John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Four seasons and a century of columns after beginning this project with a description of a rain March tie with the Merksem Greys (http://www.mister-baseball.com/old-world-pastime-playing-and-coaching-in-europe/), I close with a missive from my new home, Pittsburgh, in Western Pennsylvania.

So, you gonna play some ball out there? is a question I get a lot.

Well, it would not surprise me, but if I do, I don’t think it will be worth writing about. It won’t be a story.

Playing, coaching and organizing baseball in Europe – what most of you do, and what I did – is a story because it’s different and unique, and a narrative of struggle and sometimes triumph in the context of that charming, tasty-beer old world. And I came to know it and live it so deeply that I had to tell.

Good writing, you see, is not as much about command of the language as you think. And it’s not about you.

It’s just about having a good story.

About having a club of friends you grew up with who are nuts, just completely utterly bonkers nuts, about baseball. And they’re called, uh, the Kangaroos. And in only a few years, they climb from fourth division to first — just a bunch of ballplayers on their own, without a rich owner or patron. They win championships, send Little League teams to the World Series, and produce young talent worthy of the MLB academy in Italy.

About a cluster of scrappy, baseball-crazy communities around the port of Antwerp who have run a league in Belgium since the 1930s. (By the way, my friend Matt Brown has the answer to Belgian baseball burnout: Play Saturdays and, between late May, when the days grow long, and late August, on Thursday evenings. Done.)

About a continental subculture, and its members emailing pictures of their field. (http://www.mister-baseball.com/myfieldofdreams-photo-project-thessaloniki-greece/)

About a couple of guys named Philipp and Arndt turning text, data and pix every day into this truly wonderful website.

About, to your north, a Dutch kid named Robert Einhoorn who grew up to play for the Yankees, and then led his country to a world championship. One kid he inspires, a pitcher named Rik VandenHurk, organizes a tour of Major Leaguers. (http://www.mister-baseball.com/world-pastime-big-leagues-antwerp/) Attending this year: Prince Fielder. (http://www.europeanbigleaguetour.com/)

And, how about to your south, a Walloon electrical supplies salesman named Chris Dassy who stays up winter nights pouring over U.S. college scouting reports and who, one spring and summer, woke up every Sunday at 7.30 a.m. to coach other people’s kids to a Belgian national cadet championship.

I could go on and on with stories.

I will close with a great one: Ruth Hoffman, a friend whose twin boys Richard and Carl played on the 2006 Brussels team we took to the under-17 World Series in Maine, read the New York Times’s account of why Uganda’s Little League team couldn’t go to the World Series, even after beating Saudi Arabia. (http://www.mister-baseball.com/world-pastime-ugandan-diamonds-african-baseball-tale/)

Ruth, who works in development and business consulting, was so touched – when she lived in Brussels, we had had an “unforgettable” summer run with her boys, winning the European Championships in Poland — she decided to organize a trip to Africa by the Canadian Little League champions, who are from Vancouver, where she now lives.

Working the phones and her computer for weeks, she made it happen. The Canadian team will play in Uganda, January 15 to 21, in the “Pearl of Africa Series.”

You can donate money for the project here: http://righttoplay.akaraisin.com/youthbaseball

And it was written up in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/sports/baseball/fund-raising-effort-to-send-canadian-team-to-face-uganda-youth-team.html

In an email, Ruth tells how it was “so random” that she even read the story. “I only buy the Times once in a blue moon.”

She quotes Steve Jobs: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.”

For you and me, one big something is baseball. And if you’re not afraid of new adventures, to try to scale new heights, because the first step toward success is trying, without fear of failure – because, hey, it’s baseball, and you will fail, eh, Rangers? — the game will reward you. Not always in the way you first dreamed of, but somehow. I have always found this to be true.

That was my final column, but you can still connect to my dots at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

This column has platformed a spirited debate about how to fix an overwhelmingly long six-month all-weekend amateur adult baseball league with a high burnout rate and not a single team able to boast anything near full attendance at games or practices.

In my space and in the comments section below, we have heard the arguments between those suggesting some changes and those who like things the way they are.

I don’t know what will happen if the Belgian baseball federation adopts a doubleheader format.

I do know what will happen if nothing changes: The league will keep playing six months a year with a high burnout rate that filters out good, stable guys with balanced lives. There will continue to be zero teams in the entire country where all players attend every practice and every game.

Why it is desirable to keep a schedule so long and loaded that it does not allow full attendance and commitment — in a team sport where commitment is the path to excellence — I have no idea. This, my friends, is not baseball.

But I am not going to win this argument – and I pity the poor souls who will have to try at a chaotic trilingual committee meeting — so goodbye to all that.

Let’s spin backwards, to the rosy shades of my childhood. It is the mid-1990s. I am a teenager, crazy about baseball and books and girls. For hours, I stand in the middle of Rue Luther and throw my baseball against the corner of our home

The four-storey house on a quiet street near the European Commission in Brussels is packed. There are six kids and two parents. Then there is my mother’s habit of welcoming in random people, especially mothers with children. She serves them tea, lets their kids play with hers. Some moms come around regularly only for weeks. Some for years.

Fast forward to Friday night. It is my last Kangaroos’s general assembly. And it is a good one. Jimmy, Sharmila, Pascale and the gang have ordered three kinds of pasta and hired a decent DJ. They make eloquent speeches. Nobody is tense. Yes, there is a future for baseball in Brussels.

I am saying my goodbyes. I shake hands with Nicolas, a young Belgo-African men’s softball player in his early 20s. (The Kangaroos’s men’s softball team, by the way, just finished 18-3 and won its third straight championship.)

Nico is an bright, eloquent guy who wants to be a diplomat, and we’ve been friends for a few years, ever since he showed up out of nowhere and declared his intention to learn baseball from scratch.

I said something like, “uh, ok, good luck, kid.”

I didn’t know who I was dealing with. Nico had already taught himself Japanese. As a teenager.

For a spring and summer, Nico descended on Kangaroo Field every day. He’d place the batting tee in front of the cage and take his careful practice swings. He took thousands of fly balls. Before long, he was starring on our reserves team.

It was impressive. I declared him the best 21-year-old true rookie in the world.

Then Nico decided he was going to teach himself how to pitch. “Like Tim Lincecum,” he told me. Uh, right.

Well, Nico is not pitching for the Giants. But he tried, and I say bravo.

On Friday night, he says to say hey to my brothers, Moe and Jacob.

“Uh, ok, but how do you know Jacob and Moe?” I ask. “A party or something.”

“No, actually, John, we used to be neighbors, my mom told me recently.”

“What’s you mom’s name?”

“Mediatrice.”

Is strikes me like a bolt. I know that name well. She had been like a sister to my mom, constantly over for chat and tea. This kid spent a couple years hanging around my house. It is like discovering a long lost cousin.

Only a couple more columns to go! What should I write about? Tell me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

I apologize for casting “shame” last week on the Merksem Greys.

They are a proud and excellent baseball club, full of able men and women, and undeserving of such a label. When I ran the Little League tourney there last year, I rolled out the balls and three dozen volunteers popped up to make Antwerp feel like Yankee Stadium. It was magic.

But still, they are dead wrong about leading the charge for keeping Belgium’s insane six-month season of baseball every Saturday and Sunday afternoon at 330pm. And I’m mad because it’s a crazy proposition, followed nowhere in the amateur universe, and it’s hurting baseball. So I’m sorry, but I still think I’m right.

“Be a man and have an open debate,” writes the Greys’s Lucas Verbist, who also wonders “what stick is up? Not enough free drinks when visiting?” I’m not quite sure what that means, but, no, I don’t think it’s about the free drinks, Mr. Verbist. I just really like baseball.

You, dear readers, know my views, so here we go, an open debate, with the arguments advanced by the Greys and their supporters in an avalanche of comments and emails following my column last week, along with my response. I even did some reporting!

We are the best, therefore we’re right. As RoeBEL53 puts it, “Which team has own developed youngsters in its 1st team today still playing pretty nice baseball? Which team delivers most of the players to the National Teams?”

Yes, the Greys have a wonderful club. But so what? They are a happy fish in a sad pond. And it’s true that other clubs, including my good friends at Namur, rely heavily on foreign players. And, well, shame on them for that.

But that’s a different question. The question here: what will get the most and best athletes playing baseball? I posit that it’s an attractive competition that doesn’t require you to dump the rest of your life.

A functional baseball season allows players to reasonably commit to attending every practice and game their team organizes. Where does that happen in Belgium? Nowhere, not at the Greys, not at the Kangaroos, not at the champion Hoboken Pioneers, and it poisons the culture. Better a three-month season will full attendance than a six-month season with half-attendance.

We do it like the Dutch do it. The Dutch first division does not play six months, so it’s not like Belgium, but, yes, it usually plays at 2pm on Saturday and 2pm on Sunday. I called Steve Janssen, an old friend in European baseball. Steve, an Antwerp native, is easily Belgium’s most accomplished baseball coach. He has coached Europe’s best club, Rotterdam Neptunus, to a national title. He has been the pitching coach for the Dutch national team.

The Dutch national team, faithful readers of this website will know, just won the World Cup in Panama. Steve was there, a Belgian sporting the orange. I congratulated him. “A dream come true,” he said.

Steve declined to discuss the current debate. He has friends all over Belgian baseball and has closed that chapter in his life, he said.

So the Dutch play on Saturdays and Sundays, right?

Yes, but unlike Belgium, it’s a way more professional league. Also, those games are at 2pm. “In Holland, 75 percent of the guys are showered and home to their families by 5pm, while in Belgium 75 percent of the guys go to the bar with their buddies.”

Unhealthy, I said. “Well, it’s a different culture,” he said. “Belgium doesn’t have an elite sports culture.”

So how do you change the culture?

You need a new plan. “Sometimes you gotta take a step back,” said Steve. “You know, the Chinese word for change means opportunity, but also danger.”

He should know. After the 2006 season, Steve was asked by the Belgian federation to draw up a plan for restructuring the league.

His idea: doubleheaders on Saturdays and a U-23 league on Sundays. “That way, the older guys could get Sundays off to spend with their families or coach, and the younger guys could play three times a weekend,” he said. “Think about that, the guys you’re gonna count on in the future are playing three times a weekend, isn’t that great?”

I thought so then, and I think so now. But back then, the clubs, again led by Merksem, fought innovation. Steve got so frustrated that he quit, a catastrophic loss for old, stubborn Belgian baseball.

Dear Merksem Greys and friends, sorry, but on this one I’m going to side with Steve Janssen, Belgian, ballplayer and world champion.

Doubleheaders are too long and hard. As pitdb writes, playing for “6 or even 8 hours on a field, as player, coach or supporter, is over the top.” Yes doubleheaders are a lot of baseball, but is it more “over the top” than the insane six-month Saturday-Sunday season? I don’t think so. It’s not a perfect world. So please pick the less crazy alternative.

And what’s wrong with seven inning games? Bart1977, from the U.K., writes that seven-inning doubleheaders have been a godsend for British baseball, despite the lack of sponsorship or concession sales. He credits the structure for helping to win the European cup qualifier and qualifying the World Baseball Classic.

A majority of Belgian clubs support the current structure. “The position of the Greys was taken after an intensive technical meeting with members of the coaching staff, playing and the board,” writes Peter Verheyleweghen of the Greys. “I must assume that the other 5 clubs did their homework as well.” Six of the eight D1 clubs support letting the weekend warriors play all weekend, he says.

Mr. Verheyleweghen gets the number wrongs. Namur, Brasschaat and Hoboken, the national champs, want doubleheaders. So did Merchtem, until the Cats got demoted. The Antwerp Eagles, newly in D1, changed their minds and are now opposed.

Jerome Legris, the federation president who has diligently and objectively surveyed the landscape, says 35% of players support doubleheaders (even if they have to pay higher fees to compensate for less revenue), 30% are against and 35% have not responded.

So the truth is that clubs and players are pretty evenly divided. Up to the leaders to make a decision and have the courage to try something different.

We’ll lose concession revenue. “Baseball, but obviously any sport drives on beer consumption,” writes RoeBEL53. “How many extra sponsors and fans will be attracted to the game of baseball in a double-header scenario on one day?”

People will drink less beer, he concludes. “How do you get 2 times drunk in a day?” Really, is that a sports argument?

Luckily, it’s the argument easiest to knock down. Switching the elite league to one day a weekend actually allows for more baseball, not less, and at more convenient times, because you free up a huge chunk of the weekend.

“Why don’t clubs who want to simply create an extra league with more games to generate more beer revenues?” writes Dave Gutmann, a former Kangaroos coach.

Andy Johnson writes to propose a European interleague the Greys could play in. “Why is it that there can’t be a Dutch, Western German, French, Belgian competition and another East German, Czech, Croatian, Polish competition?  The logistics are the hard part but I think you could certainly find a way for a team like the Greys to play in both competitions throughout a season.  They could even use their younger players for the Belgian league and their older players for the interleague for example.”

Adds Andy, “you have to admit that it must suck to be in their shoes if they feel that they are in a position to increase the intensity.” Yes, but the issue in Belgium is not quantity of baseball, it’s quality, with as many players as possible attending every practice and playing every game.

Finally, between 1999 and 2011, I spent thousands of hours coaching other people’s kids on Saturday and Sunday mornings, usually alone while their parents slept in.

Would the parents of those minimes, cadets and juniors, a. show up more and b. drink more beer and c. show more interest in baseball if games were on Saturday/Sunday afternoons instead of chilly early mornings?

Uh, duh.

Dear Belgian baseball, I love you, but you’re sick and old — and you don’t want to change.

That’s a problem. Because if you’re never, ever willing to try something different, to evolve, you will die. That’s how life goes.

Your stubborn unwillingness to adapt and make baseball attractive to as many good athletes as possible drives thousands from the game they love.

So, yes, please, it would be cool if you did the right thing.

To celebrate, I’d drink a beer. In Merksem.

I’m not gone yet, so please do challenge me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com. What did I miss?

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Shame on the Merksem Greys.

Belgium’s most populous club, which nurtures and drives baseball through rainy spring and raring summers, is stepping up to the plate for the wrong reason.

This winter, as in winters before, the men and women who run hardball in this country are having a simple debate, centred around the following question: Should Belgium’s top league organize games every Saturday and Sunday for six months, or just on Saturdays?

Across Europe, the answer is obvious to better, more competitive leagues. They’ve long ago set up games only on one day, giving the amateurs who work during the week and play on weekends a much-needed day off.

It lets them coach. It keeps good men in the game.

But that’s not the case in Belgium, where playing the top level of baseball demands giving up Saturdays from noon to 8pm and Sundays from noon to 8pm, every weekend between April and September.

I repeat: No amateur league in the world has as crazy a schedule. Not in America, not in Europe, not in bat-shit insane communist dictatorial North Korea. (OK, I don’t know about North Korea, but can it be worse than Belgium? I raise my eyebrows.)

Think about that. Who can rationally make 16 hours available when a balanced, happy life means making time to work, love and rest?

The answer: Kids, and then older guys who then are likely to lose their life balance, and risk becoming unhappy and thus inferior ballplayers. Faced with this choice, reasonable guys in their late 20s tend to quit. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

So you end up with a depleted league of kids and frustrated weekend warriors.

Who does this benefit? The biggest clubs, like Merksem, who can produce a steady stream of kids. Now, all the more power to them for developing players.

But their game now, as outlined in a recent letter sent around the league, is extremely selfish. The Greys are doing their best to derail a carefully conceived plan orchestrated by the Belgian federation board, after sounding out all the country’s best and brightest, to play two first division games, a doubleheader, on one day of the weekend, with no games on the other day, when players would be free to rest – or coach.

Never mind that this could keep thousands more ballplayers playing, coaching and umpiring the pastime. The

Greys don’t like it because it upsets their business model, which depends on guys quitting to make room for their younger players, and their concession stands selling beer on two days instead of one every weekend. So they will continue to support a policy that burns out people.

The rest of the league is taking notice. “They’re just playing for themselves,” one first division coach told me. “They don’t want the rest of the clubs in the league to develop.”

The Greys are wrong — but can Belgian baseball do the right thing?

What do you think? Fire away at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

- Hey Babe, how’s chops?

- Not much going on, hit BP every day, some booze, some broads, what’s going on with you?

- Finishing up my baseball playing in Belgium, moving to the U.S. On the road in Australia this week for work. Following the post-season a bit. Weird catching night games in the morning.

- Sounds good, are you really quitting playing?

- Well, I’m 34, time to hang’em up, focus just on work and the home front for a while.

- Ah, a reasonable man, I see, but you’ll never forget.

- No, damn it, I know. On Sunday, I stopped by a ballgame in Perth, saw the grass, I wanted to hit fungoes to the third baseman. I wanted to get up early and run a camp all day.

- That’s good, I’ll drink to that.

- Babe, got a confession, I kind of have a crush on the Yankees

- What? Have you to told Orioles yet?

- No, I’m afraid she won’t understand, her feelings will be hurt.

- Yeah, teams are like that. But sometimes a man can’t help himself.

- I know, look at Jorge Posada, he’s a catcher, he hits without batting gloves, I mean that’s all I need.

- But John, the Yankees?

- Yeah, I know, there’s Rivera, too, the way he bounces softly right before going into the set, love that.

- And Jeter…

- Yeah, that damn Jeter.

- Well, at least you still have A-Rod to hate.

- I know Babe, I do hate him, so that’s OK, but I still feel guilty

- Let it go, John, you’re forgetting the natural superiority complex you should have.

- Huh?

- Well, do you know what I and the Yankees have in common?

- Hot dogs?

- No, John, we’re both from Baltimore. The Yankees were originally from Crab City before they moved to New York in 1903 and became the Highlanders.

- Fine, but they’re in New York now, the team of billionaires and bankers, it’s sick.

- John, they’re just borrowing a team from Baltimore. Life is long, they’ll be back soon. Look at it this way, Baltimore baseball is so good it could afford to give away the Yankees.

- Wow, I’m not cheating on my team in my heart anymore. I’m still faithful to Baltimore. Thanks Babe.

- Of course, John, now go drink a beer and hit some fungoes.

