Reds’ Pitching Coach Was Raised on a Kibbutz

Six years before the release of “Field of Dreams,” the classic baseball flick in which Kevin Costner roamed the Iowa cornfields and felt inspired to carve out a homemade ballfield, David Leichman had a similar epiphany while surveying the lush wheatfields of his 250-person kibbutz in central Israel.

The year was 1983, and there was not a single baseball or softball diamond in Israel. Hardly anyone was familiar with the sport. Rather, basketball and soccer reigned supreme. So, as the resident of Kibbutz Gezer charged with overseeing construction projects, Leichman, a baseball-obsessed native of Queens, N.Y., who settled in Israel the prior decade, felt inclined to craft a sandlot diamond amid the bushels of wheat in the southwest corner of the kibbutz. Within months, Leichman’s own field of dreams spawned a generation of young kibbutzniks playing pickup baseball and softball for, in all likelihood, the first time in Israeli history.

Eventually, one of those sandlot ballplayers was his youngest son, Alon, who quickly grew enthralled by the sport and went on to represent Israel in international competition before immigrating to America to play baseball at Cypress College and the University of California, San Diego. When two Tommy John surgeries (an extensive, yet fairly common, procedure used to repair a pitcher’s torn ulnar collateral ligament inside the elbow) dashed any of his dreams to play Major League Baseball, Leichman turned toward coaching, soon working his way up the Seattle Mariners’ minor-league system en route to recently being named the assistant pitching coach for the Cincinnati Reds, a ballclub struggling to reach .500 but still very much a contender in the mediocre National League Central.

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“Everyone older than me was playing baseball,” Alon recalled about his childhood while speaking to the Atlanta Jewish Times hours before his Reds were set to play the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park last month, coincidentally during Jewish Heritage Night. “It was just a little island of baseball within Israel. No one knew what baseball was outside of it, but it was kind of like the natural thing for any kid growing up on the kibbutz was to play.”

And play he did, starting at age five and continuing throughout his later childhood and adolescent years during which he balanced baseball (as well as a little softball) with academics and communal responsibilities, namely agrarian tasks like picking olives and milking cows. In fact, as a 10-year-old, he proved capable enough in performing the latter chore that the kibbutz bankrolled his baseball team’s expenses to play in a tournament in the Netherlands. It was around this time – the mid-1990s – when Leichman started fantasizing about coming stateside to play college ball upon turning 18. Perhaps, the seemingly incessant violence engulfing his homeland would soon subside and there would no longer be a mandate for young adults to fulfill their military duties. But with each passing day, as militant violence raged in the background, it became painfully obvious that there would be the aforementioned military requirement, one which Alon fulfilled from 2007-2010 while being granted occasional leaves of absence to play baseball overseas before embarking on his collegiate career.

But, irrespective of his time in the armed forces, playing sandlot baseball in Israel through the years meant honing his pitching mechanics in the shadow of terror.

“I don’t think about it [violence] a lot because it’s just the way that I grew up,” said the 33-year-old Leichman whose parents, brother, and sister still live on Kibbutz Gezer. “Is it a crazy story for the people in the states that we’re playing a game and the sirens went off because of rockets so we had to stop? Yeah, but it’s probably not even something that we went home and talked about because there’s rockets everywhere. You’re going to play a game, there might be rockets.”

I don’t think about it [violence] a lot because it’s just the way that I grew up…Is it a crazy story for the people in the states that we’re playing a game and the sirens went off because of rockets so we had to stop? Yeah, but it’s probably not even something that we went home and talked about because there’s rockets everywhere. You’re going to play a game, there might be rockets.

Leichman is one of the most fascinating characters in Major League Baseball not just because he is the first athlete born in Israel to make it to MLB as either a player or coach. But also because his formative years were spent on a kibbutz where everyone and everything is literally around the corner (“My sister lives a minute-walk away and she’s far”) and yet, he now calls Ohio’s third-largest city home while traveling to world-class destinations like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago for business trips.

“I like Cincinnati. I’m living pretty much downtown, Over-the-Rhine area,” explained the Reds’ cerebral assistant pitching coach, who’s equally revered in the clubhouse for his pitching acumen as for his ability to pitch batting practice with pinpoint accuracy. “It takes me about a 20-minute stroll to the park or I take a scooter, which takes me five minutes. I never actually lived in a city like this before, so I’m kind of enjoying it.”

Is his unique upbringing a topic of conversation in the Reds’ clubhouse?

“Here and there. Not too much. I don’t know how many people actually know,” responded Leichman, who most recently represented Team Israel when he pitched against the U.S. during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and would have been on Israel’s 2023 World Baseball Classic coaching staff had it not been for his new position, which he assumed this past December.

Speaking of Team Israel, when asked if he is pleased with the progress that Israel has made on the diamond over the past decade, Leichman responds: “It’s a tough question because I personally benefited from it, going to the Olympics and going to the World Baseball Classic. [He played for Team Israel during the 2012 WBC qualifiers and, later, served the team as its bullpen coach.] So, on the personal side, it was awesome. I think it’s still to be determined what the long-term effects are going to be, but I do wish that 10 years after the first World Baseball Classic we would see a bigger development back home and we unfortunately didn’t. Ten years might not be fast enough, it might take another 10. Because now, with that money, we just built a field, so hoping that field can affect [baseball in Israel] in a positive way. But up until this moment, it hasn’t really changed much, unfortunately.”

The next iteration of the World Baseball Classic is slated for 2026. Certainly, as a pitching coach with both minor league and MLB experience, Leichman would be a prime candidate to rejoin the club’s coaching staff. But in a perfect world, he hopes for a repeat of this past winter – to be a fixture on a big-league team’s staff (preferably, the Reds’) and forced to make another difficult decision.

“I’m actually living my childhood dream because this is all I wanted,” said Leichman. “I wanted to play as much as I could and then coach for as much as I could. Now I’m getting to be a coach and doing it at the highest level, I don’t want anything else.”