NEW YORK TIMES: From a New York basement baseball school to the Olympics: Meet the man at the center of Team Israel’s unlikely rise
Originally written by Joe Vardon, Senior NBA writer for The Athletic
A towering, bearded Canadian man, who stood 6 feet, 7 inches tall and tossed blazing fastballs with his right hand for all of 2 2/3 innings for the Montreal Expos one summer, started a baseball school for the richest kids in New York City.
His name was Derek Aucoin. Sadly, he died from a brain tumor in December 2020, but the school he ran about 20 years ago, called The Baseball Center NYC, in the basement of the Apple Bank building on the corner of West 74th St. and Amsterdam Ave., is where the 2021 Israeli Olympic team was born.
Or, close enough.
Each day, Aucoin’s instructors, ex-minor leaguers and former college players, took the train to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They were teaching the old American pastime to children of movie stars, investment bankers and Wall Street traders. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins’ son (yes, literally the son of “Nuke LaLoosh”) was a student. So was at least one of Robert De Niro’s boys. And Spike Lee’s son.
“Basically coaching bad youth baseball for the over-privileged children of uptown Manhattan, for years,” said Nate Fish.
Fish, 41, who grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, will coach third base for Team Israel at this month’s Tokyo Games. Team USA’s first game at the Olympics is July 30, against the Israelis. Fish is a past national director for Israeli baseball, which means for three years, he not only played for, coached and helped piece together the national teams, but he also grew the sport in a country that doesn’t really care about it. In a seminal moment of his life, Fish flew to Tokyo in 2013 to cast a “yes” vote on behalf of Israel to reinstate baseball as an Olympic sport, not knowing at the time that he’d be participating in the Games.
In the fall of 2002, Fish was one of those young coaches riding the New York subway to teach the game to LaLoosh Jr. He was DJ-ing for money in Brooklyn and trying to finish his college degree at The New School of New York, something he failed to do while playing collegiately for four years at the University of Cincinnati.
After playing for the Bearcats, where he was a teammate of future Red Sox great Kevin Youkilis, Fish moved to New York to become a writer. Had his sister not seen an ad in a local newspaper, Fish never would have been in that basement, teaching lessons to the wealthy children who came through the doors and honing his own swing on the old, blue Iron Mike pitching machine between lessons.
Without all of those hours of extra batting practice (because he wasn’t much of a hitter at Cincinnati), Fish never would have accepted an invitation to try out for the American men’s fast-pitch softball team that was going to the 2005 Maccabiah Games (often called the “Jewish Olympics”).
Had he not won gold with the Americans at the Maccabiah, he would not have been invited to play on a traveling, pro softball team called the New York Gremlins, owned by a man who had a limousine company, which meant Fish and the boys would show up to the games, in each town, in a small fleet of stretch limos.
And if he hadn’t been playing competitively, regardless of the size of the ball, the story he saw in The New York Times in the fall of 2006 about the planning of the Israel Baseball League, the country’s first-ever pro league, by a Boston bagel maker without a smidge of sports experience, wouldn’t have caught his eye. He would not have tried out and made the Tel Aviv Lightning and won the league’s “gold glove” in the league’s only season of existence, in 2007.
He would not have been invited to play pro baseball in Munich in 2008, where he was housed (with a roommate) in a mental hospital, next to the ball field. He would not have gone back with the American softball squad for the 2009 Maccabiah Games and won silver. He would not have been invited to coach the Israeli baseball team in the 2011 European championships. He would not have had the opportunity to be the team’s third catcher when Major League Baseball created the World Baseball Classic in 2012 and tinkered with the rules so the Israelis could field a squad with a bunch of Jewish-American pros.
Fish would not have been hired as national director of Israeli baseball, would not have flown to Tokyo to cast that vote, would not have coached first base for the 2017 Israeli team that finished a stunning sixth place (winning $1 million in prize money) at the World Baseball Classic, and would not have been invited by his old roommate from the 2007 Tel Aviv Lightning, who is now the Team Israel manager, to come and coach third at the Olympics.