Apologies for the delay this week, have been traveling, but still here for a bit on oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Before they go to heaven, some ballplayers grow up.

And so this weekend, Jean-Mi, Manu and I tore down to Lake Como in Jean-Mi’s pristine black leather-interior Audi A3 for a two-day Italian wedding.

The groom was Chris Blackbee, a lanky Australian righthander who pitched elegantly for the Kangaroos in 2006 and 2007 before moving to Switzerland, where he’s starred for the Therwil Flyers.

Chris met his bride Christine, an exuberant and beautiful American, in Brussels, so the banquets and parties and lunches and dances were full of languages and people and stories from across the planet. No shortage of jet in this set. Como, after all, is the playground of movie stars like George Clooney. Coffee Guy didn’t show, but nothing else was amiss: Prosecco by the lake, ladies in summer dresses, and Cuban cigars for the men. We ate Patanegra ham and drank Chianti, took ferries to visit ancient gardens, and admired the Lycra’d cyclists climbing 1.5-lane roads on their custom Cervelos. This, dear readers, was Europe.

But, to my delight, in the speeches and the stories came the unmistakable grassy smell of hardball. Chris is now 29 and has given a half-decade to the European game. His slider still is one of the best in the Old World.

Skills don’t just happen, and not a few toasters at the big banquet noted Chris as kid’s ferocious dreams of excellence. The hours of sweaty practice. The mission to figure out this most difficult game — and pitch. The teenage autographs for friends. (“Someday, Matty, that’ll be worth a lot.”)

Our game is tough, which is why you should never underestimate the cut-throat will of a ballplayer. If that goofy-grinned fellow from Perth can play a bit, it’s because he fought for it.

And the Kangaroos from the Lowlands bonded with the Flyers from the Alps. Such meetings usually devolve into scouting reports. What position you play? You hit lefty? How was your season?

Husbands teazed wives about walking away oblivious from a close, tense game in the ninth a couple outs before the end.

The Flyers, unlike Brussels, are in the Swiss final, and by Saturday afternoon, as the party rolled on, they had decamped in time to suit up for the first pitch.

We kept up with the Belgian final, where Namur now trails Hoboken 2-0. With four ex-Kangaroos, the Angels are our dog in that fight.

I was one of four groomsmen, two of whom were — I really like this part — catchers. The other receiver, J.B. Tucker, the Flyers’ catcher and coach, had excelled several cuts above this writer, having played for Wake Forest, Mississippi State and the Seattle Mariners’ minor league system. He hit 45 professional homeruns. The issue had not been ability, but consistency, said J.B. “That is what the pro game is about.” Happily, the giant world of baseball offers constant nuanced advancements of understanding, even at destination weddings.

As the sun rose Sunday over Bellagio, basking the sub-continent on the other side of the Alps in striking warmth, there was comfort in our friend’s big day, and the ever-giving bonds forged in our sport.

Only a few more columns left! Tell me what I should write about at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Without an end, there is no beginning — and no story. There are no battles to win or lose, and no joy or sorrow.

So it goes that on Saturday, I played my last game for the Kangaroos. At least for now.

I have accepted a job with my newspaper in Pittsburgh, for reasons professional, financial and personal. I start November 1.
So this, dear readers, is the last season of Old World Pastime. I’ll do a half-dozen more, then depart, flipping away my column like a ball back to the pitcher’s mound after a high fastball swinging strike.
Pouring sweat and soul into playing, coaching and organizing baseball in a tiny European country was, I realize now, an eccentric way to spend one’s twenties and early thirties.

But it is what made total, beautiful sense when I moved back to Belgium from Mount Saint Mary’s College in Maryland in 1999.

My college baseball experience was not that fun. In three years, I got into four games. It was a lesson in stubborn masochism.

And so when, at age 22, I got a job in Brussels writing for a small magazine, I eagerly noted that a. My best friends from the Kangaroos, with whom I’d started playing in high school, were eager to tackle the first division. b. My little brothers were 11 and 12, and needed a coach. So did their friends. And c. I badly wanted to play.

And so, a bit insanely, building a baseball community in Brussels became a principal life goal. We were not many in the club back then – a few dozen – but there were many families with a lot of boys and a few girls who wanted to play. And everybody fell in love with baseball.

And we spent Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturday and Sundays, year after year, lining the fields and hitting groundballs and playing catch. And so many winter nights obsessing about the following season. Who would coach. Who would play. In heaven, if I am asked to name my top ten human experiences, getting a day of baseball rolling on sunny freshly cut grass is right there.
On and on it went. We won championships, fought to stay in first division and took youth teams to the World Series in the U.S.
In the end, the Kangaroos lost their mojo. People burned out. Good players left. As Gloucester says in Shakespeare’s King Lear about the inevitable, often inexplainable decay of human relationships: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ‘twixt son and father.”
But all those games happened. And the friendships happened. They are still there, and real. I am not a man of wealth. But I am a billionaire in friendships, especially through baseball.
Without even trying, three quick, easy examples:

Last night, walking through Brussels, I was approached by Khader, a Palestinian in his 20s who played for us for several years. We greeted each other like family.

On Saturday, after the game, Nathan, Jimmy, Davy and I drank some Leffes and talked and talked. Nathan drove me home. He was 15 ten years ago, when we won the Belgian cadet national championship. Now we are both men. We have lives to talk about.

Also on Saturday, Tony, an umpire I’d been feuding with, approached me to wish me luck. I said my piece. He listened, and apologized. We shook hands. I might have hated the guy an hour before, but the world of Belgian baseball is too small to carry grudges. We’ve known each other for 15 years. I’ve probably caught 25 games with Tony behind the plate, chatting away between pitches. Com’on, man, on the corner, gotta give me that!

I’ll be reflecting more on leaving, but your thoughts are always welcome at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Talent development in baseball is a pyramid, and the success at the tip of the European game is possible because of the thousands of coaches from Lisbon to Moscow.

So all of us can be proud this month with the Netherlands’s Rick Van den Hurk and Italy’s Alex Liddi getting called up to the major leagues.

For Van den Hurk, it is the fifth straight season he has appeared in a major league uniform. Back to him in a sec.

Liddi, 23, is the first Italian native to play in the bigs. I met him last year in Tirrenia. He has that powerful hulking physique that just screams big leaguer. An Italian Stallion.

Liddi started his minor league career at 17 and already has 85 professional homeruns. He is, at this writing, 1 for 6 in the bigs with a double. Given his dynamite track record — he hit 30 bombs in AAA this year — he should receive plenty of opportunity to play at the highest level offered by his employer, the Seattle Mariners.

Then there is Maximillian, or “Max”, Kepler, the 18-year-old son of classical ballet dancers from Berlin whom the Twins signed in 2009 for a record $750,000+ signing bonus.

At only 18, Kepler hit .262 for the Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League this year. His on-base average was .347, and he hit his first dinger. He’s now list at 6ft4, 180 pounds, and my scout friends say he’s thought to be progressing on track. Holding your own in pro ball at age 18 is no mean achievement, and a sign that the major leagues beckon down the road.

Youth is key, Van den Hurk, only 26, has already appeared in 45 major league games for the Marlins and O’s, and given his youth, he could still blossom.

I met the tall Dutchman when he, somewhat unbelievably, managed to bring a group of major leaguers on a tour of the Netherlands and Belgium last November.

He has a passion, and a skill, for spreading the gospel of the game. Jason Holowaty, MLB’s game development manger in Europe, recalls when Van den Hurk first told him of his plan to bring big leaguers to Europe. “He had the words, which is common, but then he had actions, which is not,” says Holowaty.

So I was pleased to see the Orioles call Van den Hurk back to Baltimore. After seeing him pitch a scoreless inning in relief against the Blue Jays on Sept. 1, I sent him a congratulatory email.

“I’m doing great,” he replied, describing his season as a starter for the AAA Norfolk Tides. “Being out there every five day starting and pitching is where you learn them most.”

Usually a side-winder, he’s throwing a bit more overhand this year. “I’m trying to use my height to my advantage and throw a bit more over the top and create downhill angle.”

And Van den Hurk will continue giving back and being an ambassador for the game. From November 5 to 12 this year, he and his companions will visit Utrecht, Amsterdam, Prague and Parma. (Link).

The players include Van den Hurk himself, Adam Jones, Jeremy Guthrie, Roger Bernadina, Dexter Fowler and Jair Jurrjens. The last two are still to be confirmed.

The players want to come, says Van den Hurk, after having a “blast” last year. “They went and experienced everything about Europe,” he writes. “Besides the clinics they got a great feel for the history of Europe as well as all the foods and museums and monuments.”

Yes, Europe has great food and monuments.

And, now, some big league ballplayers.

Who’ll be the next European big leaguer? Venture a guess at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Last week she followed. Only months after my grandfather went Marjorie Miller, his wife of 68 years. She was 89, like him. A generation, gone.

Grandmom was shy. Only with difficulty did she connect with strangers. It was kindled by kin that she shone, a sparkly-eyed flower of wit and wisdom.

Her gift was words, gold polished by a life as reader, writer and raconteur. Grandmom’s hungry brain worked in narratives that picked up anecdotes and one-liners like spinning tornadoes.

She was a kind mother who raised five kids in a hard age for women, while her engineering husband tinkered with radar and rockets. But she knew God didn’t give her a brain just for nesting, so, after her kids grew up, she went back to school and got a master’s. She then ran the local library.

Her mind, like an iceberg, showed but a slice of what it stored. She was, among other things, a published expert on the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, a thinking Christian who loved C.S. Lewis, and a progressive FDR Democrat. She read the New Yorker for over sixty years, and, I think, dreamed of taking a drug against her shyness and joining their quick-thinking writers for dinner in Manhattan.

This was the woman who welcomed me when I, grandson growing up in Belgium, travelled to Maryland. Like my grandfather, she relished her role as grandmother to a tribe marching the earth from California to Brussels.

She adored sharing the great American one-liners – How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice – and repeated them like prayer. She also liked passing on wisdom gathered from the careful education she received from her meticulous elders. Only marry somebody you can’t stand the idea of not marrying. Time flies whether you’re having fun or not.

And, as with my grandfather, baseball was a piece of our bond. She loved the game’s history and color.

Her favorite player? Coco Crisp, outfielder and alliterative pun. “How is that Coco Crisp doing?” she would often ask when I called their house. (He’s hitting .268 for Oakland, grandmom.)

She knew how to pencil in a scorecard, and was proud of having tracked Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, which she had watched on television.

She indulged in conversation about my Orioles. “They’re really not that good anymore, are they?” On most evenings when I showed up at their house, the Orioles game would be on TV. Maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.

And she was an equal partner to my grandfather’s gifts of baseball books, trips to camps and games, and support. When I was played my first game of American Legion in Linthicum, Maryland, there she was, sitting next to granddad in the first base bleachers.

In some ways, this column – words about baseball – is what a guy who is his grandmother’s grandson is meant to do.

My grandmother adored following the lives of her five kids and 20-something grandkids and their spouses. She kept lists of people’s birthdays and anniversaries, always making sure to mail us gifts, often books.

For a while, she published an enthusiastic newsletter called the Fitful Family News, whose title accurately conveys its exclusive focus on our successes.

That attitude, hopeful at the expense occasionally of the truth, was the spirited optimism of her generation. Sometimes forced, but brave and right. We shall overcome.

Most of all, her words and stories were her way of showing love — a gift to us, her very lucky family.

Feedback always welcome at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic
From “Perfection Wasted” by John Updike

In July 1987, I was nine, on vacation in Maryland with my parents. My uncle Steve took us to Memorial Stadium, the Orioles’s grand old brick park.

It was a day when fans were let onto the field. I shook hand with Cal Ripken. A pretty girl next to me gave him an envelope.

One player, I remember, carried on actual conversations. I snapped his picture and, for years, kept it in my box of family snaps. That player was Mike Flanagan.

For the 24 years between that summer day and last week, I followed his pitching, coaching and broadcasting. His voice became familiar. I felt like I knew him.

So his suicide last week at age 59 is like losing a planet one has long gazed at from afar.

I’m only 34, but I’ve seen enough mental illness in friends and family to know that it strikes mercilessly. The details that drive some to self-slaughter are just details. It is the darkness, not the cards, that says fold.

That fragility, to different degrees, is part of being human. But it takes shape in childhood, and it’s worth thinking about as we watch 12-year-olds in the Little League World Series. We baseball coaches are stewards of a priceless, vulnerable piece of a young man’s life, when he wakes up to a talent for playing shortstop or pitching or stealing bases.

There is a risk that we convey that the player is to be appreciated only because he can pick it and make the throw from the hole. Teach that, and beware the painful emptiness when the ball gets through.

The hardest part of being a coach is not communicating an appreciation for excellence. That’s easy, isn’t it?

The challenge, I would argue, is communicating that you are not judging kids on being kids, that you are grading only hardball plays, and that they are always worthy of appreciation and respect for who they are, no matter what.

This is hard. I’ve not yet figured out how to do it well. But I know it’s important.

It was clear reading the clips that Flanagan was a man who had married himself to his identity as a baseball pitcher. It was what he was good at. And he was good when the Orioles were great, winning a World Series in 1983.

Rare is the individual ballplayer who maintains his sense of self through good times and bad. And when the good times were so good, it is ever harder to remind yourself, when the winds turn, that you might need to take a walk and find a few flowers elsewhere.

There was speculation in the media that Flanagan was depressed because the Orioles who have been terrible in the last decade, including between 2002 and 2008 when he was co-general manager.

We have no idea whether this is true, and it is none of our business.

But there is a lesson here, especially for we who run baseball in Europe, and are prone to a. falling in love with the odd B+ player who comes along and b. risk despairing over a poor team or organization.

Sometimes, a baseball leader needs to remind himself and his players that we are all human and noble, even when we don’t hit doubles in the gap. You never know whose hidden darkness those words might shine into.

As I read dozens of stories about Flanagan, one that stuck was a fan’s description of meeting Flanagan at spring training a few years ago. He asked for an autograph. The 1979 Cy Young award winner penned his name followed by the tag, “CY ‘79”.

Just “Mike Flanagan” was not enough.

This is a rather serious topic for OWP, but I’m still taking your emails at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

In 12 years as a working journalist, I have always avoided writing about my urine. You’d think that in the Age of Overshare it would have been fair game at some point. But no. My private parts have stayed private.

Until Saturday, when I was made to let a man watch me pee. From the front.

It was a drug test. It will be, I believe, negative, unless Trappist beers have been added to substances banned.

After the Kangaroos’s 6-0 win over the Lions of Beveren, a suburb of Antwerp, a pleasant sports doctor named Stefaan walked up to our team.

Let’s see some ID, said Jimmy, our coach. Good for Jimmy. Nobody plays doctor with his players without showing ID.

Stefaan had already picked three positions. Catchers, firstbasemen and secondbasemen from each team were to be tested.

Our secondbaseman, 16 years old, did not feel nature’s call. He said so. Stefaan’s advice: “Just drink a beer, kid.” I had heard that before. In 2006, I was too dehydrated to pee for a post-game drug test and the doctor told me to drink beer. I had three Jupilers on an empty stomach, took the test, then got in my car and drove home.

On Saturday, I was behind the dish, so it was off to the closed locker room.

Stefaan was a chatterbox. “Where are you from?…Oh, I vacationed in New York last year…Ran the marathon…Have been to Chicago, too…You like it here?”

To Davy, our firstbaseman who went after me, he would throw in some free political peanuts. “Can’t believe you can’t order bread in a bakery in Wemmel in Dutch.” Wemmel is a Brussels suburb where a bunch of people speak French. It’s in Flanders, so that drives the Flemings bananas. Ah, Belgium.

Stefaan took my ID and handed me papers to fill out. I am drug testee number 1921278 of the Flemish sports administration.

He handed me a plastic bottle and motioned me toward the shower. “I have to watch, because you could have a wire attached to you to put in somebody else’s urine, you know.”

OK, I said.

“You have a bucket there, in case you want to keep going after you’ve filled the cup.”

OK, I said.

I filled the cup, ignoring the stranger focusing intently on my mid-section. I am happy to report that there is nothing more to share about these 30 seconds of my life.

The cup was closed, but I had some left in the tank. I moved toward the bucket to finish the job. He kept staring. I pulled up my pants and resolved to empty the rest of my bladder later.

OK, I said, I’m done.

We walked back to the table.

“We need to measure the wateriness,” he said.

What if it’s too watery?

“Then you need to stay and pee again.”

What if I have a dinner to get to?

“And you leave? Then it’s a positive test, and you’ll have six months or a year suspension.”

OK, I said.

Stefaan stuck a drop in a machine that looked like a flashlight and peered in one end. Thankfully, my pee was just thick enough, and I was sparred an evening of steak and beer in Beveren.

Stefaan showed me two bottles, one labeled “A” and one “B”. He poured three-fifths of my sample into A and the rest into the B.

“We’re going to test the A and put the B in the fridge.” If the A is positive, he continued, “you and your attorney will have the right to examine the B.”

I am now an athlete with a B urine sample sitting in a fridge somewhere in Flanders. Like Floyd Landis when he was fighting a positive test after winning the Tour de France.

I filled out some more paperwork, and then was allowed to leave.

What do I think about all of this?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for testing for steroids. Not sure about pot, which is what gets a lot of ballplayers in Belgium suspended.

Seriously, do you know what would happen to NCAA baseball if they tested for pot?

I don’t think the 34-year-old weekend warrior catcher for the Brussels Kangaroos needs a B sample the way Cadel Evans does. I don’t have the cash to pay a lawyer, even if they get me for HGH, Amphetamines and Methandrostenolone.

And I certainly don’t think the penalties should be stiff. Suspend an amateur athlete for six months and he’ll just quit.

And I will never write about my urine again. Promise.

I listen to all kinds of stories at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

Our season has started again, and, although we were swept this weekend by the Antwerp Eagles, it was nice to get out there again. I do love to play. Still.

Our field is not ready yet, and doesn’t figure to be set until October. It has been a headache for Jimmy, the club president, to figure out where we might play and practice for the rest of the season.

Baseball does not happen on its own.

