But that wasn’t even the main gripe. Players just wanted to play baseball and were expecting the necessities that accompany any sport. But when they arrived at their dorm facilities at Kfar Hayarok just north of Tel Aviv, there was no ice to soothe sore muscles, and no weight room.

The IBL arranged to buy ice, until an ice machine was obtained a couple of weeks into the season, and for players to use nearby gyms.

Most of the players were willing to look past the lack of amenities in order to play baseball. But there, too, they were working under a severe handicap.

Arriving only three days before the season began, the players had no time for preseason workouts. And then there were the fields themselves. The best facility was at the Baptist Village in Petach Tikva, a beautiful diamond that hosts baseball and softball for the Maccabiah Games.

But the other two fields were bones of contention among the players. The one at Kibbutz Gezer had no warning track in left and center fields, the outfield fence wasn’t padded, and there was a light pole in right field. The outfield grass sloped upward. Moreover, the right-field foul line was a short 280 feet, making it feel like a Little League park and skewing players’ statistics.

The Sportek field in Tel Aviv had not even been completed when the season started. With two fields for six teams, a cumbersome schedule left the teams with too many days off and managers unable to set up a proper pitching rotation. No team completed its full 45-game schedule — four teams played 41 games, and two played 40.

When Sportek finally opened July 10, 16 days into the eight-week season — and with a right-field line even shorter than Gezer’s — it still wasn’t ready, with potentially dangerous field conditions.

“There are rocks, glass, and pieces of rusty metal we pulled out of the ground,” said Jarmakowicz. “You can slide on a rock anywhere, but most fields aren’t going to have three bars sticking out of it. And these are hard fences; you can really get hurt.”

IBL commissioner Daniel Kurtzer, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, concurred. “We need to improve the fields. We used [Gezer and Sportek], but they are not really at a professional level,” he said.

At first the ballparks also did not have proper equipment, from little things like pitchers’ rosin bags, to important items like screens at the bases during batting practice and protective backstops known as “turtles.”

On July 11 at Gezer, Raynaldo Cruz, a 24-year-old star outfielder from the Dominican Republic playing for the Petach Tikva Pioneers, committed a cardinal sin and turned his back on batting practice. Standing near his dugout, situated close to the field, he was struck in the back of the head by a line drive off the bat of Modi’in’s Adalberto Paulino.

Cruz was knocked cold and taken to Assaf Harofeh hospital, where he stayed for two weeks, was released, and went back in — still complaining of dizzy spells. Cruz’s season was over.

“Gezer is a particular problem — we probably should have anticipated more safety requirements at Gezer,” said Kurtzer. “Secondly, the players themselves have been too lax all season, not wearing batting helmets and not paying attention on the field during practice. So the horse escapes, the barn door gets closed. We did institute some better safety procedures at Gezer.”

The players were also vociferous in their criticism of the umpiring.

“There [have] been a couple of problems with the umpires here,” said one player on his independent blog. “They don’t know some of the rules. They don’t know correct umpire positioning. They have inconsistent strike zones at times. They have a bad habit of ejecting players for no specific reason. And most importantly, some of them have trouble taking control of the game.”

During the first three weeks of the season, the league worked hard at spin control. In a July 13 letter from IBL president and COO Martin Berger, the players were told that everything was fine.

“Things over here continue to be strong,” Berger wrote from the United States. “We are meeting with investors every day and we are having a meeting with Major League Baseball Affiliates this week. The buzz is fantastic.”

Three days later was payday, and miscommunication between the league and the players resulted in smaller paychecks than the players expected. Players — led by those from the Dominican Republic, who were much more in need of the money to send to their families back home — threatened to strike, 22 days into the brand-new league.

In rushed the league’s commissioner, who scrambled up to Kfar Yarok to stem the rebellion. Around noon, a meeting was held on an outdoor basketball court with the player’s improvised union, led by 45-year-old Alan Gardner, centerfielder for the Blue Sox and a practicing New York lawyer.

“It was funny because the IBL was close to striking — it was surreal,” said a player in attendance. “Some of the players took video of the makeshift meeting because we all thought it was so funny.”

Not to the league it wasn’t. Kurtzer, a savvy veteran of tough Middle East political negotiations, told the players that there had been a misunderstanding, but that he would not negotiate under threat — and, according to players who were there, that he would cancel the league if they struck.

Kurtzer denies he made such a threat.

“I didn’t say that,” Kurtzer said. “I said, ‘I’ll talk to you all day, and we’ll fix the problem, but I’m not going to be here with you saying if you’re not happy you’re going out on strike.’ I said, ‘If you want to go out on strike that’s your choice, I can’t stop you.’”

Kurtzer explained the mix-up. “The problem at the beginning of the season was that they didn’t understand that we overpaid them the first time, and therefore we adjusted it the second [time], and our communications broke down,” he said. “It was explained to them, and they understood it.”

At a subsequent payday, the checks were again late. The players, having heard rumors about the league’s financial difficulties, were upset that the league was not more forthcoming.

