Alon Leichman charted a new path from Israel to the Reds’ coaching staff
GOODYEAR, Ariz. –– New Cincinnati Reds assistant pitching coach Alon Leichman grew up playing baseball on a small sandlot field where the bases rested on the outfield grass. It was about 250 feet from home plate to center field. Beyond the perimeter of the baseball field, there was a big sunflower field.
And beyond that sunflower field, almost no one else in Leichman’s home country knows anything about baseball.
“I grew up in Israel in a kibbutz, a small community of about 250 people,” Leichman said. “It was founded by Americans in the 1970s. They decided to build the only baseball field in Israel.”
The only field in Israel?
“Yeah. Outside of this 250-person community, no one knew what baseball was, pretty much. Every time anyone heard about me playing baseball, the reaction was, ‘What?’ They weren’t sure of the difference between football and baseball.”
Leichman, who grew up at Kibbutz Gezer in central Israel, is thought to be the only person who grew up in Israel and is now on an MLB team or coaching staff. Twelve years ago, he became the third Israeli pitcher to play college baseball.
Just like most journeys to the major leagues, Leichman started as a 5-year-old who played against his older siblings and their friends. Leichman, 33, was a part of the first generation of kids who grew up playing pickup games on the baseball field at Kibbutz Gezer. If anyone in the country wanted to play a baseball game, they’d go to this field. A 200-or-so-person baseball community formed in a country where soccer and basketball are the predominant sports.
Leichman’s kibbutz was baseball country.
“Baseball was the main sport in the small community where I grew up,” Leichman said. “But when you leave there, no one knows what it is.”
As a child, Leichman dreamed of leaving Israel in high school to pursue a baseball career.
“As I got older, I realized that’s not happening,” Leichman said. “I always thought by the time I was 18, I wouldn’t need to go to the Army because the wars and conflicts would be over. That didn’t happen.”
When Leichman completed his mandatory service in the Israeli Army, he wanted to give baseball a shot. His only connection to the American baseball world was his friend Ophir Katz, who had tried out and failed to make the team at Cypress College in California.
Katz told Cypress head coach Scott Pickler, “There’s this Israeli kid who wants to play college baseball. Can he come to a practice?”
In 2011, Leichman made the team. At Leichman’s first practice, Pickler asked the freshman, “What was it like over there in Israel?”
“He showed me a video of him pitching in a game and the sirens went off and everybody started sprinting for the bunkers as they worried about getting bombed,” Pickler remembers. “This kid has been through some things that our (American players) haven’t.”
Pickler noticed how much Leichman appreciated having a regulation-sized baseball field to play on. Leichman loved getting to finally practice every day against players at his level. He pitched well leading up to the season, and Pickler was thinking about using Leichman to close out the first game of the season.
At the water fountain one day, Pickler asked Leichman, “Are you scared?”“Not as scared as you are to pitch me,” Leichman answered.
“It was one of the best things a kid has ever said to me,” Pickler said. “He had moxie. I wish every kid came in with an open mind like he had. He was just so excited to be there. Some kids have been given so many things in their lives, but Alon was a different kind of person who really appreciated everything.”
And so Leichman took the mound for the ninth inning of the season opener. His elbow popped. He needed Tommy John surgery and missed the rest of the season.
Leichman worked his way back to become a long reliever on the 2013 team at Cypress. He pitched low leverage situations, and Leichman wasn’t expected to get a shot in the regional tournament.
Before the playoffs, Leichman hadn’t thrown more than 36 pitches in any game during the 2013 season. In the fifth and final game of the double-elimination tournament, Pickler was running low on available pitchers. He gave Leichman a shot to start. Leichman pitched nine shutout innings to get Cypress to the state tournament at the junior college level, where they eventually won it all.
Leichman’s velocity had been dropping, and he transferred the following year to the University of California-San Diego, hoping the baseball program’s medical team could finally fix his elbow. It turned out Leichman needed a second surgery. Six months after that, Leichman learned he needed another surgery. He pitched there from 2014 through 2016, but he knew his dream of pitching professionally wasn’t going to happen.
After the 2016 season, Leichman called Pickler looking for a job in the Cape Cod summer league. Pickler gave Leichman a shot. At the end of the summer, Leichman got the chance to be the bullpen coach in the 2017 World Baseball Classic. He coached a Team Israel team that was made up of American Jews who are eligible for Israeli citizenship. Leichman and pitcher Shlomo Leipetz were the only born-and-raised Israelis there.
With Team Israel, Leichman met a relief pitcher who changed his career. Craig Breslow, a 12-year MLB veteran, was working on his cutter. Leichman, who hardly had any coaching experience, offered him some advice about tweaking his cutter.
“He appreciated the fact that this Israeli kid wasn’t afraid to tell a 12-year big leaguer what he thought,” Leichman said. “The relationship became really close.”
Breslow was an early adopter of “Rapsodo” a pitch-tracking technology that’s now common across MLB. Breslow showed Leichman how it worked and gave Leichman his first experience working with analytics.
The experience with Team Israel helped him land a job with the Seattle Mariners in 2017 as the coordinator of organization learning. One year later, the Mariners named him the pitching coach for their Dominican Summer League team, and he then rose up the ranks to Triple-A for the 2022 season.
“He’s very easy to talk to,” said Reds starting pitcher Levi Stoudt, who played for Leichman in the Mariners’ farm system. “He feels like one of the guys, not like a superior figure. He’ll be honest and give you really good feedback. And he really cares.”
“Alon really cares,” said Reds starting pitcher Brandon Williamson, another former Mariners prospect. “I had him in the minors, and if you care that much in the minors it’ll be easy in the big leagues to really care about your players. He’s really easy to talk to, and he’s really honest.”
After the 2022 season, Reds assistant pitching coach Eric Jagers left for a job with the New York Mets. The night before Leichman was scheduled to fly home to Israel for the offseason, he got the call that the Reds were interested in adding him to their big league coaching staff.
Scott Pickler’s son, Jeff, is the Reds’ infield coach. Through Jeff, the Reds knew what they would be getting in Leichman, and he was hired in December.
Now, he’s working with pitching coach Derek Johnson to develop a pitching staff that the Reds are counting on.
“Alon is beyond his years with his thinking,” Scott Pickler said. “If you have a coach with that mindset who’s genuine with everything he does and tries to make people better, you can go a long way.”
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Alon Leichman charted a new path from Israel to the Reds’ staff
