The Yankles? New team takes new swing at bringing professional baseball to Israel!

Remember the Israel Baseball League? How could you forget? Tabloid Baby's comprehensive coverage of the disastrous 2007 season and the tragicomic failed attempts to carry on led to our editor and Our Man Elli in Israel being submitted for a Pulitzer Prize-- being cut off at the pass by gatekeeper Sig Gissler-- and given a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. Now, a new group of sportsminded US businessmen with stars-- and shekels-- in their eyes-- are ready to give it another go. Our Man Elli leads us to the article in YNetNews, noting that it "mistakes Martin Indyk for Dan Kurtzer":

NY Yankees make aliyah

Co-Owner of legendary American baseball team
promotes initiative to establish
professional baseball league in Israel

Itamar Eichner

American businessmen, including one of the owners of legendary baseball team The New York Yankees – which is worth approximately $1.5 billion – are promoting an initiative to establish a professional baseball league in Israel.

The businessmen visited Israel and held meetings with Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Regional Development Silvan Shalom and Jerusalem's Mayor Nir Barkat, in which they asked for their assistance.

As part of the initiative, the businessmen proposed to build a baseball stadium near Jerusalem's Teddy Stadium, which will serve as Israel's central baseball hub.

Following the meeting, Barkat promised to promote the project and help find a proper location for the construction of the stadium.

Minister Shalom offered the businessmen governmental aid, if they were to build stadiums in the country's northern and southern regions.

"The entrepreneurs are aware
that baseball is not
very popular in Israel,
but believe it can
gain a following."

Officials were also examining the possibility of building a stadium in Netanya, which brands itself as Israel's sports hub.

One of the men involved in the project is billionaire Jeffrey Rosen, who owns Israeli basketball team Maccabi Haifa.

The businessmen have also approached Israeli diplomats, and asked them to help coordinate meetings with Israeli officials that can help promote the project.

The entrepreneurs are aware of the fact that baseball is not very popular in Israel, but believe that with time it can gain a following. At first, they plan on catering to American expatriates living in Israel, who continue to follow the popular American sport.

Past attempts to import the sport have proved unsuccessful. In 2007, the first professional Israeli baseball league was established, and one of its managers was former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk.

Six teams participated in the league's first season, but the second season was cancelled after the league suffered financial loses. Despite the failure of previous initiatives, the American entrepreneurs, who enjoy the support of The NY Yankees, want to have another go at it, and believe this time they will hit a home run.

Cick here to read Tabloid Baby's entire coverage of the Israeli baseball fiasco.

Our Man Elli in Auschwitz

Our Man Elli in Israel has returned home to Jerusalem after a trip to Auschwitz, Poland, for events commemorating the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps as the rest of the world celebrated International Holocaust Day. Elli, also known as Elli Wohlgelernter, the award-winning journalist, New York City tabloid veteran, Pulitzer Prize-nominee for his investigation of chronicler of The Israel Baseball League and familiar across the Middle East as correspondent Israel Broadcasting Authority, spent time at the Auschwitz I andd Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps, and sends this report:

I was in Auschwitz last week for International Holocaust Day. My first impressions: Well, one word dominated everything: freezing. I would recommend anyone visiting Auschwitz to only go in the winter. One cannot imagine the suffering, or anything for that matter, because it all looks so pretty, a winter wonderland with clean snow without any red blood. But the cold? That you can feel, even with two pair of gottkas, two pairs of socks, gloves, heavy coat, Chinese fur hat, and the coat hood over that. And then you imagine being there without that clothing. That's as close as you can get to any understanding-- and even that is limited.

As for the Auschwitz Museum: well done, actually, considering how old it is, and that we've seen all the pictures of the display. The hair gets to a lot of people, but I wasn't as moved by that as I was by the suitcases, with everyone's names on it; and the shoes, and how bad a shape most of the soles were in-- real poor Jews; and surprisingly, the hundreds of pots and pans, all in just three colors: red, blue and white, for milchig, fleishig and parve.

Inside another building in Auschwitz 1 is a still-standing gas chamber, which was only used at the beginning of the war before Birkenau was built and, next door, the ovens. That, needless to say, leaves one speechless.


