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All the Jewish MLB players to watch in 2023
(JTA) — The 2023 MLB season is almost upon us, and it has the potential to be a historic year for Jews in professional baseball.
Last year, 17 Jewish players appeared in a game — a likely record. This season, the number could be even higher.
The slate of Jewish players in the game this year features stars such as Max Fried and Alex Bregman, on-the-rise big league talent like Harrison Bader and Dean Kremer, and an impressive wave of minor league prospects on the cusp of the majors.
With the World Baseball Classic over and Spring Training winding down, there are plenty of storylines for Jewish fans to keep an eye on, including a number of Jewish teammate pairs — and even a possible trio.
Opening Day is next Thursday. Here is a complete guide to every Jewish player to watch in 2023.
The big leaguers
Max Fried pitches in Game 6 of the 2021 World Series, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. (Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
Max Fried, Atlanta Braves, starting pitcher: Fried is arguably the best Jewish player in baseball — and one of the best pitchers, period. Fried was an All-Star for the first time last season, finished second for the National League Cy Young award and has won three Gold Gloves in a row for his defense. The Los Angeles native grew up idolizing fellow Jewish lefty ace Sandy Koufax.
Alex Bregman, Houston Astros, third baseman: Bregman returned to form in 2022, hitting 23 home runs with 93 runs batted in as the Astros won the World Series. The two-time All-Star has become one of the best postseason hitters of his generation, setting all-time records for most home runs and RBIs among third basemen. Bregman has been an active member of the Houston Jewish community.
Joc Pederson, San Francisco Giants, outfielder: Pederson is entering his second season playing for manager Gabe Kapler’s Giants. Last year was his best since 2019, as he notched 23 home runs, a .274 batting average and his second career All-Star selection. Pederson played for Team Israel in the 2023 WBC and even helped recruit fellow Jewish big leaguers to the team.
Harrison Bader, New York Yankees, outfielder: Bader will likely begin his first full season in New York on the injured list — injuries that kept him from playing for Team Israel, which he had committed to do. In parts of six seasons in the big leagues, spent almost entirely in St. Louis, Bader has become known for his elite defense in the outfield — he won a Gold Glove in 2021 — and last fall became a breakout star for the Yankees in the playoffs. Bader’s father, who is Jewish, told the Forward that his son is considering formally converting to Judaism.
Dean Kremer, Baltimore Orioles, starting pitcher: Born in California to Israeli parents, Kremer was the first Israeli drafted into the MLB. He told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency during the WBC that Israel is “like another home.” Kremer was very good for Baltimore in 2022, posting a 3.32 earned-run average (ERA) in 21 starts — highlighted by a complete game shutout against Bregman’s Astros in September.
Rowdy Tellez, Milwaukee Brewers, first baseman: Tellez has the most power of any Jewish player, crushing 35 home runs in 2022. In one game in May, Tellez hit two home runs on his way to a historic 8-RBI game for the Brewers. Tellez, who had a Jewish mother and a father with Mexican heritage, considered playing for Israel in the WBC but opted to represent Mexico.
Eli Morgan, Cleveland Guardians, relief pitcher: Last year was Morgan’s first season as a reliever, and it seemed to be the right move for the 26-year-old righty. Morgan appeared in 50 games for Cleveland, posting a 3.38 ERA — though his first half (2.83 ERA) was much stronger than his second half (4.26 ERA). Morgan originally planned to play for Israel in the WBC but ultimately did not join the team.
Garrett Stubbs, Philadelphia Phillies, catcher: Stubbs played in 46 games for the Phillies as the backup behind J.T. Realmuto, the best catcher in baseball. Stubbs delivered the game-winning hit in Israel’s lone WBC victory, while playing third base for the first time, and has already said he will play for Israel again in 2026. (His younger brother C.J. is a catcher in the Astros system and replaced Garrett on Team Israel following an injury earlier this month.)