During the Belgian Little League championships in early July, a once-sparkling Belgian infielder named Frank van Drogenbroeck approached me. Frank was the best hitter in the league back when the Kangaroos first broke into first division in 2000.

Swinging a 28-33 with a wide barrel, he was as close to indestructible as any hitter I’ve ever caught against. There were weekends where I’m sure he went 12 for 13 off us.

The Belgian federation has equipped itself with a nifty stats tool, http://www.frbbs.be/statistique.php, where you’ll learn that Frank hit, yes, .554 over a full season in 2000.

Anyway, Frank, who is now 47, thanked me for my work in setting up the Little League tournament and handed me a worn-out program. It was from a trip that his under-13 team took to South Africa in 1975.

The program listed two games, Vaal Province vs. Belgium on Dec. 21, and South Africa vs. Belgium on Dec. 27. A message from Theuns Botha, the chairman of Vaal Province’s Little League, mentions that “South Africans have been Little League visitors to Belgium several times and many Vaal Province players have been included in these touring teams and have always spoken enthusiastically about the wonderful hospitality received in Belgium.”

There is a list of the kids, including Frank, on the Belgian team, along with their birthdays. For the South African team, there are no birthdays, only names and pictures.

They are, of course, all white kids, many with Afrikaaner names like van Wyngaard, Botha and Els.

This was apartheid South Africa, a place that had few friends in the world. It was an awful, fascist political regime, which imprisoned and tortured blacks who tried to organize politically against it.

The Dutch-speaking (and baseball-playing) people of the lowlands shared a similar language, and some culture, with the Afrikaners. So it made sense to stay in touch and organize things like baseball games. But our story here has nothing to do with politics.

This story is about baseball, and a grown man who now has fond memories thanks to a few coaches who thought it’d be neat to take a baseball team to the other side of the world.

Any good stories about taking a team of kids a long way? Tell to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

It is rainy and gray, but the days of summer are long, and we wait for the 180-day Belgian baseball season to resume, and while we wait, we see old friends and eat and drink. Tell a few stories, too.

So on Thursday night, Manu, Jean-Mi, Jimmy, Larry, Frank and I gathered for a Belgian supper, washed down with a barrel of malted barley. The six of us were teammates in 2000, when the Kangaroos decided to crack open this country’s first division, not the world’s best baseball league, but good enough still to crush teams not past that basic quality level of making plays, throwing strikes and hitting the ball hard.

In April of 2000, the Kangaroos weren’t quite there yet. The team was started in the late 1980s by students at the Universite Libre de Belgique. They had played in the 1990s mostly for fun in division four, three and two, but always for competition, too. Getting better mattered. Thus, finally, the first division.

It was painful at first. We had little pitching and no experience playing at a higher level, and we played with metal bats in a park with a 265-foot leftfield fence. There were games when the rival teams, worked-out semi-pro athletes coming off national team tournaments, would smack a dozen homeruns, then run into outs on purpose to escape Brussels as fast as possible. If not for the 20-run mercy rule (after five innings), we’d have lost games by 50.

We were also, looking back on it, brave and ballsy. It’s easy to show up and rake against lousy pitching; it takes guts to stare your own shortcomings in the face, and keep playing. Beat us 31-1? Go screw yourselves — and see you tomorrow.

One story repeated Thursday night involved a game against the Brasschaat Braves, champions of the day. Frank, our head coach, intentionally walked the baseball loaded losing 12-3 in the bottom of the seventh. We wanted to set up a force out to, at all costs, prevent the mercy rule and and play at least one more inning. The Braves were furious.

But it worked. We played two more innings – another half-hour of baseball on planet earth — and lost in nine. We drove home as if we had won the seventh game of the World Series. Sometimes, winning means understanding that victories come, at different places and times, in different shapes and sizes.

Frank arrived in May of that year, fresh off his master’s degree in sports management from the University of Springfield. He is now the highly-regarded, and wildly successful, head coach at Pomona College near Los Angeles. I like to teaze him that he learned everything he needed to know in Belgium in 2000. We battled, and fought, and cried, and by September we were no longer pushovers.

On a warm Saturday afternoon at Kangaroo Field, before a crowd of what I remember now to be 58,327, we beat the Borgerhout Squirrels 10-8, our first victory against one of the better Antwerp teams. Frank pitched. Jean-Mi homered.

After a few beers, the topic Thursday was favorite memories. Those two games topped the list. Larry, who now works as an economic analyst, had another one. The day after that 10-8 victory, he pitched and beat Borgerhout again. “That’s when I decided to quit,” he said Thursday. “I always said I’d give it up if I won just one game in the first division.”

This email address is all about receiving memories: oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

The unbelievable tale of baseball in Uganda and its recent setback (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/31/sports/for-uganda-little-leaguers-exhilaration-and-then-heartbreak.html) offer a precious morality tale.

We start with a group of Americans and do-gooders, led by a retired U.S. engineer named Richard Stanley, who brought the game to this land-locked nation of 32 million eight years ago.

Baseball is not an easy sport to give to a culture unused to bats and diamonds. It’s even harder when kids are undisciplined, many of them orphaned, in a place where per capita income remains well under $1,000 a year. We in European baseball should not think we have it so rough.

But as images shot by American filmmaker Jay Shapiro, who is making a documentary called “Opposite Field” (www.opposite-field.com), can attest, these coaches and their backers have brought not just baseball to Uganda, but good baseball.

Last month, putting icing on the cake of an extraordinary story, Uganda earned the to participate in the crown jewel of youth sports by beating Saudi Arabia 6-4 in the finals of Little League’s European Championships in Kutno, Poland

That is no small achievement. On the sunny compounds of the desert kingdom, Little League baseball is a religion. There’s not much else to do down there. So they play and play and play. Saudi had reeled off some 20 consecutive championships.

In the early 2000s, I coached my little brother’s Little League team. We went to four European championships and won two of them, both in age categories where Saudi was not competing. In the 2002 finals, Saudi whooped us, 10-1. Nobody could ever beat these guys.

Thus my intense reaction on hearing the news that the U.S. State Department had denied Uganda’s visas was: How could a bunch of bureaucrats deny these kids their chance at glory, especially after they beat Saudi? Don’t they understand how hard it is?

I called a connection at Little League. We’re going to back the State Department on this one, he said. That’s outrageous, I said. I needed to know more.

But it took only a few more phone calls and a follow-up statement by the State Department on Saturday to confirm what had happened: Uganda, in a mad scramble for visas to travel to Poland and get its best kids certified for Little League, had played around with its paperwork, likely making at least some kids appear younger than they were.

Little League runs the world’s biggest and greatest youth sports tournament, a global battle involving millions of kids and thousands of teams. To qualify, leagues around the world must respect a host of rules, governing everything from helmet use to TV rights.

Two are sacrosanct: Kids must be 11 or 12 years old on April 30, and they must live full-time in the place they’re playing for. An older kid, as Danny Almonte from New York famously demonstrated in 2001, can skewer the whole tournament.

In over 50 years of running their event, Little League, and the State Department, have never denied a World Series participant because of visas. And it had a huge public relations interest in bringing the first African team ever to the World Series.

This, I grudgingly concluded, was a totally legitimate denial.

On Sunday, my last call was to George Mukhobe, Uganda’s coach. At 34, he is roughly my age, and I knew I could identify most with him.

“The kids are the right age,” he said at first. Then, he added, “well, in Africa, sometimes it’s difficult, we don’t have birth certificates.” He continued: “This is not my responsibility, I’m not these kids’s parents or guardians, but if somebody has broken the law here and needs to take the fall for [fraud], they can take me. I’ll coach baseball in prison. I just love this game.”

So, here you have a dedicated man, somebody who has brightened lives and developed the talents of young men, a true coach, brought down by the failure of his society, for whatever reason, to systematically document the births of its children, thus opening the temptation to bend the rules of youth sports.

The State Department and Little League made the right call in holding Uganda to the same standard as other countries.

Mr. Mukhobe and his fellow baseball coaches in Uganda have accomplished something life-altering and perhaps more valuable here, besides bringing joy to a lot of boys.

They have forced a nation’s attention on one of its shortcomings, one that applies to both baseball and lifting a nation out of poverty: You can train the best ballplayers, build the best motorcycles or grow the best mangoes, but if you can’t certify them, you can’t export them. It’s just the way it is.

Meanwhile, baseball endures and, through failure, teaches us what we might do better next time.

Wait til next year. And Go Uganda.

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

So, after following the Tour de France, I was assigned to cover the shootings in Norway. That’s put me in a somber mood, prompting me to pose the following question:

I’ve decided to wonder
Cuz it’s worth a ponder
What would be this world
If without baseball it twirled?

No baseball in Canada, Jamaica or Cuba
No baseball in the U-S-A
No baseball in Belgium, no baseball in Italy
No baseball in Japan, sadly

No playing catch, no T-Ball
No coach pitch, just nothing, y’all
No Big leagues, no Little League
No legion, no summer, no leagues at all

A sad, muddy fog
For starters, nobody would have invented the hot dog
No Say Hey Kid, No Cal or Derek
A world with no grass infield, that’s a wreck

No baseball means no spring training
No long-toss, not stadium meandering
No bullpens, no World Series game seven
No Wrigley, no Camden, no Fenway heaven

Without the diamonds
I’d have fewer friends
Grayer memories
A lot less stories

No pinch-hitters or that big homerun
No set-up man, no closer, no high hard one
Killing these words, that’s something scary
What would happen to the cliché vocabulary?

Without Cartwright’s game
My childhood: nothing the same
Could I have loved soccer or hoops
So much? My life goes oops

God, my childhood!
No newspaper clippings, no board games, nothing worth it, nothing good
No baseball on the radio or online
No waking up at 4 with the game on the line

Gut God’s game
And kill infields and outfield and the Hall of Fame
Gone are on-deck hitters and no-hitters
Sliders and screwballs and knuckles and spitters

Rid the world of hardball
Is to rain a free fall
A long, lunging nothingness
What you’d call a mess

No practice on grass in the early morning
The lack of batting cages we’d be mourning
A universe with no dugout banter
What would I discuss, moi, ranter?

What no baseball would mean
If this you can glean
To go with the empty winter,
An empty summer

What do you think would happen if there were no baseball? Email me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

For the second July in a row, I am on the road, covering the world’s greatest bicycle race. The Tour de France has little in common with Major League Baseball. But the two professional athletic events share one big thing: They are both unique tests of endurance as well as skill.

A truth not often enough acknowledged about pro baseball is that it is truly alone in organizing almost daily games for straight six months.

This is great if you’re a fan, of course. Every day, a new chapter in an annual narrative. Baltimore, why do you test me so?

If you’re a player, welcome to a cruel, unusual and punishing world. A friend of mine once ran into a great Braves outfielder in a bar. It was November. “Do you miss baseball?” my friend asked. The outfielder lowered his glass of beer. “Dude, f— baseball,” he said.

We may love the game, but a couple hundred in a row will do that to a man. (Earth to Belgium, your baseball would be better and more fun if your season were three or four months long instead of six. Leave that to the guys who make millions of dollars a year. I’m sorry, one cannot make this point often enough.)

The long season, I think, is why we who watch from the outside often find ourselves putting the sharp whip of judgments to pro players who use performance-enhancing drugs.

Nine of the 10 times I have asked a pro player or coach about steroids or speed, I get one of those raised eyebrows the married like to give the single. Young man, you simply do not understand.

Of course, I would argue, the pros have only themselves to blame for this scenario. Major League Baseball runs 162-game seasons because the physics of the sport permit such a thing, and because that’s what makes a maximum amount of money. Yes, the owners want that money, but so do the players.

There is talk now of doubling the number of Major League teams to receive wild cards, and holding one-game playoffs to determine the extra playoff team. That would mean an annual guaranteed two one-game playoffs.

As a fan of a team (see above) unlikely to finish first or second ever again, I support this idea. Give me crazy make-or-break baseball, with starters entering in relief, unknown players getting big hits, and generally painful tension.

Doubtless, it would change the game some. General managers might build teams differently. A team aiming for a wild card might overspend for a starting pitcher at the trade deadline.

But it would be worth it. Sometimes, one game is enough.

Your thoughts on the extra wild card? Pray, do tell, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

The winds of work sailed me to Sweden this weekend, and I took advantage of the travel opportunity to drop in on my pal Frank Pericolosi, the former Kangaroo and ace Pomona College coach who’s laboring for the baseball club in Rattvik this summer.

It’s a town of 10,000, three hours northwest of Stockholm, next to a tranquil lake surrounded by tall, elegant pines. You wouldn’t think so, but it’s home to one of the more remarkable baseball clubs, and men, in Europe.

The Rattvik Butchers – yes, that is a sweet, meaty name – have been going for decades now. Their cornerstone is Magnus Hoglund, a right-handed pitcher, now 49 years old, who put together one of the best national team baseball careers in the world.

Between 1980 and 2008, Magnus pitched in dozens upon dozens of international tournaments. He debuted as a baby-faced 18-year-old, playing in the baseball of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and graduated from international baseball at 46, an adult male living in a world with wireless internet, the euro and the aftermath of the steroid era.

In between, Magnus threw his canny, cutting arsenal against Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, Panama, the list goes on and on. Swedish baseball is not the world’s best, but it is good enough that the Swedes play with the big boys. For instance, Sweden has, at least once, defeated Italy.

Evenings on Lake Siljan with Magnus generate anecdotes by the peantutful. “I gave up a dinger to Joey Votto…I struck out Bobby Bonilla… I faced Nick Markakis, can’t remember what he did.” Degrees of connection in baseball can quickly, and delightfully, unite the globe.

During a late Sunday afternoon, before our drinking began, we had wandered over to the Butchers’s home field. Nestled beneath a short slope, it reminded me much of Kangaroo Field, before a destruction company started tearing it up last month. The outfield fence is strung together by horizontal slabs of wood. Leftfield is a tall monster, and all around are green and brown. Pure baseball.

Magnus and I long-tossed, and then he threw a pen. There are not many men almost 50 years old in this world who can throw like he does. In a world of six billion human beings, maybe 1,000. Maybe.

The fastball snapped out of a cracking arm action, blowing in at the knees, an effortless 80 mph. The curve and slurve bit like angry dogs. And then there was the changeup. “I throw a one-finger changeup,” Magnus had told me the night before, as we munched sausages off his grill, and drank Tuborgs, while admiring the loving sun setting over the lake. He grips the pitch with his middle finger, he explained. “Sometimes it spins off to the right, and sometimes to the left.”

And so it went in our mini-bullpen session. The first dropped a foot. The second spun off to my right. I had never seen this pitch before.

It is a good world, this, where one might spend a weekend in a small Swedish town, play catch with the Jamie Moyer of European hardball, and learn a new pitch.

Do you know any new pitches? Please do tell, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

For the second year in a row, I ran the Belgian Little League Championships. We set up shop in Hoboken, Belgium, the original place name for the eponymous locale in New Jersey where baseball was supposedly invented.

It wasn’t a bad tournament. Brussels and Wallonia were again weaker than the two Flanders squads. This is logical. The true home of Belgian hardball is Antwerp, home to a half-dozen communities where the game is actually popular.

The weaker two regions have some talented kids. But they lack the intense focus and coaching motivation and muscle you need to nurture the game to a higher level.

Flanders has that focus right now. A generation of younger coaches, now in their 30s, has set up an elite training program.

Every Friday night, the best players are invited to scrimmage with a pitching machine. Coaching is not about talking to kids.

It’s about getting them enjoyable and consistent reps at a higher level. If you can figure out how to deliver that – be in the backyard, as part of a serious game, or in a goofy practice — you’ve got yourself a winner.

It’s not about what you say. It’s about what the kids do. More importantly, it’s about what they want to do. That’s why I love Little League’s global tournament. It motivates kids.

It’s difficult to get my fellow Belgians to grasp my passion for taking care of this 11-12-year-old age group. It’s a special age to me, life’s only intersection of sharp, hard skills, and childlike enthusiasm and innocence.

The energy and focus of my friends, instead, is directed toward running the insanely-long adult season that, like the war in Afghanistan, just goes on and on and on. April to September, sometimes October. No other amateur season in the world is so long. It’s stupid.

My buddies who coach and administer these teams are burned out, as I was when I tried that game. They are not coping. They have no energy to devote to creating a cool environment for 12-year-olds to prosper.

Instead, they worry themselves sick about whether they’ll have nine for Sunday, and whether their 22-year-old shortstop is going to the beach next weekend.

I want to scream: Your six-month season is a lie. It is a failure. People burn out. They don’t have fun. Play a few months. Stop the season. Then go on vacation. Play a few practice games in September. Then rest.

So it goes that our Little League tournament has the kids screeching with joy, and that many of the adults who are running baseball in this country are not there to watch, or are too trench-eyed to appreciate what they’re seeing.

After running through their round-robin games, Flanders East and Flanders West played for the championship, and the right to represent Belgium in the 2011 European Little League Championships in Kutno, Poland. The winner of that tournament goes to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA, in August.

It was a good, high-level kids baseball game, better than last year’s final. Plays got made, doubles ripped to the opposite field gap, and bunts successfully defended. I like.

The boys (and a few girls) knew they were playing for something big. They were focused, and intense. The crowd of 200+ was into it. Ballplayers were growing on this field. That’s not always apparent when you’re playing on Saturday mornings in the mud, five months of other muddy Saturday mornings behind you, with nothing at all at stake, except the approval of a lonely, frustrated father.

West knocked the ball around hard, and carried the day, 11-4.

To the sound of a loud “We are the champions”, they ran around and popped kiddie champagne corks, their screams filling the fresh Belgian July air.

Got some good baseball stories? Tell me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Photo by Frédéric de Laminne, www.event-pics.be

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

In “Dollar Sign on the Muscle”, his classic on baseball scouting, Kevin Kerrane tells a revealing story about Eddie Murray, the (mainly) Orioles all-time great switch hitter.

In the early 1970, Eddie was a top prospect at Locke High School in Los Angels. Ozzie Smith was a teammate. He was, at 18, much like the man he would become – quiet, steady, unemotional.

To many Major League scouts, writes Kerrane, he appeared not to care.