Another thing: the difference between Auschwitz and Birkenau. The entire Auschwitz complex, with many sub-camps, is some 40 square kilometers, which is huge. Auschwitz 1, where the museum and Arbeit Macht Frei sign stand, is the old camp, originally for political prisoners. It's a hotel compared with Birkenau. The barracks in Birkenau, such as they are, are stark, but it's still hard to imagine what it was like. The wood will eventually rot away, and they have to decide what to do with that; very disturbing is graffiti cut into the stone walls, with dates going back 20-30 years. How crazy and sick. If kids can do graffiti in Birkenau, I tried to imagine the most obscene thing 30 years from now, when Holocaust denial will be more prevalent. I came up with Playboy doing a pictorial, "The Girls of Auschwitz," with shots of them sprawled out on the bunks. If that sounds sick, which it is, it's part of the surreal feeling that you feel altogether.

With the snow covering everything, you get no sense of what's what, even one who knows more than the average visitor. But at one point I went walking away from the crowd, and came upon what was a long, narrow, underground room/corridor. Now open, there was snow covering it, except the side walls of brick, and I knew right away that this was the undressing room before the gas chambers at the end of the corridor. That blew me away.

What was also interesting to me was that I, a full-blown crybaby, didn't cry once, mostly because all I thought about was the cold.


I went as a representative of the IBA. I did a phone interview live, and brought back a couple of interviews, and thankfully there was real work to do. Also Davaned in the Rama Shul, and saw his cemetery, which was very interesting, in the old Jewish neighborhood of Kazimeirz.

Just being in Poland for the first time was heavy. Overall, unforgettable, of course. but i need to see more of Jewish Poland (such as it is)-- Warsaw, Lublin, Lodz and the other camp sites.

And that's my recap for now.

The National Enquirer will enter John Edwards scandal coverage for a Pulitzer Prize: Well-deserved, but good luck getting past Sig Gissler!

The National Enquirer plans to enter its coverage of the John Edwards paternity scandal for a Pulitzer Prize.

"It's clear we should be a contender for this," executive editor and Tabloid Baby pal Barry Levine told the Washington Post today, after the former presidential candidate admitted what the newspaper had been reporting all along: that he fathered a child out of wedlock in an adulterous affair. "The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, was able to publish this reporting."


Levine, and the Enquirer undoubtedly deserve the Pulitzer. They championed the story. They dedicated the resources and moved forward against the lies and brickbats hurled their way, while the lazy, "mainstream" media fed off their scraps and covered the story from a distance until it was safe to go in for the kill and start buying up the players for headlines and morning show interviews.

Ultimately, we predict the Enquirer won't get a Pulitzer, most likely because old Sig Gissler, the Pulitzer prize administrator, probably won't even let the nomination reach the Prize Board.

Readers of this site will recall the uproar when Gissler screwed TabloidBaby.com and its correspondent Elli Wohlgelernter out of a Pulitzer when he rejected our nominations for the groundbreaking coverage of the Israel Baseball League scandals out of hand-- citing some technical clause for refusing to let the Pulitzer boardmembers decide for themselves.

Mr. Pulitzer may have been a tabloid king, but the Pulitzers' Ivy League ivory tower does not admit tabloid journos.

Holy Land Hardball's tribute to Our Man Elli

Holy Land Hardball, the documentary about the optimistic, hopeful start of the Israel Baseball League in 2007, got its first nationwide U.S. audience last night, thanks to an airing on the MLB Network and proved to be a great, feelgood work of art about a group of men who became young again by carrying out an innocent, naive dream in a foreign land. Yet to those who know how the story played out, the film proved to be a poignant, even anger-making document as the cheerful, seemingly guileless businessmen behind the scenes were revealed to be charlatans, liars, scamsters and worse.

Experiencing Holy Land Hardball without the real-life epilogue of deceit and failure that followed would be like watching a lump-in-the-throat doco about Mark McGwire's chase of baseball's home run record later tonight, with no knowledge of his overdue shameful, tearful steroid admission on the very same MLB Network earlier this evening.

Yet for us, there was a high point to Holy Land Hardball, and that was the quick tribute given to Our Man Elli in Israel early in the film. As disgraced IBL founder Larry Baras is profiled affectionately as a bagel-making bumpkin blustering his way through the baseball business, there is a brief moment when he is shown being interviewed by Our Man Elli.


There he is, Elli Wohlgelernter, the journalist who would expose the moral and financial corruption of the IBL days after the final pitch, shown interviewing Baras months before the first pitch, Elli towering over the self-styled baseball exec, the no-frills professional, holding a large, makeshift hand microphone, wearing a tie, kippah in place, unmistakeably an Israeli, unquestionably a Jew, asking Baras:

"And how fearful are you
that you could end up
being called 'a colossal failure'?"

Baras does not answer.