“I believe that they knew seven or 10 days ahead of time that it was going to be late,” said Jarmakowicz. “Don’t just have us show up, keep telling us you’re going to pay us, and then when we get there — when you knew 90 percent chance that it wasn’t going to come through — tell us, ‘Hey, we’re really trying to get you paid, it could be up to a week late. We’re gonna push it back.’”

Meanwhile, baseball continued. But not all the teams were doing well. The Petach Tikva team, managed by former Jewish Major Leaguer Ken Holtzman, was losing a lot of games and was destined for last place early on. The losing, and the problems encountered all season, finally got to Holtzman, and in angry comments to a blogger he publicly gave a blistering critique of the league, the teams, the management, the attendance, the fields, the Israeli fans — even his own players.

It was the black eye the league had been working to avoid all season. Two weeks later, the league and Holtzman reached an agreement for him to leave.

But the league was in trouble, most of all financially. At one point they ran out of baseballs, partly a result of players handing out too many souvenirs to fans. The IBL had to order more, and the players were instructed not to give away any balls to fans, under threat of a $12 fine.

The players were upset.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to say no to a seven-year-old boy asking for a ball?” wrote Jesse Michel on his blog.

The league’s woes were largely unknown to the general public. With the notable exception of the Web portal Walla, the Israeli press — Hebrew and English — was mainly indifferent, and the Anglo-Jewish press was happy to run feel-good features about the league that contrasted with the usual spate of bad news out of the Mideast.

The IBL was happy with the free, non-controversial publicity and tried to control any negative publicity by censoring players blogging on their Web site, as well as influencing independent bloggers to remove negative postings.

Many fans were happy to believe the best about the league. Bet Shemesh and Modi’in, two cities with large Anglo communities, had particularly enthusiastic fans. One fan from Bet Shemesh celebrated his 45th birthday by baking a cake and traveling to Tel Aviv to hand out slices to his beloved Blue Sox.

“It brought back innocence,” Alan Krasma said of his summer experience while dishing out the dessert. “If you look at the last two summers, we had Gush Katif two summers ago, we had the Lebanon war last summer. This summer was just really relaxed. I was able to come with each of my kids to the game, we met a few of the players, and we really got to know them. It was like coming to watch a bunch of friends play.”

But while Americans supported the sport — average attendance ranged from 73 for Netanya to 418 for Bet Shemesh, though it was often a matter of guesswork — few Israelis attended. The promised marketing gimmicks never happened, and outreach to communities was too little, too late: Teams visited their respective city’s malls to give out free tickets and paraphernalia in the seventh week of the eight-week season.

“We did, I think, a superlative job for a new league marketing among Americans in America and among Anglos in Israel,” said Kurtzer. “And we did nothing with Israelis. Part of it had to do with organization. We talked about it a lot, and then we didn’t hire anybody to do it for a long time, and then there was a budget issue — we spent a lot of money on the television contract…. This was our management fashla,” he said, using the Israeli slang for a screw-up. “That’s what it was.”

The league did try one marketing drive aimed at Israelis — they paid the Israeli sports channel to broadcast Sunday night games in Hebrew. But when payment stopped coming, so did the broadcasts.

“It’s a shame this is what they are doing to us, after we put our heart and soul in it,” Yaron Talpaz, the sports channel’s vice president for business development, told Walla. “We did not expect this kind of management from a league whose commissioner was the former U.S. ambassador to Israel.”

Kurtzer said everyone would eventually be paid, including, he admitted, himself. He said that it was a shame the sports channel chose not to broadcast the second half of the season, including the championship game.

“Yes, we do owe them money, but I’m confident that they are going to get paid. It’s a haval [pity] that we didn’t have the cash flow to pay them, it’s haval that they didn’t want to do it on faith that they are going to get paid, so, haval. Everyone’s going to get paid.”

Kurtzer said that plans for next season are already under way, that he and league management know what needs to be done, and that there will not be a replay of the challenges of this season.

“It will be different in the sense that you will have other complaints — the food is always going to be a complaint — but I’d say that 75 percent of the legitimate stuff that these guys complained about this year — legitimate being because it was true — we’ll fix it,” said Kurtzer. “And they’re gonna get paid on time, and we now know that you gotta get the laundry right, so all that stuff will be done right.”

The players seem willing to take Kurtzer at his word. By the time the Blue Sox beat the Modi’in Miracle for the championship, the players had put all the problems behind them. All players asked said they would love to come back and play another season, if they don’t get offers to play anywhere else.

“My personal experience has just been wonderful in every aspect of it,” said Eric Holtz, the 41-year-old player-coach for the Blue Sox. “To be able to play and compete, having my wife and children here for three weeks and having them involved in one of the most exciting things of my life, has just been phenomenal. And being a Jew, you can’t come here and not feel some sense of spirituality. And I’m not a religious Jew.”

Asked if he and the other players would come back next season, after all they went through, Holtz didn’t hesitate.

“If they lived through the worst and survived,” he said, “then why wouldn’t they come back next year?”