The Orioles saw it differently. At the time, they were pioneering new scouting techniques, including a psychological test. It showed that this young firstbaseman cared a great deal, but that his high motivation and aggressiveness were masked by an even higher degree of emotional control.

Eddie cared. He just didn’t show it.

Baltimore picked Eddie Murray 63rd overall in the 1973 draft. It was a steal. He would become one of three players with 3,000 hits and 500 homeruns. More importantly to his fans, and I am a big one, he would be unbelievably consistent. For 20 straight seasons, he hit at least 10 homeruns, but never more than 33.

And, 12 years after he was signed, on one July day, he would hit to a deafening chant of “Ed-die, Ed-die” in Baltimore’s old Memorial Stadium, to an audience who included a seven-year-old boy living in Belgium and visiting his Maryland family.

Ironically, the supercharged emotion of that moment taught me exactly the wrong lesson about how to play baseball.

If I had to change one thing about myself as an amateur player and coach, it would be to be more like Eddie. From the time I was a seven-year-old T-ball player in the Brussels Sports Association, I have had a difficult time not feeling frustration in defeat and ecstasy in triumph. I admire players and coaches who accept outcomes as irreparable truth, without succumbing to passion.

I am going to see plenty of emotion next weekend, while I direct the second Belgian Little League championships in Hoboken, a suburb of Antwerp and home of the Pioneers.

For the second year in a row, I am the commissioner and will oversee a tournament of four teams: Flanders East, Flanders West, Brussels and Wallonia. The winner will go to the European championships in Kutno, Poland. I am still a believer in Little League for the sheer fun and the sharp aliveness that it cooks up for its players, parents and coaches.

But if I could change anything, it would be, somehow, to impart on the players the perspective that wins need not essential to happiness and losses proof of failure and deficiency.

I don’t have a team to coach full-time anymore, but, when I have thoughts like this, they often turn into a short speech or message I would bestow on my team if I had one.

Here’s the speech: “You want to be great. That is your goal. Want to be great. Strive to be great. Work to be great. Do it every day. But accept the outcome. It is OK if you’re not great. It is actually perfectly 100% more than OK. You’re still a good person, a great person. But it’s not OK not to try. Have dreams, but understand that learning to accept reality is just as important.”

I would hope that, if I believe this and transfer it to my players, that, step by step, they would learn that most difficult lesson of baseball. The one that Eddie Murray was born knowing. That emotion is fine to drive us before the play, but not useful afterwards. That we are who we are, and our play is what our play is, and that we must always accept truth without emotion and look to a better future.

That is my dream, my 3,000 hits.

What’s your best coaching speech? Tell me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

On the road, I’ve been reading. My favorite has been Kevin Kerrane’s classic account of scouting, Dollar Sign on the Muscle. It was written in 1981, so it’s an account of the profession before the Money Ball-statistics revolution.

After reading the book, I’m not entirely persuaded that that much has changed. There is still no sure way to tell whether an 18-year-old is going to gain the strength, skill and maturity needed to play in Major Leagues. If you, reader, have seen a study comparing first-round draft picks in the 2000s and the 1970s, please do send in. I’m curious.

Memory, you see, can play tricks. We are not necessarily wiser today.

I’ve also been reading Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir “Speak, Memory.” I’m not a fan of his so-called masterpiece “Lolita”, an ironic first-person narrative about a man in love with a kid. I just don’t get the book.

But I adore this memoir. The prose is delectable, like watching Maddux or Pedro in their primes. (How well would those guys do in the era of the skinny-armed hitter?)

He writes about his past, his childhood, but he also writes about the magic of memory.

“A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory,” he writes. “That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.”

This picture brims with brightness. I have written about this day in this space before, but it deserves another swing, and Nabokov helped the recall.

From left to right, that’s Jaime Cevallos (a ballplayer, now a.k.a. The Swing Mechanic. One of his clients is Ben Zobrist), Cal Ripken, Sr., me and Irene Cuyun, another college classmate who (still) loves baseball just as much as Jaime and me. She loves the game with a pure heart.

This was September of 1998. Jaime had worked a summer camp with Cal, Sr. at our college, Mount Saint Mary’s in Maryland. Cal, Sr. invited him to a crab feast and said “bring some friends”, who turned out to be me and Irene. For this, I am still grateful, Jaime. If Jack McKeon ever invites me for Scotch, I will return the favor.

Cal, Sr. is holding a cigarette in his right hand. A week later, ESPN would report that he had lung cancer. A year later, he was gone.

During the afternoon, I walked through the Ripken’s living room to use the bathroom. Cal, Sr. was sitting on the couch watching, on the television, Mark McGwire hit. September of 1998, remember? McGwire hit a homerun, number 66 or 67. We did not have a very enlightened conversation. I said something like “unbelievable” and he just grunted. But still, it was just the two of us, and I have spent enough time on the outside looking in to appreciate the humble truth of the moment.

The Ripken’s living room, by the way, was decorated with a random collection of trophies and plaques that included stuff like the 1974 Aberdeen Little League sportsmanship award, granddaughter soccer trophies, and, I will never forget this, the 1983 American League MVP award.

At some point, I did corner Billy Ripken (he was retired by then, unlike Cal, Jr., who was on the road playing that day) and tell him about baseball in Belgium, and the Brussels Kangaroos. Of course I did.

I’m still too locked into current baseball adventures to explore what they’ve meant to me, but another part of the past, like this picture, is sitting there to enjoy. Baseball has been one constant since I was seven, so it is always there, running straight through seasons and winters, anchoring time. Memory will speak again. This game is good for that.

What are your best baseball memories? Always listening at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

To the mailbox we go. This column does not enjoy a million readers. I am not Maureen Dowd. But it does garner a few hundred dedicated and loyal participants in our baseball conversations. And a story that goes a bit viral will get a few thousand views, I am told. That’s plenty for me, and I am grateful for your support.

You write in for good reasons. Early in the year, it was pointed out that Daisuke Yasui, a Japanese submariner who made his name in this country and column with a theatrical display of Asian big-timing, (http://www.mister-baseball.com/world-pastime-tale-wandering-submariner/) had signed a professional contract with the Pittsfield Colonials, an independent minor league team in Massachusetts.

As of this writing, he is on their “inactive” list. http://canam.bbstats.pointstreak.com/player.html?playerid=117128. I am heartened that, at a time of global communication, there is still mystery in the world. How is our friend Yaz doing in America? We all want to know.

The desire for fantasy and miracles is strong. Witness this email, received from a hopeful teenager Dutch pitcher after I published a fake news story about a 17-year-old Luxembourg pitching phenom named Luc Roeland, and his coach, Swiss physicist Van Marslias. (link)

“He will do a good job if he sticks with his moves and if he’s able to mix in different pitches,” my correspondent wrote. “I am a pitcher in the Dutch rookie league myself (16-year-old) and i was wondering if you have any idea how I could contact Mr. Marslias? Hopefully you are able help me.”

You laugh, but he was not alone. One scout based in Europe wrote to me: “You cannot imagine how many e-mails I got from the US (media included) asking about Luc Roeland. Seems like you got them. Well done!”

Of course, what this column is about is loving baseball, and all of you do that. You’re also experts. Here, quoted in full, is one reader’s add to my list of things to change about baseball:

1. Get a team back in Brooklyn.

2. Have the players leave their gloves on the field when they go to bat.

3. Beanie caps and baggie uniforms.

4. World Series games during the day.

5. Max capacity at any ballpark should be 40k.

6. More doubleheaders.

7. Wood bats everywhere you go (each team should follow the Twins example and plant 100 trees for every bat the opposition breaks.

8. Every team should have a ticket that costs under $5. and they should offer atleast 5000 of them each game on game day only.

9. Institute a salary cap of 25million dollars a year.

10. Increase minor league salaries: Rookie=23-26k. A ball=26-29, AA=29-34, AAA=34-40k. And limit signing bonus’ so players are deciding on things that matter.

11. Make it mandatory that every ballpark has an organ player.

12. Only meat that can be grilled is allowed to be sold at ballparks.

13. Limit the number of pitching changes to 3 per game. If a pitcher leaves due to injury you can replace him but he must then go on the 10 day disabled list (thus miss 2 starts).

14. Expand the league to include teams overseas.

15. Get rid of regional TV rights. Let teams grow their fan base as they wish.

16. I agree, shorten the season. Play the WBC in the fall every 4th year.

17. Instant replay upon request from the manager. If he is wrong, he loses a pitching change.

And then there is this on-key appeal to reason in the question of performance-enhancing drugs. “Very few people have looked at this problem from the perspective of the player and easily criticize them after the fact for having taken PEDs,” he writes. “I would have done it if I thought it would have helped to get to the elite level. There were no rules (yes it was illegal but so was drinking under 21, marijuana, speeding, and running stop signs) against it and the culture was ripe. Why hasn’t anyone attempted to look at it from their perspective and help us understand why so many could be lured into this. What have we done that allows this to happen?”

Keep writing. Talking about baseball is fun.

I want to know how Yaz is doing. You can reach me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com.

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

I’ve been out of Belgium, traveling in the U.S. to attend my grandfather’s memorial service. It was a fitful celebration, and it was wonderful to catch up with uncles, aunts and cousins. The global family is something of a new invention, and, thanks to the Internet, we can be friends, and that’s nice.

Baseball, of course, remains part of the architecture of my brain wherever I go. I saw a couple games in Baltimore, something I hadn’t done in a half-dozen years. Camden Yards is still a magnificent ballpark, but somewhat empty these days. Luckily, the Orioles played the Royals, and well enough for victories in both games.

One pleasant part of maturity is recognizing that, as Belgian coaching maestro Steve Janssen, now a pitching coach in the Netherlands, once told me, Major League Baseball “is still the same game, just faster.”

It is the same game, and I see that more as I get older. Take the outside fastball. Go to any level. Nobody can really hit a decent fastball on the black. It’s just too difficult.

OK, let me amend. Nobody can hit an outside fastball thrown at their level. Yes, A-Rod can hit MY outside fastball. But he can’t hit a major league fastball on the black. Sometimes, he will. If he knows it’s coming, ok, that’s easier. And, you do need to come inside sometimes. But, as a rule, the outside fastball is a viciously hard pitch to hit, from Little League to the Belgian second division to the Majors.

Look at the greatest starting rotating in recent history, the Atlanta Braves of the 1990s. All Tom Glavine did, every time out, was flip that heater on the black.

In the 1995 World Series, Greg Maddux beat the Indians 3-2 in Game 1. In Game 5, Albert Belle came up in the first. He sat on an outside fastball from Maddux and hit a homerun to right field. Spectators, and Tim McCarver, were aghast. Belle was a premium hitter of his generation, and that was his exceptional feat of the series.

Yes, it is the same game, but from a few hundred feet, one can see that big leaguers are, well, not like you and me. And there are those who stand out as special amongst the special. Eric Hosmer, the Royals’s 21-year-old rookie phenom, strode across the dirt like a knight on a medieval jousting ground. It doesn’t take a professional scout to take one look at this guy and say “Major Leaguer.”

At my college, Mount Saint Mary’s, there was a extraordinarily talented basketball player named Melvin Whitaker who could have played at a big-time school but wound up at the Mount after slashing somebody with a knife during a playground fight.

I remember Melvin playing pick-up basketball in the gym. He was 6ft11 with long arms. He played a zippy point guard, skipping down the floor with lightning-quick feet. The day I saw him do that, I grasped what it meant to be a professional athlete. They are different from you and me.

But they’re still playing the same game.

Next week is mail week, so send anything you’d like to see published in the column to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

As discussed last week, yes, baseball is the best game. But let’s not let best be the enemy of perfect. So, here, friends, are 20 suggestions for improving baseball as I see and play it.

1. Scrap the infield-fly rule. Think how much excitement it would add on pop-ups with first and second and less than two outs. As soon as the ball soared skywards, the defensive team would have to make a decision. Catch or drop. The offensive team would also have to choose, run, halfway or hold. It would add several seriously exciting moments to every game. Imagine if it happened with the bases loaded and one out in the ninth inning of a tie game.
2. Shorten the Major League season by 30 games. Finish the World Series by October 5. I love baseball, but too much of a good thing is too much.
3. Aggregate regular and post-season stats. We already make all kinds of adjustments, for teams and parks, etc., so why not for whether a team makes the post-season or not? Good play in the post-season actually matters more, and should be rewarded.
4. Limit all amateur seasons — yes, I’m talking to you, Belgium — to three months. For example, in Belgium, play doubleheaders on Saturdays, and a game during the week.  Yes, a man needs a day off on weekends.
5. Institutionalize the infield-outfield routine I saw the Japanese national team do.  Two balls. Start with infield. Last plays are the impressive, beautiful lasers from outfielders.
6. Make Major League hitters stay in the batter’s box. Penalize them a strike if they take too much time. Like in tennis.
7. Ditto for pitchers. If you stall, it’s a ball.
8. Wood bats in college. That’s a no-brainer.
9. Wood bats in high school.
10. Wood bats in Little League.
11. Bring back 1980s bright, striped unis.
12. Bring back stirrups. I remember receiving those with my socks and pants when I was 11. It added a necessary, rich formality to the game.
13. Even out the Major League divisions to five teams apiece. Duh.
14. Get rid of the catcher’s interference rule. It should be a do-over, unless the offensive team chooses to have the play stand. I was at a game in Baltimore this week where the hitter waited way too long to swing and then tried to slap it the opposite way. He nailed the catcher’s glove — it was not the catcher who interfered.  Ten or so years ago, I was catching when a hitter on the now-defunct Wanze Cardinals — a true buffoon — intentionally nailed me on the wrist. He took first base. By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. You don’t need this rule. Catchers are punished enough by a hard swing to their hands.
15. Price controls on beer at Major League Stadiums.
16. Remove the mandatory helmet rule for base coaches. It looks stupid, and there have been over 200,000 MLB games played without mishap. Just because a freak accident happens, it doesn’ t mean we have to get all child-proof. And why don’t field umps wear helmets, too?
17. Ban elbow guards for hitters. It distorts the game’s delicate, competitive balance. OK, crowd the plate, but pay the price if you lean in too far.
18. No more God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch.
19. Maximum five throws to first base during an inning, to encourage more stolen bases. The sixth throw is a balk.
20. Instant replay. Actually, nah, no thanks.

Send your suggestions for improving baseball, or your thoughts on mine, to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

A baseball dream. Midnight at L’Atelier, a beer bar in Brussels’s student quarter. I’ve had 3 Orvals, a heavy, hoppy drink brewed by monks, with my friend Sean Gilbert, Kangaroos C’03, and now a wine-maker in Yakima, WA. Head’s getting whoozy. Conversations about work and women have run out.

Time to pull out all the stops, I say. Tell it like it is, and write it down to bear witness to the almighty truth. At a Mount Saint Mary’s College dinner party in 1999, a philosophy professor named John Drummond, an expert in 19th century German thought, after a few glasses of wine, said “oh, there is no doubt that, philosophically, baseball is the best game.” He then made a speech about why that is. I’ve not forgotten.

Well, here, my amigos, is my version of that argument of porque hardball is the gospel game, my best rendition of the archetypical ballplayer’s nocturne soliloquy:

There is no clock. There are outs. Every game is different. Some are 1-0. Some are 17-12. That abundance of possibility is truly unique to baseball. And that’s like life. That’s like lives.

Each out is the failure of a human being. If nobody gets out, you can live forever. We dream of living forever, but nobody ever does.

Fair territory extends beyond the outfield fences into deep, infinite space. Another intimation of immortality.

You can explore deep, infinite space with rockets. Those are major achievements.

There is technology in baseball. The ball itself is complex. It’s a tool. What is Roy Halladay but a skilled machine engineer? The bat is complex. A bat engineer can break it.

In baseball, there are industrial revolutions, when new technology is discovered. Here cometh the splitter.

Beyond the busy, rustling, bustling denizens of the infield, there is the countryside outfield, pastures of peace where things are simple, straightforward.

As I tell the kids I coach, the only truly easy play in baseball, the one I cannot forgive screwing up, is a flyball. Yes, things are simple in rustic, small towns.

A groundball is morning traffic, crossing the street and walking down a dark alley at midnight. You can get hit by cars. But respect the process, and you’ll mostly be OK.

On some days, there is lots of traffic in the city. On some days, like a quiet Sunday in August, the roads are empty.

Home to first is Main Street. You’ll always have people driving up and down that strip. Third to home is turning the corner onto a good friend’s street for dinner, or up the driveway to a big job interview.

The baseball field is chaos defined into civilization by its relationships.

Some are competitive. Pitcher v. Hitter. Catcher v. Baserunner.

Some are cooperative. Shortstop with Firstbaseman. Bunter with Runner. (There is stupidity. Witness the bunt-and-run.)

Violence is possible. But unlike other sports, it is optional. That’s like life.

Some justice is handled by citizens. Stolen bases. Beanballs.

Sometimes, the law must intervene. Uniformed officers can put you away.

Everybody gets an equal chance to contribute, but not everybody is equal. Roy Halladay throws more, better pitches. Pay him more.

Excellence in baseball is habit, of skill and character, sustained over time. Bad things happen to good players.

There are different kinds of baseball citizens. Short, fast secondbasemen. Big lefties. Short lefties. They do different things. And that’s ok.

Some players are unique. Mariano Rivera uses one pitch. There are only ever a handful of knuck chuckers in the Bigs at once. Ichiro.

Some players believe in the gods, some are atheists.

Whatever you believe in, the truth is the narrative, written down with precision. And it’s vastly more accurate than any other game. Double to right, runner thrown out at the plate.

The breaks between discrete, significant actions are the perfect lengths to tell good, short stories.

There is no such thing as a draw: You win or you lose.

But the next day, you play again, and you can always do better. Like the insights you get talking to old friends, there is always a chance at redemption.

Check, please.

Gimme your best baseball bar speech at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

So, yes, the Luc Roeland story last week was a hoax, my homage to George Plimpton’s classic 1985 April Fool’s story about Sidd Finch, the Yogic Mets pitcher who could, it was written, throw a baseball 168 mph.