The filmmakers, baseball historians that they are, were sitting in their editing room doing post production on the film at the same time that Our Man Elli's reportage was spooling out from this site and other publications, day after day, month after month. They saw that Larry Baras was being called many other things beyond "colossal failure." They realized that Elli was onto something from the start, and knew that history would prove him right.

So they gave him that tribute.

Nice job, boys. We're only sorry it took us this long to see it!

Click here to read the complete year-long coverage of the rise and fall of the Israel Baseball League and much more of Our Man Elli's reportage at Tabloid Baby's special Baseball in Israel archive site.

Israel Baseball League doco on television

Our Man Elli in Israel offers a programming note: Holy Land Hardball, the documentary feature about the startup of the Israel Baseball League in 2007, can be seen on television tomorrow evening on the MLB Network.

Our Man Elli's got a cameo in the doco, so we'll be sure to tune in and go for a screen grab, although the world now knows that the story of the Israel Baseball League was not told until the day after the final out of the first and only season, and led to a solid year of Elli Wohlgelernter's independent, exclusive, groundbreaking coverage of seamy deals, athlete-endangering nincompoopery and arrogance that exposed the dream introduced in Holy Land Hardball as an international scandal and nightmare, and won Elli and Tabloid Baby, where his coverage appeared exclusively, a place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Holy Land Hardball, a film by Brett Rapkin and Erik Kesten, makes its national television premiere this weekend, airing on the MLB Network Sunday, Jan. 10, at 10 p.m.

Click here to read Our Man Elli and Tabloid Baby's complete coverage of the Israel Baseball League successes and scandals at our Baseball In Israel archive site.

Disrael: M-I-C-K-E-Y N-E-V-E-R F-O-R-G-E-T

Our Man Elli in Israel checks in with some historic Disney news: The Walt Disney Company will produce, for the first time, original Hebrew-language shows in Israel. The Disney Channel began airing in Israel this year and has been so successful, it's begun joint production with Herzliya Studios on two original programs to air there.


So let's put aside all that talk about old Uncle Walt being an antisemite. Yes, in the 1930s he was sympathetic to the pro-Nazi German American Bund, and allegedly showed up at a meeting or two, and yes, legend has it that he, alone among all studio heads, met with Hitler's filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl when she was looking for work in Hollywood, and yes, legend has it he told her he admired her work that hiring her would hurt the brand, and yes, there were lots of Jew gags in the animated shorts Walt approved (like the scene in the original "The Three Little Pigs" in which the Big Bad Wolf comes to the door dressed as a stereotypical Jewish peddler, yes--- in any case, there's always Eisner and Iger... oy!

UPDATE: Our Man Elli reminds us we can't put aside Uncle Walt's record, and adds this from the Israel News Network: "The announcement is bitter irony for Hamas, which was forced to stop its anti-Israel children’s programs, featuring Disney characters, after the company threatened to sue it for copyright infringement. Hamas used characters similar to Mickey Mouse, among others, to air material that often incited Arab children to become martyrs when they grow up.

"Anti-Israel groups previously have tried to boycott Disney, which 10 years ago set up its Millennium exhibition in Florida and referred to Jerusalem as 'the capital of the millennium' and the 'heart of the Israeli people..' The Arab League had tried to boycott Disney until Saudi Prince Walid ibn Talal, who was a large shareholder of Euro Disney said, 'If we boycott Disney, Israel will win because it will impact our image negatively in the United States.'"

Holiday Outrage! Our Man Elli blasts Garrison Keillor for antisemitic Christmas song swipe

"...all those lousy holiday songs
by Jewish guys
that trash up the malls every year,
Rudolph and the chestnuts
and the rest of that dreck..."

Our Man Elli in Israel is steaming mad over comments by Prairie Home Companion windbag Garrison Keillor after the one-trick radio host attacked some classic Christmas songs-- because they were written by Jews!

In what is probably meant to be a witty column in The Baltimore Sun entitled Nonbelievers, please leave Christmas alone, Keillor writes:

"Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write 'Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we'll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah'? No, we didn't.

"Christmas is a Christian holiday - if you're not in the club, then buzz off."

Elli fumes:

"Is Keillor just jealous that Jews can write better Christmas songs than Christians? He's got a problem that 'White Christmas' was written by Israel Isidore Baline (ed: better known as Irving Berlin), the son of a rabbi? That one, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is the best-selling single of all-time. There. I beat you to it, Keillor. The Jews do it for the money. Now you got nothin' left to say. And while I grant that ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’ is kinda catchy, it won't make Billboard's Top 100. Or 1,000. Or 1,000,000."

We guess Garrison Keillor can blow Elli.

