It would be hard to have a better Shabbat than Jack Frishman did this last week.

Frishman, the sole Jewish player and top starting pitcher for the West Linn High School Lions’ varsity baseball squad, threw seven innings of one-run ball and got the win in the 2026 Oregon School Activities Association Class 6A State Championship Game Saturday, June 6, at Roto-Rooter Park in Keizer. The Lions defeated the top-seed Clackamas Cavaliers 6-2 in eight innings, scoring five of those runs in the extra frame beyond high school baseball’s regulation seven.

For Frishman, a junior, it was the culmination of a season that saw him unexpectedly become the team’s top pitcher and amass a 12-0 record as the Lions won their fourth state championship in five years. Frishman started the season behind senior Caden Klouda, who made the All-State first team as a pitcher in 2025. Amid a bumpy start to the season for the Lions, Frishman moved into the top spot in the rotation, with Klouda eventually being used as the closer in the playoffs; he pitched the eighth inning Saturday in relief of Frishman, allowing one run.

“He even said he likes relieving better anyways,” Frishman said of Klouda. “He’s a senior that I look up to and want to be like.”

Frishman, a right hander, delivers three different pitches: A fastball at upwards of 85 miles per hour, a slower changeup and a slider, which moves down and away from right-handed hitters; He’ll also employ a curveball to lefties. The slider is his best pitch, he said, and he’s been developing it since his days in New York, where his family (including parents Aaron Frishman and Lisa Fasolo Frishman) lived until Jack was in eighth grade.

That family, and the Judaism that connects them, is a big part of Frishman’s life.

“I love celebrating all the holidays and with my family. Every year for like Hanukkah and Passover we go over to another Jewish family and we do the ceremonies together and I got to meet all these lovely people, which I never would have met if we didn’t move out here,” he said. “I just love representing the community and being Jewish.”

That Judaism doesn’t come up as often amongst his other family, the one in the West Linn dugout, but that has worked out just fine.

“It’s not really something that we talk about that much,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re there for each other. We’re like a family. Nobody’s like going to be mean to you for whatever you believe in, for your race, religion, anything like that.”

Like most Jewish pitchers, Frishman looks up to Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers legend Sandy Koufax.

“He’s one of the reasons why I wanted to be a pitcher, honestly, in just the way that he was so dominant, but also the way that he stood up for his religion and stood up for his beliefs,” Frishman said of the Hall-of-Famer. And I think that’s a hard thing for people to do nowadays. I look up to him every single time I go out on the mound.”

There is one particular way Frishman wishes he was more like his role model.

“I wish I was lefty,” he said. “I love being a righty, but lefties, they get a little bit more love in the baseball world.”

While Koufax famously did not pitch in the opener of the 1965 World Series, which fell on Yom Kippur, he did pitch on Shabbat more than 100 times in his 12 major league seasons. These included his major-league debut, a two-inning relief appearance against the Milwaukee Braves on the evening of Friday, June 24, 1955, his first career win, a complete-game shutout on Saturday, Aug. 27, 1955, against Cincinnati and his first two no-hitters; Saturday, June 30, 1962, against the Mets and Saturday, May 11, 1963, against San Francisco.

For Frishman, the championship game was his first Saturday appearance of the year. He allowed six hits and three walks across his seven innings of work, yielding a lone earned run and striking out six Cavaliers.

“I’m so excited. It’s unreal to be where we are, especially from the start of the season,” he told the West Linn Tidings after the contest, in which he was named Player of the Game.

Some feel the honors should go farther than that.

“Frishman, in my opinion, is the Pitcher of the Year in the state,” his head coach, Joe Monahan, told OSAA Today.

PHOTO: Courtesy Jackson Lee via the Frishman family