The annual convention of the European Baseball Coaches Association takes place in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. John Miller, who you might know from Old World Pastime, is on hand and blogs about it for Mister-Baseball.

PRACTICE

I skipped the gym clinic in the morning to run the Kangaroos kids practice. I was disappointed to miss Mike Lane’s hitting talk, but it was refreshing exercise to get back to working with 10-year-olds. In a 90-minute practice, we needed about 85 minutes of playing catch practice.

LUNCH STORY

Benjamin Kleiner, the Berlin baseball coach, relayed a very cool tale over a Caesar’s salad and Pepsi. Cubs great Ernie Banks was stationed in Mannheim as part of a Ranger Platoon unit. He played baseball as a 19-year-old, before going on to Chicago.

Jim Jones had another piece of sage advice: There are too many roadblocks to entry for young Europeans play baseball. “All you need is a T-shirt and a cap.” He’s right. The Belgian federation youth league requires a pricey uniform, an official scorekeeper and a seven-month commitment.

CLOSING

After a talk on defensive positioning, Mr. Lefebvre offered a gracious closing speech. He appropriately thanked Chris Dassy for his sweat putting the convention together. His main piece of wisdom for European baseball: “You need opportunities to play. When you have a dream, you need a place to go to fulfill that dream.”

For coaches, the EBCA convention is always a good place to go.

Stay in touch this winter, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

The annual convention of the European Baseball Coaches Association takes place in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. John Miller, who you might know from Old World Pastime, is on hand and blogs about it for Mister-Baseball.

UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION

Saturday is the core of the convention, when the bulk of the learning happens. It’s also when the eyes glaze over around three in the afternoon, as speaker 7 goes on and on and on. Luckily, this is baseball, and you can always dream away, of warm afternoons and two-hop groundballs, or take a walk to the equipment area — or to the bar, where in this case you were likely to find Jim Lefebvre discussing his cameo appearance in the Batman show.

CORE OF COACHES

The charm of the EBCA and its supporters is that this is a small group of men who work incredibly hard to introduce coaches of all stripes to the European baseball scene. It’s a credit to guys like Germany’s Georg Apfelbaum and Jim Jones, a former Wyoming and St. Mary’s college coach who’s been involved in European baseball for 20 years. Mr. Jones is still going, and on Saturday served up a pro talk on medicine ball workouts.

ODD BALLS

The choice of convention speakers is refreshingly unconventional. Last year, the EBCA brought over a sports psychologist who lectured on the hidden psychological pain inflicted on young players by their overbearing parents. His meditation technique involved tapping yourself on the forehead.

STRONG

This year, one of the more interesting guest speakers was a 28-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks strength coach named Vaughn Robinson. Until the spring, he’ll live in Amsterdam and work with top European baseball prospects. We should differentiate soreness from pain, he said. The first is a healthy side effect of hard training; the second a sign of injury. Players don’t necessarily need to work out for more than an hour at a time, he said.

Interestingly, his science is not exact. For example, one question is why pitchers seem to pick up velocity in the days before an elbow blowout.

RUN

Steve Janssen is as good as any European coach at lecturing on fundamentals. The problem with base-running, he rightly pointed out, is that nobody ever practices it. He offered a useful acronym for getting runners’s heads in the right place as soon as they get to first base: BSBD, pick up BALL, see SIGN, check scoreBOARD and be ready to DIVE back to first.

MORE STORIES

And of course, there was Mr. Lefebvre, cooking up a lecture that combined stories, teaching points and advice on life:

• They call it hand-eye coordination, so obviously your hands should start out near your eyes.”
• A drill: Strap socks to beginning player’s wrists to allow them to practice throwing without losing any balls.
• Major Leaguers hit .700 on line drills and hard groundballs.
• “Players have to have FUN at the entry level” to get them to keep playing.