Richard Bleier, Boston Red Sox, relief pitcher: After not making it to the big leagues until he was 29, Bleier has grown into a reliable reliever across seven MLB seasons, with a 3.06 career ERA. Bleier was traded to Chaim Bloom’s Red Sox this offseason after two years in Miami — where his most famous (and unfortunate) moment was a three-balk at bat last year. Bleier pitched for Israel in the 2023 WBC.
Jake Bird, Colorado Rockies, relief pitcher: Bird made his MLB debut last summer and would go on to pitch in 38 games for the Rockies out of the bullpen. Bird was originally on Israel’s WBC roster but dropped out at the last minute due to injury.
Zack Weiss, Los Angeles Angels, relief pitcher: Weiss debuted in 2018, but it did not go well: he allowed four runs, including two home runs, without recording an out. That meant his earned run average was — and this is real — infinite. Four years later, Weiss made it back to the big leagues with the Angels, appearing in 12 games with a more respectable 3.38 ERA. After a solid stint with Israel in the WBC, Weiss is expected to factor into the Angels bullpen this season, though he could start the season in the minor leagues. Weiss has talked about attending Rosh Hashanah services as a minor leaguer in Montana.
Dalton Guthrie, Philadelphia Phillies, utility player: Guthrie is the most recent Jewish ballplayer to debut, joining the Phillies in September. He played in 14 games for the National League champions, and even appeared in a postseason game. Guthrie is the son of former MLB pitcher Mark Guthrie, who played for eight teams across a 15-year career.
Scott Effross, New York Yankees, relief pitcher: Effross is likely to miss all of 2023 after undergoing ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (known as Tommy John surgery). Before his injury, Effross, who wears a Star of David necklace on the mound, was excellent for the Chicago Cubs and Yankees last year, with a 2.54 ERA in 60 games. Effross also would have played for Israel had he not gotten hurt.
(Also worth noting: Chicago White Sox ace Dylan Cease, the 2022 American League Cy Young runner-up, does not identify as Jewish but was on Israel’s preliminary roster of eligible players for the 2023 WBC.)
The prospects
Spencer Horwitz played for Team Israel in the 2023 World Baseball Classic. (Courtesy of Team Israel)
There are a number of Jewish players who are on the brink of breaking into the big leagues — including a few who could even make Opening Day rosters.
Jared Shuster, Atlanta Braves, starting pitcher: Shuster is the top prospect in the Atlanta organization, and in the midst of a stellar Spring Training, with a 1.45 ERA through 18.2 innings. He has a serious shot of securing the final spot in the Braves rotation to begin 2023. He was a first-round draft pick in 2020 and played in the MLB Futures Game last year.
Matt Mervis, Chicago Cubs, first baseman: Mervis played for Israel in the WBC and though he begins the season in the minors, he is almost certain to join the big-league team this season. The Washington, D.C., native belted 36 home runs in the minors last year, hitting .309 with 119 runs batted in while rising through the Cubs’ system at an impressive pace.
Zack Gelof, Oakland Athletics, second baseman: Another Israel player, Gelof will begin the season in the minors but is expected to make his debut this year. The 23-year-old is Oakland’s No. 3 ranked prospect and was a second-round pick in the 2021 draft. (His younger brother, Jake, currently plays at the University of Virginia and is seen as a possible first round pick this year.)
Spencer Horwitz, Toronto Blue Jays, outfielder: Horwitz played with Gelof and Mervis in the WBC, and will also start 2023 in the minors. But the 25-year-old Maryland native is a candidate to crack into the big leagues at some point this season as depth for the loaded Blue Jays.
Other minor leaguers with MLB experience
Kevin Pillar during Spring Training with the New York Mets, Feb. 27, 2021. (Alejandra Villa Loarca/Newsday RM via Getty Images)
Kevin Pillar, Atlanta Braves, outfielder: The MLB veteran signed a minor league deal with the Braves this offseason and has a chance at securing a spot on Atlanta’s bench entering the year. Pillar has embraced his status as a Jewish ballplayer.
