I am not prone to using profanity on any of my blogs but when I picked up my MLB Preview, what did I see?
A photo of Le’veon Bell, the NY Jets big deal.
Now, I know that the baseball annuals tailor their covers according to region, but this? Inexcusable. There shouldn’t be anything other than a baseball photo for the preview issue. #Sad.
On the up side, at least SI — being a weekly publication (at least for now) — has the latest information from the spring training camps, unlike the annual magazines such as Athlon, Lindy’s, and Street & Smith.
By the way, as many of you know, I host Kaplan’s Korner, a site on Jews and Sports that I started while working at the NJ Jewish News. I recently put that blog on hiatus and wouldn’t you know, this issue of SI has a feature on Alex Bregman, an up-and-coming Jewish star. and not Jew-ish, as are many of the current players who are considered “members of the tribe” (MOT for short). Obaerve how Ben Reiter, author of Astroball: The New Way to Win It All, begins his story:
The portion of the Torah known as Tazria-Metzora describes the ancient rituals God commanded Jewish people to undertake were they afflicted with a variety of unfortunate ailments, including scabrous skin infections, eruptive plague and penile discharge. It’s a little awkward, to say the least, for most of the 13-year-olds who discover that this is the passage they must chant and explain to their gathered families—and, even worse, to their also 13-year-old friends (penile discharge!)—at their bar or bat mitzvah service.
But if the boy assigned that portion by the Hebrew calendar wished he had gotten one involving, say, Moses and the Red Sea instead, he didn’t show it at Congregation Albert in Albuquerque on April 21, 2007. “We all need to realize that there are people out there who may be suffering and we all need to try to do our part to relieve that suffering when we can,” the 13-year-old, wearing a pin-striped suit, confidently read from his six-page, double-spaced speech. Two pages later, in a section on top of which he’d scrawled SLOWLY, he reached the heart of his message.
“When I think about the future and how I can make a difference in the world, I want to be able to use my love of the game of baseball to be a good example and a good person,” he said. “I want to be a professional athlete who plays for the love of the game, never quits trying to give my best and is a good role model for all of the kids who look up to baseball players.”
The congregants must have smiled. It was a dream harbored by millions of boys at that optimistic age, just before hard realities arrive for almost all of them, Jewish or not. This particular one stood a head shorter than his mother, who herself was only 5’ 4″, and he struggled to hold the Torah’s moderately heavy scroll. But Alexander David Bregman was completely unabashed about his intentions. “There never was a Plan B,” he says.
Where were stories like this when I needed them?
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