EAT EAT EAT

Then it was on to my wife’s restaurant for hours of fine pasta and wine. You can do worse than a high-level 28-headed baseball conversation at your family eatery. The baseball gods are good.

The annual convention of the European Baseball Coaches Association takes place in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. John Miller, who you might know from Old World Pastime, is on hand and blogs about it for Mister-Baseball.

BRUSSELS

Once again, there is no better winter baseball event on the Old World scene than the annual European Baseball Coaches Association’s convention. It’s in Brussels this year, happily a few blocks from my apartment.

The Friday night was cozy and tight, an extended cocktail party on the first floor of a Courtyard Marriott in northern Brussels. Chris Dassy, the uber-obsessed Namur Angels coach, poured prodigious energy into setting up speakers and marketing the convention to over 100 attending coaches and players.

BALLS

The equipment stand slot was occupied by a jovial Frenchman named Lahcene Benhamida, a 38-year-old second baseman for the national team who has courageously started his own equipment business. “Ballsy,” as the president of the Belgian federation Jerome Legris put it. Indeed. Mr. Benhamida gets his gloves (and balls) made in Taiwan, and sells them under the brand name Lace, smartly branded with a stylish L on a black background. “We’re starting to catch on,” he says.

COACH

Coach of the year went to the ever-professional Steve Janssen, who took his Rotterdam Neptunus crew to a well-deserved Dutch national title this year.

CATCH

We make baseball so complicated sometimes, with inner tubes and weighted balls, flat gloves and video software. It takes talks like U of North Alabama coach Mike Lane’s opener to remind us what matters.

Mr. Lane delivered a virtuoso lecture on the art of playing catch. It was standard stuff, of course, but broken down into several dozen exquisite parts, most of them too often ignored. He correctly pointed out that the imperative for the infielder is not bringing the caught ball to the waist with two hands, but getting the ball in the throwing slot with one hand.

There were useful drills, best of all shoulder rotations holding two baseballs “to extend your range of motion.”

Players should be challenged while practicing their catch-playing, Mr. Lane said. He is a fan of the priceless relay game, and timing infielders on their bat-impact-to-first-base speed (crack-to-thud, instead of pop-to-pop). Good infielders are consistently under four seconds, he said.

CHINA VS. EUROPE

Jim Lefebvre, the voluble ex-Dodger and Major League manager, followed up with an insightful lecture on his experience building up the Chinese national team in the early 2000s. I had looked forward to his talk because, after all, we in Europe are also stuck on the bottom rung of the baseball ladder. As Mr. Lefebvre put it, “You can’t identify with the Yankees spending $200 million, but you can relate to the Chinese building a baseball program.”

The biggest adjustment in bringing amateur talent to a professional level, he said, was “the speed of the game.” To prepare his squad, he relentlessly drilled them in measuring up to the pace and violence of the pro game. He also brought to the table that pure meritocratic approach that is unique to baseball, with its statistics and scouting reports.

That philosophy, he said, is encompassed by something the great Dodger manager Walter Alston told Mr. Lefebvre and his Dodger teammates before the opening series of the 1965 season. Mr. Alston’s entire pep talk consisted of: “Gentlemen, we’re here to win. Do the job and you’ll play, and if not, we’ll find somebody else.”

STORIES

Then it was on to an open bar and a stream of conversation and patter. The star, of course, was Mr. Lefebvre, hobbled by replaced knees, but still mighty in his ability to recount baseball lore.

A few salted nuts:

• Sandy Koufax threw only two pitches, a rising fastball and a vicious down-breaking curveball. “He worked up and down.”
• The 1966 Dodgers lost to the Orioles in the World Series because they were crushed by a brutal pennant race.
• Managers and coaches stay out of players’s personal training habits, including steroids, he said.
• Drafting players who walk a lot is silly, Mr. Lefebvre, because Big League pitchers will destroy somebody with a good eye and a slow bat.

Tere were other stories then, and more to come in the convention, of course.

Tell me stories at oldworldpastime@gmail.com