Not as elaborate or skilfully done, but tricky enough to net a few emails from players wanting to work out with my nuclear scientist, scouts and fellow journalists on the other side of the Ocean, despite the obvious (to me) untruth that there’s a sport involving throwing dead fish across a river. (On another note, amazingly, the word I made up for that sport “vloetsen” doesn’t exist in any Germanic language. If you Google that word, you find only my story.)

Meanwhile, after all my melodramatic narration, and the jar of infield dirt I collected, construction on New Kangaroo Field has been delayed, meaning we played the last game there this Saturday. And it was better. We won 16-6 in seven innings, finally unleashing the sticks in a meaningful way.

Our victory came with a casualty. Reid Henkel, our imported New York gentleman baseball nutcase, blew out his knee picking up a ball in front of the mound. Reid is an easy-going young man, but he hearts the hardball hard, the way you should when you’re young and open to the world. He’s also a fine right-handed pitcher, an effective and efficient strike thrower.

The injury was dramatic. We called an ambulance. A siren sounded. Paramedics carted him off. We played on. The tests turned out as well as could be hoped for. He has a strained knee ligament and will spend a week in a cast.

The player who went with him to translate and drive him home is another interesting little baseball story happening in Brussels. Joseph Kaziz, a young physical education student, is writing a thesis on baseball for his degree. And he’s joined the Kangaroos. He decided to keep score of the game. I didn’t show him how.

So, intuitively, he made up his own scoresheet. And what he came up with was a grid showing the result of every pitch, from one to a hundred and whatever. So strike, strike, ball, ball, foul, hit, strike, ball.

In other words, he didn’t give more space and place to the outs and hits. Every pitch was equal. Like a communist interpretation of baseball score-keeping. And without any real description of the action. He just noted “hit”. And when a team scored, he noted that down, too. Why not? Baseball could be that way.

In the first draft of his thesis, which I’ve read, Joseph rightly leads with a description of the importance of the mental game in baseball. It is a sport with a lot of failure, he writes. The kid doesn’t know the half of it. In my last K Field at-bat, I got into one and flew out to a few feet in front of the centerfield fence.

We are looking for a name for the new Kangaroo Field. The Outback? Camden Yards? The Bush? Make your vote at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

The New York Yankees Friday gave 17-year-old left-handed pitcher Luc Roeland from Luxembourg a $2.6 million signing bonus, a record for so young a pitcher, and for a European signing.

The contract is a watershed moment for Wanton Mechanics, a revolutionary school of pitching theory based on new atomic research by Swiss physicist Van Marslias. « Again, the Yankees show they’re ahead of the curve by grabbing the purest human representation of this new school, » says baseball analyst Peter Gammons.

As the quality of pitching in the Major Leagues has shot upwards following the end of the steroid era, teams are bidding to find players who can exceed today’s eye-popping velocities. Aroldis Chapman of the Cincinnati Reds has been clocked at 105 mph.

Now, in a fantastic fusion of science and an exceptional human physical specimen, the Yankees are raising the bar by following the new pitching theories of Mr. Marslias, a staff engineer at the Large Handron Collider, the world’s pre-eminent particle accelerator complex near Geneva.

It was Mr. Marslias’s work colliding sub-atomic particles at the LHC, which has a circumference of 17 miles, that showed him that the best way to develop supersonic arm motion. « The quark experiments showed us there were ways of triggering microscopic atomic fusion in the throwing arm, » he said. « But you just needed to find the right body type, and somebody without too many pitches already in his arm. » His paper, « Wanton Mechanics », was published in 2009 in the Journal of Applied Sciences. He just needed a ballplayer.

Enter Mr. Roeland, the shy, unassuming 5ft6 son of a dog trainer from Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, pop. 7,500. His paternal grandfather, Wolfus, was a German circus juggler who fled his troupe in 1943 rather than return to Nazi Germany, where he would have almost surely been conscripted into the army. From Wolfus, he inherited seven-inch fingers, and a left arm that, right before release, can bend backwards at the elbow 79 degrees. With the success of pitchers like the Giants’s Tim Lincecum and Royals lefty Tim Collins, size is now less of an issue, say MLB scouts.

Ettelbruck had a baseball team, the Fishes, briefly after World War Two, but it was destroyed in 1954 to plant a vineyard. So Mr. Roeland grew up playing team handball and vloetsen, a quaint local sport that involves throwing dead fish across the Moselle river on the Luxembourg border. He holds the world mark for throwing a mackerel 415 feet on the fly.

Mr. Marslias, who became obsessed with baseball after a vacation to Baltimore in 2005, spotted Mr. Roeland at a 2008 team handball tournament in Strasbourg, France. « I heard this sound – woosh — and he had scored a goal from the other end of the court without anybody seeing the ball, » says Mr. Marslias. «I’m not a professional scout or anything, but I knew this kid belonged on a mound. »

He invited the young man to his laboratory, and, in a story that mirrors Mr. Lincecum’s Boeing engineering father tinkering with his mechanics, set about sculpting his delivery using atomic quark theory. The results were eye-popping. After a week, Roeland was hitting 94 on the gun. His top speed is now 97. « And the best part is that, following this theory, he’ll be able to throw 290-300 pitches a game, and pitch every third day, » says Mr. Marslias.

On March 30, he called the Yankees, who dispatched a scout to evaluate Mr. Roeland. « We knew right away, this was a good investment, and we need to be on the cutting edge of this new pitching theory, » says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. « It also shows that Europe, with its mix of science and culture, and its history as the birthplace of the empiricist paradigm, might just be the future of baseball. »

Mr. Roeland will now report to the Yankees’s single-A team in Tampa, FL. Given the porous state of New York’s starting rotation, he could land in the Big Apple before September, says a person familiar with the matter.

How do you think Roeland will do? I’m always curious at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

At Old World Pastime
Summer prose, and poetry
Like speed and finesse

What’s haiku? Here’s yes:
Why, five syllables, then comes
Seven, five. Great funs!

Theme should be seasons
And some bittersweet wisdom
No, we throw spitballs

And rhymes for jive calls
Like the five-tool big playa
‘time flashes sick knives

Summer is alive!
Always breakfast and ballgame
Thus, 25 years

I have other gears:
Food, love, work, Springsteen, Shakespeare
But hardball is thread

Ways to live instead
Of living way too serious
(Get out these days much?)

Euroball’s soft touch
We play for love, not money
Make baseball, not war

The game’s ever more
Richer for its players here,
Nettuno, Haarlem

Rotterdam, Brussels
Brno, Madrid, Regensburg
Paris, Milano

Bust, Soriano?
We dig fantasy baseball,
MLB.COM

See Yankee Stadium
When we check out le New York
Records remember

Spring to September
Long seasons lead us onwards
Diamonds consume us

Magic cool-aid bus
To sublime, ridiculous
Welcome to the hive

Baseball bees will strive
Solid rock physics, not books
For brawn and not brains

Baseball’s magic names:
Bonds, Niekro, DiMaggio,
Gwynn: Hall of Fame gold

But here’s to Sam Fuld
A big leaguer, and a nerd
Hero to our kinds

Like Euroball finds
See Kepler, Rick VandenHurk
Inspire our green springs

And history brings
A tale to each, offer talks of
Kriek/krak of balle/batte

We know where it at:
Mister-Baseball Old World ‘time
Haiku, first inning!

Send your (European) baseball haiku, and other thoughts, to oldworldpastime@gmail.com. Yes I know this isn’t exactly what haiku is meant to be, but it’s my column.

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

In 1995, a gaggle of baseball crazy college students lobbied the eastern Brussels municipality of Woluwe-St-Lambert for a diamond.
Their club, the Kangaroos, had been playing on a soccer rectangle. Right field was 220 feet deep. Anything to the right of a phone poll in right-center was a double. They wanted better.

The students got their wish, and a proper baseball field was built. It isn’t perfect, but it is cool, and distinctive. There’s a short porch in left-center, 275 feet from homeplate. Right-center is 365 feet deep. It drains amazingly well. On many weekends, all other ballgames in Belgium, except for ours, are rained out.

The homeplate area is surrounded by a grassy hill, protecting the field from the wind and affording picnicking spectators a luxury-box view. The grass is tall and lush. It always smells nice.

On and around this field, those students, and I was one of them, would grow up, find work and women and the wisdom of age — but they would keep playing and organizing baseball, together.

And as the field blossomed, warmed, turned to mud and froze with the seasons, the baseball got better. Some very cool things happened.

The ‘Roos won three division-two titles. They beat the best teams in Belgium’s first division. Among the 300+ games was a 30-0 defeat, a 52-0 victory, a three-homer game, a 17-strikeout game and a perfect game. A dozen walk-off wins. Some brawls. Former professionals and college stars from the U.S. and Australia, some very fine baseballers indeed, played at Kangaroo Field.

We started a youth program that’s allowed thousands to play baseball in leagues and camps. Generations of Brussels kids learned the game and made new friends. A cadet squad won a national title. Two teams that trained on the field won European championships and advanced to Little League World Series events in the U.S.

We won, lost, practiced, fought, tried hard and sometimes not hard enough. It was sometimes exhilarating and sometimes frustrating as hell. Sometimes we partied all night next to the three 20-foot shipping containers that housed equipment, groundskeeping gear and concessions. Once I climbed on top of a container and sang a rap song.

All that was Kangaroo Field.

Saturday was its last chapter. Woluwe-St-Lambert has elected to put in a multipurpose artificial turf field, able to carry soccer and hockey as well as baseball. It will be a canyonesque baseball yard, 500 feet to center with youth/softball fields in right and left. No grass, no hill. There will be a proper canteen.

Construction begins May and should last two months. A Dutch private firm is doing the digging, so it should finish on time. Until the new field is ready, we’ll play chez our rivals to the south, the Louvain-la-Neuve Phoenix.

So there will still be baseball in Brussels, but I don’t think it will be the same. At least not for me. Things happen for a reason.

We lost our last game at K Field, 8-2, to the Beveren Lions. There was one hero. Toshinori Ogikubo, a New Yorker of Mexican and Japanese descent who moved to Brussels last year, pitched valiantly into the 7th, and, two innings later, hit the last homerun at Kangaroo Field.

A lot of guys like Toshi, young Americans living abroad, have played for us. They are invariably surprised, confused and delighted to find hardball in Europe’s capital. And, as they get to know the Kangaroos, they get excited about it.

After Saturday’s game, we were having beers when Toshi, with a wide grin, handed me a white plastic bag full of infield dirt.

Yes, I’m keeping it in a jar.

Meanwhile, we’re holding a contest to name the new facility. Kangaroo Grounds? Stade du Baseball Bruxellois? Camden Yards? Make the call at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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Photo: © Leander Schaerlaeckens

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

On a spiffy Sunday, a quartet of dudes from Brussels hopped in the rod and whizzed down to Namur to watch its Angels play the Braves of a Brasschaat, a tony suburb of Antwerp whose team has won numerous Belgian national championships.

This year’s Angels, coached by my friend, baseball uberobessive Chris Dassy, feature a half-dozen former Kangaroos, who left for brighter pastures when our club fell into an ill-fortuned cycle of decline and frustration, sliding down to second division.

They are still our guys, though, and the Angels are admirably serious about their first-division baseball, so we made a date to see what was cooking. It was worth the trip.

The field in Namur sits atop a wind-swept plateau up the hill from 19th century villas and mansions along the lovely Meuse river. This elevated diamond surrounded by corn fields always seems to be too hot, too cold or too windy. At this game, it was mostly the later two. We gladly sipped minutes of warmth when the sun served them up.

The damndest people show up at ballgames. We met Doug, a groundskeeper for a youth baseball league in Indiana who was lonely on a month-long assignment in Luxembourg for an American auto parts company. He found the game online. He kept score on the back of his Google Maps printout. The Angels are his team, he said, at least while he’s here. He bought a hat.

And, in Belgium, the damndest things happen next to baseball fields. An encampment of Roma people is set up beyond the left-field fence. They’ve been there forever.

But what was happening beyond the right-field fence took the, ahem, cake. A local sex shop, and I am not making this up, had sponsored an Easter sex toys hunt. The store buried 150 sex toys in a grass field, brought out some beers and fired up the grill, and invited women to bring their shovels. We saw ladies in pink T-shirts walking toward their garden, shovels perched on shoulders like soldiers marching to war.

We, of course, paid attention only to the ballgame. And it was a fine one. Cedric De Smedt, a hulking righty who grew up next to our ballfield in Brussels, threw seven innings of one-hit no-run baseball. Both infields made sparkling plays. The Angels drew some walks and knocked some gappers to build a lead.

Brasschaat came back, bringing the tying run to the plate in the last inning. Vincent King, another Brussels boy, made a stylish catch, chasing down a pop-up in right field from his position at second base to help preserve the lead. The final score was for Namur, 7-4.

A good ballgame makes for a good day.

What’s the best game you’ve seen in person this year? I always like to hear baseball stories at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

William E. Miller died Saturday in Maryland, of what was definitely old age. My grandfather was 89, and tired. It was his time.

Coming from a place where men were soldiers and salesmen, Bill Miller learned engineering on a scholarship, served in World War Two, raised a family of a girl and four boys, and labored on radar and rockets. He worked on the NASA space program of the 1960s, one of mankind’s greatest achievements.

Like many in his generation, granddad was principled and stubborn. He marched for Civil Rights, once with Martin Luther King. He said what he thought, and he didn’t care what people said about him.

Before he was 25, he had married, fathered and become a soldier. This was always to be a serious life. His marriage to Marjorie lasted until Saturday, 68 years.

He was disciplined and stern, punctilious, precise and punctual, sometimes painfully so for those around him. Just chilling was not his thing. He never touched tobacco or alcohol. He said grace at meals. He told people if he thought they were wrong.

By the time his 16 grandkids came along, his duty was all devotion. He softened. In his last years, he could hardly talk about another family member without tears of pride and, I think, gratitude. Like he never thought he deserved such happiness.

We liked movies. He taped, and I am not making this up, thousands off TV, recording them on VHS tapes that took over his house like a weed. We liked dinosaurs; he took us to the Smithsonian. Somebody played the piano; he listened. Somebody danced; he taped. If you cared about something, he and grandmom gave you a book about it.

Granddad took life too seriously to play sports. As far as I know, he never ran, rode a bicycle or played ball. (An exercise bike in his house famously went untouched.)

But he had followed baseball when he was a boy. He favored the Saint Louis Cardinals, he said. He took his own sons to Cooperstown, and to see the Washington Senators play. Like churchgoers, he attended and didn’t always understand. But he knew it mattered.

And, luckily for me, he found out it was another good way to love a grandson.

In July 1988, my birthday present was a week at camp at the Little League complex in Williamsport, PA.

Later that year, on a trip to Brussels, he carried a handheld Sony black and white television. We didn’t have any kind of TV, so there was magic in his eight-inch footage of Kirk Gibson hitting his famous World Series homerun off Dennis Eckersley.

There were the week after week of two 90-minute cassettes wrapped tightly in a brown package addressed and airmailed to Brussels with his neat handwriting.

The content was always an Orioles ballgame taped off WBAL radio, led by announcer Jon Miller. Listening to those games over and over again as a kid probably shaped my character as much as school.

And on and on. There were trips to Camden Yards and my American Legion games, and many evenings camped out with me on his sofa, watching games on a flat-screen TV.

In his last decade, he even turned playful. Once, he pointed his finger below my neck. I was wearing an open-collar shirt. “Chest-hair, huh? You paint that on?” He chuckled at his own joke. On our way back from one of the suburban buffet diners he loved so much, he insisted on riding in the back of his station wagon while I drove, like a little kid, “just so I can see what this is like.”

I totaled that same station wagon one Sunday morning in Western Maryland by hitting a deer. The 80-year-old guy drove 90 minutes to get me. He wanted to make sure I got to the Orioles game we had tickets for.

I still remember that car ride, wondering what I had done to deserve such unselfish generosity. “Boy,” he said, “I’ve sure been lucky with my life.”

I was sure lucky with my granddad.

You can email me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

On Sunday, I hitched a ride from Brussels to Regensburg, in southern Germany, to check out the annual tournament of the national elite academies overseen by Major League Baseball.

(A reminder: A few years ago, MLB decided it would be smarter to develop the sport by training elite talent in academies, and gambling on a trickle-down effect as the skilled shared their acquired learnings, instead of trying to teach newbies at schools and scouts to play hardball.)

Four Belgian academy coaches brought their team, and I went along with Rik Ruts, who’s been coaching since the last time the Orioles won the World Series. (Another reminder: That was 1983.)

Over and across the Rhine valley, to Regensburg, where, nestled by the Danube and the Bavarian Forest, lies a jewel of a European ballpark, home of the Legionnaires, Germany’s best ballclub.

The diamond is perfect, it seats about 1,000, and there’s a cozy batting cage complex down the right field line. The field belongs to the local government, but overall, the story of the small stadium is pure German capitalist industry and effort. “We do almost everything with volunteers,” Martin Brunner, who oversees most baseball operations in Regensburg, told me. He pointed at a gentleman pouring beer at the concession stand. “That guy is a high-powered lawyer, but he’s also a volunteer.”

“In Belgium, this is a dream,” one of the Belgian parents told me, shaking his dead in mock despair.

I spent the previous week on a crazy frat-house ski vacation in the French Alps. High-octane carousing, singing, dancing, and sliding, very fast, down the silky slopes.

Sunday afternoon was like the anti-ski vacation. The air was warm. The breeze was soft and sweet. No frat songs. And, as the day slowly ticked away, Holland played Germany, and Belgium Sweden. It felt like Florida.

I hung out with the half-dozen or so scouts who make a living checking out European talent. It didn’t take long for the familiar rhythms of baseball chatter and inquisition to reinstate themselves.

It is a mysterious and wonderful feature of baseball that so many questions remain open, often unanswered and always subject to interpretation, tinkering and theorizing.

Like sinking into a warm bath, it was comforting to launch a stream of conversation.

“Would you bet a grand,” I asked, “that Stephen Strasburg will win 50 games in the Major Leagues?” (A baseball friend I posed the question to the day before had said no way.)

