On a recent evening at Manhattan's City Winery, the music director, Shlomo Lipetz, found himself in an unusual situation: For once, the crowd had come to see him.

That's because Mr. Lipetz was playing the other role in his intriguing double life—Israel's biggest baseball star.

In between scheduling concerts, the 33-year-old Mr. Lipetz flies to Israel to play in for the Israeli National Baseball team. In September, he is hoping to represent Israel in the qualifying tournament of the World Baseball Classic—the first time the country has been invited to participate.

The City Winery event was the first-ever fundraiser for the Israel Association of Baseball, which has made the World Baseball Classic tournament the centerpiece of a grand plan to expand interest in the sport, raise funds for a new baseball complex and ultimately, they say, revive a professional league that lasted only one season in 2007. Overall, they are seeking to raise $4.4 million.

Currently only about 1,000 people play baseball in Israel, in a country of eight million.