They’re not Jewish for the jokes. Just for the baseball.

“On this team I can say the most random Seinfeld reference and everyone laughs and quotes the next line. It’s the only baseball team in the world that can do that,” says Cody Decker, one of the 28 players representing the early darlings of the World Baseball Classic: Team Israel, a cobbled-together, schmatta-tag bunch that would love to turn the leaflet of famous Jewish sports legends into, at the very least, a pamphlet.

With a pair of victories in its first two WBC games, Team Israel clinched a berth in the second round of the tournament, which was designed to grow international baseball in places like Israel, where the sport barely exists. Only one of its players carries an Israeli passport. Another pitches competitively in the Israel Association of Baseball. The rest are Americans whose Jewish ancestry allows them to adhere to tournament rules and play for the team, even if they haven’t seen a synagogue in years.

There is no Sandy Koufax among this tribe. There might not even be a Moe Berg. Considering invitations were turned down by the best Jewish players in the world – Ryan Braun, Joc Pederson, Ian Kinsler, Kevin Pillar and Alex Bregman would have made for a mighty lineup – one very well could call this the greatest miracle for Jews since the oil burned for eight days.

Team Israel sees something else. In 2009, a team from the Netherlands, where the sport is called “honkbal,” twice stunned the Dominican Republic. Four years later, Team Italy, comprised mostly of Americans, upset Mexico and Canada to advance. Now, in its first WBC, Israel has played spoiler. And with its final game in pool play at 4:30 a.m. ET Thursday against the Dutch team to determine which will emerge with the top seed before the second round begins in Tokyo on Sunday, Israeli baseball gets to show the world why it’s more than an oxymoron.

“It’s a large group of really talented ballplayers who all have been kicked around a lot in their career,” Decker says. “We don’t have a single star on this team. It’s all the role players who made the stars look good. Everyone on this team has been passed over – no pun intended on that one.”

Cody Decker has brought personality to Team Israel. (AP) More

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During his down time as a scout for the Houston Astros, Alex Jacobs would play a guessing game: Jew or not a Jew? As the director of player personnel for Team Israel, Jacobs was in charge of filling out the team’s roster with the best available players. That meant starting with the obvious – “I would look for names that sounded like they could be Jewish,” Jacobs says – and graduating to more unconventional methods.

He scoured for players who married Jewish women. He called temples in the Dominican Republic and Colombia to inquire about Jewish congregants. He found out one Panamanian player wears a Star of David and considered reaching out to him. He trawled websites with pictures of gravestones. He sought certificates verifying bar mitzvah dates and Hebrew school report cards.

The standard for a non-national joining a WBC team is the ability to become a citizen, and Israel happens to have extremely lax laws when it comes to those with a Jewish connection. Married to a Jew, like Kansas City third baseman Mike Moustakas? You can get Israeli citizenship – and play for Team Israel. (Moustakas, coming off a torn ACL, couldn’t get insured.) Was one of your grandparents Jewish? Good enough, so long as there’s proof – like the gravestones. Are you more cultural Jew than religious? Cool. That covers pretty much the entire roster.

“There aren’t a whole lot of us in baseball,” Decker says. “Even if you aren’t very religious, you’re still a minority, and in the baseball world you’re practically a minority of a minority of a minority if you’re Jewish. It’s such a small percentage, it doesn’t calculate to a percent.”