feature
Wild pitch
How an Israeli kibbutznik became
a coach for the Cincinnati Reds
Elli Wohlgelernter | JTA
Alon Leichman, hired as a pitching coach for the Cincinnati Reds,
plays for Team Israel during the eighth inning of the Tokyo Olympic
Games baseball opening round against the United States in
Yokohama, Japan, on July 30, 2021.

archaeological site that gives Gezer its name.

And that’s where Leichman grew up, fi rst brought
to the fi eld by his father for the 1989 Maccabiah
Games, fi ve weeks after Alon was born on May 29.

“I never related to that fi eld as the place my dad
built,” said Leichman. “It was a fi eld that was on the
kibbutz. Growing up, everyone around me played
— my older brother played, and all my friends, a
little older than me, played.

“I remember — I was 4, in gan [pre-kindergarten],
and I would walk to the baseball fi eld and practice.

I vividly remember being in the gan and going to
practice. But baseball on the kibbutz is just some-
thing that I grew into. Everyone did it; I was not
special, just another kid who played. I happened
to love it a lot.”
‘We’re good people’
So he played and played and got better and better.

By age 10, he was on the team representing Israel
at a tournament in the Netherlands. But baseball
in Israel back then was in its infancy, and there was
not enough money to pay for the team to travel.

So Leichman had to work extra hours to get the
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM 17
P Kazuhiro Fujihara/AFP via Getty Images
KIBBUTZ GEZER, Israel — Bill James, the infl uen-
tial baseball writer, historian and statistician, once
described the great Yankees fi rst baseman Don
Mattingly in only four words: “100% ballplayer,
0% bulls***.”
The same can be said of Alon Leichman, the
fi rst athlete born in Israel to make it to the major
leagues, having just been named assistant pitching
coach of the Cincinnati Reds.

Under manager David Bell, Leichman will help
instruct the team’s pitchers, including Chase
Anderson, Luis Cessa, Fernando Cruz, Alexis Díaz
and Hunter Greene, on mechanics, pitch selection,
preparation, concentration and execution.

His journey has been unlikely, verging on prepos-
terous: How could someone from Israel, where
baseball is barely an afterthought, step out of the
wheat fi elds of a kibbutz to the highest level of
baseball in the world?
The 33-year-old is the product of Kibbutz Gezer
(the “Carrot Kibbutz”), the youngest child born to
two idealists who grew up in Zionist youth groups
and helped found this kibbutz in central Israel in
the 1970s together with other Anglo — that is,
English-speaking — Zionists.

But David, Leichman’s father, couldn’t leave it all
behind in Queens, N.Y. He was a baseball fan, a big
baseball fan — “I always knew that if, God forbid,
there’s a fi re in my house, I know where my base-
ball glove is.” One day, he and his fellow kibbutz
residents had an idea: Why don’t we cut off a slice
of the wheat crop and construct a regulation-sized
fi eld in the southwest corner of the kibbutz, where
we can all go play when we get off work?
That was 1983, and there wasn’t a single base-
ball or softball fi eld in all of Israel. So David, who
was in charge of construction on the kibbutz
(Leichman’s mother, Miri, is the kibbutz rabbi),
built his fi eld of dreams, just 450 yards from his
front door and in the shadow of the 4,000-year-old