Jake Fishman, Oakland Athletics, relief pitcher: The Team Israel pitcher made his MLB debut with (who else) the Marlins last season, and begins 2023 at the Triple A level with Gelof. He could be called up as bullpen depth.
Bubby Rossman, New York Mets, relief pitcher: Rossman made his debut last year with the Phillies, and it also did not go well. But after a strong stretch with Team Israel, Rossman begins the year in the New York Mets system. Despite his Yiddish-sounding name, Rossman is only 30.
Ryan Sherriff, Boston Red Sox, relief pitcher: Sherriff has four years of big-league experience under his belt with the Cardinals and the Tampa Bay Rays. He signed a minor league deal with the Red Sox this offseason.
Kenny Rosenberg, Los Angeles Angels, relief pitcher: Rosenberg made his debut for the Angels last April and appeared in three games over the course of the season. He begins the year in the minors but has a shot to be called back up as bullpen depth.
Robert Stock, Milwaukee Brewers, starting pitcher: Stock has pitched for four MLB teams across four seasons, plus a year in the Korean professional league last year. Stock pitched for Israel in 2023 and will begin the season in Triple A.
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The post All the Jewish MLB players to watch in 2023 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him
In 2022, during a reporting trip to London, I had tea with a source who confessed to me that her mother’s central interest was the work of Tom Stoppard. It was more than an interest, really: “He was the main thing in her life,” she said.
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists you flat-out adore. Particularly cerebral types, like Stoppard, risk falling into the first category: They may generate great thoughts, but those great thoughts have a great chance of leaving you cold. That wasn’t the case for Stoppard, who died Saturday at 88, and was a thinker worth adoring. His best work achieved a rare balance: Audiences left his most affecting plays with both a fresh perspective on the world, and a feeling of great warmth toward it.
I felt that myself, after seeing a much-heralded revival of Stoppard’s Travesties on Broadway in 2018. It’s quite a highbrow play, about the brief intersection, in Switzerland during World War I, of the lives and work of James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin and Tristan Tzara, founder of Dadaism. It made me laugh until I cried. And the gloss Stoppard bestowed on this obscure episode of history followed me out of the theater, giving a brief sheen to everything and everyone I saw. I felt as though I floated back to Brooklyn, and as if the Q train might be full of personalities I’d never guess were important until years afterward.
Much of Stoppard’s work revolved around the question of what it really means to live an important life — one that is not just full, but has some kind of identifiable impact on others. The main character of Travesties isn’t Joyce, Lenin or Tzara; he’s an endearingly self-satisfied British diplomat, Henry Carr, who briefly found himself in the same circles as those luminaries. As the play opens, decades later, he’s trying to conjure up a memoir about his time in the presence of the greats, with the implication that he deserves to be considered among their ranks.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, the play that made Stoppard into a star at age 29, the two title characters grapple with their inability to in any way change the course of a narrative — that of Hamlet — that they know will lead to their deaths. In Shakespeare in Love, the film that won Stoppard an Oscar in 1998, he and his coauthor Marc Norman imagined the king of English playwrights as a young man full of talent but still struggling toward greatness, in need of an overwhelming emotional shock to propel him into complete ownership of his gifts.
There are the 19th-century Russian revolutionaries of the ambitious trilogy The Coast of Utopia; the intellectuals seeking to redefine the world and its history in Arcadia; the striving academics of The Hard Problem; the newly emancipated Viennese Jews of Leopoldstadt, the play Stoppard wrote that most profoundly invoked his heritage. Over and over, variations of the same question emerge. What does it mean to live completely and well, as an individual and a member of society?
“If there is any meaning in any of it” — “it” being the brutal course of history, its neverending cycles of destruction — “it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities,” Joyce declares in Travesties. Later, Carr echoes him — a surprise, as the two hold very little respect for one another. When told that the only relevant function of art is “social criticism,” he protests.