Fish’s life story, and the story of Team Israel, reads like a Philip Roth novel. And it really did all start in the basement of the Apple Bank building, on the Upper West Side, two decades ago.
“It’s a twisted version of my childhood dream to play in the big leagues,” Fish said.
The Israelis who will actually be on the field playing in the Olympics include a music director at a New York winery, a banker at Goldman Sachs, two members of Major League front offices, a Master’s candidate in international business from the University of Miami, and four on active duty in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2019, they became the first baseball team besides host Japan to qualify for the Olympics by winning the Africa/Europe Qualifying event, including wins over two quality national teams ranked well ahead of the Israelis — No. 8 Netherlands and No. 16 Italy.
Which brings to mind a specific Roth novel, his “Great American Novel,” from 1973, a satirical look at the fictitious Patriot League and one terrible team (the Port Ruppert Mundys) that goes on an improbable winning streak. The Mundys had one legitimate player (who is playing for no salary, because his father wanted him to learn to be gracious), and he spiked his teammates’ breakfast with steroids, which sparked the streak. There was a one-armed outfielder, a 14-year-old, and a pitcher-turned-manager who was originally blackballed from the league under accusations he was a Communist, trying to infiltrate America. And the U.S. military commandeered the Mundys’ home park for the whole season, meaning they played all their games on the road.
“No, this team isn’t like that,” Fish said of the comparison. “The Israel Baseball League was like that, it was inexplicable how some of these men had gotten a contract to play in a professional baseball league. That was a very, very, very ragtag group of guys. This is legit.”
There are nine players on Team Israel with major-league experience, including Ian Kinsler, who won a World Series and made four big-league All-Star teams. He hit 257 homers in 14 big-league seasons, but he hasn’t played since 2019. Another is Danny Valencia, a .268 lifetime hitter in nine major-league seasons who last played for Baltimore in 2018.
The Israeli with the most recent major-league experience is catcher Ryan Lavarnway, who registered three hits in 11 at-bats in spot duty for the Cleveland Indians this season. He was recently designated for assignment, which was fortunate for Team Israel because you cannot be on a 40-man roster and play in the Olympics.
Jeremy Bleich, a major-league staff assistant in Pittsburgh who pitched 1/3 of one inning for the Oakland A’s in 2018, was a first-round pick by the Yankees in 2008. Among his jobs with the Pirates, in addition to crunching numbers in their analytics department, is to pitch early batting practice to switch hitters who aren’t getting enough at-bats against left-handed pitching.
Josh Zeid, a pitching analyst in the Chicago Cubs’ front office, pitched for two seasons in the big leagues (2013-14) with the Astros.
What separates this team from the surprise Team Israel group that made so much noise in the 2017 WBC — that team had 20 players from MLB-affiliated clubs — is all of the players are Israeli citizens, even though only four were born there. After the 2017 WBC, as the national team was playing in European tournaments with the hope of getting into the Olympic qualifier, Team Israel general manager Peter Kurz convinced former American pros to make their aliyah, or pilgrimage to Israel, to become a citizen. Kinsler, for instance, gained his Israeli citizenship in March 2020.
In the WBC, players just had to be eligible for citizenship, so if they had a Jewish grandparent, they could play.
It will be a tall order for Israel when the Tokyo Olympics begin. The other five teams in the Games — the United States, Japan, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, and Mexico — are all in the top seven of the official world rankings. Israel is 24th.
“It’s not our job to be realistic, anyway,” Fish said. “It’s our job to really believe that we can do this and try to make other people believe it too. Fuck it, we did it in 2017. Having that experience gives us hope. We know we’re the underdog, we know we’re the sixth seed of six.”
Larry Baras, whose UnHoley Bagels stores in the U.S. sold bagels pre-stuffed with cream cheese, started the Israel Baseball League in 2007. He hired Dan Duquette, the former Red Sox and Orioles GM, as the league’s director of baseball ops — he was the only one with any pro baseball experience in the league’s front office.