“Easily. Actually, he’s gonna be good,” a scout friend said, taking the bait. “You know the ulnar collateral ligament, which he tore, isn’t actually involved in throwing.”

The scout stood up to show what was wrong with Strasburg’s throwing motion. As his front foot hit the ground, the right hand was pointing down toward the ground. The upward jerk to prepare the launch of the ball toward home plate had frittered away the ligament over the years, the scout explained. “That injury was a long time coming, it didn’t start in Washington.”

Strasburg could have the same injury again, the scout concluded, but he’ll still be an ace pitcher.

Another scout sitting nearby perked up his ears. “I don’t believe in teaching mechanics,” he muttered.

Still another: “Every human being is different. No two people do things the same way.”

Meanwhile, on the field, skinny European teenagers played their considerably flawed version of the game. The scouts gunned their pitches – “only broken 80 once today” – and noted players’s foot speeds home to first. “They need to play more baseball in high-quality environments, and not have coaches try to compensate by oversculpting their mechanics,” I offered. A couple scouts nodded.

The games — a 3-3 tie and a 9-8 Swedish win over Belgium — ended. The sky was still blue. Players marched to their locker rooms. Scouts kept on talking.

In Bavaria, this was baseball. For real.

How would you place your grand bet on Stephen Strasburg? Please tell at oldwoldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

One thing that makes this column so rewarding is the feedback I get from readers. They write questions and comments, and share their own stories of baseball devotion. I don’t always have smart answers or replies, but it’s fun to try.

Why, a reader, and many others wonder, is a baseball team from Brussels called the Kangaroos?

It is, I will confess, high time to address that point.

Right, so let’s plant ourselves in 1987 Brussels. World War Two ended only 42 years ago. Reagan is president. Madonna is young. Spain and Portugal have just joined the EU. There is no internet.

From these cobblestones, America is distant, and alluring, visible only in film, song and the pages of the International Herald Tribune. A fruit plucked from this sexy tree appears sweet indeed.

And thus does a student from the University of Brussels return from a visit to Brown University in Rhode Island with tales of the crack of the bat. He spreads the word, and soon are Brussels students playing catch on their campus lawn.

This game, it turns out, is too much fun not to take more, shall we say, seriously, and a club is born.

Come the naming: Kangaroos. Why?

Here, as elsewhere, history has more than one tale to tell.

The club’s founder was named Karim, and he wanted a K on the hats.

One member owned an anatomically-picturesque photograph of a male Kangaroo, and all were swayed by his, um, size.

The Walabi amusement park south of Brussels, a staple of any Belgian childhood, has a Kangaroo figure as its mascot.

The first gloves ordered were made of Kangaroo leather. Those, dear reader, are the stories I have heard. I do not know which one is true, though I have a favorite guess.

Whatever the reason, the club took off and, in 1993, would welcome a nutty 16-year-old American kid growing up in Belgium. Kangaroos has always sounded perfectly logical to me.

Readers often want to share their own stories and ask questions about developing baseball in their region. There is, I think, only one true answer, and it is reflected in the story of the Kangaroos baptism: individual passion.

On Tuesday evening, I attended a short performance of the Trey McIntyre project, an elite touring US dance company that, oddly, had set up in Boise, Idaho, and was bringing dance to that rural, western place. “How did you get people in Idaho to love dance so much?” I asked. “Sounds kinda like teaching baseball to Belgians.”

The answer? “It comes down to each dancer communicating their passion when they’re out in the community. They become ambassadors for the company. And it makes people buy into them, and the project.”

Let’s dance!

What’s your favorite origin story about the Kangaroos? I’m at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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It was two years ago that the Dutch beat the Dominican Republic twice during the World Baseball Classic. The first time, I was so excited that I immediately emailed a story to mister-baseball. When I arrived at the office in the morning, my boss asked me to write something for my newspaper. I had to tell mister-baseball to kill the story. (Generally, I can’t write about the same event for both.) I was reminded of the game last week when Jason Holowaty of MLB Europe described it, during his talk at the CEB congress in Brussels, as the “best game I’ve ever seen live.” So I dug this out for mister-baseball readers. It was a great game, and it deserves to be remembered. It’s also fun to recall the raw, giddy excitement of the moment.

MIRACLE ON GRASS: A TRIBUTE TO EUROPEAN BASEBALL

Brussels– In 1980, the U.S. hockey team, amateurs, lifted every American heart by upending the mighty Russians in the Winter Olympics. That was Miracle on Ice.

Last night, after our dinner guests had departed, I settled in at our kitchen table and watched, in a trance, as the Netherlands, my neighbors to the North, beat the Dominican Republic 2-1 in 11 innings. Miracle on Grass.

I’ve been involved in European federation baseball for 16 years. I play and coach in a second or third tier league. Team Belgium, unlike the Netherlands or Italy, doesn’t belong in Puerto Rico or Tokyo. (Yes, some of that has to do with colonizing the Congo, instead of islands orbiting around Florida, and with not emigrating millions from Sicily in 1890. But whatever.)

But baseball and its lovers find each other, and I have just enough personal connections to the Dutch team to feel like I know the guys, and there they were, in San Juan, steel in their eyes and grit in their hearts, facing down 100 million dollars worth of prize arms and legs, and not giving an inch.

A couple years ago, I wrote a story on the Dutch team for my newspaper. I drove up to Rotterdam on a rainy Tuesday night to watch a practice. There was nobody else in the stadium. Diegomar Markwell, a lefty who pitched an inning last night, was throwing a bullpen down the right field line. The pops seemed to echo all over town.

I chatted with Sydney de Jong’s dad. His son, the catcher, loved baseball, he said, but knew it would never be his profession. I thought of that last night when Sydney crushed a leadoff double in the 11th off Carlos Marmol, a major leaguer with a 2.68 e.r.a. The Dominican pitcher looked like a man seeing his noose.

That night in Rotterdam, it turned out, was Diegomar’s birthday, so after practice he handed out cake and whiskey. I chatted with him, de Jong and Michael Duursma, the second baseman.

Duursma, I think, is typical of European national team players. He works a day job. He’s not going to the show. But last night, he was there in my kitchen, switching places every half-inning at second with Robinson Cano (Total major league earnings: $3.8 million).

I wondered where Robert Eenhoorn was last night. He built the Dutch national program almost single-handedly after a short major league career in the 1990s. (He was the Yankees shortstop until Jeter came along).

Behind Eenhoorn, Dutch baseball – and every successful European program from Sweden to Sicily — has an army of crazy, dedicated baseball guys like my friend Steve Janssen, once the Dutch national team’s pitching coach. (Now it’s Bert Blyleven.) Steve sets his clock on baseball 365 days a year. In the summers, Steve volunteers as a minor league coach in the U.S. He runs winter clinics and attends baseball conferences in the winter. Last night was a validation of the special love guys like Steve have for the game.

Dutch closer Leon Boyd stepped into European baseball via the Hoboken Pioneers in our league. He tore up our bats, and then found his niche under Eenhorn. And so on.

This proud bunch played rope-a-dope with Pedro Martinez, Miguel Tejada and David Ortiz all night. The mighty Dominicans pounded long balls into the wind.

The Dutch kept throwing strikes and catching the balls. Sure, they struggled with the sticks. Dominican starter Ubaldo Jimenez — 12 wins in the bigs last year – struck out 10. In FOUR innings. After him, Pedro. But the men in black and orange hung in there until the 11th, when Yurrendell de Caster knocked the game winner up the line.

After the game, Netherlands head coach, Rod Delmonico wept and talked about how his player never “felt sorry for themselves.”

The Netherlands, our heroes.

John Miller

Previous Columns

John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.

All around the world, baseball is ticking. U.S. high school and college seasons are under way. In Arizona and Florida, the best among us are fine-tuning their muscular art. And in Amsterdam and Albany, Brussels and Boston, and Cairo (Yes! I looked it up) and California, clubs and amateur leagues are revving their engines.

Committees hammer out schedules over spaghetti bolognaise. Hardened lovers of the game dig holes, trying to find first base. Players lift weights and hit soft toss, vowing this year to hit .300 in their men’s leagues.

Let’s face it. At the end of the day, our beloved — and I do love it — MLB is kinda like the Vatican: grand, haughty, talented, and everybody watches it on TV. They’re what most people think about when you say Baseball or Catholic. (I think this analogy mostly works, but it falls short when you get to fantasy baseball. There ‘s no fantasy Vatican. Hmm, how would that work?)

But every intellectually honest Catholic knows that Rome is, well, not really what’s it all about, as well as a bit corrupt, and that the church’s real value is the local, the kind priest counseling a family through tough times, the lovely music brightening Sundays, and the old nun serving at soup kitchens.

In the same way, our game survives not because Alex Rodriguez is paid to play it, but because kids love it, coaches run it, and umpires and scorers do their thing.

And so that brings me to this little patch of earth. It’s an odd time for the Brussels Kangaroos. The men who started the club in the late 1980s are mostly gone. Only Jimmy, an EU air traffic control manager who now serves as club president, is left. This is probably my last year on the club board. In mid-season, our pleasant grass and dirt diamond will be torn up to make way for a turf terrain able to field soccer and hockey games. Changes, changes, changes.

But we’re still here! On Sunday, the air was chilly and the sun was warm. Jimmy, I and five other grown-ups rolled out for our first outdoors practice of the year. We raked the field, dug up a hole to put first base in and dragged the balls and bats out of our shipping container locker rooms.

And yes, baseball is still great. Toshi, a Japanese-Mexican-American boxer-ballplayer, and a new Kangaroo, from New York, ran us through some creative conditioning drills. (More on that in a future column.) I organized some groundball and flyball drills. And then we took BP. Pure weekend warrior heaven.

I try to come up with a different baseball initiative every year. In 2008, I coached the men’s team and started this column. In 2009, I started my own youth program. Last year, I launched a Little League tournament. I’m still looking for a new idea for this year. For now, I’m content to roll out for Tuesday and Thursday practices, and Saturday games. The pastime is good that way.

How best to serve the game? I’m all ears if you got suggestions at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, journalist and player/coach with the Brussels Kangaroos is back for a fourth year to author Old World Pastime at Mister-Baseball.com

The Confederation of European Baseball threw its annual get-together this year at a hotel in downtown Brussels. I went along to see what the uber-Administrators were up. There were talks on developing and promoting the pastime. Kinda theoretical stuff.

My highlight was a cool lecture by Dutch coaches Charles van der Meijs and Gijs Selderijk about BeeBall, a version of the game with only three bases. Kids play four on four. It’s useful because it allows smaller clubs with only seven or eight kids in a young age category to run games.

Over coffee, Pat Doyle, who runs Major League Baseball’s envoy program for Europe, Middle East and Africa, showed off pictures of a recent two-week trip to Uganda. A small village. A tiny, rural place crushed by poverty. Kids played barefoot. Pat spent two weeks there. “Kids were amazing, once you show them how to do something, they wanted to do it, and do it right,” he said, describing a particular groundball practice.

It is with these stories of people innovating and finding different ways of doing things that I start this season of Old World Pastime, because, well, that’s what we try to do with this column.

I started it in 2008, when I coached a feuding and failing Kangaroos men’s team in the first division. That was an awful, but important educational, experience. The following year was also poisonous, although I played my slap-hitting catcher as well as I could, and didn’t coach. Last year, we finally put it together and had a solid, fun 16-7 season in the second division. And the column, like a good friend, ran 108 stitches through the times good and bad.

But ultimately, the unbelievably impressive Mister-Baseball website, and this humble piece of it, tell the story of the crazy, passionate community of 115,000 playing the pastime here in Europe. And it is a community. We root together for the powerhouse Dutch and Italian national teams on the world stage, cheer on Max Kepler in the minor leagues, drink beer together at the World Port Tournament in Rotterdam, and, always, pray for sun.

That said, the column needs to stay sharp and innovative, which is why I will continue to want your ideas. As always, the format will be a mix of stories, essays, lists, book reviews, arguments, poems, conversations with the Baseball Gods, rhapsodies about my beloved Baltimore baseball club, and, sometimes, pictures and videos. I’ll tell you about how things are going in our little baseball laboratory called Belgium, report on baseball across the continent, and chronicle how European pro players like Kepler are doing across the pond. There’ll be some jokes and reflections on life, love and happiness.

In the end, though, the material writes itself. All I do is try to be honest and true about it all. And try as I might, I can’t not care about baseball. This is my 25th season. (I am 33.) The game pops up as naturally in my life as the first buds and shoots in a rainy spring forest. Other people burn out and take a year off. I’ve never done that. To paraphrase that line about sleep, there’s plenty of time to not play baseball when you die.

And, shit, has anybody seen how good the Orioles will be this year!?

I take tips, stories, questions, advice, and bets on the O’s at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

Things Major Leaguers can do after the end of their grueling 162-game season: golf, hunt, Mexico.

So what were Adam Jones, Jeremy Guthrie, Rick VandenHurk and John Baker doing running drills for 200 Belgian kids at the “Extra-Time” sports complex on Louisalei in southern Antwerp on an apocalyptically rainy Saturday in November?

I’ll say it again: Belgium in November?

Credit VandenHurk, the Orioles righty with a baseball fire burning in his belly. Yes, he’s in the bigs now, but it took side-winding righty seven years of bone-crunching work to get there after he went to Florida as a 16-year-old prodigy in 2001.

His climb to the top is the story of all Major Leaguers. It’s why we admire these fellow citizens of ours, even if they got head starts with their unfair premiums of athletic talent. The strength of character and sheer will for excellence you develop on your way to Yankee Stadium are why we encourage children to idolize ballplayers.

Except, if you live by the North Sea, you and your kids are not seeing a lot of big leaguers.

And thus it came to VandenHurk to dream up this crazy scheme.

How did it start?

Listen to Jones, the talkative, gregarious Orioles centerfielder: “I knew about the Dutch from the World Baseball Classic, so when Rick came over, we were shagging balls in the outfield before a game, and I was like, man, you do have baseball over there, huh?”

VandenHurk: “All over the league, guys were asking me about European baseball. And guys want to see Europe, so I thought let’s figure out a way for them to teach baseball and also see Europe.” A lot of players expressed interest in coming, including Barry Zito, Chase Utley and Nick Swisher.

Last summer, Rick called his dad, Wim, a successful businessman, who set up stops in Haarlem, Rotterdam and Eindhoven, the VandenHurk’s home town. They recruited sponsors, got MLB on board and battled all elements, including the cost-inflating insistence of the MLB players’s union on five-star everything for their members.

The list of players eventually came down to six: the four I saw Saturday, plus Greg Halman and Brady Anderson, who went as far as the Netherlands, but didn’t make it to Antwerp.

“Boy, this was a lot of work,” Wim said on Saturday. “But look, all those kids: lots of sleepless nights over there.” He pointed across the gym, where Guthrie, the Orioles righthander, was tutoring wide-eyed preteen pitchers.

“Pay attention to how you throw,” the Orioles righty was saying. “Because pitching and throwing are basically the same.” When you’re gone so far, it’s amazing how you realize that the simple answers were there all along.

I talked to Guthrie and the three others. They all said they were motivated by an opportunity to give back to the game. “I love Europe and would like to help more,” said Guthrie, who confessed a soft spot for Spain.

Their presence seemed to inspire everybody there. “All this baseball, here in Belgium,” said U.S. ambassador to Belgium Howard Guttman, who came equipped with a tattered Rod Carew left-handed glove. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, he hustled from ballplayer to ballplayer, talking up a storm. “Amazing,” he said.

The big leaguers fielded questions. What was your best season? How many players on a team? Who’s your favorite player?

What do you when you get hit by the pitch? “Don’t rub it,” said VandenHurk, a twinkle in his eye. He then repeated it in Dutch. “Niet wrijven.”

A Belgian coach helping out — one of couple dozen local baseball types who worked hard for weeks to make the day happen — watched in awe. “He’s so down-to-earth,” he said. “Not at all like a typical Dutchman.”

The 25-year-old VandenHurk is an impressive young man and cross-cultural ambassador. One group had couple kids who spoke only English. VandenHurk started repeating himself in both languages to make sure every member of his audience could understand every word.

How many money do you make? “400,000 dollars,” said VandenHurk. “But those guys make several million.” He pointed at Guthrie and Jones.

Guthrie had the best answers to that question. “Enough to buy a lot of Playstations.” And later, to a Belgian reporter: “That’s what Google is for.”

Guy Van Drom, the press liaison for the Belgian event, recalled a recent visit by another pro American athlete. “We had Dennis Rodman,” he said. “He was two hours late, played for three minutes, wouldn’t even have his picture taken with any kids.”

These ballplayers were the opposite of that churlish hoopster. They patiently held their grins and autograph postures the whole day. “It’s refreshing,” said Baker, the Marlins’s catcher. “In the U.S., everybody knows everything, everybody’s a coach. Here, the questions are sincere, they really want to learn.”

At the end of the day, Jones picked out seven-year-old Kobe Roef, who had made several nice catches during outfield drills. He gave her his Orioles hat. On it, he wrote: “You are my MVP.” She beamed with pride.

The Orioles had donated hats and T-shirts. Kids and parents headed out into the late afternoon darkness, an army of orange ducking under the rain, brains abuzz with something they could never have experienced on facebook.

Reporters don’t clap — we are not meant to be impressed by kings and rock stars. But watching VandenHurk and his merry men in their crisp whites enchant the masses, I put my hands together.

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

The leaves outside are (almost Oriole) orange, and the sky is a mighty grey. When I go to work, it is dark. And the baseball season — the northern hemisphere one that sustains my psyche — is over and done.

I am 33, married, with a steady eddy job as a journalist. And I still can’t imagine living without baseball.

It’s too soon after the end of my Belgian division two season (I caught for the Brussels Kangaroos and hit .309) to miss playing. Need a few more weeks for that. But it is the right time to watch, and see our journey conclude.

This October, just like the all the ones since 1989, I sacrificed sleep and sanity to watch Major League Baseball’s postseason games.

