Against All Odds: A Baseball Team That Taught the World About Belief Busines NewsWire1st September 2026, 19:49 GMT+11 You don't have to love baseball to love this story. As Bob Costas wrote: Where Traditions Meet "is the against-all-odds account of a team" - and a man - who refused to accept that a dream was impossible. Every great underdog story starts the same way: nobody believes. Israel had a few hundred baseball players, a handful of fields, and a national program most o

You don't have to love baseball to love this story. Where Traditions Meet is the against-all-odds account of a team — and a man — who refused to accept that a dream was impossible. Every great underdog story starts the same way: nobody believes. Israel had roughly a thousand baseball players, a handful of fields, and a national program most of the sporting world had never heard of. Ranked 41st in the world, the team was given 200-to-1 odds at the 2017 World Baseball Classic.

Peter Kurz's Where Traditions Meet chronicles how a roster of Jewish ballplayers turned an improbable dream into a source of pride for Israel — and for Jews around the world. They came from Los Angeles and Miami, from college fields and Major League clubhouses — and many had never set foot in Israel. Under World Baseball Classic rules, a player can represent a country whose citizenship he is eligible for, and Israel's Law of Return opened the door to Jewish ballplayers from a

In Where Traditions Meet, Peter Kurz tells the firsthand story of how a 200-to-1 underdog stunned the World Baseball Classic and chased a dream all the way to the Tokyo Olympics. When Team Israel took the field at the 2017 World Baseball Classic, almost no one gave them a chance. Ranked 41st in the world — dead last in the 16-team field — they were such long shots that ESPN dubbed them "the Jamaican bobsled team of the WBC," and oddsmakers set them at 200-to-1. What happened