“A great deal of what we call art,” he says, “has no such function, and yet in some way it gratifies a hunger that is common to princes and peasants.”
Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as Carr reflects at the end of Travesties, it’s a sure thing that not everyone can be. But in the wake of Stoppard’s death, I’ve found myself thinking about the mother of my one-time source, so enraptured by what Stoppard created that her own child saw his work as the most profound passion of her life.
It’s easy to say that kind of effect made Stoppard’s life important. But the quieter story, I think, is that it made that devoted fan’s life important, too. Because she loved Stoppard, she saw herself as more firmly secured in her own existence; she saw herself as having a purpose and place.
To help someone experience their own significance — to gratify the common hunger that afflicts us all — is a great gift. And Stoppard gave it to many, including to me.
The post The gift Tom Stoppard gave to me — and to all who adore him appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran to Boycott World Cup Draw Over Visa Restrictions
Soccer Football – World Cup Playoff Tournament and European Playoff draws – FIFA Headquarters, Zurich, Switzerland- November 20, 2025 The original FIFA World Cup trophy is kept on display during the draws. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
Iran intends to boycott next week’s World Cup draw due to the limited number of visas allocated to the country’s football federation.
According to the Tehran Times, the United States issued visas to only four members of Iran‘s delegation, with requests for three additional visas denied, including one for Iranian Football Federation (FFIRI) President Mehdi Taj.
“We have informed FIFA that the decisions taken are unrelated to sport and that the members of the Iranian delegation will not participate in the World Cup draw,” FFIRI spokesman Mehdi Alavi said on Friday, per the report.
Alavi said the federation has been in contact with FIFA in an effort to resolve the situation.
The World Cup draw will take place on Dec. 5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
The expanded 48-team World Cup is being hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico from June 11 to July 19, 2026. Matches will be played at 16 venues, including three in Mexico and two in Canada.
The draw will sort the teams into 12 groups of four. The top two teams from each group and the eight best third-place teams will advance to the knockout stage.
Iran has secured a spot in its fourth consecutive World Cup and seventh appearance overall.
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Dublin to Rename Chaim Herzog Park in a Move Slammed as Attempt to Erase Jewish History
Anti-Israel demonstrators stand outside the Israeli embassy after Ireland has announced it will recognize a Palestinian state, in Dublin, Ireland, May 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Molly Darlington
i24 News – Citing the Gaza war, Dublin city council voted to rename a park honoring Israel’s sixth president, the Irish-born Chaim Herzog, in further manifestation of anti-Israel sentiment in the country.
While a new name is yet to be chosen, reports cite efforts by pro-Palestinian activists to change it to the “Free Palestine Park.”
Former Irish justice minister Alan Shatter harshly criticized the vote, charging that “Dublin City Council has now gone full on Nazi & a committee of the Council has determined it should erase Jewish/Irish history. Herzog Park in Rathgar is named after Chaim Herzog, Israel’s 6th President, brought up in Dublin by his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, a friend of Eamon De Valera, who was Chief Rabbi of Ireland & Israel’s first Chief Rabbi… Some councillors want the Park renamed ‘Free Palestine Park.”
The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland issued a statement regarding the renaming of Herzog Park.
“It sends a hurtful and isolating message to a small minority community that has contributed to Ireland for centuries. We call on Dublin City Councillors to reject this motion. The removal of the Herzog name from this park would be widely understood as an attempt to erase our Irish Jewish history.”
A virtuoso diplomat and an intellectual giant, Herzog had served in a variety of roles throughout his storied career, including a memorable stint as the ambassador to the United Nations, where in 1975 he delivered a speech condemning the Soviet-engineered resolution to brand Zionism as a form of racism. The address is now regarded as a classic, along with the oration from the same session by the US Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar slammed the decision, saying that Ireland’s “antisemitic and anti-Israel obsession is sickening.”