International Pastime looks at baseball's influence outside the U.S.
The Israeli Baseball League has been a minor fascination around here since the MLB 'House started. International baseball is interesting altogether, actually, and who doesn't love the potential of new leagues? Israelis? Oh. Well that's not good:
"There will be no league in 2008," Haim Katz, president of the Israel Association of Baseball, told the Post on Thursday. "The main difficulty last year was that there wasn't sufficient work on the ground to prepare the terrain and to familiarize people with what was going to happen," said Zimbalist, a pioneer in the field of baseball economics. "There needs to be a lot more marketing - to introduce a new sport into a country, you need to promote it, and it wasn't adequately promoted. Once it got started, the communication system between the league and the potential fan base was not in place."There's a chance the IBL will return in some incarnation in 2009, or beyond, but by the sounds of it the league seems doomed. Too bad. I, for one, will never forget Dan Duquette's Israeli redemption song. Oy vey. That's the joke, right? I'm supposed to say oy vey? Can someone Jewish bail me out here?
(HT: Walkoff Walk)