Fish describes the experiences as playing on “substandard fields, with substandard equipment, substandard umpires.” The league lasted just one season because, essentially, it ran out of money. But he was 27, hit .347, won the gold glove and had a broader, career-defining thought: “Am I good? Should I be playing pro ball?”
“I know I didn’t get drafted, but I stack up against some of the guys who were in that same draft class,” Fish said. “Like damn, I’m actually pretty good. And I am not saying any of this stuff to be like — I’m the best baseball player in the world, I am totally not, but I was still getting better at 27.”
After the Israel league fell apart, Fish returned to New York. He got a job at a gym, working the front desk, when the Haar Disciples of Munich, in Germany’s pro baseball league, asked if he wanted to come and be one the few international players allowed?
“We need you here on Thursday, first game is on Sunday, we had a Dominican guy back out, he couldn’t come,” Fish remembered as being the club’s pitch. For 800 Euros a month, Fish spent six months there, where he said he was housed “in the largest functioning mental institution in Germany” because it was “right next to the field and it must have been cheap for them.”
By the time Team Israel was invited to qualify for the WBC in 2012, Fish was 32. The invite he received was to come and try out, with the hope of claiming the 29th spot on a 28-man roster — the third catcher who can be activated in the case of an injury. No one got hurt and Team Israel failed to qualify, but the experience (the team trained and played at the Marlins and Cardinals spring-training facilities in Jupiter, Fla.) set Fish up for the next big step on this journey: to be offered, and accept, the role of national director for the Israel Association of Baseball, which meant a move to Tel Aviv.
“I’ve been coaching shitty baseball in uptown Manhattan and showing kids very, very, very basic things for a long time,” Fish said. “It’s a good experience as a coach — work with kids that are bad, work with kids that are young, because you get a good skill set. What I really like is high-level shit that matters, where there’s money on the line and everyone is all the way in, and really good and highly detailed baseball, and not showing someone how to put a glove on their left hand for the hundredth time that day.”
For three years, Fish oversaw the growth and development of the sport in his new country. He played and coached on the national team, started a program teaching baseball to Jewish and Muslim children and another for the country’s top players so they could be plugged into MLB’s draft pipeline. He was paid 15,000 shekels a month (about $4,000 in U.S. dollars), and, he said, child participation in baseball grew by 25 percent during his tenure.
Fish coached first base for the 2017 Israel team, under manager Jerry Weinstein (who is now coaching under Mike Scioscia for Team USA at the Olympics), and worked two summers in the Cape Cod League before the Dodgers hired him as a minor-league coach in 2019. After Team Israel qualified for the Olympics, Eric Holtz, his roommate at the Israel Baseball League and current manager of the Olympic team, called with the offer to coach third at the Olympics.
Fish was not only reunited with Holtz, but Team Israel pitcher Schlomo Lipetz is also an Israel Baseball League alum. Lipetz is the one who holds the normal job as music director at City Winery in New York. Israel trainer Dan Rootenberg played for the IBL’s Netanya Tigers in 2007.
“Larry (Baras) even said this in 2007 — you see American Jews, the most Jewish-American sport is baseball,” Fish said. “There is history there. Jewish Americans tend to be baseball fans. It’s just not part of mainstream Israeli society. Larry had a crazy idea to start a professional baseball league in the Middle East. Israel is not in any way sort of set up to sustain a professional baseball league for fans, the facilities, anything.
“It set this crazy chain of events into motion involving Israel baseball that is still going on,” Fish said.
Was it Baras the bagel man who did that? Or Aucoin, De Niro, and the Ohio-raised Jew who moved to New York at 22 to be a writer, took a job in a basement teaching baseball to a silver-spoon crowd, and two decades later will be coaching third base for the national team he helped build?
It’s a story that could make a great American novel someday.
I'm a little insulted the Premier League didn't make the list of your stepping stones! 🤣😂
Loved reading this!
Fish
Great piece.
jw