I’m no longer 15, which I was in 1992 when the Blue Jays beat the Braves in six games. The excitement ripped me out of my bed and down the stairs to share the news. It was 4 a.m. in Brussels. Nobody else was awake. Nor am I 20, the year I decided to skip a meeting during a community service trip in Appalachia so I could listen to the Indians beat the Orioles in the ALCS. When I returned, the pastor, in his spoken prayer, included an invocation to “turn our minds away from inconsequential things like baseball.” In 2004, my home computer was broken, so my dad, brother and I went to my office to watch the last out of the Red Sox championship.

And then there was last night. We just moved, and my new place does not yet have internet installed. So I tracked each pitch and play of the final two innings on my Blackberry. When Brian Wilson K’d out the victory, I played both the scene and the commentary in my mind.

The post-season is like the girlfriends or jobs of youth — a key mental anchor, a system for setting down signposts year after year. Spin the wheel. 1996? A friend’s apartment in college, drinking cheap beer and watching Jim Leyritz go deeeeep off Mark Wohlers. 1997? Renteria singles; I’m watching in a bar in Tennessee. 2001? A packed, crowded bar by the harbor in Baltimore for those magic dingers off Yankee bats. And so on.

The human brain is a weird device, full of love, hate, fear, contradictions and beauty. We need these pillars. You and I share a big one. Which is why I’ve enjoyed writing this column for the third year in a row. Thank you for reading and sometimes writing, and to Philipp Wuerfel for his peerless oversight of mister-baseball.com. It is a wonderful website.

And I still love to hear from you even when the season is over, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

As we get ready to watch the left-coast Giants play the Republican Rangers in the World Delirious, let’s take a minute to acknowledge the thousands of American ballplayers who’ve made Europe home for a summer. They are among the primary readers of this website and column, and they give Old World baseball a big lift every summer.

The trend really took off a decade ago with the explosion of this here internet, making it much easier to match player and European team. Of course, that didn’t stop the odd ex-con, frat house moron or one-legged outfielder from selling his services to the unsuspecting euro club. But in general, the phenomenon has been tremendously positive.

One member of the new generation was Mark Cardillo. He graduated from a four-year career at Villanova in 2005. He didn’t get drafted so he rode the wave and moved to Italy, where he played short and second for four years.

His epiphany, however, came a bit later in Naples (Florida) when he attended a lecture by Yogi Berra and Baseball Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey. The latter noted in his remarks, writes Cardillo in an email, that “5% of all little leaguers make it to high school baseball. 5% of all high school players make it to college. 5% of all college players make it to the minors. 5% of all minor leaguers make it to the Major Leagues.”

That made him realize, he says, that there were thousands of players who needed help finding a place to play after their amateur careers ended. “I want to show college players that don’t get drafted in the MLB draft or minor league players that will be cut from the minor league teams that there are many opportunities to play baseball at a professional level in the international leagues,” he says. “Someone just needs to inform these players.”

Informing is the mission of Cardillo’s new website www.ProBaseballInternational.com. It connects players and coaches. There are a few websites that do this, including www.mister-baseball.com, but Cardillo promises a more systematic, professional approach.

The motivation, he says, is allowing other players to match his experience. “I can’t think of a better way than to spend a summer abroad as a college student or young professional and gain valuable hands on experience working for an international baseball team for college credit or a stipend,” he says.

The site remains free. ”If I put my business hat on, yes there are ways to make a profit on this site,” says Cardillo. “However, I know the importance of this site and the potential it has. The last thing I want to do is hamper its potential due to greed. That’s why I’m trying to keep it free to join as long as possible. This site is my project, my baby. I want to watch it grow up to be something important.”

He’s gotten attention and help from MLB and the International Baseball Federation IBAF. Not to mention Old World Pastime.

Who will win the World Series? Send your picks to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

This is my third year of writing this column. I treasure my hour a week (more, sometimes) with you, reflecting on baseball my mistress and her place in my life. Sometimes, you write to me. Here are some highlights from reader emails. Thanks!

“I envy the traditionalist, of which I used to consider myself one,” writes a European scout for a Major League team. “Had you asked me about replay 2 years ago you would have gotten a definite NO!  Now I’m just not convinced it isn’t a decent idea if implemented properly.”

He lists two reasons replay would work:

“1. The game is played by players and the result is determined by their actions.  We know they will make errors, strikeout, and walk people.  That’s why we play, to see who does this less and who can capitalize on those mistakes.  The problem with bad calls is that they change everything that happens after they occur, from the measureable statistical probabilities to the emotional state and confidence of a team.  Getting calls wrong changes things.”

“2.  We can’t erase the technology we have.  When an umpire makes a bad call we can see it and will continue to see it over and over again.”

There are two ways, he says, to bring in replay:

“1.Define which plays are reviewable and which are not.  I would suggest you can’t argue called balls and strikes or any play which would have a direct impact on future actions in the same play.  This latter point would include something like a trapped ball with a runner on base which is ruled a catch.  The runner has to take action based on the call that was made, we couldn’t possibly assume what the runner would have been able to do after that action.”

“2. Take five umpires and five MLB scorekeepers at random and have them watch replays of a large enough sample from the last three to five years to determine calls that could be deemed wrong and summarize the results to determine how many runs, wins, and losses could reasonably determined to have been altered due to bad calls.”

“3. If it is shown that these calls do have a significant impact then implement a simple review process similar to that of the NFL in which a manager is allowed one challenge per game. If his challenge is validated then he keeps it again for future use. If the manager is wrong, he loses his challenge for the remainder of the game.  Just as on an appeal play the manager must appeal for a replay before the next pitch is thrown. I would also ban televisions from the dugouts and bullpens and insist that managers are basing their decision to challenge a play based on what they and their coaching staff saw.  This I believe would introduce replay not as a weapon but as a strategic decision.”

“Founding a major league baseball of European version is my biggest dream,” writes a Japanese student living in England. “I’ve read your latest article about the major league tour in the Belgium and the Netherlands led by Mr. Rick VandenHurk. And I must say, this is definitely by far the best news for my entire life with baseball!”

The VandenHurk tour, he continues, “may become to cause a huge chemical reaction to develop the ballgame in Europe.”

“I’m really praying from my heart for this program to bring a great success. Besides, I’m really looking forward to reading your new articles. Please be careful for your health, and do your best for your work both in States and Belgium.”

“For some reason we error players with only physical errors,” writes an Australian pitching in Switzerland. “But mental errors are just as bad, especially as an umpire. This is when an umpire sees something and makes the wrong call, not because he saw it wrong, but because he didn’t know the rules or what was wrong and what was right. And on being informed of the correct rules, refuses to change the call.”

In a recent key game, he says, two interference calls went against the team:

“1. Ground ball to second baseman, he goes to tag runner going to second, runner stops, second baseman goes forward to tag runner, once runner is tagged he takes off, knocking the second baseman over and preventing him from throwing to first for the double play. No interference called.”

“2. Routine double play breakup slide on second, runner called out on interference I can’t even describe it any more than routine!”

“What is the acceptable umpire average?” he asks. “What average do we expect in a game before an umpire is no better than a sub 200 batter or a pitcher with a +6.00 ERA? Or a fielder who makes 1 error a game? How many calls does an umpire have to make on average in a game? How many should he get right? If he gets five pitches wrong, ok. if he makes one out call wrong ok? How do we judge the umpires? Why not work with numbers/stats/averages, that’s how we judge everything else in baseball. Ha, I’ve had my rant, catchya mate.”

“I am looking to further my playing career and understand since not being drafted my best alternative is free agency and overseas,” writes a young, hopeful amateur free agent. “I realize open tryouts might have been an option; however my college season hadn’t ended when many were being held, so I was not available to tryout at that time. I read your blog and completely understand your position when selecting players you have never met, but I am a very committed athlete who still wants to compete. I am a left-handed pitcher 6’00” – 180 lbs., birth date: 3-10-1988, my fast ball lives at about 86-88 mph; it has topped out at 90 and has good movement. I also have a very good curveball and decent change-up. I also have the ability to play the Outfield. I have been injury free my entire college career.”

“Glad to see you are blogging again this year,” writes a fan. “Looking forward to your weekly posts.”

“The Yankees are very good at Russian roulette,” writes a logistics manager and Twins fan based in Thailand. “They are also very good, period. Over here in Bangkok, they are on ESPN every morning. I have been watching them more than the Twins. They play every game like it’s the World Series and that’s why they are good at playing these series play-offs – they have been practicing all year.  They also play a tougher schedule than anyone except the poor saps in their division, who have to play them. Toronto is maybe a better team than 2/3rds of the American league, but they finish 4^th in their division? Tough bunch. How NY does it I don’t know. Posada can’t throw, doesn’t run, and is 39. Jeter covers less ground than any Major league SS. As a group, they play like a team from an over 35 league playing in an American Legion tournament. Athletically, they don’t match up, but they know “stuff” that the kids with more talent don’t know and they use it. They turn the game into something the other team doesn’t feel comfortable with.”

“Bill James wrote a couple of decades back about the remarkable persistence of Brooklyn Dodgers fans: ”There’s never been a book titled, ‘The Man Who Brought the Braves Back to Beantown.’” writes a baseball nerd colleague. “ I suspect the number of people who even know the Orioles were once the St. Louis Browns is tinier than the number that knows of the Boston Braves (at least the team name still lives). And it’s not getting any bigger. That is one thoroughly shaken past, though this year the Os are playing like a Browns tribute team.”

And you can still write to me, at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

It is that time of the year, when Brussels gets an Indian summer, the Yankees march to the World Series and baseball people complain about umpires blowing calls in the playoffs.

There is no question that calls, like groundballs, are sometimes mishandled. Here IS the question: Should we do something about it?

It is perhaps the most popular query in the world of sports in 2010. The favorite answer: instant replay. Many are the denizens of England who believe technology might have bounced their soccer squad miraculously past Germany in this year’s World Cup.

As far as our pastime goes, there are three schools of thought:

1. Robot umpires. This is less crazy than it sounds. Balls and strikes can already be determined by laser technology. Some spring training games have already been umpired this way. It’s a matter of time before sensors inside the ball and on the uniform can determine a tag play. Ever played lazer tag?

2. Instant replay. As in the NFL, managers should have the right to “challenge” calls they believe have been missed. Video playback would then determine the truth.

3. Conservative. In no way should technology be used on the baseball field.

I confess to being a conservative. I think blown calls matter much less than baseball people think they matter. Two examples:

Last week, Michael Young of Texas swings at strike three. He should’ve been sat down. The ump ruled he checked his swing. Ball three. Next pitch: fastball down the middle. Young hits a three-run homer.

All the Rays could talk about after the game was the checked swing. But I think they lost because Chad Qualls first threw two pitches outside the zone and then grooved the 3-2 pitch. The Rays also let two guys reach base before Young, allowed three other runs, and batted like babies. I’ve seen this phenomenon in European baseball. Lose 13-12 in the 9th on a throwing error by the second baseman, and everybody gets pissed at him. But that’s not why you lost. You lost because you gave up 13 runs.

Along these same lines, the most famous blown call in Orioles history is Jeffrey Maier taking away the homerun ball from Tony Tarasco in the 1996 ALCS.

OK, it was fan interference, but for that ball to be there in the first place, Armando Benitez made a bad pitch and Derek Jeter still hit it 320 feet to rightfield. The Orioles lost just as much because Armando couldn’t keep the ball down and Derek Jeter’s a great hitter as because the kid interfered. And they also lost because the score was 4-3 going into the 9th and not 5-2 or 3-1. And then they lost three other games in the series.

In baseball, if two teams play about the same in a single game or season, the outcome is determined by luck, be it the odd bad call or the wind or the bloop hit, so stop complaining about the umpire – it belongs to the category of the uncontrollable — and worry about playing the game clearly better than the other team, which is the only guarantee of success.

A friend and reader, a Europe scout for a Major League team, writes in to suggest a fourth school of thought: Keep stats for umpires, and “adjusted” stats for players, in other words, their stats had no calls been missed. “Hire a scorekeeper whose job it is to go through video after a game and review all plays that were blown,” he writes me. “I wouldn’t want the stats to really be a means of looking at a specific umpire on a daily basis, but more to see what impact their bad calls actually have. We know umpires will blow calls, just as players will make errors and strikeout. The objective of the exercise is to see if their mistakes are costing anyone something.”

We could publish umpire baseball cards. Collect your favorites. That’s an idea that should be replayed.

Send your rants on umpires to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

Readers of this space know that I am a fan of an East Coast baseball club that, between 1960 and 1980, won more games than any professional sports team in the entire universe. The Baltimore Orioles own one-fifth of the entire 20th century. The other 29 major league baseball teams can divide the rest.

My habit of living in a happier past was snapped this past summer when, in early August, the O’s hired William Nathaniel Showalter as manager. Uncle Buck led them to a 34-23 record. That translates to 97 wins over a 162-game season. That’s how many games the Phillies, the best team in baseball, won. And the O’s play in the mighty AL East.

I’m not going to give Buck Showalter all the credit, though. On July 31, the O’s traded for 25-year-old Rick VandenHurk, one of only two native-born Europeans in the bigs. He pitched in only seven games, with a 4.96 e.r.a., but he was part of the change in clubhouse atmosphere that helped turn around the Orioles’s season. By all accounts, the Dutchman is a fine young man, a hard-working baseball-loving prince. With a nasty slider.

I’m a fan of big Rick for another reason. He cares about baseball in Europe. This fall, he is, audaciously, taking a half-dozen major leaguers on a tour of Belgium and the Netherlands. (Details on http://www.europeanbigleaguetour.com/) Amsterdam, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Eindhoven; are you ready for Adam Jones, Barry Zito and Chase Utley? Led by Mr. VandenHurk, the big leaguers will run clinics and promote the game.

I caught up with the tall Dutch pitcher a couple weeks ago. The Orioles team plane had just landed in Boston. He sounded excited. “All around the league, guys keeping asking me how there’s baseball in Europe,” he said. “There was no much interest, I decided to organize something.”

He saw an opportunity. “Guys can see Europe, which they wanted to do, and also coach a bit, which is something they really known how to do.”

The Orioles, he said, “are believing Buck Showalter when he says you have to attack every series fresh and play hard.”

Then we hung up, and one of us went to Fenway Park.

What do you think about the VandenHurk big league tour? Email oldworldpastime@gmail.com with your thoughts.

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This weekend, I spent a rainy/sunny Saturday at the field offering half-hour initiations to passers-by as part of a nationwide sports festival. A handful of Kangaroo teammates joined me to help for an hour or two at different parts of the day.

I always start off by introducing the field and her four bases. Belgian playground baseball often features between five to ten bases. It’s a non-trivial point to correct. Then I make the kids run around those four bases “in a circle, not a square.”

We taught the newcomers to play catch, “which is to baseball what swimming is to water-polo and what skating is to ice hockey”, as I explain it. “Is it like a serve?” asked a 17-year-old boy who professed himself a tennis ace. I guess so, I said. His was the best arm of the day.

There are two kinds of balls to defend, I told those assembled: “groundballs and… undergroundballs.” Yes, some people laughed.

We finished up each session by letting the kids hit off a tee, one at a time. It worked fine until a plump 10-year-old connected firmly and lined a ball off a classmate’s jaw. A TV cameraman had just showed up, our luck. There was blood everywhere. “Don’t worry, if something was broken, it’d be a different kind of bleeding,” said Toshi, a new member of the Kangaroos who had come to help out. Toshi is a boxer. The kid survived. I gave him a ball.

The crowd was made up of a wide socio-demographic. There were scout troupes, families and city youth clubs. A Venezuelan man came with his seven-year-old son. There was a mom who stood right next to her darling as he took groundballs.

And you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to teach baseball to 31 hyper-active wild-eyed kids from the worst part of Brussels. They have a hard time not picking up bats lying around.

My favorite group was a dozen or so soccer players from a small-town club. We played soft-toss baseball on a youth/softball field. They were above-average athletes and picked up the game fast. It wasn’t long before, without prompting, the outfielders were throwing the ball to the shortstop on a double in the gap.

One of the soccer players had an interesting assumption regarding the rules. He kept on calling for the ball to be thrown precisely to second base after a single. “We have to seal the base, right?” he said. It was his belief that by stepping on second base with the ball, you stopped the batter from advancing after you threw the ball back into the pitcher, or, in our case, the soft-tosser.

Very few kids were from Brussels, and I don’t expect the 31 inner-city kids to make their way out to our field any time soon, but baseball was played on Saturday. We please the gods as we can.

Besides sealing the base, what other rule changes could baseball us? Tell me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

Woe betides the man who bets against an American male swatting a baseball 300 feet with a 21st century aluminum bat. And so I lost my wager with the McLennan brothers.

It was far from a sure thing and, for a while, I felt confident of triumph. For some 50 BP pitches, the pair punched a palette of line drives into left field. Shots that bounced between shortstop and, once, just short of the top of the left-field wall. I could smell a win.

The terms specified that they didn’t have to swing. As Jon and Jeff figured out that anything not wheelhouse could be ignored, their swings caught more meat and the balls became straighter and longer.

My mistake, it turns out, was giving the Macs 30 swings each. Were it 20 cuts, it was I who would have been 20 Euros richer. On the 25th pitch of his sequence, Jon dropped one beyond the left-field netting. The crowd – the Mac wives – whooped as he embarked on a square lap. I let Jeff finish his attempts and he, too, promptly pinged one over.

I handed over my 20 smackers and threw BP to the Roos while pondering the day’s lessons. I had plenty of time to do that when our day’s opponents, the Sunville Tigers from eastern Belgium, declined to show up. We scrimmaged a few innings, then packed it up. The season is over.

What’s wonderful about baseball is that its stage is magical. The athletic feat performed on Saturday by my favorite twins is, in itself, comparable to running a half-marathon or making a half-court shot in basketball. That is, a lot of, but definitely not all of, reasonably in-shape people can do it.

But give men a barroom bet, a sunny day and a ballfield, and it felt like we were performing prime-time. The baseball field is dramatic décor, and homers, whatever their power and arc, have a glorious and transcendent quality. You have conquered your little world and get the diamond to yourself for a few seconds. I have puny power, I’ve only hit a dozen over the fence in my life, but I remember almost all of them.

