All right, hello again everyone. Welcome and the pod and excited to tell the story today or at least have someone tell the story.

He is believed to be the only person who grew up in Israel who was on a major league staff or a major league team.

That's true. And we had Fernando Cruz on this podcast earlier this season. Incredible story. This one might be a little more incredible or at least as incredible.

He is assistant pitching coach for the Reds alone, Lyshman. How are you alone? What's happened to him? Everything's good, you know, nice view out here in Chicago. I love this place.

Do you love this voice? Yeah, I really do. Yeah, it's nice. There you go for the record. We are in Chicago as we speak in a hotel room overlooking Lake Michigan.

Now, are you living the dream right now? I mean, and once we tell your story, people are going to like, oh, yeah, he's living the dream. How good is this right now? I'm for sure living my dream. That's 100% right.

Yeah, all right. Let's let's go back to the beginning. I think the best way to tell this story is chronologically and just go back to the beginning.

You were raised in central Israel, right? Yeah. Now the predominant sports there are soccer and basketball. Do I have that right? Yeah.

So baseball is non-existent except for the community that you lived in correct? Yeah. So my community 250 people if I'm exaggerating.

It's about a mile circle that was founded in the 70s by a group of American, Jewish American, moved to Israel to settle over there.

You know, Israel is a young country. So in the 70s, it's still kind of the beginning of a lot of stuff there. Jews from all over the world kind of came to Israel, one big melting pot.

So my small community was founded by Jewish Americans that decided to bring part of their culture to Israel and they did that by playing softball.

You know, baseball softball. Yeah. So growing up, that was randomly the sport on the community. Now correct me if I'm wrong here. You're on a field that basically the bases are on the outfield grass.

Yeah. And it's like 250 feet from home plate to center field. So it's not like a regulation field that we know in America.

Now if you hit it over the 250 foot fence, it's a double. If you hit it onto there was a little, you know, little hill. If you hit it onto the hill, it would be a homer.

Wow. Not many people did that. That takes me back to my childhood because we played on fields where we didn't have enough players. We'd have ghost runners and we would be on a smaller field. So if you hit it over here, it's not a home run.

So I mean, that's that's unbelievable. But that that is all you had. So how predominant was baseball in that community?

Ah, it like I said, it's a tiny community. But that was that was our sport. So all the kids around me were we're all playing it.

Actually, my best friend growing up was in L.A. came to watch a game and I told him it's like, if we didn't play catch every day, like I'd have no one to play catch with, then probably never be here.

Were you a pitcher from a young age? Yeah, it's like just played it all. You play half the play at all. Yeah, because like you said ghosts around there's like in the Premier League Premier League of Israel.

If your team has seven and the other team has nine, you play eight on eight. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And if you have eight that day, because that's a real thing. Yeah.

Then it's automatic out on the ninth guy. So if someone that wasn't in this community in Israel that wanted to play baseball, this was basically the only place to come.

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