Gocheok Sky Dome in Seoul holds just over 16,000 people, and on the evening of 6 March 2017 it was close to full for the opening game of the World Baseball Classic. The host nation, South Korea, was among the favorites to make a deep run in the tournament it was co-hosting. Its opponent, playing its first-ever WBC game, was a team most of the crowd had never heard of: Team Israel.
Israel arrived in Seoul ranked 41st in the world — the only team in the sixteen-nation field outside the top twenty, and some thirty-eight places below Korea. ESPN, previewing the tournament, had called them the "Jamaican bobsled team of the WBC." The roster carried the Star of David on its cap but almost no one on it had grown up in Israel; under the tournament's eligibility rules, and Israel's Law of Return, any player Jewish enough to qualify for Israeli citizenship could play for the team, and general manager Peter Kurz and manager Jerry Weinstein — a 73-year-old lifer of American professional baseball — had built a roster of Jewish-American major and minor leaguers, including Ike Davis, Ryan Lavarnway and Josh Zeid.
Getting to Seoul had taken two tries. In 2012, Israel lost a winner-take-all qualifier game to Spain, 9-7 in ten innings, and missed the 2013 Classic entirely. Four years later, at Maimonides Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Israel beat Great Britain 5-2 in the qualifying opener, rallying with four runs in the seventh, then routed the same opponent 9-1 in the championship game on 25 September 2016 to clinch its first-ever berth in the main tournament.
Few outside the clubhouse gave them a chance against Korea. "We're not the underdogs," Weinstein told reporters before the game. "We're pretty much unknown, and I think that's why people think we're underdogs."
The game itself refused to behave like a mismatch. Israel's starter, 38-year-old journeyman Jason Marquis, threw three scoreless innings, and Israel led 1-0 in the second when Tyler Krieger drew a bases-loaded walk that forced in Nate Freiman. Korea tied it in the fifth when Seo Geon-chang, the KBO's reigning batting star, singled to left to score Kim Jae-ho. From there the game tightened into a bullpen duel, six Israeli pitchers combining to hold the home lineup at one run through nine innings, right-hander Josh Zeid working the final stretch with three shutout innings of his own.
The winning rally arrived in the top of the tenth. Ike Davis drew a one-out walk and was replaced at first by pinch-runner Mike Meyers, who moved to third on a Ryan Lavarnway single. After Krieger popped up a bunt attempt, Scott Burcham chopped an infield single toward second base — just enough to score Meyers and put Israel ahead, 2-1. Zeid returned to the mound and retired the side in the bottom of the tenth to close it out.
It was, on paper, one baseball game in the opening round of a tournament Israel was not expected to survive. In practice, it set the tone for something much larger. Israel beat Chinese Taipei and the Netherlands to finish pool play 3-0 — the first team ever to enter the WBC through qualifying and go undefeated in the first round — then went on to beat a Cuban side ranked fifth in the world in the second round in Tokyo. Israel finally lost to Japan and the Netherlands and finished the tournament sixth of sixteen nations, with a 4-2 overall record, a result no one had thought possible when Marquis threw his first pitch in Seoul.
The run became famous well beyond the box scores. The team's cardboard-and-felt mascot, Mensch on a Bench, turned into a minor media phenomenon, and the whole improbable story was later chronicled in the 2018 documentary "Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel."
For Israeli baseball — a sport played on a handful of fields in a country better known for judo mats and basketball courts — the 2 March 6 win over Korea remains the moment the program stopped being a curiosity. It gave a small federation its first real audience, its first real highlight reel, and, in the years since, a pipeline that has kept sending teams back to the Classic.
