sparing no one.

He criticized the baseball fields: “They would reach the level of high schools in our country”; the teams: “Chosen at random, and in a strange manner”; the Israeli players: “There are no good Israeli players”; the other players: “According to what I can see, none of the players can reach even semi-pro baseball in the United States… the really good player would never come here”; and the Israeli fan: “There is no chance that baseball will succeed in Israel. People here relate to baseball the way people in America relate to soccer. They see it as something very boring, and it will never catch on… you can’t make a big impression because there is no culture of baseball, and the facilities are the worse possible.”

A season of frustration all came pouring out, and against league organizers as well.

“They wanted to make the league work very very quickly,” Holtzman said. “The main point to them was that there would be a league, that they could then go to Bud Selig, commissioner of Major League Baseball [and a member of the league’s advisory committee], to tell him that ‘we provided the goods,’ that there is also baseball in Israel. But they opened the league a year too soon. It makes no sense that they would sit in the Eastern United States doing publicity and creating the league, and at the same time, there is nobody here supervising. Look at this field,” he said, referring to Sportek Field in Tel Aviv. “The league opened, and this field still wasn’t ready. They pushed off 25 games because of scandalous management. They should have waited.”

Sheli Teitelbaum writes for The Jerusalem Report:

With draft-dodging alarmingly on the rise, the IDF is generally loath to give potential recruits pointers on how to avoid the rigors of compulsory service. Not long ago, however, army psychologists publicly divulged at least one tactic guaranteed to secure a cushy gig in a rear-echelon unit.

The prospective shirker need only profess, according to "security sources" cited by the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot, a passion for fantasy war-gaming of the "Dungeons and Dragons" variety. Afficionados of the "Role-Playing Games," played strictly in the imaginations of a group of make-believe warriors and wizards, are deemed to be lacking in judgment, detatched from reality, and possessed of a "weak personality." Letting it be known that your high school nickname was Gandalf; asking whether volunteering for the paratroops will generate greater "prestige points" than Golani; trying to cow your kaban (Hebrew acronym for mental health officer) with attack gazes, soul binds, heatstroke and other forms of spellcasting – these and other intimations of affinity for the more fanciful margins of geekdom will almost certainly win you three years in the rear peeling spuds, handing out kitbags or waving jeeps into parking lots.

But D&D, along with the age-old tradition of board and card games and the newer phenomena of computer and video games, is a war game par excellence. And war games have long enjoyed a special cachet within the Zionist enterprise, according to commercial art historian Haim Grossman, who published an article in the Israel Studies journal in 2004 entitled "War As Child’s Play."

Between 1920 and the early 70s, some 250 locally manufactured board-die-and-counter, miniature and card-based war games were marketed to help connect Jewish youngsters (mostly of the male variety) to the geographic, historical and martial exigencies of nation-building and defense. Interest in the hobby diminished after 1973, as Israel’s military predicament grew more complex, as attitudes toward the country’s defense posture became fraught with ambiguity, and as the national saga fragmented into competing, sometimes mutually exclusive narratives. The advent of the personal computer during the early 1980s boosted interest in war-gaming worldwide, with the Arab-Israeli conflict inspiring a small but enduring subgenre of titles available either as software packages or as map or board games. An Israeli company, Pixel Multimedia, even teamed up with Electronic Arts in 1998 to produce a moderately well-received flight and combat simulation called "Jane’s Israeli Air Force."