Losing a bet does give you that dentist chair feeling, but it was big-time fun for the winners, so good for them. Jon’s toddler Marcus was there. Maybe this becomes a family story that trickles down to Marcus picking baseball over soccer when the time comes. Maybe the Macs fill out a softball team down the road and that allows more people to play. Fun happens on the field, and the game goes on.

The club president, Jimmy, and I also discussed using pre-game homerun derbies to raise money for the club. “That was worth 20 bucks even if I didn’t hit a single homerun,” said Jon, grinning. “I never hit one when I was playing.”
Baseball is never about a single player, hit, game or contest. It is hard. Frustration follows glory. But, if you let it, baseball delights. Even if you lose the bet. Because, well, it’s not about you.

Any good baseball wager stories to tell? I forgot to remind folks last week of my email, but I’m still here at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

You can’t argue with a good challenge. From the kid who struck out Babe Ruth in The Natural to the catcher who staked a claim that he could catch a ball off the top of the Washington Monument, baseball has always been a great game for wagers.

Introducing the McLennan twin brothers, two all-American Californians who have lived in or near Brussels for years. They are your classic late-30s good-guy, golf-playing, football-watching expats.

Jon put in a few seasons for the Kangaroos. Jeff not. But both have talked their way through all the bars and all the beers of Belgium, advancing the following claim, that Belgian baseball is an entertaining, yet easily conquerable mite, and that, if they so wanted, they could slap it down and be called daddy. Jeff, in particular, likes to brag about his glory days raking it in a men’s league in Ohio. (Or maybe it’s West Virginia.)

I have expressed skepticism at this claim in at least three languages, roared with laughter and dared them to put money where mouth lie. For years, I listened and listened and listened, but could never get the big Macs to come out to the field for a demonstration. It took an impromptu birthday party last Monday night for an agreement to be sealed.

The Kangaroos, as my loyal readers know, are poorly endowed in left-field real estate. Knocking a baseball over the fence doesn’t always strike one as impossible.

Especially Team McLennan after a few Belgian beers and Jagermeisters. “I can easily hit a homerun at your field, what is it, like 250 out there?” said Jeff. “Me, too,” said Jon.

Bring it on, I said. The fence is 25 feet high and it’s about 270 feet to one narrow section of the field. Everywhere else is farther, up to 360 in the right-center field power alley. And hitting a baseball is, well, the hardest thing in sports.

And so we agreed that this Saturday, Sept. 18, before our final game of the year, Jon and Jeff will each get 30 batting practice swings. I will pitch. As in the All-Star homerun derby, they won’t have to swing at every pitch.

“You can even use an aluminum bat,” I said.

“That’s too easy, I’ll give you the chance to double or nothing with another 30 swings with a wooden bat,” said John.

“You can swing a metal bat,” I said.

One homerun in their 60 swings and I owe the brothers 20 euros. Zero and they owe me.

Nothing more fun than a baseball challenge.

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

On Sunday, after our 12-to-15-year-old “cadet” game, I threw an hour of batting practice. It was fun and carefree but the kids weren’t focused. Let’s play a game, I said: You get 10 swings and we’ll count how many you hit hard. The kids were transformed. They squinted and swung harder. Outside the cage, others stopped to watch.

This phenomenon, which I touched upon last week, is the subject of Tom O’Connell’s excellent new book “Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games.” Conventional coaching, O’Connell writes, “puts too much stress on direct instruction. The coach tells the players what to do and how to do it.” It’s an approach that is heavy on adults “teaching” but sometimes light on kids “learning.”

Drills end up happening “outside the context of the game.” The result is hitters who sting in BP but stink in competition, fielders who “can field every ground ball flawlessly in practice but [bobble] easy grounders in a game or let them go through his legs.”

Wisely, O’Connell points out that coaches often err in tagging these players as “choking.” The truth is that they’re simply uncomfortable with competition, with having to perform with something on the line, and they’re afraid of failure. Making kids comfortable with competing, giving them that feeling that they must do their best and accept the result, is the coach’s job.

Here, O’Connell has an answer, and it is the subject of his book. His games are divided into eight sections: throwing, infield, outfield, pitching, catching, hitting, situational and team. And there’s an extra chapter on practice planning.

An experienced coach will recognize the components of almost all these games. For example, we know to drill catchers by throwing them balls in the dirt to block. What O’Connell does is add competitive texture to these drills. Why not, he suggests, mark out a box with traffic cones around the catcher and count how many balls he keeps in the box? Then you can have catchers compete against each other.

Another example: We lecture kids endlessly about the importance of location in the strike zone, but how to make sure they learn it? Here O’Connell suggests giving pitchers a clipboard and making them chart their own pitches during bullpen sessions. Writing it down will trigger a competitive instinct to do better.

My favorite, though, is an adapted baseball game he calls “Keystone Cops.” It’s basically baseball with two bases, second and home. These ideas are great for Europe because they conjure the magic of baseball while requiring fewer players.

O’Connell is a veteran high school baseball coach, writer, administrator and scout from Milwaukee. He’s a warm, friendly man and a great ally of European baseball. As usual, he’ll be at the European Baseball Coaches Association convention in Cologne this November 19-21. (You should go.)

Tom also knows what he’s talking about. “The trick,” he concludes, “is to get players to handle each situation in a game the same way that they deal with it in practice. The more skilled they become in challenging situations, the more confidence they gain in their ability to carry out their responsibilities and just play the game.”

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John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

You can play a lot of baseball before you’re ever a part of what I was on Saturday. I estimate I’ve caught an average of 20 games a year since I was nine years old. That adds up to roughly 500 baseball games.

On Saturday, behind the dish for the Kangaroos against the Leuven Twins, the balls being fired toward my mitt produced a pleasant pattern. It went something like this: 1-2-3. Again and again. Our defensive innings went by so fast that the umpire asked us to take more time between pitches.

Of course, we directly didn’t talk about what was going on. That rule is in the baseball gods’s 10 Commandments. I had planned to take out the starting pitcher after six or seven and give innings to somebody else. But that wasn’t going to happen if the outs kept falling like they were, in tight little bunches. “Yeah, if I keep doin what I’m doin, I’d like to stay in the game,” the pitcher told me after the fifth, venturing out on a rhetorical tightrope. “Cuz, uh, what I’m doing, well, I’ve never done it before.” I couldn’t have agreed more.

The end was anti-climactic. We won 10-0, finishing off the game in the bottom of the seventh on a mercy rule. It may have been the Belgian second division and only seven innings of baseball, but 21 up and 21 down counts in my book. Even at age 33, I’m plenty enough a baseball nut to get excited about such things. “Lucas Fogarty, you got yourself a perfect game,” I yelled.

The Kangaroos have been bringing over American and Australian players for a decade now. We’ve seen a couple dozen college and pro guys roll through Brussels. It’s been a cast of characters. Among others: a vintner, a cell phone salesman, a Toronto thug, a Harvard Law School student, a 50ish pot smoker, and plenty of coaches.

Lucas, a 22-year-old psychology graduate of Pomona-Pitzer in California, is unique, and worth a mention here. As he announces before every game, “Mister umpire, je suis un diabetique.” He then points at the insulin pump attached to his belt that he has to play with. It looks like an old-fashioned blue tape recorder.

Like all those who suffer from Type-1 diabetes, including some Major Leaguers like Brandon Morrow, Lucas lives his life with one eye on his blood sugar scoreboard. If low, candy or soft drinks. If high, water and an injection of insulin to help the body break down the extra sugar. “When I was a kid, they told me, you can deal with this and have the life you want, or you can choose not to, and have a bad life,” he explained. Living with the disease has given him an awareness of his own body and an appreciation for the fragility of life that most people can’t fathom.

And on the baseball field, Lucas says, “it gives me a bit of a chip on my shoulder.” He is an animated figure on the mound, pounding his fist in his glove, cheering on teammates, and yelling at the umpire one minute then, the next, apologizing in his sweetest French.

On Saturday, the Californian’s fastball-change-curve arsenal was dynamite: It was like the hitters were swinging wiffle ball bats. There was no need to apologize for anything.

Tell your no-hitter and perfect game stories to oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

I turned 33 last week and, as a baseball coach, my age is making me a bit more stubborn, a bit more principled about a few things I believe in. I admit I still don’t know much about nothing, there are mountains yet to climb, but what I do know, well, of that I am becoming more certain.

There is one baseball training idea above all that I realize I believe in. Call it Movement. We have a sport that, at times, is static. We have a society that is increasingly static. Last week, I indulged in a three-hour Playstation session with my 21-year-old brother Jacob. It’s a lot of fun, but it is less than athletic. Such are the habits of our time.

When kids exit society and step onto our stage, why would they not keep on doing what they do? Static is who they are.

And so, please, Movement. Coach is catalyst. He is the first mover, the igniter of the flame. As a coach, there is no excuse for not making movement happen. Over and over again. Whatever you do, there should be energy and pace on your baseball field. Everybody should be acting or reacting. Swing, swing, sprint, pitch, field. Quick, quick, quick. There is no excuse for being slow.

In Europe, where kids don’t grow up with baseball, it’s important that their moves be part of a baseball or baseball-like game, and that they understand the game they’re playing. Forced to react fast, they will, and they will learn fast. And they will have fun, and your job is done.

Movement is less valuable when spent on drills only tangentially related to baseball. The more experienced the player, the more you can veer away from making the game click on the field. But if an uninitiated kid is swinging a bat during soft-toss and doesn’t really understand what he’s doing, besides swinging the bat, well I’d argue that’s not building a baseball player.

And so, in the name of Movement, at practice, I’ve been toying with fun fast-paced variations on nine-on-nine baseball, especially when you don’t have players to play a full game. Here are my favorites so far:

• 1. 3×3 Extreme Baseball. Two teams of three. Soft-toss to hitter, who hits and has to run around the bases before the three defensive players throw the ball to three of the four bases. If he does, he gets a run. Otherwise, out. Three outs per inning, then switch. Try it: this game is terrific for conditioning.
• 2. Right-Field Baseball. Two teams of 3-5 players. Soft-toss or tee. Any ball hit to the left of second is an out. Score a run by getting to second. Last night, we had 10 guys, so we tried a variation. We put a traffic cone at shortstop. Any ball to the left of that was an out. And you had to make it to third base to score a run.
• 3. Multi-team Baseball: Three or four teams of 3-4 players. Pitch, front-toss or tee. One team hits. The others play defense. Rotate.

I’m playing around with other ideas. Whatever they are, they will have to fit into the philosophy of Movement. Because that is something I believe in.

Share variations on classic baseball at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

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John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

In 2001, a tall, pleasant man walked up to the first practice of our Little League season. I was coaching my brother Moe’s team. “I think I’ve been a bad American dad,” the man said, grinning at his companion, an 11-year-old boy with bleached blond hair. “I mean, I haven’t taught my son baseball. But now we are going to play baseball, huh, Vincent?”

That started, for me and the Brussels Kangaroos, an intense friendship with Peter King. He was a professional translator and intellectual, an American living with Levke, his wife, and their two kids, in Brussels, who, at our sides, fell in love with baseball. So much so that when he passed away after a long illness in 2004, he asked that money be given in his name to the Brussels Kangaroos. Astonishingly, friends and family donated some 3,000 euros. For years afterwards, we debated the best way to spend that money.

I’ve lain awake more than a few nights wondering what the most appropriate allocation of those funds might be. What would Peter have wanted?

Something durable. Not just a bunch of baseballs to be lost or knocked over fences during homerun derby. Something communal. Peter loved to sit on the grass with other parents and watch his kids Vincent and Esther play. Something baseball. In those years, my phone would often ring at 10 o’clock in the evening. “Hey guy, it’s Peter, now I wanted to ask you, this infield fly rule, is it really necessary? I’ve been thinking about this.” We’d hang up the phone 45 minutes later. With baseball, he often seemed like a kid with a new toy. He even became a coach.

Last year, the International School of Brussels, where I once worked, decided to replace its baseball scoreboard. They were chucking the old one. I got wind of this and called the athletic director. Could we have the throwaway? Pouring concrete and mounting the scoreboard on iron pillars would be a great project for the Peter King fund. What could be more durable, communal and baseball that a scoreboard? The Kangaroos don’t have one. I hired a truck, got a half-dozen volunteers and we hauled the ton-heavy board over to Kangaroo Field. I called a sports equipment company to come write up an estimate. They wanted 7,000 euros to put up the board. So that wouldn’t work. We propped the scoreboard against an equipment container. It’s still there.

I’ve always loved music at ballparks. There’s nothing more fun than warming up before a big game with a good soundtrack floating across the field. This year, browsing at a thrift shop that sells sound equipment, I had an idea. Why not buy a portable sound system? It’ll last, every baseball and softball player, coach and parent can enjoy it, and it’ll add significantly to creating a ballpark atmosphere in our little corner of Brussels. I shopped around online and found a nifty piece of equipment, a portable wireless battery-powered machine that can project sound 350 feet away. (Against my journalistic principles, I won’t name the brand here, so as not to distract from the point of this story.) It cost a little under 1,000 euros.

We still have a couple thousand euros left to spend, and we haven’t given up hope of getting that scoreboard up, but we’re happy that, more than six years after Peter’s friends and family acted so generously in his name and in recognition of his love of baseball, we finally made their gift count.

Thank you: From now on, you’ll hear loud, clear music bursting off our diamond during batting and infield practice, between innings and at post-game BBQs. This morning, a ray of bright heat lifted rain water mistily off our field. Kids and coaches gathered for Kangaroos summer baseball camp. I rolled out our special sound machine and cued up the Beatles. “Here comes the sun…”

If you had such a fund for your European club baseball team, what would you spend it on? I’m curious, and reachable at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

Where have you been all my life, Buck Showalter? After going 28-72 under Dave Trembley and Juan Samuel, my Baltimore Orioles are now 6-1 since Uncle Buck rolled in a week or so ago. OK, they’re still 30 games out of first place in the American League Beast, but what’s happened in Baltimore offers a cool lab experiment in baseball leadership and performance.

First, let’s assume that 6-1 is not a fluke. The Orioles swept the Angels and took three out of four from the White Sox. Yes, the real test will come against the Red Sox and Yankees, but let’s say that they actually are really, truly playing much better under BS. They didn’t go 6-1 under either of the other two managers. Let’s also take the players out of the equation.

So why the Buck effect? My answer is that an overwhelming part of being a successful manager or coach, after your players are over 15, is actually more akin to a good parent. It’s setting a tone, a level, a standard, and expecting people to live up to that. It’s a cool, unspoken attitude that says Enough! A grown-up is here and I’m not taking this crap. It’s knowing exactly who you are and what you stand for when everything around you is sinking. Buck is that grown-up.

When I first started coaching, I thought the job was all X’s and O’s. Know how to explain a bunt or correct an elbow position and you’re headed for glory. I was wrong. For younger kids, coaching is organization and structure. It’s explaining the game, setting the parameters for a practice, workout or game, and then letting the kids play.

Talented players will figure it out. A coach has less influence than he thinks. The good news is that plenty of kids do have talent and if they’re left alone to play and play and play in the right conditions, they will flourish. And those who struggle will still like baseball instead of quitting because their coach is always nagging them about what they’re doing wrong.

I was successful coaching kids up to age 16, but struggled directing our men’s team in 2008. I’ve given that failure a lot of thought, and I think I know why. I wasn’t able to set that grown-up tone. I reacted emotionally to players not playing well. What? How can you idiots make so many errors? I yelled and screamed. It was silly.

Deep down, I didn’t really expect them to make the plays, and my anger and frustration was more my problem than theirs. I didn’t have that confident expectation, that Buck Showalter-like ability to be the anchor in the storm. (Of course, there’s also this approach)

So how do you achieve that winning attitude? I think it’s something you develop, like learning how to dance, fly or speak a new language.

It’s not rocket science. Coaching baseball is a craft, and if you work at it, and do it over and over again, admitting when you make mistakes and learning from them, you get better at it. It explains why older managers are better.

Meanwhile, man, winning is, like, better than losing.

Share your theories on what makes a great baseball general at oldworldpastime@gmail.com

Previous Columns

John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.

Hello, Baseball Gods?

Yes, hello, I’m calling with a complaint. You made me an Oriole fan, and I can’t shake it, and they’re 32 and 72, and somehow I still care.

Hold the line, we need to find somebody to take your call.

Hello, Turk Farrell speaking.

Who?

Turk Farrell, I won 106 games for three teams between 1956 and 1969.

And you’re a Baseball God?

Sure, there are thousands of us. We make all kinds of decisions, from the Major Leagues to the Belgian leagues to Little League. Every god is assigned a game per day. You do the math.

And why do I get you?

Because I was killed in a car accident in England in June, 1977, only two months before you were born in Belgium. Also, you’re a catcher for the Brussels Kangaroos. Who did you expect, Ted Williams? He’s busy babysitting A-Rod, by the way.

Lotta Major Leaguers die in Europe?

Seven. Me, four guys who died in France during the World Wars, and two guys in Austria, Lord knows why. I got nixed in a car accident. Bad luck.

And Babe Ruth’s not around? I’ve talked to him before.

Sorry, the Babe’s playing celestial homerun derby. That, or a whorehouse.

Ah, ok. Anyway, here I am listening to the Orioles lose to the Kansas City Royals on the radio, and it’s still more fun than tuning into the Yankees-Rays or Red Sox-Tigers game. Can’t I become a fan of another team?

You’ve given up the faith already? It’s only been, what, 12 straight losing season. What about Eddie Murray, Cal Ripken, the 1960-1980 period during which the Orioles won more games than any baseball team, which means more games than any team in any sport in the world? 1983!

Yeah.

And this week, you get a new manager, Buck Showalter.

Yeah.

OK, I can kinda see your point. Sure, you have Matt Wieters, Brian Matusz, Adam Jones, but what are they going to do, start crushing the Yankees, Rays and Red Sox? Haha.

What I’m saying.

You’re young, you have your whole life ahead of you. You’ll survive this. The Orioles will win again.

You really believe that?

Hey, we can only tweak baseball’s future. We don’t work wholesale miracles. Those Orioles need to play better baseball, and the breaks will fall.

Yeah.

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