Tag Archives: europeanchampionships

THE WAR

24 Jul

One of our baseball players was killed in Gaza.  His name was Shon Mondshine.  He was 19 years old.  I did not know him. He played for the Tel Aviv Juniors in 2011.  This blog post is for Shon and his family.

It started like any good story starts, I did not realize it was starting, there was no announcement, no one said, “Please take your seats, and cover your heads, the war is going to begin now,” it just began.

3 Jewish boys got kidnapped and killed in the West Bank, in “the Gush”.  We have teams there, I am there often, but it didn’t feel close.  We have a proximity meter with tragedy.  When is it real?  How close do we have to be? 7,000 miles away?  Someone from the same religion?  Same country?  A family member?  A stranger?  An enemy?  Then an Arab boy got killed in Jerusalem.  Narratives form.  Things escalate.  A couple of sirens in southern Israel, and Tel Aviv, no big deal, still not close enough, it’s Israel, it happens, the Iron Dome, the rockets don’t get through, life goes on.  More rockets.  Every day.  A lot of them.  Sirens 2 or 3 times a day some places.  Taking shelter on the side of the road, at the field, in random apartment buildings, with the kids at camp.  It’s getting tiresome.  Things escalate again.  Air strikes in Gaza.  Then Israel goes into Gaza.  13 Israeli soldiers killed in one day, and 7 more the next, a total of 28 so far, and far more Gazans.  And then Shon.  My meter goes off.  A baseball player.  A kid.  In the same uniform I see the kids in every week.

Through all of this, we are trying to get ready to play.  We go out to practice, forget about it, maybe hear some booms in the distance, then, after, check our phones for updates, Red Alerts, rockets in Ashdod, on the ride home, “Yuli, What’s he saying on the radio?” 3 more soldiers killed, and everyone is quiet for a moment.  It’s not like in the States.  Everyone knows each other here, or knows someone who knew them.  It’s like everyone went to the same high school.  If you couldn’t tell from the tone of this post, there is a seriousness to things right now.  You can feel it.  This has made me more Israeli than a passport.  Stores are being burned in France.  Maccabi Haifa’s soccer team was attacked on the field during a game in Vienna yesterday.  What is happening?

For the Americans, the only thing I can compare it to is 9/11.  People don’t leave their houses, they just sit and watch news.  People are sad.  People are mad.  People are jumpy.  When a motorcycle starts, or a dumpster lid slams closed too fast, or a song with a siren in the background comes on the radio, everyone perks up. Liberals become conservatives.  Flags come out.  There are demonstrations in the street.

We leave in 3 days for Slovenia.  And the airport is closed, sort of, some flights are getting out, some are cancelled, I can’t keep up.  It feels like Michael Corleone trying to get the last flight out of Cuba on New Years Eve.

We will be fine.  Mostly, we’ll just be playing ball, like we always do.  But, every once in a while, maybe at the hotel, privately, maybe in the 3rd inning of a close game, we will think about what is going on, about the people who are fighting, and the people who are dying, and about Shon.

Shon Mondshine. 2011 Tel Aviv Comrades. 4th from the right, top row, with long hair. RIP.

Shon Mondshine. 2011 Tel Aviv Comrades. 4th from the right, top row, with long hair. RIP.

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , ,

THE ROAD TO SLOVENIA

5 Jul

What is this “World Cup” people are speaking about?  I have never heard of it.  Clearly, the world is not interested.  No, no, no.  The collective conscience of all animal life on Earth is focused solely on the significantly larger and more important world sporting event know as the EUROPEAN CHAMPIONSHIPS OF BASEBALL C POOL, where the lowest ranked teams in Europe compete to advance to next summer’s B Pool.  TV deals are in negotiation.  Stadiums are being faultily constructed even as I sit here writing, in my bathtub filled with gold and rubies, surrounded by my women dressed, barely, in velvet and brass, feeding me truffles and spellchecking.  That’s right, Ladies, Geetles, faithful addicts of the Greatest Blog of All Time, on July 27, in 3 weeks, we, the Israel National Team, the Greatest Jewish Baseball Show on Earth, leave for Lubljanja Slovenia to play against our International Baseball Counterparts in the deadly gladiatorial competition of wit and athleticism called baseball.  But the road Slovenia is not an easy one.

According to the travel documents I just received, it appears we will we fly into Prague on the 27th, sleep 4 hours in tents in the forest behind the airport, rent canoes, and head east down the first sewage canal we find.  A witch named Rudolf in a Team Israel hat will be waiting for us at the southern mouth of the canal.  He will lead us through the treacherous sewage rapids into the GULF OF POSSIBLE DEATH where we will drift and let the current take us until rescue helicopters come.  This will be considered our “rest period”.  We do, after all, have games to play.  There will be 3 stick-shift Jeeps covered in rust with drivers waiting for us at the hospital after we rehydrate with intravenous fluids and have received treatments for our open sores and various mental illnesses we developed from drinking a deadly if delicious combination of salt water and sewage.  We will do a quick head count and drive south on route 4 Million for 9 hours where we will stop to get gas, eat raw tomatoes, and throw bullpens in the parking lot of a rest stop in Transylvania.  If everything goes according to plan, the Jeeps will run out of gas by the time we reach THE WEIRD AND MAGICAL EUROPEAN CASTLE HALFWAY UP A SNOW CAPPED MOUNTAIN OVERLOOKING A LAKE OF WATER SO STILL AND PURE IT LOOKS LIKE CRYSTAL WHICH IS VERY NEAR SLOVENIA, as it’s called, when, for the final leg of our trip, we will inflate our orb balls and roll directly to the field in uniform just in time for the 1st inning of our 1st game.  According to our travel agent, it is the cheapest option…

