Jewish Film Festival's CineMondays presents 'Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel'

Heading Home focuses on Team Israel: the formation of its 2017 roster, its experiences in Israel, and its rapid rise to international stardom, culminating in the World Baseball Classic. This underdog team wasn’t expected to succeed, but exceeded all expectations.

Starting from scratch

The World Baseball Classic (WBC) is an international tournament sanctioned by the World Baseball Softball Confederation. Competition between nation-based teams is similar to the Olympics. In fact, the WBC is held every four years and serves as a sort of baseball Olympics, since baseball was removed from the Olympic program in 2005.

The rules of participation are simple: all members of each team must be citizens of the host country—but since each country makes up its own rules about citizenship, things get complicated. In 2017, for instance, most players on Team Spain were from South America.

Baseball is not widely played in Israel (in 2017, the country did not even have a full-sized baseball stadium). When it decided to field a team in the WBC, it looked to the United States for recruits. General manager Peter Kurtz ultimately assembled a mostly American team.

Many of those players did not self-identify as Jews, qualifying for Israeli citizenship only through the odd Jewish grandparent. In addition, several players who were raised Jewish had not thought much about their Jewish heritage.

When the assembled team travels to Israel, many of the players begin to learn for the first time what it’s like to live as a Jew, especially in Israel. They visit a Holocaust museum and the Wishing Bridge of Jaffa. Pitcher Ike Davis, formerly of the Yankees, is shown near tears while praying at the Western Wall, connecting viscerally for the first time in his life with his religion, history, and culture.

The team is also confronted brutally by another aspect of Jewish life: a terrorist attack occurs near their hotel, resulting in the deaths of several civilians.

Has-beens and wannabes

In short order, the game’s meaning shifts. The players came onboard for the prestige of competing internationally or to extend their careers — several were edging into retirement or had been sidelined by injury. But the team coalesces quickly behind the importance of representing Israel and international Jewry on the world sporting stage.

Cody Decker, formerly of the Mets, says, “It’s not about my career. It’s not about any of our careers. It’s about something bigger.”

And then the team becomes stars. ESPN characterized Team Israel’s players as “has-beens and wannabes” or “the Jamaican bobsled team of the WBC.” But against all odds, they started winning against more powerful teams: South Korea, the Netherlands, Cuba. Even the team mascot, the Mensch on the Bench, became an international celebrity.

By the time the film’s directors embark on a familiar sports-movie narrative, we are so invested in these guys, both as individuals and as a team, that we end up rooting for them as much as the crowds who gather to watch them in Tel Aviv sports bars.

In the end, it doesn’t matter to Israel’s newly minted baseball fans that most of the players are American. They are Jews, wayward sons welcomed home. That is also how Team Israel ended up feeling about themselves: they weren’t just proud to be Jewish but proud to be the home team, newly minted Jewish heroes to a generation of starry-eyed Israeli kids.