Now, considering that Jew Johnny Marks wrote Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer, Rockin Around the Christmas Tree, Run Rudolph Run and A Holly Jolly Christmas, which landed at #7 on the list of the Tabloid Baby Top Ten Christmas Songs, while Christians wrote Ring Christmas Bells and The Little Drummer Boy, it seems apparent the pretentious droner (he was born "Gary") is trying to get a little attention for himself. We used to enjoy Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion radio show from Minnesota-- back in The Seventies. That was before he made an attempt to move up a notch in respectability, leaving the show for New York City, while revealing himself to be an out-of touch elitist and philanderer, dumping his longtime girlfriend and producer Margaret Moos for a former exchange student from Denmark he'd reconnected with at a high school reunion (now that he was the big star). That marriage fizzled, and somewhere along the line there was a Page Six item about the principled married man keeping a love nest for an extramarital cutie before he moved back to Minnesota, and cranked up the sputtering old Prairie Home engine again where it continues to run on his fumes.

Watch this Antisemitism brawl escalate. Though that was probably Gary's intention in the first place.

Tabloid Baby makes Baseball Hall of Fame

Our Man Elli in Israel has discovered a fact that Pulitzer Prize gatekeeper Sig Gissler might have found interesting before unceremoniously rejecting our nomination: Tabloid Baby has earned a place in The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown!

Our groundbreaking, exclusive, historic coverage of the benighted single season and wacky aftermath of the Israel Baseball League was cited as a major source in The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, 2007-2008, discussed at length in the hallowed Baseball Hall of Fame, and immortalized in print in the recent book edited by William M. Simons.

Gaining special attention was Elli Wohlgelernter's bombshell exposé of the IBL, an article that first appeared on this site exclusively days after the season ended as Can't Anyone Here Run This Game, and causing an international sports firestorm the likes of which would not be seen until the Tiger Woods scandal.


Read all of Tabloid Baby's Israel Baseball League coverage at our Baseball in Israel site.

Ferrara first death of Israel Baseball League

Our Man Elli in Israel has resurfaced to bring us sad news: what appears to be the first death among the veterans of the Israel Baseball League. Team manager Tony Ferrara was 84.

"Tony took over for Ken Holtzman when he was fired from Petah Tikva Pioneers," Elli recalls. "Real, real nice guy, players loved him, low-key, and a baseball man through and through.

"Tony may not have been Jewish, but he was the epitome of a mensch."

Tony Ferrara played four seasons with St. Louis Cardinals affiliates before injury ended his dream, but went on to work as a batting practice pitcher, bullpen catcher and scout for Major League teams including the New York Yankees, New York Mets, Seattle Mariners, Chicago Cubs and Oakland A’s.

He also coached college and in the minors-- and acted in and was technical adviser on The Natural.

He was a longtime friend of Mickey Mantle and even wore Mantle's number 7 in his most recent job as bench coach for the Newark Bears.

There was an impromptu memorial service for Ferrara yesterday at the Babe Ruth bat at Yankee Stadium. One of The Mick's sons was there, along with Ron Darling, Art Shamsky, Ed Kranepool, Miracle Met and IBL manager Art Shamsky and legendary Yankee publicist and IBL official Marty Appel.

Click here to see our complete coverage of the ill-fated Israel baseball League on our Israel Baseball League archive site.

Sex & Baseball Grand Slam! Our Man Elli's kudos for Conan

Our Man Elli in Israel, the man behind our Pulitzer Prize-nominated coverage of the Israel Baseball League (thanks for nothing, Sig Gissler!), checks in after a long absence (hard at work as a correspondent for the Israel Broadcasting Authority) to offer declare a “Grand Slam for Conan O’Brien” for a late night sex and baseball joke:

“Parents’ groups are complaining that TV broadcasts of baseball games are filled with ads for erectile dysfunction drugs. In other words, things are so turned around these days that now we delay baseball by thinking about sex.”


And who’d forget that Our Man Elli is subject of the Sex & Baseball documentary project…

Holy Land Hardball: Watch the movie about the Israel Baseball League for free online

One of the many highlights of our solid year covering the foibles of the fledgling, floundering and flummoxed Israel Baseball League was the release of the film Holy Land Hardball. The entertaining and exciting doco about the league's startup was called "socko!" by Variety and, Our Man Elli in Israel has emerged to inform us, is available for viewing online through Thursday on the SnagFilms website.

Click here to watch Holy Land Hardball.

And click here to see our complete Pulitzer Prize nominated coverage (oy, Sig Gissler, you putz!) of the Israel Baseball League.