Sometimes you don’t have to garner gold to be a winner.
So it was for Israel’s Olympic baseball team, a band of 24 athletes who went farther in the Olympic competition than anyone anywhere predicted, and finished fifth in the world.
Team Israel, ranked 24th in the world and given a 3.2% probability of winning a gold medal, played five games in Japan. They lost to third-ranked South Korea, fourth-ranked US, and then beat and eliminated fifth-ranked Mexico. In their final round, they lost to Korea again and then to the seventh-ranked Dominican Republic. Their first loss to Korea was in the bottom of the 10th, the loss to the Dominicans in the bottom of the ninth; and 25 months after it started, their journey ended with the team three outs away from playing for a medal.
So tantalizingly close. But look at how far they had come. Their trek to Tokyo began July 1, 2019, when Israel went 6-0, beating Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ireland and Russia twice, to win the European Championships Pool B tournament in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria.
On July 26 and 27, Israel beat Lithuania, winner of the second Pool B group. They took the first two games of their two-of-three contest in Lithuania, scoring 27 runs to Lithuania’s two, and moved up to the Pool A playoffs in Germany. From September 7 to 15, 2019, Israel competed in Solingen and Bonn, Germany, in the European Baseball Championship A Pool for the first time. They surprised oddsmakers by coming in fourth place, with wins over the Czech Republic, Sweden, Germany, and Great Britain. They lost to the Netherlands, then won against France in the playoffs before losing to Italy and Spain. They finished among the top five, to advance to the Olympics qualifiers.
In Parma, Italy, from September 18 to 22, Team Israel beat the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, lost to the Czech Republic, and then beat South Africa to clinch qualifying for the Olympics. They had gone 17-4 over the summer, having beaten 15 national teams in four tournaments in four countries to get to the Olympics. What was then supposed to be 10 months until the opening ceremony turned into 22, as the world shut down over corona. But athletes can’t shut it down, can’t turn it off and on at will. There’s a system, there’s a program they all had to keep to. They had to ensure that when they showed up at workouts in Arizona in May, they would be in shape and ready to play an exhibition tour and the Olympic games themselves. Some players were dealing with injuries, but everyone kept to their routine, staying the course for 671 days while figuring out a way to stay physically and mentally prepared within the confines of quarantine.
Then came a whirlwind exhibition tour in July, with the team playing in Coney Island; Pomona, New York; Hartford; Lancaster and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Aberdeen and Bethesda, Maryland and Central Islip, New York – nine games in 10 days in eight cities in four states. The guys did a lot of traveling over the last 25 months.
Shlomo Lipetz, the team’s most senior veteran and living legend, said playing in the Olympics was living a dream he never knew he had. None of them did – how could they? There was no Olympic baseball to aspire to growing up. Yet here they were, playing on the largest sports stage in the world, the first team in any sport to represent Israel at the Olympics in 45 years. The team fell short of a medal. But they won big with all they accomplished. Let us not be sad, not cry over its ending, but smile over its achievement – an incredible success. Baseball is a cruel game, and it seems that Israel has more work to do.
“There is a lot to an Olympic medal,” a father of one of the players said. “Maybe a taste creates a craving.”■