Seven innings is a lot of baseball, and forty five games is rather ambitious for a fledgling league that, as far as I can tell, has no fan base. But a home run derby at the end of games? Why not throw darts at a dart board?

Baseball is about the long story, about the days that go exactly as planned, about the inning after inning of balls and strikes and the regular ground out, about the beauty of a quotidian base hit. A home run derby has no story. The home runs don’t even mean anything. There are no runners to bat home. It’s not baseball. It’s an accumulation of points. And now, like a runner rounding third base too wide, I race to my conclusion.

Too often I look for “Jew points.” If only I said one more prayer, or ate one more Kosher meal, or studied one more passage of Torah, or heard one more Jewish lecture, would that be Judaism? It would be an empty Judaism. A series of home runs hit against your own practice pitcher, with no fielders, with no one on base, with no teammates of which to speak, with fans about to leave, is no more a baseball game than a series of disconnected Jewish “programs” is no more a Jewish life.

We Yankee Jews sell our Israeli cousins short if we think they don’t understand that life is about the long story, passed down for generations, about that great extra inning game, or about Sandy Koufax not pitching on Yom Kippur. Surely the Americans starting this new league know that; they drafted Koufax, now over 70. I love baseball because of the community, of slapping high five with strangers an unexpected home team hit, or at that clutch walk off home run.

I love Jews because they are my community, and they are mine, even if they think more about one more Jewish program, one more Jew point, and not about the season-long story.