For now, we are practicing 3 days a week and have games the other 3 days which is good because it is only 1.3 trillion degrees celsius in Israel this time of year.  I experienced a unique injury at practice the other day, both my knees melted.  Not sure about the recovery time.  We are working HARD, fueled by the power of a thousand future generations of Israel Baseball fans.  I must tell you, I have never had this much fun playing.  We have three weeks before we put on our periwinkle blue Team Israel uniforms and get the chance to call ourselves CHAMPIONS.  Despite the odds of making it to Slovenia alive, I think we can do it, we can win this thing, we can return to Israel, late, exhausted, empty airport, full hearts, hopefully with a trophy.

You’re lucky, you can join us, without having to canoe through Eastern Europe, you have me, your own personal genius.  So switch the channel from the World Cup Finals to the whatever station our games will not appear on, use your imagination, for it is stronger than your TV anyways, and join the Israel National Team on the ROAD TO SLOVENIA.

 

 

LET'S GO!

LET’S GO!

Here is our schedule… And since you are likely too lazy to click on the clearly labeled link, I rewrote it with my own two hands below.

schedule

Tuesday, July 29, vs. Finland, 1:30pm
Wednesday, July 30, vs. Slovenia, 5:30pm
Thursday, July 31, vs. Latvia, 1:30pm
Friday, August 1, Semi-Finals,
Saturday, August 2, Finals

Search #roadtoslovenia on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter for all updates on the team and our trip…

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

THE C POOL

27 Feb

I must apologize, dear reader, again, for not writing lately.  I know you wake each morning, in a panic, and stumble from bed, naked, drunk, to read a new blog post.  And most mornings, I fail you, I am not there, my absence rushes in.  You swipe at the emptiness in front of you, gasping for breathe, wondering, where is he, WHERE? –  With goats?  Yes.  The elderly?  Yes, usually.  But this time, I was in the Dark and Magical Land of Prague, home to the worlds largest community of Orthodox Vampires.  You see, it was time for the 2014 Confederation of European Baseball Annual Congress.  All the Kings and Queens of European Baseball united in one place, battling for baseball supremacy of the continent.  Power.  Politics.  We had important issues to vote on, decisions to make, chicken or fish, where will next year’s Congress be held.   I am glad to report I survived the glare of a thousand gargoyles and made it through the meetings so that today, I do not fail you, today, I deliver, today, I write.  Using only the experimental technology known as words, and youtube,  of course, Ladies and Geetles, I humbly, dutifully present to you another blog post, on this, the Most Important Blog of All Time.

photo-4

2014 CEB Congress

In Prague, we met our opponents for upcoming competitions.  This summer, this July, to be specific, we, THE ISRAEL NATIONAL TEAM, will play in the European Championships “C Pool” in Ljubljana, Slovenia.  A total of 8 teams will compete. 2 of the 8 teams will move up to play in next summers “B Pool”, and the winner of the B Pool will play with the Best in Europe in the 2016 A Pool.   The other teams in the C Pool are; Latvia, Romania, Noway, Finland, Ireland, Hungary, and, of course, our hosts, Slovenia.  Being the KING OF ALL JEWISH BASEBALL, and leader of the Most Powerful Baseball Organization in the World, the Israel Association of Baseball, I thought I should do some research.  Here is what I found.  Enjoy.  A look into our world, the world of international baseball.

Enjoy a well played game in Latvia to the soft sounds of Metallica.

Moving on, a video from Baseball in Romania’s Facebook Page.  These teams love metal.

Romania

Norway’s Opening of their Baseball Hall of Fame.

Finland’s own version of baseball.  What is this!!!  The best head-first slides I have ever seen, and there are 20,000 fans.  Horrifying.

A well-done story about baseball in Ireland…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1an6wPCWWM

Baseball in Hungary – nice little ballpark.

A single pitch is thrown in Slovenia, the pitch heard ’round the world as it’s come to be known, a come-backer, out at 1st.  Base runner at 1st not sure what to do…

So it appears we will be competing against Romanian Metal Heads, Hungarian Missionaries, and some of the Greatest Athletes in Finland playing a sport called baseball that is not baseball.  Winner takes all.  In defense of the other teams, we do not have even as robust an internet presence as they, that is, besides my instructional videos, which are admittedly cardboard boxes of videography.  And in the end, they are not “the other teams” at all.  As the saying goes, all is fair in love and international baseball.  We are one team, playing the same game, fighting the same bizarre battles in Norway, or Portugal, or Israel, one tribe of weirdos, baseball players, spread out over Europe, the diaspora, to be reunited for a brief moment this summer for the Greatest, Bloodiest Battle of Them All, The European Championship C Pool.  See you in Ljubjana.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,