The great philosopher and manager of the Texas Rangers, Ron Washington, had this quote (“That the way baseball go”). We thought about this quote often while teaching baseball to the Israeli kids here at camp.
Baseball has not “caught on” in Israel – it has grown in popularity, but it has been a very slow growth. In fact, one of the Israeli camp counselor’s told me today that the only sport offered is soccer – he told me later that he would have loved to have played American football and baseball, but he couldn’t. Consequently, the kids that Drew and I, along with 2 others from Abilene, were working with today had never even thrown a ball – maybe a rock, but rarely if ever a ball – nor had they ever caught a ball. The man from Abilene who is leading this baseball education warned me, as I tried to contrive a series of drills and possible ways to help them improve their baseball skills. His warnings were “spot on”. These kids were eager to learn baseball, but most of them had never put on a glove or picked up a bat! It was crazy.
So, as you can imagine, all my practice plans and grandios ideas went out the window. We had to focus on the very basics – “this is a glove, what hand do you throw with? The glove goes on the opposite hand. Here is how you throw a ball. Here is how you catch a ball. Etc.” And to complicate matters, everything we said had to be translated into Hebrew and some Russian! Of course, the kids understood some English, but not as much as we needed them to understand. Some interesting baseball dialog that does not translate well and leads to confused looks:
- I am going throw you some “grounders”.
- Now, I am going to toss you some “pop flies”. (If you had never heard of baseball, what would you think we meant by “pop flies”?
- David (pronounced “Dauveed”), you’re “on deck”.
- “Foul ball”
- You need to “touch” the bases. (We had a kid actually touch first base with their hand!)
This is just a few of issues we ran into. The biggest problem that I had was when a boy who spoke Hebrew was standing on first base and a boy who spoke Russian was batting. The Russian speaking boy hit the ball on the ground toward second base and the Hebrew speaking boy did not run to second. So, we had two boys who spoke different languages standing on first base with me trying to explain what had happened in English while using baseball terms! It almost caused an international incident! But fortunately, we had a 10 year old boy who could speak English, Russian, and Hebrew who settled the matter!
We taught and played baseball for almost 6 hours today – Paul Lovelace would have been proud! It is 11:21 p.m. in Israel, and I have got to get prepared for 6 more hours of baseball tomorrow. I have so much more to tell you, but it will have to wait until tomorrow.
My last thought – I am really being stretched this week, and I cannot imagine having more fun! I challenge the rest of you to look for opportunities to stretch yourself – it is the greatest of all Blessings!!!
Shalom!