Exclusive! Our Man Elli writes definitive piece on Israel Baseball for The Jerusalem Post, but we have the passage that the editors left out!

"...An ugly and angry battle was waged via comments posted on the Tabloid Baby site. That blog became the unlikely forum for information and debate surrounding the dream of professional baseball in Israel, with more than 250 posts about baseball in Israel, and more than 1,400 mostly anonymous comments posted by players and fans..."

--deleted section from Elli Wohlgelernter's
Jerusalem Post article

Elli Wohlgelernter, The Dean of Israel Baseball League reporting-- heck, he's the whole g-ddamn university!-- has broken just about every major development in the story, from its opening day to the scandals that followed its final out through the financial questions, defections, deflections and deceptions all the way to its latest, almost comically bizarre manifestation, headed by a second controversial Boston businessman who's already broken promises in the creation of his new Dominican Republic of The Middle East Baseball League.

And occasionally, Elli breaks the news in internationally respected mainstream publications, as he does this morning with a major feature in The Jerusalem Post.

Field of Failed Dreams brings the IBL saga up to date from the final out of the 2007 season and seeing all the facts in one place should give pause to any critics of Elli's great reportage:

"It's not that playing baseball in Israel is so important, when there are real bombs bursting in air and real rockets' red glare; it's just that the idea was so novel, the vision so grand, the imagination so captured and emotions so impassioned that few believed it could ever happen. And then, amazingly, it did. And then, sadly, it died.

"The dream actually started to unravel just minutes after the maiden season ended last August 19: After the Beit Shemesh Blue Sox won the Israel Baseball League championship game, Commissioner Dan Kurtzer and the league brass presented them with the championship trophy. Missing from the ceremony was the league founder, Larry Baras. He had slipped out in the middle of the game..."

We've discovered that editors at the internationally-circulated newspaper, however, did remove several graphs from Elli's submission, most likely because we have criticized the Post, and other "mainstream" outlets for taking advantage of our documented coverage and expounding upon it without attribution:

"The IBL players themselves were divided over whose side to take. An ugly and angry battle was waged via comments posted on the Tabloid Baby site. That blog became the unlikely forum for information and debate surrounding the dream of professional baseball in Israel, with more than 250 posts about baseball in Israel, and more than 1,400 mostly anonymous comments posted by players and fans.

"Being anonymous, of course, meant nothing was out of bounds for the commentators, and charges and countercharges were hurled in both directions. Some called the upstart IPBL 'carpetbaggers, parasites and ambulance-chasers feeding off the carcass of the IBL'; on the other side were players demanding to know when they would finally get paid by the IBL, and questioning what happened to all the money that was raised. Others were asking why Baras had registered at least six limited liability corporations for the league in Delaware."

And this:

"On April 14, Tabloid Baby reported that there would be no baseball in Israel in 2008."

Why? Not enough space?